Church of the Churchless

We're all having an "out of brain experience"

At long last, I'm reaching the home stretch of reading Thomas Metzinger's meaty/tofuy book, all 500 pages of it, The Elephant and the Blind, about the experience of pure consciousness that's based on more than five hundred experiential reports from meditators.

There are 35 chapters. I've just got two left to read. I thought about skipping some, but after finishing the "Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality" chapter this morning, I'm glad that my rather obsessive reading style -- usually I read every page in a book, unless I'm really not enjoying it -- paid off in this instance. 

Because Metzinger makes some fascinating points in this chapter. I'm sure I've been exposed to similar thoughts in other books by Metzinger that I've read, along with other neuroscience books, but his basic thesis seemed fresh to me.

He starts off the chapter, #28, with this overview:

This is a special chapter. I want to draw your attention to three particularly interesting phenomenological aspects, and therefore I offer more extensive commentary than usual, in addition to our selection of experiential reports.

In chapter 27, on nondual awareness, I said that ordinary consciousness is a nonconceptual mode of knowing one's inner model of reality. However, any time that this way of knowing is contracted into an ego and falsely experienced as direct and immediate, a large part of the model appears as an outer reality to us. 

We then have what the Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo has called a built-in "out of brain experience"; we experience ourselves as an embodied agent situated in some external environment.

This makes good evolutionary sense: Our biological ancestors successfully learned to use different parts of their inner model as a proxy for parts of their environment. According to our ancestors' subjective experience, models of trees turned into trees and models of wolves into real wolves.

Their brains also learned to use the model of the body that carried them, including sensations like hunger, thirst, breath, and heartbeat, as a proxy for the body itself, improving the organism's capacity for self-control. 

This is what it means to have a "transparent self-model" -- that is, a conscious model of yourself as a whole that has become so reliable that you are unable to experience it as a model -- and we will learn more about all this in the second half of this chapter.

To stay alive, there was a boundary that had to be protected, or re-created from moment to moment. Conscious experience often includes an explicit representation of inside and outside (e.g., of the interior parts of my body, of inner feelings and emotions arising from them, and also of what appears as my "own" mind) -- plus an outside world of mind-independent objects. 

What meditation practice shows is that awareness can also occur with no explicit representation of inside and outside. This can lead to a conscious model of reality in which, according to verbal description, everything is inside and outside at the same time -- or in which it has neither quality.

There's a lot to unpack here, which is why the chapter is unusually long, 27 pages. I'll have more to share about it in other blog posts. For now, I'll be content with some basic observations about the "out of brain experience" thing, a term I like a lot, which is a play on the much more familiar "out of body experience."

With an out of body experience, someone has the illusion (almost certainly that's what it is) that their consciousness has left a body and entered the world. That's pretty damn dramatic, so it gets a lot of attention. 

An out of brain experience, by contrast, is what almost everybody has at each waking moment. It's so commonplace, few people even know that's what they're experiencing, neuroscientists being an exception, along with Buddhists and others in the know about how the human mind works.

For we have an intuitive sense that there is (1) our internal consciousness and (2) an external world that consciousness is aware of. In other words, consciousness perceives a world that is independent of our perceptions of it.

But this isn't true. It can't be true. It just seems to be true. 

The brain has no direct connection with external reality, the world outside of the brain. The brain is locked inside our skull. All it knows about the world comes through the five senses -- sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. 

Those sensations undergo a great deal of processing within the brain before they appear in consciousness. That's part of what Metzinger means by a conscious model of reality.

So in truth we never have an "out of brain" experience of an outside world. We have what our conscious model of reality presents to us, which ordinarily is constrained by mostly accurate sense perceptions that allow us humans to generally agree on what the world is like. 

"Beautiful sunset," we may say to a stranger. "Sure is," they may reply. 

This is a manifestation of the transparent nature of our conscious model of reality. Usually we aren't aware of the model that, somewhat akin to the programming of an AI (artificial intelligence), leads us to wrongly believe in dualism: that there is a physical world out there that's separate and distinct from the mental world in here. 

Metzinger says that understanding the nonduality of reality is what both modern neuroscience has been able to achieve, along with ancient wisdom traditions such as Buddhism.

We are now beginning to expand our understanding of what the phenomenological concept of "nonduality" means. One of the most fascinating aspects is that some experiences of nondual awareness given by our participants quite directly match our best current models of what consciousness might really be from a neuroscientific, computational, or mathematical perspective, while at the same time cleanly mapping onto phenomenological descriptions given by scholar-practitioners more than 1,000 years ago.

This may well be one of the most philosophically important results of our first interdisciplinary study. It is interesting to see how one can apply the idea of nonduality not only to the distinctions between subject and object and between inside and outside, but even to the distinction between what is "real" and what "does not exist."

 

Sea level and evolution show that reality is shades of gray, not black and white

One of the reasons why I've come to dislike religions so much is that they're so prone to making absolutist statements. 

God is.... blah, blah, blah. The commandments to follow are... blah, blah, blah. You can tell good from evil by...blah, blah, blah. That's all bullshit, regardless of what the blah, blah, blah consists of. 

I say this for a couple of reasons.

One obvious reason is that religions don't deal in truth, they deal in fantasy. They make stuff up, then expect people to believe in it. If they don't, bad things are supposed to happen: hell, damnation, God's wrath.

Another more subtle reason is that reality isn't marked by sharp distinctions akin to the difference between black and white. While reality may seem that way at first glance, a closer look reveals shades of gray. 

Examples abound. 

A vacuum in deep space isn't really empty, but is filled with ephemeral quantum particles popping in and out of existence. Sexual desire isn't homosexual and heterosexual, but includes other varieties such as bisexual. The big bang wasn't a single moment of creation, but is ongoing as space continues to expand some 14 billion years later.

Here's a few more examples drawn from articles I read recently in The New Yorker and New Scientist. 

The New Yorker article by Brooke Jarvis is called "Sea Change: What the search for sea level tells us about living on our changeable planet." The Compass app on my iPhone tells me that I'm at 360 feet elevation. But what am I elevated above?

Well, sea level. Just about everybody knows that elevation refers to the distance above sea level. Few people, though, wonder about how sea level is measured, me certainly included. The article describes how difficult this is.

The oceans rise and fall with the tides, which are caused by the moon. Some places in the ocean are higher than others. Because of how our planet bulges as it spins, "the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometers higher than the sea ice at the North Pole." The oceans expand when warmer and shrink when cooler. Melting ice sheets raise the ocean level while growing ice sheets lower it.

It was only in 1929 that the U.S. adopted a shared reference for setting mean sea levels around the country; it was derived from calculations based on twenty-six tidal stations and 106,724 kilometres' worth of coastline surveying.

The article is based in part on a book about the quest to determine sea level.

"There is no progress to be found in the story this book tells, no constant improvement of knowledge, no approach to a more 'real' system of reference," von Hardenberg writes in his introduction. Instead, there's a story of people abandoning a belief in some perfect natural reference point as it slowly becomes  evident how complicated and changeable the planet on which they live truly is.

The line between the land and the ocean, after all, has never been fixed; it is a binary abstraction we impose on a place that, as Rachel Carson wrote, is forever "changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea." For animals and plants that make their homes in the intertidal zone, survival depends on flexibility, on adapting to a world in which the only constant is inconstancy.

The New Scientist article by Colin Barres is called "Becoming Human." Subtitle: "What is a human and when did such a being emerge? These fundamental questions about ourselves are surprisingly difficult to answer."

Our species is called Homo sapiens. But there have been other species in the genus Homo. DNA testing, such as via the firm Ancestry, shows this. Five years ago I got my DNA tested. I was mainly interested in where my recent relatives came from, but the test also showed a much more distant heritage: like most people, I have some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. 

So I'm mostly Homo sapiens, but not entirely. This indicates how it is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between who is "human" and who isn't. The article goes into this problem at some length, ending with:

A century after the discovery of the Taung Child, and 50 years after Lucy, we seem no closer to understanding when or why humans emerged. That is frustrating, but also, paradoxically, a reflection of how much progress has been made.

When researchers had just a handful of hominin fossils to work with, it was easy to spot the significant differences between them and to assume that there was a dramatic moment when our ancestors became human. It is because we have better evidence that we now know things are more complicated.

What is clear is that we didn't suddenly "become human" 2.9 million years ago when A. afarensis died out. That should come as no surprise. Evolution is a continuous process, and the propensity to divide life up into conspicuously distinct species and genera is less a reflection of fact than another human idiosyncrasy. 

Ultimately, where we draw the line between "us" and "them" isn't simply a biological question -- it is a philosophical one too.

"Empty Force" is a Tai Chi and martial arts myth, but people fall for it

Today someone in my Tai Chi class spoke about a Tai Chi master being able to repel people, or knock them down, without using any physical force. You know, just with their mind, their supposedly highly evolved chi power. 

(Note: in Chinese the same word can denote different things. The "Chi" in Tai Chi means boundary. Chi can also refer to vital life force, also known as qi. That's how I used it in the sentence above.)

When I heard this, I thought, that's a Tai Chi myth, because it isn't possible to project a physical force just with the mind. However, I didn't say that out loud. People believe all kinds of things that aren't true. That's the basis of every religion: fantasies that people believe in. 

They do this out of a search for meaning. It can feel good to believe in the supernatural, in God, in "empty force" chi power.

I'm not shy about making fun of those myths on this blog, and in conversations with people who agree with me about the absurdity of supernaturalism, but I don't go out of my way to dump a heaping load of reality on someone else's fantasy if the fantasy works for them.

Fortunately, when it comes to empty force in Tai Chi and other martial arts there's plenty of evidence that has debunked this myth. 

It seems clear that one foundation of this myth is the same foundation that causes followers of a guru to ascribe supernatural powers to them. I know whereof I speak, because for 35 years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form.

That there wasn't any objective evidence of this didn't bother the most fervent of the guru's devotees (I was a bit more on the skeptical side) who believed the guru could know what his disciples were doing and thinking half a world away, and could intervene in their lives if he so chose.

Those devotees, like devotees of a Tai Chi master who claims to have the power of empty force, want so badly for their fantasy to be true, they participate in the manufacturing of supernatural powers which then are taken as truth by other gullible devotees.

Here's a You Tube video that, in 5 1/2 minutes, demonstrates how "Chi Power Woo Woo Fails." (Title of the video.) It's rather sad how the students of a Tai Chi or marital arts master will either consciously or unconsciously go along with his empty force B.S., which is shown to be a fantasy when someone not under the spell of devotion participates in a demonstration that invariably fails. 

If you want more amusement, check out this longer 13 1/2 minute video that shows some additional empty force staged ridiculousness. Again, I'm unsure whether those who participate in the demonstrations know that the supposed master is a fake, or have convinced themselves that he's really got empty force power, so they fall down when he gestures at them. I like the description of the video:

Qi Power, Lin Kong Jin / Empty Force Compilation of Martial Artists desperately in need of psychiatric treatment. Harness the Chi Power of confused minds! ... This kind of belief is common in Chinese and Japanese martial arts as Tai Chi and Aikido. But there are also "sects" out there as Yellow Bamboo and EFO. It seems like many of the "masters" believe themselves in what they do. Apparently some people have a very deep need of believing in magic and mysteries. - "Hey! Look at me! I am special!"

Lastly, "Myth busting in Chinese marital arts" is a good post on The Tai Chi Notebook site. Excerpt:

These more marketing-orientated myths about the prowess of practitioners – how deadly they were, how unbeatable their martial arts was, how the power of Qi was greater than physical strength all fed directly into all that nonsense about no touch knockouts and “empty force” that has marred the image of Chinese martial arts in the modern age.

And politics also gets involved. When obvious myths about the origins of martial arts are dispelled they often get replaced by more politically motivated stories about the arts origins that are equally as unprovable and unreliable yet fit a nationalist agenda. It seems like the Chinese martial arts are forever being used to support some sort of Chinese government propaganda.

In short, the Chinese martial arts world was in need of, and remains in need of, a lot of myth busting, because much of what we are being told and sold is basically not true. But Bowman’s fears, that we are in danger of spoiling the fun for everybody with this relentless search for the truth, holds true, I think. I was certainly attracted to Chinese martial arts by a steady diet of orientalist propaganda from the likes of David Carradine’s Kung Fu TV series and Marvel comics with heroes like Iron Fist. This is often what draws us to the martial arts in the first place and there has to be some way of searching for truth in the martial arts, but keeping the magic that drew us there in the first place. 

UPDATE: Here's a few links to descriptions of empty force by people who believe this myth. They sound a lot like miraculous faith healing stories in evangelical Christianity. My best attempt to be sympathetic about such unfounded beliefs is that it shows the power of the human mind: when someone really wants to believe in something that isn't true, they reshape reality to fit their belief. I just have an old-fashioned attitude that we should reshape our beliefs to fit reality, to the best of our ability.

Empty Force
Empty Force in the Buqi System
Chinese Empty Force

And here's a post that, on a quick read (it's pretty long) puts Tai Chi training in a realistic perspective. I'll share some excerpts that debunk the notion of empty force as something supernatural. By the way, if anyone is wondering, I've practiced Tai Chi for nineteen years. Before that I was into hard style martial arts for about twelve years, earning a black belt in a form of karate. 

What is Empty Force?

Possibly a year after my lifelong friend and martial arts partner, Martin Inn and I had immigrated Chu, Ch’u-fang into the United States, he announced a new and important mission for us. There was someone else, someone of great importance, that we must now turn our efforts toward immigrating. This was a special and secretive individual only known to a few advanced adepts, such as Mr. Chu, and we should be honored to have the job of bringing him to America.

He was so special because he had mastered the technique of “empty force,” the highest achievement of Taijiquan. When one’s circulation of qi becomes high enough, he reaches the point at which he can project it at others, knocking them down at a distance, or even killing them. We all have some idea of what this looks like, having seen it in countless gung-fu movies.

Marty and I were properly stunned, not expecting to be “living the dream” of becoming gung-fu supermen quite so quickly, and Mr. Chu must have noticed, asking next if we believed him, to which, after quickly glancing at one another, we both assured him that of course, teacher, you can bet on it. After nodding solemnly for a moment, he told us, sounding rather disgusted, that we were fools. No one, he emphasized in a slightly louder tone of voice, can do this, and don’t believe anyone that tells you that they can. 

I am sure that no one could righteously fault me for ending the current discussion right here, because Mr. Chu’s warning is definitely the short answer to the whole subject of empty force, given what people take the phrase to mean.

It is a worthwhile warning, because purveyors of this “power” seem to surface every few years with the persistence of some sort of biblical pestilence. It is amazing to see the number and relatively high caliber of people who can be taken in by this “emperor’s new clothes” con, in which an inability to be affected by this “qi attack” identifies an insufficiency in you, rather than in the one mounting the attack. 

...As far as any fantasies concerning what appears to be happening in supposed demonstrations of “empty force,” these should be relegated to the same mental dust bin as similar martial fantasies about making oneself heavier or lighter at will, or fighting multiple assailants while blindfolded. All of these kinds of stories have their origins in some sort of reality, but never the reality that is presumed.

The presumed reality here is that someone is emitting a force that operates at a distance and can affect completely untrained and even unaware opponents. In the words of Chu, Ch’u-fang: no one can do this, and don’t believe anyone who tells you that they can.

"Right Concentration" is a good book about meditation and the jhanas

As I like to say, it isn't wise to judge a book by its cover, but I've found that it usually makes sense to judge a book by the first twenty pages. For that's enough reading to get a good feel for the author's style and personality, at least as how it's expressed in writing.

This morning I got that far in Leigh Brasington's Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas. Brasington clearly has a lot of experience with meditation, Buddhist variety, which is pretty much how I've been meditating for around fifteen years, maybe longer. 

I don't consider myself a Buddhist, though. That enables me to look upon the book as a guide for those who are interested in Buddhism, yet aren't committed to the full-blown Buddhist way of meditation, as Brasington is. 

So when he says that it's best if someone has gone to several week-long meditation retreats in order to get the most out of his book, I think, "Not in my opinion." I have the same attitude when he lists the five Buddhist precepts for lay people (monks have 227 precepts and nuns 311, which makes me really glad I'm not a monk or nun).

To refrain from killing living beings.
To refrain from taking that which is not given.
To refrain from committing sexual misconduct.
To refrain from wrong speech.
To refrain from intoxicants.

I have no idea what these specifically mean. They sound fine, but for me Buddhist moral/ethical teachings aren't of much interest.

I bought the book for its meditation advice. Here Brasington is on more solid ground, since I view meditation as akin to physical exercise: anyone can do it, and it doesn't matter what religion or philosophy you espouse. That's irrelevant to meditation. 

Brasington speaks of awakening rather than enlightenment, considering that word is closer to the meaning of the teachings ascribed to the Buddha. The jhanas are stages of concentration on the path of awakening. Supposedly they are experienced in a certain order, but it seems entirely possible that this is just a product of Buddhist tradition, not reality. 

He starts off by discussing The Preliminaries in a chapter with that name. Mindfulness is key to setting the stage for jhana realizations. 

It's also necessary to develop habitual mindfulness. We translate the word sati as "mindfulness," but we need to keep in mind that it is etymologically related to the Sanskrit smrti, which means "memory." So being mindful means to remember. And what are we to remember?

Be here, now.

Pay attention to what's actually going on in the present moment, to the place where you are currently located. Now, this doesn't mean you should never plan for the future or learn from the past. But it does mean that when doing so, you need to know that is what you are intending to do.

In the gradual training, the Buddha suggests that you pay attention to your bodily activities throughout the day. When you are attempting to learn jhanas, this unrelenting mindfulness is the most useful of all the practices given in the Satipatthana Suttas. 

This practice itself won't generate sufficient concentration to enter a jhana -- but it will make it much more likely that any method that you do undertake to generate such concentration is actually effective.

Brasington then has a chapter on Access Concentration, defined as concentration strong enough to provide access to the jhanas. Momentary concentration is less concentrated than access concentration, and one-pointed concentration is more concentrated than access concentration, being the "stronger concentration associated with the jhanas."

The general method for generating access concentration is to put your attention on a suitable meditation object, and when your attention wanders off, gently bring it back. Keep doing this until the distractions fade away and your attention on the object is unwavering.

The typical object of attention is the breath.

It is extremely important to not control the breath in any way -- just pay attention to the naturally occurring breathing. If you control the breath, it does make it easier to not become distracted. But it makes it too easy, and you won't generate enough concentration to enter the jhanas.

It is probably better if you can observe the physical sensations at the nostrils or on the area between the nose and the upper lip, rather than at the abdomen or elsewhere. It is better because it is more difficult to do; therefore, you have to concentrate more.

Since you are trying to generate access concentration, you take something that is doable, though not terribly easy to do, and then you do it. When noticing the natural, uncontrolled breath at the nose, you have to pay attention very carefully. 

...When the thoughts are just slight, when they're not really pulling you away and you're fully with the sensations of the breath, knowing each in-breath and each out-breath, this is the sign that you've arrived at access concentration.

Whatever method you use to generate access concentration, the sign that you've gotten to access concentration is that you are fully present with the object of meditation. 

An important principle is to not crave the jhanas.

If you are craving to experience a jhana, you have the hindrance of wanting. You have to set aside such craving -- those expectations -- to be able to enter the jhana. Setting aside expectations is certainly easier said than done. The best advice I can give you is to refrain from what Ayya Khema called "result thinking."

Don't focus on what you hope or think or expect should happen. Ayya offered a simile that you might find helpful.

Suppose you want to drive from your home to, for example, a retreat center many hours away. Suppose someone gives you excellent directions. If the directions start out by saying something like, "When you get to the end of your street, turn right. When you get to such and such a highway, turn left," it does you no good to start looking for the retreat center as you drive down your street toward the first turn.

In order to use the directions properly, you don't focus on the destination; you determine where you currently are and what you'll need to do next when you arrive at the place where you change from what you are doing now to something new.

This is exactly how to approach learning the jhanas. Gain an understanding of the directions. Determine where you currently are and what "landmark" to look for so that you will know when to take the next step. Don't focus on, or even think about, the destination.

Why teachers are needed, but not gurus

Back in my true believing days, the 35 years that I was an active member of a guru-centered religious organization (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB), I accepted the RSSB adage that a guru was needed because we require teachers throughout our life, and finding God or our true self, pretty much the same thing according to RSSB, really required a teacher, being so difficult on our own.

That made sense at the time, but not now. For in my present way of looking at reality, there's a big difference between needing a teacher (who can be really valuable) and a guru (who can be really problematic). 

I'm not going to rely on dictionary definitions of "teacher" and "guru," because these don't capture the emotional difference between people who embrace someone they call a teacher and someone they call a guru. Being intimately familiar with this difference, having experienced it myself, I'll explain what I mean.

I've had many teachers of various sorts in my life. When I was young, they were classroom teachers in elementary school, high school, and college. When I was working, they were people who knew more than I did about some subject. When I played competitive tennis, they were instructors and coaches who could help me with the flaws in my game. I also consider that every book I've read has taught me something, so all the authors I've read during my lifetime have been teachers.

This just scratches the surface, of course. My wife has been my teacher, along with my daughter and granddaughter. Dogs and cats also. Plus movies and television shows. There's no end to the teachers we encounter, looking upon "teacher" as any entity that helps us learn something. Nature can be a great teacher.

But here's the thing: I've never looked upon any teacher as infallible or irreplaceable. Each of them had strengths and weaknesses. I never worshipped any of them. I never viewed any of them as being different in kind than I was. They simply knew something that I didn't, so there was a flow of knowledge from them to me. Of course, often there was a return flow also, since students can be sources of knowledge for teachers. It goes both ways. 

If a teacher wasn't meeting my needs, I had no problem letting them go and finding a better teacher. Athletes do this all the time with coaches. Students do this all the time with their instructors. For it isn't the person that is important in teaching, it is the knowledge being transmitted from the teacher. If I could get more of that knowledge from someone else, I happily said goodbye to a teacher. 

A guru often, or usually, is looked upon in a different way.

I'm speaking here of real gurus, not those who just have that title applied to them casually, as in "he's a real guru when it comes to fixing computer problems." I'm talking about people who claim to have spiritual, mystical, or religious knowledge that can be conveyed to students, often termed disciples. These gurus typically are viewed as possessing wisdom that others lack, which merits a level of devotion to them that teachers aren't entitled to.

I say this as someone who has been criticized many times by visitors to this blog for not sticking with the RSSB guru who initiated me in 1971, Charan Singh, for my entire life. I'd sometimes reply to those criticisms by saying that I've had two wives, many cars, lots of different teachers, various jobs, numerous houses, and varied political beliefs. So why the heck should meditation or spirituality be the only part of my life that can never change? Why can't I say farewell to Charan Singh, especially since he died in 1990?

The reason offered by avid guru-worshippers was along the lines of, you were initiated by a perfect living guru, God in Human Form; this is a lifetime commitment; even if you don't get the hoped-for results or knowledge, you should have stuck with the guru. 

Well, that's ridiculous.

This attitude assumes that a guru has supernatural powers, so is able to bring benefits to a disciple that an ordinary meditation teacher -- person, book, video, whatever -- can't provide. I heartily disagree with this faith-based assumption. I can easily do this, because I used to be a disciple who felt that way, so I know how wishful thinking can lead followers of a guru astray.

Almost certainly, the human brain and mind is as physical an entity as rocks, trees, and grass are. The only difference is that our brains are hugely complex, capable of so much more than other physical objects are. Given that complexity, sometimes we need teachers to point the way toward a good way to meditate, practice mindfulness, be happier, and other possible goals.

And sometimes we don't need any help at all, being capable of figuring things out by ourselves. It just depends on a person and their situation. Serious mental illness may require a psychiatrist. Merely feeling down may just require a walk in nature. 

I'm not saying that embracing a guru is always the wrong thing to do. This felt absolutely right to me at a certain point in my life. However, I do believe that viewing a guru as divine, as perfect, as beyond criticism, is dangerous. For most of the 35 years I was a part of RSSB, I kept telling myself something that I read in a book by Huston Smith, who heard this from a Zen practitioner.

I have a new koan: I could be wrong. 

Beautiful. I readily admit that I could be wrong about gurus. All I ask is that those who follow a guru say the same thing about the person they're devoted to: I could be wrong. 

Jhanas are the current meditation craze, says TIME magazine

I've got to get me some jhanas. That was my thought, admittedly not thoroughly spiritual, that came to mind this morning after I read a story in the August 26, 2024 issue of TIME magazine: "The Pursuit of Happiness."

It was written by Nina Bajekal, who combined her reporting about a company, Jhourney, that offers training in how to experience jhanas through meditation, with her personal experience of going on a week-long Jhourney retreat.

The online version of her story is called "My Week at the Buzzy Meditation Retreat That Promises Bliss on Demand." In case you aren't able to access the story, here's a PDF file.
Download Meditation Start-up Jhourney Promises Bliss on Demand | TIME

This is how the story starts out:

Nick Cammarata has always been unusually happy. The 31-year-old AI safety researcher had a good childhood, but it wasn’t just that; situations that made others depressed seemed to roll off him. “I think I was probably happier than 99% of people. It’s just kind of unfair luck,” he says. “I figured maybe what I had was as good as it gets.”

Then, in 2021, as part of an effort to investigate whether life could get even better, Cammarata discovered the jhanas. These eight advanced meditative states, characterized by deep concentration and blissful absorption, have been practiced for thousands of years but were long considered the domain of mystics and monks with decades of training. Cammarata, however, taught himself to enter these states after around 1,000 hours of solo meditation practice. “I was shocked that it was possible to get this thing you turn on in 10 seconds and just get joy for five hours straight,” he says. “Nobody talks about it.”

So he started to. In the past few decades, a handful of American Buddhist teachers had published books and led retreats on the jhanas, but knowledge hadn’t spread much beyond meditation circles. Cammarata’s enthusiastic tweets about the jhanas got the attention of many in the Bay Area, fueling a growing interest in the ancient practices. Now neuroscientists are researching these altered states of consciousness, more meditation teachers are guiding people into them, and a much hyped startup called Jhourney—where Cammarata is a minor investor—claims most of its participants can reach them in under 40 hours of meditation.

The mainstreaming of the jhanas may represent the next frontier of the mindfulness movement, which has taken hold in American schools, hospitals, and workplaces and, propelled by apps like Calm and Headspace, become a billion-dollar industry. Mindfulness has been shown to minimize stress, improve focus, and help with pain management. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this surge in interest comes as mental-health issues are soaring globally, and as the U.S.—the richest country in the world—has dropped out of the top 20 nations for happiness, largely because of a decline among under 30s. Dr. Matthew Sacchet, director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, believes the destabilization of the pandemic, as well as other global challenges, has contributed to a “crisis of meaning” that makes advanced meditation increasingly appealing.

So what are the jhanas? The story offers some hints.

One of the challenges with the jhanas is that as with falling in love, ordinary speech doesn’t seem to do them justice. Analogies abound: getting goose bumps while listening to music; cuddling with a partner after sex; the satisfaction of completing a major project.

The initial jhanas, characterized by high-energy experiences, seem to vary dramatically. One Jhourney participant likens the first jhana to the jolt of putting your tongue onto a battery, while another describes a floating sensation so intense that she wondered if her water had been laced with MDMA.

There’s more consensus about the fourth jhana, however, which seems to be characterized by a deep peace and equanimity, a stark contrast to the internal dissonance most of us are used to in everyday life—thinking about emails while talking to a loved one or worrying about a past conversation while trying to enjoy a party.

The fourth jhana, Devaney says, “feels like every atom in your body has had a nice meal, a good glass of water, and is sitting back in its armchair after dinner. It’s very profoundly like your whole system is on the same page.”

Sounds good. But I'm not willing to pay $1,295 for an online retreat or $1,995 for an in-person Jhourney retreat, especially given the daily/weekly time commitment. 

So I took a much less expensive route to getting all blissed out with jhanas. Since I have little understanding of what they are, or how you experience them, I ordered a book that was mentioned in the TIME story, Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas, by Leigh Brasington. I'm totally willing to pay $17.92 for a chance at jhana bliss.

The Amazon listing sounds appealing. So did the reader reviews, which are 81% 5-stars.

A practical guidebook for meditators interested in achieving the states of bliss and deep focus associated with the Buddhist jhānas

One of the elements of the Eightfold Path is Right Concentration: the one-pointedness of mind that, together with ethics, livelihood, meditation, and more, leads to the ultimate freedom from suffering. So how does one achieve Right Concentration? According to the Buddha himself, the jhānas—a series of eight progressive altered states of consciousness—are an essential method. But because the jhānas can usually be achieved only through prolonged meditation retreat, they have been shrouded in mystery for years.
 
Not anymore. In Right Concentration, Leigh Brasington takes away the mystique and gives instructions on how to achieve them in plain, accessible language. He notes the various pitfalls to avoid along the way and provides a wealth of material on the theory of jhāna practice—all geared toward the practitioner rather than the scholar. As Brasington proves, these states of bliss and concentration are attainable by anyone who devotes the time and sincerity of practice necessary to realize them.

RSSB national satsang at Haynes Park leaves attendee with "disbelief and disappointment"

Since I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for 35 years until I became disillusioned with this India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human form, I like to share messages from other people who don't like what RSSB has become.

Below is a comment left on a recent Church of the Churchless blog post by M B Sharma. I enjoyed his honest "review" of a RSSB talk, or satsang, apparently given by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current guru. 

Sharma alludes to the fact that while the RSSB teachings clearly state that the primary purpose of human life is God-realization, which requires living a pure and simple life, Gurinder Singh enjoys a lavish lifestyle and has been accused of financial misdeeds that reportedly enriched the Dhillon family with hundreds of millions of dollars. 

There's many posts about this on this blog. Here's a couple of them:
More details surface about financial fraud involving RSSB guru
Why the RSSB guru is responsible for financial fraud

In 2018 Gurinder Singh Dhillon reportedly said that he'd answer questions about his involvement in the financial misdeeds. I'm quite sure that this never happened. In his comment, Sharma says that people attending the RSSB satsang were told they couldn't ask questions about the guru's involvement in shell companies or his financial dealings.

So much for transparency and truth-telling. Apparently that's something RSSB initiates should do, but the RSSB guru is exempt. Here's what Sharma said:

I recently attended what is referred to as the national satsang in Haynes, Bedford, UK, and I left with a deep sense of disbelief and disappointment. The event, which draws crowds from all over, turned out to be little more than a recital of selected poetry from saints or teachings from previous RSSB leaders. There was nothing new, nothing profound—just a repetitive cycle of words that seemed designed to maintain a facade rather than inspire genuine spiritual growth.

The Q&A session, which I had hoped would offer some clarity, was even more bewildering. The responses were vague and confusing, leaving me with more questions than answers. It felt as though real issues were being sidestepped, and any attempt at deeper inquiry was subtly discouraged.

The satsang took place in a sprawling mansion, a stark contrast to the simplicity one might expect from a spiritual gathering. What struck me most was the realization that GSD has a private residence within the premises, a well-guarded house that raises serious questions. How did he manage to secure such a luxurious home on land bought under the guise of charity? This residence is maintained by sevadaars—volunteers who provide free housekeeping and other services. It seems this place serves as his holiday retreat, where he spends 5-6 months each year.

Observing the opulence surrounding GSD, it’s hard to reconcile his lifestyle with that of a genuine spiritual leader. Yet, his sevadaars, some of whom are reportedly paid handsomely, work tirelessly to project him as a divine figure, a 'God in human form.' The commercialization of the event was evident—after the program, there were stalls selling food, books, and even photographs of GSD. Donation boxes were scattered everywhere, inviting contributions without providing any receipts, making it impossible to account for the funds collected. Not be surprised if it used for money laundry.

Given the substantial income generated, one would expect that the organizers could at least provide free food, especially considering that many attendees travel long distances. However, the irony is that the food sold is prepared by volunteer sevadaars, who then have to pay for it themselves.

I also learned that attendees are not allowed to ask about GSD’s involvement in shell companies or his financial dealings. Questions must be submitted in advance, and only a select few are permitted to speak. This level of control was not seen a few years ago, and it seems designed to prevent any scrutiny.

The security at the event was on par with that of an airport—rigorous checks, and no phones allowed. The atmosphere was more reminiscent of a high-security event than a spiritual gathering.

Having returned after a long time, I couldn’t help but feel that the situation is deteriorating. The contrast between the message of simplicity and humility and the reality of luxury and control was too glaring to ignore. I can only hope that the truth will eventually emerge if there is truly a higher power overseeing all of this.

This is a comment by AAM in response to what Sharma said. 

@M. B. Sharma, I have to agree the atmosphere at these events have deteriorated, as there isn't much spiritual inspiration. Of course, the representatives are quick to tell you that the problem is with you. You are not receptive. You get what you come to get. May not be attending in the future.

Douglas Harding sees God where most people see consciousness

It's a familiar feeling. I'm enjoying a book about spirituality, because the author makes sense to me and doesn't go overboard on religious mumbo-jumbo. 

Then... I reach a chapter where I fill the margins with question marks, because what's being said doesn't make sense to me and sounds like religious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the previous part, but it makes me wonder how the author could shift so suddenly into religiosity. 

That's what happened to me today with Douglas Harding's Face to No Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. I wrote about my initial reading of it in "Love is keeping your mind open for other people and things."

I was cruising along in the second chapter, enjoying how Harding looked upon the "faceless" aspect of him as being a capacity for knowing, which is pretty much how Thomas Metzinger describes pure awareness in his book The Elephant and The Blind.

Harding uses anxiety as an example of how consciousness has space for anything that can be known.

Look, just as I find myself Capacity for you, just as I find myself faceless Here for your face, colorless Here for your color, formless Here for your form, so I find myself Space Here, Capacity Here, for anxiety. I'm Space for it.

This Space, this Capacity for the changing feelings, is always me, always available. So what I'm on about is not a case of feeling. It's a case of fact. I should have said this right at the beginning of the evening. We are not on about feelings. We are on about where they come from, what is upstream of feelings, the facts. 

It's facts which will bring us relief from our anguish. Feelings will not.

Music to my ears. I love facts. I'm not always capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, but I aspire to being as factual as possible in my life. This is a big reason why I've come to dislike religion, which all too often is fact-free.

I guess I should have paid more attention to all the capitalized nouns in the excerpt above from Harding's first chapter. That's often a giveaway when a spiritual writer elevates everyday words to a meaning that is anything but obvious, as in Capacity, Here, Space.

Because it turned out in the second chapter that Harding somehow concludes that our usual human consciousness is God. And this from a guy who just said a few pages before that he was all about facts. Here's some excerpts that show what I mean. 

Harding says that if we're to see God Here and find God Here, "we have to know what we are looking for so that we can tell whether those mystics and sages got it right... something very specific, not something vague."

Well, this makes little sense. After all, there's no proof that God even exists, much less that God has certain well-defined characteristics. Religions heartily disagree on both fronts. (I call Buddhism a religion that has no god.) Harding then says:

And I would say that which we can name God provisionally (or if we prefer, Atman-Brahman or Reality or Essence or even No-thingness -- I don't care what you call it) has five characteristics. 

The first characteristic is that it has no boundaries, no fence around it, no edges. It's absolutely unlimited in all directions. The second characteristic is that it is absolutely clear, clean, empty of contamination. It is utterly simple, totally transparent, empty of everything but itself, empty even of itself, clearer than glass, cloudless, an infinite sky.

The third characteristic is that it is also full of the world. Because it's empty, it's full -- full of the scene, whatever the scene is, absolutely united with it. The fourth characteristic is that it is awake, it's aware, it's conscious. And the fifth characteristic is that it is right where you are. 

The only place you will find Her Majesty is nearer to you than everything else. That's her throne room, her royal palace, right where you are. The Kingdom is within you.To sum up, there are five characteristics of Her Majesty: she is infinite, empty, full of the world, awake, and right where you are. Now that's a description of God. But doesn't the description also fit you?

This is an amazing bit of bad philosophizing from someone who claims to be factual, but obviously is deeply religious in a Christian sense, which is the religion he was brought up in by a fundamentalist father. 

First of all, Harding makes the mistake that Thomas Metzinger warns about repeatedly in his own book about pure awareness. He uses the phenomenology of how awareness appears to us humans to draw unwarranted conclusions about the actual reality those phenomenal experiences point to. 

Metzinger calls this theory contamination, which is exactly what Harding does in the excerpt above. Harding describes how consciousness appears, then claims that those characteristics are those of God, so, using horribly twisted logic, our consciousness is God. 

Circular reasoning gone wild.

Harding neglects to mention that God also is considered by major world religions to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent -- qualities that definitely don't apply to human consciousness, since he only focused on those that match up with how our limited consciousness appears to us. 

Here's some additional quotations to show further how Harding equates God with human awareness.

We should have the humility to be a little bit traditional here and realize that for two thousand years great saints have been working at this, and the common feature of their discovery is: "Not I but Christ liveth in me." Paul goes on and on: "I am crucified with Christ." Father Gerard Hughes, author of the book, God of Surprises, says, "God calls on us to become Christ." Not Christs, but Christ. When I hold out my arms, I see the pattern of the Crucifixion. We're built to that incredible pattern.

It is really true that Who you are is the Origin of the world, everywhichway you look at it. Just think! You never moved an inch. You are the unmoved mover of the world. You are timeless. You have no boundaries.

The big thing for me, a development over the last few years, is the realization of the Incarnation. To put it very, very simply, if it is true what Tennyson says, what the Koran says, that God is nearer to me than my hands and my feet and my breathing, then God is Here and This is where he lives...These feet go on the errands of God, and this voice speaks his words. They are the instruments of Who we really, really are.

I really, really disagree. Harding's first book, On Having No Head, appealed to me because it was almost entirely based on what I considered to be facts about our human consciousness. However, somewhere along the way, Harding merged the Christianity of his youth with his headless perceptions. 

The result isn't useless, but it contains way too much gibberish for my taste.

Love is keeping your mind open for other people and things

I love my wife. Which is why last night was so disturbing.

It was deeply painful to know that soon I'd be holding my wife's hand for the last time, because she was about to die. The more I thought about this, the more distress I felt, until I was on the verge of crying a massive amount of tears.

Thankfully, my wife was fine.

Her death was a product of my imagination, which ran away with me while I was brushing my teeth after we'd finished watching an episode of Shogun on Hulu where a man committed hara-kiri, ritual suicide, because a disagreement with his Japanese lord left him no other choice if he was to maintain his honor.

Death was on my mind, which probably explains why I suddenly began thinking about how sad I would be when my wife died. 

The relevance of this to my rediscovery of Douglas Harding's book, On Having No Head, which I wrote about a few days ago, is that I was almost totally immersed in my own thoughts about my wife dying, to such an extent that they seemed real, until I focused my attention on the world outside my head.

As soon as I returned to looking at the white porcelain of our sink, and the toothbrush filled with toothpaste that I was holding in my hand, the sorrow I had conjured in my mind vanished. The world was much more real than my imagination, and I reacted accordingly.

What this taught me -- and this is a lesson that I keep learning over and over -- is the difference between how I imagine the world to be versus how it actually is. 

I worry about lots of stuff that never happens. I also find that lots of stuff happens that I never worried about, but disturbs me when it rears its unpleasant head. So in my wiser moments, I try to live in accord with what Harding says in On Having No Head. (By Space, he means the capacity for knowing that is awareness.)

This unknowing has no limits. It extends beyond what we perceive to all we feel and think and do. It is ceasing to know how to cope with life, where we are going, what to do after this immediate task is done, what's going to happen to us tomorrow, next week, next year.

It is walking one step at a time and blindfolded, in the assurance that the Space here -- which is nothing and knows nothing but Itself -- will nevertheless come up, moment by moment, with what's needed. It is living like the lilies of the field, taking no thought for the morrow, trusting our Source.

This is where Harding and I begin to part company, when he talks about the Source and God rather than sticking with the bare facts of open-minded awareness. Harding is on solid ground when he speaks about the phenomenology of "having no head," of our sense that consciousness itself is empty and pristine, while the contents of consciousness are full of diverse qualities. 

But when he crosses over into religious territory, drawing implications about the meaning of his "headless way" that aren't part of that experience itself, that Harding is on shaky ground. 

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the way he looks upon love in another of his books that I recently ordered from Amazon, Face to No-Face. In the first chapter, Harding talks about how as a youth brought up by a rigid fundamentalist Christian father who forbid him from reading anything but the Bible, he had come to believe that love is the cornerstone of life and the universe.

Sentiments like that usually leave me cold. They sound nice, but lack substance. I'm not attracted to a philosophy that sounds like it was written on a Hallmark Card. I liked what Harding says about love though, viewing it as the result of a mind, or awareness, focused on a person or thing in the world, not on our own inward self. 

In other words, we are headless for the object of our beheaded love. Our emptiness meets their fullness, and if they return our love, their emptiness meets our fullness. 

You want to love well the person you love. There's only one way truly to love that person. It is to disappear in his or her favor. We are built to give our lives for one another. This is an exquisite design for living, that we give our lives for one another.

I look at my young friend next to me here. The only way that I can receive his face is to die as Douglas and be resurrected as him. I guess it is the same for him. His gives his life for Douglas; I give my life for him. 

We are disappearing in each other's favor. We are built for loving. I'm not talking about the feeling. I'm talking about the ground from which love can grow and flourish. Here, I really am in receipt of him, not because I am a nice person, because I'm not.

Douglas is not a very nice person. My friend is not a perfect person, either. He looks pretty good, but he's not perfect. But he's built for loving.

This disappearance is real disappearance because when I look Here, not a molecule is left, let alone a cell, let alone some goo or chemical stuff -- as you saw for yourself when you looked at the Clarity where you are. There's no dust on this clear Window.

This is real death. It's a more complete death than the one the mortician deals with because he's left with some mess, something to get rid of. There's nothing to get rid of here. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he gave his life for his friend."

Well, those are lofty words, a bit too lofty and abstract for my liking. I look at things more simply and practically. 

When my wife has something to say to me, my loving response is to stop whatever I'm doing, try to shut up the chatter inside my head, and listen to her with an open attentive mind. Same applies to my Tai Chi class. Today, as every time I go to the class, I try to focus on what our instructor is saying, and what we are doing.

Sure, I also wonder about what I'm going to have for dinner, and I'm aware of the sciatica pain in my right leg which is worse when I'm standing still rather than moving. But in general, I figure that since I love Tai Chi and I love my Tai Chi class, the best way to express that love is being attentive to what's happening in the class, not to the going's on inside my head that are unrelated to Tai Chi.

I rediscover Douglas Harding's "headless" rediscovery of the obvious

Douglas Harding's classic book, On Having No Head, has the subtitle of Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious.

Well, as I said in a 2018 post, "'On Having No Head' has a few simple truths," I'd bought the book quite a few years prior, given it away because I wasn't overly impressed with it back then, then bought a revised edition after I heard Sam Harris talk about it on his Waking Up app.

The past few days I've been re-re-reading the book that I re-bought and re-read six years ago. That's a lot of "re's" for a book that is about the rediscovery of the obvious. Guess I've got a problem with obviousness.

Which isn't entirely true, since I liked the book in 2018 and I'm liking it even more now, assuming I can tell the difference between those likings. 

If you're not familiar with Harding's headlessness, here's an excerpt from my 2018 post about his book:

Here's the short version of what Harding experienced on a walk in the Himalayas, after he realized that he wasn't seeing his head (excerpt for a part of his nose).

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it as, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me," unstained by any observer. It's total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious.

My post of a few days ago was about looking without, not within, being the best spiritual advice. I mentioned Harding in that post, which spurred me to take another look at his book, since I really like the idea of having the world be my head as much as possible.

Of course, this is always the case, which is why Harding says his insight, and Zen, is so obvious. There's no world for us, or for anyone else, without consciousness. That's a given. It's how our consciousness and the world relate that is the interesting question.

Harding seems to have it right when he says that our adult consciousness looks outward at the world, but falls short when it looks inward in a falsely self-conscious manner, "aiming your arrows of attention at that insubstantial some-body, at that human appearance of yours which daily became more substantial for you, and soon was your identity card, our identity itself."

By contrast, as the seer with a more refined understanding, "you are again truly Self-conscious: but this time you penetrate that ring of appearances more deliberately and consistently, and begin to rest in What they are appearances of, in your Reality, which is your true Identity, your Presence-Absence, your Core and Source."

More and more often your arrows of attention, simultaneously aimed inwards and outwards, hit their mark. You are becoming adept at two-way looking -- at once looking in at No-thing and out at every-thing.

Of course, given how complex the human brain is, about a hundred billion neurons with trillions of connections, that "No-thing" is anything but, since our mind is the result of intense neurological activity, most of which is outside of our conscious awareness.

So it's more accurate to say that looking inwards, we find nothing substantial, unchanging, and independent. In the 2018 post I said that Harding's "insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self residing within our psyche, and there is no free will belonging to that nonexistent self."

I like how Harding describes some of the changes in our everyday lives from his headless realization in a single lengthy sentence.

Typically, these will include an enlivening of the senses (raising the screen which muffles the plangency of sounds, dims the glow of colours, blurs forms, and filters out the loveliness shining in the "ugliest" places) and (to go with the sensory awakening) a complex of interrelated psychophysical changes -- including a sustained "whole-body" alertness in place of the "heady" intermittent source (as if one were poised through-and-through to run the race of one's life), a reduction of stress, particularly in the regions of the eyes and mouth and neck (as if one were at last letting them go), a progressive lowering of one's center of gravity (as if losing one's head were finding one's heart, and guts, and feet, which are now rooted in the Earth), a striking downward shift of one's breathing (as if it were a belly-function), and in fact a general come-down (as if all the good things one had vainly strained after in the heights were awaiting one in the depths).

Look without, not within, is the best spiritual advice

For thirty-five years I belonged to a guru-centered religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), whose teachings centered around a meditation approach aimed at "going within." 

Through the repetition of a mantra, visualization of the guru, and observation by one's inner senses of theorized divine sound and light, the promise was that realms of reality beyond the physical would be experienced on the road to God-realization.

Nice idea. Never happened to me. Nor did it happen to anyone else associated with RSSB who I talked with over those thirty-five years. And believe me, I talked with lots of RSSB initiates.

Now, the whole notion of going within doesn't make much sense to me. I meditated in that fashion for over three decades. Eventually I realized that this sort of meditation can lead to concentration, but it isn't a useful means of living a more satisfying life, since life is lived without, not within.

Buddhist'y meditation, which typically involves following one's breath, being mindful of external perceptions, and having the eyes open at times and closed at times, strikes me as a wiser form of spirituality.

In Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure awareness either in meditation or in everyday activities, he makes an astute observation in the "Coming Home" chapter.

For now, we can simply conclude that on this reading -- treating it as something aimed at successful practice (not as metaphysics) -- the classical motif of "recognizing your own true nature" would really describe the possibility of a shift in the unit of identification: the possibility of pure awareness becoming that from which the world is now experienced, as opposed to that at which the meditating self looks.

Metzinger says that a common mostly unconscious belief in the brain holds that (1) we have a preexisting, perhaps innate, true nature, and (2) this nature can be recognized. This certainly fits with the RSSB meditation I was taught which theorized that our true nature is soul, but soul is disguised by coverings of mind and matter that need to be removed so our pristine immaterial nature is recognized.

Maybe, but I deeply doubt it. 

What seems much more likely is that we do not possess any sort of enduring, unchanging true nature, commonly termed the Self. Instead, we are an ever-changing collection of qualities that arise from countless causes and conditions extending for vast periods of past time -- all the way back to the big bang, really.

As I frequently say to myself, No self, no free will, no problem. 

If I look within, I won't find anything very interesting. Just more of me. Thoughts, emotions, memories, anticipations. When my mind is silent and still, there's a certain peace, but this is an absence, not a presence. Deep dreamless sleep is peaceful also, as is death. Why would I want that before I die?

I enjoy a certain state of pure awareness where I feel what Metzinger said in the quotation above: becoming that from which the world is experienced. It's hard to put into words what this feeling is like for me. 

One way to put it is Douglas Harding's well-known adage of having no head. At first this seemed ridiculous, since obviously I and everybody else has a head.

But what he means is that when we look with eyes open, what we see is the world, not a head. A head only appears when we look in a mirror, or at a photograph of ourself, which entails making an object of ourself.

Our subjectivity, our consciousness, has no head. There is no place where we could "go within." That's a fantasy, an abstraction with no basis in reality. What is real is our awareness from which the world is experienced. It makes no sense for awareness to be that at which the meditating self looks, because awareness is what is doing the looking, and we can't look at what is doing the looking. 

Expressed in words, this sounds confusing. But in my actual life, it is very simple. At times throughout the day, I feel the breath passing in and out of my nostrils. Centered in that physical sensation, I view the world as if it were my head. Which indeed, it is, for the only way I can know anything is by being aware of it.

Looking without rather than within feels better to me. Again, the world is much more interesting than I am. My thoughts and feelings are very familiar to me. I much prefer to have the world be my head, rather than my head be my head.

That may sound crazy to you. It does seem that way when I read the words I just wrote. All I can say is that it reflects how I feel, albeit imperfectly. That's the problem with words. They aren't reality.

Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death

I'm a believer in the Five Minute University equivalent of book reading. If you're not familiar with Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, congratulations. You're nowhere near as old as I am. Sarducci was a thing back in the ancient days of 1970's/80's comedy.

His brilliant idea, which is hard to argue with, was to charge $20 for a diploma from his college, which only takes five minutes to graduate from, since five years after someone graduates from a regular college, all they can remember about what they learned could be regurgitated in five minutes. For more details, here's a video:

When I read a non-fiction book, I have a similar approach to it. If I can come across just a couple of ideas that I'll remember a couple of years after I finish the book, I consider that my time reading it was well spent. 

Today I came across a quotation in Jean Tollifson's book, Painting the Sidewalk With Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality, that struck me as meeting Sarducci's criterion. I think I'll remember these words, because I resonate with them so much.

"Enlightenment is not dying a good death. It is not needing to die a good death."

Tollifson said that these were the words of Katagiri Roshi when he was dying of cancer. She went on to say this in a brief chapter, "You Can't Get Any Closer to Here than Here."

The egoic mirage always wants to look and feel good -- be calm while the plane crashes, smile benevolently on my deathbed, meet everything with total equanimity, never get angry or anxious or depressed. But the One Reality includes everything.

So what difference does it make? Obviously it's more pleasant one way, but life is not always pleasant by its very nature. The suffering is in the thought that this is "my" reaction, and "I" want it to be spiritually correct. It all seems very important and very serious.

So here we are at the Yoga Center and the mind is busy plotting what to do if there is turbulence on the plane flight home tomorrow. It's so human, and it's quite funny, isn't it? As Mark Twain once said, I've been through lots of terrible things in my life, but fortunately most of them never happened.

...You will do whatever you do -- but there is no executive at the helm calling the shots. And nothing you do will get you anywhere other than right here, where you always are. And when consciousness goes, either in deep sleep or in death, all your progress is gone. The whole movie of your life vanishes like last night's dream.

Enlightenment is seeing this. Delusion is not seeing this. When enlightenment is here, we see everything as unicity [a single entity]. When delusion is here, we imagine enemies who need to be vanquished, internal enemies or external enemies. Enlightenment sees no boundary between internal and external, and it sees no enemies.

It sees only God.

Tollfison isn't referring to a personal God here. In fact, I don't believe she is referring to anything at all, except unicity, oneness, the "uni" in our universe.

She also isn't saying that enlightenment is something permanent. It comes and goes as we bounce back and forth between viewing ourselves as a separate "I" and, in our wiser moments, seeing ourselves as inseparable from everything in existence.

I really like the notion of not needing to die a good death, or indeed, of not needing for anything to be other than what it is. This takes the pressure off.

It relaxes me. It makes me more accepting of my faults and weaknesses. It helps me look upon pain, disappointment, fear, and other disturbing emotions as simply something that's part of life, rather than as a cancer that needs to be excised from my mind.

"Theory contamination" is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. 

I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions.

A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun and the planets known at the time orbiting Earth.

To make the observations fit with that assumption, Ptolemy and others came up with the notion of epicycles -- basically circles within circles that, with enough fiddling, could fairly accurately mirror motions of what was observed in the heavens. 

Of course, once the Sun-centered assumption took hold, the epicycles weren't necessary. Well, actually they were to some extent, since it was assumed that planetary orbits were circular, rather than elliptical as they actually are, so some fiddling still was required.

My point is that the interpretation of observations or perceptions rarely, if ever, take place in a theoretical vacuum.

The smell of coffee is much more appealing to someone who enjoys the beverage than to someone who can't stand the taste of it. How big a problem the number of undocumented immigrants entering the United States is depends on how valuable someone considers the immigrants are for this country.

In Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure awareness reported by meditators, he speaks about "theory contamination" as being an issue for every scientific approach.

I'd add that it's an issue for non-scientific approaches also. It's really tough for a group of people to decide on a restaurant to go to when some of the deciders only eat organic food, others are vegetarians, and still others are on a paleo all-meat diet. How they value a restaurant depends on what food they prefer.

Metzinger writes:

In Tibetan Buddhism, pure awareness has long been beautifully described as "the natural state" (rang bzhin gnas rigs). The existence of a label like this may seem unremarkable, or it may be straightforwardly useful. But it also presents us with one example of a methodological difficulty, a major obstacle that every scientific approach has to face.

In chapter 2, I called it the problem of "theory contamination": Theoretical assumptions and belief systems may have strongly colored the reports that we received, and the conceptual instruments available to a practitioner inevitably shape the way she communicates her own experience.

We find many example of such contamination in this book. Our meditators spontaneously and more or less innocently use ancient concepts charged with implicit bias, like "suchness" (chapter 9), "emptiness" (chapter 17), "luminosity" (chapter 18), "witnessing" (chapter 19), "nonduality" (chapters 26 and 27), and "nonmeditation" (chapter 32).

Here's some of the conclusions Metzinger draws from the problem of theory contamination.

But if we adopt an intellectually honest and methodologically sound perspective, then "phenomenality" as such -- the subjective sense of appearance itself, the bare and nonconceptual character of "awareness" or "pure consciousness" -- is only a phenomenal quality too, just as redness, greenness, sweetness, and epistemicity are.

Today, the way to go is not to jump to strong metaphysical conclusions in a naively realistic manner, as if the structure of reality could be directly read from the structure of certain kinds of conscious experience.

Our new model of consciousness must not be constrained only by the phenomenology because other forms of evidence count as well. The elephant approach must involve a multiplicity of perspectives, because it is attempting to satisfy a whole range of constraints entailed by multiple levels of analysis.

Nothing is given here -- no direct form of inner perception. The directness, transparency, and experiential immediacy all belong on the level of appearances, as later reported verbally.

Hard to argue with. Color and taste, as Metzinger observed, aren't part of physical reality, but of human sense organs and brain. Some people are color-blind. Some people are able to taste flavors that others can't. (A professional wine taster, for example.) 

He's saying that experiences of pure awareness are similar. But here it isn't a physical perception that is experienced differently by various people, but the character of awareness or pure consciousness.

Most Buddhists will describe their experience in a different way than most Christians will. An atheist may describe their experience as an embrace of being, while a religious person may describe it as the presence of God.

Metzinger's quest, which he says will take much more research than he's been able to do so far, is to arrive at a phenomenology of pure awareness where the "actual" experience (a problematic word) is separated from the conceptual overlay meditators give the experience via theory contamination. 

It's a noble goal. I'm just skeptical that it's possible to achieve. But that's an assumption of mine which surely suffers from a form of theory contamination.

Pure consciousness isn't an experience. It's the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate.

I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes:

Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to us by coming and going in the mind.

Rather, pure awareness may feel like something that reveals the timeless possibility for all conscious experience itself, and, somehow, its true nature as well.

Makes sense. After all, how could consciousness or awareness (same thing, according to Metzinger) be an experience when consciousness or awareness obviously is required to have any sort of conscious experience?

I've been skeptical of the idea that it is possible to be conscious without some conscious content. I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility, but I find it difficult to imagine how someone could simply be conscious, period. 

No sensations. No perceptions. No thoughts. No emotions. No anything except being conscious. For someone to know that they were in a state of consciousness without conscious content seemingly would require, at minimum, a capacity of being aware that one is simply being aware.

Which would be pretty damn close to consciousness without conscious content, but that extra "aware that one is simply being aware" is a subtle addition to consciousness. And that, pleasingly, seems to be close to what Metzinger is saying in this passage.

Admittedly, it takes some effort to grasp what he's getting at, since Metzinger is a philosopher, and often writes like one.

All physical processes have certain conditions that make their existence possible. But only very few physical systems model and track these conditions. Self-organizing systems like ourselves exist by persisting in dynamic environments, following, as Hohwy explains, an inner norm by which they model the conditions that make their own physical existence possible.

...But what about pure awareness? Can we also internally model the conditions of possibility for knowing -- in meditation, non conceptually, without words, in a state of silence?

If we view the experience of pure awareness as an internal model of epistemic openness, and if the same principle of continuously tracking the conditions of possibility holds not only for whole organisms, but also for conscious processes unfolding in their nervous systems, then it is conceivable that the actual functioning of the principle can sometimes be detected by the model itself (e.g., in exceptionally clear and silent nondual states).

It could be detected by meditators in states of dual mindfulness, but it could perhaps also detect itself in what, in the preceding chapter, we called "reflexively aware mindfulness" or "self-knowing empty cognizance." The currently running model would be continuously tracking its own condition for existence -- epistemic openness, the very possibility of knowledge -- thereby autopoietically re-creating itself over and over.

If this physical process had a conscious correlate (or if it were not correlated with, but were simply identical to, pure awareness "coming alive"), then our predication would have to be that a bare and empty form of wakefulness emerges, a state that cannot be easily compared to any other kind of conscious experience.

The phenomenological prediction would be that it has the experiential quality of continuously refreshing itself, of autonomously holding itself in existence -- and, plausibly, of knowing itself. 

Our dog clearly is aware. But I doubt that she is aware of her own awareness. If she is, this is a much less sophisticated form of self-awareness, or of knowing herself, than we humans possess.

Metzinger seems to be saying that in addition to knowing ourselves as an object, from the outside as it were, humans also are capable of knowing ourselves as a subject, from the inside as it were. Which basically is pure awareness -- a non-conceptual knowing of our capacity to know.

It's temping to draw metaphysical conclusions from this capacity. Soul! Universal consciousness! Enlightenment! Buddha-nature! All that stuff that religions derive from conscious experiences that, in themselves, don't possess any inherent meaning along those lines. Metzinger warns about this.

Conclusions are also easily jumped to when it comes to "phenomenality per se" actually being something nominal, being the "thing in itself" behind all appearances. The C-fallacy arises whenever someone falsely concludes that just because something feels like the true and timeless nature of consciousness itself -- or not like an experience at all -- we have actually found some metaphysical bedrock or ultimately understood consciousness itself. 

...Intellectual honesty is an integral, indispensable part of spiritual practice and it is what connects such practice with modern philosophy and science. 

What the Olympics can teach us about life, love, and reality

Ooh, after just writing the title for this blog post, I realized that it's pretty grandiose. But if I stumble and fall before I cross the blog-post-expectation finish line, this will simply serve to emphasize one of my points about the meaning of the Olympics -- assuming I can remember what it was.

The Paris Olympics are about halfway done. My wife and I watched the opening ceremony in its entirety.  Well, until the ceremony reached the stadium, after which we lost interest.

I thought it was one of the best opening ceremonies ever. Creative, emotional, energetic. Having the athletes on boats was a stroke of genius. I'm always moved by so many nations coming together under a single banner: the Olympics. 

As I recall, the athletes from Iran were on a boat just ahead of the boat that carried the Israeli athletes. Though their countries are mortal enemies politically and religiously, I'm confident that athletes from Iran and Israel would get along fine if they met during the Olympics. 

It gave me hope to see the floating Parade of Nations. I realize that sports is a special case of global cooperation. But if the world can peacefully coexist on the field of athletic competition, it sure seems that one day we can bridge our political, religious, and cultural differences. 

That's why John Lennon's Imagine was played during the opening ceremony, a song with great lyrics, including:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

 

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

A big reason why sports unites rather than divides is that there are agreed-upon rules for every Olympic event. If you can't follow the rules, you can't compete. Breaking the rules has consequences. A warning, a penalty, maybe even a forfeit of the match. 

In part this was a dream of the United Nations, including the International Court of Justice. It still is to some extent, but I'm sorry to say that my country, the United States, is one of those that puts itself above the rule of international law. Which makes no sense, since the United States is pleased to follow international rules that govern our athletes in the Olympics.

People hate to see their favored team or athlete lose. They hate it even more when an officiating error seems to bend the rules unfairly. That happened to American tennis star Coco Gauff when she lost a match after a linesperson called a ball out while Gauff was about to swing at it, which made her mishit the ball, then the referee overruled the call and refused to replay the point. 

This shows how life often isn't fair, or at least appears to be unfair, despite the title of one of my books that argued otherwise. 

Further evidence of this abounds in the Olympics, as in all sporting events. However, I don't see this further evidence as pointing to life's unfairness, but to life's contingency, its unpredictable and chaotic nature. Meaning, large effects often follow from small causes. Very small, sometimes. This helps produce the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

For me, the surfing competition showed this dramatically, which is taking place in Tahiti, at a notorious reef where large waves break with tremendous force in what soon turns into shallow water. Surfing is a unique Olympic sport in that the field of play, so to speak, is constantly shifting -- in line with Buddhist notions of life itself. 

Two competitors have 30 minutes to catch waves, taking turns, basically. Depending on the ocean conditions, there might be a string, or set, of large high quality waves that will showcase the surfer's talents. Or, the competitors might have to wait, and wait, and wait for a decent wave. 

I watched two surfers who were pretty evenly matched. Only a small difference separated their scores as the competition grew close to the 3o minute mark. The surfer who was behind hoped for a large wave to appear, as this was their only hope to get in the breaking "pipeline," pop out cleanly, and earn a good score from the judges.

But it wasn't a big wave day. The horn sounded signaling the end of the competition with the surfer behind never getting another chance. That's how sports, and life, often is. You do your best, but there are forces outside of your control that have the last say in how well you do.

Surfers, like skateboarders and athletes in many, if not most, other Olympic sports, love what they do. They'd be doing it even if fame and money didn't accompany their efforts. I liked watching two male surfers on a really big wave day catch giant wave after giant wave, smiling and laughing with each other as they paddled back out to get another wave.

An announcer, who I believe was a professional surfer himself, said that what the competitors would remember about this day wasn't whether they won or lost, but how great the surfing was. Similarly, I read that after a Japanese skateboarder pulled off a very difficult trick, giving him a gold medal, his competitors applauded him, since they love skateboarding more than they hate losing, and someone who advances the sport via a rarely or never seen trick -- that really pleases them.

I'm a competitive person. I don't like losing, whether it be an argument or an athletic competition (though my days as an avid club tennis player are far in my rear-view mirror). But I'm going to try to keep in mind that losing an argument to someone who makes better points than I'm capable of isn't anything to be ashamed of, but an opportunity to admire the skills of the other person.

The Olympics brings out the best in competitors. It also can bring out the best in us spectators, if we have the right attitude toward watching.

Oh, almost forgot to mention another memorable moment, the last minute or so of the bronze medal match between the United States and Australia women's rugby teams. Australia was ahead 14-7. The Americans were 85 yards away from the goal line. Things looked bleak for the USA team. 

After a few passes that didn't result in much, if any, forward progress, the ball ended up in the hands of an American woman who was almost instantly in the grasp of an Australian player. But she managed to get loose, looked upfield, and saw open territory between her and the goal line.

She took off running. Nobody from the Australian team could catch her. I was worried she'd run out of steam, but she dived across the goal line untouched. The camera showed the joy of the American players and the shock of the Australian players.

They had the game won, seemingly. Until the game was lost. That's life. You just never know for sure what's going to happen next. Something horrible. Something wonderful. You just never know.