Church of the Churchless

Zen circle reminds me that perfection is a fantasy

Here's my new piece of art, courtesy of Amazon and a 8X10 frame that I put the print in. It doesn't really have an up or down. I just like it oriented this way, though I might change my mind. 

(I don't keep it on a rug. That was for a photography purpose. Normally it sits next to a bathroom sink where I can peruse it when I wash my hands, which is frequently, given the coronavirus scare the world is going through.)

I got the print, which admittedly isn't traditional, given its color, after reading a paragraph in Lesley Hazleton's book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto. I like how it reminds me that perfection is an abstract idea, not anything that actually exists

Here's the passage, which was in her "Imperfect Soul" chapter.

The great Zen Buddhist masters knew what those who seek perfection do not: it leaves us cold. A classic Zen exercise is the ensō, the circle hand-drawn in a single fluid brushstroke. It is close to perfect, but never there.

If perfection is what you want, you can produce it anytime by using a compass or computer, but the ensō defies such mechanistic precision; indeed, it is often incomplete, left slightly open as though in invitation to everything beyond it.

And each one is different, never the same circle twice. You can see the hairs of the brush in the drag of the ink on the paper; trace the fluidity of the moment when the stillness of meditation was released in one rapid stroke; sense the calm grace of the artist.

The beauty of the Zen circle lies precisely (or more precisely, imprecisely) in its imperfection. That is what speaks to us and draws us in.

A perfect circle is uninteresting, a closed system containing nothing, while an imperfect one vibrates with warmth. It invites us into the moment of its creation, into that single deep exhalation as the hand arced through the air, the brush over the paper. 

It is open, human, fallible -- an expression, that is, of soul.

Religious belief is an untrue concept

So why do so many people, billions really, believe untruths about God, heaven, spirit, soul, angels, devils, and other unseen entities of which there is zero proof of their existence?

Because of the Cognitive Revolution, according to Yuval Noah Harari, a historian who has written three compelling books, Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (I've read all of them).

The February 17/24 issue of The New Yorker has a lengthy story by Ian Parker about Harari. Here's an excerpt from "The Really Big Picture." 

I think Harari is absolutely correct about religious belief being an example of how the evolved brains of humans enabled us to begin communicating untruths, which helped people to cooperate by binding them together in a shared fantasy.

in Chapter 2 of "Sapiens," Harari describes how, about seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to develop nuanced language, and thereby began to dominate other Homo species, and the world. 

Harari's discussion reflects standard scholarly arguments, but he adds this gloss: during what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths.

"As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled," he writes, referring to myths and gods.

"Many animals and human species could previously say 'Careful! A lion!' Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, 'The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.'"

This mental leap enabled cooperation among strangers: "Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins."

Here's another passage from The New Yorker story that I liked. Harari is a big believer in meditation of the Buddhist Vipassana variety. He frequently goes on retreats that last from 10 days to as much as a month.

Harari is correct: there's no such thing as an eternal essence. Belief in such a thing is another example of a mental concept that religious believers embrace because it makes them feel good. But truth is something different from feeling good.

"21 Lessons" includes extended commentary on the life of the Buddha, who "taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying." 

Harari continues, "You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfied you... 'What should I do' ask people, and the Buddha advises, 'Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.'"

Another mini-enlightenment visits me on a yoga mat

I'm assuming, and hoping, that my many mini-enlightenments are adding up to an eventual maxi-enlightenment -- in the same way saving spare change found in pockets eventually totals to some real money.

Today I added to my mini-enlightenment score card while standing on a mat in an exercise room at my athletic club where I do some Tai Chi and yoga after doing my elliptical trainer and weight lifting thing.

I decided to take a photo of the just-after-mini-enlighentment moment in case I ever attain maximal Buddha nature, and those who revere me want documentation of something analogous to the Buddha's realization under the Bodhi Tree. Plus, I like how the sunlight illuminated the mat, and how marvelously the color of my Darn Tough socks matched the mat.

Naturally the wisdom that flowed into my psyche as I was doing a yoga movement can't be expressed in language, being an ineffable showering upon me of cosmic truth. 

But I'll try to distill my mini-enlightenment into a few inadequate words.

This, right here and now, that's all there is, and will ever be. Experiencing that truth had an immediate emotional impact on me. Namely, relief.

I recall that I'd been thinking about what to have for dinner, what time the Democratic presidential debate tonight was, and other mundane thoughts. But when my mini-enlightenment hit, I realized that no matter what happens in my life, no matter what I do, no matter if pain, pleasure, or anything in-between becomes my lot -- in a very real sense, it's all the same.

Reality. This. Right here and now.

Sure, the details of here and now are ever-changing. But that everything anyone ever can be aware of is localized in here-and-now was a realization that relieved any pressure on me to be somewhere there-and-then.

Because that place would turn out to be another here-and-now.

And so it goes, for every moment of every person's life, until a last breath brings an end to here-and-nows. (Since I'm a proud atheist, I view life after death as an extremely low probability; greater than zero, but not much greater, like maybe .0001%, or a thousandth of one percent.)

If you want to peruse some of my other mini-enlightenments, the Great God Google has revealed them to me. See here, here, and here. Pleasingly, one of them involves another photo of my legs and feet!

Claims to absolute truth lead to abuses of power

Sam Harris conducted an interesting interview with Buddhist heretic Stephen Batchelor (I consider that word to be a compliment) and shared it on his Waking Up iPhone app.

Here's my transcription of a part of the interview where Batchelor talks about abuses of power in religious or spiritual organizations. I think he's correct that hierarchical institutions make it easier for wrongdoing to take place by those at the top.

And I also agree that claims to knowledge of ultimate truth by a religious leader also lead to abuses of power. This is what Batchelor said. There may be a few small errors in my transcription, but I've got it almost entirely correct.

Well, there's many different ways we could approach this. And one way I'd like to approach it off the top of my head is to think of it as really a function of a different kind of human institution. Let me just restrict myself to Buddhism.

Institutions in which you find, in a way, the greatest number of incidents are the institutions that are the most feudal and hierarchical. And as you said yourself, you have it more in the Zen and Tibetan and less in the Theraveda.

Well, the kinds of societies that these particular three traditions come from rather make my point. 

If you have a society that honors a kind of absolute relation of power between a feudal lord and underlings, or a king and the subjects, and you model your monastic institutions, probably quite unconsciously, on that structure of power, then you give people, individual men almost entirely, extraordinary power over others.

And when you have a theocratic tradition like in Tibet, with notions of enlightenment that are, frankly, superhuman, and these are projected onto these men who have all this power, you have a very unbalanced relationship between the teacher and the student.

I'm not trying to explain this away by saying it's all about the institutions and the individuals have no responsibility. Of course the individuals have responsibility for their acts. But I cannot fail to see that part of the problem lies in the structures of power in which people operate.

And the Roman Catholic church might strike us as slightly similar in its organization.

You see, any claim to absolute truth, which many Tibetan and other Zen Buddhists will claim, is a claim to absolute power. To me the split into the relative truth and the ultimate truth, which is so widespread in Buddhism, also is a doctrine that underpins and legitimizes a particular structure of power. 

The lama or the roshi or the monk who has gained insight into these deep spiritual traditions and so forth, that person has access to God, essentially, and thereby carries the authority and the power in the eyes of their followers, to God himself. I find that to be a situation where, almost invariably, abuses of power are going to take place. 

Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor on enlightenment and listening

Following up on my previous post about a charming little book by Stephen Batchelor and his wife Martine, which consists of talks they gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition (Son), here's some passages from What is this? that I resonated with in my pre-meditation reading this morning. 

I liked this take on enlightenment, which is very much in line with Zen teachings. Son, which means "meditation," is the Korean equivalent of the Japanese "Chan" and Japanese "Zen."

So once we let go of the idea that to be enlightened means to understand the nature of reality as it really is, or to gain some privileged mystical insight into truth with a capital "T" -- the way of thinking Deshan and other Son masters are trying to shake us free from -- then we shift into a practice that that is inextricably tied up with how we respond to life in each moment, which is the foundation for engaging with the world in an ethical way.

And I also liked this description of how listening can be a better way of describing what meditation, and life, is all about, than seeing is.

When you are asked to watch something carefully, what do you do?

You tend to narrow the focus of your attention onto the object, thereby letting it stand out in the wider field of vision, in order that you can look at it more precisely. What you're looking at is invariably something outside of yourself, 'over there' somewhere.

What often happens in meditation is that we fail to acknowledge the metaphoric nature of the visual language being used. Quite unconsciously, we adopt an inner stance or posture that mimics the act of seeing.

You might feel, for example, that when you're meditating there's a bit of you, in the back of your head somewhere, that's peering in on your body and breath and mental states. You've created a distance between an observer looking in and an object being observed.

But if you think about listening or hearing it's often completely the other way round. Rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound 'out there', you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. 

When you listen to a piece of music in your living room, for example, what do you tend to do? Very often you dim the lights or close your eyes, then raise the sound so that it envelopes you. Then you relax and let yourself be completely receptive to the sounds that enter you from all around.

So the internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction.

Now that's a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something. 

...To think of listening in this way can help us better understand how to attend to what arises in response to the question 'What is this?'. In posing that question, allow yourself to be completely open to whatever you 'hear' in the pregnant silence that follows, without any hopes or expectations.

Metaphorically, you're waiting to hear a response rather than expecting to find an answer. The point of Son practice is not to look for an answer, or to see the nature of reality. Again, pay attention to the metaphors we use unthinkingly. 

You might find it helpful on our last full day together just to explore what it feels like in your body to be open to this question in the same way that you would open yourself to a piece of music or listen with total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on the windows.

Listen more carefully, and at the same time notice how that listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love, which brings us back into the world of relationships that we will be returning to tomorrow.

Life is a matter of material chance, not divine dispensation

The truth can be disturbing. Yet truth is immensely valuable. These two truths about truth present a dilemma to religious believers. They don't want to be disturbed, so they choose to accept falsehoods about reality.

By contrast, people like me who don't believe in religious fantasies are able to accept both truths about truth. We embrace disturbing facts such as the non-existence of God, no life after death, and the contingency of life on Earth.

That last fact is discussed by Buddhist skeptic Stephen Batchelor in an appealing little book that consists of talks he and his wife, Martine, gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition. 

I'm enjoying "What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds." Here's some excerpts from a talk Stephen Batchelor gave. His theme is how amazing existence is, even though no God designed the cosmos or is overseeing how it operates.

Yet today when I read popular books, listen to a radio programme or watch documentaries about the discoveries of the natural sciences, it often evokes in me feelings that might best be described as religious. I find the sheer scale and vastness of space and time overwhelming.

And I become acutely aware of the poignancy, the utter contingency of existence. 

Contingency means that, on the one hand, something arises contingent on other conditions, which, in turn, are contingent on yet other conditions, ad infinitum.

And, on the other hand, we make 'contingency plans' because we realize that what we prepare ourselves for might suddenly get thrown off course by circumstances we hadn't foreseen coming into play.

Such notions of contingency are very close, I feel, to what the Buddha meant by paticcasamuppada, usually translated as 'dependent origination' or 'conditioned arising'. Remember, in the early sutras the Buddha says that the person who sees such conditioned arising sees the dharma, and the person who sees the dharma sees conditioned arising.

So there's something very much at the core of the Buddha's teaching which has to do with waking up to what I would call the utterly contingent nature of experience.

...In terms of the cosmic timeframe, we are latecomers on the scene. The first human beings anatomically identical to us -- who, when naked, would have been indistinguishable from us -- first appeared somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand years ago. 

Which is really just the blink of an eye. And how long we will manage to remain here is anyone's guess.

The fact that all of this has happened seems entirely accidental and arbitrary. This is difficult for human beings to accept. We like to tell ourselves stories that explain how special we are. We invent concepts like 'God' to show how the story of life on earth was designed in such a way that would culminate in humankind, made 'in the image' of God.

The idea that humans could actually be a purely contingent and haphazard event we find deeply uncomfortable. We have an instinctive sense that we're so much more than just a pure accident, that there must be some reason for our being here.

Buddhists may not speak of God, but they nonetheless have developed theories of karma, which attempts to explain how over countless lifetimes we have been reaping the results of our previous actions that lead us to getting born in one place rather than another, and as one kind of creature rather than another.

This too explains why we exist; it provides reasons that we can get our heads around. It makes us feel that we are meant to be here.

According to classical Buddhist theory, this has been going on forever -- since 'beginningless time'. But the natural sciences simply don't back that up. We have emerged, it appears, out of purely physical conditions by random mutations and chance.

In principle, I see no reason why Buddhists should have an issue with this explanation of how life evolved; it accords well with the principle of conditioned arising. But I suspect many of them, like their theistic brothers and sisters, find this account rather chilling. It makes them uncomfortable.

If everything is the product of chance, rather than the moral consequences of our karma, it cannot account for the dignity and special opportunities of being human. 

But given what we now know from evolutionary biology, we have little choice, I feel, but to swallow the fact that these pre-modern explanations might simply be wrong. The fact is that we're here and, as far as we know, these material conditions alone are what gave rise to us being here.

I disagree with Stephen Batchelor about Buddhist truth claims

A couple of days ago I wrote, "I like Stephen Batchelor's take on Buddhism."

In that blog post I said that after I listened to the end of Batchelor's lengthy discussion with Sam Harris that Harris shared on his Waking Up iPhone app, I'd share anything interesting that I heard.

Well, what I heard Batchelor say in the last five minutes does strike me as both interesting and highly debatable.

Harris asked a good question of Batchelor: currently, what are your most important disagreements with Buddhist doctrine?

To his credit, Batchelor started off by saying that he can't stand dogmatic assertions by Buddhist practitioners. Since Harris had mentioned rebirth/reincarnation as a tenet that Batchelor probably disagreed with, I figured that Batchelor would agree with Harris.

Instead, Batchelor said he wasn't at all interested in the truth claims of Buddhism. Rather, what concerned him was: "How does your belief in reincarnation help you live better?" That was the central question for him.

OK. I can sort of understand where Batchelor was coming from. His focus is on practicality, not theology. If a religious belief has a practical benefit, then it gets a thumbs-up from Batchelor.

Not from me, though, not automatically.

If a religious belief isn't true -- and almost certainly rebirth/reincarnation is a fantasy -- that strikes me as a big argument against accepting it, no matter how it makes someone feel. Harris also sounded surprised at Batchelor's casual attitude toward the truth claims of Buddhism.

Sure, an argument can be made that if a religious person finds satisfaction in an untrue belief, and the belief helps them to live better, there's no harm in this.

I'd agree, so long as the belief remains private and personal. But this isn't how religious beliefs operate. They become dogmatic assertions that have real effects in the real world.

For example, reincarnation has been used as an argument for India's caste system, vestiges of which still exist in that country. (Maybe more than "vestiges.")

Likewise, a related belief in karma that extends over multiple lives can lead to an uncompassionate they deserve what they're getting attitude toward the less fortunate members of a society. So I hope Batchelor rethinks his view that it doesn't matter if a religious belief is true or not, so long as it appeals to the believer.

On a lighter note...

I like Stephen Batchelor's take on Buddhism

Over the years I believe I've read all of Stephen Batchelor's books about his somewhat heretical attitude toward Buddhism. Some blog posts about his books can be perused here, here, here, and here. 

Batchelor correctly argues that for Buddhism to make sense and be useful, its religious/supernatural aspects need to be set aside. 

Stephen Batchelor

So no karma extending over multiple lives, no reincarnation, no mythical entities inhabiting non-material realms of existence.

In this regard Batchelor agrees with Sam Harris. Both Batchelor and Harris have many years of experience with Buddhist meditation and teachings. So I've been enjoying listening to a lengthy discussion between Batchelor and Harris that is on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I subscribe to.

Today I heard an interesting dialogue about how they view enlightenment and the familiar Buddhist adage that life is suffering.

Because Batchelor and Harris largely agree on most things Buddhist'y, their exchange wasn't so much a debate, but an exchange of views, with each man trying to understand where the other was coming from, as the saying goes.

Harris is more into enlightenment as an end in itself, where that word basically means seeing through the illusion of a separate self or soul, and recognizing that everything we experience is an alteration of consciousness.

In his view, it is always possible to step back (a favorite Harris saying) and view an emotion, thought, or whatever as something that arises in consciousness, rather than a substantial entity -- thereby defusing the power of a disturbing or unproductive state of mind.

Batchelor agrees with the value of doing this, but prefers to speak about non-reactivity, as I noted in a blog post. 

In his book "After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age," Bachelor has some interesting observations about nirvana. Prior to saying that nirvana can be understood in one of two ways, as either the ceasing of reactivity or as freedom and independence from reactivity, he gave this view of reactivity:

We tend to regard the appearance of such a fearful world as a projection of our mental state.

But this reading of the situation is based on the cultural habit of interpreting experience psychologically. No matter how much we tell ourselves that the fearfulness of the world is just a projection, such reassurance does not significantly alter either how the world appears to us or how we feel about it.

From the perspective of a dharma practitioner, the task of "letting go of what arises" entails releasing one's grip on the whole picture: angry-me-facing-hostile-situation. 

Letting go is not simply a question of breathing deeply to calm my rattled mind; I need to cleanse the doors of my perception. This requires suspending the default habit of seeing the world as being hostile, desirable, or boring. One of the most effective ways of suspending that habit is to train yourself to comprehend the world as an infinitely suffering world.

Now, I don't claim to fully understand what Bachelor means.

However, I have at least an indistinct grasp of what he's getting at, and that's good enough for me. The way I see it, Bachelor doesn't view life as ever being free of suffering. But it is possible to lessen the impact of suffering.

Now, the differences between Harris and Batchelor in this regard are subtle. In large part they matter only to people like themselves -- so knowledgeable about Buddhist history, teachings, and writings, they can intelligently discuss the finer points of Buddhism.

That said, there was one area where I believe I understood Batchelor quite well, and agree with him to a greater extent than I agree with Harris.

Today I heard Batchelor say that individual enlightenment or ending suffering shouldn't be the final goal of a Buddhist practitioner. Instead, being a good ethical person should be. Thus our inner work should be viewed as a foundation for wise compassionate actions and relationships in our everyday life.

I see this as akin to a combination shot in pool, or billiards. You're striking a certain ball with the intention that it will hit another ball that's your primary interest.

Which isn't totally different from how Harris views things. He said that the more he can tone down or eliminate his worries, anxieties, fears, negative emotions, and such, the better his relationships with other people will be. Which makes perfect sense. It's much easier to be around someone loving and happy than someone angry and sad.

Thus what makes meditation important isn't only how it impacts how we experience the world. Equally important, if not more so, is how an inner realization affects our outer relationships.

If a spiritual practice isn't making us a better human being, it isn't serving a purpose.

This is clear when we consider how often supposedly enlightened or awakened people engage in bad behaviors. There's simply no excuse for devotees of these people to say things like, "It isn't possible to judge the behavior of an enlightened soul."

Sure it is. Are they honest, compassionate, loving, truthful, caring, generous, and so on? Are they acting like a normal good human being? If not, their so-called enlightenment or awakening is a fraud, bullshit. 

I've got a bit more of the Harris-Batchelor discussion to listen to. If I hear anything worth sharing in another blog post, I'll be sure to do that.

Dalai Lama isn't big on single-pointed attention

Here's some good news for everybody who has difficulty concentrating during meditation. The Dalai Lama does too! And he doesn't think that single-pointed attention is the best way to meditate. Analytical meditation is. 

A few days ago, in a blog post I shared a lengthy passage from my new favorite book, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D.

That passage ended with Sood mentioning that it was the Dalai Lama who provided the final push that got Sood to break away from the traditional meditation approach he learned growing up in India, and to embrace a modern version of mindfulness founded in a blend of modern science and ancient spirituality.

This is how Sood describes his conversation with the Dalai Lama at a Mayo Clinic event. The boldfacing is in Sood's book. I've added a section from the following chapter where Sood summarizes the seven tenets that have become the basis for his redesigned approach to mindfulness -- each of which makes a lot of sense to me.

It was a dramatic ninety minutes. I found the Dalai Lama to be kind, gentle, encouraging, fun, and wise. Spending time with him was like learning from my very sweet, very loving grandpa.

I asked the Dalai Lama lots of questions --- about human struggles, compassion, his childhood, and more. Then, in his presence, I asked these two questions to the audience of about five hundred people, the who's who of the meditation world.

(The answers would truly shock me and steer me forward in my path.) "How many of you have practiced meditation?" and "How many of you have found meditation a piece of cake, very easy?" 

As expected, the majority of the participants raised their hands in response to the first question. In response to the second question, barely one or two hands went up.

At that point, the Dalai Lama, in all his humility, shared his insights about meditation. I have watched this clip several times on YouTube. He described two types of meditation: analytical and single pointed.

Analytical meditation cultivates a sense of curiosity -- an alert mind that is busy exploring the nature of the body, world, humanity, and mind. Such a mind analyzes all it sees and connects different experiences to learn about the world.

Analytic meditation helps develop a holistic view. It decreases the gap between appearance and reality. This form of meditation he found easy, and he thought it was more important than the second form of meditation -- focused attention.

For the second form of meditation, which creates a single-pointed mind (in which you focus on a single object of attention), the word Dalai Lama used was impossible. It needed a lot of time -- four, five, or six hours a day.

...Talking to the Dalai Lama was a moment of great realization for me. I felt uplifted, absolved, freed. My cage had been opened. This hummingbird was ready to fly.

If the Dalai Lama struggles with single-pointed meditation and promotes a more wisdom-seeking analytical process, why was I seeking single-pointed meditation as a first step. Why were many other programs doing the same?

I realized my folly. I was copying and pasting practices I had learned without much thinking. I had picked cliches. I was talking about the "now" without knowing what it meant. I was evangelizing about being in the present moment without knowing how difficult it was.

I was sharing practices that didn't work for the majority of the people for the long term. They were just too polite to tell me. I was setting them up for failure, swapping one trap for the other. This wasn't right, and I needed to fix it.

If the basic concepts of diet and exercise are simple and can be learned in a very short time, why shouldn't mindfulness resilience, happiness, and stress management be equally simple and accessible? I thought.

...Here are the seven tenets presented as seven tweets. 

(1) Ancient wisdom relied on philosophy; modern wisdom increasingly consults twenty-first century science.
(2) Time is fleeting and untethered. Anchor presence by intentionality instead of time.
(3) Intentional attention, external or internal, engages the same brain network. Focus your meditation on the world if you struggle with the mind.
(4) If the short-term is challenged, think about the long term; if the long term is challenged, live for the next moment. Keep a flexible zoom.
(5) A non-judgmental stance can be comforting but is unachievable. Being grateful and compassionate is an easier and more accessible solution.
(6) Mindfulness isn't a practice; it is a way of life.
(7) Instead of emptying the mind, fill it with hope, inspiration, and courage.

You can see the Dalai Lama's response to the questions Sood asked the audience in this video of the event. I've set the You Tube video to start at the appropriate place, a bit after 1:05.

Reading this blog post, know that you are reading this blog post

If you're not into mindfulness meditation, the title of this blog post may seem like nonsense to you. But like I wrote last year, "Mindfulness has become my meditation."

A frequently-heard saying in the guided meditations I listen to via iPhone apps is Breathing in, know that you are breathing in. In other words, bring mind and body into a state of harmonious relatedness.

Of course, you don't have to always be aware of your breathing. But if your goal in a particular meditation session is to be aware of your breathing, then obviously you need to know that you are breathing to bring about that awareness.

It's entirely possible, very common, in fact, to be doing something physically without being aware of what you're doing. I can read several paragraphs of a book before I suddenly realize, I have no idea what I just read. My eyes were scanning the words, while my mind was thinking about something else.

So I try to get into the habit of saying to myself, "While doing ____, know that I'm doing ____."

Not continuously, of course. That would distract from my awareness of what I'm doing, since if I kept repeating that phrase, I'd be aware of repeating that phrase, not what I was physically doing.

For example, at the beginning of the three Tai Chi classes I attend each week I typically say to myself, "While doing Tai Chi, know that I am doing Tai Chi."  Maybe that seems obvious. It isn't, though. After 15 years of learning Tai Chi, I know most of the forms so well I can do them while my mind is elsewhere.

Like, thinking about what I'm going to have for dinner. Thus my body can be practicing Tai Chi, while my mind is visualizing what's going to be taken out of the refrigerator when I get home.

There's nothing wrong with doing that.

It just means that I'm not fully into the present moment, since my body is in one place while my mind is in another place. That's often fine. How would we be able to envision the future if our minds were locked into only being cognizant of what's happening right now?

Ditto for remembering the past.

I'm simply saying that by and large, I've found that life is more pleasant, and seems to flow more smoothly, when my mind is as much in sync with my physical actions as possible. Sure, sometimes we need to be almost totally immersed in thoughts or feelings that take us away from what our body is doing.

Even then, though, we should be aware of our inner contemplation while we're engaged in that inner contemplation. Most of us have had the unsettling experience of talking to somebody, then having them say, "Oh, sorry. Could you repeat that? My mind was somewhere else."

Typically we aren't as unsettled when we aren't aware of what our own mind has been saying inside our head, because this happens so frequently, it is second nature (or even first nature) to us.  

Meaning, if our inner voice were to be broadcast to the world at large via a psychological loudspeaker, other people would look upon us as if we were crazy --  much as mentally ill homeless people are viewed when they stand on a street corner and blurt out whatever pops into their head.

A main difference between them and us is that we're able to keep our bizarre non-sensical stream-of-consciousness thoughts to ourselves while we walk down a sidewalk. Which shouldn't fill us with pride in our sanity. We're just better at keeping our craziness inside our head.

Mindfulness practice hasn't made me into a Buddha, for sure.

I still get anxious, sad, upset, angry, worried, fearful, and such just about as much as before. However, I'm working on simply experiencing those feelings as they arise, rather than, say, getting anxious about my anxiety, or sad about my sadness.

Being more mindful of how I'm feeling seems to help me avoid becoming overwhelmed by an emotion, where I make myself feel worse by over-reacting to a feeling I'm experiencing. Feeling worried, I know that I'm feeling worried -- that sort of thing.

It's been a while since I've locked my car, then walked back to my car to see if I've locked it. Like I said back in February, this is a positive sign of my (mini) enlightenment.

Any resemblance between me and this image that I shared in that post is purely coincidental. I do, though, live near a lake that has water lilies, so there's that.

 

 

My Zen snow globe

BEHOLD... my mystical magical enlightening Zen snow globe!

You turn it over to stir things up, then it settles down. Until things get stirred up again, after which they settle down.

Just like life.

Buddhists, the mind isn't like a mirror. Science knows better.

In my churchless frame of mind, it's rare that I can get very far into a book with some religious overtones before I start using my highlighter to make question marks in the margins.

The book I'm reading now, As It Is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, was bought because I was curious to learn more about one of the Dzogchen/Buddhist teachers mentioned in Sam Harris' Waking Up book -- which I like a lot.

(But which also has some question marks in the margins; just a few, though.)

I'll write about what appeals to me in As It Is in another blog post. Buddhism gets a lot right about reality, so long as the supernatural aspects of Buddhist teachings are stripped out. The doctrine of no-self and no-soul is very much in accord with modern neuroscience, for example.

Since Buddhist philosophy emanates from pre-scientific times, it's surprising that Buddhism gets so much right about how the mind works. However, it also gets quite a bit wrong, as evidenced by these quotations from As It Is that I read this morning.

Better to be like a mirror, letting reflections occur in the state of rigpa [knowledge of original wakefulness] without fixating on anything. That is the state of suchness.

...To reflect the pure development stage, first be a bright mirror. First understand, then experience, then realize. Try first of all to be a good mirror, a mind essence mirror, a rigpa mirror. 

Suchness. I don't like that word. Back in 2010 I wrote "My main gripe with Buddhist meditation." Here's some excerpts that apply to the As It Is book also.

Bare knowing. Actually happening. Just as they are. Inner life naked. As they truly are.

Many Buddhists actually believe this stuff, that through their many hours of meditation they're able to enter into an experience of suchness and thus so'ness -- which supposedly is an awareness of things as they are, not as they seem to be to deluded minds like you and I have (I'm assuming you aren't an enlightened Buddhist practitioner; if you think you are, congratulations).

Every human being, without exception, knows reality through his or her own idiosyncratic brain filters. Experience leads us to see things in a certain way, then our seeing feeds back into our experience in a never-ending cycle.

I do believe that meditation and other forms of mental training can help us become more aware of what's going on in both our inner and outer world. However, these awarenesses are of reality as we know it, not reality as it is nakedly, purely, actually.

Nine years later, I believe what I said above even more strongly. This is basic neuroscience: the mind/brain actively constructs reality; it doesn't passively reflect reality.

Recently my wife and I re-watched the first episode of David Eagleman's PBS series, The Brain. That episode is called "What is Reality?"

The description of the episode on the PBS website shows that Buddhism may be correct about many things regarding the mind, but viewing the mind as a mirror isn't one of them.

Dr. Eagleman takes viewers on an extraordinary journey that explores how the brain, locked in silence and darkness without direct access to the world, conjures up the rich and beautiful world we all take for granted. 

‘What is Reality?’ begins with the astonishing fact that this technicolor multi-sensory experience we are having is a convincing illusion conjured up for us by our brains. 

In the outside world there is no color, no sound, no smell. These are all constructions of the brain. Instead, there is electromagnetic radiation, air compression waves, and aromatic molecules all of which are interpreted by the brain as color, sound and smell.   

Cutting edge graphics show that data from the outside are rendered into electrochemical signals inside the brain, which map meaningfully onto physical reality. Our experience of reality is an electrochemical rendition of the world outside. It is not a faithful rendition.

Visual illusions are reminders that what’s important to the brain is not being faithful to ‘reality’ but being able to perceive just enough so that we can navigate successfully through it. The brain leaves a lot out of its beautiful rendition of the physical world, a fact that Dr Eagleman reveals using experiments, and street demonstrations. 

We meet the men and women whose experiences of reality reveal important clues about how the brain constructs our own reality, including the Alcatraz prisoner who was locked in the notorious ‘Dark Hole’ for 29 days, and yet experienced richly colorful moments of reality.

His experience, along with those who have experienced total sensory deprivation show us that even when sensory input to the brain stops, the show still goes on. Why? Because, amazingly, our senses – eyes, ears, skin, nose - only modulate an internally generated simulation of what the brain expects is out there. This so-called ‘internal model of reality’ allows us to move through the world, recognizing it rather than constructing it anew, moment by moment. 

We meet a man who is blind despite the fact that he has eyes that can see. His story reveals that it’s the brain that sees, not our eyes. A woman with schizophrenia, whose psychotic episodes were her reality, emphasizes the fact that whatever our brains tell us is out there, we believe it.

We have no way to get beyond what our brains allow us to perceive. Like the rest of the animal kingdom, we inhabit a miniscule slice of reality, and yet we believe it to be the whole picture. 

Eagleman also explores time, and takes a look at how – and why - the brain alters its perception of time, depending on the situation we find ourselves in. Time, it turns out, is not an absolute to the brain. 

Each one of our brains is different, and so is the reality it produces. What is reality? It’s whatever your brain tells you it is.

Sam Harris shows my meditation is on the right spiritual track

There's many forms of meditation. They all have strengths and weaknesses, pluses and minuses. But only a few forms of meditation lead to an increased knowledge of reality, since most are based on unfounded religious dogma.

I'm confident that the meditation I've been practicing for about fifteen years -- after I wisely gave up a religiously-based form of meditation -- has me on the right spiritual track.

I explained why in "Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self." Here's how that 2014 post starts out.

Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."

I'm about a third of the way through. Which is far enough to have discovered the central theme. Harris writes:

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion -- and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

...Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self -- not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body behind the eyes, inside the head.

The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will.

And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished. 

...Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents.

Wow. 

Now, I realize that some people would say "Yeah, makes sense, no big surprise" to the above scientifically- and experientially-persuasive truths.

But I spent decades as a devotee of a mystical philosophy that, like many others, taught that we humans have, or are, an eternal soul. The soul supposedly could return to God through meditation at the "eye center" -- that place behind the eyes and inside the head Harris, a neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, says doesn't house a self or soul.

So it sure seems like those who claim that this world is an illusion, with soul-realms being true reality, are the ones who have gotten it wrong. 

There is no enduring soul or self to be liberated. As Harris says in his book, genuine spirituality is realizing this. Thus a belief in the existence of soul leads one farther away from the truth, not closer. This is basic Buddhism, yet even many Buddhists still harbor fantasies of living on after death as... something or other.

Other posts I wrote about my first reading of Harris' "Waking Up" are here, here, and here. I re-read the book in 2016 and wrote another post about it. I had some quibbles about how Harris views consciousness, but upon a closer reading of certain sections I was able to better grasp his viewpoint.

The past few days I've been reading "Waking Up" a third time. I switch highlighter colors with every reading. By now some pages are almost completely highlighted.

This book is my favorite in the spiritual but not religious genre. Harris is famously down on religion, yet decidedly up on understanding the nature of ourselves through Buddhist Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation that's aimed at dissolving the illusion that we are, or have, a self/soul.

Harris writes:

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

Although many Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary  human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind.

Buddha means "swakened one" -- and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self. 

Compare this with the Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition.

...Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in the religious and philosophical literature of the West.

Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.

Beautiful. 

What I love about this approach to spirituality is that it's solidly founded in modern neuroscience, which also says that our sense of being a "self" is almost certainly an illusion, so meditation needs to be aimed at realizing what we are not by paying close attention to what we actually are.

Namely, thoughts without a thinker; perceptions without a perceiver; emotions without an emoter; and so on.

Sam Harris writes:

The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self -- that there is no rider on the horse -- seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.

How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn't. What doesn't survive scrutiny cannot be real.

Harris uses this visual illusion as an analogy.

There appears to be a white box in the center of the figure. But, Harris says, "when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled."

Try blanking out all but one of the black figures with your hand. That makes it easier to see that what appears to be a white square actually is an absence, not a presence. 

Just like the self, or soul. It appears to be there, but this is an illusion. Look for it, and it's nowhere to be found. If that feeling of nowhere'ness persists, congratulations. You're enlightened! Or, awake.

Here's the problem with living: we're going to die

This isn't exactly breaking news, but I'll say it anyway. Each of us is going to die. 


Those seven words are undeniably scary. Life isn't always pleasant. Yet the gulf between having a difficult life and no life at all is more than immense. It's immeasurable. There's no way to compare being alive and being dead, or existence and non-existence.

The worst day anyone can have is on a different dimension than not existing at all.

Understand: I'm not saying that life is always worth living. Suicide and death with dignity testify to the fact that sometimes people prefer to check out of life early, rather than waiting for the involuntary eviction notice.

There are many reasons most people on Earth embrace some form of religiosity. However, a central reason has to be the reassurance almost every religion provides that when the last breath is taken, that doesn't mark the end of their life, but rather the beginning of a new form of existence.

I don't believe this is true.

There's no convincing evidence of life after death. Nor is there convincing evidence that human consciousness can exist without a functioning brain. Comas, anesthesia, being hit on the head with a baseball bat -- there's abundant evidence that consciousness is a product of the brain, though how this happens still isn't fully understood.

Still, each of has to come to grips with the reality of death whether we're an ardent atheist, committed religious believer, or somewhere in-between. 

Leaving aside the option of not thinking about death until it stares us in the face (which can be a good way to live, for those capable of doing this), it seems to me that there's two basic approaches to preparing for the inevitability of our eventual demise.

One is to try to expand our self. The other is to try to shrink our self. 

Almost all religions take the first approach: expanding the self. For example, some religions say that after death there is either bodily resurrection (Christianity) or reincarnation (Hinduism). Mystical aspects of religion proclaim that the soul can merge with God, taking on divine attributes. 

Aside from the fact that self-expansion, or consciousness-expansion, likely isn't possible in any sense that extends beyond the bounds of a single physical life, there's other reasons to shy away from this approach.

It encourages grandiosity.

I see this all the time in comments religious believers leave on my blog posts, notably those who are devotees of an Indian form of spirituality known as Sant Mat, or the Path of the Saints. They're fond of claiming that this is the highest form of religion, supposedly leading as it does to knowledge of an ultimate divine reality.

Of course, just about every religion makes this same claim.

Since there is no evidence of one religion being superior to another, almost certainly because they all are "fake news" (to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump), it seems ridiculous for a member of any faith to say that their way is the only way -- sort of like people arguing about which unicorn color is the most attractive, given that unicorns don't exist except in one's imagination.

So I prefer the other approach to dealing with life and our eventual death: shrinking the self. 

After all, us humans already are pretty damn insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Aside from having a lot of company here on Earth -- the human population is about 7.6 billion -- we are on a planet circling one of about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of at least 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

And we're very lucky to live 100 years, which is an infinitesimal blip in the 13.7 billion year old universe we inhabit. 

Thus it doesn't take much for us to shrink down to almost nothing, either figuratively or literally (the whole "ashes to ashes' thing). But our egos enjoy pretending that we're way more important than we really are, which goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of religions.

God so loves us, he sent his only son to die for our sins. The soul is destined to return home to its heavenly father. Humans are the pinnacle of creation. 

The myths of religion are innumerable. I much prefer reality:

Each of us is nothing special. We're connected to all other living things through the secular "miracle" of evolution. We live for a while, then we die. Humility is not only a virtue, it's the way things are in a world that is much grander and longer-lived than us.

Of all the world's religions, in my opinion Buddhism and Taoism are the best at offering ways to help us shrink our sense of self. One reason is that neither posits an enduring Self, or Soul. Rather, they teach that life is ever-changing, as are we. Our existence is intimately connected with that of everything else on Earth. We're humble parts of the whole.

He who stands on tiptoe is not steady.
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.
According to followers of the Tao, 
    "These are extra food and unnecessary luggage."
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them.
    -- Tao Te Ching

As a concrete example of the difference between grandiose and humble approaches to spirituality, I spend exactly zero time and effort on religious web sites or blogs trying to push my atheist point of view. Sure, I enjoy sharing churchless/atheist ideas here on my own blog, but I don't go out of my way to convince others that they should adopt my perspective.

But ever since I started this blog in 2004, religious believers -- mostly of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas/Sant Mat variety -- have commented in droves on my blog posts. The way I see it, this shows that they're not very confident in their belief system, since when someone presents arguments against what they believe, they take this as a battle cry to fight against.

Thus I'm pleased to be a humble churchless blogger rather than a grandiose believer in religious dogma. It's much more relaxing that way, since my only commitment is to the truth as best I can understand it. Truth doesn't require any attempt to boost it up, since it stands tall on its own.

Regarding death, my bet is that what will happen to me is exactly the same thing that happens to every other person: we die and are gone forever. The way I see it, the more I can reduce my sense of ego and specialness, the easier it will be to let go when the moment of dying comes.

Until then, I'll enjoy life.

Sure, religious believers typically derive comfort from a fantasy that death won't be the end for them. But the price they pay for their belief strikes me as too high -- feeling like they are the special beloveds of God or some other higher power, which leads to a sense of separation from everybody else who won't enjoy such a marvelous afterlife.

I'd rather feel like I'm simply part of the dead-and-gone-forever crowd. If somehow I discover that I'm living on after I die, that'll be great news. I'm not counting on it, though.

Vipassana vs. Surat Shabd Yoga meditation. I pick a winner.

Arguably it doesn't make sense to consider that meditation styles can be classed as winners or losers. But, hey, that's no fun! So in this post I'm going to choose a winner after considering a question I got in an email message recently:

Do you have any opinion as to whether vipassana is more or less equal to RSSB's simran?

Well, of course I have an opinion.

I'm a blogger. Opinionating is what I love to do. I've got opinions on just about everything. Heck, on one of my other two blogs I rated the grocery carts at the three stores in south Salem (Oregon) where I do the weekly shopping for my wife, dog, and myself.

First, let's get some terms defined. Vipassana is a Buddhist meditation practice that is basically what is now called "mindfulness." Sure, there's more to it than that, as discussed in a Tricycle article, "What Exactly is Vipassana Meditation?"

The distinction between Vipassana meditation and other styles of meditation is crucial and needs to be fully understood. Buddhism addresses two major types of meditation. They are different mental skills, modes of functioning or qualities of consciousness. In Pali, the original language of Theravada literature, they are called Vipassana and Samatha.

Vipassana can be translated as “Insight,” a clear awareness of exactly what is happening as it happens. Samatha can be translated as “concentration” or “tranquility.” It is a state in which the mind is brought to rest, focused only on one item and not allowed to wander. When this is done, a deep calm pervades body and mind, a state of tranquility which must be experienced to be understood.

Most systems of meditation emphasize the Samatha component. The meditator focuses his mind upon some items, such as prayer, a certain type of box, a chant, a candle flame, a religious image or whatever, and excludes all other thoughts and perceptions from his consciousness. The result is a state of rapture which lasts until the meditator ends the session of sitting. It is beautiful, delightful, meaningful and alluring, but only temporary. Vipassana meditation addresses the other component, insight.

Simran is one component of the Surat Shabd Yoga meditation practice taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), along with other sects that fall into the general category of Sant Mat. Simran is the repetition of a mantra, so it falls into the Samatha or concentration category, as noted in the passage quoted above. 

The other components of Surat Shabd Yoga are dhyan, visualization of an image (usually the face of the guru who initiated the practitioner), and bhajan, listening to a supposed celestial or supernatural sound.

The simran part of Surat Shabd Yoga is what I was asked about, but what follows really is a comparison of Vipassana and Surat Shabd Yoga in general.

I practiced Surat Shabd Yoga diligently for about 35 years, meditating every day from 1 1/2 hours to 2 1/2 hours. For the past 15 years or so my morning meditation has been Vipassana/mindfulness oriented. 

The key difference between Vipassana and Surat Shabd Yoga is the goal.

As noted in the passage above, Vipassana, or mindfulness, aims at being clearly aware of whatever is present within one's consciousness.

It isn't other-worldly, unless sensations of another world are present. Typically awareness of the breath is used to calm the mind, though thoughts and emotions aren't rejected in mindfulness meditation, since they can be another object of awareness.

Surat Shabd Yoga, on the other hand, is very much other-worldly. The goal is to withdraw one's consciousness from the outside world, including sensations of one's own body, and bring awareness completely "inside."

Once there, at the eye center or Third Eye, supposedly one's soul consciousness rises to higher realms of spiritual reality, considered to be five in number. 

Now, I've used supposed and supposedly to describe Surat Shabd Yoga meditation, but not to describe Vipassana or mindfulness meditation. 

This points to the central reason I consider Vipassana to be superior: it deals with what is actually present in consciousness, not with what might be there. Surat Shabd Yoga, on the other hand aims at leaving this world behind in order to gain a supposedly better one.

Even the simran or mantra repetition aspect of Surat Shabd Yoga has an other-worldly connotation, since the Five Holy Names repeated by the practitioner supposedly are associated with characteristics of the aforementioned five higher realms of reality.

So the benefit of Surat Shabd Yoga meditation is much reduced if, as I consider highly likely, the supernatural regions it posits actually don't exist.

Meaning, if there's no supernatural side to reality that human consciousness can become aware of, then Surat Shabd Yoga basically is Samatha or concentration. There's a benefit to being able to concentrate on a mantra or image to the exclusion of other sensations, thoughts, emotions, and such, but otherwise the Surat Shabd Yoga practitioner isn't doing anything special.

Ah, that word, special. 

This points to another reason why I now much prefer Vipassana/mindfulness meditation. There's nothing special about it, nor is there any claim that it's something special. It's simply an attempt to recognize whatever is happening with as clear an awareness as possible.

As I frequently hear on my Daily Calm guided meditation via my iPhone's Calm app, "breathing in, know that you are breathing in; breathing out, know that you are breathing out." (Also, as I've noted in a blog post, when locking my car, know that I am locking the car.)

So mindfulness is a universal approach to living.

In a very real sense, there's nothing higher or lower, better or worse, desirable or undesirable. If we're happy, we know we're happy. If sad, we know we're sad. Judgement is absent from Vipassana meditation, as I understand it.

If the mind wanders, we know our mind is wandering. When the mind is concentrated, we know our mind is concentrating.

By contrast, my experience is that Surat Shabd Yoga practitioners -- at least those in the RSSB organization -- consider themselves to be on a very special path that leads to God-realization. The RSSB teachings claim that those initiated by the guru, who is viewed as God in human form, are "marked souls." 

Marked, that is, by God as deserving of being put on a path that is guaranteed to lead to God-realization within a maximum of four lifetimes (which entails a belief in reincarnation, obviously).

The Surat Shabd Yoga goal of leaving this world behind to find a better one within the depths of one's consciousness also encourages an unhealthy disdain for everyday life among many devotees. The RSSB guru sometimes is adored more than an initiate's own family, in line with Jesus' supposed saying:

"Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." (Matthew 10:37)

Bottom line: I'm enjoying my meditation much more now that I've switched to a Vipassana/mindfulness approach. I feel more in touch both with myself and with other people. I no longer consider that I'm on a special spiritual journey leading to the highest divine realm that people who practice other forms of meditation are unable to reach.

It feels good to simply view myself as an ordinary human being living an ordinary life.

But if God or a supernatural divinity actually does exist, seemingly Vipassana meditation will help me be mindfully aware of it, should that divinity deign to make an appearance in my consciousness.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention another reason I prefer Vipassana/mindfulness meditation now. In accord with Buddhist teachings, Vipassana leads to a realization that there's no "self" inside our head, no enduring essence, nothing separate from ever-changing experience.

Surat Shabd Yoga, on the other hand, assumes we have, or are, a soul that is unchanging and eternal, even though there's no convincing evidence of this. So in addition to assuming that supernatural realms of reality exist, Surat Shabd Yoga also assumes that the soul exists. 

I want to know reality as it is, as clearly and fully as possible. Fantasies about what could be, but isn't, can be fun to engage in (that's why movies and novels are so pleasing), but they shouldn't be taken seriously.

Here's a positive sign of my (mini) enlightenment

I was really proud of myself tonight. So proud, I'm thinking that what I did could be a tangible sign of my enlightenment, mini, or even micro, variety.

After finding a parking spot a couple of blocks from my 6 pm Tai Chi class in downtown Salem, I walked away from my VW GTI without going back and checking if I'd locked the car via a button on the door handle.

Now, this may not seem like something that distinguishes an enlightened being. It pales in comparison to what supposedly happened with the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. 

But given how often I do return to my car to peer into the driver's side window to see if the red "locked" light is flashing, I was decidedly pleased that even though doing this did pass through my mind, tonight I recalled hearing the clunk sound my GTI makes when a door is locked. 

Thus this time I'd managed to be mindful of a habitual action: locking my car. 

Many other times, way too many to count, I'd started thinking of something else I needed to do while my finger was pressing the lock button. Since the human brain has limited bandwidth, and really is able to do only one thing at a time skillfully, my lack of attention to what my body was doing at the locking-car moment often leaves me unsure if I'd done it.

Now that I've reached the age of 70 (which seems astoundingly old whenever I see it in writing), I'm paying more attention to the few pearls of wisdom I might be able to pass on to the young'uns. Here's one pearl, as prosaic as it may seem:

Try to keep your mind and body on the same page of reality.

This is Mindfulness 101, of course. Others have said the same thing, and better, in the many books I've read about meditation and mindfulness. For example, here's a passage from Thich Nhat Hanh's wonderful little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness."

Our breath is such a fragile piece of thread. But once we know how to use it, it can become a wondrous tool to help us surmount situations which would otherwise seem hopeless. Our breath is the bridge from our body to our mind, the element which reconciles our body and mind and which makes possible one-ness of body and mind. 

Breath is aligned to both body and mind and it alone is the tool which can bring them both together, illuminating both and bringing both peace and calm.

Life is short. The older we get, the more this becomes obvious. Some people deal with this fact by making a Bucket List of things they want to accomplish before, as the saying goes, they kick the bucket. 

I used to embrace that sort of attitude.

But now I've come to feel something different, and seemingly more attainable. I simply want to be as fully aware as possible of whatever it is I'm doing until I take my last breath. What that whatever is doesn't matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.

By which I mean, there's an unbridgeable gulf between (1) existing as a living being, and (2) dying and not existing at all.

(I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in life after death. However, even religious people should admit there is no solid proof of this, so my point holds for everybody in my decidedly personal opinion.)

So let's say I write a best-selling book -- which previously was on my Bucket List. So what? How does that change my life? How does it affect my everyday existence? I still need to fix my breakfast, wash dishes, walk the dog, and, yes, lock my car. If I'm thinking of how great an author I am while doing those things, I've lost part of my living.

Again, Thich Nhat Hanh makes this point way better than I can.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.

In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands.

Thus we are sucked away into the future -- and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

Meditation isn't mystical. It's about awareness of actual reality.

For about 35 years I had some deluded notions about meditation.

Back then I embraced a teaching that said meditation was about concentrating at the eye center (third eye, basically) so one's mind/soul could enter higher realms of mystical consciousness.

Now I realize that this wasn't what genuine meditation really is all about. A book that I've gotten back to reading, "Altered Traits:  Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" has helped me understand this. 

I bought this book in September 2017, wrote a rather critical blog post about it in April 2018 ("Awareness is a process, not a thing") and recently read a couple of additional chapters that make me feel considerably more positive about the book.

Here's some highlights from those chapters, which describe what happened when the brains of some highly experienced meditators, both Buddhist monks and others, were examined through modern scientific devices: EEG and fMRI. The key theme here is Open Presence.

Researchers found that the brain waves of Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan monk, were off the charts when it came to his ability to almost instantly enter a state of compassionate meditation. But those spikes diminished, yet didn't disappear, when he went into a rest period. Thus his brain had acquired a lasting trait, not just the ability to enter into temporary states of consciousness.

When another researcher tested whether Mingyur could generate an elaborate visual image or had extrasensory perception, he flunked both tests. Here's a passage from Altered Traits about this.

Mingyur, it turned out, had done no practice with visualization since the long-gone, early years of his practice. As time went on, his meditations evolved. His current method, ongoing open presence (which expressed itself as kindness in everyday life), encourages letting go of any and all thoughts rather than generating any specific visual images.

...As for "extrasensory perception," Mingyur had never claimed to have such supernormal powers. Indeed, the texts of his tradition made clear that any fascination with such abilities was a detour, a dead end on the path.

Which is exactly my experience, though I make no claim to being anywhere near as experienced with meditation as Mingyur is. What we're trying to do in meditation is experience reality as it is, not as religious fantasies make it out to be.

An eighteenth-century Tibetan text urges meditators to practice "on whatever harms come your way," adding, "When sick, practice on that sickness... When cold, practice on that coldness. By practicing in this way all situations will arise as meditation."

...Mingyur Rinpoche, likewise, encourages making all sensation, even pain, our "friend," using it as a basis for meditation. Since the essence of meditation is awareness, any sensation that anchors attention can be used as support -- and pain can be very effective in focusing.

...Each yogi (including Mingyur) was compared to a meditation-naive volunteer matched for age and gender. For a week before they came to be studied, the volunteers learned to generate an "open presence," an attentional stance of letting whatever life presents us come and go, without adding thoughts or emotional reactions. Our senses are fully aware, and we just stay aware of what happens without getting carried away by any downs or ups.

When the yogis and volunteers were tested to see how they reacted to a 10-second slight warming of a firey device, followed by a 10-second blast of hotness, the control groups' pain matrix in the brain reacted almost as strongly to the slight warming as it did when the high heat came on.

So their "anticipatory anxiety" caused them distress even before the real pain arrived. By contrast, the experienced meditators showed little change when the plate warmed just a little.

Interestingly, though:

But during the actual moments of intense heat the yogis had a surprising heightened response, mainly in the sensory areas that receive the genuine feel of a stimulus -- the tingling, pressure, high heat, and other raw sensations on the skin of the wrist where the hot plate rested. The emotional regions of the pain matrix activated a bit, but not as much as the sensory circuitry. 

This suggests a lessening of the psychological component -- like the worry we feel in anticipation of pain -- along with intensification of the pain sensations themselves. Right after the heat stopped, all the regions of the brain matrix rapidly returned down to their levels before the pain cue, far more quickly than was the case for the controls.

For the highly advanced meditators, the recovery from pain was almost as though nothing much had happened at all.

Pretty inspiring. This shows that the human brain/mind is capable of more than most people are able to express, or experience. Yet this capacity isn't supernatural, divine, or godly. Here's some final quotes from Altered Traits.

We can only make conjectures about what state of consciousness this reflects: yogis like Mingyur seem to experience an ongoing state of open, rich awareness during their daily lives, not just when they meditate. The yogis themselves have described it as a spaciousness and vastness in their experience, as if all their senses were wide open to the full rich panorama of experience. 

Or, as a fourteenth-century Tibetan text describes it,

...a state of bare, transparent awareness.

Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom;

Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point;

Spacious empty clarity, a state-wide-open and unconfined; the senses unfettered...

Sand mandalas are a symbol of impermanence, that nothing lasts

Today the Daily Calm guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my iPhone app was about mandalas. I've transcribed the last portion of what Levitt said, because I found it inspiring. 

It's so true. Nothing lasts. Everything is impermanent. Our wanting to make the impermanent permanent isn't the only source of suffering, but it certainly contributes to our dissatisfaction with life. 

The image below came from a web page about sand mandalas. It describes the process used to create them in the Buddhist tradition. Here's the transcript:

Today we’ll be discussing the transient nature of all things.

In Buddhism there is a tradition of making beautiful mandalas out of vibrantly colored sand. A mandala is a geometric work of art created on a large flat surface and composed of thousands of tiny deposits of colored sand arranged in a stunningly intricate pattern of concentric lines, curls, and shapes. 

A mandala is meant to symbolize the complexity of the universe. And its creation is a meditation in itself. 

Traditionally sand mandalas are carefully created by a group of monks often working over a span of many hours, typically taking days to complete. There’s a remarkable attention to detail and striking beauty. Yet as soon as the artists complete the mandala, they destroy it. 

The stunning composition of brightly colored sand is ceremoniously brushed away and taken to a river to be carried off by the water. You might ask, why would the makers of a mandala exert such extraordinary effort into it, only to willfully destroy it.

Well, it is to remind themselves of the lesson of impermanence, that nothing lasts. 

This lesson is contrary to human nature. Our instinct is to resist change. We try to keep our kids from growing up too fast. We fight a natural aging process. And we hold on to romantic relationships long after we’ve realized it’s best for us to move on. 

But impermanence is an unavoidable law of nature. 

And the more we resist change, the more difficult we make our lives. As Thich Nhat Hanh stated, it is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

So keep the sand ceremony mandala in mind as a reminder to embrace the transient nature of life.

Do your best not to cling to the things you want to last. Rather, experience them as fully as you can, as they happen, and gracefully let them go as they naturally come to an end. 

Completed mandala being brushed away

Attention isn't what meditation is all about

I'm in book bliss.

Someone emailed me with a book recommendation, "The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness," and I'm loving what I've read so far -- the first couple of chapters.

Here's a few early thoughts about the book.

First, it confirms my belief, which isn't shared by some religious fundamentalists (Eastern mysticism variety) who've been frequent commenters on this blog, that there are many forms of useful meditation. 

In fact, the inward looking, world-denying, mantra-focused type of meditation favored by Sant Mat/Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which I embraced for 35 years, is much different from what is likely the most common form of meditation in the world: mindfulness based on Buddhist principles.

This is clear from the opening pages of The Mind Illuminated. The primary author, John Yates, lays out in summary form the ten stages of meditation practice discussed in the book. The final stage, Stage Ten, is described in this fashion:

When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities you experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions, so your daily life is imbued with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity.

Since Yates bases the ten stages on his study of ancient Buddhist writings, which often are largely incomprehensible to the modern reader, Stage Ten is firmly in line with Buddhist teachings. Yates writes:

The modern road map offered in this book combines experience, tradition, and science. It is a synthesis based on firsthand experience, and expanded on through the shared experiences of many other dedicated practitioners. To make sense of my own meditations and find guidance about where my practice should go next, I turned to my teachers, the Pali suttas, and the commentaries of several Buddhist traditions. 

Over and over, these traditional sources gave me the information I needed and provided an appropriate context to fit the pieces together. By integrating this information and my own experiences with the insights of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, I've "reverse engineered" traditional meditation instructions to create a contemporary map of meditation.

So there is no mention of God; no mention of supernatural entities; no mention of heavenly realms separate from this world.

Instead, Yates writes clearly about how the human mind works, and how meditation can help it function better. It's great how the book is based, as noted in the quote above, both on Buddhist tradition and current neuroscience. 

Second, in my reading this morning I was struck by the wisdom of clearly distinguishing attention from awareness. A Glossary in the back of the book defines these terms.

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli. Attention is one of two forms of conscious awareness. Peripheral awareness is the second: we pay attention to some things, while simultaneously being aware of, but not attending to, others. 

Awareness: As used in this book, awareness always has the same meaning as peripheral awareness. It never means attention, nor does it refer to covert or non-conscious awareness. 

Any meditation approach that doesn't combine the benefits of attention and awareness is like a bird trying to fly with one wing. Both are needed. When we drive a car, we can't focus all of our attention on staying in our lane and keeping a safe distance from the car ahead of us. 

We've got to have peripheral awareness also. What if a car unexpectedly runs a stop light at an intersection? What if a child chasing a ball runs into the road? There are so many things we need to be aware of, other than what our primary focus is.

This is why mantra meditation, where a word or words is repeated (usually soundlessly) as a focus of attention, is very limited. Repeating a mantra was emphasized by the RSSB teachings that I followed for so many years. And not only during the time of meditation, but as much as possible throughout the rest of the day.

I eventually realized that this had some major drawbacks.

I found that when I put too much attention on the mantra, I distanced myself from the reality of what was around me. Like, the person I was talking with, or nature, if I was out on a walk. I also observed that many RSSB devotees acted a lot like robots, lacking spontaneity, naturalness, social awareness. 

They were so focused on keeping their attention from scattering out into the world, they were clueless about what was happening in the world -- the exact opposite of mindfulness, which requires a wise balancing of attention and awareness. There's a time to be focused on one thing, and there's a time to be aware of the entirety of what surrounds us.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about The Mind Illuminated as I read more of it. For now, I simply can say that I highly recommend it to anyone who is meditating, or wants to meditate. 

Spiritual illusions are as deceptive as worldly illusions

I enthusiastically embraced spiritual illusions for 35 years.

I believed in God. I believed that God could be found by following the teachings of divine incarnations, God in human form. I believed I'd live on after my death. I believed in an eternal heaven beyond time and earthly tribulations. I believed spirituality required following certain commandments.

This sounds like I was a Christian, right? No, wrong. I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Eastern form of religion known as Sant Mat. Its headquarters were in India, and the organization was led by a guru.

Eventually I came to realize that what I believed was real actually was an illusion. I simply wanted to believe so badly, it took three and a half decades for the truth to break through the dogmas that I held on to so tightly. 

Today I finished reading "No Self, No Problem," a Buddhist book by Anam Thubten that talks a lot about illusions. My first post about the book is here.

I liked the book a lot. I don't agree with everything Thubten says, such as the supposed ability to go beyond pain and suffering by realizing that the notion of a permanent self is an illusion. But I agree with him that our sense of being, or having, a self that's independent of the goings-on in our brain is the most important illusion to come to grips with.

Why? Because our exaggerated sense of ego is the cause of many of our problems. (Thubten might say all of them, but I wouldn't go that far.)

A key reason I deconverted from religiosity to atheism is what Thubten speaks about in his book. Just because someone is on a supposedly "spiritual" path doesn't mean anything. They can still be ignorant, self-centered, and full of themselves. All that changes is that now they believe it is OK to be that way, because God is on their side.

Below are some additional excerpts from the last chapters of "No Self, No Problem." Like I said, I think most of what Thubten says is true. Meditation for me now is exactly what he speaks of: doing as little as possible so I can be in contact with what is true to the greatest degree possible.

I'm no longer aiming at self-realization, because along with modern neuroscience and Buddhism, I no longer believe that my self exists (at least, not as a detached conscious observer separate from the physical brain). And I no longer aim at God-realization, because I no longer believe in God.

This makes me a semi-Buddhist, I guess. But since Buddha himself wasn't a Buddhist -- Buddhism came along long after his death -- I suppose I'm in good company. 

Here's the excerpts from Thubten's book.

When we come to the spiritual path we have to be very cautious. We have to be certain that we are not adding another illusion on top of the illusions we already have. When we look into our consciousness we see that we have many illusions.

Everything is an illusion, especially this notion of "I."

The story of my life is an illusion, my birth, my relationships, and so forth. They are all a story just like a movie. If something happens to my brain, much of this story will be immediately forgotten. Therefore in the ultimate sense it is not truly existent. It is illusion.

We have to be careful when we come to the spiritual world so that we do not fall into the trap of accumulating new illusions. Believe it or not there are very beautiful illusions along the path, the journey, and the practices. Sometimes celebrating illusions can be very entertaining but the problem is that sooner or later illusions collapse.

...Here in the West many people like Eastern illusions because they have already become disillusioned with American illusions. Now they are going around trying to buy Eastern illusions. These new illusions may work for a while because we don't have any heartache associated with them, no bad memories.

But ultimately we must dissolve every illusion: American illusions, Eastern illusions, European illusions, and finally our own illusions.

What is our main illusion? The illusion is that I am real. I am truly existent. This final illusion is the one we want to hold on to.

...We are all carrying this imaginary self around day and night. We are trying to secure it at any cost. Sometimes, the spiritual path that we are on might be just another way to enforce it.

Obviously people have been using the notion of God or eternal life as a way to solidify this illusion. Eternal life in heaven somewhere means that this "I" never has to die.

The idea of surrender itself can be very beautiful. It is the direct doorway to the truth. It is the powerful art of dropping the self right away. 

People often have the tendency to surrender to something or someone outside of themselves. Surrendering to the guru is not true surrender, because then you become the surrenderer, which is another version of self. For that very reason, Buddha discouraged people from surrendering to his personality. Of course, we always surrender to his wisdom. 

The problem is that when we surrender to his personality we don't surrender to his wisdom. He told devotees not to take even his words on blind faith. He said we should question them before accepting them as such. 

...So meditation ultimately stops everything. We stop pushing that rolling snowball and we stop pedaling the bicycle. We don't do anything because there is nothing we can do. From that moment on, we are no longer in charge. The truth is in charge, From that moment on truth is going to voluntarily destroy the foundation, the basis of all sorrow, all misery. 

Truth does that work for us. All we have to do is stop everything. That is what meditation is all about. 

In the ancient times, spiritual seekers used various methods to practice meditation, Yet, there is only one meditation. That is a state of nondoing. When we stop trying to get somewhere and let go of all of our inner exertions, surprisingly the ineffable truth reveals itself to us.

Then that's it. There is nothing else to be found.

...We have a egoic mind that is trained and habituated to do something, to construct this world of illusion. Ego is working very hard. Ego is always talking. Ego is making up stories for the sake of perpetuating all of the stories of the notion of "I." "I" am meditating. "I" am truly existent. "I" am truly meditating and now "I" am getting somewhere. "I" am chasing enlightenment. 

This very thought is just ego's way of perpetuating itself.  

Buddhist wisdom: pay attention to the breath until the self dissolves

My spiritual evolution has been a lot like my marital arts evolution. I'll explain.

For about nine years I practiced traditional Shotokan karate. I got to the brown belt level, and did quite well in tournaments where I sparred against black belts with considerably more experience, and who were much younger than me. But when it came to testing, I was stuck. I wasn't being advanced from the initial brown belt level.

Eventually it dawned on me that I was learning martial arts skills.

But what I was learning wasn't what the Shotokan higher-ups wanted to see when it came to testing. So I switched to a more flexible style of karate. It was a big relief to realize that for those nine years, I'd been learning about martial arts. What I was learning just wasn't what traditional Shotokan karate expected me to learn.

Likewise, for about 35 years I practiced a form of meditation that involved devotion to a supposedly "perfect guru." The technique involved repetition of a mantra with a focus on the center of the forehead, drawing attention away from the body and external world. The goal was to "go within" and experience realms of existence beyond the physical.

I learned a lot during those years of meditating from one to two-and-a-half hours a day.

Eventually, though, it dawned on me that what I was learning wasn't what this particular spiritual path of Radha Soami Satsang Beas wanted me to learn. So for quite a few years I've shifted to a Buddhist style of meditation centered on awareness of the breath -- along with whatever else is happening within me and without me.

There are various forms of Buddhism, of course. I don't have much use for the more religious forms. But I very much enjoy the forms that are either wholly secular, or keep the supernatural side of Buddhism to a minimum (such as rebirth).

I'm about halfway through a book that I saw mentioned in a comment on this blog, "No Self, No Problem," by Anam Thubten. I agree with the positive Amazon reviews. Even though Thubten appears to believe in rebirth, he puts very little emphasis on this. Rather, Thubten has an engaging, honest, direct way of speaking about spirituality and meditation.

What I most like about this book is that it reassures me that the meditation path I'm on is the path taught by the Buddha. Not that I revere the Buddha, since I don't know the guy, and one of my favorite Buddhist adages is "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" 

Not literally, of course. But in the sense of not being led astray by theological or religious concepts, or bowing down to an external authority, trusting instead in your own experience.

Here's excerpts from the first half of "No Self, No Problem" where Thubten talks about how a true spiritual path doesn't involve devotion to dogmas, concepts, complex belief systems. Rather, the Buddhist approach is to observe the breath, and everything else in this world, in a wonderfully simple fashion until the illusion of the self dissolves.

This opening, this receptivity, is basically related to our ability to resist arming the ego with concepts and ideas. A true spiritual path transcends all concepts and belief systems. It is not about reinforcing the mind's illusion of self as an identity. It is not about being a Buddhist, a saint, or a better person. It is really about deconstructing all of our illusions without any mercy.

...Sometimes our ego convinces us that we are realizing this sense of no fixed self at the same time we are holding on to another concept like trying to be sacred or spiritual. Holding on to conceptions such as "sacred" or "spiritual" while we are working toward transcending self-attachment is very subtle.

...Often we discover that we have been chasing illusions. Sometimes they are beautiful illusions like the illusion of enlightenment and spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, as long as we allow our mind to chase such illusions, there is no true liberation.

...On the spiritual path people sometimes get attached to all kinds of sacred and bizarre concepts to make sense out of their place in this giant mysterious universe. 

...Nirvana is not some kind of beautiful, celestial garden filled with peaches and mangoes, a place where everyone is walking around with beautiful halos... It's not a place, a destination we are going to travel to. It's not even a transcendent state of mind that we are going to achieve. It is not a beautiful, ecstatic, trancelike state of mind we can cherish. That's not really nirvana. Rather, nirvana is a great cessation of the separation between us and the truth. It is the mere acknowledgement of what has been the case all along. It is like waking up from a nightmare. It's a great relief to discover that nothing has to be done.

...Sometimes the spiritual search itself prevents us from seeing the truth that is always with us. We have to know when to stop the search. 

...When we meditate, when we sit and simply pay attention to our breath, we begin to see that there is an "I, a self, who is searching for enlightenment and liberation from suffering. But if we keep paying attention to our breath and body sensations, then eventually all of those ideas, concepts, and illusions begin to dissipate one after another and truth reveals itself.

...Nobody is there. "I" is completely nonexistent in that place. There is no separation between samsara, bad circumstances, and nirvana, good circumstances, and there is nobody pursuing the path or chasing after enlightenment. In that moment we realize the essence of the Buddha's teaching.

...Believe it or not, we often use the spiritual or religious path to construct ego identity, even when this is not conscious at the time.

...Sometimes the very self that is fighting ego is actually ego and that's even trickier. But sometimes we can just look directly into our consciousness and ask, "Who is fighting against ego?" Often everything collapses right there. Therefore the path of bliss is really not about declaring war on the ego in order to get rid of anything we see as a stumbling block on the road to our imagined final destination. Rather, it is about allowing the self to dissolve spontaneously by giving up nothing and going nowhere.

...Ego is trying to seduce us into chasing some beautiful exotic illusion. But if we just surrender and remain in that present awareness, paying attention to our breath, amazingly the self dies. There is no longer a self who says, "I don't like what is going on. I don't like this ordinary moment. I don't like just sitting here paying attention to breath." The "I" who doesn't like what is unfolding is completely gone and that is all that matters in the ultimate sense.

...When self dissolves, everything is already awakened. 

...The hindrances to inner awakening can be so subtle they are almost unperceivable, and usually they sneak in through the back door. Many spiritual traditions teach us that we cannot be free in this lifetime. But even if they teach us that it is possible, they make it sound like it is some kind of a super attainment unlikely for us to reach. Some even go to the extreme of saying that it can only be achieved by surrendering to an outer authority. As long as we believe those rumors, we're not going anywhere but in circles. Our practice won't amount to anything more than a dog chasing its tail.

...Therefore, the essence of all spiritual paths is about dissolving everything here and now without waiting. And again, how do we dissolve that self ecstatically? We are just present, paying attention to the breath, and then the self begins to dissolve. This sounds so simple.

...As long as we are building defense mechanisms, transformation will be exiled to the realm of improbability. And these defense mechanisms, wearing a spiritual mask now, comprise layers of denial, each one more subtle than the other. It is like finding a new cradle where we can be infantile again and have no responsibility for ourselves. Mommy and Daddy are projected onto an omnipotent god or guru who will take care of us eternally.

...True meditation is nothing but the art of abiding, without effort, where you don't try to get rid of anything. If you leave your mind as it is, you will see that nothing can bind you. 

...So whatever arises in your consciousness, bad thoughts, good thoughts, don't try to catch them. Watch them. It's like watching the waves on the surface of the ocean. They arise and they always go back. In the same way observe your mind without any effort. Remember that this is called the method of effortlessness. Don't try to alter or change the natural state of mind.

My "spiritual" Theory of Everything is coming along nicely

Once in a while I get a glimpse of how things really are, or ideally are, spiritually speaking.

Now, I put "spiritual" in quotation marks in the title of this post, because the way I use the word, it has nothing to do with God or the supernatural -- which in my view don't exist.

Rather, when I speak of spirituality, I mean a quest to understand how best to live life. The ancient Greeks called this philosophy, literally "love of wisdom." However, these days philosophy usually is considered to be not a way of life, but an academic discipline.

So for me spiritual points to an attempt to live life fully, happily, wisely, compassionately. And since I'm a lover of science, I enjoy thinking of my personal form of spirituality as a Theory of Everything that applies to me -- yet might have some appeal to others as well.

This post is just a first attempt at laying out an outline of how I'm seeing things. The pieces I'm trying to fit together include:

-- Reactivity
-- No-self
-- Responding to a totality of circumstances
-- Objectivism within subjectivity
-- Detachment
-- Nirvana

It probably is obvious (to some, at least) that my inspiration is a blend of Buddhism and Taoism, two philosophies that I have a lot of fondness for when they're stripped of supernatural mumbo-jumbo.

Rather than describe how those six notions listed above relate, which I'll try to do in another post, for now I'll simply describe an everyday event that's a broad-brush illustration of my personal Theory of Everything.

I'm driving along on the two-lane, curvy, hilly road that leads from our home in rural south Salem to the city limits about five miles away. The speed limit is 55 mph. I come up behind a car that's traveling much more slowly than I am, 35 mph.

There's no doubt about the objective reality here. My VW GTI is following another car. We're both going 35 mph, which is about 20 mph slower than what my car was traveling at before I caught up to the other car. However, my subjective reality could take several turns at this point.

One way it could go would be to get irritated at the person driving the car ahead of me. I'm late for my Tai Chi class, per usual, and I don't need a slow driver making me later. Irritation would be a form of reactivity that wouldn't change the objective situation, just my subjective feeling.

I could, though, simply observe, "That car is going quite slow."

I also could realize that the amount of time I'd save by driving a few miles at 55 mph rather than 35 mph is minimal. Coming to a bunch of red lights when I got to town, or not being able to find a parking space close to my Tai Chi class, would affect my arrival time much more.

Thus I could detach from a view that following a slow car is a bad thing.

Instead, it is just a thing, a happening, an event tossed up by a wide variety of circumstances that together, resulted in me ending up behind the car in front of me at this particular time, in this particular place. I wouldn't see this event as having any special significance.

This person driving the car ahead of me isn't trying to slow me down. They may not even be aware of me, if they fail to check their rear-view mirror. They're likely just driving as they typically do, slower than I like to drive. 

I could even try to imagine that I'm experiencing the vehicular version of a Taoist tale about a man rowing across a lake who becomes angry when he sees another boat coming right at him, as if he wasn't even there, forcing him to take evasive action to avoid a collision.

Then he sees that no one is in the other boat. It's drifting on its own. His anger subsides.

So I could envision that I and the driver of the other car are powerless to do anything than what we are actually doing. The universe has conjured up chains of causes and effects that have led each of us to be driving in a certain fashion on the stretch of road that leads to town.

Thus those six notions I listed above can lead me to a calm acceptance of the situation, rather than an irritated response. This may not seem like nirvana, but actually it is quite close to how Buddhists view this state of non-reactivity. 

Anyway, naturally there's more to say about my personal Theory of Everything. Being a wordy person, I'll probably be doing that saying before too long.

(By the way, even given what I said above, I could still calmly pass the slow-moving car when it was safe to do so. Which I do frequently, since my VW GTI is a joy to drive on hilly, twisty roads. And everywhere else, really.)

Nirvana: the moment reactivity stops

I'm attracted to Buddhism, along with Taoism, because these are forms of spirituality that can be viewed without a lens of fantastical supernaturalism.

Sure, many Buddhists and Taoists do embrace mystical mumbo-jumbo, but it is entirely possible to be a Buddhist or Taoist who considers that this earthly existence is the one and only life each of us will ever live, and that's just fine.

Stephen Bachelor is a pleasingly secular Buddhist who has written several books from the standpoint of Buddhism as a practical way of living, not as a religion that demands belief in unbelievable stuff -- such as reincarnation and the survival of consciousness after death.

In his book "After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age," Bachelor has some interesting observations about nirvana. Prior to saying that nirvana can be understood in one of two ways, as either the ceasing of reactivity or as freedom and independence from reactivity, he gave this view of reactivity:

We tend to regard the appearance of such a fearful world as a projection of our mental state.

But this reading of the situation is based on the cultural habit of interpreting experience psychologically. No matter how much we tell ourselves that the fearfulness of the world is just a projection, such reassurance does not significantly alter either how the world appears to us or how we feel about it.

From the perspective of a dharma practitioner, the task of "letting go of what arises" entails releasing one's grip on the whole picture: angry-me-facing-hostile-situation. 

Letting go is not simply a question of breathing deeply to calm my rattled mind; I need to cleanse the doors of my perception. This requires suspending the default habit of seeing the world as being hostile, desirable, or boring. One of the most effective ways of suspending that habit is to train yourself to comprehend the world as an infinitely suffering world.

Now, I don't claim to fully understand what Bachelor means.

However, I have at least an indistinct grasp of what he's getting at, and that's good enough for me. The way I see it, Bachelor doesn't view life as ever being free of suffering. But it is possible to lessen the impact of suffering.

Channeling my inner Alan Watts, we don't have to find suffering insufferable; we don't have to be anxious about our anxieties; we don't have to worry about being worried; we don't have to be happy about our happiness. We can simply suffer, be anxious, worry, and be happy.

(To name but a few possible states of mind.)

In other words, we still react to what life brings us. But we understand the nature of this reactivity. Like everything else in life, it is changeable, ephemeral, something to be experienced before another experience comes along. Even if suffering always is with us, the form of that suffering changes shape continuously.

This seems to be in line with the second sort of nirvana Bachelor speaks of above: as freedom and independence from reactivity, as opposed to the ceasing of reactivity. Here's some additional quotes from his book.

The first sense of nirvana is traditionally understood as a quasi-mystical experience in which an accomplished meditator achieves sufficient calm and insight to bring his reactivity to a complete stop. But this interpretation makes nirvana accessible only to trained meditators, thus conflicting with the account of it as "immediate, clearly visible, inviting, uplifting, and personally sensed by the wise."

...For the second sense of nirvana as freedom from reactivity, we again need to turn to the dialogues with Mara. Here, one becomes aware of nirvana whenever one understands reactivity for what it is and thereby gains freedom from its control. In this case, the experience of nirvana becomes possible even while in the throes of reactivity itself. 

Along this line, I'm up to Day Forty Four in Sam Harris' fifty-day guided meditations in his Waking Up course that I listen to on my iPhone. So I'm damn close to graduating! 

So far I've been getting some fresh insights from Harris, even though most of what he says is familiar to me from other mindfulness exercises. However, Harris has some ways of putting things that are unique to his take on the mind, consciousness, and meditation.

Of late, he's been directing my attention to noticing whether there really is anybody paying attention within my mind. This is nicely Zen, of course. Who is the thinker of my thoughts? Who is the feeler of my feelings? Who is reacting to my reactivity? 

Answer: no one, since an unchanging self who sits in my cranium and observes what's going on in my consciousness doesn't exist. And naturally the same is true of you and everybody else.

Here's some notes that I've taken after listening to Harris' guided meditations.

-- Recognize that the sense of subject and object, that too is an appearance in consciousness.

-- Simply look for the subject. See if there is something to be found.

-- Look for the one who is seeing. Then rest your mind wide open.

-- Every goal, every regret, is nothing but this: consciousness and its content.

-- Look for the thinker of a thought. Is there anyone the thought is occurring to or coming from?

-- Contents of consciousness appear and disappear on their own; you can't choose them.

-- The self's struggle to control is itself an appearance in consciousness.

-- There's no inside or outside of consciousness; things are just appearing. 

-- Is there a hearer in addition to the fact of hearing?

-- Feeling there is a subject, a self, observing the screen of consciousness is just another experience on the screen.

-- Anything you can notice is not what consciousness is, since consciousness is doing the noticing.

These observations fit nicely with the Buddhist notion that while we continue to react to what we're experiencing, it is possible to diminish the sense that someone inside our head is responsible for those reactions.

This allows us to gain a wiser perspective on reactivity.  It isn't something to be done away with, but rather something to be accepted as simply as possible by lessening our reactions to our reactivity.

Nirvana! Without the pressure to achieve it.

 

Thoughts about enlightenment from a Church of the Churchless visitor

I like to hear from people who read my blog posts -- especially when what they say is supportive of my churchless un-preaching.

Here's an email message that I got today from John. After I asked if I could share his message, he said "sure." I like John's perspective on things. He and I carry on a fairly regular correspondence. 

Hey Brian.  Wow.  I really enjoyed reading your latest post on enlightenment!  To me, that is so freeing!  I’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion.

There is a lot of pressure involved in trying to become “enlightened”.  You know what I mean?  In my Christian days, it was either trying to walk in the spirit and not in the flesh, or trying to be more like Jesus, or not sinning, or whatever.  Then you get into, what is sin?  There are the biggies; don’t kill, steal, cheat, lie, etc. 

But some believe that wearing shorts is a sin.  Or having musical instruments in the church is a sin.  And so forth.  Depending on how strict the group was, we never would consistently live up to that and we just felt bad a lot of the time.  So you mix the stress of just living everyday life on this planet with chasing enlightenment or salvation or whatever… And it really can become unbearable.

I haven’t really consciously chased enlightenment that I can remember.  From what I’ve read, it’s hard to get two people to agree on what exactly enlightenment is or what it means. 

Some say it’s the cessation of suffering.  Others say it’s some kind of realization and living out of your “God self”.  Both of these are pretty vague.  LOL  Others say it’s just being present or mindful.  I guess in that case, you can have moments of enlightenment? 

Kind of like you said in your post;

…some Buddhists view enlightenment as being totally immersed and accepting of the present moment. I, and everyone else, am capable of doing this. Not always, but often. So this makes me "enlightened" at times, along with everybody else in the world."

Also from your current post, I read this and went, Yes!

Because there is no way to tell whether someone is enlightened. This is an intellectual concept made up by certain religions and spiritual paths to justify their specialness. They've made up a word, "enlightenment," then claimed that if devotees do such and such, they can become enlightened.

Whatever that is.

That’s so true!  It’s almost like marketing.  LOL  If you join us, and do our thing, you can become more enlightened than the other guys...  And I love the addition of, “Whatever that is”.  

I’ve gone through periods of reading a lot, so I can’t remember who said this or the exact wording. 

But it went something like, you can have various experiences for various reasons.  One experience may even seem like what you think is enlightenment.  But don’t try to hang on to any of them, including what you thought was enlightenment.  Experiences come and go.  Let them come and go.

Another one said that when you think a person is enlightened, ask their spouse if that is true.  LOL

I guess all these different opinions and points of view keep the world a more interesting place.  If we all believed the same thing, I guess it would be boring.  Right? 

But I am grateful for the, what I would consider, solid and more down to earth influences that I have had.  Whether meditation, or yoga, or tai chi, it seems that most of the books that I’ve read and people I’ve practiced with have all stressed being here and now.  Not chasing some undefinable enlightenment. 

I look at these things as simply tools that help me get through life a little more smoothly.  When I’m meditating on a regular basis and practicing tai chi as well, I do seem to handle stress better, respond to difficult situations better, etc.  But I don’t really see it as a spiritual thing, like many of my friends do. 

The general idea of many folks that I know is that when you do some kind of “spiritual” practice, then you live more out of your spirit man than you do this earthly man. 

Well, I no longer think that I’m divided like that.  I think what you see is what you get.  When I do my practice, I just think that my mind is less cluttered and distracted, and my body is more relaxed, so it’s just naturally easier to process life in a way that seems a little smoother.  If that makes sense?  

Thanks again for the great posts. 

I hope you and yours are doing well.

John

"Enlightenment" is a meaningless concept

Over on this post of mine there's been a comment conversation about enlightenment. "JB" left this cogent comment, which I agree with.

Tim Rimmer said: "Wasn't that the nature of the Buddha’s realisation? - All is Dukkha, yet ‘one’ is able to remove/get past it?"

That one is able to remove/get past suffering is unadulterated mythology. The hero, the savior, the enlightened person- these are all variations on a theme. This is the mythical theme that has encapsulated humankind's greatest hope. It is a dead giveaway that the "enlightened masters" are all from the ancient past. Those that claim to be enlightened today are invariably discovered to have the same neuroses and foibles as the average person, sometimes far worse. Instead of realizing that enlightenment is the stuff of legend, we radically redefine enlightenment to accomodate them.

There are no enlightened beings and never were.

"Manjit" left a reply, which I found unconvincing.

Basically it was that because lots of people claim to have "enlightenment" experiences, that means there is such a thing as enlightenment. Well, lots of people claim to have been abducted by aliens, which doesn't mean this actually happens. 

Here's an excerpt from Manjit's comment.

So, are you here REALLY stating that YOU have never had any experiences of "enlightenment" or, say a "kundalini awakening" or "absorption in the sound-current" or inner "communion" with "love" or "light", or "astral projection" etc etc?

So again, Manjit is arguing that because people say there is such a thing as enlightenment, this means there is such a thing as enlightenment. Which, of course, is untrue, since people often say things that are false. (Just watch President Trump talk.)

Here's the comment I left on this subject.

The best argument against there being such a thing as "enlightenment" is that it is entirely possible and valid to have arguments about whether there's such a thing as enlightenment.

There aren't arguments about whether there are rich people, artistic people, musical people, mathematically-gifted people, lazy people, productive people, or a myriad of other kinds of people.

But there are indeed arguments about whether there are enlightened people. Why?

Because there is no way to tell whether someone is enlightened. This is an intellectual concept made up by certain religions and spiritual paths to justify their specialness. They've made up a word, "enlightenment," then claimed that if devotees do such and such, they can become enlightened.

Whatever that is.

Here's a challenge to anyone who believes that enlightenment is real. Describe how it is possible to distinguish an enlightened person from an unenlightened person.

Imagine the spiritual equivalent of a police lineup. You're presented with a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand, or seven billion, people. Your job is to point out the "enlightened" people.

How would you do this? What questions would you ask them? What answers would you find persuasive, and why? What behaviors or actions they perform would you want to observe? Which of these behaviors or actions would show they're enlightened, and why?

My strong suspicion is that believers in the reality of enlightenment would say that this is an ineffable personal experience, or state of being, that can't be described or observed.

OK. Fair enough.

This sounds like the dreams that I have every night. Or the feelings I have throughout the day. This would make "enlightenment" one of a myriad of personal experiences that only have reality within the mind of the experiencer.

But this means that enlightenment isn't anything special. In fact, it may not even exist as a genuine subjective reality, since it could refer only to a normal state of being that certain religions or spiritual path have elevated to a special experience.

For example, some Buddhists view enlightenment as being totally immersed and accepting of the present moment. I, and everyone else, am capable of doing this. Not always, but often. So this makes me "enlightened" at times, along with everybody else in the world.

The fact that there's no agreement about what enlightenment means is strong evidence that it doesn't really exist except as a religious/spiritual concept.

"Teaching is impossible." An excerpt from The Wooden Bowl book.

People often make spirituality into something complex, argumentative, esoteric. They consider there's a right and wrong way to meditate, to worship, to live life. 

I used to be one of those people. I'm a lot less dogmatic now. 

Recently, like today, which is pretty damn recent, I've been both entertained and bemused by a rash of comments on this blog where people have been arguing about this and that. 

I enjoy those sorts of interchanges. Except when I don't. 

In those latter times, I try to remind myself of how simple spirituality can be. And how it really isn't necessary to bring in that often-contentious word, spirituality. 

Why not just say, how simple life can be.

I've started reading The Wooden Bowl, a book recommended to me by a visitor to this blog who emails me interesting messages about what's going on in his life from time to time. 

It's out of print, but I found a used copy on Amazon that cost me just a few bucks. It took a while to arrive by media mail, but it was worth the wait. 

I really like the down-to-earth approach to meditation, and life, that the author, Clark Strand, describes. Here's the first chapter, "Teaching is Impossible."

"Meditation cannot be taught." So said my first teacher, Deh Chun, an elderly Chinese hermit who lived the last years of his life in Monteagle, Tennessee. "Only learning is possible," he said, "sometimes."

What he meant was that meditation can only be practiced. If it is taught, then, by definition, what is taught is not really meditation at all, but something else. Some method or philosophy, but not meditation itself.

When I consider the years of our association, the most remarkable thing is that I cannot recall any particular thing I learned from him. I can't point to a particular conversation we had and say, "Well, you know, then Deh Chun said such and such and everything was clear."

At the time, nothing was clear. When I think back on it now, I realize that his entire teaching consisted of being in the present moment, with nothing else whatsoever added on.

Being with Deh Chun was like dropping through a hole in everything that the world said was important -- education, progress, money, sex, prestige. It was like discovering that nothing else mattered and all I needed was now -- the moment -- to survive. 

Sitting there in the little house, listening to the water boil, to the twigs crackling in the wood stove, I was temporarily removed from the game. That was the genius of his teaching, that he could bring forth that transformation without even saying a word.

His was a state of complete simplicity. Like water, the direction of his life was downward, always seeking lower ground. When I met him he lived in a ramshackle two-room house heated by a wood stove the size of a typewriter. There was no furniture, only a few turned-over crates and several cardboard boxes in which he kept his clothes.

His bed consisted of two sawhorses on top of which he had placed a 3 x 5 sheet of plywood. and a piece of packing foam. I remember thinking once that this bed suited him perfectly, his body was so light and small.

A similar structure in the other room served as a desk for writing letters and for painting his ink-wash Chinese landscapes. Propped against the back door were spades, a shovel, and a rake, tools he used to tend a plot of land the size of two king-size beds laid end to end.

With the exception of tea, soybeans, peanut butter, molasses, and occasional wheat-flour, whatever he ate came from there.

We would sit in his little house without saying much of anything. Early on I learned that he was not disposed to give instruction in any formal way. He would serve me lunch, or sometimes breakfast if I'd managed to get there early enough, and then I'd wash up. 

Afterward we would talk about his garden, or more likely we would remain silent for a long while and then it would be time to leave.

Nowadays, in books on meditation, it has become standard practice to say that your teacher was a mirror that allowed you to see your true self. But that was not my experience with Deh Chun. It was more like floating weightless on the Dead Sea and looking up at an empty sky.

There was a feeling of tremendous peace and freedom, but that was all. I didn't know anything after I was done. Trying to pin him down on some aspect of meditation was as pointless as trying to drive a stake through the air. He taught one thing and one thing only, and that he taught to perfection: meditation happens now.

After the first few visits to his house, I realized nothing pivotal was going to happen, but I kept returning anyway without knowing what it was about him that held my attention.

I was a college student, and fairly typical of other nineteen-year-olds in that I was not particularly interested in spending time with someone four times my age. Especially someone who by ordinary standards was little better than a bum.

Deh Chun was completely simple. He lived on fifty dollars a month. He was a Buddhist monk who never spoke of Buddhism, an accomplished landscape painter who never sold his work. He wore only secondhand clothes and was without pretension of any kind. 

Long after his death, it is finally clear to me that he taught only by example. 

Recently, a friend of mind said of a certain Catholic priest, "He practices what he preaches, so he doesn't have to preach so loud." Deh Chun practiced so well he didn't have to preach at all. 

Nice quotes from "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist"

I'm a big fan of Stephen Bachelor, who writes about Buddhism from a pleasingly non-religious, non-supernatural perspective.

I didn't like "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" as much as his other books, but some quotations from this book that someone emailed to me resonated with my psyche. 

Here they are. The boldfacing was added by the person who sent me the quotes.

To be conscious of what is happening in the present requires training in mindfulness, which Gotama described as “the one way” to achieve the kind of focused presence and responsiveness needed to function optimally on a groundless ground.

Indeed, he spoke of mindfulness (sati) as being grounded (pat hāna) in whatever occurs in one’s body, feelings, and mind as well as in the world about one. Mindfulness is to be aware of what is happening, as opposed to either letting things drift by in a semiconscious haze or being assailed by events with such intensity that one reacts before one has even had time to think.

Mindfulness focuses entirely on the specific conditions of one’s day-to-day experience. It is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief.

“When a monk breathes out long,” said Gotama, “he knows: ‘I am breathing out long.’ Breathing in short, he knows: ‘I am breathing in short.’”

Such a person acts in full awareness when looking ahead and looking away, when flexing and extending his limbs, when wearing his robes and carrying his bowl, when eating, drinking and tasting, when defecating and urinating, when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking and keeping silent.

...There is nothing so lowly or mundane that it is unworthy of being embraced by mindful attention. Mindfulness accepts as its focus of inquiry whatever arises in one’s field of awareness, no matter how disturbing or painful it might be. 

One neither seeks nor expects to find some greater truth lurking behind the veil of appearances. What appears and how you respond to it: that alone is what matters.

The person who sent me these quotes added some thoughts of his own.

A Buddhist friend of mine whom I used to meditate with talked this way about meditation. It makes a lot of sense to me and also takes the frustration out of it. 

Instead of going away from a time of meditation thinking that I didn’t get anything out of it because I didn’t have some “experience," now I see it as there is no wrong way to meditate or a “bad” session. 

Because I’m just paying attention to what is actually happening. If that makes sense?

Yes, it does make sense. This is the way I meditate now also. Or at least, how I try to meditate.

It's difficult to break past habits of believing that certain kinds of experiences are to be sought for in meditation, like a calm mind. 

But I'm getting better at this, in part through the guided meditations I listen to every morning via the Calm app on my iPhone. They're very much in line with the Buddhism Stephen Bachelor is talking about.

After listening to a guided meditation, I then engage in my own "free-form" meditation. 

Zen's tiger and strawberry story is about dealing with death

The older I get -- I'm 69 -- the more I resonate with the Zen story of a man who had a bad day when he was chased by a tiger. Which turned into a much worse day when another tiger and a couple of mice showed up. 

A man was walking across a field when he saw a tiger. Fearing for his life, the man fled, but the tiger gave chase. The man reached the edge of a cliff, and just as he thought the tiger would get him, he spotted a vine growing over the edge of the cliff. Grabbing on to it, he swung himself over the edge to safety.

The tiger came to the edge and snarled at him from above. While precariously perched like this, the man saw another tiger growling at him from below. Trembling, he held on to the thin vine that was keeping him from being dinner for the tigers. What could be worse than this, he wondered.

Just then, two mice scampered out and began gnawing at the vine. As they chewed and the man pondered over his fate, he saw a juicy, red strawberry on a ledge next to him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. Ah, how sweet it tasted!

Now, some Googling revealed to me that there are different views of what this story is intended to teach us. Live in the moment is a common interpretation. A contrary perspective is don't be distracted by pleasure. 

I'm much more in favor of live in the moment than don't be distracted by pleasure.

Whoever thought the man paid undue attention to the strawberry obviously hasn't spent much time clinging to a vine that's being chewed by mice while tigers await above and below.

You might be thinking, who has experienced this? To which I reply to that thought: Everyone. Without exception. 

Because my view of what the story is all about is that the tigers represent the fear of death, and the mice represent death itself. After all, virtually everybody does their best to run from death when the specter of it appears before us. We cling to whatever life-giving alternative is available.

But in the end, the mice of human mortality are going to nibble through the vine of living, 100% guaranteed. The only question is how long it will take them.

The strawberry represents... a strawberry. (I have strawberries on my oatmeal almost every morning, and I live in Oregon, which has some of the best-tasting strawberries in the world.)

Not only a strawberry, of course. The strawberry is everything in existence.

Or at least, that portion of everything that we humans can be aware of. So long as death hasn't completely nibbled through the vine of our life, we should taste every bite of existence with gusto.

What gives the strawberry an extra dose of sweetness is precisely the fact that our ability to taste it is limited. Nobody lives forever. In fact, nobody even lives very long, by cosmic standards. The universe is about 14 billion years old. We're lucky if we can live to 80, and very lucky to live to 100.

This being a Church of the Churchless blog, I'm going to conclude my interpretation of this Zen story with some jabs at religion. 

There's zero demonstrable evidence, nada, zilch, that anyone has ever cheated death. Those damn mice can't be stopped. Death is an unavoidable eater of life. Death can be postponed, but only for a while.

Given the inevitability of death, and the near-certainty that when we die, we're dead forever (being scientifically-minded, I realize that nothing is 100% certain, including what I just said), it makes sense to get as much sweetness from life as possible while we're still able to cling to its vine.

So here's a Big Problem with religion: every major religion, and most minor ones, claim that another life awaits after we die. Meaning, no mice! Death is a fiction. Thus tigers are optional, since fear of death is justified only if death exists.

This makes strawberries, and the rest of life, less sweet. 

In fact, religions are notorious for urging people to shun many of life's pleasures, such as sex, alcohol, recreational drugs, sensual indulgences, partying-on. They claim -- again, with zero evidence -- that a gigantic heavenly strawberry awaits those who obey whatever restrictions a particular religion enjoins.

Thus the way I see it, the Zen story only has meaning for those who reject religiosity.  

Mindfulness has become my meditation

Back in my true-believing religious days, when I embraced an Eastern form of mysticism that espoused several hours of daily eyes-closed meditation, I thought that the ultimate aim of life was to experience higher realms of reality beyond the physical.

Of course, I had a job to go to, a wife and daughter, worldly activities I enjoyed. But I viewed these as mostly distinct from my spiritual goal of god-realization -- those things were part of my karma; important, yet not what my life's highest purpose was all about.

I'm grateful that my eyes have been opened to the flaws in this point of view. 

Since there is no demonstrable proof that God or other supernatural entities exist, and clearly this world does exist, it makes sense to focus first and foremost on what is right before us rather than on some imagined immaterial domain. 

This is why, even though I'm by no means a practicing Buddhist, I find a lot to like in Buddhist philosophy that's been stripped of supernaturalism. Mindfulness has become my current preferred form of meditation.

Of course, mindfulness doesn't have any inherent connection with Buddhism, a point Jon Kabat-Zinn makes in his engaging book, "Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment -- And Your Life."

In essence, mindfulness is universal because it is all about attention and awareness, and attention and awareness are human capacities that are innate in all of us. Still, it is fair to say that, historically speaking, the most refined and developed articulations of mindfulness and how to cultivate it stem from the Buddhist tradition, and Buddhist texts and teachings constitute an invaluable resource for deepening our understanding and appreciation of mindfulness and the subtleties of its cultivation.

On page 1, Kabat-Zinn describes what mindfulness is.

Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. 

It is one of many forms of meditation, if you think of meditation as any way in which we engage in (1) systematically regulating our attention and energy (2) thereby influencing and possibly transforming the quality of our experience (3) in the service of realizing the full range of our humanity and of (4) our relationships to others and the world.

Today, in the late afternoon on a sunny June day here in rural south Salem, Oregon, I had just set out on a walk through some paths on our ten acre property that lead to a community lake not far away.

I was idly thinking about what I was going to write about in a blog post when I got home. Which, as you might suspect, meant my mind was filled with thoughts about mindfulness. 

I wasn't being mindful. I was planning what to say about mindfulness, a whole other thing. But a flash of white caught my attention off to my left. Suddenly I had jumped into being aware of the present moment, not a future blogging moment. 


Either I had missed the daisies on previous walks, or now simply was the time for the daisies to blossom forth. Regardless, I was pleased to be jolted out of my mental machinations into an appreciation of beauty in the world outside my cranium.

A bit further along, the setting sun illuminated the fronds of ferns that grow copiously here in Oregon.

I always enjoy this part of the path that leads to the lake, because it disappears around a bend. Like life itself, the path only shows what is close at hand, not what is around the corner. 

Ah, the shape of trees, backlit by the setting sun. I've seen this sight so many times in the 28 years we've lived where we are now. But that word, now, means that never before had I seen this sight, in this way, on this day.

Which made it magical. In a supremely ordinary fashion. Such is the power of mindfulness, which really is nothing more than what Kabat-Zinn speaks about in his first mini-essay, Beginner's Mind.

Suzuki Roshi, the Japanese Zen Master who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and touched the hearts of so many, is famous for having said, "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

Beginners come to new experiences not knowing so much and therefore open. This openness is very creative. It is an innate characteristic of the mind. The trick is never to lose it.

That would require that you stay in the ever-emerging wonder of the present moment, which is always fresh. Of course, you will lose beginner's mind in one way, when you cease to be a beginner.

But if you can remember from time to time that each moment is fresh and new, maybe, just maybe, what you know will not get in the way of being open to what you don't know, which is always a larger field. Then a beginner's mind will be available at any moment you are open to it.

Can't stop quoting from "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide"

Zen, along with Buddhism in general, teaches that nothing is permanent, everything changes.

So even though right now I feel like I can't stop sharing quotes from my re-reading of Barry Magid's book, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, clearly I will at some point. 

Like maybe tomorrow, not today. Here's more passages from the book that appealed to my churchless consciousness. Which follow a Zen cartoon.

"Karma means "cause and effect," which is another way of describing interconnection and change. Enlightenment is the realization of our being the ongoing product of interconnection and change -- it is not the cosmic equivalent of the Monopoly card, "Get Out of Jail Free." We transcend nothing and nothing lasts, no matter how much we'd like to believe the opposite."

"There is nothing permanent, not even 'enlightenment.' As soon as we think we have achieved some new, perfect, permanent, and invulnerable state, we have betrayed the very essence of our realization."

"We have to kill off any notion we have that there is something to attain, something to hold on to, something special we can become once and for all. Enlightenment is not a 'thing' we 'get' from practice. Anything we think we've gotten -- even if it's made of gold -- can only get in the way. Only when there is nothing and nobody left to obstruct it will the clear breeze blow freely in every direction."

"Now Buddhism has given an altogether different answer to the question of what we essentially are. And Buddhism's answer is 'Nothing.' There is no essential true, inner nature at all."

"Although zazen is often described as a spiritual practice, 'spiritual' is not a word I like very much. Too often, 'spiritual' is explicitly contrasted with 'material' as if it represented another separate (usually higher) order of reality. In the Christian tradition, the spiritual is the realm of the soul, which is believed to have an existence separate from the body, and because the soul is not material, it is not subject to change and death like the body. This idea of a separate non-material soul is regularly conjoined to the idea of a soul that is likewise immortal."

"Yet no matter how illogical, humankind has a long history of fantasizing a separate, ethereal inner essence and imagining that, in total contrast to bodies that are all mortal, this disembodied breath or spirit is somehow immortal. It is a fantasy that exists across cultures, even persisting within Buddhism, which would seem, by the law of emptiness, to insist that there is no personal essence that could be immortal. It is hard not to conclude that a universal fear of death gives rise to an equally universal fantasy of spiritual immortality that denies its finality."

"In our daily practice, we must discover and express for ourselves the fundamental truth that this mind, this body, this moment is all that we have, is all that there is. We come to practice believing that our minds as they are, our bodies as they are, are the problem. Who wants a wandering mind or aching knees, let alone a body that is growing old or has a serious illness? But practice will never teach us to exchange this mind for another one or to substitute this body for someone else's."

"We want to escape something we believe is wrong with who we are, to escape whatever lays us open to suffering. We don't realize that the attempt at escape is itself an engine of our suffering."

"Be careful what you wish for. Only when our hopes are completely smashed will we be free. It's not the 'freedom we started out looking for at all."

But it sure sounds like something Janis Joplin sang about.

(I could listen to this song a million times and still want to hear it again. Janis Joplin was one of a kind. I got to see her perform in 1966 and will never forget that moment.)

 

 

Great quotes from "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide"

I'm a big fan of Zen, though I've never actually practiced with a Zen teacher, and I'm turned off by overly dogmatic or religious versions of Zen Buddhism. 

Yesterday I was idly glancing at the Zen section of my bookcase and noticed a book that I'd read nine years ago and blogged about in "Search for happiness (and self) called off."

I'm enjoying a re-reading of Barry Magid's Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide. Magid is a psychoanalyst with an appealing take on Zen. He founded the Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York City and still teaches there.

Here's some quotes from the book that resonated with me, because I agree with them. 

"Meditation can create an oasis or bubble of clarity or calm or concentration that simply excludes all the messiness of our everyday emotional reality. Under the illusion that we are cultivating a higher spiritual self, we merely end up avoiding what is emotionally painful. I have seen this take place at every level of practice from beginning students to what I had imagined were seasoned teachers."

"Zen students, especially those who have had some realization, are in grave danger of imagining that they now are somehow 'seeing reality directly,' just as it is -- without acknowledging all the ways that unconscious processes and organizing principles continue to operate, both on a personal and cultural level."

"Zazen [meditation] is not a technique. It is not a means to an end. It's not a way to become calmer, more confident, or even 'enlightened.' Indeed, our whole practice can be said to be about putting an end to self-improvement, an end to our usual compulsive pursuit of happiness -- or its Zen equivalent, the pursuit of enlightenment. Not that we can't be happy (or enlightened), it's just that we'll get there by a very different route than we once imagined -- and it may not look anything like what we expected when we started out."

"Which is the 'true' self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray. Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there's another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for. Not surprisingly, we can never find it."

"Zen practice can redeem the ordinariness of our lives and return us to a natural richness, simplicity, and creativity that we have long imagined could only be ours by becoming special, by attaining enlightenment or some other exotic state of consciousness that once and for all will turn us into a wholly different kind of being."

"In the traditional Zen literature, we read of the Absolute and the Relative. Here, the Absolute refers to the experience of no separation between ourselves and this moment just as it is, of no separation and therefore no sense of a separate 'self' and instead just the oneness of the whole universe. The Relative refers to our ordinary world of distinctions: good and bad, self and other, special and ordinary."

"Many forms of traditional meditation practice are initially geared to pushing students to have some experience of the Absolute -- which can feel like a very special experience indeed. But Zen has also stressed that that is only the first step, and the student must go on to experience the identity of the Absolute and the Relative, the sameness of the special and the ordinary, as paradoxical as that may sound."

"Having lost that original identity of the ordinary and the special, we typically give up on the ordinary and look to new special experiences to compensate for our loss. Although what we've lost is the most ordinary thing in the world, we go looking for something special to replace it. And thus, by pursuing the special, we are, in effect, forever condemning ourselves to be looking in exactly the wrong place for exactly the wrong thing."

"It's a little harder for most people to realize that not only is the mind that I'm trying to escape the only mind I have, but that the mind that I'm seeking is also the mind that I already have. The perfection that we're so busy pursuing is to be found nowhere but right here in the very moment, regardless of its content. This is the most basic spiritual insight that we can have. This moment is it! What we've desperately been seeking is already here."

What is enlightenment good for?

David Chapman, a philosophically-inclined Buddhist'y guy I follow on Twitter, raised an interesting question:

It sure is a reasonable question. But I'd like to go further by ditching the word "practical." Which makes the question, in statement form, Show us some thing this "enlightenment" is good for.

Meaning, the way I see it, how would anyone know whether someone is enlightened? 

Substitute a wording of your choice for enlightened, if you like. Spiritually advanced. God-realized. Possesses an elevated consciousness. The point is, well, to be able to point to some characteristic of such a person that distinguishes them from an unenlightened person.

If there isn't any differentiating characteristic, if there's no way to tell whether someone is enlightened, then isn't "enlightenment" just like any other abstraction that fails to point to anything demonstrably real? 

Like God or heaven. Or fairy dust. 

If someone is enlightened, or God-realized, shouldn't there be some way of telling them apart from other people? If there isn't, then how is enlightenment or God-realization a thing to be sought after? 

A baker can bake. An artist makes art. An auto mechanic fixes cars. A teacher teaches. And an enlightened person... what? ... enlights? What the heck does that mean?

I've heard devotees talk about a supposedly God-realized guru in ways like these: He's so inspiring. I feel elevated in his presence. His eyes looked right through me. I had all my questions answered. 

OK. There's lots of people who don't claim to be enlightened who merit these sorts of statements. So again, what really distinguishes an enlightened person from an unenlightened person?

If there's no outward characteristic, only a supposedly inward subjective essence, then enlightenment truly isn't good for anything. Each of us already possesses an inward subjective essence. It's called human consciousness. 

Donald Trump has some (mild) Buddhist leanings

OK, I get what this guy is saying in "Donald Trump, Accidental Buddhist." Let's just stress the accidental. Have a read on the New York Times site. 

Or, the piece is short, so I've shared it below. 

      Donald Trump, Accidental Buddhist

By BEN DOLNICK
DEC. 7, 2017

Donald Trump is the contemporary master of a little-used literary device: the narcissistic third person. On the indictment of Paul Manafort: “There’s not even a mention of Trump in there.” On the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election: “Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?” Even his very first tweet, back in the innocent days of 2009, employed this peculiar mirror-gazing perspective: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman ….”

Like so much else that Mr. Trump favors — red baseball hats, caps lock — referring to oneself in the third person has, these past few years, come to seem tainted, almost pathological. It has entered the cultural lexicon — suitable only for the toweringly grandiose (LeBron) or the deeply immature (Elmo). When the writers of a drama wish to signal that someone is soon to die of tuberculosis, they have her cough blood into a handkerchief. When they wish to signal that someone suffers from a terminal case of self-regard, they have him refer to himself in the third person.

Which accounts for the sheepishness I feel when I tell you about my recent discovery: that referring to yourself in the third person is, well, kind of wonderful. Lately I’ve been walking around with an inner monologue that runs something like this: Ben is feeling tired; Ben is considering blowing off the gym; Ben is feeling regret about eating that entire baguette while walking home from the grocery store.

And I’ve not only found my ego swelling from all this Ben-ing. I’ve also found it tamer than ever before, as manageable and mild as a baby panda. Much as it pains me to admit, I’ve come to believe that our egotist-in-chief may have stumbled onto something profound.

Allow me to explain.

At the core of Buddhism is the concept of non-self. The idea, basically, is that the thing you think of as you — the entity whose well-being occupies your every waking thought — is an illusion. This doesn’t mean that your body is a hologram — that Uniqlo-clad lump of meat is indisputably there. What non-self refers to, rather, is the thing that you think of as your true self — the little captain who lives somewhere behind your forehead and looks out through your eyes. The thing that says, “I hope people like me” or “I can’t stand another minute on this train” — that, Buddhists believe, is what needs to be seen through and rooted out.

This teaching, Buddhists insist, has the potential to eliminate your suffering entirely. But it is destined to remain so much inert philosophy, no more life-changing than the quadratic equation, until you’re able to actually glimpse your little impostor, to fix him in your mental cross hairs. Which is where the Trumpian third person comes in.

Because it turns out that what we refer to, when we refer to ourselves in the third person, is the very thing that Buddhists believe causes us so much trouble. When I say, “Ben can’t stand the taste of turnips,” I am forcing myself, at grammatical gunpoint, to inhabit a perspective outside my usual one. From this new vantage point, my feelings about turnips — not to mention the very thing that I’m used to thinking of as myself — appear as objects, separate from the one doing the speaking. Which means that I, just by shifting into the speech patterns of a narcissistic lunatic, have stationed myself out in the hard-to-describe spaciousness where Buddhists say we’d do well to set up shop.

All of which is to say that referring to yourself in the third person — if you do it thoughtfully, and probably silently — need not be a step on the path toward “Celebrity Rehab.” It can instead be a means of finally realizing a life-altering truth. You are not your thoughts; you are not your feelings. Now that my inner narrator has alternatives to I think and I feel, these seem not like self-help platitudes but like observable facts.

Does this mean that Donald Trump, when he goes on and on about “Donald Trump,” is demonstrating his enlightenment? That when he refers to himself in the third person, he is expressing not a personality disorder but an intuitive grasp of the subtlest Buddhist teachings? Ben highly doubts it.

Meditation practices only "work" in specific cultural settings

Some people claim that specific sorts of meditation practices are akin to a science that produces the same results, no matter who is doing the meditating or where the meditation is being done.

A thoughtful piece by David L. McMahan, "How Meditation Works: Theorizing the Role of Cultural Context in Buddhist Contemplative Practices," casts doubt on this claim.

I came across McMahan's essay in a re-tweet by David Chapman of someone else's tweet:

I had to jump through some online hoops to download the PDF file. Here it is:
Download How_Meditation_Works_Theorizing_the_Role

The general thesis seems totally believable to me.

People who meditate are influenced by the culture in which they live, which includes the context of the religion or spiritual approach that their meditation practice is embedded in. So there's no such thing as a "pure" form of meditation that stands apart from the mind of the meditating person.

Here's some quotes from the essay that will give you a feel for McMahan's approach. His "Two Meditators" introduction sets the stage for later arguments.

I would like to begin with a simple proposition: meditation works. Now to a qualification that makes things more complicated: what it means for meditation to work—the work meditation does—is different, sometimes radically different, in diverse contexts.

Let me illustrate this by imagining two practitioners of the basic Buddhist meditation practice of mindfulness of the breath. One is a contemporary American female professional who practices modern insight meditation (vipassanā) and modern secular mindfulness practices.

The other is an ancient monk—let’s say around the beginning of the common era—in the movement established by Gautama the Buddha. Both are serious practitioners, and both are drawing from the same text, the locus classicus of Buddhist meditation, the Sutta on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

They both sit down in the same posture—legs crossed, back straight, hands in the lap—and bring their attention to the movement of their breath. If we could secretly scan their brains, the same parts might be lit up with activity, while blood flow to other parts is slowed to a trickle.

The goals of these two meditators are very different. The modern woman is trying to relieve stress, get along better with other people, achieve more mindfulness in her daily life, and so on, all within her family life. The ancient monk is seeking to enter a transcendent state beyond rebirth and suffering while living in a monastery and being celibate.

But more to the point, similar meditation practices are apparently accomplishing aims—for example, “engag[ing] the world rather than withdraw[ing] from it”—nearly the opposite of the ideals of ancient meditation practices, which explicitly recommended withdrawal from the world. The work meditation does, therefore, is determined by the surrounding ideas, aims, attitudes, and cultural context of the practitioner.

Again, such practices do not simply produce particular, precisely reproducible mental “states” that are the same across time and space. They are part of larger complexes of ways of being in the world in particular social imaginaries.

We all make maps of the world. Not geographic maps, but a mapping of how reality is and how we fit into it. Meditation isn't separate from these maps; it is part and parcel of how we view the world. So the idea that meditation shows us reality "as it is" is false. 

As McMahan says, there's a strong inclination to have experiences that conform to our map of reality. How often do Buddhist meditators have a vision of Jesus and convert to Christianity? How often do Christians have a meditative insight that leads them to convert to Islam?

Very rarely, if ever.

Most meditators have likely considered their maps to correspond to a pre-existing architecture of the mind and reality; therefore, they have considerable incentive to interpret and produce experiences that conform to the map.

Buddhist meditators, therefore, have striven to identify the markers of transition between the first jhāna and the second, to look for signs that they have attained stream entry, or to discern whether they have truly had insight into the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence.

They have questioned basic intuitions, like that of a continuing, enduring self, and instead have tried to isolate and identify the five aggregates in their own experience. In later traditions that insist that all phenomena are illusory, practitioners must train their minds to see the world itself as a dream. In some traditions, they must try to imagine the world and themselves as having Buddha nature, perfect and already awakened, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

They must, in other words, reimagine themselves and the world in ways suggested by these maps, not only interpreting but also cultivating their experiences accordingly.

Near the end of his essay, McMahan revisits the two meditators.

Are the modern professional and the ancient monk doing something utterly different? Certainly there is overlap: both follow their breath, calm their minds and bodies, try to cultivate compassion and avoid hatred, greed, and delusion. But the familial, institutional, social, cultural, civilizational, and cosmic contexts in which they enact these values could hardly be more divergent.

The modern professional has a family to which she is deeply committed, a job that sustains her, arts and entertainment, and broader commitments to gender equality, human rights, individual choice, and many other non-negotiable goods. She lives, in other words, in an entirely different social imaginary with different default intuitions and a different repertoire of possible ways of being.

Some of the things that mindfulness helps her with are expressly forbidden the monk: parenting, money-making, love-making, play-watching. So mindfulness and meditation help to cultivate a very different kind of person in this case than in the earliest contexts (as well as monastic contexts today).

Moderns have discovered new uses for ancient tools. Clearly these are flexible practices that have been adapted today to quite different ends within very different lifeworlds.

Of course, if you really want to understand the subtleties of McMahan's excellent essay, read the entire piece.
Download How_Meditation_Works_Theorizing_the_Role
I've just shared an overview of some key concepts. Here's a quote from the end of the essay that points to McMahan's emphasis on looking at both the "inside" of the meditator and the "outside" of cultural influences to grasp what works and doesn't work in meditation.

By all means we should measure what is measurable, but we should not think that such measurements—be they oscillating brain-waves, blood flow to various parts of the brain, respiration, and so on—get down to the real “facts” about meditation to which all other “data” (beliefs, social situation, cultural factors, relations of power) are extraneous.

We must understand all of these factors together systemically. The study of meditation should not succumb to the modern cult of calculability in which something is only real when it is measurable and measured. 

No need to have a "calling." Just live your life.

Someone emailed me a link to a short essay on the Secular Buddhist Association site, "What's your  calling or purpose in life?" I like the author's conclusion: there's no reason to feel that you have a special calling.

After all, where would that come from? 

The notion of a calling or purpose in life presupposes that such exists somewhere outside of the person's own mind, that somehow we're supposed to identify what we're meant to do with our life as if that was a law of nature akin to gravity or electromagnetism. 

Or maybe a better analogy is finding our life's compass, which would point us in the direction we're meant to go. But again, this presumes that there's a "magnetic" purpose that is separate and distinct from our everyday choices about what to do.

Here's an excerpt from the essay that makes a lot of sense to me.

I feel fortunate where I am now in life. I have no desire to look for purpose in my life. I don’t feel the compulsion of a calling. I am content to follow this journey we call life and see where it leads moment by moment. It is a feeling of peace, of openness that I didn’t have while being driven by goals, by a calling, by a purpose in life. I’m relieved to have dropped such notions, and for me they really were notions, and instead just be in whatever life brings each day.

I worry when I hear “spiritual leaders”, people regarded as sages and full of wisdom, speak in terms of finding purpose, finding your calling. What if there is no purpose? What if you don’t have a calling? Are you going to be the dog chasing his own tail? Do we have to have a purpose? Does our life have to have “meaning?” I think we should asks ourselves what we really mean by all that. What is driving the need for meaning?

That’s not to say there is something wrong with goals or direction, intent. Having short term goals and direction is useful, as long as we aren’t clinging to expectations, as long as we are open to changes and shifts that will inevitably occur. Life can throw a rock in the waters of resolve at any minute.  Expect change, because change is the norm.

Maybe it’s ok to be without purpose or calling and see what life hands you.

 

Buddhism doesn't believe in a soul, which is fine with soulless me

During my religious days I took solace in feeling that I had, or was, a soul that would survive my bodily death. Now, I'm more attached to truth than to fond beliefs, even when they feel good. 

So I enjoy many Buddhist writings (just not the ones that talk about reincarnation and other supernatural stuff). 

Back in 2012 I resonated with Owen Flanagan's naturalistic take on Buddhism, as I wrote about in "Buddhism says I'm a soulless Heraclitean river. Cool!"

So everything is changing. Including me, you, beliefs, brains, selves, Mt. Everest, ants, galaxies, subatomic particles, who is ahead in the latest presidential poll. Heraclitus sure seems to have gotten that right.

If we hope to base our happiness, our well-being, our satisfaction, on something immutable, unchanging, and eternal -- that hope is going to be still unfulfilled on our death bed. Better to accept that we're all Heraclitean rivers in a Heraclitean universe. 

By contrast, I heartily disagreed with an attempt by an author to misleadingly cram the soul into Buddhist teachings. His book published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas deserved the title of my blog post: "RSSB 'Buddhism' book distorts Buddhist reality."

I'm fine with books which accurately describe a religion or philosophy, and then attempt to show how its tenets relate to some other belief system. But it deeply irks me when an author distorts a religion or philosophy in order to cram it into the confines of his/her favored world view, like RSSB's Sant Mat.

After reading only one chapter, I can tell that this is what K.N. Upadhyaya is up to with his "Buddhism" book. It was difficult for me to recognize the Buddhism that I've come to know (and sort of love) in his discussion of how Buddhists look upon soul and God.

Over and over, Upadhyaya cited the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, Hindu holy books, in his effort to show that the Buddha's teachings basically are the same as Hinduism's central tenets of atman (soul) and Brahman (God).

Well, if the Buddha was so up with Hinduism, why did he head off in a different spiritual direction? I'm no expert on Buddhist lore, but I've always thought that the Buddha was critical of Hindu dogmatism and urged his followers to leave all of that supernatural theorizing behind.

I thought right. More evidence of this is coming from Stephen Bachelor's new book, "After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age."

Bachelor says that he's trying to recover the Buddha's original teachings before they became hidden under layers of dogma and confusion. After all, the Buddha, like Jesus, never wrote anything. So what we have in the Buddhist canon are oral traditions that  must imperfectly represent what the Buddha originally taught. 

The earliest Buddhist writings, Pali, seemingly would come closest to those teachings. Further, Bachelor tries to separate out influences from Brahmanic/Hindu philosophy -- which do posit a soul (jiva)  that can unite with God, or Brahman.

I'm about halfway through After Buddhism. Here's some quotations I've come across so far on the subject of whether the Buddha taught about soul.

A topic upon which Gotama refused to comment was whether body (sarira) and soul (jiva) are identical or different. Sarira refers to the inanimate matter of which the body is composed rather than the living and breathing body (kaya). The term later came to denote the bones and material relics of deceased monks and saints.

Jiva (a cognate of the English "quick") is, by contrast, the animating principle that "quickens" dumb matter. While this kind of dualism is in keeping with the Brahmanic view that soul is essentially other than the material world, neither term has a central role in Gotama's lexicon.

He refused to get drawn into speculation about the relation between body and soul, nor did he consider such a dualistic distinction a useful starting point for understanding human experience.

Gotama likewise considers consciousness to be inseparable from the rest of the physical, emotional, perceptual, and intentional bundles of which it is an integral part. He makes the point emphatically: "Though someone might say: 'Apart from form, apart from feeling, apart from perception, apart from inclinations, I will make known the coming and going of consciousness, its passing away and rebirth, its growth, increase and expansion' -- that is impossible."

In contrast to widespread Buddhist beliefs to the contrary, he refuses to grant consciousness any separate or privileged status within experience.

...By implication, for Gotama there can be no such thing as "pure" consciousness, an unconditioned or pristine "knowing" that exists independently of the phenomenal world of discrete physical things and mental processes. 

...To consider awakening in terms of the workings of the five bundles marks a departure from Brahmanic orthodoxy, where the goal of the path is to achieve union with a transcendent and unknowable consciousness or God. If nothing else, Gotama's emphasis on the five bundles points to a practice that from the outset is engaged with the specificity and diversity of the world of human experience rather than seeking an ultimate truth that lies hidden from view.

Two books about whether there's a science of Buddhism

I don't read every article in The New Yorker. But when I got near the end of the latest issue and saw this image, along with "American Nirvana: Is there a science of Buddhism?" by Adam Gopnik, I knew I'd peruse every word. 

(The online version has a different title.)

Gopnik's piece was a review of two recent books: "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Enlightenment" by Robert Wright, and "After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age" by Stephen Bachelor.

Naturally I've ordered both books from Amazon. I say "naturally," because I'm a big fan of Buddhism -- but only when Buddhism is stripped of religious supernaturalism, dogmatism, and mysticism. Bachelor has done this in several previous books that I've enjoyed, so I figured it was a no-brainer to buy his newest book.

I'm less familiar with Robert Wright. However, as soon as I got a few paragraphs into Gopnik's review, these passages told me I'd be ordering his book also.

He [Wright] thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to fix them. Being Buddhist—that is, simply practicing Vipassana, or “insight” meditation—will make you feel better about being alive, he believes, and he shows how you can and why it does.

Wright’s is a Buddhism almost completely cleansed of supernaturalism. His Buddha is conceived as a wise man and self-help psychologist, not as a divine being—no miraculous birth, no thirty-two distinguishing marks of the godhead (one being a penis sheath), no reincarnation. 

Great. I've always had the feeling that, like Jesus, whoever the Buddha really was isn't at all like the mythical person he is now imagined to be. Here's how Wright speaks about the Buddha.

...a wealthy Indian princeling named Gotama (as the Pali version of his name is rendered) came to realize, after a long and moving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the things we cherish inevitably change and rot, and desires are inevitably disappointed.

But he also realized that, simply by sitting and breathing, people can begin to disengage from the normal run of desires and disappointments, and come to grasp that the self whom the sitter has been serving so frantically, and who is suffering from all these needs, is an illusion.

Set free from the self’s anxieties and appetites and constant, petulant demands, the meditator can see and share the actualities of existence with others. The sitter becomes less selfish and more selfless.

Sounds good. I've written a lot on this blog about how modern neuroscience agrees with ancient Buddhism (and Taoism) that a notion of an independent, unchanging, separate "self" is indeed an illusion. So, of course, is the related notion of a unitary "soul" with pretty much the same attributes. 

Rather, we're a conglomeration of all sorts of psychological/mental traits that usually fit together more or less coherently, causing us to mistakenly believe that a self or soui is inhabiting the body we call "me." Gopnik says;

Wright, like his Bay Area and Boston predecessors, is delighted to announce the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our own recent ideas. His new version of an American Buddhism is not only self-consciously secularized but aggressively “scientized.”

He believes that Buddhist doctrine and practice anticipate and affirm the “modular” view of the mind favored by much contemporary cognitive science.

Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision.

By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if it cannot demobilize the armies, lets us see their nature and temporarily disarms their still juvenile soldiers.

I used to believe that meditation could lead to knowledge of higher realms of existence by separating our eternal soul from our time-bound body/mind. Now, I'm firmly in accord with Wright's secular Buddhism.

Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane. It is a cognitive probe for self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind.

“According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly,” he writes. “What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.”

Our feelings ceaselessly generate narratives, contes moraux, about the world, and we become their prisoners. We make things good and bad, desirable and not, meaningful and trivial. 

For sure. I doubt that anyone can completely break the habit of creating narratives about the world. But we can make our stories less rigid, ego-centered, and unproductive.

Meditation shows us how anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it: he tells us about an enlightened man who tastes wine without the contextual tales about vintage, varietal, region. It tastes . . . less emotional. “All the states of equanimity come through the realization that things aren’t what we thought they were,” Wright quotes a guru as saying. What Wright calls “the perception of emptiness” dampens the affect, but it also settles the mind. If it isn’t there, you don’t overreact to it.

Then Gopnik moves to an examination of Stephen Bachelor's book. Since I don't believe in free will, probably I'll like Wright's treatment of this subject more than Bachelor's. Still, I agree with the basic thrust of how Bachelor sees things, based on this passage from the review.

Where Wright insists that the Buddhist doctrine of not-self precludes the possibility of freely chosen agency, Batchelor insists of Buddhism that “as soon as we consider it a task-based ethics . . . such objections vanish. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can perform a task. When an inclination to say something cruel occurs, for example, can you resist acting on that impulse? . . . Whether your decision to hold the barbed remark was the result of free will or not is beside the point.” He calls the obsession with free will a “peculiarly Western concern.” Meditation works as much at the level of conscious intention as it does at the level of unreflective instinct.

Having read other books by Bachelor, I already knew that he likes his Buddhism with supernaturalism on the side. But as Gopnik notes, this requires Bachelor to show that the "main dish" of secular Buddhism hasn't been made untasty by a mixture with religious superstition.

Batchelor also tackles the issue, basically shelved by Wright, of whether Buddhism without any supernatural scaffolding is still Buddhism. As a scholar, he doesn’t try to deny that the supernaturalist doctrines of karma and reincarnation are as old as the ethical and philosophical ones, and entangled with them. His project is unashamedly to secularize Buddhism. But, since it’s Buddhism that he wants to secularize, he has to be able to show that its traditions are not hopelessly polluted with superstition.

l really liked the following passage in Gopnik's piece. I get the absurdity he speaks about below frequently in comments on my blog posts. Because nothing is 100% certain, not even the best proven scientific theory, religious believers often try to equate faith in some supernatural entity with faith in a law of nature. 

Um, there's a lot of room between 0% and 100%.

A belief in the truth of electromagnetism warrants 99.9% faith in it. A belief in the truth of Jesus' resurrection and ability to save souls warrants a much lesser faith, like 0.1% -- given the demonstrable evidence for each.

Then there’s the shrug-and-grin argument that everyone believes something. Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith, too? Well, we don’t take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing.

We have confidence—amply evidenced by the technological transformation of the world since the scientific revolution, and by the cash value of validated predictions based on esoteric mathematical abstraction—that the world picture it conveys is true, or more nearly true than anything else on offer.

Batchelor tap-dances perilously close to the often repeated absurdity that a highly credulous belief about supernatural claims and an extremely skeptical belief about supernatural claims are really the same because they are both beliefs.

And this is a great section of the review that I've quoted at some length. It is indeed amazing that so many "spiritual" people who claim that living in the moment, now, is the best and highest use of human consciousness, unabashedly embrace scientific, cultural, and other truths that only exist because people put a bunch of moments together to fashion a greater understanding of both the past, present, and future.

A deeper objection to the attempted reconciliation of contemporary science and Buddhist practice flows from the nature of scientific storytelling.

The practice of telling stories—imagined tales of cause and effect that fixate on the past and the future while escaping the present, sending us back and forth without being here now—is something that both Wright and Batchelor see as one of the worst delusions the mind imprints on the world. And yet it is inseparable from the Enlightenment science that makes psychology and biology possible.

The contemporary generation of American Buddhists draws again and again on scientific evidence for the power of meditation—EEGs and MRIs and so on—without ever wondering why a scientific explanation of that kind has seldom arisen in Buddhist cultures. (Science has latterly been practiced by Buddhists, of course.)

What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practice—the draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each moment in favor of simply having the moment—is antithetical to the kind of evidentiary argument he admires. Science is competitive storytelling. If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself.

Only a restless Western Newton would say, “Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, not a moment we experience. The Buddhist Newton might have been happier than ours—ours was plenty unhappy—but he would never have found the equation.

Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend. The stories improve over time in the light of evidence, or they don’t. It’s just as possible to have Buddhist science as to have Christian science or Taoist science. But the meditator’s project of being here now will never be the same as the scientist’s project of connecting the past to the future, of telling how and knowing why.

Lastly, Gopnik ends his piece with the stark truth that everything ends. After birth, death. In between, we're continually introduced to the reality of loss. Which is the root of sadness. Whatever helps us deal with loss and sadness, this has to be good, Insofar as Buddhism and meditation can do this, they're worthy of our embrace -- along with much else.

The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom. We may or may not be able to Americanize our Buddhism, but we can certainly ecumenicize our analgesics.

Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage. Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe.

Flexible improvisation is a better way of living than rigid religion

Rules are fine. Except when they aren't. 

For me, one of the most enjoyable things about giving up on the ridiculousness of religion is no longer having to comply with rigid rules, dogmas, commandments, rituals, and such. 

Every religion has its own peculiar absurdities. Of course, what is absurd to an outsider will make sense to an insider. At least if the insider doesn't think about what's being required too much. 

Here's an example: the mystical meditation path I followed for about thirty years demanded that followers be vegetarians. This wasn't a problem for me, since I'd stopped eating meat before I learned about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian spiritual organization led by a guru who was considered to be God in human form. 

At some point in the 1990s, I believe it was, the guru decided to raise the bar on vegetarianism. Now animal rennet, a frequent ingredient in cheese, was a no-no. So RSSB followers were supposed to make sure that cheese they ate didn't contain animal-derived rennet.

Now, even though I was a strong believer in not killing animals for food, it was a stretch for me to accept that eating a minuscule bit of forbidden rennet in a pizza, say, was going to be a big drag on my spiritual evolution.

But since at that time I was a devoted devotee of the guru, I did my best to eliminate cheese with animal rennet from my diet. RSSB followers put a lot of work into compiling lists of "good" and "bad" cheese brands. Eating out at a restaurant, though, often required some decidedly awkward encounters with serving staff.

"Does the cheese on this veggie pizza have animal rennet in it?" us rigidly obedient RSSB'ers would ask a hapless waiter. Not surprisingly he'd say, "I have no idea." "Please check," we'd say. 

The poor guy would be forced to disappear into a backroom and try to read the label on a cheese container. Or at least he'd pretend to do this before returning to our table with some sort of answer. Which often was "I couldn't tell for sure." 

We felt that we were acting in accord with God's will, since the guru's edict against eating animal rennet supposedly had a divine foundation, given his status as God in Human Form (akin to a living Jesus). I'm not sure what the waiters and waitresses who had to deal with our no animal rennet! demands thought about us. 

"Crazy religious fanatics" would have been a reasonable assessment, one which I now agree with.

Today I was browsing the online New York Times opinion page and came across a piece by Stephen Asma with a great title: "Was Bo Diddley a Buddha?"

If you don't know who Bo Diddley is, this probably means you're a lot younger than I am. Here's a video of him from 1965, when I was a junior or senior in high school. 

Asma relates how he used to play guitar with Bo Diddley, and what this taught him about improvisation. Asma now is a philosophy professor, so his piece has some depth to it. It's nicely written, so I invite you to read the whole thing. Here's some excerpts:

Before my first gig with Bo, I spent a full week of intense preparation, learning and rehearsing his songs. On the opening night, he arrived to the venue five minutes before showtime. As he walked onstage in front of 500 shouting fans, I tried to tell him all the songs I’d prepared.

He just looked at me blankly through his Coke-bottle glasses, plugged into his amp and launched into a loud, rhythmic riff on his trademark rectangular guitar. He never bothered to tell me what song we were playing, what chord changes were coming, what key we were in, or anything. But, as every blues and jazz musician knows, that’s how it goes.

After the first tune, he realized that I could follow him, and he cryptically shouted, “This monkey is tied, now let’s skin it!”

Bo and the other greats I played with often worked this way, and it was a hair-raising on-the-job education. These musicians never told me what was coming next, partly because they didn’t know themselves. They were masters of the art of improvisation.

...Improvising, in music, is the act of composing and performing simultaneously, and it is difficult to master. But it is also universal, and despite the powerful human impulse to plan and program, integral to nearly every aspect of our lives. No matter who you are — a welder, philosopher, a guitarist or a president — you are in some sense simultaneously making the map of your life and following it. It is not an exaggeration to say life itself is one long improvisation.

...In music, at least, improvisation sometimes gets a bad rap, usually from the precincts of classical or other formal Western styles that rely on notation. It is sometimes looked down upon with a “my kid could do that” kind of dismissive attitude. But the ability to improvise is not just “winging it.” It is built on foundations of study and practice that prepare the improviser for the moment of action.

“Wu-Wei” is a Chinese word that is often translated as “non-action” but more accurately means “natural action,” or action in accordance with nature. The idea, dominant in Taoism and Zen, is that one should try to find the natural way of doing something and then simulate, or align oneself to it, as opposed to forcing it.

For example, the butcher should carve the animal at its joints, not in arbitrary locations. A carpenter should work with the grain of wood, rather than against it. A martial arts master should find the most economic use of his energy, and turn his opponent’s own force to his advantage, and so on.

Finding this natural way is not effortless, but requires great practice. Once it has been mastered, however, it is possible to find a unique presence of mind in these activities. The mundane actions are turned into artistic and even spiritual expressions. Playing a musical instrument, boxing in a competition, and even folding your laundry can be Zen-like improvisations.

Zen Buddhism and Taoism focus more on the method of your life rather than the content of your life. It’s not so much who you are, or even what you do in life. Rather, it’s how you do it. Since, in these practices, the present moment is ultimate reality (albeit usually obscured and hidden in regular consciousness), all one needs to do is shut off the babble of discursive thought and sink into one’s present activity.

According to this view, the meaning of life is not found in rules, formulas, commandments, categorical imperatives and cultural norms.

For sure. 

Obsessing over eating a few specks of animal rennet that are part of the cheese in a vegetarian pizza is rigid religiosity. Laughing about whether the cheese has rennet -- who gives a shit! -- while taking a big bite would have been flexible improvisation.

But I didn't know that at the time.

So, accept my belated apology, all you waiters and waitresses who had to check cheese ingredients because my friends and I were in the grip of playing life as if every note on the guru's music sheet had to be followed exactly.

Which, as Bo Diddley and Stephen Asma knew, goes against the grain of an improvisational understanding of life. 

Eating, drinking, shitting, fucking -- the most "spiritual" aspect of our reality

Religions typically disparage our animal and vegetative nature. They urge us to embrace soul, mind, spirit -- whatever immaterial essence supposedly lies within us and connects us with a higher divine reality.

Re-reading the first chapters of Hubert Benoit's marvelous book, "Zen and the Psychology of Self-Transformation: The Supreme Doctrine, " I was struck again by how brilliantly Benoit talks about Zen. His outlook is pleasingly fresh.

In The Existentialism of Zen chapter, Benoit says that we mistakenly value living more than existence.

We aren't content with just being an integral part of a much larger reality. No, we seek to elevate that part -- our individuality -- above a status commensurate with the way things really are. So figuring out how to live life fully and meaningfully to the greatest possible extent becomes an obsession, while simply embracing our everyday existence is seen as not enough, too obvious, insufficient for the Fulfillment Task at hand.

Benoit wrote in French, which was translated. He's intellectual. He's a psychoanalyst. He's philosophically sophisticated. So it can take a bit of effort to absorb his words. But I've found that the effort is worth it. 

Here's some passages from the above-mentioned chapter. I've bold-faced some passages that I really like:

A man declares, "My life is insipid and monotonous; I do not call that living; at most it is existing." Everyone understands what this man means to say, which proves that everyone carries in himself the idea of this distinction. At the same time, everyone feels that "living" is superior to "existing"; and this opinion is so clear, so categoric, in the mind of man, that he comes to regard to "exist" as nothing, and to "live" as everything.

...However, when man places living so much above existing the frontier of this preferential distinction does not lie between their vegetative phenomena and their actions; it lies within the domain of action, and in the following manner: among my actions some have for object the service of my vegetative life (to eat, to repose, to perform the sexual act by pure animal desire); these actions affirm me (that is to say maintain my creation) in so far as I am an organism in all respects similar to the other animals, in so far as I live from the point of view of the universe, as a cosmic cog-wheel, in so far as I am "universal." 

But every day, besides these actions, I perform others which do not serve my vegetative life, which often even impede it, and whose aim is to make me appear different from every other man, that is to say affirm me as distinct from every other man, as a particular man.

Between these two kinds of action lies the frontier which we are studying. My egotistical state, which carries the fiction of my personal divinity, makes me regard as senseless my vegetative life and all the actions by which I serve this life (it is this ensemble which constitutes in my eyes the contemptible notion of existing) and leads me to see sense only in those actions which distinguish me (there, in my eyes, is the precious, estimable notion of living).

I do not count in my own eyes in so far as I am a universal man; I only count in so far as I am the individual "I." According to my fiction of personal divinity, to found the sense of my life on my vegetative phenomena and the actions which serve them is absurd, while to found this sense on actions which tend to affirm me as separate is sensible. This view is profoundly rooted in the mind of man.

It is evident to anyone who thinks about it impartially that it is this opinion which is absurd. 

... My organism is a link in the immense chain of cosmic cause and effect, and I can only perceive its real sense by considering it in its real place, in its real connexion with all the rest, that is to say by considering it from the point of view of the Universe, in my capacity as universal man and not particular man, in so far as I am similar to all other men and not in so far as I am different.

Man achieves existence, but only (as he thinks) because existing is a necessary condition for living. He eats, he rests, but he does so uniquely because he cannot otherwise affirm himself egotistically, as distinct; he only performs commonplace actions, common to all, in order to do something that no one but he will ever do, he exists in order to live. Basing, thus, the idea of existing on the idea of living he runs counter to the real order of things since he bases the real on the illusory. 

... The natural man is only conscious of images, so it is not astonishing that he should be unconscious of existing, which is real, which has three dimensions. In short, I am unconscious of that in which I am real, and that of which I am conscious in myself is illusory.

The attainment of satori is nothing else than the becoming conscious of existing which is actually unconscious in me; becoming conscious of the Reality, unique and original, of this universal vegetative life which is the manifestation in my person of the Absolute Principle (that in which I am and infinitely more than I'; imminence and transcendence).

It is that which Zen call "seeing into one's own nature." One understands the insistence with which Zen keeps coming back to the maintenance of our vegetative life. To the disciple who asks for the way of Wisdom the master replies: "When you are hungry you eat; when you are tired you lie down."

There is therein the wherewithal to scandalise the vain egotist who dreams of "spiritual" prowess and of "extatic" personal relations with a personal "God" whose image he creates for himself. 

I love Hubert Benoit and his book. Writing in 1951, his words speak as strongly and persuasively now as then. 

Both science and everyday experience tell us that the natural, physical, material, evident world is the ONLY WORLD THERE IS. Yet we humans place so much importance on our vaunted capacity to imagine, to conceive of worlds that don't exist, but could, if our individual imaginations were to be converted into universal reality. 

There's nothing wrong with thought and imagination. After all, nature evolved us Homo sapiens, who do that stuff. But Zen, and Benoit's take on Zen, remind us that the best form of spirituality is accepting that there's no need to be spiritual. It is letting go of the unnecessary. 

The Zen master is too intelligent to advise the natural man to suggest to himself, when he satisfies his hunger, that he is at last in contact with Absolute Reality; that would be to replace the old imaginative reveries by a theoretical image of cosmic participation which would change nothing whatever. 

The natural man has not to revalorise his vegetative life, he has only to obtain one day the immediate perception of the infinite value of this life by the integral devalorisation of his egotistical life. The necessary inner task does not consist in "doing" anything whatsoever, but in "undoing" something, in undoing all the illusory egotistical beliefs which keep tightly closed the lid of the "third eye."

Here's some of my previous posts about Benoit's book:

Letting go -- the essence of Zen
"The Supreme Doctrine," 36 years overdue
Centering in on "The Supreme Doctrine"

Meaningness site well worth an (uncertain) read

Back in 2011 I discovered David Chapman's "Meaningness" writings. In a blog post I praised Chapman's dizzying thoughts about what life is, and isn't, all about. 

And shared what I said to the person who turned me on to the Meaningness site.

Thanks a lot for the link. I've read several posts/chapters and am blown away by this guy. He's like a more intelligent, more scientific, more coherent, more wise version of me who also can write a heck of a lot better. And has a great sense of humor. I'm an instant David Chapman fan.

Since, I've gotten Meaningness updates as Chapman continues to work on his online work in progress. It is vaguely Buddhist'y, but in a pleasingly non-dogmatic sense.

(Yes, Buddhists can be dogmatic, sometimes irritatingly so; Chapman isn't.)

A recent update resonated with me, "The Promise of Certainty." Here's some excerpts.

What we want most from meaning is guarantees.

Life is nebulous: chaotic, risky, and confusing. Efforts that should work fail. The good suffer and wrong-doers prosper. The world does not make sense. Each of us is torn by uncertainties, conflicting desires, and impossible decisions.

We want assurance that this is all just an illusion. We want to hear that the real world is—somehow—orderly and consistently meaningful. We want answers—sometimes desperately.

Eternalism promises to deliver those answers, and to guarantee them. It cannot; and so it lies.

...Eternalism is at its most glorious in a conversion experience, during the honeymoon after you have first committed to a system. That can last for a few weeks to a few years; for as long as you can silence your internal voices of doubt.

Eventually it becomes impossible to not-see the evidence against the system. You may remain committed, but it can only be a wavering commitment. The honeymoon turns into a warm memory, cherished on Sunday mornings but increasingly distant from everyday experience.

Alternatively, seeking renewed certainty, you may search for a new system. Some people become serial conversion junkies.

But as with opiate addiction, it becomes harder and harder to recreate the first high. And the periods of doubt between commitments, like heroin withdrawal, turn increasingly into nihilistic anxiety and despair.

...The complete stance recognizes that certainty is impossible, but that meaning is real. If we set aside the futile hope for absolute answers, we can find patterns of meaning that are usually good enough to navigate our lives.

No ultimate, perfectly reliable foundation for morality or purpose is possible—but we do regularly solve problems of ethics and direction; and therefore we can!

In Buddhism, ultimate truth is an absence, not a presence

Yeah, I'm on an emptiness roll, Buddhism style. Three blog posts in a row on this fascinating subject (see here and here for #1 and #2).

Having finished Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness," I ordered a roughly similar Newland book, "Appearance & Reality." Both books are giving me new insights into what Buddhism is all about. 

There's very little religious supernaturalism in them, a big reason why they appeal to me. I'm fine with philosophical Buddhism, which by and large is compatible with modern scientific understandings of reality.

Once we get into rebirth, omniscience, and additional other-worldly stuff, though, I part company with Buddhism.

Newland makes a few references to "liberation from cyclic existence" and other religious'y aspects of Buddhism, but I just put a question mark in the page margin when I come across such mentions and move on.

To his core theme, emptiness. 

The normal meaning of that word is an absence. Same applies in Buddhism.

What we need to do to become enlightened as to the nature of reality is give up the notion that anything (including us) exists permanently, fixedly, unchangingly, independently.

Yes, we are real. A chair is real. Dogs are real. Everything in everyday existence is real. There isn't any reality beyond the conventional world, no hidden realms of existence in some far-off heaven or spiritual realm.

Our problem isn't that we aren't in touch with ultimate reality.

Our problem is that we fail to see it as it is -- empty of inherent existence. Actually, everything is interconnected, interdependent, interwoven. But we wrongly consider that things (including the human self) possess their own inherent nature.

In the book I'm reading now, Newland writes:

The Great Vehicle tenet systems teach that the subtle and profound emptiness realized on the bodhisattva path is an ultimate truth. This ultimate truth is a negative phenomenon -- the mere absence of a certain type of self (i.e., a certain kind of existence) in phenomena.

The various Great Vehicle systems disagree about the kind of existence that emptiness negates. The Mind Only system, for example, says that emptiness is the absence of a difference of entity between an object and the mind apprehending it, while the Middle Way Consequence system says that emptiness is the absence of inherent existence.

Still, however they define it, Great Vehicle tenet systems agree that the subtle emptiness is (1) an ultimate truth, and (2) a quality present in all phenomena. That is, everything that exists (including emptiness itself) is devoid of whatever type of existence emptiness negates.

Back in my mystical meditation days -- which lasted over thirty years -- I was super-fond of the term ultimate reality. But then I viewed ultimate reality, or ultimate truth, as something positive that could be known. 

So it's been a refreshing eye-opener to get exposed to a fuller and clearer explanation of how Buddhism views emptiness as ultimate truth. I really like the idea that what separates us from ultimate truth is the presence of a false notion: inherent existence.

Which Newland defines as "the existence of something by the power of its own intrinsic or essential character."

This is how soul, God, and other supernatural entities are viewed by most religions. And how everyday existence is viewed by almost everybody in the world. Meaning, we see things -- like a table and chairs -- as possessing inherent existence rather than being brought into being by dependent arising. 

Which Newland defines as:

The core teaching that "in dependence upon this, that arises," which is the heart of the Dharma. Since there is nothing that exists in and of itself, all existents are dependent arisings.

Reality, then, is "synonym for emptiness, the ultimate truth." And Newland says emptiness is...

The sheer nonexistence of intrinsic nature. For example, the table's emptiness is the table's lack of existence by way of an intrinsic nature.

For me, the beauty of this Buddhist philosophy is that it negates the search for a True Self.

In the Indian philosophy I previously embraced, but have now discarded, there was the notion of coverings of mind and matter that obscured the primal soul-consciousness of who we really are. Supposedly these coverings could be removed through spiritual practice, meditation, and God's/Guru's grace.

Mahayana Buddhism seems much closer to the truth. Here's a few more Newland definitions.

self -- sometimes refers to the person -- that is, to something that does conventionally exist. However, often refers to a reified nature that does not exist at all but is wrongly superimposed on persons and other things.

selflessness -- the nonexistence of a reified nature that ignorance wrongly superimposes on persons and other things. In Prasangika Madhyamaka, the nonexistence of intrinsic nature in a person or other existing things.

Beautiful!

Suffering, distress, unhappiness, and ignorance arise from adding an "extra" on to things that exist: unchangingness, permanence, independence. We worry about not knowing our True Self when, actually, the truth is that we don't have a self.

Nothing does. 

Including emptiness, because emptiness isn't something that exists; it is the absence of inherent existence.

So what we need to be fulfilled isn't something; it is giving up a belief in "things," understanding that, as Newland puts it, "there is nothing that is truly or ultimately existent."

 

Buddhism: the illusion of life is believing in a fixed reality

For many years -- decades, really -- I believed that the everyday world in which we live was an illusion. Meaning, there was an unseen truly real realm beyond the bounds of ordinary consciousness. 

Changeable matter and mind weren't part of this ultimate reality. Only the eternal unchanging soul, our true self, was able to be aware of it. 

Now, I understand that I had things completely backward. Such is how science comprehends the world. Also, Buddhism.

As noted in my previous post, the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" is that nothing -- including us, and even emptiness itself -- has an intrinsic unchanging nature.

So while the idea of an unchanging eternal soul is appealing (most people find the prospect of dying and being gone forever extremely bothersome), it is a purely human concept, not reality. 

Here's some additional quotes from Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness" which point to the illusion of believing in an unchanging essence that underlies our ever-changing body and mind.

Tsong-kha-pa notes that non-Buddhist philosophies about an eternal and essential self arise when their proponents realize that the essential self really cannot be identical to the flux of mental and physical aggregates.

Reaching the wrong inference, they then teach about the existence of a metaphysical self that is essentially different from the mind and body. 

However, their own ordinary and conventionally valid consciousnesses never perceive any essence or intrinsic self that is different from the mind and body. This is simply an imaginary construct. 

Instead of assuming that there must be a permanent self and then locating it as an essence distinct from the mind and body, they should realize that since an intrinsically existing self can be found neither as one with nor as different from the mind and body, it simply does not exist.

...A person appears very vividly to have intrinsic nature, just as the reflection of a face may appear very vividly to be a face. If we come upon a reflection of ourselves unexpectedly, in a very clean mirror, we may for a moment be startled. We may feel strongly that we are seeing another person.

While this appearance as a person is completely false, the reflection does exist and does function effectively as what it actually is. It arises, functions, and passes away depending upon conditions. 

Likewise, the person is completely devoid of any shred of the intrinsically existent nature that vividly appears to our minds. Such a nature is unfindable because of being utterly nonexistent, just as there is no actual person in the mirror.

On the other hand, just as a reflection does exist as a mere reflection, a person does exist as a mere person. And, as it turns out, that is exactly the kind of person one needs to be in order to make choices, to act and to change, and to bring help to the world.

...The Buddha is not a God issuing the great commandment: Do not grasp. Nor is he a judge who stands ready to condemn those who violate this commandment. Rather, the Buddha is our spiritual physician, giving us healthy advice.

If happiness could be attained by grasping things, there would be no need for Buddhism. All of our needless miseries arise because we continue to grasp after things that are in fact completely ungraspable -- because they have no pith, no innermost core, no fixed essence. 

...Because they have no ability to set themselves up and exist on their own, we and the things around us are in flux, changing as conditions change. 

With no essential nature, neither our own selves nor the things around us have any inner handle by which we can grab and hold them. We are afraid to face this lack, this emptiness.

Our fear arises from and feeds our grasping, and in this way we build a prison for ourselves, moment by moment. Yet by bravely facing the reality of emptiness, we can let go of our fear, anger, and greed.

We can be free.

Emptiness is ultimate reality: nothing, including us, has an intrinsic nature

I run hot and cold about Buddhism, depending on what sort of Buddhist writing I'm reading. Religious Buddhism turns me off, but I like philosophical Buddhism that doesn't fall prey to unfounded supernaturalism. 

Recently I've been re-reading Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness." It's a clear and persuasive description of the core notion in Mahayana Buddhism, emptiness. 

In the first few pages of his book, Newland explains what emptiness is all about. First, he speaks of the suffering that arises because we wrongly believe that we are something we're not.

We suffer unnecessarily because we do not know ourselves. Like addicts fiercely clinging to a drug, we cannot let go of the sense that we are substantial, solid, independent, and autonomous... Like an addict's drug, the false notion of an independently existing self is the source of great misery for ourselves and others.

For example, humans make up myths about an eternally existing soul. Religions tell us that when we die, we aren't really dead, but live on as some sort of indestructible essence. Newland says:

To be real, to be alive, we feel that we must deep down somehow exist in a solid and independent way. Death tells us a very different story, but for that very reason we find a million ways to avoid hearing the message of death. That message is that we are impermanent. 

Our bodies are disintegrating moment by moment, right now. And though we desperately wish to believe otherwise, the truth is that beneath our ever-changing minds and aging bodies there is no eternal and essential self. We have no natural existence, no independent way of existing.

So how do we exist?

Well, as natural beings who are part and parcel of everything in the world. Our existence is the result of previous causes and conditions, all of which are equally interdependent and without a permanent essence.

We exist contingently, interdependently. We exist, but only in dependence on our ancestors, our body parts, our food, air, and water, and the other members of our society. We could not and do not exist otherwise. Devoid of any independent or substantial nature, our existence is possible only because it is far less rigid, less concrete, than what we imagine it to be.

This leads Newland to a description of what emptiness is... and isn't.

Rather than seeing things as they are, we superimpose upon ourselves -- and on things around us -- a false existence, a self-existence or essential reality that actually does not exist at all. In the Buddhist philosophy explained here, the ultimate truth is the sheer absence, the lack, of any such essence.

This is emptiness (stong pa nyid, shunyata). While this may sound bleak, disappointing, or frightening, it is the very nature of reality. And it is reality -- not fantasy -- that is our final hope and our refuge. The path to freedom from needless misery, for ourselves and others, is through profound realization of this fundamental reality.

...The Tibetan and Sanskrit words that we translate as "emptiness" do, in fact, literally mean "emptiness." They refer specifically to some sort of lack or absence in things. But it is not a lack of meaning or hope or existence. 

It is the lack of the exaggerated and distorted kind of existence that we have projected onto things and onto ourselves. It is the absence of a false essential nature with which we have unconsciously invested everything. It can be quite frightening as we start to have doubts about this "heavy duty" kind of reality. We will feel that things cannot exist at all if they do not exist in the solid way we are accustomed to seeing them.

Jumping to another chapter in the book, here Newland explains that conventional reality is the only reality there is. This explains the Zen Buddhist emphasis on "chop wood, carry water." 

There is no supernatural world. There is no true self that we need to find. There is no hidden soul or state of consciousness we have to realize. 

What we are aware of here and now is ultimate reality: emptiness. Newland writes:

Because it is the final nature of every existent, emptiness that is the sheer absence of intrinsic nature is the ultimate reality. While this reality is very important -- because we all suffer immeasurably through clinging to intrinsic nature -- it is not something rare that we have to look for far away.

This ultimate reality is always immediately present as the final nature of every thing in every moment. What is very rare and very precious is the wisdom consciousness that understands this reality.

...When the mind of ultimate analysis looks at a cup, it finds only the emptiness of the cup. When it looks at this emptiness, it does not find some essentially real thing called emptiness as the basis of all. Emptiness, like all other existents, lacks intrinsic nature.

This is a profound point in Madhyamaka Buddhism. It is not that everything else is unreal as compared to the one real thing, which is real in and of itself. There are other philosophies which teach this.

But in Madhyamaka there is only one level of existence or type of existence: conventional existence. One particular conventionally existing phenomenon -- emptiness -- is the utter absence of any other level or type of existence.

Among all the things that exist conventionally, things' lack of existing on their own, in and of themselves, is called the ultimate truth because it is the truth realized by a mind that analyzes how thing ultimately exist.

Beautiful!

Difficult to understand. Also, easy to understand. 

Asked to say something about love, I'm pretty much speechless

Yesterday I got an email message:

Dear Mr. Hines ,

Your blog is very honest and nothing is more beautiful save love itself. Please tell us more about self-less and mutual love  and your views on the subject.

Sincerely, __________

Reading those words, I realized that I haven't written much explicitly about love during the eleven years this blog has existed.

This will be post # 2,140. When I used the search box in the right sidebar to see what popped up when I put in "love," almost all of the Google results for my two blogs were on my more personal and political HinesSight blog.

I've written about loving my iPhone, a Salem outdoor store, taxes, the "24" TV show, and other things. On this churchless blog, the most relevant post seemed to be "I'd love my self if I had one."

Which started out...

Proving, or not, that profound insights are found in the strangest places, I'll share some of the lyrics to an atonal song that I made up and love to "sing" (using that word in its absolutely loosest sense) in the shower.

I love my dog.
I love my cat.
Only problem is, 
I don't have a cat.
It's hard to love
What you don't have.

This is how I also feel about loving God. Or, my self. 

Except seemingly there's more evidence for a "self" than for "God." Buddhism, though, seizes on that seemingly and runs with it to an intriguing, reasonable, and scientifically defensible conclusion.

I don't have a self. No one does. Meaning, as agnostic Buddhist Stephen Bachelor says in his wonderful book, "Buddhism Without Beliefs":

As a human being I am more complex than a pot or a daffodil, but I have also emerged from causes and am composed of diverse, changing features and traits. There is no essential me that exists apart from this unique configuration of biological and cultural processes.

This helps to explain why I haven't written much about love. I agree with my email correspondent that love is beautiful. But I have no idea what those three words, love is beautiful, really mean. 

Nor would it help to delete "beautiful" and substitute any other word after love is...

Love, like me or you (as Stephen Bachelor said), isn't something separate and distinct from the beings who feel this ineffable emotion. Whatever love is, it is an ever-changing process, not a static entity. Especially, it isn't an other-worldly entity.

So my feeling is, the less we analyze and speak about love itself -- as contrasted with talking about what we love -- the better. Abstracting love diminishes this way of experiencing reality.

Meaning, I don't believe that love exists without a lover and an object of adoration.

How could love exist as a free floating something-or-other? This would be like being angry, yet not being angry about anything. At the least, an angry person would be angry about being angry, which counts as being angry about something.  

I'm not really a Buddhist, but I resonate with certain Buddhist principles -- such as the selflessness and mutuality mentioned in the email message I got.

As was noted in the above-linked post, we don't have to do anything to be selfless. This, it seems from both a Buddhist and neuroscientific perspective, is how we are: without an enduring changeless self. Such is the Buddhist notion of "emptiness."

Here's another quote from that post:

Emptiness is Buddhism's shorthand term for this absence of intrinsic selfness or thingness. Living and lifeless entities are equally devoid of independent, free-standing, unchanging existence.

The world is interconnected, with never-ending matrices of causes and effects stretching back to the big bang, and likely beyond. Out of this creative ferment arises...

Me. You. Religious beliefs. Scientific discoveries. Blogs. Books. Life. Death. Joy. Pain. Questions. Answers. Everything.

It isn't exactly true that we are all one, because obviously there are lots of different things that have manifested as Everything. But it's clear that the cosmos is a whole, so now I worship at the altar of scientifically defensible wholeiness rather than imaginary holiness.

Everything is interconnected. Everything is dependent on other things for its existence. No thing and no one is an island, compete unto itself. Reality is an interwoven web with no dangling threads. 

So the way I see it, love is an integral aspect of the way things are.

Meaning, reality (including us human beings) is bound together by unbreakable connections. We can't escape being attracted to this and that, because such is the way of the world, of the universe, of the cosmos.

And so is hate: lack of attraction, disengagement, disinterest. It isn't possible to have love without hate, just as there is no such thing as up without down, or hot without cold. 

We can't be equally connected or attracted to everything in existence. Neither can unconscious entities. If this were the case, reality would be a featureless blob. Life is a flux, a flow, an ever-changing dance. 

We come closer; we grow apart. We smile; we frown. We feel at peace; we feel at war.

For me, "love" points to all of this.

It is the way things are: interconnected, in relationships, yet with no fixed essence or state of being. There's no way to put words to this, because it's what reality is, was, and always will be absent human conceptions.

That said (or unsaid), maybe it makes sense to say, "love is acceptance of everything that really exists." I used the word love in the title of my post, "Respect reality, not religion, if you love the Ultimate."

At every moment, each of us is enjoying a great gift: reality.

Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches connect us with a world that exists independent of our subjective consciousness. The proof of this is that we can say to someone else, "Do you see that? Do you hear that? Doesn't this taste great?", and learn that what we consider to be real, actually is.

For me, mindfulness of the present moment has become my religion (speaking loosely; mindfulness is far removed from traditional religiosity). I try to separate my senses from my stories. Reality is different from our beliefs. 

Tantra vs. Buddhist ethics (Tantra is a lot more fun!)

I don't know much about Tantra. I've had the impression that Tantra was all about wild spiritual sex -- which might have some truth to it, but possibly just a little.

David Chapman, though, knows a lot about Tantra. The real Tantra. Also, Chapman is an expert on Buddhism. So he's just the guy to write a post called "Buddhist ethics": a Tantric critique.

The post, like all of Chapman's writings (I'm a fan), is clear and nicely composed. Still, it will strike people not into this subject as rather Buddhist-geeky. 

Which isn't a criticism. Just an observation. 

I read some parts of his piece carefully, and other parts less carefully. The whole essay, though, merits reading. Though focused on Tantric and Buddhist ethics, Chapman addresses issues that are relevant to anyone seeking to live a happy, meaningful, ethical life.

Which is just about everyone, right?

Here's some passages that I particularly liked, which will give you a flavor of David Chapman's piece.

A highlight of my time as a Wiccan Neopagan was the culminating ritual of a week-long retreat. The ceremony evolved by stages into two hundred witches dancing naked around a bonfire for hours after midnight. It was a sublime, transformative experience.

It is unthinkable that anything similar might happen on a Consensus Buddhist retreat. But why? What Buddhist principle would it violate?

The ritual violated every principle of Sutrayana. But nobody practices that in America. What of Consensus Buddhism? That is not anti-nakedness, anti-dancing, anti-bonfires, or anti-staying-up-late. Or is it?

Such a ritual would be too much fun. You might have frighteningly strong emotions. You might lose control. That would be undignified and awkward. Someone might see you having too much fun, and would judge you for it, and you’d feel awful the next day.

These are not Buddhist criteria. They are Puritan criteria. They are American middle class public morality—which is mainly Puritanism, lightly revised to reflect improved contraceptive technology.

...Two puritan fears inhibit us. The first is that intense enjoyment must lead to harm. “That ritual sounds extremely problematic. Probably everyone drank way too much, and some had inappropriate sex they regretted in the morning. You should be mindful at all times, lest you harm yourself or others. That was the traditional meaning of the Fifth Precept.”

Tantra emphasizes personal responsibility, and basic sense and sanity. Tantra is not hedonism—the antonym of puritanism in current usage—but only because it recognizes actions have longer-term consequences. Seeking immediate pleasure without regard for consequences is simply stupid.

If you drink too much, expect and accept the result. Don’t blame the ritual’s leaders; no one forced you to do that. You should know your own limits and act accordingly. “We shouldn’t hold revels on Buddhist retreats because some people would do stupid things” gives stupid people veto power over the religious practice of responsible people. That’s morally wrong, in my opinion.

The second fear is social judgement. Puritanism encourages everyone to police everyone else’s enjoyment. I think that is also morally wrong.

If I can offer just one piece of ethical advice, from this whole series on “Buddhist ethics,” it is this:

Do not judge, censor, condemn, or ridicule anyone else (not even those bad people!) for enjoying things you consider “problematic,” “inappropriate,” or just don’t like yourself.

“Problematic” could be an expression of genuine moral concern. Too often, though, it’s just an expression of self-righteous judgmentalism. Those bad people enjoy the wrong things, and too much. “Inappropriate” may conceal simple envy.

Learn to accept other people enjoying things you dislike—or that your social group rejects. Then learn to enjoy their enjoyment of those things. This is entirely possible! You may then come to enjoy those things, too—if you have the courage to engage in pleasures your social group disparages.

You may find the only reason you thought you disliked them is that “people like you” aren’t “supposed to” like them. You may also find you truly don’t like them—and that’s also fine. You can still enjoy other people’s enjoyment of them. 

30-plus days into Headspace meditation, I'm liking it a lot

A bit over a month ago I discovered Headspace, which was founded by Andy Puddicombe, a British guy who trained as a Buddhist monk before starting this online meditation site.

My first free trial experience on July 7 led me to write "Yikes! I actually like a guided Headspace meditation."

I'm not a big fan of guided meditations. Usually they irk more than relax me. I get annoyed with the (usually) New Age'y tone of the person doing the guiding.

Hey, if anybody is going to annoy me while I meditate, I'm perfectly capable of filling that role myself. After about 45 years of daily meditation, that's one thing I've learned from contemplating the workings of my mind.

(Maybe the only thing... but at least that's one thing.)

A few minutes ago, though, I actually enjoyed a ten minute guided meditation. Listening on my laptop while sitting outside on our deck, I made it through the first Headspace lesson with essentially zero annoyance.

With the aid of a discount "coupon" code I found through the grace of the great god Google, after trying out ten free 10-minute guided meditations I decided to sign up for a full year's worth of Headspace. I think the cost was around $70-80. 

Seemed like a fair price for enlightenment. Which isn't really what I'm after, though. Not now, in my current churchless frame of mind.

For about thirty-five years I used to meditate from an hour to two and a half hours a day, using a mixture of mantra meditation and open awareness techniques. I gained a lot from all that meditating. However, I'm finding the Headspace approach to be more appealing.

Again, for the person I am now.

Before, I was very mystically inclined. I believed it was possible to detach my consciousness from my bodily being and enter higher supernatural realms of reality. The Sant Mat meditation I practiced was founded on a theology that viewed this world as an illusion, a pale reflection of much more vibrant spiritual dimensions.

Over time I grew disenchanted with this dualistic philosophy. Not only wasn't there any demonstrable evidence that it was true, it didn't even make sense. 

Sant Mat taught that supposedly the lower mental and physical realms of creation were under the control of a Negative Power, Kal, who -- yeah, I know this sounds really weird -- stood on one foot for eons, impressing "God" (Sat Purush) so much he got the right to oversee our universe.

Which means our goal should be to get out of this wretched dump of materiality and become pure soul again. Psychologically, this isn't a healthy way to live. I knew quite a few Sant Mat devotees who were disgusted with their own body and mind, seeing them as obstacles to becoming a pristine spiritual being.

By contrast, Puddicombe's Headspace meditations are pleasingly here-and-now centered. I've completed the first 30 days of guided meditations. This unlocked the full panoply of Headspace content. I'm now into a Self-Esteem series. 

A recent New Yorker article, "The Higher Life," describes how trendy mindfulness is in today's high tech world, and how the Headspace approach to meditation has become so popular. The piece is well worth reading in its entirety.

Here's a description by author Lizzie Widdicombe (interesting that she wrote about Andy Puddicombe) of how her Headspace experience went.

The basics of mindfulness meditation are easy to find—you can download instructions from the Web. But, Puddicombe told Brzezinski at THRIVE, “I liken it to driving a car. It’s helpful to have someone sit there with you at first.” With noise-cancelling headphones, the app creates a surprisingly intimate experience—Puddicombe could be whispering in your ear.

He starts each session with a “checking in” routine, the contemplative equivalent of buckling your seat belt and adjusting the rearview mirror. He tells you to take a few deep breaths, to notice any background noise (instead of blocking it out, or screaming at its creator to shut up), and to become aware of “the different physical sensations . . . the weight of the body, the contact between the body and the chair.”

Slowly, he draws attention to your breath, which you count in sets of ten. Puddicombe savors the breath the way some people do wine. He talks about it appreciatively, pointing out its protozoan wisdom (“Remember, the body knows how to breathe”), its soothing rhythm, its oceanic rise and fall.

The seconds pass slowly. You seem to drop, briefly, into another dimension—the realm of quiet walks and kindergarten nap time. Like travel, the chief boon of meditation might be the way that it throws the place you came from into relief.

I’d never noticed what an incredible racket was going on in my mind: to-do lists, scraps of conversation, ancient memories. Sometimes Puddicombe’s voice would register as a distant peep. As calm set in, I’d occasionally achieve a few seconds of relaxed concentration—the meditative grail—which felt as if I were walking on a balance beam.

Just as often, I’d lose the thread and nod off completely, or begin composing angry e-mails. Puddicombe’s voice would interject. “It’s perfectly normal to be distracted,” he’d say. “Just bring the attention gently back to the breath.”

Puddicombe's Headspace guided meditations are, bluntly put, Buddhism without the bullshit.

Meaning, without the religious'y stuff that turns me off about traditional Buddhism. Karma. Rebirth. Eightfold path. Dharma. I think the Buddha correctly recognized some important facts about how the human mind works.

But he didn't have the benefit of our modern scientific understandings.

Sure, Buddhism's contention that we don't have a self or soul in the sense most people believe they do -- a steadfast ongoing ethereal consciousness largely or entirely distinct from the workings of the physical brain -- is remarkably consistent with 21st century neuroscience.

This doesn't mean that the rest of Buddhism deserves to be incorporated into someone's meditation practice. I was pleased to see in the article that Headspace irks some traditional Buddhists. 

Mindfulness and Meditation are only two of eight life-style choices that the Buddha instructed his followers to practice, in order to break free from the cycle of suffering and rebirth. The others involve a code of ethics. They include Right Understanding, Right Motivation, Right Livelihood (not making a living in a way that harms other beings), Right Action (not killing or hurting people), Right Speech, and Right Effort (diligence).

To pluck some things from the list, while ignoring others, strikes many Buddhists as absurd. McMahan said, “It would be as if somebody went to the Catholic Church and said, ‘I don’t buy all this stuff about Jesus and God, but I really dig this Communion ritual. Would you just teach me how to do that bit? Oh, and I want to start a company marketing wafers.’ ”

Well, if someone doesn't want to embrace the whole Buddhist thing, or the whole Catholic thing, or the whole thing of any other religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and choosing the parts they do like. 

Mindfulness and meditation really don't have anything to do with theology or supernatualism. All that counts is if these mental exercises have positive effects, in the same way as physical exercises do.

A final observation: during my more than three decades as a member of a mystical spiritual organization, I was struck by how many people in the group really didn't progress much as caring, compassionate, calm, centered human beings.

They were so focused on getting out of this world and entering a hypothetical "heaven," they pretty much ignored what it takes to be a normal happy, healthy person.  The term Spiritual Bypassing nicely captures their condition -- which I shared to some extent.

Spiritual bypass is a defense mechanism. Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from the truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in—and the difference is so subtle that we usually don't even know we are doing it.

The shorthand for spiritual bypass is grasping rather than gratitude, arriving rather than being, avoiding rather than accepting. It is spiritual practice in the service of repression, usually because we can not tolerate what we are feeling, or think that we shouldn't be experiencing what we are feeling.

The Headspace guided meditations are completely different from this.

They're about being here, not somewhere else. About being who we are, not someone else. About being in the present moment, not sometime else. 

Yikes! I actually like a guided Headspace meditation

I'm not a big fan of guided meditations. Usually they irk more than relax me. I get annoyed with the (usually) New Age'y tone of the person doing the guiding.

Hey, if anybody is going to annoy me while I meditate, I'm perfectly capable of filling that role myself. After about 45 years of daily meditation, that's one thing I've learned from contemplating the workings of my mind.

(Maybe the only thing... but at least that's one thing.)

A few minutes ago, though, I actually enjoyed a ten minute guided meditation. Listening on my laptop while sitting outside on our deck, I made it through the first Headspace lesson with essentially zero annoyance.

Enlightenment Diploma, please! 

However, I don't think I'm going to get one so fast, since I've got nine more free guided ten-minute meditations on my enlightenment plate, after which, from what I've learned so far on the Headspace website, I'll have to subscribe to get super-duper-even-more enlightened.

Which I may actually do.

I'm always open to new insights into meditation and my mind's mysterious workings. I've fallen into some ruts after all those years of meditating each morning on my own. It'll be interesting to see how mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe (great name) approaches things.

I came across Puddicombe via someone's Twitter tweet today. Clicking on the Ted talk link, I watched his "All it takes is 10 mindful minutes" presentation. Pleasingly, it lasts 9:24. Here's the You Tube version.

 

I wasn't overwhelmed by this talk.

In fact, I planned for tonight's blog post to be mostly a critique of what Puddicombe said. But when I browsed through the comments on the You Tube video, several people mentioned how much they liked his Headspace site -- which isn't mentioned in the talk.

That led me to Headspace, which led me to scan through an easy-to-read "The Science Behind Meditation" piece, which led me to click on the "Sign up for free" link, which led me to my first enjoyable ten minute guided meditation.

Puddicombe is an intriguing guy. So I'm looking forward to trying out some more of what he has to offer. Here's his bio:

Andy Puddicombe is a meditation and mindfulness expert. An accomplished presenter and writer, Andy is the voice of all things Headspace.

In his early twenties, midway through a university degree in Sports Science, Andy made the unexpected decision to travel to the Himalayas to study meditation instead. It was the beginning of a ten year journey which took him around the world, culminating with ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Northern India.

His transition back to lay life in 2004 was no less extraordinary. Training briefly at Moscow State Circus, he returned to London where he completed a degree in Circus Arts with the Conservatoire of Dance and Drama, whilst drawing up the early plans for what was later to become Headspace.

Idea of no-self doesn't translate into no-fear-of-death

Over on Slate there's an interesting piece by Nina Strohminger, Jay Garfield, and Shaun Nichols, "Buddhism and the Loss of Self." I've copied it in below for easy reading.

Surprisingly, research seems to show that Buddhists who don't believe they have (or are) a continuous self are more fearful of death than Hindus or adherents of the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam).

Buddhists also were less generous in a thought experiment about giving away a single dose of medicine that could extend either their own or someone else's life.

But I guess this really isn't so surprising. After all, our sense of self appears to persist even though we may think we've left it behind.

The way I think about this is, how would a supposedly "selfless" person feel if someone came up behind them on a dark sidewalk, put a gun to their head, and said I'm going to kill you.

I suspect they would react as anyone else would: with fear and trembling.

However, those who believe in an eternal soul will have the comfort of expecting that even if their body dies, their soulful conscious essence won't. So this could explain why Buddhists who embrace a doctrine of no-self are more afraid of death than Hindus, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Here's the essay:

Buddhism and the Loss of Self
by Nina Strohminger, Jay Garfield, and Shaun Nichols

Unlike Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism embraces the idea that there is no self, only a sequence of ever-changing and impermanent psychophysical processes. Just as one cannot step into the same river twice, there is no such thing as a continuous self, a single “me” that persists over time. Because there is no continuous self in life, there is no self to preserve in death.

The Buddhist no-self doctrine is sometimes said to alleviate a familiar source of suffering: fear of death. By focusing early and often on how the self is continually dying, many Buddhist scholars argue, one is able to make peace with death of the physical body. Buddhists also believe that embracing the no-self doctrine is central to the elimination of suffering: when one does away with the self, egocentricity and selfishness go with it.

Though the benefits of Buddhism have been oft-repeated, until recently there had been almost no empirical work on whether Buddhists actually are less selfish or less afraid of death. Our research team recently traveled to Nepal and India to examine the impact of these religious teachings on their adherents.

We measured responses from displaced Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus. We also surveyed Americans who were raised in Abrahamic religious traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). Unlike Buddhism, Hinduism and Abrahamic religions characteristically subscribe to the belief that there is a self that persists over time (an ātman or soul), which survives the body in rebirth or the afterlife.

Our data show that Buddhists have internalized the no-self doctrine. While Americans and Indians indicate a high belief in the connectedness of the self and an essential core self that persists across the lifespan, Buddhists strongly disagree with these statements. This was true whether our test subjects were Buddhist monks and nuns or Buddhist laypeople. Buddhists also believe in greater impermanence of the world and everything in it.

We also asked these populations if they coped with death by embracing the no-self doctrine. While almost all Tibetans affirmed this coping strategy, virtually none of the Americans said they did. (Abrahamic religions rely on other means for coping with death, such as belief in an afterlife.) Indian Hindus were somewhere in between.

The no-self doctrine is deeply insinuated into the Tibetan Buddhists, but how do these beliefs affect anxiety about death and selfishness? We gave our subjects the fear of personal death scale to fill out, which contains a series of statements about different kinds of reasons one might be afraid of death, to which subjects rate their level of agreement. The scale allows us to measure both the overall fear of death and the reasons for this anxiety.

We were particularly interested in the items related to self-annihilation, which include, “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the loss and destruction of the self,” and, “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the destruction of personality.” When we asked prominent Tibetan scholars how a good Buddhist ought to respond to this scale, they said that one should have little to no fear of destruction of the self.

Nonetheless, Buddhist monks and nuns—those who were steeped in these religion doctrines day in and day out—exhibited significantly more fear of self-annihilation than Americans or Indians. Buddhist laypeople, who were less versed in the details of the doctrine of selflessness, also exhibited less fear than the monastics. If we consider only the other possible reasons to fear death, such as fear of the unknown, Buddhists were no less fearful than anyone else. In short, the no-self doctrine, rather than equipping the Tibetan lamas with serenity regarding end of life, seems to provoke a deep-rooted anxiety of self-annihilation, and does nothing to reduce overall fear of death.

In another survey, we gave participants a tradeoff task to measure generosity in end-of-life decisions. Imagine, we said, that you have a terminal disease that will kill you in six months unless you take a medication. There is only one dose of the medication available. If you take it, it will prolong your life by six months. If you don’t take the medication, it will go to someone else who has the same condition and, like you, will die in six months. If the medicine would prolong his life by twelve months instead of six, would you still take the medicine? What about two years? How much more life would the stranger have to receive before you would give up your medicine?

What we found surprised us. While Abrahamic and Hindu populations chose to give their medicine away when the stranger would live an additional couple of years, Buddhists were exceedingly reluctant to give their medicine away under any circumstances. If there is a ceiling on how much Buddhists value their lives over others, we never found it. Our scale only went up to “more than five years”—more than 70 percent of Buddhists selected this option.

Much of Buddhist philosophy and religious practice is aimed at cultivating selflessness, rechanneling concerns to the larger moral universe around us. But we did not find this effect in our studies. Ironically, it seems that these teachings, instead of mitigating fear of death and nurturing generosity, engender some of the behaviors and thought patterns they seek to destroy. These effects are especially strong among monastics who have the deepest understanding of these doctrines. They are the most fearful of self-annihilation, and the least generous with their lives.

This cross-cultural research highlights that religious teachings can have a deep and lasting impact on precisely the sort of moral and existential quandaries that religion is designed to help us navigate. However, these beliefs will not always have the impact on practitioners that we intend—and may in some cases even be counterproductive.

Sam Harris' "Waking Up" video is well worth $4.99

I've read Sam Harris' book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. I've written four blog posts about his book (see here, here, here, and here). 

So when I learned that Harris was offering a $4.99 video -- an hour of him talking about the message of "Waking Up" plus an hour or so of audience Q&A -- I wondered if it was worth five bucks to me.

Turns out, it was. 

I came away with a deeper appreciation for Harris' central theme: the supernatural side of religions is bullshit, but a secular understanding of how human consciousness functions isn't.

Meaning, basically, that we can live a happier and more fulfilling life by being more mindful. Near the start of his talk Harris says this is "a passion for observing what is subjectively real in this moment."

I like that word, subjectively.

This seems key to me, because otherwise mindfulness and meditation can be used to justify religious dogmas that assume it is possible to know the truth about objective reality through higher states of awareness.

Harris doesn't really mean this, though he does say in the video that it is possible to make objective statements about human consciousness. For example, he puts up a photo of Abraham Lincoln and observes that almost certainly nobody in this auditorium was thinking of this man until now.

My overall impression of the video is that Harris does an excellent job explaining important philosophical, scientific, and religious issues in an appealing way.

His extensive experience both as a neuroscientist and long-time student of Buddhist meditation make him well-qualified to tread a middle ground between the extremes of unfounded religious belief and a disregard of the potential to explore what Harris (problematically) calls "spirituality." 

Harris' use of that word was questioned by an audience member in the Q&A portion of the video. Harris acknowledged its limitations, but said he couldn't think of a better one. 

What he means by "spiritual" is a realization of the selflessness of consciousness. It has nothing to do with supernatural realms, psychic phenomena, the soul, God, or such.

In the video a man tells Harris that, as an avid hiker, he experiences a state of selfless awe and connection with the world when he is in the majesty of the high Sierra mountains. Harris responds that what he means by "spiritual" is something deeper than that.

Well, as I said in my final post about Harris' book, I'm not so sure. 

Buddhist meditation -- Harris favors the Dzogchen variety -- surely is a proven way of experiencing more fully the reality of no-self. Simply living life with eyes wide open is another way. I doubt that sitting at the feet of a Dzogchen master is necessary to realize there is no self or soul inside my head.

Harris writes:

We have long known that how things seem in the world can be misleading, and this is no less true of the mind itself. And yet many people have found that through sustained introspection, how things seem can be brought into closer register with how they are.

Well, not only through introspection. Extrospection -- diving into the world -- can do this also. 

Dance. Run. Ski. Surf. Walk. Gaze. Love. 

Harris correctly says, "Subjectively speaking, there is only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious." 

Other audience questions addressed this issue in various ways: if we don't have a separate "self" that is conscious, then why is Harris so big on achieving a mindful state where part of human consciousness is having an experience, and another part is aware of "I'm having this experience."

This was brought out in a Q&A about Harris' movie projector analogy. We can either (1) watch a movie and forget that it is a movie, or (2) be aware of the projector and screen, along with the movie.

In another post I'll talk about another author's knowledgeable perspective on this that makes more sense to me. It's more Taoist than Buddhist, which is Harris' leaning. I prefer to see "immersion" and "detachment" as possibilities open to human consciousness, neither of which being better than the other.

Sometimes it's good to be fully immersed in an experience, forgetting everything else, pretty much. Other times it's good to be aware of what you're aware of, so to speak.

Harris repeatedly says in the video that the sense of "I" is thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

In other words, habitual, scattered, Monkey Mind, rambling thinking. I can resonate with this perspective, since thinking in this way does seem to narrow us into focusing on the content of our own mind, while we lose touch with the outside world. The "I" is enlarged, while everything else is diminished.

However, watching a movie with very minimal awareness that I'm watching a movie -- that seems to me like a great way to watch a movie. Just as dancing without knowing that "I'm dancing" is a great way to dance. 

I'll end this post with a countervailing message from Harris that I did completely agree with. A man asked a question about whether doing what Harris advised would lead to a feeling that life is more meaningful.

Harris responded, "When you're immersed in a deeply satisfying experience, you're not worried about what it means."

So true.

Meaning is a concept. Experience is, well, experience.

A fulfilling sexual experience doesn't require an extra conceptual topping of meaning to be pleasurable. Harris went on to say something like, "Finding an answer to a question about meaning is less interesting than an interesting present moment."

I've got more notes from my watching of Harris' video scribbled on some scraps of paper. I'll probably share some of them later.

Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality

As I said in a previous post, I've dug David Loy's book, "Nonduality," out of a forgotten book bag and have gotten back to reading it after a several-year break. 

A few days ago I read his chapter, The Mind-Space Analogy. Pretty damn brilliant. Of course, this book is based on Loy's philosophy doctoral dissertation, so I guess the brilliance isn't surprising.

Below I've shared Loy's analogy in his own words, albeit condensed. I've left out F and G of his analogy, which are another form of Mahayana Buddhism and Theism. 

As you'll see, what Loy has done is imagine that something akin to "pure consciousness" actually exists.

This is more than an individual consciousness; it is an all-pervasive Mind-space that bears considerable resemblance to how the Absolute is viewed in the Eastern philosophies of Hindu Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Forms of theism, of course, view the Absolute or God as an entity that is distinct from everything in existence. So the inclusive emptiness of Mind-space doesn't fit well with theism (though they can be crammed together with a bit of effort).

What I like most about Loy's analogy is how it points to this: a supposed experience of the Absolute can be interpreted in various ways. Meaning, this experience isn't revelatory of The Way Things Are, though religious true believers imagine that it is.

In my college days, for example, I had numerous psychedelic experiences that gave me a profoundly different view of the world. But I just looked upon these as impossible-to-describe experiences, not a glimpse of an objectively true alternative reality. 

Everybody, repeat, everybody, has ineffable personal experiences. In fact, it can be argued that each and every experience is ineffable, since it is ours alone.

What Loy has done is point out how the same experience of his hypothetical Mind-space can be interpreted in various contradictory ways that correspond to how differing Eastern philosophical/religious perspectives view reality. 

In short, it may indeed be possible for people to have a "non-dual" experience of the world, but this tells us little or nothing about what the world is like.

Here's a shortened version of Loy's Mind-Space analogy.

Comparing the Absolute to empty space is a metaphor that naturally suggests itself when we want to describe "something" which in itself has no characteristics. 

...Thus space seems to be an excellent analogy for "empty nonduality." The analogy breaks down -- that is, we are reminded it is only an analogy -- in that our usual understanding of space conceives of it as an objectively existing medium that things are "in" and as having neither life nor awareness, whereas sunyata for Mahayana, Brahman for Vedanta and the Tao for Taoism are the ground of everything including all consciousness.

Of course, this is nothing other than the two sides of our familiar duality, the commonsense but problematical bifurcation between object (in this case, "material" space) and subject.

But let us use our imagination to eliminate this duality, by supposing that space is conscious. Let us suppose that as a result of some experience I realize that "my" consciousness is not mine at all but is an aspect of space itself.

...this experience of Mind-space seems to reveal "The Way Things Really Are." But if "I," having had this experience, were to be asked what I had realized, how would I answer? The point of this chapter is that this "Mind-space experience" lends itself to very different and contradictory descriptions.

In the following section I imagine some of the responses that might occur during a conversation among people who have had this experience and who have drawn metaphysical conclusions from it.

Speaker A [Sankkya-Yoga]: "There are two very different substances, both of which are uncaused and eternal and omnipresent, although they do not seem to interfere with each other or even interact. One is immutable and attributeless consciousness (Mind-space), which, I now realize, is what my mind always has been. The other is more difficult to characterize. I suppose we can call it an 'energy-stuff' or perhaps a fine 'matter-stuff'... now I realize that immutable consciousness and the constantly changing energy-stuff are quite different from each other and always have been."

Speaker B [Advaita Vedanta]: "Speaker A is mistaken. Only one thing is real: this immutable, attributeless Mind-space, which is what I and everything else really are. The constantly changing forms that arise within and from this Mind-space are simply illusions which delude us about what really is: they have no substance or reality of their own, for they are only phenomena that represent nothing but merely manifest the Mind-space... There is only this Mind-space, which is birthless and deathless and has no characteristics of its own."

Speaker C [Early Buddhism]: "What the others have called 'Mind-space' cannot really be said to exist, because it has no characteristics at all. It is so 'empty' that it is literally nothing, and how can nothing be 'real'? What 'I' have realized is that there is no 'I' and never was. All that does exist are those constantly changing phenomena -- or rather the 'attribute-elements' of which things are composed and which are now experienced clearly... However, it doesn't matter anymore what attributes arise or pass away, now that the sense of 'I' has evaporated and there is the deep peace of emptiness in its place."

Speaker D [Mahayana Buddhism]: "I agree with speaker C that speakers A and B, by referring to mind-space, have made something out of nothing -- that is, they have hypostatized emptiness into a substance. Yet I must also agree with speaker B that phenomena are not real, for they too are empty... Except for speaker A, we all agree that these appearances [of phenomena] do not represent any material substratum, but speaker C still tries to make these attributes into little substances of their own... Phenomena are illusory only if we are deluded into taking them as self-existing: now that we have realized they are empty appearances, we should accept them for what they are and be able to play with them freely. The dance may have no meaning, but there is still the empty dance."

Speaker E [ Taoism]: "I agree with speaker D, but he does not go far enough. He too is still one-sided. We have realized that the world is nondual, but we should not be so infatuated with this new way of experiencing that we become prejudiced against the more usual dualistic mode... Subject-object duality and the plurality of phenomena are also aspects of the world, and we should not dualistically reject one mode in favor of the other. Let us accept that there are these two ways of experiencing, without prejudice against either. Our aim should be to understand fully the relation between these two modes in order to be able to experience both."

Loy summarizes these perspectives by their answers to two questions: 

Is Mind-space real?
Are Phenomena real?

Here's the answers.

A. Sankhya-Yoga: Yes, both Mind-space and Phenomena are real.
B. Advaita Vedanta: Yes, Mind-space is real. No, Phenomena are unreal.
C. Early Buddhism: No, Mind-space is unreal. Yes, Phenomena are real.
D. Mahayana Buddhism: No, both Mind-space and Phenomena are unreal.
E. Taoism: duality and nonduality are both "Real"

So take your pick.

A "mystical" experience of nonduality or cosmic oneness can be interpreted in various ways. We can accept the validity of the experience, yet be no closer to knowing the nature of absoute reality.