Church of the Churchless

If you want a fresh self, a right-brain one is worth considering

One of the reasons I'm so attracted to modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism is that each discipline agrees that the unchanging Self most people believe they have is an illusion -- the reality being that we have multiple selves popping into existence all the time.

Cognitive neuropsychologist Chris Niebauer speaks about this in his book, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, which I wrote about a few days ago. Here's a compelling passage from his "Pattern Perception and the Missing Self" chapter.

Noting just how many "yous" appear in a day works to dismantle the illusion of a singular "you" behind it all. A sense of freedom can emerge from the realization that you are under no obligation to be consistent. You need not try to glue the continuous change in the world into one single thing.

Anger may appear with one "you," but that is only one page of the flip-book, which will soon be replaced with another emotion, another perception, another thought. Like the sun rising and setting, these "yous" will come and go. There is no need to cling to some and avoid others.

There need be no conflict between these selves -- so you can abandon the wrestling match between "sinner you" and "saint you." This frees up an enormous amount of mental energy and fundamentally changes how we can experience the world.

Lastly, you can try to notice that in between the yous there are moments when you are so engaged in some activity that the self isn't even noticeably around. This points to a central question of this book: where is the self when no one is thinking about it?

In his next chapter, "The Basics of Right-Brain Consciousness," Niebauer starts off with the fascinating story of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a stroke that took much of her left brain off-line. I wrote about Taylor in "Brain Damage = Enlightenment?"

The stroke caused her inner voice to fall silent, as it affected the side of her brain that deals with language. But as pleasant as this may seem to those of us (which is virtually everybody) afflicted with monkey mind, Taylor had to undergo years of therapy before she could return to her scholarly work. I shared some quotes from her in my blog post. Taylor said:

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

...So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is.

Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

This is entirely consistent with Niebauer's perspective. He correctly observes that because the left brain is the primary handler of words, language, and concepts, it has the upper hand in determining how most people view the world. Namely, through the lens of words, language, and concepts. 

But there obviously are other ways of experiencing reality. When we walk, ride a bicycle, dance, reach for a glass of water, and such, we Just Do It. We don't think about doing it. We don't talk about doing it. We just do it. Sure, we can also think and talk about those actions, but our doing is distinct from the speaking.

Evolution has brought us a brain divided into left and right hemispheres. So clearly both the left and right brain have important functions. Niebauer summarizes some of them.

In many ways the right brain is the yin to the yang of the left brain. For instance, in the same way that the left brain is categorical, the right brain takes a more global approach to what it perceives. Rather than dividing things into categories and making judgments that separate the world, the right brain gives attention to the whole scene and processes the world as a continuum.

Whereas the attention of the left brain is focused and narrow, the right brain is broad, vigilant, and attends to the big picture. Whereas the left brain focuses on the local elements, the right brain processes the global form that the elements create. The left brain is sequential, separating time into "before that" or "after this," while the right brain is focused on the immediacy of the present moment.

...Another way to summarize the differences between the left and right brain is that the left brain is the language center and the right brain is the spatial center. While admittedly this is reductive, it is a helpful way to summarize decades of research.

Language is categorical; it looks at one word at a time with a narrow focus either as you read or as you speak. When we process the space around us, we deal with the whole at once, not individual parts but how the parts are all connected as they are in any picture.

Niebauer recommends some right-brain activities: yoga, meditation, mindfulness, tai chi, qigong, Since I've been practicing tai chi for twenty years, I resonated with his observation about moving forms of meditation.

When done well, one is conscious of movement within space without verbal labels.

Well, based on my experience, it is possible to do both: be in the right brain flow while still engaging in some left brain verbiage. In my 2008 post about Taylor, I shared this anecdote.

There are lots of ways to get more in touch with our right brain – meditation, dancing, athletics, drugs, sex, to name a few. Getting into "the zone" is a good thing. But for sure, it's not the only thing.

Yesterday I felt great in my Tai Chi class. At the end of it we did the long form, 108 moves that should take around 20 minutes to perform (or "play," in Tai Chi parlance).

About a third a way into the form I thought, "I'm flowing today." About halfway through I thought, "There's no way I'm going to stumble or make a wrong move."

As soon as I said that to myself, my analytical side responded with, "Oh no, you shouldn't be thinking that way. You're going to jinx yourself. You're going to talk yourself out of the zone you're in."

But I didn't.

I kept on feeling in the flow. Part of me was in the zone, and part of me could say "You're in the zone." The two parts weren't interfering with each other, as they sometimes do. I didn't have to shut off half of my brain to play the long form proficiently.

Balance. Not going to extremes. The middle way. Accepting what is. Flowing flexibly. This is the way to approach the left brain/right brain thing. Here's another tip from Niebauer that appeals to me.

Once a day, do something for no reason at all. As one cannot plan to be spontaneous no matter what your left brain tells you, allow for moments of opportunity to arise. If at some point you feel like getting up and taking a walk, do so -- not because you want the fresh air or because work is boring but because you had the inclination and now are acting upon it "for no reason."

Obvious, but needs repeating: our conceptions may seem true, but often aren't

It had been a while since the Great God Amazon blessed me with another book about how our usual conception of the self is an illusion. But after prayerfully searching for "neuroscience" titles, my faith was rewarded with No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, by Chris Niebauer.

This won't be my favorite book is this genre, but I'm enjoying the first part of it.

I did peek ahead to a later chapter on consciousness and was disappointed to see positive mentions of Rupert Sheldrake. That's an annoyance. However, what I've read so far seems neuroscientifically correct. Niebauer has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuropsychology so that's to be expected. I'll give him a pass on the Sheldrake mentions if that's the only woo-woo stuff in his book.

On the plus side, after I read his chapter on "Language and Categories" this morning I had a strangely satisfying insight that left me feeling lighter and more relaxed. I say strangely because Niebauer didn't say anything that I didn't already know. He just said it in a way that made me feel a bit differently about my own beliefs and conceptions.

The lead-up to that chapter was "Meet the Interpreter." Here Niebauer described the experiments with split-brain patients whose connection between the left and right parts of the brain was severed, often in an attempt to prevent serious epileptic seizures. These experiments demonstrated that the left part of the brain is where language happens, providing interpretations of sensory information known to the right part. 

For example, a split-brain patient had a picture of a chicken's foot presented to the left brain only, and  a picture of a snow scene was shown to the right brain only. Then the patient was shown several pictures to both sides of the brain at the same time and asked to pick which was the most related to the original image they were shown.

The right brain pointed to a picture of a snow shovel while the left brain pointed to a picture of a chicken. Then the experimenter asked "Why is your left hand pointing to a snow shovel?" (The input and output from each side of the body is processed by the opposite side of the brain; so the right brain used the left hand to point to the snow shovel.)  Niebauer writes:

Keep in mind, when the experimenter was talking to the split-brain patient, he was talking only to the patient's left brain, since the left brain controls speech. The left brain should have said, "I haven't talked to the right brain in a long time, I don't know why it does what it does with that left hand," but it didn't. 

Without hesitation, the left brain said, "Oh, that's simple: the chicken foot goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop." The patient stated this with absolute confidence. Here is what's most important about this: the talking left side of the brain easily came up with a plausible and coherent, but completely incorrect explanation based on the evidence it had available.

That's interesting, but few of us are split-brain patients. So what meaning does that have for me? Niebauer explains.

Now I would invite you to think about the interpretive mechanism of your own mind in light of what I've just told you about these experiments. For instance, if something noticeable happens, say a person cuts you off in traffic, someone gets up and suddenly runs out of a room, or an attractive person looks at you a second longer than normal, you hear a voice in your head that creates an explanation of the event: "He is a jerk," "They must have forgotten something," or "He or she is interested in me."

Notice that those are all interpretations; they may be true or they may not be. However, because many people are not conscious of the left-brain interpreter, they can't even consider that their thoughts are interpretations, but rather feel secure they are seeing things "as they really are."

This passage moves the interpreter from the outside to the inside of us.

Because the left brain looks outward and only focuses on objects, categorizes them, and labels them, is it possible that it also looks inward and does the same thing? In other words, does the left brain see thought happening in the brain and continuously create a "thing" out of the process of thinking, which it then labels "me"? 

Is the sense of self related to seeing patterns in randomness? Is it possible that the self we invest so much in is nothing more than a story to help explain our behaviors, the myriad events that go on in our lives, and our experiences in the world?

Have you ever looked up at the stars in the night sky or the clouds during the day and been convinced some pattern was out there? Is it possible that you might be making that same mistake every day when you look within and find an ego or self?

In his next chapter, Niebauer talks about categories.

Another characteristic of the left brain is its constant propensity to create categories. In fact, almost everything the left brain does, from language to its perception of objects in space, is categorial in nature.

What do we mean by category? Categories are just another type of map of reality. They are mental representations that don't exist "out there" in the world, but rather they are only in the human mind -- the left side of the brain to be specific.

Categories are based on the left brain's ability to see differences and create opposites and are formed when things in the world that are continuous are grouped by some common features and then treated as one unit.

This has many benefits for us humans. But it also can lead us to wrongly believe that we know more about the world than we really do. This passage resonated with me. It left me with the aforementioned "lightness of being," because it reminded me that my beliefs, and everyone's beliefs, shouldn't be taken as seriously as most of us do.

Simply becoming aware of the interpreter and the endless categories it creates through judgment frees you from being tied to the inevitability of these judgments. That is to say, when you become conscious of the interpreter, you are free to choose to no longer take its interpretations so seriously. 

In other words, when you realize that everyone's brain is constantly interpreting, in ways that are subjective and often inaccurate or completely incorrect, you might find yourself able to grasp this as "just my opinion" or "the way I see it" rather than "this is the way it is."

You being to see your judgments as simply a different line in the sand than others. When someone approaches you with a "this is the way it is" attitude, you can appreciate that this person is dominated by the left brain, that they are a servant to its master. 

As a result, there is no need to take their actions or attitudes personally; it's a biological function that they have not yet recognized. This small perspective shift is enough to change how we live with each other and ourselves. 

Zen and Jack Reacher have this in common

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where we spent several days with my daughter's (Celeste) family -- Patrick (husband) and Evelyn (my granddaughter). They live in southern California and came up for Evelyn's orientation at the University of Oregon, where she'll be a freshman this fall.

Yesterday we made a trip into Sisters for lunch and to browse Paulina Springs Books, a wonderful small town bookstore where I always find something to buy.

Two of the three books I purchased were Lee Child's Make Me and Hiking Zen by two Zen monks, Pham Xa and Pham Luu.

I'm a big fan of Lee Child's books about Jack Reacher, a kick-ass ex-Army MP who travels around the United States with just a toothbrush and the clothes he's wearing, getting into adventures and trouble not of his own making, since Reacher has a strong sense of duty to help people he encounters who are being victimized by someone(s) with power and influence.

It had been a while since I'd bought a Jack Reacher book. But I buy Zen books all the time. This one appealed to me because we were in a beautiful natural setting in central Oregon, and we live full time in a beautiful natural setting in western Oregon's Willamette Valley. 

I didn't expect I'd find any commonality between a thriller book and a philosophical book. Yet I did. Jack Reacher thrillers rarely, if ever, include any descriptions about how Reacher views his life that make me pause and think, "Wow, I resonate with this." In this case, I liked the sentence so much, I committed it to memory as soon as I read it on page 4 of the book I'd just bought.

He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing.

Nicely put, Lee Child. It kind of fits with my oft-repeated meditation advice to myself, "Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become."  I described it this way.

Nowhere to go… Here I am, stock still on my cushion. No place else I need to be for the next 30 minutes or so. This is It.

Nothing to do… No mental place I need to arrive at either. I don't need to think, feel, imagine, perceive, or do anything else inside my head.

No one to become… Even more, no transformation of my basic being needs to happen from on high, or down below. Like Popeye, I am what I am (or, I yam what I yam).

This centers me in three dimensions of space, time, and being – exactly where I am. I realize that every movement from this center, on what spiritual traditions call a "path," is going to take me farther away from really real reality, not closer.

That's my theory, at least.

I'm also just a few pages into the Hiking Zen book. Here's some passages that struck me as Jack Reacher'ish. Or maybe it was these passages that made me think the Lee Child sentence was Zen'ish.

Often in everyday life, we walk to arrive somewhere. Hiking Zen's most basic principle is to arrive in each step we take, to stop losing ourselves in thoughts about the past or future.

...The unknown can be scary. It may feel more comfortable to be indoors in a house or to drive to work in a car. Observe, though, how the boxes we spend so much time in affect our minds. The mind mirrors its habitat. If we aren't careful, our worldview is drawn with very clear borders: this is mine, that is yours -- we become territorial, overly attached to our boxes. 

...Observing nature, we realize everything changes, and our habitual fear begins to loosen its grip. 

...To claim our sovereign nature as free, wild, endlessly creative, and beautiful creatures, we need to train ourselves by untraining ourselves. We need to step out of the boxes in which we find ourselves and unravel our contemporary conditioning.

Belief in a human "essence" is strong, but almost certainly wrong

On the whole I agree with Amit Sood's view of things. He's an M.D. who has written a book about a more modern approach to mindfulness that I enjoyed reading. I decided to buy a recent book of his, It Takes You to Tango: Leverage the Science of Loneliness to Master the Art of Connection.

It's turned out to be sort of a disappointment. I'm liking the book, but so far it hasn't really done much to inform or interest me. And when I came to several chapters about what Sood calls the Esse, an essence in every person deeper than mind, I got even more disillusioned by the book.

One reason is that Sood appears to base his belief in Esse on what his English teacher, Mr. Kamesh, told him when Sood was a 15 year-old studying at a rural, state-funded school in North Central India. Here's how his story goes.

One morning, during a particularly rough week, he called me to his office to share an insight about water. I had no idea his thoughts would stay with me for the rest of my life, and in some ways, change my life's trajectory. Here is an approximate sequence of what I recall about my discussion that day.

Mr. Kamesh kept a glass half filled with water on the table.

"What do you see here?" he asked.

"A glass of water?" I was confused about where he was going.

"Yes, that's right. Dirty or clean?"

"Clean, I think," I said after peering through the glass.

Next, he took out a plastic bag full of dirt and emptied a few spoons in the water. After stirring gently, he asked, "What do you see now?"

"Dirty water," I said.

He nodded. "What might happen if we leave this water still for a few days?"

"The dust will settle at the bottom."

"Leaving the pure water at the top," his eyes brightened. "What do you learn from this?"

"If you leave the water still, it gets pure." I wasn't sure if I got the right answer or at least the one he wanted.

"Yes, that's good. But here is an even more important lesson. Behind every collection of dirty water is pure water that you can reclaim. Mud starts with pure water, and in the end, the same pure water will separate to leave the dirt. Mud has both dirt and water. While the dirt is more visible, the water keeps it together; otherwise the wind will blow it away."

The story goes on for a bit longer, then Sood says:

As I moved toward high school and then college, I was partially successful at holding on to Mr. Kamesh's teachings that the real me, my essence, my self, remains unblemished by anything that happens to my physical body or mind. This latter realization became a firm conviction as my brain's pre-frontal cortex matured. 

Well, it's a pretty big jump to go from what happens when dirt is stirred into a glass of water to what the essence of a human being is. I have no doubt that Sood has benefitted from believing that a pure unchanging essence is part of his being, along with an impure changeable body and mind. 

But beliefs aren't reality, no matter how they make us feel. Sood says:

For now, I feel comfortable considering our mind (Psyche) and our essence deeper than the mind (Esse) as the two elements constituting our experiencer (our self).

There's simply no evidence for such an essence. Julian Baggini speaks about this in his book, The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean To Be You?

It would be claiming too much to say that neuroscience has fully explained what selves are and how they can exist. Nevertheless, real progress has been made in recent decades and we are now in a position to at least sketch out how the self is constructed.

The most important finding, which seems to be universally accepted by all researchers into the self and the brain, is that brain research has given up on the search for the pearl of self. As the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks put it to me, 'We have this deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off, probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together.' The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.

...Broks says that, despite his intellectual convictions, he lives as a 'soul theorist' or 'ego theorist' who persists with the belief in a fixed core of self. 'I think we probably all do, because that's the way we've evolved biologically and sociologically to think and behave. Neuroscience is chipping and will chip away at the cherished ideas that go with that, like the idea that we're autonomous agents with free will and moral choice. But it won't stop us living by them and it probably shouldn't.'

No matter how tenuous a notion the self seems to be under scientific scrutiny, we cannot abandon it because it is the thread on which we hang our lives.

Probably true in most cases. Though it's possible that some people (I'm thinking of Buddhism here) not only intellectually recognize that there is no essence or enduring self, but also experience life from this selfless perspective.

Not knowing is most intimate -- a Zen koan that I grasped instantly

Zen master Henry Shukman's The Way app, which I embarked on in January of this year and have been enjoying ever since, contains guided meditations that include koans. 

Pleasingly, Shukman's view of koans isn't that they are a spiritual puzzle to be solved, but simply messages to consider and see what effect the koan has on us. A few days ago he introduced a koan that I was unfamiliar with: Not knowing is most intimate.

Two Zen teachers meet; one is carrying his bags. “Where are you going?”, inquires the first teacher.

“I’m going on a pilgrimage”, the other teacher responds.

“What’s the purpose of pilgrimage?” asks the first teacher.

“I don’t know.” he responds.

“Not knowing is most intimate.” Replies the first teacher.

Some Googling revealed that this is a much-discussed koan. For example, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I've just taken a quick look at those links because I agree with Shukman's approach to koans. There isn't a right or wrong answer to them. There's just how our own mind responds to them. 

Maybe this is an indication that I'm well on the road to enlightenment. Maybe this is an indication that I'm a pathetic Zen imposter.

Regardless, as soon as I heard Shukman share the koan on his The Way app, I understood what Not knowing is most intimate meant to me. Some additional pondering hasn't changed that first impression.

When I know something, whether it is part of the physical world outside of me or part of the mental world inside of me, there's necessarily a certain distance between my knowing and that thing. I know what 7 times 8 is, 56.

(I've heard that young students today in the United States aren't required to memorize the multiplication table; if so, that's disappointing; I use this knowledge a lot.)

That answer, a bit of knowledge, is something that exists within my mind. It comes and goes, depending on whether I need to know what 7 times 8 is. Same applies to everything else that I know which isn't a habitual action, like how to ride a bicycle, that has become part of my innate physical action repertoire.

This means that knowing brings me close to the object of knowledge, but leaves me at some distance from it. I could say that knowing is intimate, but not most intimate. 

That's reserved for my not-knowing. When I don't know something, this truly is most intimate. I don't have to grasp anything. My absence of knowledge is right there, closer to me than anything else could be, an intimacy of ignorance. 

I can forget or misplace objects of knowledge. My not-knowing is very different. It is part and parcel of my consciousness, the nothingness that forms a backdrop to my knowing. 

When I drove to downtown Salem for my 4:30 pm Tai Chi class today, I didn't know where I was going to find a parking place. This absence of knowledge was crystal clear to me. I didn't need to exert any effort. I didn't worry that I might be wrong. Not knowing where I'd park my car was the most intimate bit of non-knowledge in my mind -- along with countless other things that I don't know.

Sure, it takes some effort to consciously realize something that I don't know. However, the not-knowing itself is completely effortless. It isn't something that I acquire. It is something that is so intimate an aspect of my consciousness that to even call it an aspect is going too far. 

Not-knowing is the same as being for me. The sense of "I am" carries with it an inescapable "I am not." Likewise, all that I know rests on the foundation of what I don't know. Pleasingly, it takes effort for me to know. Not-knowing is effortless, since it is the most intimate quality I possess. Or more accurately, fail to possess.

What is changeless? Important question that I'm not sure about.

I stay in touch with a few people from my high school years, including an old friend that I went to elementary school with. He's as philosophically and spiritually minded as I am, so I enjoy our periodic email exchanges.

In our most recent sharing of views, my friend included a quote from a previous message I'd sent him. I was referring to Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism is True, a book I've written about on this blog.

Wright says that the main illusions Buddhism can help us dissolve are a belief in an enduring unchanging self, and the related illusion that things outside of us in the world also possess an independent unchanging quality. He makes a good case, drawing both from Buddhism and neuroscience, that rather than a single Self, we actually are comprised of a bunch of mental modules, any one of which can come to the fore at a given time.

My friend said that from an early age his journey of prolonged self-inquiry has centered around the question, "What is changeless?" He shared some thoughts about this question, but noted that any answer truly can't be described or conceptualized.

He may be correct. However, that didn't stop me from responding to him today with:

I always enjoy your observations about life, reality, and all that. We’re both attracted to this sort of thing, though sometimes I feel like I’m almost as far away from realizing the truth of that “thing” as I was fifty years ago. 

Yes, I too struggle with what’s changeless versus what changes. Consciousness and awareness —that seems changeless, at least while we’re alive, because without it we wouldn’t know anything else, including what’s changeless or changeable. Beyond that, it’s an open question.

I know several people who have suffered from dementia lately. It’s a side effect of growing old, though one of the people is in his 50s I believe. It’s really difficult for loved ones, and the person themself, to see the person slipping away in the sense they’ve always known them and others. What remains is the bodily person and some memories and personal characteristics, but a lot is gone.

I do my best to remain centered in what’s actually happening with me, versus what my mind says might happen in the future or has happened in the past. This is tough sometimes, though. Mindfulness practice says to accept the toughness along with the mental thoughts of past and future, plus the physical reality of here/now. 

This strikes me as wise, even if I can’t manage it all the time. If change is happening continuously, accepting all those changes perhaps is the only way to deal with change.

 

Every time I go to my Tai Chi class I’m presented with images of the Taoist symbol showing yin flowing into yang, and yang into yin. There’s a never-ending balancing going on within and without us. Staying aware of all that balancing, the back and forth, maybe is the best I can do — since controlling what happens within and without me is impossible.

 

Is there anything that never changes? My intuition says "No." But I could be wrong about this.

For example, the laws of nature may never change. Yet physics and cosmology tell us that the laws of nature appeared at the moment of the big bang which marked the beginning of space and time, or spacetime in Einstein's formulation. 

If infinity or eternity exists, and I lean toward believing that they do, are they changeless? Maybe. At least, insofar as we know, since I have no idea how it would be possible to tell if there's a beginning or end to infinity or eternity.

But those examples are far removed from everyday life. Sure, religions say that God is beyond change, as is the soul, which some consider to be a changeless bit of being that survives a person's bodily death. This is in the realm of theology, though, not here-and-now reality.

In my life I can't think of anything that hasn't changed. Nor can I think of anything that could be changeless, whether it be part of my life or someone else's life. Again, as I said to my friend, consciousness is a constant in everyone's life, including my own. 

But to elevate consciousness to some sort of Cosmic Certainty, beyond change, strikes me as going way too far -- since every conscious being that has existed on our planet since life first arose has died and lost consciousness.

Sure, people love to imagine that consciousness is changeless, even considering this the hallmark of soul. That's merely an idea, though, a pleasant concept with no grounding in fact.

If someone else can come up with something that is changeless, not just theoretically but in demonstrable reality, leave a comment on this post. I'd be delighted to learn that change is almost universal, except for _________. Can anyone fill in that blank?

"The White Lotus" show raises question about Buddhist truth

First, unrelated to the primary subject of this post I wanted to mention a You Tube channel, No Nonsense Spirituality, that someone recently pointed out to me via an email, as he liked this woman's style. It's worth a look, based on my quick browsing of some videos. Here's what's said about a Welcome video:

Welcome to No-Nonsense Spirituality! If you're feeling lost in a world filled with competing beliefs and overwhelming choices, you’re not alone. In this video, Brit Hartley, an atheist spiritual director with advanced theological training, guides you through the process of deconstructing your beliefs about God, faith, and meaning. You’ll discover practical tools from the science of well-being and wisdom traditions that can help you create a life worth living, even in the face of uncertainty and nihilism. Here, you don't need to subscribe to any faith or dogma—just an open mind and a desire for authenticity. Join Brit every Monday as you explore how to navigate the challenges of life without the need for spiritual crutches, empowering you to rise above the harsh truths of reality.

Now, on to a discussion of what the third season of HBO's The White Lotus, which is set in Thailand, has to say about Buddhist truth. In short, not much. I say this because there isn't a single Buddhist truth, just as there isn't a single Christian truth, or a single truth about any other religion, mystical pursuit, or spiritual path.

In the appendix to his book, Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright says:

While I was writing this book, I didn't have in mind the title Why Buddhism is True. But after I finished writing it I realized that the book did amount to an argument for the validity of what I consider the core ideas of Buddhism -- or, at least, the core ideas of the "naturalistic" side of Buddhism, the side that "Western" Buddhism is mainly concerned with.

Today New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote an opinion piece, "How the 'White Lotus' ran aground." Douthat is a devoted Christian who wrote a book that I've criticized in several posts, Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious. So it isn't surprising that I found his opinion piece annoying.

For one thing, my wife and I heartily enjoyed the third season of The White Lotus, considering it the best, while Douthat started off his piece with:

Crashing waves and flying spray have been the most consistent visual motifs in Mike White’s HBO hit “The White Lotus,” which just wrapped up its third (and by general agreement, weakest) season with a bloody denouement at the Thailand outpost of its titular resort.

Well, the Rotten Tomatoes site says that Season 1 got 90% positive critic reviews, while Season 2 got 94% and Season 3 86%. So calling Season 3 weakest, by general agreement, is a bit of a stretch. Leaving that aside, Douthat doesn't like the Buddhist philosophy in Season 3.

And midway through the season we received a direct interpretation of what that watery imagery is supposed to represent from the lips of Luang Por Teera, a Buddhist monk and an ajaan, or teacher, with whom the daughter of one of the wealthy hotel-going families hopes to study.

Queried by the young woman’s father, Tim Ratliff, a North Carolina businessman who is contemplating suicide — indeed, murder-suicide — after discovering that he may be ruined and even headed to prison, about what awaits us after death, the monk answers: “When you are born you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down, you die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated, no more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home.”

When I heard the Buddhist teacher say this in one of the final episodes, it sounded fine to me. After all, this is a freaking HBO show, not a Buddhist scripture. I don't expect realism from a show designed to entertain, not to inform.

However, Douthat wants people to believe in the traditional teachings of one of the major world religions, not some watered-down version. So he doesn't like that the Buddhist monk in The White Lotus talked about merging with one consciousness after death, while traditional Buddhism speaks of karma causing people to be reborn in some form depending on one's mixture of virtues and vices.

Douthat cites an article by Matthew Gindin, who used to be a Buddhist monastic, called "The Buddha in 'The White Lotus." Gindin makes some valid points about the show not being in line with traditional Theravada Buddhist teachings, but again, this is entertainment, not a class in Buddhist orthodoxy. And Gindin ends his piece with a fairly positive view of The White Lotus.

If I knew nothing about Buddhism watching The White Lotus, I would come away with the idea that it is a peaceful religion that promotes stilling the mind, non-violence, and acceptance of life as it is, and whose meditation teachings are commensurate with the pop-mindfulness stuff one can hear in any yoga class or meditation app. I would also believe that it promotes spirit above form, and detachment from self, and that it promises that all beings come from one universal consciousness to which they will return at death in a peaceful homecoming. Not the worst presentation of Theravada Buddhism, to be sure, but far from a wholly accurate one. 

When it comes to the plot, however, the show delivers Buddhist insights in spades, serving up hefty doses of teaching about the perils of violence, along with the poisonous nature of greed, hatred, and delusion and the chaotic consequences of killing, stealing, lying, unethical sex, and intoxicants. The show might not be true to Thai Buddhism, but it’s true to life. 

Good enough for me. And good enough for Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism is True.

The point is that when we speak casually of a scientific theory being "true," what we mean, strictly speaking, is that it has substantial corroborating evidence in its favor and has not yet encountered firm evidence that is incompatible with it. That's what the title of this book means in referring to core Buddhist ideas as "true."

...But I certainly think the core of Buddhism's assessment of the human condition -- its basic view of why people suffer and why they make other people suffer and, more broadly, its conception of certain basic aspects of how the mind works and of how we can change how our minds work -- warrants enough confidence to get the label that the title of this book gives it.

Wright then lists twelve Buddhist truths. None of them involve karma or rebirth.

This is all there is, says David Chapman. But what is, is extraordinary.

David Chapman is a really interesting guy. I've followed his writings on Buddhism, artificial intelligence, and other subjects for quite a few years. Meaningness is his main web site, and well worth a look. Chapman describes his form of Buddhism this way:

I am, somewhat reluctantly, a Buddhist. Of an odd sort: “the opposite of whatever you’d expect” comes close. That sort of Buddhism shares central themes with Meaningness. I explain it elsewhere:

• • A window has recently opened for Buddhist innovations that can address new cultural, social, and personal problems. Vividness explores possible futures, based on Buddhism’s history and its interactions with the modern–and postmodern—world.

  • Buddhism for Vampires is a playful, yet deadly serious, look at the dark side of Buddhism. We are all monsters, but we can embrace our monstrosity while retaining our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes.

"About David Chapman" on the Meaningness home page shows his impressive background.

I did a PhD in artificial intelligence at MIT. My undergraduate degree was in math. I’ve also studied cognitive science, biochemistry, Old English and Ancient Greek literature. None of that qualifies me to write Meaningness, but it may explain a certain STEM-ish orientation, decorated with occasional literary jokes. The closest thing I’ve written to an autobiography explains how I became a fictional character in Ken Wilber’s philosophical novel about artificial intelligence.

I have founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company. That may explain a certain practical orientation, and lack of interest in philosophical theories that depend on the world being very unlike the way it appears.

That last comment helps explain the essay from Chapman that appeared in my email inbox a few days ago. I liked it a lot, so have copied it in below. Chapman has a substack with the usual subscription levels, free versus paid. I'm on the free level currently, but am considering going to paid.

Here's David Chapman's essay about finding another option to (1) considering this isn't the real world, and (2) considering that this real world is meaningless and ordinary. Chapman argues that this world actually is extraordinary. The essay is a transcript of a video he made, which explains how it starts out.

This is it!

We’re actually here. I’m here in this room you can see behind me maybe, if you’re watching, not listening. You can hear my voice. I’m in a place. I’m in this world.

You’re in a place. You’re in a room, you’re out walking, you’re driving in a car, and you can see what place you’re in. We are in the actual world.

There are people of a religious or philosophical bent, they say, no, this isn’t the real world. We’re not really here. Everything we see is an illusion. Or, this is a garbage world. We’re stuck here, but the real world is somewhere else. It is quite different and it is much better.

The “real world” might be somewhat unimaginable. We can have some fantasies about it, but what we do know, they say, is that it is perfect!

This is a vision that is attractive when it seems like this world is no damn good. The message that this is a garbage world then becomes really attractive, and we want a way of escape to some other, better world.

So this is an idea that is just absolutely part of our basic way of being, and we’re imaginatively living in some fantasy land a lot of the time. We’re not actually willing to admit that we are here.

The only reason for thinking that there might be some better world is the sense that life couldn’t be so unfair that we’re stuck here in a world that is completely meaningless, worthless. It is dust and ashes. It’s garbage.

The idea that there is some other better world is obviously false. And so there’s a way of reacting to that, which is to say, yeah, we have to face up to the fact that this is all there is. “Is this all there is? Yeah. This is all there is. So I guess we have to make the best of it.”

This leads to a kind of brutal materialism, in which we imagine, okay, the world is actually meaningless, but we evolved to like some things and dislike some other things. And so, we haven’t actually got any choice here. All we can do is try to get as much of the stuff we like as possible, and accumulate it and consume it. And try to get rid of as much of the bad stuff. This isn’t even hedonism. I mean, hedonism would be better than this! This is a grind. Hedonism is a kind of carefree enjoyment of sensory pleasure where you can get it. This kind of materialistic outlook is actually joyless.

So this fantasy that there’s a better world leads to the fantasy that this world is meaningless and ordinary; and that all that is possible is engaging with it in an ordinary way. It’s like: Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Is that all there is? “Yeah, that’s all there is,” this materialist view says.

And that’s completely wrong. Because the world isn’t ordinary. The world is absolutely extraordinary. The actual world, not this imaginary fantasy world. The actual world is incredible. It is just amazingly beautiful. If you look around wherever you are. There’s colors, there’s shapes, there’s things happening.

There’s plants growing here, and there’s these books that are such incredible colors! And we don’t want to see that, because the extraordinariness is threatening. It could be overwhelming. The beauty is overwhelming. The possibility of joy is overwhelming because it can be taken away at any moment.

And the horror, the amount of absolute terror and suffering that is going on in the world, we just don’t want to deal with any of that. It’s just too much. And so we unsee it. And we know yes, flowers are beautiful. Okay, yes, everybody knows that. And yes, you can look at flowers and they’re nice.

And we also know there’s horrific wars going on with people being bombed and mutilated and dying in the street and living in absolute terror. And that’s somewhere else. “Let’s be in the ordinary world because the extraordinary world is too much to deal with.” So we narrow our scope of vision to what’s immediately on our plate...

Taxes are due tomorrow, we’d better stick to taxes. There’s nothing more ordinary than taxes, let’s face it. “And that’s life.”

So we shut out the actual world and live in a different fantasy world, not the fantasy world of the perfected philosophical utopia, or religious enlightenment or something. We live in the fantasy world of ordinariness. It is possible to start poking holes in the cloak of unseeing we put in front of the world, and to let a little light in, so that suddenly the intense red and blue of these books shows up as something remarkable and not just, “oh yes, that’s a book.”

Then we don’t have to live in the ordinary world. We can live in the actual world, which is extraordinary.

In the comments on this video and essay, I noticed a reply from Chapman to someone's comment that many people who are materialists find joy in life. Chapman responded that he was using materialism in the sense of materialistic, not as believing that matter is the sole reality.

Ah, I think the ambiguity of the word "materialism" may cause a misunderstanding here. (This is a problem with the "radio sermonette" format: there isn't time to be careful about clarifying terms to avoid possible misinterpretations.)

Here I meant "materialism" in the sense of "he's so materialistic." It's the stance that only the sorts of purposes we share with other apes are meaningful: safety, sex, power, status, territory, physical pleasures.

The other meaning is the metaphysical claim that matter is the only thing that exists. These are logically distinct and dissimilar. There's some sort of correlation or emotional connection, though.

I wrote about "materialism" in the relevant sense here (and elsewhere): https://meaningness.com/materialism

Nirvana basically is reducing our habitual reactivity

Nirvana is a word that often conjures up visions of an otherworldly paradise, sort of like heaven.

But the literal meaning in Sanskrit is "blown out," as in blowing out a candle -- which points to the extinguishing of passions that lead to suffering, as desires are endless and so cause us to continually chase them, much as the proverbial donkey drawn to walk fast in an effort to get the carrot dangled in front of the animal's face that grabs its attention but is impossible to reach, though the donkey doesn't know this.

In Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, there's a chapter ("Nirvana in a Nutshell") that describes nirvana in a pleasingly clear fashion without delving into supernatural mumbo-jumbo like the dissolution of karmic bonds that keep a being reincarnating in various life forms.

Here's how Wright arrives at his basic notion of nirvana being the lessening of our habitual reactivity to things we like and don't like.

In ancient terms, nirvana is often described with a word that is commonly translated as "the unconditioned."... The conditioned, in Buddhist terminology, can be thought of as roughly synonymous with "the caused."

Which makes sense. After all, when we talk about the conditions that give rise to something -- the conditions that lead water to boil or rain to fall or the crime rate to rise -- we're basically saying these conditions are involved in the causal chain that led to that something. Things that are conditioned in the Buddhist sense are things that are subject to causes.

Now, obviously it is impossible to free ourselves from causes. And this isn't what Buddhism seeks. Instead, the goal is something more subtle: reducing the bondage of tanha, or craving. 

We crave the pleasant feelings and crave to escape the unpleasant feelings. Let's freeze frame right here, because this is where the action is. Here is how Bhikkhu Bodhi put it in a series of lectures he recorded in 1981: 

It is here in the space between feeling and craving that the battle will be fought which will determine whether bondage will continue indefinitely into the future or whether it will be replaced by enlightenment and liberation. For if instead of yielding to craving, to the driving thirst for pleasure, if a person contemplates with mindfulness and awareness the nature of feelings and understands these feelings as they are, then that person can prevent craving from crystallizing and solidifying.

This is where we start to segue from the exotic to the naturalistic. The liberation that Bhikkhu Bodhi is talking about is, in the first instance, a liberation from perpetual rebirth, a liberation that will fully kick in at the end of this life cycle. 

But it is also liberation in the here and now, liberation from the suffering tanha brings -- liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

...The main point is that whichever kind of nirvana you're focused on, the mechanics for getting there centrally involve mindfulness meditation cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them.

Regardless of how exotic or practical your aspirations -- whether you believe in a cycle of rebirth and want to escape it, or just want to attain complete liberation in the here and now, or just hope to find partial liberation in the here and now -- the essential tool for liberation is the same.

I'm good with partial liberation in the here and now. As I said in my previous post, I'm always going to be flawed, imperfect, confused, unsure what's best to do. But if I can lessen the degree to which I'm under the sway of unpleasant and unhelpful emotions, hey, give me a ticket for the Nirvana Train and I'll see if it can take me to a more desirable psychological place.

Wright speaks of going on a meditation retreat that made him feel like he was living in a zone of enchantment.

No, that's not the same as entering a zone that is magically impervious to causation. I was still reacting at least somewhat reflexively to the causes impinging on me. Still, one source of this enchantment, I think, was that I was spending less time reacting, less time having my buttons pushed, and more time observing -- which, as a bonus, allowed for more thoughtful responses to things. I assume living in the unconditioned would be great, but living in the less conditioned can be pretty great, too.

So how do we get to that less conditioned state? Wright says this near the end of his nirvana chapter.

You could say that enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with enlightenment in the Western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what.

All of this flies in the face of stereotype. Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about "getting in touch with your feelings" and "not making judgments." And, yes, it does involve those things.

It can let you experience your feelings -- anger, love, sorrow, joy -- with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments -- that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.

Still, you do this not in oder to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights.

So what "not making judgments" ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what "getting in touch with your feelings" ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them. And all of this means informing your responses to the world with the clearest possible view of the world.

Underlying this whole endeavor is a highly mechanistic conception of how the mind works. The idea is to finely sense the workings of the machine and use that understanding to rewire it, to subvert its programming, to radically alter its response to the causes, the conditions, impinging on it.

Doing this doesn't let you enter "the unconditioned" in the strict sense; it doesn't let you literally escape the realm of cause and effect. Then again, airplanes don't literally defy the law of gravity. But they still fly.

I enjoy Buddhism's Pure Land tradition, but I don't believe in it

Is it possible to enjoy a religious tradition without believing in it? Absolutely. In a sense that's what Christmas is like for many people. You don't have to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and is God's beloved son to like the Christmas season.

All that's needed is to keep the parts of Christmas you can accept, and reject the parts you can't accept. Same goes with any religion. 

That's how I explain my enjoyment of the Pure Land tradition of Buddhism, which I mainly know about from reading Taitetsu Unno's book, "River of Fire, River of Water." I've written a couple of previous posts about the book: "Descend into the valley of life, rather than climb the mountaintop," and "Compassion, like other good qualities, is in us, not the cosmos."

What spurred me to pick up the book again today was something Zen Master Henry Shukman alluded to in one of his talks that I listen to on my iPhone's The Way app. Shukman said that frequently we get glimpses of awakening (in the Buddhist sense) as we go about our everyday activities, not during meditation.

In other words, some insight bubbles away in an unconscious corner of our brain, then boils over and makes an appearance in our conscious awareness.

My mini, or micro, awakening occurred last night as my wife and I were watching an episode in the new season of Hacks, a comedy series on Netflix that also contains quite a bit of drama. Ava Daniels, one of the lead characters, was going through her usual trials and tribulations, trying to make sense of a life that often seems nonsensical.

Suddenly I was struck by a realization that wasn't a thought or a feeling, but seemed more like a message from one part of me to another part of me. It didn't arrive in the form of words. However I can try to express it in words: Stop continually trying to improve yourself; accept that you're always going to be flawed, imperfect, confused, unsure what's best to do -- just like Ava.

A weight seemed to life from my psyche. I felt a sense of relief. Later, as I was heading off to bed, I was drawn to retrieve "River of Fire, River of Water" from a bookcase. I read a few pages before going to sleep and re-read more of the book this morning.

Part of the message of the Pure Land tradition of Shin Buddhism fits with my realization. Here's some examples (recitative nembutsu refers to the practice of reciting "namu-amida-butsu," which means "I entrust myself to Amida Buddha"):

As the world became increasingly unstable and chaotic, traditional  Buddhism, supported by the privileged classes, became increasingly irrelevant to the times [12th century], and the demand for a new religiosity to meet the spiritual needs of the age became intense.

The void was filled by the newly established Pure Land teaching of recitative nembutsu. It met the spiritual hunger of the people and attracted a mass following. For those who had been excluded from the Buddhist path, it was the saving grace.

Those who had been excluded were fishermen and hunters who made a living by violating the principle of noninjury, peasants who were considered "bad," lowly and ignorant, women of all classes because of their defilements, and monks and nuns who had broken the monastic precepts.

...The new school stood out in many ways from the traditions that preceded it, particularly in the way that it could be integrated into common, everyday life. Shin Buddhism makes no sharp distinction between clergy and laity as far as the possibility of enlightenment is concerned. Everyone, regardless of differences in age, class, gender, profession, or moral culpability, would attain Buddhahood by the working of great compassion.

How the working of great compassion comes about is one place where Pure Land Buddhism and I part company. Shin Buddhism embraces supernaturalism when it comes to the Primal Vow that makes Buddhahood attainable. 

The transformation of bits of rubble into gold is due solely to the working of the Primal Vow. Originating in the mythic past, the bodhisattva by the name of Dharmakara identified with the pains of all living beings and attempted to find solutions to human suffering. Expending countless eons of time in suprahuman resolve, reflection, and praxis, Dharmakara fulfilled the Primal Vow to save all beings.

This resulted in the attainment of Buddhahood known as Amida, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life. This drama of salvation is contained in the Name, namu-amida-butsu, which resounds throughout the universe.

Well, one thought that obviously comes to mind is how it is that the historical Buddha, who lived in what is now India not all that long ago, relates to this Dharmakara guy (or gal, maybe?) who supposedly preceded the historical Buddha by a lot, "countless eons of time."

Leaving this quibble aside, I don't believe that the compassion embodied in the Primal Vow resides in the universe. The way I look upon compassion, as I laid out in a previous post about this book, is that it is a feature of the human mind -- which is how I was able to feel a sense of compassion toward my decidedly flawed self last night, realizing that it is absolutely fine if I remain as imperfect as I am now.

I wrote:

I don't believe that repeating Namu Amida Butsu causes countless Buddhas to rejoice in and protect the person reciting those words. However, this mantra, as with any mantra, has an effect upon the person speaking it.

Thus if we find that a mantra produces some good quality in us, this is  wonderful. We just shouldn't believe that the quality entered into us from the outside, from some corner of the cosmos. 

For example, Unno says in his book, "To bring about such a transformation is the sole purpose of the Primal Vow of Amida, the working of great compassion that courses through the universe."

When I read those words, I thought about disease, hurricanes, tsunamis, birth defects, and all the other nasty stuff that seems incompatible with a compassion that courses through the universe. Then it struck me that compassion isn't out there. It is in here.

Within us. 

Almost everybody is compassionate. Not all the time. Not to everyone deserving of it. But at least to some people, to some living beings, some of the time. Which  naturally includes ourself, for compassion begins with self-compassion.

And we can learn to become more compassionate through a variety of means, including Buddhist practices.

Thus we shouldn't be led astray by the familiar habit of believing that a feeling we have is produced by an external force. When I was a member of a guru-centered religious organization, people would return from seeing the guru and say, "He made me feel so wonderful."

No, he didn't.

The proof of this is that other people can see the guru and feel nothing, or even a negative emotion. Likewise, a movie doesn't make us cry, or laugh, or scared. Our own mind produces those sensations, stimulated by the movie. Someone else may feel no sadness, humor, or fear from the same movie.

That's why I'm confident that the universe doesn't have compassion coursing through it. Our mind can, though. And if repeating Namu Amida Butsu makes us feel more compassionate, or more relaxed, or happier, that's a wonderful thing. 

By the way, I frequently recite namu amida butsu. It's become my favorite mantra. I tried to explain why in a 2021 post. 

Classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me

Well, I gave it a try. Today Google News, in its Picks For You section, presented me with a link to an Aeon article, "By the light of brahman: Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality."

I decided to read the article, albeit quickly, because I hoped it would live up to the title by illuminating those enigmas.

I did learn something: that classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me. Of course, since this philosophy is the foundation of Hinduism, it isn't surprising that atheist me would find little to like in all the talk about Brahman and Atman (basically, God and soul). 

However, since I resonate with Buddhism, another philosophy that originated in India, I thought that maybe, just maybe, Vedic Hinduism would have something interesting to say about our modern attempts to understand the nature of selfhood, consciousness, and the nature of reality.

Perhaps this article does a poor job at that goal, but my first somewhat superficial reading of it left me unimpressed. Again, though, I'm unimpressed with every religion. (For me, but not for many others, Buddhism is much more of a philosophy than a religion.)

The way I see it, Vedic Hinduism is inherently metaphysical and supernatural, while philosophical Buddhism is inherently psychological and natural. This makes it much easier for me to relate to Buddhism, since often I can recognize how my mind works in its teachings.

On the other hand, the whole Brahman and Atman thing is difficult for me to find any practical use for, or relevance to my everyday life. The article says:

Naciketas presses Yama for clarity about the nature of the relationship between brahman and the world of experienced reality. Yama says that the way to think of consciousness is that it is the thing that ‘illuminates’ and that allows for all mental phenomena. Consciousness, in turn, is itself illuminated by brahman – the one and only source of all illumination. Without brahman there would be no light of consciousness and therefore no experience, no knowledge, no perception. ‘Him alone, as he shines, do all things reflect; this whole world radiates with his light.’

There is only one reality, brahman, which takes myriad illusory forms, but like fire it is both an individual flame and a blaze. This one reality is both the transcendental brahman and the immanent ātman. Everything else is fleeting, illusory, sprung from ignorance. Consciousness is illumination. As the light of a blazing lamp brightens a dark room, so consciousness lights up life.

So while Buddhism, along with modern neuroscience, has a lot to say about the contents of consciousness, and to a lesser degree about the nature of consciousness itself, Vedic Hinduism considers that the consciousness we all experience flows from the universal consciousness of Brahman -- which makes the foundation of consciousness into something supernatural, even though the human brain sure seems to be why we're conscious, and the brain is physical.

I've read quite a few books that make a strong case for how philosophical Buddhism is compatible with modern neuroscience. It's difficult for me to imagine how this would be possible with Vedic Hinduism, as it is decidedly other-worldly.

In fact, this world is considered to be an illusion, for reasons that seem spurious.

For a flavour of the kind of things classical Indian philosophers thought about, we will begin with a bird’s eye view of a few notions from classical Indian philosophy, with the caveat that every idea described below has been hotly debated for hundreds of years.

Central to Indian philosophy is the idea of illusion. Here, there is a distinction between temporal and presentational notions of illusion. The first holds that whatever is not permanent in time, or else beyond time, is thereby an illusion. Of the various schools of Indian philosophy, Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree in accepting this account. The second notion holds that whatever is presented to a subject of experience as other than how it is, is an illusion. This notion derives from the school of Nyāya, its early proponents from the 1st millennium and the work of the 14th-century philosopher Gaṅgeśa, considered to be the founder of the New Nyāya movement.

With talk about illusion, of course, comes talk about reality. And here the classical Indian philosophers made a number of fine distinctions. For our purposes, three are of note: conventional reality, apparent reality, and ultimate reality. Conventional reality just means everyday reality, one that is based on the pragmatics of everyday life under societal conventions and laws. Think of money, or the game of chess. Apparent reality is the notion of a reality that depends on our sensory organs of perception and the machinations of the mind: what we see is a tree and not an aggregate of organic molecules. Finally, ultimate reality is the notion that there is an underlying or hidden substratum to the world. Advaita Vedānta, for example, holds that brahman is identical with this ultimate reality.

I don't agree that Buddhism views whatever is not permanent in time is an illusion. Quite the opposite, in fact. Emptiness is a key Buddhist concept, one I've written quite a bit about. In this post, I included quotes from a book about Buddhist emptiness. 

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.

...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.

Vedic Hinduism has an opposite view of reality from Buddhism. It's much less scientific and much more supernatural. The notions of Brahman and Atman presuppose an essential nature to both the cosmos and ourselves. God and soul are viewed as self-sufficient, eternal, indestructible. 

As the quotation above says, the "empty" view of Buddhism can be frightening to people who want to believe that they existed before they were born and will continue to exist after they die. But reality doesn't care how we humans feel about it, for it simply is what it is.

And I'm pretty sure that classical Indian philosophy doesn't reflect the nature of reality, but of the minds of ancient philosophers who fashioned some entertaining theology which, unfortunately, doesn't say much to scientifically-minded people today.

I love this Zen saying, though it's difficult for me to grasp

I've been reading, and enjoying, Zen literature since my college days about 56 years ago. That explains how I was able to write a blog post in 2005 called "The Supreme Doctrine," thirty-six years overdue. 

“The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought” is one of my favorite books. When I checked it out from the San Jose Public Library while I was a San Jose State University student, I couldn’t bear to return it.

It’s now thirty-six years overdue. I’m pretty sure I paid the library the $1.65 replacement cost. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than 5 cents a day, times 365 days, times 36 years, which is what I would have owed by now.

This is the only library book I’ve ever kept permanently. I brought it on our Maui vacation (where my wife and I are now) because I haven’t re-read it for a long time, and I was curious to see if what attracted me so strongly to “The Supreme Doctrine” when I was twenty-one still was a spiritual magnet for me at the age of fifty-six.

It is.

Now, at the age of 76, I'm still attracted to Zen. Currently I'm making my through a lengthy series of guided meditations by Zen Master Henry Shukman via his "The Way" app on my iPhone. It takes about nine months to traverse Shukman's Way and I'm enjoying the journey.

A few days ago I was listening to a guided meditation and was struck so powerfully by something Shukman said that I had to pause the app, grab a pen, and write down his words.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out.

Wow. I wasn't sure what to make of this saying. I just knew that it appealed to me, a lot. The context of Shukman's guided meditation was, I recall, about how the "self" isn't something to be discarded. Rather, it is to be clearly understood. 

In an introductory video to this stage of The Way, Shukman told a story about how he was sitting on a tropical beach, watching sunlight sparkle on dancing waves, when he suddenly felt there was no difference between the sparkling sunlight and his awareness of the ocean scene. 

In other words, he'd had a nondual experience where the usual sharp distinction between an observing subject and an observed object markedly diminishes, maybe even disappearing entirely. So that is one approach to looking upon the saying I like so much. 

Which for me is a fresh way of looking upon mindfulness. 

Let your self... These words point to relaxed ease. No need for effort or control. Simply let your self, however you view "self," do something that seems to be amazingly easy.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness... "Seems" is the operative word, because most of us have a conception of our selfhood that goes beyond awareness -- though I suspect Shukman would say that a conception has to be part of awareness or it doesn't exist for us. So in that case, the whole of our awareness is the same as our self. Thoughts, emotions, perceptions, all that stuff is synonymous with our self. Which is always changing, since awareness is always changing.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out. Ah, with nothing left out. Those four words are the most difficult for me to grasp. For one thing, how do I know that I haven't left out part of the whole of my awareness? 

The only way I know something exists is to be aware of it. As noted above, what I'm not aware of doesn't exist for me. I can know that I've left something out of my grocery shopping if it was on my list and didn't make it into the bags that I carried into our kitchen this afternoon. But I don't have a list of the contents of my awareness.

So that's makes me wonder if it is even possible to leave something out of the whole of my awareness. In that case, whatever I'm aware of is the whole of my awareness. If I miss a fly on the wall, that's left out of my awareness. But this doesn't matter. What matters from a Zen standpoint is that my self has become the whole of my awareness.

And that I don't consciously exclude something I'm aware of. Like, I'm angry, but since I view myself as a spiritual person who doesn't get angry (I'm speaking hypothetically here, obviously), I'm going to leave out my anger, or minimize it, from my awareness.

Again, we get into tricky philosophical ground here, because as I've been saying, it's difficult for me to envision how I could leave something out of my awareness. That strikes me as being akin to being told by someone, "Don't think of an elephant!" When I try, I'm still thinking of an elephant, albeit the absence of one.

My suspicion, and I could be totally wrong here, is that when Shukman says with nothing left out, he's pointing toward the sort of nonjudgmental awareness that is a hallmark of mindfulness. Life is full of both pain and pleasure, lies and truthfulness, sorrow and joy -- many pairs of opposites. It's natural to focus on the positive and exclude the negative, but this doesn't lead to wholeness.

Anyway, I enjoy repeating Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out a few times as I'm lying in bed, heading off to sleep. Maybe someday the meaning of those words will become clearer to me. However, if this doesn't happen, I still enjoy what Zen Master Shukman said.

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense." 

That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property.

Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines in our neighborhood. (We have a Generac whole house generator, so are doing fine, pretty much.) So I'm going to take the easy way out with this blog post and simply share a passage from Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, that I found interesting.

This passage follows a story from Wright about how he was on a meditation retreat where construction work was going on in the building, causing loud noises from buzz saws and other equipment. At first that bothered Wright a lot while he was meditating. But eventually he was able to simply listen to the construction sounds without thinking thoughts like, "This is really annoying." The passage starts with his speaking with a leader of the meditation retreat.

So I pressed her on what precisely was meant by the term [formless]. She confirmed my suspicion that it didn't mean that the physical world doesn't exist or that we are devoid of structure. Tables exist, buzz saws exist.

After a few minutes of conversation I felt I got her gist. I asked, "So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?" She answered, "Exactly."

I hasten to add that this doesn't mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life -- not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning, is, in that sense, inherent in life. 

But the point Narayan was making is that, as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we've done was a huge mistake, and if we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful.

Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don't get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narrative judgments about the goodness or badness of things in themselves.

So, for example, if I start spinning a long narrative about how coming to this meditation retreat was a huge mistake, and I'm always making mistakes like this, and so on, there are a number of questionable premises on which this story rests. 

There's the premise that, had I not gone on this retreat, whatever I did instead would have gone swimmingly, whereas for all I know, I would have been run over by a bus. There's the premise that having a few painful experiences this week means the retreat was on balance bad for me, whereas in fact its long-term effects are unknowable.

And at the base of this narrative lie the most basic kinds of premises: simple perceptual judgments such as "This buzz saw sound I hear while trying to meditate is bad." And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn't, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality.

We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally. 

That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. 

He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering:

Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct experience can take you to lots of different places, pretty much all of those places seem to lie within the province of one of the sort of mental modules I've already described.

Which is to say, modules that make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which means denigrating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure that they're reciprocal and that you're not getting exploited), and so on.

...When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering -- like it's strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one.

But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind "wanders" from one module to another, what's actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.

Far be it from me to insist that you accept one of the other of these ways of looking at mind wandering. For now I'd just make two points: (1) Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the second view -- the idea that the conscious you isn't choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, as Gazzaniga put in in chapter 6, "won the prize of conscious recognition."

(2) If you do go on a Vipassana meditation retreat and slowly, haltingly, get better at focusing on your breath, you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn't wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders.

Wright describes a conversation he had with noted Buddhist meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. Wright says about Goldstein:

He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and sometimes inject them into consciousness.

Wright speaks with Goldstein about viewing thoughts as akin to going to a movie theater and getting absorbed in what's happening on the screen, quoting Goldstein: 

And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It's the same with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature.

This passage was key to the emotional insight I had:

Escaping this drama -- seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you -- can carry you closer to the not-self experience, to that moment when you "see" that there is no "you" in there doing the thinking or doing anything else, that moment when what seems like a metaphysical truth is unveiled.

But, as we saw in chapter 5, some people say that the Buddha's original not-self teaching is best seen not as a metaphysical truth but as a pragmatic strategy: regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person. And this pragmatic strategy of not-self, no less than the metaphysical discovery of not-self, would seem to be furthered by the kind of perspective Goldstein was describing.

What happened to me was, suddenly I realized -- not intellectually, but intuitively and emotionally -- that I am not the person who has made so many mistakes, had so many failures, caused pain to so many people that I disappointed or let down. 

UPDATE: Below I struggled to explain the feeling I had. Here's a one-sentence version: As my mind conjured up thoughts about the past and future that were filled with images of deserved praise and blame, in a flash it struck me that there was no one within my skull who deserved applause or boos, just the happenings of an impersonal modular mind. 

I'm not that person because I'm not really a person at all, at least in the sense of being a person who is a solid self, who is a single entity no matter my age: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75. Or 76, my current age. I've always looked back on my life and thought, "How was I capable of doing so many negative things?" Which has an inescapable mirror image, "How was I capable of doing so many positive things?"

Suddenly I felt that the answer to those questions is simple, and wonderfully reassuring. Because I am not a solid self or single entity. Just as my body is made up of many physical organs, my mind is made up of many mental modules akin to how Wright describes them in Why Buddhism is True.

When my mind has either led me astray, or put me on a positive path, a self named Brian wasn't responsible. Unconscious inclinations leading in different directions -- positive/negative, loving/hateful, productive/unproductive -- battled it out beneath the surface of my awareness. Eventually one module (not a great term, but I'll stick with Wright's language) won out in that subterranean conflict and placed thoughts in my conscious mind that led to actions.

This realization was deeply moving. I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my psyche. I no longer looked upon my successes and failures as emanating from me, because there really isn't such a singular Me. There have been many Me's, and there will be many more. 

Whenever I've gotten super angry, or super loving, or super resentful, or super grateful, that's a new temporary Me coming into being. Right now a writer Me has risen to the fore. Soon a hot-bath-loving Me will take over. I'm composed of multitudes that bubble up from unconscious depths to become conscious story-tellers and actors for a while.

Yes, there is a certain continuity to my existence, because I remember some of what this mind and body have experienced over the years, and many of my attributes don't change drastically with every new manifestation of Me. 

It just felt really good, and still does, to realize that, as Wright says in his book, the thoughts and resulting actions that either have made me feel proud or ashamed actually have not been produced by a conscious Me, but were directed from unconscious depths toward whatever sort of Me was ascendent at any particular time.

I realize this probably doesn't make a lot of sense. I wish I could describe it better. But a hot bath awaits.

For Buddhism, taking the "red pill" means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true.

Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life.

The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is "to see it for yourself." He offers Neo two pills, a red pill and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

That's a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it's a choice that's so dramatic that you'd think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs -- that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.

The people I'm thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn't grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism.

At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as a belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy.

(Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism -- that it's atheistic and that it revolves around meditation -- are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don't meditate.)

Interesting. I'm definitely attracted to the Western form of Buddhism, since I like this philosophy (in Asia it is a religion) because it fits with my attraction toward atheism and meditation. This reminds me of a difference I observed between American and Indian members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization headquartered in India and led by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years.

On the whole we Americans were more interested in the fine points of the RSSB teachings and the meditation practice we'd been taught than the members of RSSB with an Indian background -- who seemed more devoted to the person of the guru and often meditated little if at all, being more concerned about seva, or volunteer service on behalf of RSSB and the guru.

There's no right or wrong here, just different ways of approaching spirituality. For Wright, a Western Buddhist, this gets at the question of how deeply committed someone is to truly upending their current view of reality versus merely improving our life without such a drastic change of perception. He notes:

Using meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn't deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine thing to do. It's good for you, and it will probably be good for the world.

But Wright goes on to say:

Still, using meditation this way isn't, by itself, taking the red pill. Taking the red pill means asking basic questions about the relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality. If you're thinking seriously about taking the red pill, you'll be curious as to whether the Buddhist view of the world "works" not just in a therapeutic sense but in a more philosophical sense.

So what is it that distinguishes a "red pill" approach to Buddhism? Not an easy question to answer. Wright offers up some hints in this passage.

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Due belonged) that you find the most radically based conception of illusion.

Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a "mind only" doctrine that, in its most extreme incarnation, dismisses the things we "perceive" via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought -- the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix -- isn't dominant within Mahayana Buddhism, much less within Buddhism at large.

But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have.

And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self -- you know, your self, my self -- is an illusion. In this view, the "you" that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn't really exist. 

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together -- the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness -- you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

Evolution doesn't care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring.

This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves.

After writing that, I came across a mention of Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, in another book that I was reading. That spurred me to pull Wright's book off of the Buddhism shelf in my office bookcase and start re-re-reading it. 

(Often I can tell how many times I've read a book by the different highlighting colors in it, as I used to bounce back and forth between various colors; now I favor yellow almost exclusively.)

Heraclitus famously said “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” For me this applies to re-reading books. They seem fresh every time I do this, because while the book has stayed the same, unlike a river, I've changed.

Now that my daily meditation consists of guided meditations from Zen master Henry Shukman via his The Way app on my iPhone, I figured that I should remind myself why Buddhism is true, according to Wright. 

Early on in his book, page 6 to be precise, Wright -- who has written a book about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal -- talks about why pleasure always fades (a basic tenet of Buddhism) from the perspective of evolution.

Here's the basic logic. We were "designed" by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation -- things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put "designed" in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn't a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process.

Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they're the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators.

So, as a kind of thought experiment, it's legitimate to think of natural selection as a "designer" and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? 

In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense.

1. 1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
   2. The pleasure shouldn't last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn't subside, we'd never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That's no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
   3. The animal's brain should focus more on (1) the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you'll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you'll be full of ennui and wishing you'd majored in philosophy.

If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.

Natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, after all, it just "wants" us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

In another chapter, "When Are Feelings Illusions?," Wright provides useful advice about how to tell when a feeling is productive in a broader sense than how natural selection views productive -- basically as doing things that keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation.

I certainly could relate to his examples.

Like getting angry at a driver who is following me too closely, even though it is unlikely that I'm in any danger from him (such drivers are usually men, in my experience). I'm reacting as natural selection intended when someone threatens my life. Except in modern times, our lives rarely are truly threatened by other people. They just irritate us.

So my feeling of anger is an illusion of sorts. It isn't a reflection of how the world truly is, but as how my feelings believe it is, since evolution favors feelings that aided in survival more than feelings that reflected truth.

Of course, Wright points out that some feelings do indeed reflect the truth about reality. If I jump at the sight of a large snake, that's a good thing, as some snakes are poisonous. (I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California where rattlesnakes were common and jumping at the sound of a rattle was a very good thing.)

Obviously, this chapter hasn't been a blanket indictment of human feelings. Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well; they don't much distort our view of reality, and they help keep us alive and flourishing.

My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers -- all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation -- inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don't, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don't.

And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It's in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally "designed" to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

Here's the best description of Zen koans I've ever seen

Koans are an aspect of Zen Buddhism that I've always looked upon as wonderfully mysterious, yet unappealing. For in traditional Zen writings I'd read about a student being given a koan like "Does a dog have buddha nature?"

Then they struggled to figure out what the answer is, periodically having a get-together with their Zen master for him to see how they're doing, where usually he rejects their lame attempt at a response by hitting them on the head with his staff or screaming at them.

Not exactly something that sounds either pleasant or productive to me. 

But near the end of his book, Original Love, which I finished reading today, Zen master Henry Shukman presents a view of koans which makes more sense than any other description of koan practice that I've come across.

First Shukman describes koans in this fashion.

Koan training is an ingenious method for conveying the experience of awakening, and for learning to live it more thoroughly, in a rich, deep life informed by love.

Most koans are about things. A dog. A tree. A bridge. A flower. Autumn leaves. Somehow, in Zen, these ordinary things of the world contain the deepest truths. If these truths are explored through koans, then the most ordinary things can awaken us.

...What is the sound of one hand? Stop the sound of the distant bell. Make Mount Fuji take three steps. A meditator runs a koan through their mind as they sit, until they become absorbed in the phrase.

...What is the sound of one hand? A nonsense question. Yet if we refrain from getting into problem-solving mode, and don't try to unravel it like a puzzle, then we can allow the strange question to hover in our minds, like a full moon rising in the evening sky as sunset is darkening into night. There the hazy moon is, floating low in the sky. So the koan floats in the mind. We wait and see -- does it provoke a call, an ease, a quiet? Does it spark curiosity?

Then Shukman shares a guided meditation on Exploring a Koan. This sort of thing isn't in the traditional literature about koans. I'm grateful Shukman describes his approach to koan practice, as it is appealingly doable.

In this meditation we'll explore sitting with a classic koan. This one actually has two formulations: "This" and "What is this." We'll try out both in this sit. A key aspect of meditating with a koan is not to try to answer or resolve it. It may seem paradoxical, but instead of seeking a response, see if you can just state the koan in your mind and simply observe what effect the word or phrase has on the quality or clarity of meditation.

As with any other sit, start by finding a comfortable seated position. Let your whole body relax. Let your body be balanced, so all parts can relax downward around the central column of the upper body. (If you're reclining, then give yourself entirely to the support beneath you.) The spine has its own intrinsic capacity to hold itself upright. Let it do that by itself. Let your body be balanced around it, so everything else can drape and hang, like rigging gone slack on a tall ship at rest in a bay.

Feel the swells of breath rolling gently through you, slightly lifting and lowering the hull of your lower trunk. Let the rise and fall of the breath soothe you.

Now sense the space within which your body sensations are appearing.

Tune into the space within which sounds are arising. Note that they are really one space, one great space. 

Now, as presence starts to develop and you begin to inhabit your experience here and now, gently bring in the koan. Start by saying in your mind the word This... This... on each exhalation. 

Let the word come gently, quietly. You inhale... and then exhale, and in your mind you add the word This... to the longer, relaxing release of the exhalation. 

This... This... This 

Don't try to do anything special. Don't seek anything special. Just imagine that there is nothing more to be found. All that there is, is here right now. There is nothing but This... This

Again, don't look for anything. Just rest in exactly what is happening right now. This... This

How does it feel to hear the word This? Notice when you say it if whether the word has any effect on you that you can detect. This...

If the practice is feeling interesting or is arousing curiosity or appreciation, then stay with the feeling and continue as you are. This... This

If the practice is not particularly engaging, or if you feel like you have done enough of it for now, then we can shift to a different formulation. 

Now, in the same way as before, on each exhalation, add the words What is this...

Don't think of the words as a question to which you need to find an answer. Imagine that there is no answer and that the words are only a phrase. What is this...

Gently, quietly, and tenderly, pour this little phrase into the stream of your exhalation. 

Inhale ... and exhale: What is this...

What is this... What is this...

No straining, no striving, no answering. Just the words. Just the phrase. What is this...

Once again, see how it feels in your body and mind when you add this question into the space of your meditation Utter the phrase in your mind, and taste any aftereffects of saying it.

What is this...

And when you feel ready, drop the phrase and rest in silence and stillness for a few moments. Then bring some movement into your toes and fingers, your limbs, and your spine. Open your eyes and stretch. Come back to the space you're in, ready for whatever is next.

Thank you for being open to trying this.

Science is the best guide to spirituality

Some people believe that science is opposed to spirituality, that these pursuits operate in different realms of reality and an embrace of one implies a distancing from the other.

I've never believed this.

Even when I was in my most religious frame of mind, the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human Form, I remained intensely interested in what science has learned about our universe even as I explored the possibility of realms beyond the physical.

This is why the first book that I wrote on behalf of RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, was a study of how the new physics could be related to ancient mysticism. I deeply enjoyed reading a lot of science books, particularly regarding quantum theory, as that was a scientific area I was pretty much ignorant about.

It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that reality is a unified whole, not a mess of disjointed pieces. So whatever is true and real in the domain of science should be reflected in whatever is true and real in the domain of spirituality.

Of course, there are unproven conjectures in both science and spirituality, albeit more so in the latter than in the former, given the emphasis on backing up hypotheses with solid evidence in science. And one reason I like science so much is that even well-proven hypotheses are never taken to be 100% true, since there's always a possibility of them being proven wrong, or at least needing to be modified.

Still, it seems that two propositions occupy an intermediate position between raw conjecture and well-cooked fact in both science and spirituality, at least certain areas of spirituality such as Buddhism and Advaita. Meaning, there's both considerable debate about the propositions and considerable evidence in support of them.

They are: (1) We humans lack a self that is unchanging and immaterial, and (2) We humans lack free will, being bound by deterministic forces. In other words, we don't have a soul that survives our bodily death and we don't have the ability to avoid lawful causes and effects.

This puts us in the same position as everything else in the universe, so far as we know.

Every living thing dies. Every living and inanimate thing obeys the laws of nature. By not viewing ourselves as special in this vast, majestic universe, both science and some forms of spirituality (again, notably Buddhism) present us with an appealing view where humans are closely connected, inseparable really, with everything else. 

What I find beautiful about this viewpoint is how learning what is true about ourselves leads to learning what is true about the universe, and vice versa -- learning what is true about the universe leads to learning what is true about ourselves. 

Not all truths, obviously, but the two important ones I've mentioned: no self, no free will. This makes scientific reality a friend of spirituality, not a foe. I can bounce back and forth between books about neuroscience and Buddhism without worrying that one will contradict the other (at least, not by much).

These days science denialism is on the upswing among certain groups. In the United States, religious fundamentalists and extreme political conservatives are the worst offenders against scientific truth. They also tend to believe in a supernatural soul and God-given free will. 

Hopefully one day not only Americans, but people all around the world, will understand that learning what is true about ourselves and the world isn't to be feared, but to be embraced. Mysteries always will remain in both science and spirituality.

But we should lean into the darkness of mystery from the well-lighted solid foundation of what is currently known about reality, not the shaky ground of unproven belief.

It's great that a Zen master can be an atheist

[Before I get into the subject of this blog post, a note about keeping to the subject in comments on my blog posts. I just had to unpublish a comment on my previous post about the need to choose a religion, as the comment was related 100% to a defense of an outrageous action by the Trump administration that I wrote about last night on my Salem Political Snark blog. I'm fine with some mildly off-topic comments, but not those completely unrelated to the subject of a blog post, as that is highly confusing to anyone reading such a comment. What the heck does that have to do with this post?]

To me it's obvious that Buddhism not only doesn't require a belief in God, but is opposed to theism. Yes, there's a religious side to Buddhism. Some Buddhists view the Buddha as possessing miraculous supernatural powers. The Pure Land sect considers that a sort of heaven awaits after a believer dies. 

But on the whole, Buddhism is pleasingly God-free. Rarely do I come across references to God in books I've read about Buddhism. This is true of a book by Zen master Henry Shukman, Original Love, that I'm currently reading. However, Shukman fairly frequently refers to soul, which is uncomfortably close to God-talk.

That made me wonder a bit about Shukman's view of the supernatural, given that Zen is so down to earth and here-and-now oriented. Thankfully, I've come across some passages that reassure me about Shukman's non-godly credentials.

This is pretty damn direct.

And the levels of practice -- all they are, in fact, is levels of love. If this whole path of practice were not about love, then it wouldn't be worth it. But at the same time, love has no levels. Once we taste the love, on no matter which level -- mindfulness, support, or absorption -- we are well. We are okay, we are home.

And yet we can abandon ourselves more and more to love. So in another sense, there really are levels. But why love? Does that word indicate that this avowed "atheist" believes in some kind of universal love, also known as "God"?

On the contrary, the discovery of universal interconnectedness as an experience, not an idea, and of an all-inclusive dimension that makes us and all things one -- this is some kind of ultimate love, without any "supreme being" needed. Unless our connection to this love is the supreme being itself. 

Now, that last sentence does seem to open the door to God, albeit just a crack. But Shukman goes on to say on the next page:

So, yes, different faces of love. All we have to do is keep opening to them. And a time can come when we cross some kind of hump, turn a corner, or go over a steep slope -- something can happen where the center of gravity of our life tips from being located in the separate, anxious, lonely sense of me, to being more centered in the nameless love whose true face is always this moment just as it is.

Coffee cup. Morning light. Yellow pad. Pen getting a little sluggish, just one shade fainter, just one micrometer thinner in its line, as its reservoir of ink gets a little closer to being used up.

This is it. If you want to meet ultimate reality, encounter the supreme being, here it is. Right here. Right now. Staring you in the face, flooding into your ears, nudging you on every side -- table edge under your elbow, hard bench under your buttocks, warm barrel of pen in your fingers, and the whole spectrum of experience flooding in -- and there is nowhere to flood in from, and nowhere to flood in to. 

Instead, there is just this. Boundless. Perfect. Fully realized, fulfilled. Totally accomplished already. You. Your yourself. Forever this. 

And Shukman views the non-historical Buddha as inhabiting an imaginal realm that exists within human consciousness, not somewhere in a supernatural dimension of reality.

Religions clearly have archetypal figures -- entities who are said to inhabit an immaterial world, and come forth into intimate consciousness to guide and support their followers. That realm may be thought of as a supernatural place, a "heaven," where holy beings dwell, for example, but can also be construed as finding its home within a zone of the human unconscious that is both personal and transpersonal.

The word Buddha, for example, applies both to a historical figure who taught in northern India twenty-four hundred years ago, and also, especially in traditional Asian contexts, to a figure who dwells in an intermediate imaginal realm, real to its devotees but not flesh and blood, ready to be invoked as an agent of succor at any time or place.

In Christianity there is not only Christ but also Mary, and many saints besides, who occupy a zone equivalent to the mundus imaginalis. The very notion of a "heaven," where the saints, angels, and other divinities dwell, might be another term for the imaginal zone of consciousness.  

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

Love. What is it? For me, love has been easier to feel than to describe.

It seems to have something to do with attraction, since I want to be closer to people and things that I love, while the opposite is true of people and things that I hate or dislike.

Every night I say "love you" to my wife before we go to sleep. She says the same to me. It's a ritual that means a lot to me, in part because it makes me feel good to know that if I die in my sleep, those would have been the last words my wife would have heard from me.

Bumper sticker sentiments, such as God is love, strike me as almost totally meaningless. They sound fine, but they lack the concreteness of feeling love for someone or something that clearly exists, which isn't the case with God.

As noted before, this is why the title of Zen master Henry Shukman's book, Original Love, gave me some pause before I decided to buy it from Amazon. Fortunately, after reading 105 pages I'm liking how Shukman looks upon love. 

Basically, love is about spaciousness, which he relates to awareness being able to encompass anything and everything we can be aware of.

Love is like space in the sense that it gives space for things to be the way they are. It allows us to be in a troubled state. When we're no longer at war with the state we're in, our sense of identification can switch from being wrapped up in the trouble and relocate to the state of acceptance.

So while the trouble is still there, our identity can migrate from the knot of trouble to the broader context that is accepting of that knot. It's the sense of love that pulls us there. Love is a magnetism.

It's like gravity, except that rather than drawing us toward an object, it draws us into its spaciousness, which can comfortably hold the difficulty. Love loves what is difficult, which makes it no longer difficult. Explore this for yourself and see if you agree.

But what is the source of this love? It's actually simple too.

Once we are less narrowly focused, once we uncouple attention from what it has been contracting itself onto. we sense simply more of the space of awareness. Rather than being stuck in one little quadrant of awareness, we recognize more quadrants.

...One of the very features of original love is its unlimited awareness. At the deepest level, all forms of awareness are forms of it. It not only is aware of all, but also allows all experience to arise, and immediately and unconditionally meets it.

...The path to awakening, to original love, can be summarized as follows. We start to settle down. We start to lessen the hold of the hindrances.

The suffering many of us have lived with as a vague background condition -- a sense of lack, of deficiency, or a hunger, a hankering after things not yet here -- has come to the fore, and we are getting to know it more clearly. As a result of allowing it to be as it is, it is starting to dwindle and at times release itself.

As this happens, we begin to open up more to our actual experience in the here and now. We notice the whistle of the wind in the trees, the distant hum of traffic, and the sounds of a neighborhood. We relish the play of light and shadow, and we feel the magnificence of the weather, whether sunshine, cold mist, or crackling thunderheads. 

...We are returning to a natural appreciation for being, for the gift of living itself, without any need for accomplishment.

There are things about my wife that annoy me, just as there things about me that annoy her. Same is true of our dog. She can be annoying at times, and I'm sure I can annoy our dog. However, love is able to encompass those annoyances, making them appear less important in the overall light of love.

This is why what strangers do can be especially annoying. Typically I'm only aware of my irritation about their action, lacking the context of love that makes it much easier for me to accept the annoying things my wife and dog do.

One place where I frequently get annoyed is the circuit training weight room in my athletic club. Two of the three times a week I exercise at the club is just before my 4:30 pm Tai Chi class. I arrange my arrival at the club so I'm able to get my workout in prior to driving to downtown Salem for the class.

Not having a lot of leeway in that schedule, I get irked when someone is sitting at a machine that I want to use, phone in hand, staring at the screen as if it was the most important thing in the world, rather than doing what I believe people should do with a weight machine: exercise!

Recently I've been experimenting with having a more spacious awareness of the situation in line with how Shukman views love. I look at the person with the phone on the machine that I want to use in the limited time I have left at the club not as someone who is trying to irritate me, but as someone who is doing something important to them.

That thought alone changes my attitude. I realize that they may be communicating with a friend or loved one or business associate. They may have a much more vibrant social life than I do. They may not have any sense that I, or anyone else, is waiting to use that weight machine.

My annoyance is fueled by narrowly limiting my awareness to (1) what I want to do, and (2) how an action of someone else is preventing me from achieving that want. As soon as I view the situation more broadly, seeing the other person as having their own wants and needs that are just as important as mine,  I feel my irritation lessening. Sometimes it disappears completely.

A small step, to be sure. But I'm grateful that some of what Shukman says in his book, and in his The Way app that I have on my iPhone, is having a positive effect on me.

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

Recently I read an essay in either the New York Times or Washington Post by someone who spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh's classic little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness," had changed his life. 

That spurred me to head to Amazon to see if I'd already bought that book. Yes, Amazon told me, you did, in January 2019. Looking through the Buddhism section of my bookcase, there it was, all 139 pages of it.

I've been re-reading parts of The Miracle of Mindfulness the past few days. Published 50 years ago, in 1975, the book is wonderfully clear and concise. Here's a passage that I quoted in a February 2019 post. It's a great depiction of what mindfulness is all about.

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.

Today I had a glimpse of another way to appreciate mindfulness while on a dog walk along one of the trails in our rural neighborhood. I was strolling along the familiar path, thinking about what I was going to write about on this blog in a few hours.

Suddenly it struck me that my body was on a walk in nature, while my mind was contemplating a future activity that I'd do while sitting at my laptop computer in my home. I realized, "My prehistoric ancestors would have found this to be dangerous, having their thoughts in one place while their body was in another place."

For if dangerous animals, or dangerous fellow humans, were lurking behind a tree or in the brush, and a distracted mind failed to notice them, that could be the last distraction an early human ever experienced before their death.

Nowadays there usually isn't such a stark penalty to be paid for a lack of mindfulness, which Thich Nhat Hanh says is "keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality." He also says, "There is no reason why mindfulness should be different from focusing all one's attention on one's work, to be alert and to be using one's best judgment."

I'm grateful to Thich Nhat Hanh for clearing up something that has always bothered me, the familiar image of meditation as being akin to a rider controlling an elephant, with the elephant being our often unruly mind and the rider being... what? 

I used to think that maybe this was a higher mind or soul, something separate from our everyday mind. But the image still didn't make much sense to me. If there is an entity that controls the mind, then what controls the entity doing that controlling? Another entity? If so, what controls it? Where's the end of all this controlling by various entities?

Thich Nhat Hanh has a simple answer from the Zen perspective: there's just one entity, the mind. It's both the controller and what is controlled.

When I mentioned the guard at the emperor's gate, perhaps you imagined a front corridor with two doors, one entrance and one exit, with your mind as the guard. Whatever feeling or thought enters, you are aware of its entrance, and when it leaves, you are aware of its exit. 

But the image has a shortcoming: it suggests that those who enter and exit the corridor are different from the guard. In fact our thoughts and feelings are us. They are a part of ourselves. There is a temptation to look upon them, or at least some of them, as an enemy force which is trying to disturb the concentration and understanding of your mind.

But, in fact, when we are angry, we ourselves are anger. When we are happy, we ourselves are happiness. When we have certain thoughts, we are those thoughts. We are both the guard and the visitor at the same time. We are both the mind and the observer of the mind. 

Therefore, chasing away or dwelling on any thought isn't the important thing. The important thing is to be aware of the thought. This observation is not an objectification of the mind: it does not establish distinction between subject and object. Mind does not grab the mind; mind does not push mind away.

Mind can only observe itself. This observation isn't an observation of some object outside and independent of the observer.

...Mindfulness of feeling in feeling is mindfulness of feeling directly while experiencing feeling, and certainly not contemplation of some image of feeling which one creates to give feeling some objective, separate existence of its own outside of oneself.

...The objectivity of an outside observer to examine something is the method of science, but it is not the method of meditation. Thus the image of the guard and the visitor fails to illustrate adequately the mindful observation of mind.

The mind is like a monkey swinging from branch to branch through a forest, says the Sutra. In order not to lose sight of the monkey by some sudden movement, we must watch the monkey constantly and even to be one with it. 

Mind contemplating mind is like an object and its shadow -- the object cannot shake the shadow off. The two are one. Wherever the mind goes, it still lies in the harness of the mind.

...Once the mind is directly and continually aware of itself, it is no longer like a monkey. There are not two minds, one which swings from branch to branch and another which follows after to bind it with a piece of rope. 

...Your mind will take hold of mind in a direct and wondrous way which no longer differentiates between subject and object. Drinking a cup of tea, the seeming distinction between the one who drinks and the tea being drunk evaporates. Drinking a cup of tea becomes a direct and wondrous experience in which the distinction between subject and object no longer exists.

Dispersed mind is also mind, just as waves rippling in water are also water. When mind has taken hold of mind, deluded mind becomes true mind. True mind is our real self, is the Buddha: the pure one-ness which cannot be cut up by the illusory divisions of separate selves, created by concepts and language.

But I don't want to say a lot about this.

The goal is our chosen direction, says Zen master Henry Shukman

I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion.

Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master.

I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters of Sanbo Zen.

Shukman has an appealing way of explaining what meditation is all about. I like these passages from his book.

Becoming a meditator, opening up to a path of meditation, could be viewed as slowing down the car, parking it, getting out of it, and walking -- going through life at a pace where we can experience the sensory details of the trip.

...The problem is that in our pursuit of goals, we tend to get distracted from the richness of our actual life. It's not wrong to have goals and aspirations. It's healthy, and inspires and motivates us. But what if we could let them simply be the valley track we've chosen to walk down?

We're going in a certain direction. Fine. But as we go, we're going to experience each step of the journey -- each moment, this very moment -- so that the goal is our chosen direction, not something we're obsessing about reaching as quickly as possible, to the exclusion of all current experiences here and now.

Otherwise, what will happen once we reach the goal? We'll very likely set another goal, and speed off toward that one as fast as we can. And so on.

By slowing down, by deciding that each moment is worth experiencing for itself, we can broaden our life. It's not that life has no direction. It's that paying attention to what happens along the way makes life richer and fuller.

Even though we're moving in a chosen direction, it actually matters more to us how it is here and now than how it might be down the road. And some even say there is a curious law of nature, by which we'll fulfill our goals sooner and more amply if we savor the journey toward them.

This very moment, right now, as it is -- somehow we start to recognize it as already complete. Already the world is fulfilled. That's not to say there aren't problems and immense challenges -- as well as cruelty and suffering, and injustice and oppression.

We must call out these issues and devote serious, sustained effort to their resolution. At the same time, we can appreciate the wealth given to us in any moment, by the moment itself. And we trust that the positive orientation that appreciation arouses will help us to better play our part in making this world a kinder place.

Shukman says that in early Buddhism the first of four foundations of mindfulness is "mindfulness of body."

This may seem obvious, but in some spiritual, religious, and mystical traditions the body is viewed as the jailhouse of the soul. Our goal supposedly is to break the bonds that tie soul to body so we can rise beyond the crude physicality of this lowest domain of creation and ascend to "heaven."

Such is completely at odds with Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular. Pleasingly, Shukman explains why mindfulness of body is so important from a modern neuroscience perspective. 

In a nutshell, our large hominin brains are well equipped for rehearsing future scenarios and for rehashing past events. Some speculate that our thick prefrontal cortex evolved to run simulations -- to model the outcomes of possible courses of action. Apparently, it was also to rerun past events, presumably to learn from them.

When we're involved with outward tasks that occupy our attention, we tend to feel okay. We're engaging what some researchers call the task positive network. When we're having downtime, or "idle time," the default mode network is activated, whereupon we spend more time lost in thoughts of the past and of imagined futures than we do experiencing the moment at hand.

This leads to unhappiness. Why? Because we tend to regret the past and fear the future. Our brains evolved to have a strong negativity bias, meaning they act more powerfully and persistently to perceived threats than to perceived rewards. After all, if we neglect a genuine threat just once, than we might die.

So our brains not only "fire" at threats but also "wire" the threat response more strongly, in order to prompt that response again more readily if necessary. So we have work to do just to get to a more balanced state vis-a-vis the world.

...To tell ourselves not to dwell on the past or future seldom works. The mental habit is too strong, reinforced by a million years of evolution. If we offer our attention an alternative area of focus, then this shift makes it easier to break the spell of rumination. 

Hence anytime we shift our attention to our body experience, we are necessarily focusing on the here and now. The body lives in the present tense. It doesn't have the capacity to "live" anywhere else. Only the mind can do that.

Why general relativity leads me to prefer Zen'ish meditation

Ever eager to cram together two seemingly highly separate subjects into a profound (or pseudo-profound) blog post, here's my take on relativity theory and Zen.

I got to pondering the connection after two events in my life today tilted me in that direction. 

Event #1 occurred when I read an article in the August 6, 2022 issue of New Scientist that I'd dug out of the bottom of a forgotten pile of unread magazines. In it Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, described why general relativity is known as a background independent theory.

In Einstein's special relativity, which came before general relativity, she says that while now space and time were no longer separate, but merged into space-time, "This theory did share something with the Newtonian perspective: while space and time were no longer absolute, they remained a stage on which events unfolded."

Prescod-Weinstein then says that to understand what this means, it's like a ruler that never changes shape. This is because rulers, like other objects in everyday life, are background dependent -- the background being our familiar notion of time and space as the backdrop against which events unfold.

The situation is different in general relativity, which includes gravity in Einstein's more comprehensive theory. She quotes theoretical physicist John Wheeler as capturing the essence of general relativity with "Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to...curve."

This means that general relativity is a background independent theory, for there is no background against which the curvature of space-time occurs. The way I understand it, general relativity is the background of our universe. She writes:

Now imagine if your ruler stretched out when you put it near a more massive object. In other words, how you measure distance depends on where you measure and whether you are near an object that has mass. Your ruler, the metric, now depends on its location in space-time and what is inside of space-time.

This was the radical revision in our understanding of space-time necessitated by the merger of special relativity with gravity, which we call general relativity (or "GR" as physicists call it).

...To make this more concrete, let's return to the stage. It is now very weird! It is no longer fixed and unchanging in the background. The very shape of the stage itself depends on whether an actor is on it, where they are on the stage, and what they are doing -- for example, if they are rotating, walking across the stage or simply standing still.

Their presence shapes the stage and, of course, the shape of the stage will affect how someone or something can move across it. Events now happen to space-time too, not just inside of it. This is the meaning of background independence.

The notions of background dependence and background independence got me to wondering where philosophical, religious, mystical, and metaphysical discussions such as what we engage in on this blog fit in. 

Using, or some would say, misusing, the metaphor of general relativity, it seems to me that one reason why discussions of that sort never end up with any firm conclusions agreeable to everybody is that when human thought is divorced from a grounding in the physical world, there's no unchanging background against which the reality of those thoughts can be assessed.

Meaning, it's as if (as in the case of general relativity) the "ruler" used to measure a thought was changed  by that very thought. For example, someone's belief that God exists typically leads them to view arguments for God's existence more favorably than, say, an atheist's view that God doesn't exist.

After thirty-five years of embracing supernatural notions about God and higher regions of reality, I've become more and more attracted to meditation approaches that are grounded in actual here-and-now reality rather than hypothesized there-and-then reality. 

Which brings me to event #2, my cancellation of the 14-day free trial of Loch Kelly's Glimpses app that I'd downloaded to my iPhone and mentioned in my previous post. After listening to more of what the Glismpses app offers in Kelly's approach to meditation, it struck me as too other-worldly for my taste.

Instead, after reading the third message from Oshan Jarrow's five-day course on deepening one's meditation practice, More to Meditation, I decided to try out an app mentioned in that message, a Zen meditation series called The Way.

It looks enticing. I get twelve free guided meditations before I have to fork out some money for the full deal, which entails about a year's worth of training from Henry Shukman, the Zen teacher who came up with the idea for The Way with help from some talented friends and colleagues. 

Check out descriptions of The Way on Reddit, TechCrunch, and Medium. Today I got one day closer to my upcoming Zen enlightenment. And I won't have to be hit on the head with a stick or sit for hours on an uncomfortable cushion. All I need is my iPhone and a VISA card.

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.

A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside.

I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into Stage Six, where is where I left off. 

I liked the book before, and I'm liking it now. The author, John Yates, who also goes by Culadasa, is deeply versed in what meditation is all about, and has a knack for describing meditation in a manner that is clear, creative, and compelling. 

In my 2018 post, I noted how the book's discussion of attention and awareness makes a lot of sense. Both are necessary in both everyday life and meditation. (RSSB refers to the India-based religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.)

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.

Since recently I've been reading and writing about a couple of books aimed at making the reader better able to manifest their goals, with each book emphasizing the importance of positivity in our affirmations, visualizations, and such, I was struck by how The Mind Illuminated echoes that advice in a chapter I re-read today. 

Here Yates is discussing the process of (1) forgetting the meditation goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose, (2) engaging in some mind-wandering, and (3) waking up again to the goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose.

Awakening to the present is an important opportunity to understand and appreciate how your mind works. You've just had a minor epiphany, an "aha!" moment of realizing there's a disconnect between what you're doing (thinking about something else) and what you intended to do (watch the breath).

But this wasn't something you did. Nor can you voluntarily make it happen. The process that discovered this disconnect isn't under your conscious control. It happens unconsciously, but when the "findings" become conscious, you have an "aha!" moment of introspective awareness.

The way to overcome mind-wandering is by training this unconscious process to make the discovery and bring it into consciousness sooner and more often. Yet, how do you train something that happens unconsciously?

Simply take a moment to enjoy and appreciate "waking up" from mind-wandering. Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them. 

Conscious intention and affirmation powerfully influence our unconscious processes. By valuing this moment, you're training the mind through positive reinforcement to wake you up more quickly in the future.

Also, avoid becoming annoyed or self-critical about mind-wandering. It doesn't matter that your mind wandered. What's important is that you realized it. To become annoyed or self-critical in the "aha!" moment will slow down your progress.

You can't scold the mind into changing, especially when dealing with entrenched mental patterns like forgetting and mind-wandering. It's like telling your unconscious you don't want to have the mind-wandering interrupted. If negative emotions do arise, simply notice them and let them come, let them be, and let them go. 

It's like training a pet. Consistent, immediate positive reinforcement of behaviors we want will be far more effective than punishing behaviors we don't. 

Buddhist meditation and psychology can learn from each other

My undergraduate major in college was psychology. I also started to practice daily meditation while in college. So for me, psychology and meditation always have been linked, though not always as closely as they are now.

I say this, because for thirty-five years my meditation had an otherworldly emphasis. After being initiated by an Indian guru, my goal was to meditate in a fashion that would enable my soul-consciousness to leave this worldly plane of existence behind and travel to higher regions of supernatural reality.

Yeah, right...

All that had very little to do with modern psychology. But for about twenty years, I've been meditating in a Buddhist'y fashion, though I don't consider myself a Buddhist. Following the breath. Mindfulness. Loving kindness. 

Those sorts of things are firmly within the realm of psychology. Which is why I printed out a 2002 talk by psychologist Eleanor Rosch, "What Buddhist Meditation has to Tell Psychology About the Mind." 
Download Buddhist meditation paper

I just came across the talk in a stack of magazines and other material that I hadn't looked at for a long time. Re-reading it this morning, I found interesting what Rosch had to say, even though it didn't really break any new ground for me. I'll share some excerpts, along with my comment on each excerpt in italics.  

One of the best-kept secrets of the last several centuries may be that some of what we classify as religious experience can make a fundamental contribution to scientific psychology. One hundred years ago William James suggested this radical idea in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, yet today mainstream psychology is no closer to considering the idea than it was in 1902.

Surely one root of this recalcitrance is the way in which the categories and imagery of our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic psychology which are on different planes of existence altogether and cannot communicate with one another.

I believe that the Eastern traditions now arriving on our shore, particularly Buddhist thought and meditation, can bridge this divide and can reveal a quite new understanding of what the human mind and its knowing capacity actually are.

Agreed, by and large. Genuine Buddhism isn't otherworldly, though many people overlay Buddhist teachings with a heavy dose of religious supernaturalism, such as, for example, making the Buddha into a sort of god rather than an earthly teacher.

We all know the image of a human that is common in present psychology and cognitive science: the mind is seen as something isolated inside the body, peering tentatively out at a piecemeal and initially incomprehensible world, trying so hard to find simple predictive relationships between events so that it can survive. It stores the results of its experience in memory to form a coherent but inherently indirect and abstract representation of the world and of itself.

Ideas, emotions, actions, and consciousness have evolved to fulfill the only originating value which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner in a world of limited reward and much threat.

Such a portrait is not alien to the Eastern traditions. In Buddhism it is somewhat analogous to samsara, the wheel of existence to which sentient beings are bound by their habits; in Hinduism it might be depicted as lower states of consciousness; and in Taoism it might be portrayed, with a smile, as the activities of the monkey in us.

All three Eastern traditions agree that in this habitual state of mind, we are mistaken about everything important — about who and what we are, what is real, and how to act. But this is not the only possible mode of knowing the world. And here we come to the central topic of this talk. There is an alternative way of knowing. And that alternative is seen as our original, natural, fundamental state, what we are right now, not any particular or special experience.

For simplicity in this talk let us call our more limited habitual mode of knowing consciousness and the alternative more basic, comprehensive, and wiser form of knowing awareness.

Interesting. I've always considered consciousness and awareness to be very similar, if not identical. After all, how could we be aware of something without consciousness? But I'm open to the distinction Rosch is making, as discussed below, even though I don't really comprehend it.

Were awareness available only to a few skilled and practiced religious athletes, it would be of little use either for daily life or for science. But it is said to be widely available, in fact closer to us than our own eyes.

The trick is that consciousness and awareness are not actually two separate things — and this is where talking about such matters becomes elusive — because all experience is actually made out of awareness. This is analogous to Plotinus’ “what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.” And Rumi reminds us: “We seldom hear the inner music / But we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.”

This point might be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. The consciousness mode of knowing the world can be likened to a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life and in cognitive science we mistake the limited consciousness program for the whole system.

We keep trying to study how the system works, but all we can see is the functioning of the program in which we are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or in religious striving, is frustrated because to try to get out, we are only using the operations of the program itself.

Such a possibility ought to give scientists of the mind some pause because it implies that the very techniques, rules, hypotheses, assumptions, tests, and suspicions designed to make the study of the mind objective are themselves but products of operations of that same program. So how do you ever get out; where’s the exit key?

There are a number of methods common, in varying degrees, to the world religions, but the specialty of Buddhism is to find awareness in the everyday experiences of consciousness itself, including all the senses, by means of cultivating intense mindfulness and intimacy with ongoing experience. That is what makes Buddhist practice particularly valuable as a link to psychology.

Here's why I part company with Rosch somewhat. I don't find her computer analogy persuasive, nor do I find it compatible with my understanding of Buddhist meditation. I don't believe that Buddhism makes a distinction between thoughts and feelings, abstraction and concreteness, or any other division between states of the brain/mind. 

The idea that there's an "exit key" strikes me as an add-on to Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. The duality that Rosch speaks of here, where "the program" is distinct from some form of non-programmed awareness, seems at odds not only with modern neuroscience but with ancient Buddhism.

Anyway, in her talk Rosch then discusses "some ways in which the wisdom of awareness shows up in the functioning of our minds in everyday life." She says that "consciousness is really awareness in disguise," a statement that I don't understand.

I invite you to read her entire talk and decide for yourself whether what she says makes sense to you. I don't find anything truly objectionable in what Rosch says. I just have trouble with grasping what she's really getting at, aside from the rather obvious fact that Buddhism and psychology both study the workings of the human mind and have something to learn from each other.

Here's a paragraph from her "Interdependence" section that's an example of how Rosch uses words in a fairly elegant way, but I still find it difficult to fathom her basic point.

An understanding of interdependence has clinical significance. It can provide people who suffer from guilt, depression, or anxiety with a vision of themselves as part of an interdependent network in which they need neither blame themselves nor feel powerless. In fact it may be that it is only when people are able to see the way in which they are not responsible for events that they can find the deeper level at which it is possible to take responsibility beyond concept and (depending upon the terminology of one’s religious affiliation) repent, forgive, relax, or have power over the phenomenal world. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be here, now.

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

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

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

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

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

The typical object of attention is the breath.

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

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

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

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

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

An important principle is to not crave the jhanas.

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

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

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

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

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

Jhanas are the current meditation craze, says TIME magazine

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

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

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

This is how the story starts out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look without, not within, is the best spiritual advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, but I deeply doubt it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sees only God.

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

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

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

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

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations.

Joan Tollifson reminds me a lot of the best of Alan Watts.

Meaning, she communicates profound spiritual insights in a direct, down to earth, and often humorous fashion, but without the sometimes annoying tendency of Watts to make more of himself to an audience than he deserves. Tollifson has more humility.

I absolutely loved her chapter, "The Imaginary Vantage Point," in Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality. The best part was a dialog with someone at her talk who had some questions/opinions about it.

This was the central thesis in Tollifson's talk, the absence of a "me" as such is commonly visualized.

There is an idea and maybe a mental picture that there's "me" encapsulated inside the bodymind looking out at everything else through the windows of my senses and manipulating this outside world as best I can.

Relatively speaking, within the movie of waking life, this makes a certain amount of sense: "I' can apparently seek dinner outside myself and find it "over there" in the refrigerator. "I" can seemingly manipulate various ingredients and turn them into a cake. Relatively speaking, this makes sense.

But can I find enlightenment or love or happiness "out there" somewhere? Can I manipulate my thoughts or my desires in the same way I can manipulate the ingredients of a cake? Or has this way of thinking that seems to make sense for survival tasks (like food-gathering and shelter-building) suddenly become totally incoherent when the thinking mind tries to apply it to finding happiness or freedom "out there" somewhere?

And in fact, even with those survival tasks, is there actually a "me" who chooses to do them and who could have done something else instead? Or did everything in the whole universe come together at that moment as the baking of a cake or the building of a house?

Maybe if we get spiritually advanced and sophisticated enough, we think that the experiencer is "awareness" or "consciousness" or "the witness." But is there any such thing as "awareness" or "consciousness" or "the witness" that can be isolated out from everything else?

Tollifson answers no, appealing to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. This is decidedly different from nothingness or a void, even though that's often how people who don't understand what Buddhism means by emptiness misconstrue the term. She says:

Yes, the whole universe is involved in everything that happens. Everything is caused by, and everything affects, everything else. Everything is inseparable from everything else. In Buddhism they call it interdependent origination. That's what they mean by emptiness.

Everything is impermanent, constantly changing, and interconnected with everything else. There is no inherent, independent, autonomous existence. No "thing" actually ever forms to even be impermanent. There is only seamless wholeness.

However, a member of the group Tollifson was speaking with considered that they were capable of occupying a vantage point where they weren't caught up in the goings-on of the world. That feeling of detachment gave them a certain distance from happenings which they considered to be a positive thing.

The dialog between this person and Tollifson went on for quite a few pages. Here's my attempt to share the gist of what the dialog consisted of. I've focused on what Tollifson said, since she made the most sense in my opinion. 

(J is Joan Tollifson; P is the person)

J: What is the perspective?

P: Well, it's not a thing. It's an empty point -- a timeless, spaceless, dimensionless point.

J: Okay, we could call it awareness, right [participant nods] Is there an actual boundary between awareness and the content of awareness? We draw dividing lines with words, but is the separation really there? In your own experience right now, can you actually find this boundary?

P: Yes, there are two things.

J: Conceptually, there are two things. But when you actually investigate your own direct experience in this present moment, can you find a dividing line between awareness and what is being seen and heard right now? Is "awareness" actually a separate thing? Is there really this "empty point" apart from what is appearing?

P: It's not a thing; it's a vantage point.

...J: Right, I understand what you're pointing to. We might also call this vantage point "impersonal awareness" or "the witness," right? And I'm not denying the reality of awareness, but as soon as the mind turns it into some thing that is separate from everything else, something that must be remembered and maintained, then it has become a subtle mental object, a concept, an idea. Can you see that? As you say, you remember to think it. It's a thought. 

What is aware of the vantage point?

There is an awareness of both the imaginary vantage point and the objects within it. So there is something prior to any vantage point that you can imagine or conceptualize or perceive or experience or think about or remember or describe.

And actually, this awareness that is prior to everything is not separate from everything. It is everything. It is the common factor in every experience, the formlessness that is forming as every form. It is not something you can objectify and then have to keep remembering. Awareness cannot be separated out from everything else and made into a separate object. 

...P: It's like those pictures which can be seen two different ways. You know, where it can be either a picture of a lady or a vase and you can flip back and forth. It's like a painting in a frame. So there's that form of the rug appearing in a frame.

J: What sees the frame? What is aware of awareness? What is witnessing the witness? What is conscious of consciousness? Can you see that any answer that might arise, anything perceivable or conceivable, would be another appearance, another object? Is the seeing really divided up into seer and seen, or is your actual experience simply seeing?

...P: The frame is emptiness.

J: This is emptiness. The rug is emptiness. You are emptiness. Everything is emptiness. There is only emptiness. Form is emptiness. 

P: I don't see that.

J: Actually you do, but you're overlooking it. Thought is overlaying it with a conceptual story, and the focus is on the story. You're trying to see something special. You imagine that emptiness should look different than this present appearance. You think that if you were seeing emptiness, it wouldn't look like this. It wouldn't look like people and chairs and rugs.

P: True. When I really see it, it doesn't look like this. It's vibrant and it's a different experience.

J: Well, every second is a different experience. And every experience is emptiness, whether it's a vibrant experience or a dull experience, an expanded experience or a contracted experience. It's all emptiness. You can't not see emptiness. 

Emptiness is all there is. The seeing is emptiness. And everything you see is empty. But if you imagine that some particular experience is emptiness and not every other experience, then you've got an idea of emptiness that's only an idea. 

...J: I'm pointing out the difference between awareness itself, which is ever-present and all-inclusive, and a concept of awareness as something that must be remembered and maintained (some idea of "formless emptiness," "a dimensionless point," "the witness," whatever it is). Something that is separate from the supposedly unspiritual and dangerous world of form.

I'm pointing out the absurdity of working very hard at this spiritual task of remembering the vantage point and making sure that "me" is identified as emptiness and not as form.

Being aware is actually effortless. You can't not be aware, so it's always already the case. But instead, it gets turned into an imaginary project for the "me" to accomplish, an imaginary "thing" that must be remembered and maintained.

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted.

Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application).

But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances. 

Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below, since I liked what she had to say. As noted before, Tollifson has become one of my favorite writers about "spiritual" subjects, though she doesn't use that word very often. 

I agree with her that the search for Ultimate Reality is doomed to failure. I used to believe otherwise. When I'd give talks to members of the guru-centered organization headquartered in India that I belonged to for 35 years, Ultimate Reality was a term that I used a lot, because I considered that the teachings of this organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, accurately pointed to the nature of such.

Not any more, though. Like Tollifson, I've become convinced that just as science is nowhere close to grasping the ultimate nature of reality, spirituality, religion, and mysticism are ever farther away. So no one knows what the ground of being is, or even if such a ground exists. Maybe groundlessness will turn out to be the closest approximation to how Ultimate Reality typically is viewed.

Which doesn't mean that awe, wonder, delight, and even a sense of sacredness can't be part of our everyday awareness.

As Tollifson says in her essay below, our experiencing of what is Here/Now is all that we know directly. This means that attention in the present moment is the highest form of worship, to repurpose a religious term for my secular purpose. Of course, we don't really have a choice in this, since past and future only exist for us as concepts, not direct experience.

But our attention can be scattered. When my wife is talking to me, I can be half-listening while checking the news on my iPhone. This is akin to daydreaming while attending to a religious service. While everything is happening Here/Now, that Here and Now can become diluted, spread out, by a lack of attention to what most deserves our awareness. 

This is why mindfulness has come to be my favorite "spiritual" exercise (I don't much like that term, but it's hard to come up with a better word). Since there almost certainly isn't any final ground or bottom to reality, the best we can do is be as fully aware as possible of the ever-changing phenomena that manifest the boundlessness of existence.

Here's the excerpt from Joan Tollifson's essay.

A multi-dimensional extravaganza

All we ever know directly is this here-now aware presence / present experiencing. We don’t really know what this is, why it’s here, where it came from or where it’s going. We have many ideas about all of this—scientific, metaphysical, psychological, political—but all of these ideas can be doubted, and all of them are subject to change, and when we look closely, the apparently real “things” to which they all refer can never actually be pinned down or pulled out of the whole.

Both science and spirituality have been obsessed, each in their own way, with getting to the bottom of things, finding the fundamental ground and nailing down exactly what it is, as if it were something that could be found and nailed down. But as an old Zen koan says in response to a monk searching for this fundamental ground, “It just moved!”

My sense is that this living actuality is bottomless, that there is no end to the unfolding revelations and discoveries, and that there is great freedom in not needing to land anywhere or grasp anything or nail down what this is. Maybe the security and certainty that we long for isn’t about getting hold of some unchanging Ultimate Reality, some final bottom to everything. Maybe it’s simply about being fully alive right here as this one bottomless moment, just as it is.

I’ve noticed, as you probably have too, that experience shows up in a multitude of different dimensions and can be seen from infinitely different perspectives or viewpoints. There is ordinary, everyday life with all its varied facets and dimensions. There are transcendental spiritual experiences of all kinds, psychic experiences, near death experiences, out of body experiences, drug experiences, psychotic experiences, experiences that come from brain injuries and neurological disorders and illnesses.

There is the sense of being a particular person with a history and a lifespan, and there is the sense of being the timeless, impersonal, boundless aware presence being and beholding it all. There is waking life, dreaming and deep sleep. There are all the billions of different human viewing points, and the viewing points of all the other living beings. All of these infinitely diverse viewing points are continuously popping in and out of existence, dying and being born. It’s definitely a shape-shifting multi-dimensional extravaganza that never stays the same while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of Here-Now.

This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart.

To survive, we need to map our experience out in manageable ways. So thought labels, divides, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes this seamless, boundless, centerless, inconceivable, multidimensional, uncontrollable flow of experience, creating the illusion of an apparently separate autonomous controller self encapsulated inside a body and living in an apparently solid and substantial outside world made up of many separate, persisting, observer-independent forms. This phantom self is supposedly authoring our thoughts, making our choices and navigating our life. But none of this holds up to scrutiny.

Every form dissolves as soon as it appears. Exprerience doesn’t hold still. There is no boundary between inside and outside. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole. Our attention moves rapidly and uncontrollably from one thing to another, and however hard we work at controlling and taming it, that endeavor never quite works. It slips away again and again.

Our urges, desires, impulses, intentions, interests, preferences, abilities, talents, thoughts and actions emerge unbidden. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Seeing this is the freedom to be exactly as we are and for everything to be just as it is. It is freedom from blame and guilt and from the belief that anything should or could be different in this moment from exactly how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t discover ways of healing and transforming ourselves and the world—we can. But it’s all a movement of the whole.

There is no finish-line in life, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this ever-fresh aliveness, just as it is.

Buddhist humor about happiness

Just subscribed to Buddhist Humor 2.0 on Facebook after seeing this image in my feed. Wish happiness were this simple. But maybe it is.

Here's some thoughts about thinking (and nonduality) from Joan Tollifson

I've become a big fan of Joan Tollifson. I can't get enough of her take on Zen, Buddhism in general, Advaita, nonduality, and a bunch of other subjects that she talks about in her writings and speaks about in her talks.

I sort of feel like a Grateful Dead groupie back in the days when people would travel around the country attending their performances wherever they played. Except, I don't need to go anywhere to get my Tollifson fix. 

Her books are delivered to me by Amazon. Her web site has a vast amount of material in the Outpourings section. And I've signed up to get regular posts from her emailed to me.

Below is the most recent post, which I like a lot. There's a great deal of wisdom here. Plus some excellent writing. Tollifson is deeply familiar with so many spiritual/philosophical teachings, it's a joy to read her sensitive, sophisticated views on some subject.

Like, thinking and nonduality. You'll see that she favorably mentions David Loy's book, Nonduality, in the post below. I enjoyed the book also. These are the blog posts I wrote about it.

Pink Panther and Alan Watts on nonduality
Cutting out the bullshit from nonduality
Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality
"Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject
Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is
Experience is all there is for us. Praise be to nonduality!

Here's Tollifson's post about thinking. Enjoy. I sure did, in part because I've been told many times by commenters on my blog posts, "Brian, you think too much." When I'd read that, I'd think (not surprisingly), "Um, didn't you have to think to write Brian, you think too much? And who gets to decide what too much is? Shouldn't that be up to me?"

***********************************************

A few thoughts about thinking
by Joan Tollifson

Thinking is something the universe is doing in the form of human beings. Like everything else, it is an activity of the whole, inseparable from everything it apparently is not. Thinking has given humans great advantages and also significant disadvantages.

The bare activity itself—the pulsation of a thought—is amazingly ephemeral, impermanent, fleeting and without substance. A thought appears and instantly evaporates like an invisible and ungraspable little burst of invisible energy.  

But the content of thinking—the headlines it asserts, the stories it tells, the beliefs and ideas it promotes, the maps of reality it generates—these can seem very solid and real. They are sometimes functional and necessary, sometimes creative, sometimes relatively harmless, but very often, thinking—and believing what thought tells us—is the source of immense human suffering and confusion. The problematic type of thought (e.g., “I’m a hopeless failure” or “So-and-so is the devil and should be killed"), when believed, can cause enormous pain.

Because thoughts can be so powerful and so easily mistaken for objective reports on reality, being aware of them, being able to see them as thoughts, and being able to discern the difference between the pictures they paint and reality itself is a vital part of both spiritual awakening and good psychotherapy. It may sound obvious, but it can be very subtle, recognizing again and again that a map is never the territory it describes, that a concept is always an abstraction, and that “I’m a hopeless failure” is just a conditioned thought, not an objective report on reality. 

There are many relative truths that can be discovered through thinking, reasoning, logic and scientific exploration. These are wonderful human abilities. But what we might call the heart of things, the source of happiness or unconditional love cannot be found in this way. It is beyond the thinking mind, beyond reasoning and logic, beyond what science can discover. And because of this, there is a common misunderstanding in the spiritual world that the goal of meditation is to be thought-free, that awakening entails having a permanently and completely empty mind, devoid of all thinking, and that thinking is basically the enemy that must be vanquished.

I’ve never heard any teacher suggesting we should or could eliminate all thinking, and I’m certainly never suggesting that. That would be a fool’s errand. It may sound as if this is being suggested sometimes, usually when a sentence is taken out of context and/or misunderstood. But no one I know is suggesting this. Creative thinking and reasoning have done incredibly wonderful things, and we wouldn’t survive without functional thinking. Moreover, thinking is something that happens uncontrollably. There is no thinker authoring the thoughts. They bubble up automatically. Anyone who takes up meditation discovers this very quickly.

Because thoughts pop up and instantly dissolve, they can easily zip by so quickly that we don’t even see them. As a result, we are often completely unaware of habitual thought patterns. This is where meditation can be helpful. It allows us to slow down, be still, and do nothing else other than simply being, present and aware. And in this way, we begin to see more and more clearly what the mind is doing, and the more it is seen, the less believable it becomes and the more these habitual thoughts lose their grip and fall away.

I’ve often spoken about my first all-day silent meditation retreat at the San Francisco Zen Center, when it was suddenly seen that all my thoughts were about the future. I was sitting there imagining my next silent retreat, thinking about what to do on the break that was coming up and where I would park the car tomorrow when I went to work, and so on. I’d never noticed this before. Once it was seen, it was as if a light had been turned on in a previously darkened room.

From then on, whenever thoughts about the future happened, they would be noticed—sometimes instantly, sometimes after the attention had been occupied with them for quite a while. I began to see what was alluring about future fantasies, and also how it was a form of suffering. Gradually, over many years, this habitual pattern got weaker and weaker until it dissolved. Not that it never happens now, but it rarely happens, and never obsessively anymore.

Thought was powerless to remove this pattern. Having the thought, “I need to stop thinking about the future,” would only be another thought about the future—and about “me,” the imaginary thinker. Awareness was the transformative power.

The best teachings help us to discern the difference between the map and the territory in ever more subtle ways. They also recognize that mapping is something the territory is doing, and that language, imagination and thought are all vital and emergent activities of the universe, inseparable from the whole. These can all serve us beautifully, or they can get us into massive trouble, and it is profoundly liberating and helpful to discern what’s helpful and what isn’t, while also recognizing that, in the absolute sense, the apparently helpful and the apparently unhelpful are “not two” and can never actually be pulled apart.

A work of fiction, a poem, a beautiful painting, an evocative dance, a piece of sculpture, a great movie, beautiful music, a mathematical formula, a scientific theory— these certainly cannot and should not be dismissed as unreal or mere illusions. They are all quite real. And so is the spiritual dimension—boundless awareness, openness, presence, spirit.

Intelligent spirituality is operating on multiple levels, we might say—both conventional and absolute, sensory and imaginal, conceptual and actual—and these pairs can’t really be pulled apart. The boundary-lines are always themselves conceptual. Some teachings lean more one way, some more another—and certainly, in my writing, one paragraph, article or chapter may lean more one way, and another paragraph, article or chapter many lean more in another. Taking things out of context can be very misleading. We see this all the time in the political realm and in clickbait headlines.

Ultimately, ALL dividing lines between one thing and another are conceptual—they are like the lines on a map. Where exactly does the mountain become the valley? Where does heads turn into tails on a coin? Where does the body end and the environment begin? Where does inside become outside? Where is the boundary between awareness and content, or between the screen and the movie? We can’t say. We can’t deny difference and variation, but we can’t find actual separation. That recognition is what nonduality is all about.

In my experience, the most liberating forms of spirituality are those that pull the rug out from any place we want to land and from any impulse to plant a flag. Landing nowhere, freefalling, we can play freely in all realms, sticking to nothing and open to everything.

The Tao that can be spoken both is and isn’t the true Tao. Everything we say both is and isn’t the truth. Not one, not two. Or, as Dogen put it, leaping clear of the many and the one. Not fixating or getting stuck on one side of a conceptual divide.

A few words about nonduality

When people tell me they are into nonduality, I ask them what they mean, because the word has been used in so many different ways over the centuries. In recent years, nonduality has become a buzzword in certain subcultures, where it can refer to anything from Tony Parsons to Rupert Spira. There isn’t one definition upon which everyone agrees. Many people claim that their version is the One True Nonduality, but that, in my view, is dualistic nonsense.

If you want to explore the subject of nonduality in a comprehensive intellectual way, I highly recommend David Loy’s excellent book, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. David Loy is a Zen teacher and a professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, so he brings both the discernment of a trained philospher as well as the experiencial understanding of a long-time Buddhist practitioner to the table. The book compares and contrasts the Advaita notion of Self (Immutable Reality) with the Buddhist understanding of no self (impermanence, thorough-going flux, no-thing-ness), and it explores concepts such as time and space, substance, causality, freedom, and spiritual path from a nondual perspective, drawing not only on Advaita and Buddhism, but also on Taoism and Western philosophy.

Of course, nonduality is more than an intellectual philosophy. It is a living realization, a way of seeing life that brings forth a different way of being.

It seems to me that the common thread in all the different versions of nonduality is the sense of wholeness and the absence of separation. None of these different nondual perspectives are denying the appearance of diversity, differentiation, multiplicity, variety and polarity, but they are all seeing it as one inseparable whole that cannot be pulled apart. It is always a holistic perspective in which everything is included and nothing exists independently.

In Advaita, this wholeness or unicity is typically seen as the Self or the One Consciousness that underlies and is everything that appears—the ground of being. In Buddhism, it is more often understood as emptiness: impermanence, interdependence, groundlessness, and the absence of any persisting or separate self-nature in anything. Of course, within Buddhism there are many subdivisions, including the One Mind school that says, “All there is, is Mind.”

And nowadays we have expressions that don’t fit neatly into any of these pre-existing categories, or that draw from several of them—people such as Toni Packer, Adyashanti, Tony Parsons, Darryl Bailey, Peter Brown, John Astin, or myself. So there are many variations on the theme of nonduality, but in some way, all of them point to an indivisible unicity that is at once both seamless and infinitely varied.

I would also say that all the versions of nonduality that I’ve encountered point out the non-substantial nature of everything that appears. In Advaita, it is compared to a dream in which there seem to be mountains and people and events, but it’s all nothing other than the dreaming consciousness. It all vanishes upon waking up from sleep. Nothing that appeared to be there was really there in any substantial, observer-independent way. It was all a play of consciousness.

In Buddhism, it is more the understanding that no solid, discrete, independent, persisting, substantial things ever actually form, and yet, we can’t say this is nothing. But there is no-thing we can grasp that it is. The “it” is imaginary. There is only it-less-ness. As the great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna pointed out, no way that we try to conceptualize life holds up to careful scrutiny, and the true understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence, because impermanence is so thorough-going that no-thing ever actually forms to be impermanent.

Buddhism and Advaita are not the same, nor are Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons, and yet, they all point to a similar sense of wholeness, nonsubstantiality, and freedom from imaginary bondage. We can emphasize the differences, or we can see the commonality. I can appreciate both Buddhism and Advaita. I have enjoyed both Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons. At different times, I have found all of these expressions liberating. They might see each other as off-the-mark, but I don’t feel compelled to choose between any of them.

In my view, all the ways of conceptualizing, describing and mapping this living reality are in some way incomplete and inaccurate. This living reality can’t really be captured conceptually. The ultimate liberation, in my view, is in not landing anywhere, not concretizing any view (or non-view), not mistaking any map for The Truth.

Ultimately, we don’t know what this is or how it all works, and yet, here it is, clear and obvious—until we start thinking about it and trying to nail it down with words and concepts. Then suddenly, it seems very paradoxical and confusing.

And whatever this is, it keeps unfolding and revealing itself in ever-new ways. I feel less and less sure of anything I think, and this uncertainty only feels problematic when I think that it should be otherwise. What feels very real and undoubtable to me is the openness of Here-Now, aware presence, and this ungraspable present experiencing.

As I say on the current home page of my website:

We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom.

Being awake as I mean it is simply an openness, a willingness to live without answers, to be here in all simplicity, to see through the stories and beliefs that create suffering and confusion or that provide false comfort, to not land in any fixed view.

Present experiencing is ever-changing while never departing from the immediacy of here-now. It is infinitely varied, yet cannot actually be divided up or pulled apart. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole.

We tend to think that we are an independent entity with free will—the thinker of our thoughts, the maker of our choices—living in a world outside of us. But in looking closely, no substantial boundary between inside and outside, and no thinker apart from the thinking can be found.

What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, only this ever-fresh aliveness, this one bottomless moment, right here, right now, just as it is.

Love to all…

The endpoint of spirituality is breaking the addiction to spirituality

For a long time, including at this very moment, I've had a feeling that both disturbs and elates me: almost everything that I once thought was true about spirituality actually isn't, which means that what remains when my addiction to spiritual seeking has run its course is what I'm truly looking for.

This is sort of akin to the Zen'ish adage, first there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is. I alluded to this in a 2015 post, "I don't really know what 'spiritual' means anymore."

Since I don’t see anything other than naturalistic reality as being, well, real, then “spiritual” — a problematic word — must not involve anything supernatural. The question then becomes: what is the difference between being a naturalist, and a spiritual naturalist?

 

Zen, for example, seemingly ends up with no distinction. We chop wood and carry water… after recognizing that a belief in something over and above this leads us astray. The whole “first there is a mountain, then there isn’t, then there is” thing.

We humans have a unique capacity among all the other species with whom we share this planet for abstraction and conceptualization. While this talent has many benefits, it also has downsides. Like making more of life than actually exists within life for those other species.

I feel pain. So does our dog.

But when I feel pain, usually there's some suffering added on, because I have an ability to remember when I didn't feel pain, contrast it with the pain I'm experiencing now, and view the gap between what was and what is as a problem -- which creates mental suffering out of a physical sensation.

Likewise, our ability to come up with notions such as "spirituality" leads us to view life as being deficient because we lack something extra from everyday experience: enlightenment, peace of mind, detachment, boundless compassion, or other qualities valued by religions, mystical practices, and such.

For most of my life I've been addicted to some form of spiritual seeking.

This started in my college years, 1966-71, though I was philosophical before then. Seeing a Greek guy with a black beard doing yoga on the San Jose State College campus led my wife-to-be and me embrace "Yogiraj" and his blend of East and West (Yogiraj drove around in a VW bus with Christananda Ashram on the side), which led to some weird goings-on as detailed in "My strange RSSB initiation story."

For the next 35 years or so, I pursued meditation and associated spiritual practices with great enthusiasm. I was constantly wondering if my spirituality could be improved. I'd vow to make greater effort after attending a meeting (satsang) where the guru of my organization spoke. 

There was never any doubt in my mind that spiritual seeking should be a lifelong affair. Until doubts arose. After that, I felt like I was on a elevator where the "down" button had been pushed and I was leaving behind the floors of religiosity and devotion without knowing where the bottom level was.

Reading Joan Tollifson's writings has helped me identify that ground floor. She's been there and done that when it comes to discarding spiritual baggage. Tollifson is the most skilled communicator in this regard that I've ever come across.

She knows the games spiritual seekers play better than anyone I'm familiar with. In her book, Painting the Sidewalk with Water, Tollifson includes dialogues with people who had just listened to a talk she gave. 

Here's an interchange between a Participant (P) and Joan (J). Tollifson is astute here.

P: So does suffering imply a me?

J: I would say so. But the me is only a thought, a mirage. There never really is a me. It's always an illusion. And there is no "me" who has this illusion. That's part of the illusion. Thought inserts an agent into the picture who isn't really there, and then we have blame and shame and guilt and retribution and all that stuff that keeps us fighting wars and beating ourselves up.

If, by suffering, we simply mean things happening that are hurtful, then there can certainly be suffering without a "me." The tsunami or the earthquake will come whether there's a sense of me or not. And on a certain level you can call that suffering -- people losing their children, their homes, their livelihoods.

But if we say that suffering is what the mind does with all of that after the fact, then suffering requires the mirage of a sufferer. Animals have pain, but humans suffer from their pain in a whole different way, because humans can remember the past and imagine the future.

P: Right away I want to find out how to avoid that. Oh, man.

J: So, there was just a seeing of that desire to avoid suffering as it came up. Beautiful! But then instantly thought slips a sense of agency into the picture and passes judgment on the phantom agent it has just created.

When you said, "Oh, man," it was like "you" had screwed up by wanting to avoid suffering. It had a feel of despair and discouragement and self-blame. Right? [participant nods] But all of these thoughts happen automatically. 

The first layer: "How can I avoid suffering?" and then the secondary layer taking delivery of the first layer, taking it personally and passing judgment on the phantom thinker: "Oh, man. I screwed up again. What a loser I am." It's all a bunch of conditioned, impersonal thoughts arising out of infinite causes and conditions, all of it nothing but a dream-like appearance, a scene in the movie of waking life, gone in an instant. 

But it seems personal because at the center of every story is the core idea that "I" am somehow doing all this. I am responsible for all this. It's happening to me. It's my problem. And it all seems very serious and real. People commit suicide over stories as flimsy as this.

Two books, a half century apart: old Zen, new Zen

I readily admit that I'm addicted to books. It's both a genetic and learned addiction. I blame, or credit, my mother. She was an avid reader and intellectual who, like me now, had books piled up around her home and made notes about them in blank ending pages.

My addiction could help explain why I find myself attracted to books I've owned for a long time, in the example below, over a half century, even though my philosophical tastes have changed quite a bit over the years.

Like a literary archaeologist, I can estimate when I first read a book by the markings I left in it. The Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis book on the left has pencil markings in the margins. Haven't done that since my college days. (Back then psychoanalysis still was a thing; not true anymore, basically.)

A few days ago I started to re-read a piece by D.T. Suzuki in the book, "Lectures in Zen Buddhism." I correctly figured that Suzuki would speak more clearly in his talks to western audiences than in his books that were written from the get-go. 

Here's a sample where Suzuki speaks of the Self.

Scientific knowledge of the Self is not real knowledge as long as it objectifies the Self. The scientific direction of study is to be reversed, and the Self is to be taken hold of from within and not from the outside. This means that the Self is to know itself without going out of itself.

Some may ask, "How can that be possible? Knowledge always implies a dichotomy, the knower and the object known." 

I answer: "Self-knowledge is possible only when the identification of subject and object takes place, that is, where scientific studies come to an end, and lay down all their gadgets of experimentation, and confess that they cannot continue their researches any further unless they transcend themselves by performing a miraculous leap over into a realm of absolute subjectivity. 

The realm of absolute subjectivity is where the Self abides.

Good stuff. My Psychology-major-Self pencilled in a couple of lines in the margin, indicating that I agreed with what Suzuki said. My current Self is less enthusiastic, but I still consider that Suzuki makes a sound argument that fits with Zen Buddhist philosophy.

On the whole, though, this sort of classic Zen writing -- 20th century, yet traditional -- doesn't appeal to me as much as it used to. The Zen stories, the Zen parables, the Zen koans, the Zen tales of what master said what hundred of years ago -- I understand that this indirectness is in line with Zen's dislike of pinning things down in a rational, analytical fashion.

And yet. 

When Joan Tollifson's book arrived from Amazon yesterday, purchased because I enjoyed her Nothing to Grasp book so much, and wanted a fresh Tollifson fix to feed my addiction, just reading a few pages felt like a breath of fresh spiritual and philosophical air, compared to the staleness Suzuki's writing left me with.

Painting the Sidewalk with Water is an appealing title. This book, like Suzuki's contribution to Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, is based on transcripts of talks. In case, talks Tollifson gave at meetings between 20o4 and 2006, mostly in Chicago.

(As of January 2023, Tollifson was living in Ashland, Oregon, a charming small town known for its theatre offerings about four hours south of where I live in Salem, Oregon.)

The back cover says, "Joan Tollifson has an affinity with Buddhism, Advaita and other forms of spirituality, but she belongs to no tradition." Great. That describes me also. I like her approach, though I admit that a skeptic could reasonably say, she talks gibberish, with all this emphasis on Here/Now.

Here's some excerpts from the first chapter, "The Simplicity of What Is." To me, she speaks the language of Zen, just without the Buddhist baggage.

This wholeness or emptiness is not some abstract idea or mystical state of consciousness, but simply the undeniable actuality of this moment -- the sounds of traffic, the hum of machinery, the song of a bird, the knowingness that this is and that you are here. 

This bare being, this aware presence, this present experiencing requires no belief and cannot be doubted. It is undeniable and unavoidable. What can be doubted are all the ideas, interpretations, and stories about this. 

All our confusion and suffering is in this conceptual overlay, never in Reality itself. This book is about seeing through the imaginary problem.

...There is no way to achieve this boundlessness because it is all there is. Here/Now is ever-present in spite of whatever happens in the movie of waking life, never because of what happens. Here/Now is not any particular experience, but rather, it is the experiencing that is present in every experience. 

Boundlessness includes everything and depends on nothing. It is what remains when the whole universe dissolves -- your face before your parents were born.

...The mind typically imagines enlightenment to be some special state that a person attains. It is sometimes said that there is no coming back from enlightenment, and the mind interprets this to mean that a person one day crosses an imaginary finish line and enters a special "enlightened state" of infinite duration.

This "enlightened person" is then imagined to be forever after permanently established in something called "unicity" or "oneness" or "the Now," and this is conceived of as a perpetual experience, a permanent state, or a final understanding that never again lapses or disappears for that person.

But actually, the word enlightenment points to recognizing the mirage-like nature of the separate person who would enter some special state and then stay there forever after.

Zen is largely psychological rather than supernatural, a big plus

Since Zen Buddhism tends to deny that reality can be captured in words or concepts, I guess it isn't surprising that I have difficulty explaining, either to myself or to others, why I've been so enamored of Zen since my college days.

That's when I kept the only book I've failed to return to a library (I'm pretty sure I paid the San Jose Public Library for the replacement cost), Hubert Benoit's The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought. I wrote about this back in 2005: "'The Supreme Doctrine', thirty-six years overdue" 

Whenever I need another dose of Zen, that's the book I'm most likely to pick up. Sure, I've read it many times, but Benoit's profound writing always gives me fresh insights, probably because while the book doesn't change, I do, constantly.

A few days ago I started to re-read the introductory chapter in The Supreme Doctrine and noticed that Benoit says his book isn't for Zen neophytes, and he assumes that the reader is familiar with D.T. Suzuki's The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind.

I hadn't paid attention to that assumption before, so I jumped up and checked the Buddhism section of the bookcase in my office to see if I had that book by Suzuki. I did, but I'd only read less than half of it. so to honor the long-dead Benoit, I decided to finish The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind.

Haven't done that yet, but I've re-read the first 60 pages, which is as far I got in the book before.

What's striking about what Suzuki has to say is how psychological it is, as contrasted with religious books, which primarily focus on the supernatural, with human psychology being much less important.

In other words, Zen, along with Buddhism in general, though not to the same degree as Zen, starts with the human mind/consciousness, not with the supposed nature of God and divine realms of reality. Zen, in fact, both starts and stops on the psychological level, though some "cosmic" Buddhist notions do creep into Zen teachings to a certain extent.

Suzuki discusses the implications of the famous couplets presented to the Fifth Patriarch (sorry women, there's no Matriarchy in traditional Zen) by Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng which encapsulate the difference between the northern Chinese view of gradual enlightenment and the southern Chinese view of sudden enlightenment.

Translations vary, but Suzuki has Shen-hsiu saying:

This body is the Bodhi-tree.
The mind is like a mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean
And let not dust collect upon it.

Whereas Hui-neng replied:

There is no Bodhi-tree,
Nor stand of mirror bright.
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?

Boom! Smack down! In your face, Shen-hsiu! Suzuki writes:

'From the first not a thing is' -- this was the first proclamation made by Hui-neng. It is a bomb thrown into the camp of Shen-hsiu and predecessors. By it Hui-neng's Zen came to be sharply outlined against the background of the dust-brushing type of Zen meditation.

...If the Mind is originally pure and undefiled, why is it necessary to brush off its dust, which comes from nowhere? Is not this dust-wiping, which is the same thing as 'keeping one's guard', an unwarranted process on the part of the Zen Yogin? The wiping is indeed an altogether unnecessary contrivance.

If from the Mind arises this world, why not let the latter rise as it pleases? To try to stop its rising by keeping one's guard on the Mind -- is not this interfering with the mind? The most logical and most natural thing to do in relation to the Mind would be to let it go on with its creating and illuminating.

Suzuki's sympathies clearly are with Hui-neng.

The dominant idea prevailing up to the time of Hui-neng was that the Buddha-nature with which all beings are endowed is thoroughly pure and undefiled as to its self-being. The business of the Yogin is therefore to bring out his self-nature, which is the Buddha-nature, in its original purity.

But, as I said before, in practice this is apt to lead the Yogin to the conception of something separate which retains its purity behind all the confusing darkness enveloping his individual mind. His meditation may end in clearing up the mirror of consciousness in which he expects to see the image of his original self-being reflected.

This may be called static meditation. But serenely reflecting or contemplating on the purity of the Mind has a suicidal effect on life, and Hui-neng vehemently protested against this type of meditation.

So what is meditation, or Dhyana, if it isn't brushing the dust off of the mind? Suzuki tells us.

That Dhyana has nothing to do with mere sitting cross-legged in meditation, as is generally supposed by outsiders, or has been maintained by Shen-hsiu and his school ever since the days of Hui-neng, is here asserted in a most unmistakable manner. 

Dhyana is not quietism, nor is it tranquillization; it is rather acting, moving, performing deeds, seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering; Dhyana is attained where there is, so to speak, no Dhyana practised; Dhyana is Prajna [intuitive knowledge], and Prajna is Dhyana, for they are one. 

...If you say you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore not to have is to have; silence is thunder; ignorance is enlightenment; the holy disciples of the Purity-path go to hell while the precept-violating Bhikshus attain Nirvana; the wiping-off means dirt-accumulating.

Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind

After writing the title of this post, I just had a doubt about my use of the word "amazing."

It made sense when I wrote Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind. But as soon as I'd typed those words, my mind said, in effect, "Hey, dude, is it really so amazing that one part of the body affects another part of the body?"

To which I replied to myself, "No, it isn't."

So why are placebos looked upon as an indication of the surprising connection between what the human mind does and what the human body does? It must be because almost everybody views their mind as something ethereal, while the body is thoroughly physical.

This can't be true, of course, since the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is thoroughly physical.

It's just that thoughts and emotions appear to be like wispy clouds floating in a sky of immaterial consciousness, while the goings-on of the body are made of crude blood, bone, nerves, flesh, and such. That this disconnect between mind and body is illusory is the subject of a book I bought after reading an article by the author regarding placebos in New Scientist.

I'm enjoying The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World, by David Robson. It's a well-written, detailed examination of the placebo effect and methods that we can use to harness it to improve our life.

In the initial chapters, Robson focuses on the evidence for the placebo effect, emphasizing that the more we know about it -- which is why he wrote the book -- the more likely it is that we can use placebos in a positive fashion to help cure what ails us either mentally or physically.

So he repeatedly stresses how clear the evidence is for a strong mind-body connection. For example:

As a result of this continued skepticism, scientific understanding of the placebo effect has taken a long time to blossom, but we now know that positive expectations can bring much more than emotional comfort, producing real relief for many physical conditions, including asthma, Parkinson's, heart disease, and chronic pain.

Even more astoundingly, the cure often produces the same biological changes as the actual drugs prescribed to treat these ailments. The mind-body connection is real and potentially powerful.

...In an amazingly comprehensive way, the brain, working as a prediction machine, updates its simulations and coordinates the body's responses using any cue that might hone its expectations of recovery. There is now no doubt that expectations can -- and do -- shape our physical reality.

Here's some good news. Even if someone knows that a placebo has been given to them, it can still be effective.

The idea that the word "placebo" can itself evoke a placebo response may sound absurd. Since the eighteenth century, the whole concept of the placebo effect has centered on the premise that people must believe they are receiving a "real" treatment for there to be any foreseeable benefit. 

[Thomas] Jefferson wrote that the deception was a "pious fraud" because it was completely unavoidable. Beecher himself said that "it does not matter in the least what the placebo is made of or how much is used so long as it is not detected as a placebo by the subject." 

Yet various groundbreaking studies have shown that a large number of people do respond to a placebo even when they are fully aware that they are receiving an inert pill.

According to Bennett's hypothesis, this may be most common in regions where the placebo effect is already well known, but there is now plenty of evidence that "open-label placebos" can be equally potent elsewhere, provided scientists give participants a clear explanation of the brain as a prediction machine with the power to influence the body's responses.

This provides a fresh perspective on the whole idea of faith as an essential aspect of religion, and spiritual practice in general, including meditation.

Usually it's assumed that unless someone has a strong degree of faith that the tenets of a religion are true, or that the guru to whom they've sworn allegiance genuinely does have mystical powers, or that their meditation system is a proven means of achieving an altered state of consciousness, then embracing that religion, guru, or type of meditation isn't going to be productive.

But since placebo-related research shows that it is the expectation of benefit that leads to positive changes, it doesn't matter so much whether someone believes that their spiritual prescription is a sugar pill or an active substance. 

If you think it can help you, it probably will. 

For several years I've been a fan of the Buddhist mantra/phrase, Namu Amida Butsu. ("I take refuge in Amida Buddha.) I repeat it frequently, even though I don't believe in the supernatural aspects of Buddhism, which includes the Pure Land version of Buddhism that interprets Namu Amida Butsu in a much more flowery and esoteric way than I do.

I like how the words sound. I like how I'm saying something that other people also say. I like how it reminds me of central tenets of Buddhism: impermanence, emptiness, no-self. If I'm worried or distressed, repeating Namu Amida Butsu calms my mind.

It's my personal placebo. No active ingredients. Just an expectation that if I say those words, I'll get some benefit from the repetition. Usually I do. My mind is producing the benefit, not the Buddha or the words. 

Fluke: great book about chance, chaos, and how everything matters

I'd vowed not to buy any more books from Amazon until I'd finished reading the ones I'd already started. But then a review in New Scientist changed my mind. Which I'm glad it did.

Because Fluke, by Brian Klaas, is a highly provocative book about how chance and chaos govern life to a much greater extent than we normally consider -- since most of us consider that we're able to steer our way through the twists and turns of life through reason, intuition, and our own good sense when it comes to decisions.

I've only read the Introduction and the first chapter, which has a great title: "Changing Anything Changes Everything." 

However, I can already tell that I'm going to hugely enjoy the book. I say this because Klaas appears to be firmly in the same sort of worldview that most appeals to me.

Like Robert Sapolsky, who wrote Determined, a book about the illusion of free will that I've blogged about recently, Klaas (a professor of global politics at University College, London) views life as a tapestry made up of countless interrelated threads.

The tapestry of of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug on one thread, you'll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every other part of the tapestry. The truth is, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "We are caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

This is at odds with how life usually is simplistically viewed. We expect that big effects have big causes, often a single cause. What caused World War II? How did Covid-19 become a pandemic? Why did you marry your spouse? What made you choose your religion, or lack thereof?

Confronted with questions like these, typically we come up with an overconfident answer, because uncertainty is distressing while certainty gives us a pleasant feeling of knowingness. Or, we recognize that chance events have a large impact, but we view them as an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

These passages provide an overview of Klass' central theme.

Few have had quite so dramatic an escape as Motoo Kimora narrowly avoiding death by atomic bomb. But everyone can pinpoint a moment that, in hindsight, was a fluke that changed his or her life. Perhaps it was a more traditional pivot, such as a chance encounter with your future spouse, or taking a class in high school that diverted your career plans to a new passion.

Or maybe it was a near miss, such as a swerve of the steering wheel that kept you alive, or having a generous offer rejected on a house or an apartment only to find something far better that you now call home. These moments stand out because they're obviously consequential. We contemplate what could have been.

It's clear there was an alternative path. But for one small change, spouses never meet, passions remain undiscovered, near misses become fatal hits.

But these seem to be the outliers, the moments we marvel at precisely because they are so rare and unusual. We feel as though we construct our lives not with chance, but with the building blocks of large, hopefully wise, choices -- choices that we feel we, alone control. We may seek advice for which path to choose, but we would not seek advice for that which we can't control.

...Watch just about any inspirational TED Talk or read just about any self-help book, and you will be told that you, alone, are the solution that you seek. These messages are popular because most of us view our lives through an individualistic prism. Our life stories are not crowdsourced. Our major decisions define our path, which means we control our path. To understand that path, worship at the Altar of Me.

Every so often, though, we see a fleeting, perplexing glimpse of our path colliding with someone else's in a way that seems out of our control. We call those moments luck, or coincidence, or fate. But we classify them as aberrations. 

When the world functions "normally," life seems to have a predictable, well-ordered regularity, a regularity that we convince ourselves we can mostly direct, masters of our own destinies. Then, whenever we're confronted by strange coincidences or chance diversions that seem to challenge that confident certainty, we shrug at the brief respite from normality and move on, preparing ourselves to make the next big call that shapes our future.

It's a style of thinking so ubiquitous and commonplace that it's uncontested. That's just how the world works.

There's just one problem: it's a lie. It's the lie that defines our times. We might call it the delusion of individualism. We cling to this delusion, the way a man overboard clings to floating debris. But every so often, a story comes along that makes clear how absurd it is to think of ourselves as separate or separable from everyone and everything else.

The story is about a tourist in Greece who was swept out to sea. A search was conducted, but it came up empty. Eighteen hours later the tourist was found. Alive. Clinging to a soccer ball that he'd seen floating in the distance and managed to reach with his last reserves of strength. The ball had been lost ten days earlier by some boys playing on the beach. Without that accidental kick, the tourist would have died.

This emphasis on interrelationships and the illusion of individuality has a strong Buddhist flavor. Indeed, Klaas says that Western philosophies are much more self-centered than Eastern philosophies, which tend to be other-centered. He advises that the Eastern view of reality is to be embraced, not shunned.

At first, an intertwined world seems terrifying. Nobody wants to be told they're not in control, or that a stranger's decision half a world away, or a long-forgotten decision decades in the past, could kill us or cause our economy to collapse into a crippling recession.

...The reality, for better and for worse, isn't terrifying, but wondrous, giving every moment of life potentially hidden meaning. It flips the individualistic worldview on its head. Rather than being in control of our individual destinies when we make big decisions, even our smallest decisions matter, forever altering the world.

...It's time to adjust our lenses of how we see ourselves within the world. Our chaotic, intertwined existence reveals a potent, astonishing fact:

We control nothing, but influence everything.

Meditation isn't about doing it right. It's about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat."

I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head. 

Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires.

You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed, doing whatever sort of practice appeals to me that day. 

The online version of the TIME story also has a good title: "How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Retreat." Here's a PDF file if that link doesn't work for you.
Download How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Retreat | TIME

Dorie Chevlen's description of the retreat made me realize why I've never wanted to go on a 10-day Vipassana meditation session.

So off I went, first to Chicago, then the middle of seemingly nowhere, for the retreat. I signed away my wallet and cellphone; I listened to the rules: No speaking, no eye contact, no physical contact, no drugs or alcohol, no sex or masturbation, no technology, and (scariest to me) no writing. I felt like screaming, but I trusted my boyfriend more than my own instincts; if this was good for him, this will be good for me, I assured my racing heart.

Had I bothered researching Vipassana prior to attending one, I would have read plenty about the hours. We awoke at 4 a.m. each day to make it to our first meditation by 4:30 a.m. After two hours of that, we’d congregate for our 6:30 a.m. breakfast. Then a brief break. Then more meditation. Lunch. A break. More meditation. Tea. More meditation. Then a viewing of a taped lecture by an esteemed teacher of the practice. More meditation. Then bedtime to prepare to wake up and do it all again.

That sounds ghastly to me, though I know many people enjoy retreats of this sort. It just strikes me as unduly structured and artificial. Shouldn't meditation be aimed at helping us navigate life as it usually is, not as how life is lived during a rare Vipassana retreat? 

(Vipassana basically is meditation based on Buddhist mindfulness principles.)

Initially, Chevlen doesn't do well with her meditation, or other aspects of the retreat.

In our nightly lectures, the teacher encouraged us not to think while meditating, and when a thought inevitably did cross our minds, to pass it aside without judgment. I floundered at this initially. Unintentionally, I’d screen entire films in my head (mostly M. Night Shyamalan, because even my subconscious has no taste), and analyze years-old interactions.

Constantly, helplessly, my mind kept replaying “Closing Time,” for which, unfortunately, I didn’t know all the lyrics. The result was a horrible mental performance in which Cohen would croon “And the bupbupbupbup dun-dun and the ladadadada and the Johnny Walker wisdom runnin’ high,” Plus, the campus’s picturesque geese were in the midst of mating season, so Cohen’s half-wrong lyrics were punctuated by the honking of fornicating waterfowl.

What I mean is meditating was difficult for me. But so was the time spent not meditating. Have you ever heard a cafeteria full of people eating in silence? An entire room echoing with the sound of conversation-less human mastication—all wet chewing and slippery gulps, suppressed belches and scraping silverware. 

But after a few days, she did better.

To my relief, meditating became easier, slowly, as the first days of the course passed. Whereas initially I couldn’t sit for five minutes without needing to shift my hips, I found myself still for longer and longer stretches of time. My hummingbird brain, too, slowed its vibrations; my thoughts still fluttered, but I could go stretches of time before they pulled me away. And yet, I still fantasized about leaving. Yes, I can sit here and not think, but what is the point, my mind demanded. “Run,” it urged. “Run!”

Chevlen ends up running, leaving the retreat after a few additional days. Her boyfriend was disappointed. So was she. Eventually, though, she realized that she also needed to run from the relationship with her boyfriend.

I considered leaving the life we’d built. But I didn’t. Not at first. I spent a few more months unhappy; I was sure, more so now than ever, that there had to be something wrong with me. I couldn’t meditate right. I couldn’t love right. Was there anything right about me?

Eventually, my fast-expanding misery burst like a balloon in my mouth. Pop!  “This isn’t working.” The words felt like poetry on my lips. My boyfriend helped pack up my stuff and drove me to the airport. This lovely man, with real sheets on his bed and the generosity to schlep me all the way to O’Hare International Airport—I was leaving him?

My intuition shouted to be heard over reason and though I thought it would break me, I hugged him goodbye and walked away. My legs nearly collapsed with relief on arrival. I was in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, yes, but I wasn’t wrong. That toilet was probably busted before I ever used it [at the retreat, where she had to deal with a clogged toilet].

Her final paragraphs appealed to me. It mirrors, in a way, how I felt when I trusted myself and ran from the India-based religious organization that I'd belonged to for 35 years. It was a difficult decision, but I embraced the notion that after practicing a form of spirituality that involved a lot of rules, commandments, dos and don'ts, it was time to relax into a less rigid approach to life.

I’d love to say I’ve followed my instincts since then, but trust is a muscle, like any other; it only grows with pain and repetition. So I kept writing, even though it seemed doomed. I moved to New York, then I moved to LA. I got rejected; I got published; usually I got ignored. I fell in love and fell out of love and fell in love all over again.

I made a lot of mistakes, is what I mean. But they were my mistakes, at least; made from listening to my own inner voice, a voice which sometimes stuttered or misspoke or vocal-fried, but always rung true as my own. I made a lot of mistakes. But slowly, I started trusting that I could fix them. Even better, I could learn from them.

I didn’t finish the meditation course my ex-boyfriend recommended, but I sometimes still try to meditate. I’ll sit for 20 minutes and try to focus on my breath, on nothing else but just being, until my alarm goes off. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right. But I trust, now, that I don’t have to.

Here's what I wrote about Zen and naive realism when I was 20

Today I was planning to write a post about a central theme in a book I've been blogging about recently, Joan Tollifson's Nothing to Grasp. I was struck by how Tollifson has come around to viewing reality in simple terms, "as it is." Leaves falling. Birds flying. Pain happening. Dishes being washed.

She came to this outlook after a lengthy period of seeking the Truth of It All via meditation, Zen Buddhism, nondual teachings, therapy, and other means. I wanted to write about how weird and wonderful it is to have sought reality in esoteric teachings, then realize that, hey, it's been Here/Now all that time.

But that intention brought a long-forgotten term to mind: naive realism. I remembered that I'd written a paper on this subject in college. That led me to poke through a stack of folders in a rarely opened cabinet where I keep stuff that I'd written way back when. Amazingly I found it.

A paper I'd written at San Jose State College on December 20, 1968 for Phil. 111 ,a class about epistemology, the theory of knowledge. I titled it, "Psychology, Zen, and the Naive Realist." Reading it, I found that the 20 year old me who wrote that paper sounded quite a bit like the 75 year old me I am today.

Is that good or bad? Not for me to say. Probably neither. It just is what it is. I was a decent writer and thinker in 1968. I'm a decent writer and thinker now in 2024. What I found interesting was that views I hold today were foreshadowed in the views I had back in college. I adored Alan Watts and Hubert Benoit then. I still do.

Here's the portion of the paper where I talked about Zen and naive realism.

Naive realism is what the name implies: how reality appears to us is how it is, because we feel that we see the world objectively. Phenomenology is the notion that phenomena should be described as they appear to the subject. (I had to retype this part of the paper because back in 1968 I necessarily wrote with a typewriter and carbon paper on rather flimsy paper, which wouldn't make it easy to create a PDF file out of the paper.)

Let us speak of Zen Buddhism now. Zen recognizes that everyone carries within him the Knowledge of the Way. We possess realization even in the natural state in which most of us spend our lives. But this realization, although already present, must be recognized and the barriers which we have erected that prevent us from achieving true knowledge must be broken down.

This is not an easy process and requires one to exert the utmost concentration and awareness in order to realize what one already possesses. For the state of realization (Satori) is essentially a state of absolute naive realism, although in a different dimension from naive realism as we commonly experience it.

One must start from a solid belief in common experiential naive realism, but then should seriously question the premises of this assumed naive realism, for only when we experience a condition of doubt regarding the validity of the natural base of our existence can we move toward the attainment of the Way.

For the natural state of man is not his Absolute state; complacency and satisfaction with one's natural way of perceiving things will doom one to ignorance rather than knowledge, even though one does possess a certain knowledge of reality of the natural world.

Let me give an example in mixed epistemological and Zen Buddhist terms. The naive realist is correct in believing that he perceives the natural world directly, for he must, being a part of the world himself. He is correct in rejecting the phenomenalist's view that one is somehow separated from physical objects by a barrier of some sort; this is positing a dichotomy of man and the natural world which does not exist.

However, the unenlightened naive realist does not go far enough. He leaves himself directly perceiving the natural world and he rests contented. But he fails to consider the possibility that (in an anthropomorphic sense) the world is perceiving him at the same time, and that there is actually no process which he regards as "perceiving" going on in his nervous system at all.

Watts says, "There is not the external world, and then the state of nervous system, and then something which sees that state. The seeing is precisely that particular state of the nervous system, a state which for that moment is an integral part of the organism."

Watts further elaborates on this point:

Let us suppose, then, that the false reflex of "I seeing my sights" or "I feeling my feelings" is stopped by such methods as the ways of liberation employ. Will it not therefore become clear that all our perceptions of the external world are states of the organism? The division between "I" and "my sights" is projected outwardly into the sharp division between the organism and what it sees.

Just such a change of perception as this would explain the feeling, so usual at the moment of liberation (satori), that the external world is oneself and that external actions are one's own doing. Perception will then be known for what it is, a field relationship, as distinct from an encounter.

The natural man, as a naive realist, must question the foundations of his naive realism. He must continue living as he does in the world to which he is accustomed, but he must learn to perceive this world in a different manner. The world of the naive realist and the enlightened man are but a hairsbreadth apart; they are the same but for an undefinable, though very real, change in consciousness. This change is aided by one's constant awareness of his relationship with the natural world.

But first one must doubt the reality of his ordinary manner of awareness, and this is where the question of perception (among others) in regard to naive realism which epistemology raises is of value. It may help to jolt the natural man out of his inactive acceptance of illusion and cause him to seek something beyond his natural, unrealized existence.

It is the questions, the doubt, which the epistemologist raises in regard to naive realism which are of value, not the abstract answers which it tries to supply. The techniques of phenomenalism, the critical awareness of the nature of the physical world with which phenomenalism is concerned, may serve to help guide the unrealized naive realist onto the path which leads to the Way.

This process which leads to enlightenment may be thought of as consisting of three stages. The first corresponds to the state of the natural man, the pure unconcerned naive realist in epistemological terms. When one has left this natural state and has attained a partial awareness and perception of his true being, then he may be said to have entered the intermediate stage; he rejects naive realism and seeks to find the real Truth.

This seeking involves great effort and intense conflicts as one leaves the familiar state of illusory awareness for the "Great New ?". This intermediate stage at its height has been described as a "mental state of complete confusion without form (confusion so complete and so lacking in form that it is in no respect a state of chaos and resembles the transparent purity of an immense crystal behind which there would still be nothing.)" [Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine] This state of Great Doubt just precedes the attainment of Satori.

In the words of Benoit, "The idea of the three successive stages of which we are speaking is found also in this passage of Zen: 'Before a man studies Zen, for him the mountains are mountains and the waters are waters; when, thanks to the teaching of a good master, he has achieved a certain inner vision of the truth of Zen, for him the mountains are no longer mountains and the waters are no longer waters; but later, when he has really arrived at the asylum of rest, once more the mountains are mountains and the waters are waters.'"

The naive realist has come full circle: from naive realism, to a phenomenalistic state of mind, and back to naive realism. But this final state of naive realism is characterized by a change in consciousness which makes it ever so different from the natural state of naive realism, although it appears to be the same to the unenlightened.

I am using epistemological terms in a sense for which they are not exactly suited, however. The way of Zen considers of much, much more than the simplistic analogies I have drawn here. But then Zen is simple, although inexpressible, so epistemological parallels might be said to describe its nature as well as anything else. I have played an abstract intellectual game in fusing some domains of Zen and epistemology together, a game which may or may not be valid to others.

For myself, I have gained some insights into epistemology and Zen, and, more importantly, into my Self. I realize the fragility of the analogy which I have manufactured between such dissimilar areas as Zen and epistemology, but there is, I believe, some worth in it. All things are reconciled in the All, even these.

"Whoever understands the first truth
Should understand the ultimate truth.
The last and first, 
Are they not the same?"

"Words cannot describe everything.
The heart's message cannot be delivered in words.
If one receives words literally, he will be last,
If he tries to explain with words, he will not
     attain enlightenment in this life."

           ...Zen poems

Maybe the biggest problem with life is believing there's a problem with life

It sort of feels to me like a rapidly descending elevator. You know, when it seems like the floor is falling away beneath you even though you're standing on it. Except in an elevator you know what the lowest level is. 

I'm not sure how much further I have to sink. And that's okay with me. At least I'm moving in the right direction: away from the heights of religious supernaturalism toward a grounding in here-and-now reality.

Reading Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, has made me more aware of that descending elevator feeling. For she ably undercuts what I used to hold onto with such fervor in my true believing days. Gurus. Dogmas. Commandments. Goal-seeking meditation. Altered states of consciousness. 

But that's just the beginning, the upper floors that my personal Meaning of Life elevator has been leaving behind since my deconversion from a religion, Eastern mysticism variety, about nineteen years ago.

Once I let go of overt religious precepts, I was drawn to what I view as "halfway houses" in between my addiction to a highly organized religion and a complete disinterest in what usually is called spirituality, for want of a better term.

Those halfway houses, where I could dwell for a time before moving to lower levels via the Meaning of Life elevator, were Taoism and Buddhism. I was attracted to both philosophies -- which they really are, rather than religions -- from an early age. 

Here's what I said in "Taoism isn't mystical. It is natural."

Taoism appeals to me.

I started to add "because..." to that last sentence.

But I'm reluctant to try to explain why I enjoy reading Taoist books and practicing Taoism-in-motion, Tai Chi, so much. When I was about twelve years old, I visited San Francisco's Chinatown for the first time. I spent my allowance on buying cheap scrolls of what I now realize were images of Taoist wanderers in Chinese nature scenes. That artwork decorated my room until I went to college. 

At the time, I had no knowledge of Taoism. I don't think I'd even heard of that term. Now, some 50 years later, I still don't know much about Taoism. Great news! I may be a Taoist sage!

In college, Zen Buddhism grabbed my attention. It appealed to me more than non-Zen Buddhism, which has much more structure to it, what with the Eightfold Path and logical analyses of why and how suffering arises. 

But whether it was the Eastern religion (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or Sant Mat) I became initiated into in 1970 and stuck with for 35 years, or the much looser Taoism and Zen Buddhism philosophies that I enjoyed so much, I still was driven by a desire to reach an end point.

Enlightenment. Satori. Peace of mind. Oneness. 

I'd given up the idea of finding an end point on the upper religious floors that the Meaning of Life elevator was connected to. However, I had a sense that lower down, in the realm of naturalism rather than supernaturalism, I could still achieve a goal that would make me feel, "Ah, this is what life is all about."

Well, I'm having increasing doubts that this is either desirable or possible. It's a weird feeling -- the notion that after some sixty years (age 15 to 75, roughly), of believing that I was on a Path to Somewhere, now I'm inclined to believe that I'm going nowhere.

And that's absolutely fine with me. 

Joan Tollifson is just the latest in a string of people who I think of as non-spiritual writers about spirituality. Meaning, they not only undermine the foundations of religion, but also, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how radical they are, the very idea that life is a problem that needs fixing.

I've been preaching that same message on this blog in various ways for quite a while. Except, it's been more along the lines of a question: sure, there are problems in everybody's life that need attention, but is life itself a problem?

Buddhism says "yes." Life is suffering. Here's an approach to ending that suffering, or at least much diminish it.

Taoism basically agrees, though not so obviously. Taoism doesn't have anywhere near the structure that Buddhism has, but Taoist teachings still encourage us to learn how to be more in accord with the Way of Tao.

Zen Buddhism, though, is similar to Tollifson's point of view: the only problem with life itself is believing that life itself has a problem. That perspective has always been sitting there in the Zen literature, in the Zen stories, in the Zen koans, in the Zen teachings. 

Until recently I didn't see it very clearly.

Which isn't surprising, because Zen Buddhism is notoriously reluctant to spell things out, preferring subtlety, misdirection, paradox, poetic metaphor. Or, maybe not. I readily admit that after all those years of embracing Zen, without ever actually practicing Zen, I may have failed to grasp what was always within reach, but didn't appeal to me.

Namely, that there's nothing to do, and besides, there's no one to do it. All there is, is doing that happens naturally by life and existence itself -- no doer required. 

Is this the ground floor? Maybe, but probably not.

Likely the whole idea of levels, of floors, or greater or lesser distance from reality, that's all just spiritual/religious mumbo-jumbo. A bunch of words and concepts that appeal to billions of people, definitely including me, yet not only aren't necessary for a satisfying life, but actually interfere with a satisfying life.

Well, I love to say to myself, "Don't know" and "Could be wrong." So I'll end with those sayings.

Buddhist emptiness isn't nothing, it is everything

I'm a fan of emptiness, Buddhist variety. Though this really is a simple notion, it took me quite a while to appreciate what "emptiness" means from a Buddhist perspective. 

One reason is that in everyday usage, emptiness points to the absence of something, like an empty glass or an empty bank account. Though this isn't really how Buddhism uses the term, I frequently see people speaking of Buddhist emptiness similarly, as if it is a nothingness.

That's incorrect. Actually Buddhists view every entity as failing to have a quality of inherent existence.

Meaning, it doesn't stand alone as an independent reality. Instead, things are empty of inherent existence, for they only exist as a part of the whole, where everything belongs to an intricate web of interconnected relationships.

Though I'm not really surprised by this, given the depth of knowledge Joan Tollifson has about Buddhism, it still was pleasing to find that her book, Nothing to Grasp, speaks correctly about emptiness.

Our usual understanding of impermanence is that the world is full of things, like tables and chairs and you and me, and that these things are all impermanent. But in Buddhism they say that the true understanding of impermanence reveals that there is actually no impermanence because nothing ever forms in the first place as a persisting, separate, independent "thing" to be impermanent. 

There is only thorough-going flux, seamless unicity -- this ever-present, ever-changing Here/Now. This is what Buddhists mean by emptiness and what Advaita calls the one, immutable Self. When this is seen clearly, there is no fear of death, for there is no one separate to die. And there is no "me" to be unworthy or to fail. 

There are lots of implications that go along with emptiness. For example, dualistic ways of viewing the world don't make much sense in the light of emptiness. At least, when we view things from a broad holistic perspective rather than a narrow thing-centered perspective.

Tollifson writes:

Hearing wind in leaves, there is no persisting form, no division, no "me" apart from the wind, no listener apart from the sound, no sound "out there" apart from the listening presence. Without thoughts, there is simply the immediacy of whooooooosh!

Thought comes in afterwards and says: "I hear wind in leaves." Instantly, a whole conceptual picture takes shape in the mind like a mirage, a picture in which we suddenly seem to have subjects and objects, causes and effects, and actors who exist independently of their actions.

In this conceptual mirage, "I" am worrying about getting enlightened, and thought insists that there must be something more to Ultimate Reality than "just" that whooshing sound. That can't be enough! 

Thought begins chasing something bigger and better to fill the sense of lack and uncertainty that it has just created! It imagines "Ultimate Reality" as something it hopes to find, a final understanding, a special experience, something other than Here/Now. 

Round and round the thinking mind goes on its treadmill, chasing the imaginary carrot.

But the nondual absolute is that simple, immediate, conceptual whoooosh. And eventually we see that even thoughts and the mirage-worlds they spin are also a kind of energetic whoosh, and that nothing is outside that boundless totality. Even the mirage of solidity and separation is nothing but whooshing. 

...We learn to think of ourselves as a separate, persisting individual encapsulated inside a bodymind, somebody apart from this world who was born into this world, somebody who "looks out" at the world and who lives "in" it.

But this separation is conceptual. When we look for this "body" or this "mind" or this "person" or "this world," all we actually find is thorough-going flux and ceaseless change, in which everything is inseparable from everything else.

Religious believers are in love with concepts, not reality

I find it amusing when religiously-minded people accuse atheist skeptics like me of thinking too much, of not being in touch with direct experience, of being in love with abstract concepts.

This is a classic case of, as the saying goes, the pot calling the kettle black. Meaning, as that Wikipedia article points out, psychological projection has taken over, and the accuser claims that someone else has the attribute that actually they have. 

For there's nothing more tied to thinking, indirect experience, and abstract concepts than religious belief.

The reason is obvious: since there's no demonstrable evidence that the entities assumed by a religion actually exist, the only way to bring those entries into being is through acts of imagination -- concepts unmoored from direct experience.

What sort of reality would these entities have if they weren't kept alive by the thoughts of those who believe in them? God, Soul, Heaven, Hell, Angels, Divine Grace, Holy Spirit, Enlightenment, Astral Plane, and so many more.

Absent human thought, none of these things would exist at all.

And even with human thought, they exist only as abstract concepts without any grounding in here-and-now reality that other concepts like money, gravity, and sadness have. I got to thinking about this today after reading another short chapter in Joan Tollifson's book Nothing to Grasp. 

One reason I'm enjoying this book is that even when I disagree with something Tollifson says, this doesn't bother me much, because whether or not I agree with her, I like how she makes me think more deeply about issues that lie at the heart of non-religious spirituality.

Here's some excerpts from the "What is This?" chapter.

Take a moment once again to stop reading and to simply appreciate the happening of this moment. Be fully present to the sounds, fragrances, aromas, visual images, somatic sensations -- not these labels, but the happening itself, this undeniable and utterly immediate present experiencing. 

What is this?

The thinking mind instantly wants to supply an answer. It wants to figure this out -- label everything, categorize it, explain it, understand it, analyze it, capture it, frame it, get control of it.

This is the function of the thinking mind, and it serves us well in certain basic survival situations such as food gathering, shelter-building, or navigating our way through new terrain. It has gotten us to the moon and to the top of the food chain.

Our conceptual maps are functionally necessary and not to be discarded, but no matter how accurate the map is, it is never the territory itself. And yet, we have a deeply conditioned tendency to mistake the map for the territory. We do this without even realizing we are doing it.

Some of our most commonplace concepts are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that they are actually concepts. "The world," "the body," "the mind," "the self," "consciousness," "awareness," "nonduality" -- we throw these word-concepts around without ever stopping to wonder what we are actually talking about.

And next thing we know, we're lost in some conceptual confusion, very much akin to wondering what willl happen to me if I step off the edge of the earth. That's an imaginary problem, as all of us in the 21st century realize, but for people in earlier centuries, it seemed quite real.

...When we try to figure out "the meaning of life" or "the nature of reality," or when we try to come up with a conceptual understanding of Consciousness, Totality, God, or the Ground of Being, we inevitably end up frustrated and confused. 

Any conceptual picture of reality is always subject to doubt, and no metaphysical formulation ever satisfies our deep longing for Truth.

What satisfies that deep longing of the heart is the falling away of the attempt to make sense of everything. Of course, this doesn't mean we don't still make relative sense of things in a functional way in daily life.

But we stop trying to take hold of Totality, or grasp the Ground of Being, or figure out the meaning of life. Instead, we relax into simply being life. We learn to recognize (to see, to sense) when we're beginning to grasp or fixate, and in that recognition, quite naturally there is an ability to relax and let go.

When we stop trying to figure it all out, we discover that it doesn't need to be figured out, and in fact, can't be figured out! When we stop desperately trying to get a grip, we find nothing is lacking and there is nothing to grasp.

...If we say, "This is it," the words create the very split they attempt to point beyond. If we say "All is One," it is one too many. If we call it "nothing," it seems to deny the undeniable presence of everything. If we assert that "there is nothing to do," it seems to overlook the necessity of doing whatever we are moved by life to do.

If we assert that "there is something to do," it makes it sound as if something else is required in order to be what we already are. 

...The illusory bubble pops. We see that Here/Now is always unobstructed, boundless and open. It is open enough to include even resistance and contraction. Contraction is simply another form that formlessness is momentarily assuming, another fleeting appearance with no inherent reality.

Nothing needs to be different from how it is. We don't need to define or explain this present happening, and in fact, we can't! The only real answer to "What is this?" is to be awake and see.

Beautiful: how Joan Tollifson sees life, and us.

Having received Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, I wanted to share these passages from her opening chapter, "Life." The more I learn about how Toliffson views things, the more I like her perspective.

How do we make sense of all this? What's it all about? Is there any way out of our suffering or the world suffering, or any way to live through it without falling into destructive mind-states like despair, anger, hatred, and self-pity?

Like many others, I looked in different directions for answers to these questions. I tried alcohol and drugs, psychotherapy, political activism, meditation, satsang and radical nonduality. 

Finally I arrived at the place I had never left: the simplicity and immediacy of Here/Now -- this that is ever-present and utterly complete in spite of what happens in the movie of waking life and never because of what happens. 

I still experience moments of heartbreak and discouragement, bursts of anger, waves of depression or anxiety, and periodic flare-ups of addictive and compulsive behaviors. Perhaps these things happen less frequently, less severely, and for shorter duration, but they still happen. And the world at large is still full of suffering and injustice.

What does seem to have changed is that there has been a falling away of the thought-sense that I am a separate person in charge of "my life" who is going to eventually perfect myself or the world. 

There is the realization that life includes the whole show, the light and the dark, that none of it is personal, that all of it is happening effortlessly by itself in the only way possible, and that none of it has any solidity or permanence. 

There is also clarity about what the unnecessary exertion is that gives rise to so much of our human suffering and confusion, how we make ourselves miserable. As this has clarified, there has been a decrease in gullibility when the siren song of delusion appears.

When I find myself thinking that something is lacking or that the fix is "out there" somewhere, there is a greater ability to relax into Here/Now, the place I have never really left.

Instead of trying to intentionally fix or improve "myself" or "the world," I am more open to allowing everything to heal itself in its own way, in its own time, as it does anyway. There is a devotion to the immediacy of life exactly as it is right now, without superimposing any kind of spin.

This bare intimacy is neither an effortful, goal-oriented, improvement-seeking exertion, nor is it any kind of passive or fatalistic resignation. It is an energetic aliveness, an openness that includes everything and sticks to nothing.

It is not something "you" achieve or acquire, but simply the boundlessness, the bare being that is always already fully present right here, right now.

It is a great relief to realize that in this undivided happening, there is no perfection apart from the imperfection, that the light and the dark arise together like the crest and trough of the wave, that they cannot be pulled apart, and to appreciate the holiness of everything, exactly as it is, warts and all.

The firm conviction that I know what's best for the universe seems thankfully to be evaporating. And when it does show up, it has more of an endearing quality -- oh, look, there goes Joan doing her little dance of concern again.

I've discovered that there is no end to problems. When we cure one problem, a new one emerges. But this only becomes a source of suffering if we imagine it should or could be otherwise. In fact, the turbulent, cloudy weather is as integral to the whole as the clear, sunny weather. And it's all a matter of perspective and point of view what we consider sunny.

...The whole show is one seamless, ever-changing, ungraspable happening: subatomic particles waving in and out of existence, planets circling the sun, hurricanes sweeping across the ocean, birds migrating, ants building tunnels and hills, white blood cells battling an infection, humans clear-cutting a forest, building a meditation center, writing books, shopping for groceries, driving to work, falling in love, getting angry, waking, dreaming, daydreaming, waking up from daydreaming, thinking, remembering, imagining, hearing the traffic, reading these words.

Only when we think about this seamless flow and put it into words, does it apparently get broken up into subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, causes and effects, before and after, good and bad.

Only when we think, does there seem to be an unfolding narrative happening in time with "me" at the center of the story, an apparently separate unit of consciousness (a mind) encapsulated inside an apparently separate body, someone who must make something of myself, use my gifts to help the world, be a success, do the right thing, and perhaps get enlightened.

But if we look backward with awareness for the source of any impulse, thought, desire, intention, action or reaction that occurs, no point of origination can be located or found.

We have no idea what our next thought will be. Recent brain research indicates that by the time a thought such as, "I need to feed the cat," shows up in consciousness, the action this thought appears to initiate is in fact already underway in the body.

In the blink of an eye, the forms of this moment vanish into thin air, replaced instantly by an entirely new universe. When we look closely at any apparent form (a chair, a person, a thought, a feeling, a sensation), it's obvious that none of what appears has any substantial, persisting reality.

Everything is changing, dissolving into something else. It is all a shimmering, dream-like appearance, vanishing as soon as it appears. Everything is changing, and yet paradoxically Here/Now is ever-present.

...We typically imagine ourselves to be an enduring, independent entity with free will, a separate fragment apart from the whole, struggling to control our life and survive as this conceptual form called "me" that we think is real.

We fear death and hope that "my" consciousness and my story will continue on in some kind of hopefully pleasant after-life. But this picture of our situation is as ill-conceived as the one our ancestors had not that long ago when they feared they might fall off the edge of the earth if they sailed out into the ocean. 

When we truly see that there is no separate, independent, persisting form of any kind -- that no actual borders or seams exist between subject and object, self and not-self, birth and death -- that there is only this ever-changing, ever-present boundlessness -- then there is no body and no mind apart the totality.

Just as there is no edge to the earth, there is no independent or persisting someone who is born and who eventually dies. There is only this inexplicable thorough-going flux or boundless presence, just as it is, from which nothing stands apart -- vast emptiness flowering into this ever-changing appearance. 

 

Why it makes sense to assemble your own unique spirituality

As I've noted many times before, and surely will note many times again, like right now, it took me just a few seconds back in 2004 to come up with the tag line, or slogan, that's below the title of this blog: Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. 

I've never thought of changing those words, because they encapsulate what I consider to be the wisest form of spirituality. To me spirituality doesn't have anything to do with religion or supernatural stuff; it's a quest for the deeper side of life, which means it has no firm definition.

And that's the point of spiritual independence. Each of us should feel free to assemble our own unique form of spirituality.

Of course, many people don't want to do that. They prefer a ready-made religion, mystical pursuit, or whatever, just as lots of people don't want to make their own dinner, so they order takeout or pop a frozen store-bought meal in the microwave.

Which is fine. Being spiritually independent can include surrendering one's independence, if that's what seems appealing.

I enjoy reading and re-reading books about meditation, mindfulness, free will, philosophy, Buddhism, and other writings in the wonderfully vague genre of spirituality. Rarely, probably never, do I agree with everything an author says.

Heck, when I reread the books that I've written, I definitely don't agree with everything the author said, and that guy was me. The reason is that I'm constantly changing, as we all are. What struck me as profoundly meaningful at one point in my life seems absurdly wrong at another point. 

So I try to keep this in mind when I'm reading a new book that Amazon has delivered to me.

Almost certainly I'm going to find appealing much of what the author says, or I wouldn't have ordered the book. However, I also know that the author is going to say some things that will make me put a large question mark in the margin next to the offending statement.

Again, that's because spirituality is highly individualistic. Unlike science, there's no way to tell fact from fiction, reality from illusion, truth from falsehood. Rather than this being a drawback of spirituality, it's a good thing.

For the lack of standards means that every person drawn to some form of spiritual pursuit necessarily has to cobble together their own belief system, rather than having knowledge conveyed to them already fashioned via a textbook, as is the case with science.

Problem is, often people consider that their personal spiritual beliefs should be as unquestioned as a scientific fact. This is wrong. Just because someone is so confident in their beliefs, they seem akin to an objective law of nature, doesn't make that so.

It's absolutely fine to say, "I believe _____, but you're welcome to disagree." Not fine is an attitude of "I believe _____, and you should too, because it's a fact." Frequently that sentiment is justified in science. The earth is round no matter how many flat earthers claim otherwise.

But in spirituality, where we're talking about subjective meaning, not objective facts, no one has a right to demand that someone else believe as they do.

Yet this also means that no one should be barred from challenging someone else's beliefs, given that one form of spirituality my wife and I embrace (albeit in our own individual ways) is to critique dogmatic fundamentalist belief systems that wrongly claim they're 100% true.

Nothing is 100% true. Including what I just said. Every spiritual book, every spiritual teaching, every spiritual teacher -- they all include valuable gems that will be treasured by some people, as well as useless trinkets that will be rejected by other people. 

If I can find a few statements in a book or talk that ring true to me and stick in my mind, it doesn't matter if the rest of what's said strikes me as useless. I don't expect perfection in forms of spirituality because perfection doesn't exist. 

What's important to me is growth, change, open-mindedness, learning, and yes, entertainment.

I just got a new book about Buddhism that, after reading just the early pages, I can tell I disagree with some central premises of the author. However, I really liked the preface. That will stick with me. I just wish the entirety of The Art of Disappearing was written in the same style.

Here's the preface.

Do not read this book if you want to be a somebody. It will make you a nobody, a no-self.

I did not write this book. They are transcribed talks, edited with all the bad jokes removed. I did not say my bad jokes anyway. The five khandhas, which presumptively claim to be me, said them. I have the perfect alibi -- my self was absent from the scene of the crime!

This book does not tell you what you must do to get enlightened. It is not an instruction manual like Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond, which was also written by those pesky five khandhas pretending to be Ajahn Brahm. 

Doing things like following instructions just makes you more of a person. Instead, this book describes how disappearing happens in spite of you. Moreover, it is not just the "outside" that vanishes. The entire "inside," all that you take to be you, that also disappears. And that is so much fun it is sheer bliss.

The true purpose of practicing Buddhism is to let go of everything, not to get more things like attainments to show off to your friends. When we let go of something, really let go, then it disappears. We lose it. All successful meditators are losers. 

They lose their attachments. Enlightened ones lose everything. They truly are the Biggest Loser. At the very least, if you read this book and understand some of it, you may discover the meaning of freedom and, as a consequence, lose all the hair on your head!

I acknowledge the kind assistance of other nobodies, in particular Ron Storey for transcribing the talks, Ajahn Brahmali for editing the work, and all the empty beings at Wisdom Publications for publishing the book.

May you all Get Lost, 

Not really Ajahn Brahm
Perth, Australia

 

Here's a good description of what Buddhist mindfulness is all about

There's lots of ways to look upon mindfulness. Mostly I view mindfulness as a practice that doesn't require a grounding in Buddhism. However, I enjoy reading about how Buddhist practitioners view mindfulness, or vipassana insight meditation. 

A concluding chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a Buddhist monk, contains a description of what mindfulness can lead to that I found clear and mostly convincing, though I have some doubts about whether the supposedly unconditioned state of nibbana/nirvana actually can be achieved.

Enjoy.

As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory, and affective phenomena. You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts.

Actions, thoughts, feelings, desires -- you see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect. You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall, and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail. It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.

Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source.

These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained, and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts -- you have seen these things for yourself, and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death.

It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping after solid, trustworthy ground. You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.

You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age, and death. 

You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality.

...In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them; you see them as the very stuff of human thought. 

You search for that thing you call "me," but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them.

You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself -- physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions -- it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for "me."

You find nothing.

In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience, all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes that have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. 

The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots.

Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of a self, an "I" or "being" anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence -- impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness -- come rushing home with concept-searing force.

You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed.

The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated nonpersonal phenomena, which are conditioned and ever-changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

Here's my Christmas letter and blog post about not liking the holiday season

Well, here in Oregon, Christmas day is almost over. Per usual, it didn't mean much to me and my wife. Since neither of us are Christians -- not even close, since we're atheists -- the whole birth of Jesus thing is totally meaningless to Laurel and me.

We had five friends over for dinner last night, Christmas Eve. That was pleasant. Good conversation and a great vegetarian meal prepared almost entirely by my wife. My main contribution was washing a lot of dishes, a task that I'm well qualified for (as opposed to cooking).

Here's our 2023 Christmas Letter, otherwise known as our Holiday Letter. I'll share it as both a JPEG image and a PDF file. If you want to read more of my Christmas letters, which I've been writing every year since 1995, head to my aptly named "Collected Christmas Letters" post. 
Download 2023 Christmas Letter PDF

Last night I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "A message for people having a hard time during the Christmas season." If you click on that link you'll find a nice two minute video from Michael Shermer about the meaning of life. (Spoiler alert: it's in the here and now.) I also share some passages from one of my favorite books about mindfulness, "Mindfulness in Plain English."

Here's how the post starts out.

Many people, well, most people I'm sure, enjoy the Christmas season. Vacation. Gifts. Relatives. Eating. Drinking. Football. And for Christians, the birth of Jesus.

But for others, and I'm largely in your camp, all of these festivities, well-wishing, and positivity grate on their nerves, because for reasons unique to each person, the Christmas season isn't a time for celebration.

After all, as the Buddha pointed out, life is suffering. Or at least, full of disappointment. Sure, it's possible to put on a happy face and ignore this truth, but ignore it or not, that truth remains. 

Many people are lonely. Many people are in pain -- physical, emotional, or both. Many people struggle for a lack of money. Many people deeply feel the sorrow of those beset by war, starvation, oppression, discrimination. There's a myriad of reasons why merry-making feels wrong around Christmas.

So I just want to say to anyone who feels that way, know that you're not alone. Since I'm one of you, by and large, here's a couple of things that made me feel better on this Christmas Eve.

First, someone shared this video by Michael Shermer in a comment on my Church of the Churchless blog. It's just a few minutes long. I liked what Shermer had to say. Basically, be here now. Enjoy the small things of life to the extent that you can.

This morning I picked up my copy of a book by a Buddhist monk, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English. These passages from the first chapter resonated with me. I'd read them several times before, but I needed a reminder of the Buddhist message.

Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen

Wanting to read something different yesterday, I picked up my copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Since that copy has a 1949 copyright date, it's a first edition of the book that was published after Ouspensky died in 1947.

My mother, though not at all religious, was a fan of P.D. Ouspensky, who studied a form of Eastern mysticism (roughly speaking) taught by George Gurdjieff.

I kept a few books of my mother's after she died. One was The Fourth Way by Ouspensky. I'm pretty sure In Search of the Miraculous also was her book, though it doesn't have her name in it, nor any markings.

I've read the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous. It's an interesting tale of how Ouspensky met Gurdjieff in Russia during the beginning of the First World War, 1914. He was searching for the miraculous.

I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say.

After meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky learned of what Gurdjieff called the "work." It took him a while, through repeated conversations with Gurdjieff, to begin to learn what the work consisted of. The first chapter only gives glimpses of this.

Gurdjieff's system exists to this day. When I got my first research associate job in 1973 at the University of Oregon Medical School's Department of Family Practice, a young computer guy working with me spoke about how he and some other people were engaged in the Gurdjieff work. I recall that once he said he'd gone without sleep for several days as part of an experiment that was part of the work.

From the first chapter, it's clear that Gurdjieff had some sound ideas and also some crazy ones. Below I'll share part of a passage about how mechanical we humans are that sounds like something Robert Sapolsky, a denier of free will, could have said in his recent book, Determined. But Gurdjieff also believed that the sun, moon, and planets controlled human actions and were conscious.

This is what Gurdjieff said, according to Ouspensky.

All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. 

All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him -- all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.

Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels -- all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, invent anything. It all happens. 

...It always seem to people that others invariably do things wrongly, not in the way they should be done. Everybody always thinks he could do it better. They do not understand, and do not want to understand, that what is being done, and particularly what has already been done in one way, cannot be, and could not have been, done in another way.

This is good stuff. However, I'm not sure if I want to read all eighteen chapters of In Search of the Miraculous to find occasional other good stuff that will be mixed in with the weird stuff. Well, I'll probably read the last chapter, since the Wikipedia article about Ouspensky says that he parted ways with Gurdjieff in 1924, for reasons explained in that final chapter.

After I finished reading the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous, today I listened to a talk on Sam Harris' Waking Up app by Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and Zen practitioner who co-authored The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. 

This was the second of a series of short talks called "Zen and the Art of Living." It was a breath of fresh clear spiritual air after my decidedly murky reading of In Search of the Miraculous. What struck me was how simple Waldinger's central message was: genuine wellbeing (eudaimonia, as the ancient Greeks termed it) is quite different from hedonic happiness based on pleasure.

There's nothing wrong with pleasure, of course. We should embrace whatever pleasures life offers us. However, what makes us feel fulfilled, what gives us a sense of purpose, what truly satisfies, is being as much concerned, or more concerned, with the happiness of other people as with our own happiness.

This is both part of the teachings of Zen, and a conclusion from the long-lasting scientific study of happiness. Social connections are what matter most to our happiness and well-being. And it isn't possible to be self-centered or selfish and have good social connections. Here's a video of a TED talk Waldinger gave on this subject.