Church of the Churchless

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.