Church of the Churchless

Spaciousness of awareness is a nice thought, but not reality

Buddhism, like all "ism's", can be irritating. But that's the case with everything in life, really. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.

I resonate with Buddhist teachings.

However, as I make my way through Rob Burbea's in-depth examination of the Buddhist notions of emptiness, dependent arising, suffering, and such, some chapters in Seeing That Frees are too Buddhist-geeky for my taste.

Burbea, like some practitioners who are really into Buddhist teachings, strikes me as being akin to a car enthusiast who wants to fine-tune every aspect of a vehicle's operation. So his book goes into great detail about some issues that don't concern me much.

But Burbea is speaking in large part to readers who, like him, are really into Buddhism. He often refers to meditation during a lengthy retreat, something I've never done or wanted to do.

That said, I should give Burbea some slack.

For everybody in my Tai Chi class, which has no beginners, is really into Tai Chi, as is my instructor, naturally. Thus the details about weight distribution and placement of the body in Tai Chi moves we examine would annoy someone who just wants to relax and move in a flowing manner. 

Which makes my Tai Chi about as geeky as Burbea's book about Buddhist teachings is.

Today, though, my interest in Seeing That Frees perked up again when I got to a chapter on "Emptiness and Awareness." Awareness fascinates me because awareness, or consciousness, is all we are, really. 

No awareness, no us. No awareness, no connection with either the world within or the world without. Even if our heart beats and our lungs breathe, without awareness we are essentially dead. Unconsciousness is an inkling of death if it is temporary; truly death if it is permanent. 

Burbea has a pleasingly subtle take on awareness. I'll try to describe the "Emptiness and Awareness" chapter as briefly as possible, though "brief" is often hard for me to attain in my posts about this book.

He starts off with the notion that many forms of spirituality make a central part of their teaching: awareness is like the vast empty sky that contains clouds and other phenomena, yet remains apart from what appears within it.

As it opens and becomes more steady, it can seem more and more that all phenomena appear to emerge out of this space of awareness, abide for a time, and then disappear back into it, while the space itself can have a sense of profound stillness, or imperturbability, to it. 

Burbea then talks about the benefits this view of awareness as a vast empty space can have for us, as people trying to understand ourselves and as meditators. Awareness as the container that can hold any kind of object of awareness is a simple, appealing notion.

Yet there is a "but" to this.

When the perception opens in the kinds of ways described earlier, the tremendous sense of peace, freedom, and beauty that it may involve can often affect a meditator profoundly. It can be very tempting then to suppose that what is experienced is somehow ultimate.

...Perhaps it is surmised to be truly transcendent, truly free of all conditions that arise in it. The notions of emptiness and the space of awareness may get equated, so that the space of awareness itself is regarded as 'Emptiness'.

Similarly, because the experience of the space seems to accord with various descriptions one might have heard or read, it is also relatively common for this awareness to be referred to, for example, as the 'Ground of Being', as the 'Cosmic Consciousness', 'Big Mind', 'The One Mind', 'The Absolute', 'The Unconditioned', or 'the Unfabricated'.

And since a sense of divinity often permeates experience, a practitioner may begin to speak in theistic terms.

Burbea then makes the entirely reasonable point that having a thought or feeling about the "vastness of awareness" is still an object in awareness, not awareness itself. In fact, he believes, as I do also, that it is impossible to be aware of awareness itself, for we only can be aware of contents of awareness.

Can you imagine being aware of pure awareness? I can't. For awareness without an object or content of awareness would be a void, a cipher, a nothing. There would be no difference between it and death.

So almost certainly "pure awareness" is a fantasy, for a fantasy can be an object of awareness.

Burbea then says that there's an alternative approach to viewing awareness as an empty space that holds all objects of awareness. 

All things can seem at that point to share the same 'substance' as awareness, and all experience may be seen as essentially a 'manifestation of awareness'. Then, not just the knowing, but the content of experiences too is sensed as having the nature of consciousness, being made of the same 'stuff' as awareness.

In other words, says Burbea, moments of consciousness can be seen as having both a knowing and a known aspect, with the knowing (consciousness) and the known (the perceptual object) lacking any essential difference.

This makes sense to me.

Again, there is no way to know anything about an object without awareness of the object. So awareness does seem to take on the qualities of the object. Even if a mechanism like a telescope, microscope, or whatever captures the perception of an object, unless a conscious knower is aware of that perception, it doesn't exist for us humans.

Burbea writes:

Whether the attention is wider or more narrow, the key to this way of looking is to recognize that what is seen or experienced is just that -- an experience -- and then see it that way -- as an experience, a perception -- rather than in the usual way of looking, which carries with it the imputation of a solid object 'out there'.

However, in the end Burbea says while both ways of looking at awareness are useful for a practitioner, they make awareness into something it is not: an entity with inherent existence. Meaning, actually awareness is fabricated or constructed just as everything else in existence is.

Both of those views are available to us. In practice, we may sometimes have, and encourage, a sense of awareness as separate from its objects, and this view can be very helpful; and at other times we may have, and encourage, a sense of the sameness of objects and awareness, and this view too may be helpful.

In both cases, however, as part of this view, a nature of awareness has been asserted which will not ultimately stand up to scrutiny. We will see, eventually, that the nature of awareness is neither the same as nor different from its objects of perception.

...Even though it may be regarded nominally as 'not a thing', because it is not materially substantial, an intuitive belief in the inherent existence of awareness has not been destroyed yet. Nevertheless, this fundamental omission does not alter the fact that both views may be ways of looking that support a great deal of letting go, of freedom, peace, and heart opening.

And they may, if employed skillfully, act as stepping-stones to deeper insight and a fuller realization of emptiness.

Phenomenology can deconstruct religious dogma

While I said in my last post that I'd be moving on from the subject of predictive processing, I'm only going to go halfway there. Because I want to explore something that stood out for me in one of the slides I shared in that post from a talk by Shamil Chandaria about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation."

This is how I described the blue box with various terms for Non-Dual Awareness and its associated orange'ish note in my previous blog post.

Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, is one of the spiritual notions (in the blue box) that Chandaria says are similar phenomenology (meaning, as experienced) yet with different metaphysical narratives. That's for sure. Brahman, God in Hinduism, is very different from Buddhist emptiness -- which means the interdependence of all things, none of which possess inherent existence in their own right.

Now, I'm not sure how similar the phenomenological experiences of non-dual awareness actually are. But before talking about that, here's a definition of phenomenology.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.

So assuming non-dual awareness does exist, where basically there is just a unity of experience instead of (1) an experiencer and (2) something being experienced, Chandaria considers that those experiencing non-dual awareness who use terms in the blue box from various spiritual and philosophical traditions all are having pretty much the same subjective experience, even though the terms point to different metaphysical narratives or dogmas.

I like this idea.

It rings true to me, though given the inherently personal nature of subjective experience, it would be difficult to prove that a Christian who feels the presence of Jesus when she stands on top of a  mountain, totally absorbed in the majestic beauty of her surroundings, is having the same non-dual experience as a Buddhist atheist who feels the emptiness or interdependence of those same surroundings.

In other words, it is when we frame a non-dual experience of unity between subject and object within a theological, philosophical, or some other system of thought that differences appear, even though the phenomenological experiences themselves may be very similar, if not identical.

I can't resist relating this to the criminal indictment of Trump that the United States Justice Department released a few days ago. Sure, it's quite a jump from non-dual awareness to serious legal charges against an ex-president, but my mind, like all minds, works in mysterious ways.

Political junkie that I am, I've been avidly following the reactions of Republican and Democratic leaders to the news of the indictment. Let's assume that they all have read the indictment, which runs 49 pages, but doesn't take very long to read given copious white space in the pages.

The indictment is akin to low-level phenomenology. It lays out some basic evidence about the case against Trump. The details and photos in the indictment are damning. Anyone who cares about national security and keeping our nation's military secrets safe should feel alarmed at what the charges against Trump are, and the evidence backing up those charges.

(This isn't all the evidence the government has. More surely will be revealed at Trump's trial.)

However, many if not most Republican leaders, including Trump himself, have been focusing on higher-level dogmas. I call them that, because there's really no facts to back them up. They're just ways of looking at the indictment that distract from the evidence presented in it by the Justice Department.

So Trump calls it a witch hunt. Other Republicans decry the weaponization of the Justice Department to go after Trump in an unfair manner. There's false claims that Biden ordered the indictment, ignoring that a special counsel was appointed to oversee the investigation into Trump's handling of secret documents, and a grand jury authorized the indictment.

Thus while there is little debate about the facts in the indictment, which are virtually indisputable, there's lots of debate about what the indictment means. Is it a valid way of holding Trump accountable for his willful retention of sensitive documents (my view), or is it a nasty way for Democrats to punish Trump because they hate him? (the view of most Republicans)

My point here is that the closer we come to raw experience and raw facts, the more agreement there should be on those low-level aspects of life. When we enter the realm of higher-level abstractions and dogmas, there is more room for disagreement.

At any rate, I like the idea that underneath all of the differences between the world's religious theologies and philosophical ways of looking at the world, there's a fundamental human unity that manifests when experience enters a state that is variously described as flow, absorption, non-duality, and such.

More simply put, a mother who can't stop gazing at the newborn she holds in her arms, so absorbed in the infant that the two of them appear to her to be one, is having the same experience as other mothers, whether they be committed Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, or atheists.

What if religions are wrong and there's nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique.

I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me.

If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar to me, at least) of looking for your car keys only to discover that they were sitting unnoticed in a pocket or purse the whole time.

But let's think about what's necessary for a search to make sense. To begin with, you really need to have lost something. Meaning, it was in your possession at one point, and now it isn't. Then there has to be a decent probability that you can find that thing you used to possess.

If you're on a cruise and drop your glasses into the ocean while leaning over a railing, you know what you've lost, but for all practical purposes you have a zero chance of finding that item.

In Return to the One I argued that we have a sense of loss, yet most of us don't understand what we're longing to recover: God, or the One. I feel like I did a pretty good job making that argument, yet in my current frame of mind I no longer find what I wrote to be persuasive.

I still like my first sentence in the book, though. But now I see it as pointing toward the desirability of living in the here and now, rather than a there and then. After all, where we are, where everyone is, without exception, is the present moment.

No searching required. Just be here now.

This, of course, is the essence of mindfulness. And of the non-religious aspect of Buddhism, which includes Zen. Such distinguishes these forms of spirituality from the seeking forms of spirituality and religion where there is much talk of a path to be followed, and signs of progress along the way.

Here's some illustrative passages from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life.

Not only is it always now. The "curriculum" of this adventure we call living, where mindfulness can play such a pivotal role, is always what is unfolding in this moment, whether we like what is happening or not. 

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred, and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we most need is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have -- this one.

...So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious -- even foreign -- to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.

...Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There's no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. 

It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now.

It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters.

If you don't pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India said, "You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."

...Awareness itself is what mindfulness is about. It is not about achieving an ideal, or a particularly desirable or longed-for special state.

If the mind is thinking: "If I meditate I'll always be compassionate. I'll be like the Dalai Lama. I'll be like Mother Teresa" or whoever your spiritual guru/hero of the moment is, it may help to remind yourself that you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or anybody else. Nor do you know what their interior experience is.

The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself.

The irony, of course, is that you already are.

Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy

I got a Master's Degree in Social Work way back in 1973 that exposed me to the fundamentals of counseling before I headed off in the direction of health services research and planning.

Then I married my second wife, Laurel, in 1990. She also had a MSW, but unlike me, pursued a career in social work, ending up after our marriage by starting a private psychotherapy practice.

Laurel would talk about how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was used in her practice, since it is fairly short-term and insurance companies don't like paying for lengthy psychotherapy aimed at delving into the root causes of someone's problems.

They want results. Which is what everybody wants, really.

So when I saw that a series on "Mindful CBT" by Seth Gillihan had been added to Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I decided to listen to what Gillihan had to say. I've finished Part 1 of Mindful CBT, which includes eight short (8-10 minutes) talks by Gillihan. 

Here's some of what Gillihan had to say. I took notes, most of which I can actually read -- my handwriting is terrible, even to me -- but these aren't verbatim quotes.

In Fundamentals of CBT, I learned that traditionally thoughts, feelings, and actions comprise CBT. These interact with each other. You can change any one and affect the others. Integrating mindfulness introduces depth to thoughts, feelings, and actions. 

The quality of changes is based on the quality of attention. How do we relate to our thoughts, feelings, and actions? Instead of pushing away anxious thoughts, give them less weight. We shift from "should" to mindful acceptance. 

In Finding Leverage, Gillihan said that we have to match our intention with the right tools. Advice alone isn't very helpful. Willpower alone is a recipe for failure. For example, if someone is afraid of spiders, they need to start small and work up from there -- not by letting a giant tarantula crawl on your arm right off the bat. A ladder is a series of small steps. The question isn't why did I fail, but what can I do to succeed?

In Working With Thoughts, I heard that thoughts can cause anxiety and affect actions. But thoughts often are misguided in some way. We ask, what story is my mind telling me? Not objective facts, often, but a subjective story.

Examine the evidence underlying thoughts, like a scientist. What evidence is for and against the thought? What's true in the situation? Is there a more realistic way of thinking that fits the data better? 

These are some some common cognitive disturbances: (1) Fortune telling -- making predictions about a future that hasn't happened yet; (2) Catastrophizing -- seeing things in the worst possible light; (3) Mind reading of another person -- believing we know what someone else is thinking.

In Addressing Core Beliefs, Gillihan says that you become more aware of negative thoughts. Our core beliefs drive thoughts. These are regular patterns, a lens that guides how we see the world. Example: seeing disapproval everywhere, even though you're doing a good job. 

Thoughts can feed back into a core belief and strengthen it. This is circular, yet completely convincing. Instead, focus on what is actually happening right now. Minds invent stories that often aren't true. Be in a situation as it is. Brush off unhelpful thoughts.

Not "oh no" but "oh well." Just a mental event. One core belief might be that wellbeing depends on things working out for us. Don't assume how life has to go. Life doesn't have to meet our expectations.

In Thoughts Support Mindful Presence, I learned that mindfulness supports thinking and thinking supports mindfulness. Thinking is just what the mind does. We don't have to take thoughts too seriously. Thoughts can play a positive role in our lives. Meditation is being present with what is, noticing what's already there.

In Working With Behavior, I heard about Pavlov's dogs. Animals learn certain things go together. Ringing of a bell is followed by food. Dogs salivated just with the bell. This is classical conditioning. A baby begins to cry when at the doctor's office because previous visits were disturbing.

We also learn by consequences of actions. This is operant conditioning. We learn patterns in the world and outcomes of our behavior. Classical and operant go together. A cat goes to the kitchen after hearing the can opener.

Make it easier to do what you intend to do. Make exercising rewarding, right-sized, starting easy. Put things in place to guide actions when motivation leaves you.

In Mindful Action, Gillihan says that mindfulness determines the quality of actions. With more awareness, you experience a walk more fully. But beware of this taking on a moral quality: you're bad if you're not mindful. 

Sometimes it's helpful to be on autopilot, like while driving, when you can carry on a conversation or listen to the radio. But there are costs when we're in divided attention much of the time. We'll have richer memories if we're more present.

Act in ways that align with reality. Mindful action doesn't try to force an outcome. Stop struggling against what is. Notice when your actions are at odds with reality.

In Working With Distress, I learned there are three ways to feel better in Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Shift thinking. Act differently. Practice mindfulness. However, sometimes these tools don't work, so we need to make peace with discomfort. 

Respond with openness and curiosity to discomfort. Maybe it will feel interesting, not bad. Mindful acceptance helps us endure uncomfortable situations. Stop fighting against reality. Change your life to match your limitations. 

Focus on what's happening right now. Don't subject yourself to future pain that you're anticipating, but hasn't happened yet, and may never happen. Be present with uncomfortable feelings. Stand up for issues you care about even if it upsets some people.

Wellbeing doesn't depend on eliminating stress. Can I open to this?

Once again, pure awareness strikes me as a meaningless notion

I don't expect people to be perfect. Everybody is flawed. To be human is to be imperfect. And since people write books, I don't expect the books I read to be perfect. I just hope for them to make sense.

Having finished The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, I can say that this is a very good book about both mindfulness and meditation. 

But I came across a few things that made me go, Huh, that doesn't make sense. Notably, some mentions of pure awareness, since I don't see how such can exist, as noted in a post from a few months ago.

I doubt there is such a thing as pure awareness, or pure consciousness. Anyone who claims to have experienced such a state, including Sam Harris, almost certainly is mistaking a feeling or thought of pure awareness for the actual thing. 

So my attitude is that one part of my conscious brain is aware of other parts of my conscious brain, which could include a sensation of Wow, I'm experiencing pure awareness! My meditation rocks!

This leaves mindfulness as an activity, or ability, to be aware of the contents of consciousness, with mindfulness being part of those contents. Thus Harris is on the right track when he says that mindfulness practice leads us to see that the contents of consciousness are constantly shifting and changing within our mind.

Where I disagree with him is his assumption that somehow we are clear pure consciousness. This is at odds with modern neuroscience, as I wrote about in Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness. 

I wrote about my problem with Harris' claim of pure awareness in this post. What I said in 2016 still makes sense to me now.

The authors of The Mindful Way through Depression also elevate awareness into something that almost certainly it isn't. Sure, I like the metaphor of awareness being the clear sky and contents of consciousness being akin to clouds that appear and disappear in that sky.

Metaphors aren't reality, though. I see no solid evidence, or even semi-solid evidence, that awareness exists separate from what we're aware of in the same sense that the sky is there even when clouds aren't.  Here's some excerpts from the book about choiceless awareness, a notion I do think makes sense if it's viewed as being aware of everything within our experience, rather than focusing on certain things.

It's always possible to jump to choiceless awareness at any moment, simply by letting go of any and all objects of attention. This sounds easy, but it is in fact a very challenging practice because we have nothing specific to focus on.

We rest in awareness itself, without any attempt to direct our attention toward anything other than awareness itself. There is no need even to think that you are meditating or that there is even a "you" to meditate. Even these are seen and known as thoughts by awareness, and in the seeing, in the knowing, they are seen to dissipate, again, like touching soap bubbles.

OK, I don't have much of a problem with these paragraphs. Well, aside from the mention of "awareness itself." What the heck would that be? How is it possible to be aware, yet aware of nothing but awareness itself?

And even if this was possible, how could someone know they were aware only of awareness itself without a content of awareness that, at minimum, includes a thought, intuition, or sensation of "I'm now aware only of awareness itself" -- which obviously wouldn't be true, given that thought, intuition, or sensation being an object of awareness, not awareness itself.

The book then engages in some speculations that struck me as being at odds with the general theme of being mindful of what is actually present within one's consciousness.

As we engage in this practice, we may become increasingly aware of the distinction between the objects to which we can direct our attention, if we choose, and the space of awareness in which all experiences arise.

The objects could be thought of as celestial bodies hanging in space. In choiceless awareness, we become the space that holds whatever condenses momentarily within it. Awareness, like space, is boundless, having no edges or limits.

The invitation is to settle into this awareness, to be the knowing, the nonconceptual knowing that pure awareness actually is. Awareness is not itself subject to pain, although it bears profound and empathic witness to pain.

And so once we have become acquainted with it, we may find it easier simply to hold even the most difficult and painful of our experiences within it. We may even make the curious, but profound, discovery that awareness is already free, intrinsically whole, and deeply knowing.

I think this passage is wrong. There's no evidence that pure awareness exists. The authors make awareness, or consciousness, into a thing rather than an activity. I suspect they fell prey to echoing Buddhist/Hindu teachings here, rather than sticking with the science of secular mindfulness.

Yes, it's true that the human brain doesn't feel pain. That's why surgeons can operate on the brain while a patient is conscious. But that's much different from claiming that the awareness/consciousness created by the brain is not subject to pain.

Again, that claim assumes that awareness is a thing that somehow exists separately from what we humans are aware of. It's crazy for the authors to say that awareness bears "witness to pain." Everybody who has experienced pain, whether physical or psychological, knows that's bullshit. 

It is possible to endure pain. It is possible to deal with pain in a way that lessens its impact on us. But pain is a valuable signal that something is wrong. Evolution has given us pain because an inability to feel pain is exceedingly dangerous. People who don't feel pain typically don't live very long, since they're prone to ignore harmful situations, like a hot fire.

This pure awareness part of the book struck me as undercutting their main theme, as stated in this quote. Clinging to the notion of pure awareness is an attempt to make reality into something that it isn't.

As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing to being so that we take in all the information that an experience offers us before we act.

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

The brain creates the mind, which is us

Today Ron E. left a comment on a recent churchless post that I like a lot and share below.

I readily admit that my fondness for the comment, which extends to almost all of the comments Ron leaves on this blog, largely is based on the fact that he and I look at reality in much the same way.

In a word, naturalistically. Meaning, we as human beings are not separate from the natural world, but are an integral aspect of nature. Nature is us, to put it in three words.

But since we're Homo sapiens, not a rock, a bolt of lightning, or some other non-sentient aspect of nature, we're a part of nature with a mind. But mind isn't something ethereal. Consciousness isn't either. 

Mind and consciousness, which may be the same thing, arise from the physical goings-on of the human brain. No need to posit a soul or any other supernatural entity. The brain creates the mind, which is us. So it makes sense to say, the brain is us.

This is both really obvious, and really controversial -- for those who believe (without any demonstrable evidence) that humans possess some special ingredient that isn't physical, survives the death of the body, and/or has a connection with God or some other form of divinity.

Sure, awareness or consciousness does seem ethereal. But the Earth seems flat; the Sun seems to rise and set; matter seems solid; time seems separate from space. All of those seemings aren't true, so there's no reason to assume that the seeming transcendent nature of mind and consciousness is true either.

Many findings of science have come to be accepted by the vast majority of people. However, it's going to take quite a while for the near-certain fact that you and I and everyone else are made of meat, with the brain being a special form of meat, to become a truth that resonates intimately with most people.

It might be that this won't happen until advanced artificial intelligences are commonplace, being indistinguishable or even superior to human intelligence. Perhaps only then will humans truly understand that what we are is no different from what everything else in nature is: natural, not supernatural.

Here's the comment from Ron E. Courtesy of Amazon, I've ordered the book he's reading. I like that Barrett takes a contrarian approach to emotions and the mind. Maybe she's right. Maybe she's wrong. But her book seems to be well-written, thoughtful, and provocative, reason enough for me to buy it. 

I have recently been reading Lisa Fieldman Barrett’s, "How Emotions Are Made." Her research describes how the brain constructs everything we experience, including emotions. She states: “Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.”

I mention Barrett’s studies because similar to the studies described in Brian’s latest blog on the Self-Reference Effect which states that “SREs then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multiple research groups have studied intensely”, it is another study that points to the brain as being the source of all that we experience.

For years, studies have revealed how much of what we experience results from the brain, including how the self emerges from the brain and builds our identities. By now, it should be pretty obvious that the brain creates the mind with its entire cognitive repertoire – and basically operates not through actualities but through predictions.

But apparently, the brain is not alone in creating the wonder that is us, simply because the brain's responses are dependent on the body and its senses and its environment – which importantly includes other people. The self then is a construct of all the on-going variables that our organism exists with and encounters every moment.

How revelatory it would be to realise the disconnectedness that we are and how we create our own worlds. How ‘heavenly’ it would be to be able to drop systems of belief that serve to separate and alienate us from each other and the world around us.

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

As I've noted previously on this blog, one of the spiritual phrases that now irritates me, yet used to make sense to me, is "as it is." 

There's a mistaken notion that it's possible to see reality as it is, objectively. That notion gets elevated into various sorts of mumbo-jumbo where this or that meditation technique, or whatever, supposedly gives someone the ability to perceive what is actually there with no trace of illusion.

Today I finished reading another chapter in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change. "Socks and Crocs" was super-fascinating. I'll try to do the chapter justice in this summary of it.

He starts off by telling the familiar story of The Dress -- which some people see as white and gold (that's me) and others as black and blue.

There were various theories about why this occurred. A neuroscientist, Pascal Wallisch, is quoted in the chapter, having done extensive research on The Dress and similar images. He wrote a Slate piece, "Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw 'The Dress' Differently."

Even outside of vision scientists, most people just assume everyone sees the world in the same way. Which is why it’s awkward when disagreements arise—it suggests one party either is ignorant, is malicious, has an agenda, or is crazy. We believe what we see with our own eyes more than almost anything else, which may explain the feuds that occurred when “the dress” first struck and science lacked a clear explanation for what was happening.

Two years later we have a much better idea of what may have been a reason for the varied perceptions: People’s perceived color is also informed by their perception of lighting. And the image of the dress, taken on a cellphone, contained a lot of uncertainty in terms of lighting conditions. Was it taken inside or outside? This matters because it implies artificial or natural light. Was the dress illuminated from the front or the back? This matters because if it was back-lit, it would be in a shadow, otherwise not.

The brain cannot be accused of epistemic modesty. It is well-known that in situations like this—where it faces profound uncertainty—it confidently fills in the gaps in knowledge by making assumptions. Usually, its assumptions are based on what it has most frequently encountered in the past. For instance, if the sensory information is more uncertain, observers will estimate object speeds to be slower than they actually are, presumably because slow objects are much more common in the environment than fast ones. (Indeed, most objects in any given field of view don’t move at all.) Color and lighting are no exception.

As the illumination conditions are impossible to clearly assess in the dress image, people make assumptions about what they are. Different people do this in differing ways, which is what causes the different interpretations of color. At least, that’s what my research shows, thanks to 13,000 people, including many Slate readers, who took surveys on what they saw when they saw the dress and also compiled other information about how they generally perceived the photo and the world.

The dress actually is blue and black. But most people see it as white and gold, at least initially. Why? Well, the more time someone had spent exposed to natural light, the more likely they saw the dress as white and gold. The more time someone had been exposed to artificial light, the more likely they saw the dress as blue and black.

McRaney says:

Either way -- and this is the important point for us going forward -- the ambiguity never registered. Whatever colors people saw subjectively, the image never seemed ambiguous because consciously people experienced only the output of their processes, and the output differed depending on a person's prior experiences with light. The result was a lie told to them by their brains that felt obviously true.

...When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we've experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities.

When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself -- but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes the people who see things differently seem, in a word, wrong.

...In psychology, there's a term for this cognitive blind spot, for when your disambiguations feel undeniably true. It's called naive realism, and it's the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption, interpretation, bias, or the limitations of your senses.

The late psychologist Lee Ross, who helped popularize the term, told me that it leads many of us to believe we arrived at our beliefs, attitudes, and values after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions.

Unaware that different priors can lead to different disambiguations, you believe you've been mainlining pure reality for years, and it was your intense study of the bare facts that naturally led to all of your conclusions. According to Ross, this is why people on each side of any debate believe their side is the only one rooted in reality.

...The truth is that we are always reaching our conclusions through disambiguation, but all of that work is done in our different brains without us knowing it. We just experience, in consciousness, the result.

You think you are experiencing the world as it truly is, and when a lot of people are sure their version of reality is the really real version at the same time that a lot of other people are sure that no, in fact, their version is, you get arguments that break the internet (like The Dress), but also the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, QAnon, and anti-mask protests during global pandemics.

Here's a figure in the chapter that apparently came from Pascal Wallisch.

McRaney summarizes this approach, called SURFPAD.

When you combine Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified (which means branching) or Forked Priors or Assumptions, you will get Disagreement. 

In other words, when the truth is uncertain, our brains resolve the uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences. People whose brains remove that uncertainty in similar ways will find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as black and blue.

Others whose brains resolve that uncertainty in a different way will also find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as white and gold.

The essence of SURFPAD is that these two groups each feel certain, and among the like-minded it seems those who disagree, no matter their numbers, must be mistaken. In both groups, people then begin searching for reasons why so many people in other groups can't see the truth without entertaining the possibility that they aren't seeing the truth themselves.

Lose yourself to find yourself

For a long time, over three decades, I assumed that a central goal of my life was to know myself. Another way of saying this was self-realization. The idea was that somewhere hidden away in my psyche was a True Me who was different from the current Untrue Me.

So I diligently meditated every morning. Sometimes as long as two and a half hours, sometimes for a shorter period, but never less than an hour. 

I don't regret all that meditating, which totaled well over 20,000 hours. Plus, I've continued to meditate every day since the end of my religious phase some 18 years ago.

Now, though, I'm much more inclined to believe that (1) I don't have an enduring self, so (2) being mindful of what I'm doing in the world, and what the world is doing to me (could be the same thing) is the best way to know who I am at any given moment.

This attitude is in line with a story in the March 5 issue of New Scientist, Lose Yourself. A subtitle says, "Transcendent experiences, where our sense of self takes a back seat, seem to be good for us -- and there is no need to go to extremes to get the benefits, finds Jess Craig."

The story starts out by describing a study by Roland Griffiths where fifty-one people facing imminent death were given the psychedelic psilocybin, which the state where I live, Oregon, voted to legalize for therapeutic purposes. Sixty-0ne percent had a clinically significant reduction in depression symptoms and 51 percent had a reduction in anxiety symptoms.

 Craig writes:

Frederick Barrett, part of Griffith's team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, says it isn't clear that the therapeutic effect was entirely down to the transcendent experience. But "a lot of people believe that is the case," he adds, "and I am one of them."

If he is right, it is a striking example of how self-transcendent experiences, though temporary, can provide a lasting boost to well-being. And they don't have to be the intense experience induced by psychedelics. Just staring in awe at magnificent trees or concentrating intensely on a challenging task also seems to have the capacity to make you happier, less stressed and kinder to others.

The story includes a quote from William James: "We can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace."

In my experience, that's absolutely true. But union comes in many forms. It doesn't mean totally losing yourself in another entity, such as someone on LSD feeling they've become a giant oak tree. That way lies madness, were it to continue.

Rather, greater peace and pleasure comes from any degree of moving away from a focus on our own self. For most of us, that involves inward-directed thinking and feeling. 

What makes self-transcendent experiences so beneficial? At first blush, you might think it would be unsettling, even terrifying, to suddenly lose your sense of self. Indeed, many people report that intense transcendent experiences are "psychologically challenging and difficult," according to Yaden. For that reason, clinical trials aimed at inducing these states are under close supervision.

But there is ample evidence from clinical psychology to demonstrate that excessive self-focus can have negative effects -- it is a hallmark of depression, for instance -- which could explain why reducing that focus, even temporarily, can be helpful.

When I'm not feeling very positive, I find that going for a walk with our dog in nature (we live in the country) helps a lot. So does going to my Tai Chi class, which requires concentration on what my body and the bodies of others are doing, which is akin to dancing. 

Even simply washing the dishes can improve my mood. That gets me out of my head and into soapy water, a sponge, the drainer, and such. Writing a blog post makes me feel better also, since I can't be thinking about my problems when I'm focusing on what to say about some subject outside of me.

If being inside our own head was so great, prisoners would want to be in solitary confinement, rather than fearing it. Sure, meditation can seem like an inward pursuit, but usually it isn't. When I'm focusing on my breathing, I'm aware of something that's happening in my body.

That awareness obviously is part of my subjective consciousness. However, what I'm aware of is part of the objective world. Breathing is real in a way that a thought or emotion isn't. It anchors me in outward reality, while my thoughts can rattle around in the confines of my mind with little purpose or meaning.

When I used to play competitive club tennis, a ploy was frequently used when, if we were playing doubles, one of the guys on the other team was serving really well. During a changeover of sides, my partner or I would say to that guy, "Hey, your serve is great today. Wow, no double faults."

Often that not-so-innocent statement would cause the person who had been serving so well to start thinking of his serve, rather than simply serving. Then his serve went downhill. This relates to the notion of "flow," something mentioned in the New Scientist story.

Supposedly a state of flow happens when we're competent at something, yet find it challenging. There's truth in that. However, I find that flow can also occur in unchallenging situations, such as raking leaves or mowing grass. 

It's getting out of our head and into the world that's important. Which is my cue to share one of my favorite dance videos, Alex and Twitch dancing to "Outta Your Mind" on So You Think You Can Dance. Absolutely mesmerizing. 

Calm acceptance of what is -- my newest adage

I enjoy coming up with new pieces of advice that I can tell myself. They become temporary mantras, something I can repeat in my mind now and then to keep myself as centered as possible in an unpredictable world.

Calm acceptance of what is. This is my newest adage. 

I've always been impressed by people who can stay calm in stressful circumstances. Soldiers fighting in war. Emergency room doctors and nurses. Parents of a two year old having a temper tantrum. So many other examples of humans handling difficult situations with poise and competence.

That requires a certain detachment from a natural impulse of fear, anxiety, freaking out. "Calm" doesn't mean Buddha-like serenity. The way I see it, calm is founded on an ability to stand back a bit from whatever storm is raging around us, sort of like a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean.

The massive waves break upon the rock, but the lighthouse keeps on shining a light all around itself, illuminating what is there. That's the "what is" part of my adage.

It doesn't do any good to be calm if we're not in touch with reality.

For example, even though the United States intelligence services were warning that Russia was poised to invade Ukraine, in the period before the invasion President Zelensky and other top officials in his country were discounting the possibility of an invasion.

They didn't prepare the Ukrainian people for this. They didn't move military assets in preparation for war. The calm being preached by Zelensky was a false calm that wasn't based on the what is known to American intelligence, but on an attitude of I hope this turns out to be based on wishful thinking.

Another example is the raid of Seal Team Six into Pakistan that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. This mission succeeded because the highly trained special forces operatives kept their calm in the face of serious problems, such as one of their helicopters being disabled, and were completely in touch with the reality of what they faced in bin Laden's compound. 

Regarding "acceptance," I don't see this as being content with a bad situation.

That's the way I used to view the word, perhaps because one of the stages of coming to grips with grief, or one's impending death, is acceptance -- which connotes a sort of grudging realization that nothing can be done about what either has happened, or will happen.

Instead, acceptance is better thought of as an embracing of reality. It doesn't mean we don't want to change reality, to alter what is into what could be. But before we can make things better, we need to understand how things are now -- both within and without us.

Yesterday our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a nice piece by Leah Burkhart, a Salem Health educator. Here's part of what she said in "When it comes to stress, begin with acceptance." 

Fun Fact: April is Stress Awareness month (as if any of us needed help being aware of our stress).

Search any wellness book, online video or social media outlet and you’ll see all sorts of techniques for combatting stress, reducing stress, or even numbing it. You’ve seen the headlines: “Feeling stressed? We have the answer!” All you have to do is drink more of this, eat more of that, practice more of this, or give more of that. Easy peasy. Right?

We are bombarded with images of smiling faces — people who have found “the way” and are now liberated from the shackles of anxiety, fear and frustration. They are either peaceful and serene or blissed out, giggling with joy.

Naturally, then, we are left wondering why we aren’t stress-free, too. What are we doing wrong?

The answer is … nothing. You are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Stress, loneliness, frustration, sadness — these things are hardwired into the human body. Stress doesn’t have to be the enemy. At the very least, it can be considered a messenger. It can even be a powerful ally.

The key to making friends with stress is to first incorporate the practice of acceptance.

What is acceptance?

To be clear, acceptance does not mean saying, “Oh, well. There is nothing to be done. I guess I’ll just be miserable.”

Acceptance is being able to simply look at how something is without immediately seeking to change it.

In your mind, acceptance sounds like:

“Huh, I’m feeling really lonely right now.”

“I am feeling overwhelmed. There is a lot to do, and I don’t think I can get it all done as quickly as I would like. No wonder I am so tense.”

“I am really tired right now.”

“Yikes! I’m angry right now. I mean really, REALLY angry. I’m enraged.”

Why on earth might this be helpful? Because acknowledging where we are is the first step to understanding what needs to come next. Trying to reduce stress without first accepting it is like trying to read a map in a theme park without having a “you are here” dot. Acceptance represents the place to start.

Once you see, clearly, that you are overwhelmed or tired, it’s easier to ask questions like, “Okay, I’m exhausted. What is the next right thing I can do (or not do) now?” The answer might be to recruit support from people around you, get up and take a walk or go home early. But the answer is not the important piece. The important piece was being clearheaded enough to ask the question.

What can help you reach acceptance and identify what needs to come next? Often the best answer is to learn the art of slowing down and engaging in a moment of mindfulness. That might look like:

Practicing a few moments of slow, deep breathing.
Taking a moment to pull up a guided meditation practice.
Going outside and sitting still for a few moments and simply observing your surroundings.

In other words, the best way to learn acceptance is to practice slowing down.

A guided meditation by Sam Harris about the open sky of consciousness

Below is a transcript of a guided meditation by Sam Harris that I listened to recently on his Waking Up app. I enjoyed it a lot. His guided meditations last either 10 or 20 minutes, depending on how much non-speaking time you choose.

So the words by Harris should be experienced, not just thought about. Of course, there's quite a bit to ponder in how Harris views consciousness and its contents.

What he says reminds me of what I read about Descartes and his famous Cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am,  in an intriguing new book by David Chalmers that I'm reading, "Reality: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy."

Chalmers writes:

More deeply, Descartes reasoned that he could not doubt that he's thinking. Even if he doubted that he was thinking, his doubt was itself a sort of thinking. To doubt that one is thinking is internally inconsistent: The doubting itself shows that the doubt is wrong.

Once Descartes knew he was thinking, it was a small step to knowing his own existence. Where there is thinking, there must be a thinker. So Descartes concludes: Sum! I exist!

Plenty of philosophers have tried to poke holes in Descartes's Cogito ergo sum. Some question the cogito part. How can Descartes be so sure that he's even managing to doubt? That is, how does he know that he's not a mindless automaton?

Others question the step to sum. Is it so obvious that thinking requires a thinker? According to the 18th century German philosopher Georg Lichtenberg, Descartes should have said, "There is thinking, therefore thought exists." 

That way, he could have known that thoughts exist, but he should not have been so sure about himself. 

...Speaking for myself, I don't think there's anything special about thinking per se. Descartes could have said, "I feel, therefore I am," or "I see, therefore I am." All of these are claims about his mind that he can be certain of and that aren't threatened by the evil demon.

At least, he can be certain about these claims if they're understood as states of consciousness, or subjective experience. If we understand "see" as referring simply to the subjective experience of seeing, then Descartes can be certain he is seeing.

In my view, the best statement of the cogito is "I am conscious, therefore I am."

Here's the guided meditation by Sam Harris. It echoes how David Chalmers views Descartes.

OK, just find a comfortable seat, and take a few deep breaths. See if you can recognize a sky-like nature of your mind, right at the outset.

There's just this vast, open, undefined, centerless condition in which everything is appearing, all by itself.

Sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, thoughts, moods, emotions -- everything you can notice, along with the noticing itself, is simply springing into view in the space of awareness. 

Just drop back and rest as that. 

Any thought about the past is simply appearing in this space. Any thought about the future, any reaction to the present -- everything you can experience is a modification of this condition to which you are identical.

There's nothing to do here to meditate. There's nothing to focus on or to improve. Simply rest as this openness. Grasping at nothing, pushing nothing away.

It's as though you're watching a movie. And everything, including the watching itself, is on the screen. Just recognize as a matter of experience, you're identical to the screen.

You are the condition in which everything that appears, appears. You're not outside it. You're not on the edge of it. You're not merely observing it. 

You're it.

See if you can recognize what that feels like. That openness, that boundarylessness, that centerlessness. Notice how it transcends any object or process that appears within it. 

Does it feel like "I"? Or "Me"? How could it be a self? How could it be personal? How could it be happy or sad? 

At the moment you notice a thought, recognize the condition in which it already is unraveling. Rest as that. 

In the last minutes of the session, pay careful attention to the breath. See if you can refine your mindfulness, just for a minute. 

OK. Again, thank you for your practice. And I wish you much happiness for the rest of your day. I'll see you back here next time, for the next session of Waking Up.

The best spiritual practice could be...nothing

Here's some thoughts about the value of basing your spiritual practice on... drumroll please... absolutely nothing. But I'll introduce this topic by sharing an anecdote.

Yesterday I took our dog for a walk around the community lake near our rural property. A house is for sale that overlooks the lake. A woman and two children were walking down from the house toward the lake, seemingly because the family was looking into buying the house.

A young boy came up to the fence that our dog and me were on the other side of. He pointed and said, "nice lake." Then he crawled through the fence with no problem.

His mother, I assume it was, came over to him. "Look," she said, "there's some barbed wire on this fence. You could have gotten caught on it. There's a gate over there. I'll show you the proper way to get through the fence." 

The gate, with a kayak peeking from the side

I said, looking at the boy, "Proper? That's no fun." As dog and I continued on our walk, I thought about my own boyhood days growing up in a rural area in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. 

Barbed wire was used in all the fences on the land where my friends and I played and cattle roamed. Rarely were there gates. Early on I learned various tricks to get through a barbed wire fence.

If the wire was tight, stand on the strands next to a post and hop over the fence. If the wire was loose, put your foot on the bottom strand and crawl through the fence. Or have a friend pull up on a strand while you step on the bottom strand while you crawl through.

Telling the boy that only a gate is the proper way to cross a barbed wire fence not only isn't true, it prevents the boy from learning other ways. The mother could have said, "Let's think of some ways to get through the fence safely without using a gate."

I was right when I said Proper is no fun. Often we have to act properly to fulfill a societal expectation. But I've found that improper behavior tends to be more enjoyable, because it flows from our natural inclination, not someone else's view of how life should be lived.

Anyway, back to the best spiritual practice being nothing. I can relate this to what I wrote above with just a little cramming of the fence/gate metaphor into the subject at hand. 

Religions are fond of gates. They like to control who passes through their gate that supposedly leads to God, heaven, enlightenment, or some other elevated state. So there are requirements to approach the gate.

For example, the Eastern religion I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, required initiates to be vegetarian, meditate 2 1/2 hours a day, not use alcohol or recreational drugs, abstain from having sex outside of marriage, and follow a vaguely stated pure and moral life.

Members of other religions follow other sorts of rules. The underlying rationale is that the spiritual seeker is different from what is sought. So the gap between seeker and sought has to be bridged by a gate that leads between what a person is now and what they hope to be.

Thus almost all religions have a dualistic philosophy. Humans are on one side of a cosmic fence -- the worldly, physical, limited, time-bound side where suffering is commonplace. Religions promise a way to get through that fence into a very different supernatural, spiritual, expansive, eternal side of the cosmos.

But what if that side doesn't exist? After all, there's no proof that it does. Then we're left with two basic approaches to spirituality, one that isn't based in reality, and one that is.

(1) There's much to do and become (non-reality based)
(2) There's nothing to do and become (reality based)

Yet here's why (2) still exists in the form of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita, and similar non-dual approaches to spirituality. Religions who preach (1) are so ubiquitous, and have been so for thousands of years, currently billions of people are lined up in front of gates that don't lead anywhere.

So they need to be told, "Hey, guys, wanted to point out that there's no need for those gates that you wrongly believe lead to divinity. Actually, you can just walk right around them, since there's no fence either."

Meaning, reality isn't divided into a natural world and supernatural world. There's just one world, and it isn't supernatural. It's right here, right now.

Thus nothing needs to be done to be "spiritual," viewed as being in touch with how you and the world really is, other than giving up the erroneous belief that you're separate from reality.

This is akin to someone being afflicted by a psychosis of sorts where they imagine being judged by an outside power, told by that power that they lack something without which they can't live a meaningful life, and instructed how to search for it under the guidance of people in tune with that power. 

What that person needs is the ability to recognize that what they imagine to be true, actually is false. They don't need to do anything. They need to stop believing in a fantasy.

Sam Harris likes to say in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, "Rest in the condition in which everything is appearing." That condition is awareness, or if you like, consciousness. Without awareness/consciousness, there is no reality capable of being known.

So in that non-dual sense, the observer isn't separate from what's observed; the thinker isn't separate from what is thought; the hearer isn't separate from what is being heard. Alan Watts speaks of this when  he says, "We don't come into the world; we come out of the world."

In other words, we aren't separate from the world.

I'm reading Stephen Bodian's book, "Wake Up Now: A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening." There's many places in the parts of the book I've read so far that echo the notion that the best spiritual practice is nothing.

Here's an example:

From a direct intuition of the imminent availability of the truth of your being, you've been lured into the spiritual marketplace, where well-intentioned vendors hawk their wares, promising enlightenment somewhere in the distant future as the result of years of effort if you're willing to buy their product, take their course, join their community, and invest thousands of hours of your time.

The innocent initial impulse to orient, listen, and move toward truth the way a child naturally returns to its mother or a bird to its nesting ground has been co-opted by an established tradition and turned into a circuitous path to spiritual realization. Welcome to the progressive approach!

Progressive paths are extraordinarily appealing because they've been so carefully elaborated, often over many centuries. Bearing the imprimatur of an established tradition, they suggest that if you just follow the instructions wholeheartedly, the results will take care of themselves. 

If you listen to enough teachings, spend enough hours in meditation, attend enough retreats, cultivate enough of the right attitudes and qualities, you'll one day discover the truth of who you really are. As inspiration, the progressive scriptures are filled with exhortatory tales of masters who began as seekers just like you and me and eventually achieved enlightenment through prolonged and concerted effort.

...Eventually, after giving up the effort and the formal practice of meditation, I met a teacher who told me, "The seeker is the sought, the looker is what he or she is looking for." My mind couldn't wrap itself around these words, but one day soon after, in a moment out of time, the seeker and the sought collapsed into one another, and I knew who I was once and for all.

The one who had been looking so hard for true nature was the very true nature I had been looking for. Truth had been playing hide and seek with itself. As long as I continued focusing so much on searching, I couldn't possibly stumble backward into the silent presence that was the source of all searching.

...In fact, the prolonged practice of a particular technique may have the opposite effect, deadening and habituating the mind, rather than making it more open and accessible to truth. If you want to know how a progressive path might affect you, spend some time at one of the tradition's residential meditation centers or ashrams.

Do the longtime practitioners appear happier, freer, more peaceful, more enlightened? Or do they seem rigid in their adherence to structures and rules, lacking in spontaneity, proud of their spiritual progress or stature, addicted to control?

Every center, tradition, and practitioner is different, of course, but many of the ashrams and monasteries I've visited lack the joy and aliveness one would expect to find there; instead, they exude a quality of emotional repression and subservience to form.

Which is why I started off this post by saying, Proper is no fun.

 

Be thankful for nothing. Which means, everything.

I'm not a grinch about Thanksgiving. I enjoy this holiday. 

My wife just finished making an apple pie. Soon I'll prepare our main dish, a vegetarian Trader Joe's Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast, which requires all of my cooking skills: heating the oven to 375, basting the roast, and cooking it for 45 minutes. 

Whew! I feel exhausted already.

I'm also totally fine with feeling thankful. I just have a different view about what thankfulness means. Last night I saw people interviewed on the evening news about what they're thankful for. Family. Friends. Having a job. That sort of thing.

OK. Totally understandable. Around millions of dinner tables today, there will be similar talk of what everybody is thankful for. 

But here's my problem with singling out certain aspects of life for a blue ribbon thankfulness award. This leaves out most of what we experience each day. 

I'm a big fan of mindfulness, even though I often suck at it.

Basically this is non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, accepting whatever lies within and without ourselves. If we're angry, we know we're angry. If we're stuck in traffic, we know we're stuck in traffic.

We don't push what's happening away. We embrace the good and bad, the beautiful and ugly, the pleasurable and painful.

This doesn't mean fatalism. We still try to fix things, improve our condition, help others in need, fight injustice. Mindfulness just leads us to a understanding that we've got to accept what is before we can move toward what can be. 

Thanksgiving is a holiday that encourages positivity. Nothing wrong with that. But with all the pressure to have an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving, maybe some people would resonate with this perspective: 

Be thankful for nothing. Which means, everything.

I'll explain why I like this notion. In my everyday life, I'm simply living my life. I don't divide my life into what I'm thankful for, and what I'm not thankful for. I do say "thank you" occasionally, but that's different from putting things in thankful and not thankful buckets.

I have some health problems. I deal with those. I guess I'm thankful that I'm alive, since being dead would be worse than having those problems (though it would eliminate them). But that doesn't come to mind as I go about my day.

Our dog usually is a pleasure to have around, but sometimes she can be annoying. Ditto with my wife. The same is true of me. I'm sure our dog gets annoyed with me calling her when she's engrossed in hunting mice or moles. And I know my wife finds me annoying at times.

Such is the nature of life. It's a whole, not a bunch of separable things.

If I could eliminate everything unpleasant about life, it wouldn't be life anymore. Living is a combination of what we like and don't like, of pleasure and pain, of happiness and sadness. Living life mindfully means being aware of everything, not just the part of life we'd say we're thankful for if someone asked.

I love our property, ten natural acres in rural south Salem. Our house is surrounded by large trees. They're beautiful. They're also annoying when they drop leaves, branches, and needles where we don't want them.

But I can't separate what I like about the trees from what I don't like. They're just trees, doing their tree thing. I have to accept everything about the trees. That means not thinking of them as something I'm thankful for, because they're a combination of annoying and pleasurable -- as is life as a whole.

I both like and dislike dealing with leaves.

So rather than being thankful about some aspects of the trees, and not thankful about other aspects, I prefer to be thankful for nothing particular about them, which enables me to be thankful for everything about them -- though the whole notion of thankfulness then becomes irrelevant. 

This afternoon I did what I usually do on Thanksgiving: pick leaves out of bushes in our yard, since by now almost all of the leaves have fallen and been blown into the brush, so I'm into the refined part of dealing with the leaves.

So there the leaves are, something to be dealt with, but not something I classify as "thankful" or "not thankful." They're simply a chore, which is quite pleasant on a dry fairly warm day like today.

And when I looked around the back of this bush, I saw flowers blooming that I hadn't noticed before. Again, this wasn't something I was thankful or not thankful for. It was simply part of what I was doing.

Life is just what life is. We can try to categorize and divide life in a myriad of ways, but in the end, our life is a whole. 

Which is how I look upon thankfulness.

When we're thankful for nothing in particular, the door is opened to being thankful for everything -- even though "thankful" ceases to be a word pointing to something special, since all of life becomes special.

Know that you know a lot less than you think you know

I subscribe to The Atlantic, so I'm going to take the liberty of copying in a great piece from the online The Atlantic, "How to Know That You Know Nothing." 

(Maybe it's available to non-subscribers, but not knowing for sure that it is, I thought I'd take the advice put forth in the piece and realize that since I'm not confident that I know, I might as well share it this way.)

This shows that Harvard psychology professors can sound a lot like Zen masters. Which isn't really all that surprising, since Zen possesses a lot of psychological wisdom.

Enjoy.

If there’s one thing we might regret at the end of life, it’s that we missed out on moments that mattered—not because we weren’t physically there, but because our mind wandered off to some unknown place.

In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we explore why it’s uniquely challenging to “live in the moment,” how we limit our own curiosity by assuming that we know best, and why the illusion of stability pulls us from living every day fully, and in the moment. A conversation with the Harvard University psychology professor Dr. Ellen Langer helps us think through a daily struggle: How do I stay present?

Arthur C. Brooks: A big part of happiness is learning to live in the moment. What does that actually mean? And more importantly, how do we do it? It turns out that living in the moment, or at least being fully alive right now has two components: mindfulness and curiosity.

You need to figure out a way to focus on the present, to be really experiencing your current time frame, as opposed to thinking about the past or thinking about the future. Now, there’s a reason that that’s hard to do. The human brain makes it possible for us to be in other time periods than in the current moment. I can imagine that I’m in the future, practicing future scenarios in my life. That’s called prospection. That’s about living in the future.

Other people tend to think about the past a lot, and one of the things that we know from research on the elderly is they tend to be kind of retrospective, thinking about the past. The problem is, if you’re excessively prospective and/or retrospective, it can crowd out your ability to be alive right now.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Lots of people confuse what I do with meditation, but meditation is a practice; mindfulness is the result of that practice. The mindfulness that we study is immediate. It’s simply noticing new things. And in the process of noticing new things, that puts you in the moment. You have all these people who say “be in the present,” and that’s great, but it’s an empty suggestion. And even simpler than this, if one deeply appreciates uncertainty—recognizing everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, so you can’t know. And when you recognize that you can’t know or you don’t know, you tune in. When you think you do know, you don’t pay any attention.

Brooks: The big theme that I really want to talk about here is how to enjoy our lives more. One of the things that you emphasize in your work a lot is that we don’t enjoy our lives enough, because we’re not actually there. What does that mean?

Dr. Langer: Over these 40-some-odd years, we find that mindlessness is pervasive. Most of us are not there, and they are not there to know they’re not there. You know, the only way some people realize they experience this is imagine you’re driving and you want to get off at exit 28, and all of a sudden, you see you’re at exit 36. So then you say, Wow, where was I? What I mean by “you’re not there” is that you are more or less behaving like a robot. Everybody has had that experience.

You know, you are miserable, and somebody says, “Hi, how are you?” And you say, “Fine, thank you.” And you’re not aware of it, and you’re not trying to hide it. Most of what we do is done on, as it’s called, automatic pilot, but the mindlessness goes far beyond that.

I wanted to write a book a long time ago, Arthur—I never wrote this one—that was called Is There Life Before Death?, because I found, you know, all these people worrying about life after death. Many people come alive, sadly, after they get some terrible diagnosis or they have a stroke or they find out they have cancer. When I speak to people who are miserable or whatever, I simply tell them that all you need to do is take care of the moment, just right this second. And if you keep doing that, then over the course of the day, you know, you’ve had a fine time.

Brooks: Why is it that we’re so distracted from the present? What is distracting us from actually noticing things around us?

Dr. Langer: Well, we have an illusion of stability. We think things are staying still. So if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it; you don’t need to keep paying attention to it. But there’s something I think that needs to be added, which will explain why people keep doing this. Many people pretend because they think they should know. They think, You know, so therefore, I don’t want you to know that I don’t know. And here’s the big secret for everybody: Nobody knows. You change from making a personal attribution for not knowing—I don’t know, but it’s knowable. Therefore, I’ll pretend; I’ll feel stupid, insecure—to a universal attribution: I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. Okay, so now let’s find out together and explore together. If you think you know something, there’s no reason to pay attention.

Anything can be made exciting; anything can be made boring. I picked up these kids—this is back years ago, when it was okay to pick up hitchhikers. And I was in Italy, and they were wearing nyc T-shirts, so you knew they weren’t from New York.

And so I picked them up, and I asked them, “How did you like New York?” And one of them answered right away and said, you know, he didn’t like it at all. It was boring. There was nothing to do. There are few places, to my mind, that are more exciting. And if you took me and you put me in the middle of a wheat field, I probably would look at it like, Well, it’s all the same, but not to a farmer.

Brooks: Let’s go to the future. So, you know, one of the things that I talk an awful lot about with Marty Seligman is prospection, and Marty believes that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. We should be called Homo prospectus.

One point, he had this dispute with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, where the Dalai Lama was talking about mindfulness, and he said, No, Your Holiness, it’s natural that we live in the future, especially people who are ambitious and go-getters. And it’s actually important because we have to practice future scenarios, et cetera. How can we live enough in the future to be successful but, at the same time, enjoy our lives? How do we get that balance right?

Dr. Langer: I think that everything that you’re doing because of the future is based on a mistaken notion about predictability. Prediction is an illusion. Now, I know Marty doesn’t believe that. Let me convince your audience just quickly. I do this with my advanced decision-making class, and I say to them, “I’ve been teaching a version of this class for the last 40 years. I’ve never missed a class. What is the likelihood I’m going to be here next week?”

It’s a small class; we go around the room. These are Harvard kids, so they don’t say 100 percent. They say ridiculous things like 97 percent, as if there’s some calculation, but essentially they’re all saying I’ll be there. Now I say, “Okay, I want each of you to give me a good reason why I won’t be there.” The first one always says, “Well, you’ve been doing it for 40 years; you’ve been there. You deserve the time off.” The next one says, “Your dog has to go to the vet.” The next one says, “You’ve got a flat tire.” And they easily come up with things.

Then I say to them, “Okay, what is the likelihood I’m going to be here next week?” And it drops to 50 percent. And when you fully realize that we don’t know, that you can plan all you want for some future event and then something else will happen that pulls you away. But if the planning for the future is giving you a happy present, that’s fine; there’s nothing lost by it. When you stick to your predictions, you’re limiting yourself rather than expanding your universe of possibilities.

Brooks: From your perspective, goal setting is valuable to the extent that it enhances the quality of your life right now.

Dr. Langer: At the moment, yes. And I think that what we want to do, and the way I describe being mindful, is to be rule, routine, and goal guided. Most of us are mindless, so we’re rule, routine, and goal governed. You don’t want to have a rule that says you do something at time one—that’s when you’re committing to that rule—when at time two, it’s totally irrelevant. Recognize that outcomes are in our heads. They’re not in events.

A simple example, you know, if you and I go to lunch and the food is good, that’s great. You and I go to lunch and the food is awful. That’s great. Presumably, I’ll eat less, and that’ll be better for my waistline. If I take the view that the event is good or bad, then I’m in this position where I do everything I can to get the good, and I run away as fast as I can from anything bad. And once I recognize that the good/bad is in my head, I can be still and just enjoy whatever happens.

Brooks: So you and I are going back to the classroom in person for the first time in a super long time, and let’s say that your fall class, weirdly unexpectedly, goes really, really poorly. What’s your strategy then, because you’re not going to get stressed?

Dr. Langer: I have a one-liner that friends of mine put on their refrigerators, which is “Ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?” Too often we respond to things. You know, if the class didn’t go well, Oh my God, my life’s going to be—no, of course not. Let’s say you and I are going out and we have a bad conversation and it’s Oh my God, that’s going to destroy the relationship! No. No relationship is going to be made or fall apart based on one situation. No life is going to depend on failing one test or giving one bad class.

Brooks: Ellen Langer. What a joy. What a gift that you’ve given to our audience today, and what a gift that you’ve given me. So thank you very much.

Dr. Langer: It’s my pleasure, Arthur. Stay well.

Better self-awareness comes from sharing our self with others

For many years I wrongly thought that the way to "know myself" was to engage in several hours a day of solitary meditation. Sure, I did learn some things about myself in this way and developed a lot of discipline by meditating every morning whether or not I felt like it.

Now, though, I've come to realize that it is easy to fool ourselves when the only conversation we're having is within our own mind -- I talking to me; us speaking to ourself; one part of our psyche conversing with another part.

As noted in my previous post about a book I'm reading, Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness, the  outside environment provides important feedback about how well we're in touch with reality. For example, inside my own head I can fantasize that I'm in contact with higher realms of reality.

Out in the world, imagining that I'm in touch with something that isn't really there is much more difficult, because "there" is apparent to other people also. 

In a chapter called "Learning to Learn," Fleming describes the benefits of explaining things to others and communicating our thoughts in writing or out loud.

This helps to explain why I enjoy writing so much. By getting what is inside my head out into the world, I not only learn more about what I really think, I gain the benefit of other people being able to provide feedback to me about those thoughts.

We can understand why teaching and advising others can be so useful for our own learning by considering how it helps us avoid metacognitive illusions. 

When we are forced to explain things to others, there is less opportunity to be swayed by internal signals of fluency that might create unwarranted feelings of confidence in our knowledge. For instance, the "illusion of explanatory depth" refers to the common experience of thinking we know how things work (from simple gadgets to government policies), but, when we are asked to explain them to others, we are unable to do so.

Being forced to make our knowledge public ensures that misplaced confidence is exposed. For similar reasons, it is easier for us to recognize when someone else is talking nonsense than to recognize that same flaw in ourselves.

...External props and tools can also provide a new perspective on what we know. Rather than monitoring murky internal processes, many of which remain hidden from our awareness, getting words down on the page and speaking them out loud creates concrete targets for self-reflection.

...We naturally extend our minds onto the page, and the extensions can themselves be targets of metacognition, to be mused about and reflected upon just like regular thoughts and feelings. 

"On Having No Head" has a few simple truths

On Having No Head is a book by D.E. Harding. I'd bought and read it quite a few years ago. Then, when I needed to weed out unwanted books to make room for more, On Having No Head was given away. 

Recently, though, I heard Sam Harris speak about the book in his Waking Up iPhone app, so I decided to re-buy and re-read it. Here's my review, which is of a second edition of the book that contains a "Bringing the story up to date" section that was written over forty years after Harding wrote the first edition.

My main problem with On Having No Head is the problem that I have with all books about personal spiritual breakthroughs or realizations. In the early days of my churchlessness, I was more interested in stories of how someone uncovered the Secret of the Universe. 

As late as 2006 I was recommending books that now I'm much more skeptical about. Why? Because I've got a better understanding of how the human mind works -- the result of both my own experiences with meditation, and a lot of reading about modern neuroscience and psychology. 

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.

OK. I have no doubt that Harding had a breathtaking experience. But here's the thing: like he said, his revelation was of the perfectly obvious. Yesterday I jotted down a note about something Sam Harris said in lesson 28 of the guided meditations in his  Waking Up course.

You're the space in which everything appears. Everything is already happening. All you are is consciousness and its contents.

These three sentences are pretty much the gist of Harding's book. They indeed are perfectly obvious. Everything in the world, or indeed the entire universe, the Himalayas included, has to appear in our consciousness if we are to be aware of it. How else would we know anything?

But here's some facts about the human brain and mind (the mind is the brain in action, basically) that Harding doesn't address in On Having No Head, either because he wasn't aware of them, or chose not to mention them. 

(1) The brain has no feeling. This allows surgeons to operate on the brain while a patient is conscious. So we aren't aware of what our hundred billion or so brain cells are doing in the same way we feel our muscles contracting, our fingers touching something, or our stomach digesting a heavy meal. 

(2) In the quotation above, and elsewhere in his book, Harding speaks of a "vast emptiness" of consciousness. This may be how it feels to us, but that isn't reality. When Harding looked at the view of the Himalayas, his brain was busily piecing together data from his optic nerves, integrating it with past memories/experiences, and presenting him with what he calls a "superb scene." Visual perception isn't a passive mirroring of the world. It involves a lot of brain activity. 

In the updated part of his book, Harding does speak about some neuroscientific truths: there is no evidence for an independent "self" within the brain/mind, nor does it appear that we humans possess free will, which seemingly would require the aforementioned self that doesn't exist. 

Here's what Harding says in his Bringing the Story Up to Date section about his final stage of "The Eight Stages of the Headless Way." It's called (8) The Breakthrough.

This amounts to a profound declaration of intent. It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one's deepest desire is that all shall be as it is -- seeing that it all flows from one's true Nature, the Aware Space here. 

How is this breakthrough actually made? What can one do to bring it nearer?

In a sense, nothing. It's not a doing, but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there's anyone here to abandon. What else is there to do?

After all, one's initial in-seeing -- no matter how "brief" and "shallow" -- was already total self-surrender: everything here went: or rather, it was clear there's nothing here to go. It was the essential quantum leap from the fiction of egocentricity to the fact of zerocentricity. 

And for sure the faithful day-to-day seeing put in since then -- the seeing that already one is Nothing and Everything -- is a most valuable preparation for the discovery that at the deepest level one already wills Nothing and Everything. 

Now, Harding goes on to talk about an unconditional surrender to God's will in which we welcome all that the world is bringing to us. But as noted above, his 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.

Which is fully in accord with how Sam Harris understands the human brain/mind, which explains why Harris is a fan of Harding's book.

Awareness is a process, not a thing

I'm aware of typing on my laptop right now.

And after writing those words, I'm also aware that I'm aware of typing on my laptop. This second type of awareness is called meta-awareness, a term I came across in a book I'm reading, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body."

The authors, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, write:

When we did our first vipassana courses in India, we found ourselves immersed hour after hour in noting the comings and goings of our mind, cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following where those thoughts, impulses, desires, or feelings would have us go. 

This intensive attention to the movements of our mind boils down to pure meta-awareness.

In meta-awareness it does not matter what we focus our attention on, but rather that we recognize awareness itself. Usually, what we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background. Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, so awareness itself becomes foremost.

I consider this a deeply false way of looking upon awareness.

Goleman and Davidson appear to view awareness as a thing, rather than as a process. How else would it be possible for them to say, "we recognize awareness itself"? 

But awareness isn't a thing. It is part of what the mind does, and the mind is the brain in action. So how could awareness either be in the background or the foreground of consciousness, if awareness isn't a thing?

Further, the authors seemingly believe in what neuroscience rejects, that there is a "self" somewhere inside our head that looks out upon the world via the senses like a submarine commander looking through a periscope. 

I say this because of the phrase they use, "...we recognize awareness itself." Who the heck is "we"? It must be someone or something that is separate from awareness, because if it wasn't separate, recognizing awareness wouldn't be possible.

We can recognize objects in the world, or other people, because they aren't us.

But since awareness is closely akin to experience, if not identical with it, I find it difficult to conceive how anyone could be aware of awareness, or have an experience of experience. 

I suspect that Goleman and Davidson are fans of "pure awareness," though so far I haven't come across this term in their book. They do quote Sam Harris in their chapter on Attention, and Harris is a believer in pure awareness. I wrote about this in "Questions I had in Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' meditation chapter."

Talking about himself in meditation, he [Harris] writes:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

It's hard to believe this passage made it into Harris' book. I guess he didn't have a good editor. Or maybe any editor. It simply is non-sensical.

Sam, you have a Ph.D. in neuroscience. You also go to sleep every night. So you know about dreaming. We are conscious when we dream, but we don't have a "reference point in any of the usual sensory channels." 

So who are these scientists and philosophers who supposedly believe consciousness always is tied to one of the five senses? Methinks you made them up. Dreaming proves it isn't.

However, this talk of a "blissful expanse of conscious peace" is very different from "pure consciousness" -- unless that term simply means consciousness that isn't aware of, or paying attention to, external sensory inputs.

Obviously Harris' consciousness was impure in this sense: it contained various internal mental objects. Bliss, an expanse, and peace. Harris also had to feel separate enough from this internal feeling to be able to remember it. So some sense of "I" apart from the blissful expanse of conscious peace must have been present also.

Dualism is hard for us humans to give up when it comes to our own minds.

It feels like consciousness, or awareness, is something ethereal, clear, separate and distinct from matter, even "pure." But almost certainly that feeling is an illusion, since there is no evidence that awareness can exist apart from being aware of something.

Again, awareness is a mental process, not a thing. Alan Watts got this right way back in 1951, in one of my favorite books, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." Here Watts gets it exactly correct, in my opinion:

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief time stop reading. 

The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, "I am reading." Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, "I am reading?"

...When you were thinking, "I am reading this sentence" you were not reading it. In other words, in each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker, or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?

Great question.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson should have asked it of themselves before claiming that it is possible to "recognize awareness itself." Actually, this isn't possible, as Watts cogently points out.

Awareness always is aware of something, because awareness is a mental/brain process, not a thing. Awareness really is us, not something separate from us, since without awareness we don't exist as conscious beings.