Church of the Churchless

Deep thoughts (sort of) about Oscars 95

Last night my wife and I engaged in our annual ritual of watching every bit of the Oscars show where Academy Awards are presented to film winners in 43 categories, if I recall that number correctly.

We like movies. So we like the Oscars.

This year, per usual, the show ran long, so I spent 3 1/2 hours of my remaining life span in front of our TV. Given that expenditure of vital energy, I'm going to do my best to conjure a Church of the Churchless blog post out of the more philosophical/political aspects of the Oscars.

A primary interest of mine was hoping that Everything Everywhere All at Once didn't win Best Picture, because I disliked that film. 

As I said in that above-linked blog post, the multiverse theme in the film left me feeling confused and uninterested. Of course, there's no evidence that the multiverse exists. But the movie's fantasy multiverse was much less appealing than real life.

The way a multiverse was presented in Everything Everywhere All at Once reminded me of reincarnation beliefs. 

Meaning, there's forces outside normal human understanding that control what is happening in this life.

It takes some special powers to learn what those forces are. Because anything can happen in the multiverse, hurting other people or even killing them is no big deal, since they will remain uninjured or alive in another corner of the multiverse. (Akin to reincarnation, obviously.)

For me, this took away the most interesting aspect of a movie for me: the struggle of characters to deal with problems in their lives. When a movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once resorts to science fiction mumbo-jumbo, the humanity of the characters becomes subservient to fantasy.

In my January blog post about the movie, I quoted from a review in The Guardian. 

Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcerting to find it frantically hyperactive and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdetermined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.

There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe.

But this mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.

"Means that nothing is actually at stake." So true. This movie isn't really religious, but its multiverse theme gives it a supernatural vibe.

Just as a religion will say that human life is just a brief way station on the way to eternal life in heaven, so Everything Everywhere All at Once presents a view where nothing really matters in the lives of the characters, since whatever is happening is just one of many happenings to them in other corners of the multiverse.

By contrast, I liked All Quiet on the Western Front, a German movie, much more. The horrors of trench warfare in the first World War came through loud and clear. I could identify with the soldiers who had to obey stupid orders of their generals.

Scenes from All Quiet on the Western Front are still vivid in my memory because I could identify with the humanity of the German soldiers in the film. I can't recall any scenes in Everything Everywhere All at Once that came close to that vividness, since the characters in that movie were caricatures lacking human depth.

What else comes to mind about the Oscars? Well, here's an excerpt from the blog post about the Oscars I wrote last night.

A few years from now, I suspect Everything Everywhere All at Once will be viewed as a production that doesn't age well.

On the plus side, I was thrilled when Navalny got Best Documentary. The acceptance speech for Navalny was the only time Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine and his authoritarian rule of Russia was mentioned at the Oscars. 

And having watched and hugely enjoyed RRR, an Indian film, I was rooting for it to win Best Original Song, which it did for the catchy “Naatu Naatu.” The dancing that accompanied the song was as infectious as it was in RRR itself.

Jimmy Kimmel had some good jokes. Naturally I can't remember most of them. One that sticks in my mind came near the end of the show when he observed that whoever edited the voluminous footage of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol into a "film" that made the riot look like a tourist visit deserved an Oscar.

(It was Tucker Carlson of Fox News who fashioned that lie, of course.)

Here's the "Naatu Naatu" dance.

"Truth-Default Theory" helps explain why religions get away with falsehoods

Last Sunday a friend gave me his unread copy of Malcolm Gladwell's 2019 book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

I hadn't heard of the book before. It seems to be less well known than Gladwell's other books like Blink and The Tipping Point.

I'm enjoying it after reading the first few chapters. This morning I read "The Queen of Cuba."

A primary focus of the chapter is on how Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency, got away with being a double agent for Cuba even though warning signs about her were obvious in retrospect, after it was discovered she was passing American secrets to Cuban officials.

Here's excerpts from the chapter that bear on the question of why people continue to believe the teachings of a religion even though they have doubts about it. 

The point of [Tim] Levine's research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You'd think we'd be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they're being deceived.

Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn't.

...Tim Levine's answer is called the "Truth-Default Theory," or TDT.

...We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. 

...To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a "trigger." A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

We do not believe, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.

We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

...Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd -- something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out of truth-default.

That is Levine's point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

I'm going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it's crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar.

You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem.

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human. 

...In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time.

...This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, why the Cubans were able to pull the wool over the CIA's eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency's competence. It just reflects the fact that CIA officers are -- like the rest of us -- human, equipped with the same set of biases to truth as everyone else.

This fits with my own lengthy process of deconverting from the India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I was an active member of for 35 years. After I left the group and started writing about my doubts on this blog, some people would leave comments along the line of "How could you have believed in RSSB for so long, then rejected it?"

The obvious answer, which I recognized but couldn't give a name to such as Truth-Default Theory, is that I always had some doubts about RSSB and its teachings. After all, few religious people believe everything about their chosen faith 100%.

My doubts just didn't reach the enough level as mentioned above until I'd had sufficient experiences of RSSB not being what I originally thought it was to warrant cutting my ties with the organization. This is similar to how I felt about my first marriage, which lasted 18 years.

My wife, Sue, and I got along well for much of that time. But not perfectly. No marriage is perfect. Gradually, bit by bit, Sue and I grew farther apart, until one day the strains in our marriage passed the some level and hit the enough level where both of us felt a divorce was the way to go.

So even though someone may leave a religious group unexpectedly to those in the group, usually they've been having doubts about that religion for a long time. It just took a while for those doubts to rise to the level where they felt they needed to leave the group.

Here's what I said to someone with doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Recently I got an email from someone who is an initiate of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India that has centers around the world.

This person said that they've been having doubts about RSSB and don't feel connected to the RSSB guru.  Not being able to express their doubts with other initiates, I was asked to provide some feedback to what the person had to say.

Below is my response. My mention of Sufism relates to the person saying that they had a Sufi background.

Nice to hear from you. Yes, we seem to have come to similar conclusions about RSSB and Sant Mat, though it took me about 35 years to do so, and for you it was less than 5 years. But time isn’t the important thing. In my view, it’s being honest with ourself.

If we believe something, it’s very difficult not to believe it just because someone says, “Don’t believe.” Likewise, if we don’t believe something, it’s very difficult to believe it just because someone says, “Believe.”

RSSB is into believing, as is every religion, pretty much, maybe aside from Buddhism, but even there you’re expected to accept certain precepts as a basis for following the Buddhist path. Same thing applies, I’m pretty sure, to Sufism, though I bet it’s much less dogmatic than RSSB.

The way I see it, we can’t get through life without holding on to certain precepts or assumptions about life that could broadly be called beliefs. However, with our own set of life-oriented beliefs, we can pick and choose from the wide variety the world has to offer rather than accepting what an organized religion or philosophy offers as a package.

So in my case I’ve assembled a fairly coherent life belief system out of secular Buddhism, Taoism, Tai Chi (Taoism in motion, basically), modern neuroscience, mindfulness, and some other areas. I feel comfortable with this, though it took me quite a few years to break out of the RSSB mindset, even after I wasn’t formally associated with RSSB any longer.

In your case, I suspect you’d find it easier to cobble together a RSSB belief replacement, since you haven’t spent as long buying in to the RSSB teachings. I’m assuming you end up wanting to do this. Given the tone of your message, that seemed a fair assumption.

Anyway, naturally I feel like you’re on the right track. After all, the tagline of my Church of the Churchless blog is “Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence.” I’m Buddhist’y and Science’y enough to believe that everybody and everything exists within a web of interdependence and complex causal factors that act upon us from many directions.

But I see this as compatible with spiritual independence. Life and existence can’t be boiled down to a single belief system, like RSSB. What makes who we are, and who we want to be, is wonderfully unique for each of us. So when you felt like RSSB was right for you, that was the whole cosmos speaking through you. And if you come to feel like RSSB isn’t right for you, that also is the whole cosmos speaking through you.

I talked about this sort of thing in a blog post back in January about the words “It had to be.”

Feel free to write to me if you feel like it again. My experience is my own, but we seem similar enough that maybe some of my experience could be of some help to you.

Anesthesia with propofol raises interesting consciousness questions

Because I'm prone to getting non-cancerous polyps, which could turn into cancer if not removed, I've had colonoscopies every five years or so since I was around fifty.

The most recent ones have involved anesthesia with propofol, a frequently-used drug with few side effects but potential for abuse. Because it induces euphoria in many people. One study found about half. 

In 2011 I wrote "Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)."

After talking about a disturbing conversation I had with a nurse about whether propofol truly prevents a patient from feeling discomfort/pain, or merely takes away the memory of discomfort/pain, I shared how propofol made me feel.

Some pleasantries were exchanged with the doctor and the nurses. Then the nurse anesthesiologist said she was starting to inject the propofol. For about fifteen seconds I felt completely normal. I was mildly concerned that the sedative wasn't working.

Next thing I knew, the nurse was telling me "We're all done."

My instant intuitive reaction was disappointment. I was disturbed to be back in everyday reality. It had been a lot more pleasant wherever I'd been, consciousness wise. I sort of felt like I'd jumped into ice water after basking on a warm beach.

Doing some Googling on propofol before writing this post, I learned this sort of reaction is why the drug is illicitly used non-medically.

There are reports of self-administration of propofol for recreational purposes. Short-term effects include mild euphoria, hallucinations, and disinhibition. Long-term use has been reported to result in addiction.  

I felt completely alert and awake. The only side effect, so far as I could tell, was that feeling of I wish I could have stayed in that pleasant propofol place longer. My first words to the nurse were, "I had some nice dreams. Mostly of having a colonoscopy, but with absolutely no pain, as if it was happening to someone else."

Later, after some reflection, I realized that calling what I experienced a "dream" wasn't entirely accurate.

Yes, it seemed like a dream at the time. But what are the chances that my brain would choose to dream about a colonoscopy, complete with thoughts of the endoscope wending its way here and there through my colon, while I was actually having an colonoscopy?

More likely is that I was minimally aware of what was going on, but the propofol created a feeling that it wasn't really happening to me.

So it's fascinating, but obviously old news, as old as human history probably, that a drug can alter someone's consciousness so completely, while they're under the influence of propofol reality not only seems much more pleasant than in normal life, that reality appears natural rather than artificial.

This raises the familiar question of how it is possible to know what really real reality actually is, if we humans are able to be in various sorts of subjective realities -- all of which seem to be true to the people experiencing them.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I had eye surgery related to a glaucoma diagnosis that entered my life about eighteen months ago. I wrote a blog post about the surgery last night: "My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun."

That wasn't the greatest title for the post, since the 30 minutes or so of the actual surgery was the most pleasant part of a long day. (The surgery was in Portland, about 75 minutes from Salem, where I live.) Here's what I said about the anesthesia. The UPDATE was written this morning.

Another stress reducer was my surgery starting on time. My hernia surgery [in 2021] was delayed. I found it tough to be all prepped and ready to go, then be told that because a previous surgery took longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for an extra hour.

But today I was wheeled into the outpatient operating room a few minutes early.

And it was good to be awake through the eye surgery, though I'd told the anesthesiologist that I enjoy propofol when I've had it for colonoscopies. He said that he'd put a small amount in my IV tube. Don't know if that happened, though, since I felt pretty much the same during the surgery.

UPDATE: I need to change my "pretty much the same" claim after idly scratching my chest while watching TV last night and feeling a strange lump. A big lump. Checking it out, I found that it was a square of adhesive with a metal connector thingie on the top. And not just one, there were three of them on the top of my chest where they were hard to see without looking in a mirror. Must have been put there in the surgery room to monitor my heart.

I have no memory of that happening, nor, as I thought more about it, of being wheeled into the recovery room. So now I believe that while I was conscious during most of the eye surgery, I wasn't for all of it, and the "pretty much the same" feeling I had while the eye was being operated on could have been a propofol effect where propofol reality feels more real than actual reality (and more pleasant).

Also, I forgot to credit the anesthesiologist with a clever question. He asked me, "So what did you have for breakfast today?" Quick-witted senior citizen that I am, I replied, "Ha, trick question! I didn't have anything to eat after midnight, as I was told to do by the pre-op instructions." He must feel this gets a more honest answer than "Have you had anything to eat after midnight?"

Again, the interesting thing is that for most of the eye surgery I could hear my doctor, a fellow in ophthalmology who was assisting him, and a nurse talk about some arcane medical subjects unrelated to my surgery that I couldn't understand very well, yet listened to with considerable interest.

As I noted in my blog post, I felt so calm, natural, and relaxed during the surgery, at the time I thought "The anesthesiologist must not have given me propofol, and maybe not even a sedative."

Meaning, the state of consciousness I was in felt like it was the really real reality mentioned above, even though my update to the post explained why almost certainly I was in an artificially-induced reality.

Anyway, I'm prone to find interesting philosophical questions in all kinds of places. Yesterday it was an outpatient surgery room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland.

Religious bigotry behind hatred of transgender people

There are lots of reasons why I reject religion. One big one is that religious people, especially fundamentalists, often are extremely narrow-minded and judgmental when it comes to sexual matters.

Here in the United States, opposition to transgender individuals is a disgusting hallmark of the Republican Party -- which includes evangelicals and other religious zealots who love to hate those who don't conform to their theological beliefs about gender.

It's a plain fact that some people with a male or female body don't view themselves as being the sex they were assigned at birth. A CNN story, "GOP lawmakers escalate fight against gender-affirming care with bills seeking to expand the scope of bans," describes what gender-affirming care is all about.

Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender – the one the person was designated at birth – to their affirmed gender – the gender by which one wants to be known.

Though many of the bills introduced so far this year target trans youth and their access to gender-affirming care, at least four states saw bills introduced this session that would restrict such care for individuals over the age of 18, including at least two states where proposed bans covered people under the age of 26.

...Major medical associations agree that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria, which, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth do not align.

Though the care is highly individualized, some children may decide to use reversible puberty suppression therapy. This part of the process may also include hormone therapy that can lead to gender-affirming physical change. Surgical interventions, however, are not typically done on children and many health care providers do not offer them to minors.

I'm totally supportive of gender-affirming care. I've always identified as male, but I can understand the distress someone would feel if the sex of their body doesn't match the sex they psychologically identify with.

So it's cruel for Republican lawmakers to target transgender youth, along with a broader attack on LGBTQ people in general. Recently one conservative pundit went so far as to say that "transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely."

Obviously that isn't as bad as Nazi attitudes toward Jews, but it's highly disturbing nonetheless. How would he like it if there was a movement to eradicate conservatism from public life entirely?

Religion plays a large role in transgender bigotry. The American Bar Association discusses this in "The Role of Religious Objections to Transgender and Nonbinary Inclusion and Equality and/or Gender Identity Protection."

The core basis for many of the faith-based objections to transgender and nonbinary acceptance comes from deeply ingrained theologically grounded worldviews. Certain people see humanity as having been created by a divine being who specifically created humans as male and as female. This serves a reproductive purpose, and, for many, also differentiates the roles that people are expected to play in the world. To them, biological sex is divinely ordained and assigned to each person according to divine will.

It is therefore unsurprising that some people of faith will treat others according to their assigned sex at birth and will consider requiring them to acknowledge another’s gender identity to either be untruthful and/or unfaithful. They will not accept a person’s stated gender identity, and they will not accept the possibility that there are any nonbinary people.

This shows the absurdity of religion. Clearly there are transgender people. Clearly there are nonbinary people who don't identify as either male or female. Clearly there are people who are attracted to the same sex.

Yet because a holy book or holy person says this is wrong, reality is ignored by religious fundamentalists, causing them to deny the rights of LGBTQ people who don't conform to their ignorant theological perspective.

A 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found that attitudes toward transgender people divide along religious lines. 

The American public is sharply divided along religious lines over whether it is possible for someone to be a gender different from their sex at birth, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

Most Christians in the United States (63%) say that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by their sex at birth. Among religious “nones” – those who identify religiously as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – about six-in-ten (62%) say they think a person’s gender is not necessarily determined by the sex they are assigned at birth.

Well, I'm proud to be part of the religious "nones" who accept the reality that a person's gender can be different from the sex they were assigned at birth. I just wish religious people who believe otherwise would stop trying to force transgender people to conform to their dogmatism.

If our attention wanders, the question is where it should rest

Most of us are afflicted more often than we'd like with what often is called "monkey mind."

Meaning, our attention is prone to flitting around from this to that to whatever, sort of like monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a seemingly aimless fashion.

But why is monkey mind a bad thing? Monkeys seem to have a good time in trees. Why are we humans so concerned about controlling our attention?

That's one of the themes in an article by Casey Cep in the January 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, Eat, Pray, Concentrate. The online version is titled What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention: Lessons from a centuries-long war against distraction.
Download What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention | The New Yorker

This is a book review of Jamie Kreiner's "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction."

One thing they tell us is that we can't blame our own wandering mind on the internet, smartphones, television, digital games, or the other culprits we in the 21st century summon as reasons for our inability to focus.

Because back in the middle ages books were viewed with suspicion by many monks. 

Although books are rarely associated with distraction today, desperate as we are to escape our screens, they were objects of concern in early monastic circles—diversions that might need to be regulated as carefully as sexual urges. Monks hemmed and hawed about when and where and for how long it was appropriate to read.

In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus, himself an avid reader, described a common scene in the monasteries where he lived in Jerusalem and the Nile Delta: a monk who was supposed to be reading “yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to read for a while; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings, finds fault with the writing and the ornamentation. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep.”

Evagrius had a name for this inability to focus—acedia—and scholars now variously define it as depression (the so-called noonday demon) or spiritual ennui (a kind of sloth). Acedia wasn’t caused by books, exactly, since a monk could suffer from it even without reading, but the book was initially as suspect a technology as the smartphone is today.

For me the most interesting part of the article was the end, which is a discussion of what the monks feared being distracted from.

Such careful study of the mind yielded gorgeous writing about it, and Kreiner collects centuries’ worth of metaphors for concentration (fish swimming peaceably in the depths, helmsmen steering a ship through storms, potters perfecting their ware, hens sitting atop their eggs) and just as many metaphors for distraction (mice taking over your home, flies swarming your face, hair poking you in the eyes, horses breaking out of your barn).

These earthy, analog metaphors, though, betray the centuries between us and the monks who wrote them. For all that “The Wandering Mind” helps to collapse the differences between their world and ours, it also illuminates one very profound distinction. We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most of us did not inherit their clarity about what is worthy of our concentration.

Medieval monks shared a common cosmology that depended on their attention. Justinian the Great claimed that if monks lived holy lives they could bring God’s favor upon the whole of the Byzantine Empire, and the prayers of Simeon Stylites were said to be like support beams, holding up all of creation. “Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner writes. “Attention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.”

Most people today, me included certainly, don't believe that their attention is necessary to bring God's favor upon their chosen religion and those who follow that faith. So the question becomes, what is deserving of our attention?

Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep.

One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of modern life corrode our attention is that they do not merit it. The problem for those of us who don’t live in monasteries but hope to make good use of our days is figuring out what might.

That is the real contribution of “The Wandering Mind”: it moves beyond the question of why the mind wanders to the more difficult, more beautiful question of where it should rest. 

Everyone has to answer that question for themselves. My answer is quite simple: by and large, my attention should be focused on whatever my body is doing.

Right now I'm sitting in a chair in front of my MacBook Pro, composing this blog post. For about 35 minutes my mind has been focused on what my body is doing, pressing keys on my laptop's keyboard that form words and paragraphs.

Yes, a few minutes ago I got up, went to the kitchen, and ate a cookie. Once that minor distraction was over, I went back to finishing this post.

This is the essence of mindfulness, the way I've come to understand it. Paying attention to what our bodily senses are experiencing; keeping mind and body in sync; keeping in touch with the physical reality we're part of at any given moment.

When I'm lying in bed, heading off to sleep, I try to keep my mind focused on sleepy things. When I'm in my Tai Chi class, doing a form with my classmates, I try to keep my mind focused on my body's movements.

So unlike medieval monks, I don't consider that there's any one thing most deserving of my attention. That depends on the situation. When I'm watching TV, or scrolling through my Twitter feed, what's on a large or small screen is what I try to keep my attention on.

And because I've been guilty of not wholeheartedly listening to my wife and friends when they have something to say to me, I especially try not to be distracted when we're having a conversation. I could definitely do better on this front, but I think I'm making some progress on being a better listener.

I might have had a mini-enlightenment last night

Even though I no longer believe in God, I'm attracted to non-religious Buddhism. So even though I don't engage in any sort of formal Buddhist practice, I like the idea of being enlightened. 

Just seems better than being endarkened. 

Though I can't say with any certainty that the intuitive flash that coursed through my consciousness as I was heading to bed last night was a sign of a mini-enlightenment (I'm way too humble to claim a maxi-enlightenment), I like the idea that it was.

So I'll go with that.

I was heading down the stairs that lead to the bedroom where I sleep when an unbidden realization hit me. This wasn't a thought, or an emotion. It was an instant knowing. 

What I knew at that moment surprised me, given my usual tendency to see myself more positively than I'm sure I deserve. 

It was: You're just an ordinary person. Nothing special. Nothing really to be proud of.

While this didn't feel like an emotion, the after-effect of the knowing was pleasant. I felt like a weight had been lifted from me, the burden of trying to appear more competent and accomplished than I actually was.

It was sort of akin to the sensation I had decades ago when, after believing that I could figure out a way to actively manage the investments my wife and I have and beat the market, I concluded after considerable reading and research that investing in index funds was the way to go.

Meaning, I'd just try to be average, as I wrote about in a 2008 post, "Profitable spiritual investing."

As the world financial crisis deepens, conversations tend to turn toward money rather than other subjects. Last night I was with a group of people who discussed the ins and outs (not to mention the ups and downs) of investing in tough times like these.

I didn't have a whole lot to say.

Briefly I held forth on the Buddha-like nature of index fund investing, where you don't try to beat the market through some clever scheme but rather rest content with rising and falling in concert with the overall financial tide.

I told my friends, "If the world and national economy go to hell, so will our investments. If things improve, so will our portfolio. It's a humble way to invest, since you're happy to be average."

This is pretty much the same way I feel about my spiritual investing strategy now.

For many years I thought I could beat the system. That is, find a way to salvation, God-realization, enlightenment, or whatever, that would lead to a better result than others would enjoy who weren't privy to the inside knowledge I possessed.

I've written about my shift from "active" to "passive" spiritual investing in previous posts:
"Running so fast to become motionless"
"Spiritual diversification, a sound investment strategy"
"Spiritual investing takes nothing"

Here's  an excerpt from "Why atheists are more "spiritual" than religious believers," a 2014 post that echoes some of what I experienced in last night's mini-enlightenment. 

Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God. But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why.

I no longer feel special.

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in. 

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being. 

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems. 

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did. 

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all. 

I also don't expect that there is any power guiding my life which isn't also directing the lives of every other entity on Earth. 

Thus I've embraced a sort of "index fund" approach to spirituality.

Meaning, I don't try to beat the market. I don't assume that I have any special knowledge, any special talent, any special relationship with reality. Whatever laws of nature apply to everybody else, I'm content with.

We are the only animal that can deny our animal nature

In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature.

Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything.

As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park.

But it's strange that so many people are reluctant to admit that they are as much an animal as their dog or cat. Or the chicken they ate for dinner. What else could we be? We're made of flesh, blood, and bone, just like every other animal.

Sure, our brains have evolved to have the capacity to think thoughts like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." (So said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)

This doesn't make such other-worldly thoughts true, though.

It simply shows that we are able to deny the reality of our human animality, covering that inescapable fact with layers of religious and metaphysical fantasy about how our true nature is ethereal soul, or some other supernatural notion with no foundation in fact.

The world would be a much better place if every person recognized that they are an animal.

This wouldn't turn everybody into vegetarians, but it would go a long way toward diminishing the sense most people have that humans are special, separate and distinct from all those animals we use, and abuse, for our pleasure.

Here's excerpts from the essay.

Obviously Loskutoff and his partner survived their grizzly bear stalking. They (literally) ran into a park ranger armed with a big gun who told them that the female bear was being tracked because she was almost twelve and having difficulty finding enough food at that age, manifesting increasingly aggressive behavior. 

Missoula, Mont. -- In the summer of 2012, the same year that scientists fully decoded the genome of the bonobo, the last great ape, my partner and I were stalked by a female grizzly bear.

...Several things happened in my mind at once. I realized the bear was following us. I realized she wanted to eat us, and I realized that I was an animal.

It was a strange epiphany. To be human today is to deny our animal nature, though it's always there, as the earth remains round beneath our feet even when it feels flat. 

I had always been an animal, and would always be one, but it wasn't until I was prey, my own fur standing on end and certain base-level decisions being made in milliseconds (in a part of my mind that often takes ten minutes to choose toothpaste in the grocery store), that the meat-and-bone reality settled over me.

I was smaller and slower than the bear. My claws were no match for hers. And almost every part of me was edible.

...I had one concern: to get us away without being eaten.

Civilization itself is an attempt to protect us from this feeling. From its earliest iterations in fire-starting and cave-dwelling to its current zenith in the construction of megalopolises, as well as the careful documentation of every birth and the methodical laying bare of each strand in every helix, civilization is a way of setting ourselves apart from the prey we once were.

Building walls, both physical and informational, to keep out the bears.

Yet even atop the highest tower in the most prestigious university we remain animals, directed by the same base-level needs and emotions that motivate living creatures from bonobos to rats.

...Of course there are aspects of our communal society -- caring for the old, the domestication of livestock, the cultivation of crops -- that link us to only a few other species, and other aspects, such as the written word, that link us to none as yet discovered, but in no place but our own minds have we truly transcended our animal brethren.

...As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously said, "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Most days I remain fully entangled in this web, cursing at my smartphone while rolling across the earth in four thousand pounds of steel. Yet there is something of the experience with the bear that remains inside me, a gift from my moment of pure terror.

It's the knowledge of my animal self. That instinctive, frightened, clear-eyed creature beneath my clothes. And it brought with it the reassuring sense of being part of the natural world, rather than separated from it, as we so often feel ourselves to be.

My humanity, one cell in the great, breathing locomotion spreading from sunlight to leaves to root stems to bugs to birds to bears.

All of us fragile, all of us fleeting, all of us prey.

Mystical experiences need testing if they become a worldview

As I've noted before, and surely will do so again, one of the pleasures I get from this blog is reading intelligent comment conversations on posts that I've written. Or in this case, on an Open Thread where the comments are the substance of the post. 

Below is a comment that Appreciative Reader left on an Open Thread in response to a comment by manjit. If you want to read manjit's comment, click on that link and scroll up to the preceding comment.

Appreciative Reader has a knack for saying things in a way that I've never come across before. I'm not saying that his ideas are totally unique, just that how he expresses those ideas often is wonderfully clear and creative.

He's correct in noting that every personal experience is subjective, so not rational, logical, or scientific. The world's greatest physicist, along with everybody else, is engaged in a totally ineffable experience when eating a strawberry. 

So mystical experiences are simply a subset of all experiences.

They can't be put into words, or pictures, or numbers, or anything else, just as any other experience can't. I make this point frequently on this blog: nobody can question someone else's personal experience, because they aren't the person having the subjective experience.

However, once someone claims that their mystical experience has a meaning beyond the personal, that's when I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that reason, logic, and science come into play. He just has a fresh way of saying this, as you can read below.

That said, I'm not totally convinced that his thesis is correct about a worldview needing confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science. I put raspberries on my cereal every morning. The taste of those berries is "mystical," in the sense that no one but me knows how they taste to me.

But it seems a stretch to say that the fact that I buy raspberries whenever I do our weekly grocery shopping makes raspberries part of my worldview, and so requires confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science. 

Anyway, Appreciative Reader and manjit have made me ponder things that I usually take for granted. So their comment conversation has benefitted me in that regard. I guess I tend to see a dividing line between symbolic and non-symbolic sorts of experiences, which is a bit different from how Appreciative Reader sees things.

Yet maybe we're seeing similarly. So long as I simply enjoy the taste of raspberries in a subjective, non-symbolic fashion, I'm in the realm of unquestionable personal experience. However, as soon as I try to describe their taste in some way, now I'm in the realm of questionable interpersonal experience.

-------------------------------------------------------

Dear manjit,

As ever, pleasure to read your thought-provoking comment.

You think Brian’s approach pseudo-scientific. I’m afraid I don’t agree, at all. I’m kind of curious why you think *that*, but I’ll let it pass, because there’s way more meat in your comment, that I’d like to address, and that I’ll be glad if you’re able to answer, whenever you are able. (I’ll bookmark this thread, so that I don’t miss it, should you end up responding after awhile.)

I’ll resist the temptation of addressing much of your comment, in the interests of (relative!) brevity, and instead focus on just two things, on which your thoughts will be of great interest to me.

The first, and most important, of where we disagree is where you say this: “I think one of your incorrect understandings of mysticism is that there is anything rational, logical or scientific about it.” I’m very interested in how you can possibly have arrived at that conclusion, especially in context of how I see this, which is as follows:

I agree, the mystical experience itself is not rational or logical, in and of itself. Nothing subjective ever is. If we’re content to experience whatever mystical experience we have, and simply stop at that, then, agreed, there’s no reason for reason, rationality, logic, or science to intrude in there. But the moment we incorporate that experience into our worldview, immediately it is subject to all of these things.

And nor is this peculiar to mystical experience, I’d say this applies to any and every subjective experience. You see the sun rise in the morning. Or, say, you feel that kind-of-painful-yet-pleasant pump in your bicep after working out.

Both of those mundane, non-mystical experiences, if you’re content to register them, and simply let them be, then that’s the end of it; and there’s no call to bring in logic, reason, rationality, or science into it. However, the moment you incorporate these experiences into your worldview, even in the slightest bit, then your surest way to arriving at a worldview, a model, that comports best with reality, is by following logic, and reason, and science.

Likewise with mystical experiences, surely? If you’re content to simply have those experiences, and then leave them be, well then, sure, that’s the end to it.

But if you go worldviewing your way with those experiences, no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely --- even if only negatively, in questioning the veracity or the completeness of what we know about the world --- well then, right then, right there, is when it becomes subject to rationality and to science.

(To be clear, I’m not saying mystical experiences might not occasion reason to question, maybe even revise, our worldview. They well may. My point is, the moment you do even that much, the moment you do anything other than simply register that experience, completely passively and completely without any thoughts about it at all; the moment you incorporate that experience into your worldview [no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely], right then, right there, is where science becomes the surest way of ensuring that that worldview, that model, those thoughts, comport best with the actual reality.)

Which is why I cannot see how you can possibly state, as you did, that there’s nothing rational, logical or scientific about mysticism.

My other point of disagreement is where you say this (and I’ll quote that paragraph of yours in full here):

“One man's "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic dogma" is another's belief that the universe was created ex-nihilo, like a rabbit out of a hat, or that life & consciousness are the product of the random, purposeless, accidental bumping together of inert matter, as if putting some oil and pigment in a bag, giving it a good shake for 10 seconds, then throwing it at a canvas could create a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, and assorted other credulous and magical beliefs. Humanity has a long history of conflating the cultural status quo with reality itself, and implying anyone who challenges it is a "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic" dogmatist. Very often they're more right than wrong. However, very often they're more wrong than right.”

Well said, that. I agree with much of what you’ve said there. But the essence of it, the actual point of it, that is what I disagree with completely; and, again, wonder whether you might not end up changing your mind about this on thinking a bit more about it.

Haha, agreed, things popping into existence out of nowhere does sound crazy. That goes for lots of things, and indeed most things QM [quantum mechanics], agreed, absolutely. But why do we imagine that reality must necessarily comport with our native intuition about what makes sense?

After all, our intuition itself is shaped by our evolution, and is no more than what we needed to deal to best survive while running around naked in the wilds of Africa. Whether something *sounds* reasonable to our intuition, can hardly be the touchstone for evaluating whether something is *real*.

So then, if not intuition, then how *do* we make sense of the world around us, and within us? By following the evidence. By using reason and logic. In short, science. Even if that, for the present, leads us to such apparently goggle-eyed and imbecilic --- read “counter-intutive” --- explanations, as well as non-explanations, like things popping in out of nowhere, and quantum superposition, and the rest of it.

That is, there is a huge huge huge difference between the “goggle-eyed imbecilities” that science reveals to us, and the other extravagant explanations we think up about the world by means other than scientific. And what's more, basis what I’ve said just now, perhaps you’ll agree that if there’s apparently a double standard at play here, then it’s entirely warranted, in fact it is the only thing that *is* warranted, in this context.

   -- Appreciative Reader

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination.

Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions.

I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how they acted toward other Indians.

That surprised me. But I guess it shouldn't have.

After all, while discrimination against African-Americans is illegal in my county, there's still plenty of discrimination happening. Same applies to caste discrimination in India.

And in Seattle also, according to a BBC story, "Seattle: Why US city's ban on caste discrimination is historic for South Asian Americans."

On Tuesday, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination after a vote by the local council. Ahead of the vote, several South Asians stood in line for hours to share their stories with council members.

Academic Prem Pariyar was one of them. He says he fled to the US from Nepal in 2015 after his family was brutally attacked by a group of upper caste people for speaking up against atrocities.

But that didn't stop the discrimination he faced because of his caste. Once, he says, he was invited to lunch at a friend's house in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

"I was hesitant [to go] as caste dictates where you sit and eat, but I thought it will be different here as people are educated, in a country where human rights are valued," Mr Pariyar says.

But just as he was about to serve food for himself, he was asked not to touch anything. Instead, someone else handed him a plate of food.

...Mr Pariyar says the incident at his friend's house reminded him of something from his childhood in Nepal: his teacher spat out the water he gave her after finding out he belonged to a lower caste.

In her "Purity versus Pollution" chapter that I read today, Wilkerson describes similar examples of how caste discrimination has functioned in India and the United States. The chapter starts with these paragraphs.

The fourth pillar of caste rests upon the fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes deemed beneath it. Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes.

Both India and the United States at the zenith of their respective caste systems, and the short-lived but heinous regime of the Nazis, raised the obsession with purity to a high, if absurdist, art.

In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public -- somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question. They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence.

A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to "drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints" and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his "foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin."

Likewise, Wilkerson describes how well into the twentieth-century, African-Americans couldn't use white beaches, lakes, and swimming pools because the dominant caste -- Whites -- were afraid of being polluted by the subordinate caste, Blacks.

This is bizarre. Fear of pollution isn't solely a religious preoccupation, but it requires a religious mindset, even if not expressed explicitly as a religious dogma.

For example, I recall with present-day amusement how frantic my fellow devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious group that I belonged to for 35 years, would become in a restaurant after the RSSB guru decreed that animal rennet couldn't be eaten.

Rennet is used to make cheese. So if a group of us RSSB disciples wanted to order a pizza at a restaurant, the most fanatic (which excluded me) would quiz the poor waiter if the cheese was made with animal rennet or vegetable rennet.

He or she wouldn't know, not surprisingly. "Please go in the kitchen and check," someone would say.

I'd be embarrassed, since even though I've been a vegetarian for more than fifty years, I realized that the minuscule amount of animal rennet in a cheese pizza was meaningless to anyone but the people most obsessed with absolute vegetarian/karmic purity.

What's going on here, I'm pretty sure, is the doctrine of essences that I've read about in numerous books. This is the notion that things, or people, can possess an unseen essence that has certain magical powers even though there is no evidence for such.

So if someone is shown a sweater and asked whether they'd like to have it to wear, they typically say "yes." But if they're told that the sweater was worn by a murderer when he killed someone, they'll say "no," since now the sweater is viewed as possessing the essence of a murderer.

Wilkerson writes:

As the middle castes pressed for admittance to the rungs above them, what was consistent was the absolute exclusion of the "polluting" lowest caste. African-Americans were not just not citizens, they were, like their Dalit counterparts in India, forced outside the social contract.

They and the Dalits bore the daily brunt of the taint ascribed to their very beings. The Dalits were not permitted to drink from the same cups as the dominant castes in India, live in the villages of the upper-caste people, walk through the front doors of upper-caste homes, and neither were African-Americans in much of the United States for most of its history. 

...Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation.

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.)

I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present.

After reading Haupt's story, I've tried to pay more attention to bringing my mind into sync with what my body is doing. As she says in the excerpt below, my body can be in either a neutral or pleasant place while my mind is worrying about something that happened in the past, or about something that could happen in the future.

Of course, our ability to time travel is part of what makes us human. So it's fine to do this in moderation. But when our mind is habitually at odds with the state of our body, that's not conducive to our happiness and well-being.

Here's the first part of the TIME story. Click on the PDF file at the end of this excerpt to see the eight non-meditative ways to practice mindfulness. Or click here for the TIME story.

There’s a certain disconnect that plagues almost everyone nowadays: Your body is doing one thing—sitting in a meeting, eating dinner with the family—while your brain is miles away.

Some might call it multitasking, but mental-health experts say it’s more problematic. Corrie Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and founder of Shore Therapy Center for Wellness in the Chicago area, says that a lack of mindfulness can deprive us of a deep connection to our most meaningful experiences. “Our body moves through the motions of life, but our head isn’t in the game,” she says.

Not being grounded in the moment—instead allowing our thoughts to skip from place to place—is an open invitation to stress and unpleasant emotions. “Our minds tend to focus on worries about the future, or upsets from the past, even when our body may be in a neutral or pleasant place.”

Enter mindfulness. The now-ubiquitous concept, which is rooted in Buddhism, has surged in popularity in recent years and is generally defined as turning your attention inward and maintaining an awareness of your thoughts, bodily sensations, and environment. The benefits are vast. A mindfulness practice can help lower stress, reduce anxiety (as effectively as medication, in some cases), increase a person’s capacity to savor positive experiences, stop rumination, promote concentration, and more.

Mindfulness can also help cure the blahs. Three years into the pandemic, Kelly Neupert, a psychotherapist in Chicago, says that many of her clients feel like they’re languishing. Becoming more mindful has helped them get in touch with what they’re feeling and why, she says—and cultivated a greater capacity to handle life’s curveballs.

After adopting a mindfulness practice, “I typically see that they’re less reactive and more intentional,” Neupert says. “They can respond to other people rather than react. The things that used to set them off, like running late for work or getting cut off, feel more tolerable.”

Meditation is the best-known way to achieve mindfulness—but it isn’t appealing to and doesn’t work for everyone. Some find that it’s awkward, or that they have trouble sitting still. Fortunately, “a person can practice mindfulness while engaged in literally any activity,” Goldberg says, and with any available amount of time.

Here are eight ways to practice mindfulness if meditation isn’t your thing.
Download How to Be Mindful if You Hate Meditating | Time

Why I prefer Buddhism to Advaita Vedanta

On Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I noticed there was a lengthy (1 hr 37 m) discussion between Harris and Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York.

So for the past few days I'd listen to 10-15 minutes or so of the discussion every morning. Today I finished listening to the whole exchange as I was driving around in my car.

It was really interesting.

Both Harris and Sarvapriyananda are highly knowledgeable about both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Of course, Harris embraces Buddhism and Sarvapriyananda Vedanta, so each of them is more expert in their favored philosophy.

While Harris and Sarvapriyananda had a lot in common, some core differences couldn't be bridged.

Buddhism is all about emptiness, the lack of anything in existence standing in isolation from other entities, while Vedanta assumes that humans possess an eternal soul, Atman, that is essentially one with God, Brahman.

I thought that Harris had the better arguments in this regard. The notion of no-self is solidly compatible with modern neuroscience, while Atman and Brahman are religious abstractions. 

I can't recall any instance where Harris relied on a Buddhist scripture to make a point (he favors the Tibetan Buddhism sect of Dzogchen), while Sarvapriyananda frequently cited Hindu or Vedanta writings, speaking them in an Indian language, then translating into English, which he speaks very well.

Consciousness is key in Vedanta.

For Harris, consciousness probably arises from the matter of the brain, though he acknowledges that many mysteries remain about the nature of consciousness. By contrast, for Sarvapriyananda, human consciousness partakes of the universal consciousness of Brahman, God.

However, Sarvapriyananda never explained what the evidence is for this. Apparently it is just supposed to be taken on faith, even though he would repeatedly say that Advaita Vedanta doesn't require religious faith, just a willingness to experience the truths of Vedanta.

At one point Harris invited Sarvapriyananda to take five minutes or so to lead Harris and listeners to the discussion in a Vedanta exercise, or meditation, that would show the approach of Vedanta.

But Sarvapriyananda used that time, and more, to describe a logical approach to Vedanta, which disappointed me.

Often I listen to Harris' guided meditations on the Waking Up app. He uses a variety of simple exercises to help the listener understand that there is no thinker inside our head in addition to thoughts, no hearer inside our head in addition to hearing, and so on.

So I came away feeling that Buddhism is on a much solider foundation when it comes to the doctrine of no-self than Advaita Vedanta is when it comes to the doctrine of Atman, or soul. Still, I found Sarvapriyananda to be appealingly humble and open-minded.

He just buys into the truth of Vedanta more strongly than I see Harris buying into the truth of Buddhism, perhaps because Harris' secular variety of Buddhism is much less dogmatic than Sarvapriyananda's religious brand of Advaita Vedanta. 

I got the impression that Sarvapriyananda embraces Vedanta because it tells such a compelling story within the Hindu tradition. Indeed, Harris admitted that he finds the notion of Atman and Brahman to be more appealing than Buddhist emptiness and no-self.

However, Harris considers Buddhism to be closer to the truth. I agree.

The profundity of "There are no black people in Africa"

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite. 

Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't. 

If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people.

Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world didn't have the conceptual divisions that are so much a part of human existence. 

A hurricane or earthquake wasn't destructive until we humans evolved the ability to conceive of "destructive." 

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we'd be better off with a more limited brain. Conceptualization is entertaining, valuable, and a great survival tool. If concepts weren't favored by natural selection, we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for them.

But it's wise to keep in mind how arbitrary many of our customary ways of dividing up the world are. Here's another excerpt from the book by Isabel Wilkerson that I'm reading: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents."

(My first blog post about Caste is here.)

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture: the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of.

She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten that startled me in its simplicity. 

"You know that there are no black people in Africa," she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everybody else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production.

None of us are ourselves.

I think that's true. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it weren't true, if each of us actually were ourselves, and there was no societal pressure to put people into boxes that don't reflect who they truly are? Wilkerson speaks of containers.

Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you what shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.

Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor.

I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany.

Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately ordering it from Amazon. I've only read the first 35 pages so far. I'm liking the book a lot. Here's how Wilkerson describes caste early on in the book.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.

A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.

Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

Here's an excerpt from Caste that I found fascinating. When Wilkerson spoke to some Indian scholars of caste, she found that she could tell who was upper-caste and lower-caste from their bearing and behavior. I'll have more to say about the book after I'm further along in it.

In embarking upon this work, I devoured books about caste in India and in the United States. Anything with the word caste in it lit up my neurons. I discovered kindred spirits from the past -- sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, writers --- whose work carried me through time and across generations.

Many had labored against the tide, and I felt that I was carrying on a tradition and was not walking alone.

In the midst of my research, word of my inquiries spread to some Indian scholars of caste, based here in America. They invited me to speak at an inaugural conference on caste and race at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the town where W.E.B. Du Bois's papers are kept.

There, I told the audience that I had written a six-hundred-page book about the Jim Crow era in the American South, the time of naked white supremacy, but that the word racism did not appear anywhere in the narrative.

I told them that, after spending fifteen years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I realized that the term was insufficient. Caste was the more accurate term, and I set out to them the reasons why.

They were both stunned and heartened. The plates of Indian food kindly set before me at the reception thereafter sat cold due to the press of questions and the sharing that went on into the night.

At a closing ceremony that I had not been aware of ahead of time, the hosts presented to me a bronze-colored bust of the patron saint of the low-born of India, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who had written to Du Bois all those decades before.

It felt like an initiation into a caste to which I had somehow always belonged. Over and over, they shared scenarios of what they had endured, and I responded in personal recognition, as if even to anticipate some particular turn or outcome.

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy -- in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.

After one session, I went up to a woman presenter whose caste I had ascertained from observing her interactions. I noticed that she had reflexively stood over the Dalit speaker and had taken it upon herself to explain what the Dalit woman had just said or meant, to take a position of authority as if by second nature, perhaps without realizing it.

We chatted a bit, and then I said to her, "I believe you must be upper caste, are you not?" She looked crestfallen. "How did you know?" she said, "I try so hard."

We talked for what seemed an hour more, and I could see the effort it took to manage the unconscious signals of encoded superiority, the presence of mind necessary to counteract the programming of caste. I could see how hard it was even for someone committed to healing the caste divide, who was, as it turned out, married to a man from the subordinate caste and who was deeply invested in egalitarian ideals.

Why a guru shouldn't be worshipped

Recently someone sent me a link to "The Guru Has No Turban" by Greg Leveille.

It's well worth reading if you've ever believed that a guru should be worshipped as a divine being. Or worshipped for any other reason, like their supposed perfection.

The article is centered on the Sant Mat teachings that I followed for thirty-five years.

Leveille appears to believe in a basic truth of those teachings -- that it is possible to know a formless Celestial Awareness -- but rejects the Sant Mat notion that the guru is greater than God, because God isn't available to help us while the guru is.

So he manages to balance some justified skepticism about gurus while embracing a mystical approach to meditation.

I like this part of his article.

If you read about (or follow) five or more spiritual groups during your lifetime, there’s a good chance you will hear a high percentage of these common myths that Kabir and other advanced teachers have complained about.

“Only the guru can take you to Heaven.”

“Only the guru can save you.”

“Everything that the guru says is the absolute truth.”

“A true guru never has to think or use the mind.”

“Once you’re initiated, the true guru will always be inside of you.”

“The true guru is God in a human form.”

“A perfect master will always be there when you die.”

“Guru worship is essential.”

“The guru is greater than God.”

“You can’t see or feel God inside or outside of you”

“But you can always see your guru inside and outside of you.”

“My guru died, but he can still help me while I’m alive.”

“He died, but he can still perform miracles and take me to heaven.”

“The mantra won’t work unless it’s blessed by the guru.”

“Your life is wasted without initiation by a perfect guru.”

“A perfect living master (PLM) will help you clear all your karma.”

“A perfect master will take you to heaven within 1-to-4 lifetimes.”

“A PLM is responsible for all of the miracles that you experience.”

“Gurus never make mistakes.”

“Until you meet your perfect master/guru within you and talk with him, then you cannot go to heaven.”

“You have to serve, honor, love and worship your guru above and beyond everyone and everything else.”

I also enjoyed the short quote Leveille included from David Lane's 2011 book.

This is the description that Amazon used to introduce David’s Book, The Guru Has No Turban.

“One of the more celebrated, if inappropriate, honorifics we have bestowed on our chosen gurus is the term "Perfect Master." It may be one thing to call a teacher a master (he or she may know more than us in a certain subject), but it is quite another to call such mastery "perfect." The first and most troublesome problem is one of definition: what do we actually mean by "perfect"?

My sense is that we fundamentally misunderstand the honorific and we do not fully understand the implications involved when applying such terms to living human beings. My argument is a very simple one: The guru is not perfect, at least not in the ways that we may assume.

But despite the fact that we can easily demonstrate the limitations and fallibilities of our gurus, we somehow hold on to the naive concept that a guru can be an all-knowing and all-powerful being.”

So true. I'm not sure why guru-worship has such a hold on so many people.

In my case, I was attracted to the idea that it was possible to traverse supernatural regions of reality in the company of a Perfect Living Master who had been sent by God to collect certain souls whose destiny was to return to heaven, known as Sach Khand.

I went to high school and college in the 1960s. The Beatles were a big part of my musical life. The teachings of Sant Mat in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) seemed like the ultimate Magical Mystery Tour. 

And you didn't need LSD or any other psychedelic. Just a guru who could take you on that tour and a willingness to accept the vows required to be initiated by the guru, which included several hours of daily meditation.

But that was then, and this is now. I have a very different attitude toward Sant Mat and RSSB after spending most of those thirty-five years deeply devoted to the teachings, yet eventually realizing the truth of what Leveille says in his article about gurus.

He's much more positive about mysticism than I am. However, I resonate with much of what Leveille says at the end of his piece.

Not everyone is ready to tread the inward mystic path of divine awareness. If, as a spiritual seeker, you’re drawn to some other type of yoga, mindful awareness, or guru-bhakti path, then that is perfectly fine.

If you follow your heart, you can’t go wrong.

Divine awareness is a long and winding road that eventually causes everyone to choose and then to grow from different spiritual experiences along the way.

However, those souls who have begun to feel the inner pull of divine awareness are ready to follow this very precious path. It’s the secret path of many of the greatest ancient Taoists as well and most modern Sant Mat, Sufi, Celestial Awareness, and direct consciousness teachers. It’s the path that Lao Tzu, Kabir, Hafiz, Soami Ji, Shiv Brat Lal, Faqir, and Captain Ji followed as well.

These are teachers who don’t want to be worshiped. These are teachers who help you to discover and follow the divine awareness within you.

After I got Covid, science became my best friend

About two weeks ago, on Monday, January 30, I tested positive for Covid. A few days later I blogged about this on my HinesSight blog in I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020. 

After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse.

But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result. 

By Monday afternoon, thanks to quick work by my doctor's office and a Salem Health pharmacist, I'd started taking Paxlovid, a 5-day treatment that basically puts the brake on Covid replication to give your body a chance to fight it before the virus gets up a head of steam.

When the five days came to an end on Saturday morning, I wrote another blog post: My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid "rebound."

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen. 

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Paxlovid rebound happens when someone tests negative after completing the course of treatment, then a few days later, either tests positive for Covid again or has a recurrence of symptoms. I got a chance to confirm my "no big deal" attitude when, last Wednesday, February 8, a rapid Covid test came back positive, which it also did the next three days, including today.

Yesterday I wrote: I get Paxlovid "rebound," but I'm OK with being Covid positive again. 

I still feel it isn't a big deal, even though last Wednesday, four days after I finished the Paxlovid treatment, I was dismayed to find that a rapid test I took showed I was positive for Covid again. So far (this is Friday) I'm still testing positive.

That's irritating, since I enjoyed my few days of post-Covid normalcy -- having coffee with a friend, going back to exercising at my athletic club, attending my Tai Chi class. 

On the plus side, my symptoms are milder than before, and they were pretty mild the first Covid time around. I haven't had to take a decongestant at bedtime, which I did during the first bout of Covid. And I came across a recent Scientific American story about Paxlovid rebound which indicates that my "contrarian take" on this actually is scientifically mainstream. 

Meaning, whether or not someone has a Covid treatment, the virus can wax and wane in the body.

So it's important to recognize that Paxlovid rebound doesn't mean you've got a fresh case of Covid. It just means that some pockets of the virus remained after the 5-day course of treatment, popping up when the Paxlovid brake was released.

I've shared these details about my Covid experience as background for the title of this post. Science became my best friend after getting the initial positive test result. Of course, for my whole life I've felt close to science. But this health challenge has helped me realize even more strongly how important it is to cling to scientific facts.

Those facts, of course, continually change.

Science skeptics see scientists changing their minds and wrongly think that this shows that the scientific method is flawed. Actually, the opposite is true. Science, unlike religion, is happy to be proven wrong, because that allows for a more accurate picture of reality to emerge.

When I got the rebound positive test last Wednesday, one of the first things I did was Google what you're supposed to do after testing positive again following a negative test when the Paxlovid course of treatment was over.

The recommendation was to isolate for five days, as if you were getting Covid for the first time. I recall that in the early days of Covid in the United States, the isolation period was ten days. But that was then, and this is now. 

So my five day isolation period ends tomorrow. Then I'm going to start returning to public places with a mask on for another five days. This makes sense to me. I liked what a doctor had to say in an article about Paxlovid rebound. 

People who experience rebound still tend to have positive outcomes. Paxlovid is meant to help prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death — and it continues to do so, even if rebound cases occur.

“From the data so far, Paxlovid rebound has not been dangerous,” says Dr. Klausner. “There are no reported, verified cases of hospitalization or death from rebound. Typically, people have a mild recurrence of symptoms or positive test results for a few days and then get better.”

Of course, since you are still infectious during this period, it’s important to isolate.

“The CDC advises five days of isolation from the onset of symptoms and an additional five days of mask use,” says Dr. Klausner. “While some experts advise continuing isolation until a rapid test is negative and remains negative, that is not practical for most people. The five-day rule is a good compromise balancing individual needs and public health risks.”

Note Klausner's words in the last paragraph: "While some experts advise," "Not practical for most people," "A good compromise."

Scientific research, especially in areas like medicine and public health, often isn't cut-and-dried, a matter of simply looking up the facts about something. Judgement is necessary.

I read numerous articles about what to do after Paxlovid rebound before concluding that a five-day isolation following by a five-day period of mask wearing when in a public space seems to be the way for me to go. It also essentially is the CDC guideline.

I could be wrong. But I'm much more likely to be right after reading reputable information from reliable sources than I would be if I just intuitively decided what to do. 

Some people who qualify for Paxlovid don't get this treatment because they haven't understood the real meaning of "rebound." Sadly, some doctors won't prescribe Paxlovid for the same reason. Science takes work. It requires effort, whether one is a producer of scientific research or a consumer of that research.

Science also can be confusing. But there's no doubt that science is humanity's best approach to understanding reality. As I said, the fact that science evolves, that scientific facts are constantly changing, is the key to its success.

Sure, medical doctors and public health personnel have gotten things wrong about Covid. However, they've gotten hugely more right than wrong, especially when compared to the conspiracy theories about Covid that have caused untold deaths and suffering. 

Vaccines work. Paxlovid works. Don't believe those who say otherwise. I'm much rather put my faith in science, even though it isn't perfect, than in religious belief or wacko conspiracy theories that have no grounding at all in reality.

We make our own purpose, not God, not the universe

Without a purpose, life is barely worth living. That's one sign of depression: when nothing seems to matter and our existence seems meaningless.

But where does purpose come from?

Religious people typically say "God." They believe that God has a plan for us and we just need to let it unfold, trusting in the Almighty. People who strongly embrace a particular culture or nationality may feel that their purpose is to live in accord with the tenets of their society.

And as Joseph Carter says in an essay I read today in Question Everything: Essays from the New York Times Philosophy Series, Aristotle considered that everything in the universe has its own inherent goal.

From cars, trees, animals, all the way to the cosmos itself, Aristotle argued, each thing has an inherent principle that guides the course of its existence.

But Carter argues that purpose arises from ourselves in "The Universe Doesn't Care About Your 'Purpose'." Here's the PDF file if you're unable to access the New York Times essay.
Download Opinion | The Universe Doesn’t Care About Your ‘Purpose’ - The New York Times

He basically sees that the stories we tell ourselves are what provide a sense of purpose. It's as if we're our own screenwriter who pens "The Story of My Life," along with being the lead actor in this drama. 

Naturally Carter puts things more philosophically than that crude summation.

Meaning begins and ends with how we talk about our own lives, such as our myths and stories.

...Purpose springs from our longing for permanence in an ever-changing universe. It is a reaction to the universe’s indifference to us. We create stories about the world and ourselves as contours, “phantom bodies,” of the inevitability of loss and change.

Myths appear timeless; they have what Blumenberg calls an iconic constancy. Stories pass through generations, often becoming traditions, customs, even laws and institutions that order and give meaning to our lives. Purpose grows out of the durability of human lore. Our stories serve as directives for the ways we need the world to exist.

An indifferent universe also offers us a powerful and compelling case for living justly and contentedly because it allows us to anchor our attention here. It teaches us that this life matters and that we alone are responsible for it.

Love, friendship and forgiveness are for our benefit. Oppression, war and conflict are self-inflicted. When we ask what’s the purpose of the recent gassing of Syrian children in the Idlib Province or the torture and killings of Chechnyan homosexual men, we ought not simply look to God or the universe for explanations but to ourselves, to the entrenched mythologies that drive such actions — then reject them when the institutions they inform amount to acts of horror.

The purposes and goals we create are phantom bodies — vestiges of and memorials to the people, places and things we stand to lose and strive to keep. Purpose indexes the world’s impermanence, namely our own.

...Purpose is about loss, or at least the circumvention of it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We create purposes to establish happy endings in a universe where endings are simply that — endings.

...So, take a moment to think about the mythologies informing your purpose. I’ll reflect on mine, too. The universe, however, won’t. And that might be the most meaningful distinction of all.

Sometimes I've thought that we don't really need stories about our lives. Isn't simply living life enough? Is it necessary to fashion a narrative of My Life where I'm the starring character of my own theatrical production who, not surprisingly, usually comes across as an appealing hero or heroine?

Sure, one with flaws, because that makes my character more interesting. But essentially a good person who is doing their best to make their way through the myriad problems and opportunities that have arisen in My Life.

At times I've viewed this personal mythology as being out of touch with the lack of self that I've come to believe, via Buddhism and neuroscience, is likely to be true. However, when I examine how I actually live my life, I realize that just as Carter says, I need stories about myself that foster a sense of purpose.

Even materialists can’t deny the fact that purposes somehow exist to give us meaning and happiness.

Anthropologists like Dean Falk recently suggested that goal-directed behavior is also evolutionarily advantageous. This doesn’t imply that evolution itself has a purpose, of course. (Though some have argued otherwise.) What it does suggest is that as purposeless as human evolution is, we generally benefit as a species from a belief in it.

Every day I sit down at my laptop and write a post for one of my three blogs. No one forces me to do this. If I didn't do it, there wouldn't be any big problem. I don't view my writing as very important to the world at large.

I write because this gives me a sense of purpose. I write for myself, mainly. I feel a need to get thoughts and feelings out of my head and into cyberspace. When I finish a blog post, as I'm about to do, I have a feeling of satisfaction.

I've fashioned a story about myself that includes the plot element, you write blog posts, and some people read them. Everybody has such stories about themselves. It's how we create meaning in a world that lacks it.

The wonderful thing is how often our individual stories coalesce into a shared sense of meaning and purpose. Our friends typically share much of what we find meaningful. Same with larger groupings, whether they be work-related, religious, sports-related, political, artistic, or whatever. 

Though each of us is responsible for creating our own meaning, it's those shared meanings that give life a special pleasure. For example, a marriage that works well is when two people share a story of their togetherness that is mutually meaningful.

Gut-directed hypnotherapy: example of the mind-body connection

In one way, the whole idea of the mind-body connection doesn't make sense. After all, it isn't as if the mind is one thing and the body is a different thing.

The mind basically is the brain in action. The brain is part of the body. So obviously there's a connection between the mind and body, since they're different aspects of the same entity. 

But most people, me included, do view the mind as something more ethereal than the cruder body.

Our thoughts and emotions seem to be distinct from the flesh, blood, and bone of the body. Even though I know that thoughts and emotions are just as physical as my hands and feet, this is difficult to believe given the inherent subjectivity of mind.

Because I have a sensitive digestive system -- I've never been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) though I have symptoms of this -- I found it interesting when my 52 year-old daughter, Celeste, told me last summer that she's been told she has IBS.

Celeste mentioned that she'd been advised to follow the FODMAP diet, though she's been reluctant to do this because she likes so many foods that aren't advised by FODMAP, such as avocados. 

I downloaded the FODMAP app and made some changes to my diet that have alleviated most of the irritating symptoms of my own IBS, assuming that's what it should be called. Then I came across a mention in a science magazine of the Nerva app that uses hypnotherapy to alleviate IBS symptoms.

I've tried hypnotism a few times and didn't find it very useful. But I found the theory behind the Nerva app to be intriguing, so I've been using it daily for the past four weeks in hopes that I could get back to eating some of the foods that I'd eliminated from my diet.

The basic idea is that Irritable Bowel Syndrome actually isn't caused by a problem with a person's digestive system, because almost always they have a normal digestive system. Instead, the problem lies is miscommunication between the brain and the gut.

Most of us have experienced the brain-gut connection. For example, if we're stressed about giving an important presentation at work, we may feel "butterflies in the stomach" as we get up to speak. This shows that the mind and digestive system are linked quite closely.

The web site for the Nerva app says:

The app includes daily short readings, along with a 15-17 minute hypnotherapy session. One of the goals is to disrupt a negative brain-gut/mind-body feedback loop. This pertains to problems other than IBS, clearly.

Say we feel stressed. One of the ways that stress may manifest is physically. In the case of IBS, maybe we feel some stomach pain. That gut pain then leads to more mental stress, because now we're not only stressed for the original reason, but also because of the stomach pain.

So the brain can affect the gut, and the gut then can affect the brain. Left unchecked, we can spiral into a negative feedback loop. The idea of hypnotherapy -- and this also seems to apply to some forms of meditation -- is to break that cycle by introducing positive thoughts and feelings into the brain as regards the gut problem.

This happens consciously, though the real benefit seems to occur as those positive thoughts and feelings wend their way into our unconscious, creating more beneficial patterns of thinking and feeling largely outside our conscious awareness.

Apparently it doesn't matter if someone isn't highly suggestible with hypnotherapy. That's good, because while I feel relaxed during a session, I never enter a state where I'm not completely aware of my surroundings and what's going on.

Nerva says:

How does hypnotherapy really work?

Hypnosis involves entering a state of absorbed attention where you become hyper-focused on specific stimuli (such as a feeling or a memory) led by suggestions from a hypnotherapist.

During hypnosis, suggestions bypass the critical mind allowing you to subconsciously 'fix' the miscommunication between your gut and brain (how your brain and gut send and receive nerve impulses). These suggestions teach you automatic skills that can help you self-manage IBS symptoms.

I'm told that the RSSB guru said I'm good, or am a good soul

Today I got this message from someone who, unlike me, still attends the satsang meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, before RSSB and me parted our ways.

Baba Ji refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

I heard today from someone who said “Baba Ji said that Brian Hines is good (or a good soul).” I am not sure which or maybe both, because his English is a little hard for me to understand.

I told this person, Ah. That's nice.

I said that because it was indeed nice to hear this unsubstantiated rumor. For even though I've been critical of Gurinder Singh's business dealings while the RSSB guru, and I have problems with other aspects of his stint as guru, I don't feel any personal ill will toward him.

During the period I was writing three books on behalf of RSSB, I met with Gurinder Singh occasionally and found him a pleasant competent person to deal with. We also exchanged letters and I was pleased to perform security seva (volunteer work) during some of the guru's visits to the United States and British Columbia.

It isn't that I spend much time, or any time, really, wondering whether Gurinder Singh has a favorable opinion of me. I simply felt good when I heard that reportedly the RSSB guru thinks I"m good, or am a good soul.

I prefer the former, since I no longer believe that I have, or am, a soul. 

The broader issue here, I guess, is whether it ever makes sense to say that someone is bad. Or, I suppose, good. For it seems to me that most people, and this might even include all people, try to do the right thing insofar as it appears to them.

Of course, there's no doubt that some people do terrible things: murder, rape, torture, and so much else that's despicable. But we can harshly criticize the doing of those things without calling the person who does them "bad" or "evil." 

Good and bad are words that imply a choice in how we act. I'm deeply skeptical that free will actually exists. More likely is that we all are simply acting in accord with what complex and difficult-to-discern causes both inside of us and outside of us have determined that we must do.

So I don't look upon myself as being a good person, or a bad person. Sure, I feel that by and large I'm a decent human being, but I'm well aware of my defects and shortcomings, which are numerous.

At any rate, I'm pleased that the RSSB guru supposedly looks upon me positively. Though I don't mind being argumentative and confrontational, I prefer to get along with other people whenever possible, even when we disagree.

Beyond awe, beyond mystery, there's ultimate not-knowing

There's many levels lying on the other side of ordinary knowing. I've been pondering this after writing the recent post, What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I hasten to point out that while I'd love to lay claim to such a marvelous title, it belongs to David Wolpert, who wrote an engrossing monograph about the limits of not only human knowledge, but the knowledge of any other species.

Wolpert lays out the foundation of his complex and subtle arguments in a single paragraph.

This question does not concern limitations on what we can know about what it is that we can never know. Many things can be conceived by us humans even if they can never be known by us. The set of what it is that we cannot even conceive of is a (strictly smaller) subset of what it is that we cannot know. The issue I am concerned with is what we can ever perceive concerning that smaller set, the set of all that we cannot conceive of.

As quoted in the first post about Wolpert's paper, he aptly observes:

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

I think it is not only likely, but a near-certainty, that without exception, every human who has ever lived has been handicapped in knowing the nature of reality by the seemingly inescapable fact that there is much about the cosmos we can't even conceive of, must less know.

To be blunt about that "without exception," I include Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Lao Tau, Guru Nanak, and each and every mystic, saint, yogi, or whatever who has walked the earth. No one, repeat no one, is capable of knowing anything about what we can't even imagine.

Religion and mysticism embrace awe and mystery. So do I, as an atheist. But awe is what we feel when we are in the presence of something known, yet beyond our comprehension, like the vastness of the universe.

And mystery likewise requires a dividing line between what is known about something, and what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge. Darkness isn't nothing. It can be conceived, as when we peer into an unlit room and say "I can't see what's there."

We don't know what's there. However, we can imagine something being there, even if it is nothing.

Obviously it's much more difficult to envision even the slightest sign of something beyond our capacity to conceive of. I'd say it's impossible, but Wolpert has been thinking about this stuff for many years, and he sees some possibilities for humans to conceive of what is now beyond our conception.

God, of course, is either fully or largely within the realm of human conception. Which is one reason why I firmly believe that God is a creation of humans. I used to resonate with the Via Negativa, negative way, where whatever could be said about God, isn't. 

(In contrast to the Via Positiva, where believers love to describe God's love, wisdom, power, goodness, and such.)

But even the Via Negativa requires the concept of "God." It's just a way of saying that whatever can be said about God, the reality is beyond those sayings. What would we be left with, though, if the very concept of God were beyond the ability of humans to imagine?

Well, it would be akin to how our dog looks upon politics or quantum mechanics. Less than nothing, since "nothing" implies the potential presence of something, and our dog just has no capacity to conceive of much that we humans take for granted.

Yet as every dog owner knows, canines inhabit a sensory world of scent and sound and sight that is impossible for we humans to conceive of in anything more than a crude sense.

Probably each of us has a favorite way of trying to grasp in even the slightest fashion the elusive concept of what is so far beyond our conception, it can't even be imagined. Mine is the classic "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Or as I prefer to put it, "There is something rather than nothing," because I don't see any possibility of answering the "why?"

When my mind tries to conceive of this primal fact, There is something rather than nothing, I'm thrown into a realm of no beginning, no end, no creator, no creation. Just the stark reality of existence that to my human mind, must always have existed.

But that's a very human conception. It fills me with awe. It fills me with mystery.

However, I strongly suspect that if an alien being arrived on earth who, against all odds, did possess the capacity to know the nature of There is something rather than nothing, neither me nor anyone else would be able to conceive anything about that knowledge.

It would be as distant from us as the Theory of Relativity is from our dog's understanding of reality. I find this exciting. Also, humbling. Because it means that no matter how much anyone believes they know about the cosmos, what they're utterly incapable of knowing is what they cannot even imagine.

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I love the question that's the title of this blog post. The question didn't come from me, but from David Wolpert. I learned about a paper he wrote when it was mentioned in a recent issue of New Scientist.

But there is a deeper question here: can we be sure that logic, even a reformed kind, is enough to understand the universe in all its fullness?

It is a question that David Wolpert at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has been thinking about for decades. In a recent monograph, he spelled out his argument that it is more likely than not that there is some higher mode of logic that could be used to understand the universe, but that human minds wouldn't be able to grasp.

Just think of that humble linguistic device, the question. Wolpert says there are creatures -- things like a single-celled paramecium -- that couldn't conceive of the idea of a question. In fact, according to our standards of intelligence, every other species on Earth is limited in some regard in the way it understands the world around it.

Why should we be any different? "We are the paramecia," says Wolpert. "What is beyond us?"

Wolpert thinks there are ways we could potentially get at higher systems of thought that go beyond logic  as we know it. Perhaps it will be a super Turing machine that can transcend the normal rules of computing or an intelligent form of extraterrestrial life that shares its wisdom with us.

Perhaps it will be something different altogether. And what will this new plane of understanding be like?  "I can't conceive of it," says Wolpert. "But that's the whole point."

Wolpert's essay is 22 pages long, 30 including footnotes. I read it fairly quickly tonight. It deserves another reading. Maybe several readings. Parts are fairly dense, but most of the essay is understandable to anyone willing to make their way through some sophisticated thinking about the limits of human knowledge. 

Here's a PDF file.
Download What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

lt's hard to disagree with Wolpert. Since every species on Earth is limited in its knowledge of what the world is all about, why would we humans be any different? 

Here's a passage from the essay that I especially liked. Note: if you're a religious believer, or an admirer of mysticism, the same limitations of the human mind apply to you also. Meaning, even if you don't embrace logic or language as a guide to reality, you embrace some other human capacity, which leaves Wolpert's argument untouched.

To gain some insight into these questions, note that the highly limited form of all of human mathematics — sequences of finite strings of symbols — just happens to be exactly the structure that we humans use to converse with one another: the structure of human language. Indeed, starting back with Wittgenstein, it has become commonplace to identify mathematics as a special case of human language, casting its structure explicitly as grammar in the same sense as grammars arise in human conversation.

Note as well that it is a poetic cliche that libraries, and in particular mathematics libraries, are places where we converse (!) with past minds. The implication is that the contents of all the mathematics textbooks in those libraries is part of a conversation; i.e., an exercise in human language. Indeed, historically, mathematics textbooks and papers developed from written correspondence, i.e., from exercises in human language.

So, the form of human mathematics, and of our SAM more generally, just happens to exactly coincide with the form of inter-human communication. Some writers have pointed this out before, that human language’s design matches that of formal logic and Turing machine theory [16]. They have taken this as a wonderful stroke of fortune, that we just so happen have a cognitive prosthesis — human language — that is capable of capturing formal logic. After all — they presume — this means we are capable of capturing all the laws of the physical universe.

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

Sure, it’s possible that it is just a coincidence, that for some unknown reason the deepest nature of physical reality is expressible in terms of one of our cognitive prostheses. But it certainly seems as plausible that social computation is simply the most sophisticated cognitive prosthesis we have ever developed, and that even exploiting it to the hilt only allows us to capture a sliver of physical reality.

Yes, our science and mathematics — or more precisely, what they seem to be developing into — may be a complete description of what we understand physical reality to be. They might be developing into a complete description of what is experimentally accessible to us, even if only indirectly, both now and in the future [94, 95, 108, 109].

But in an exactly parallel manner, a putative ant- level theory of reality in terms of pheromone trails and environmental chemical signals could capture all that ants “understand physical reality to be”, of all that ants can “experimentally access”. And just as there is a huge expanse of physical reality lying beyond the charmed sliver that ants can conceive of, it may be that there is a huge expanse of physical reality beyond our ability to even conceive of.

After all, social computation — human language — was developed for communal sessions of shooting the shit around the campfire after a successful mastodon hunt (plus a few other purposes). There is no reason to believe that features well- suited for such exercises in nocturnal braggadocio can also be used to glean substantial insights into the shape of the hands of the Cosmic Baker, based solely on some crumbs we have discovered, scattered on their kitchen floor.

Experience is part of physical reality

Sometimes -- well, actually, quite a lot of times -- I find people arguing on this blog, and in other places, that science doesn't know how to deal with personal experience.

Further, that because experience seems to be something ineffable, as is consciousness (likely there's no difference between experience and consciousness), this means that the most intimate part of our being is outside the domain of science, which deals with physical reality.

Galen Strawson, a philosopher, disagrees. I wrote about his take on consciousness in "The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter." 

Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.

We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. 

We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical. 

In Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes a similar point as regards experience.

So what do we know for sure? When we ask this question we get, first, an old answer. We know, each of us individually, that we exist, as Descartes pointed out. We also encounter another more general certainty, as Descartes also pointed out

We encounter the fact of consciousness, conscious experience, experience, the fact of the subjective qualitative character or "phenomenological" character of experience. The existence of experience is a certainly known general fact about concrete reality.

It is, therefor, for anyone who takes the concrete real to be entirely natural, a certainly known natural fact. It is therefore, for any realistic naturalist, a certainly known physical fact. So we have our starting point. 

The necessary, inevitable starting point of genuine, realistic  naturalism, real naturalism, as I call it, is outright realism about experience, conscious experience. 

...It's true, of course, that experience seems utterly and bewilderingly different from toe-stubbing physical stuff as it is ordinarily conceived of in everyday life. But this doesn't give us any reason to think that experience isn't wholly physical.

It's also true that experience seems bewilderingly different from physical stuff as it is usually conceived of in the physics laboratory. But this, again, doesn't give us any reason to think that experience isn't wholly physical.

India's 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists.

But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947. 

I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to say what happened?"

The online article is called, "Seventy-five Years after Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?: Literature once filled in archival gaps by saying the unsayable. Now a younger generation is finding new modes of telling the story and finding new stories to tell." 

Here's a PDF file.
Download Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition Who Owns the Narrative?  | The New Yorker

It's heartbreaking to read how the partition was described by people who lived through it and in novels that cast a light on the horrendous happening through the lens of fact-based fiction. 

A Wikipedia article about the Partition of India says that Ghandi was opposed to the splitting up of India. In retrospect, he probably was right. However, for a variety of reasons the British rushed through a not very well thought-out plan for partitioning along religious lines. Wikipedia says:

The two-nation theory is the ideology that the primary identity and unifying denominator of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent is their religion, rather than their language or ethnicity, and therefore Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations regardless of commonalities. It argued that religion resulted in cultural and social differences between Muslims and Hindus. The two-nation theory was a founding principle of the Pakistan Movement (i.e., the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim nation-state in South Asia), and the partition of India in 1947.

The ideology that religion is the determining factor in defining the nationality of Indian Muslims was undertaken by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who termed it as the awakening of Muslims for the creation of Pakistan. It is also a source of inspiration to several Hindu nationalist organizations, with causes as varied as the redefinition of Indian Muslims as non-Indian foreigners and second-class citizens in India, the expulsion of all Muslims from India, the establishment of a legally Hindu state in India, prohibition of conversions to Islam, and the promotion of conversions or reconversions of Indian Muslims to Hinduism. 

There are varying interpretations of the two-nation theory, based on whether the two postulated nationalities can coexist in one territory or not, with radically different implications. One interpretation argued for sovereign autonomy, including the right to secede, for Muslim-majority areas of the Indian subcontinent, but without any transfer of populations (i.e., Hindus and Muslims would continue to live together).

A different interpretation contends that Hindus and Muslims constitute "two distinct and frequently antagonistic ways of life and that therefore they cannot coexist in one nation." In this version, a transfer of populations (i.e., the total removal of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas and the total removal of Muslims from Hindu-majority areas) was a desirable step towards a complete separation of two incompatible nations that "cannot coexist in a harmonious relationship."

Opposition to the theory has come from two sources. The first is the concept of a single Indian nation, of which Hindus and Muslims are two intertwined communities. This is a founding principle of the modern, officially-secular Republic of India. Even after the formation of Pakistan, debates on whether Muslims and Hindus are distinct nationalities or not continued in that country as well. The second source of opposition is the concept that while Indians are not one nation, neither are the Muslims or Hindus of the subcontinent, and it is instead the relatively homogeneous provincial units of the subcontinent which are true nations and deserving of sovereignty; the Baloch have presented this view, Sindhi, and Pashtun sub-nationalities of Pakistan and the Assamese  and Punjabi sub-nationalities of India.

In the end, religion was the primary criterion for dividing India into Muslim and non-Muslim nations. Of course, many Muslims still live in India, and I assume some Hindus, Sikhs, and members of other religions live in Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. 

What's beyond sad is how communities where Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs used to live together harmoniously were afflicted by massive outbreaks of violence, which led to one of the largest migrations in human history. Here's how The New Yorker story by Perul Sehgal starts out.

Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying her vegetables at the market, settling her baby on her hip, craning to hear the news—a border, where? Two borders, to be exact.

On the eve of their departure, in 1947, after more than three hundred years on the subcontinent, the British sliced the land into a Hindu-majority India flanked by a Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a thousand miles apart. The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as Partition.

A tidy word, “Partition.” Amid what the Punjabis call the raula—the “uproar”—the region convulsed with violence, Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other. Entire villages were massacred. Neighbors turned on each other. It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that seventy-five thousand women and girls were abducted and raped, a third of them under the age of twelve. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history.

“Blood trains” crisscrossed the fresh border, carrying silent cargo—passengers slaughtered during the journey. Cities transformed into open-air refugee camps, like the one in Delhi to which my grandmother escaped in the night, alone with her children, feeding the baby opium, the story goes, so he would not cry.

Bhisham Sahni’s “Tamas,” a 1973 Hindi novel set in that period, brings such a camp to life. The exhausted refugees are greeted by a functionary of the Relief Committee with the unpropitious nickname Statistics Babu. “I want figures, only figures, nothing but figures,” he instructs. The refugees mill around him, unhearing. They weep, stare blankly. They repeat, in exasperating detail, every step of their journeys. “Why don’t you understand?” Statistics Babu pleads. “I am not here to listen to the whole ‘Ramayana.’ Give me figures—how many dead, how many wounded, how much loss of property and goods. That is all.”

Is that where the story lies? What do “figures, only figures” convey of the full horror and absurdity of 1947? Of a border that cut through forests, families, and shrines, that saw wild animals apportioned between the two countries and historical artifacts snapped in half?

In “Tamas,” the testimonies of the survivors reveal all that records omit and conceal. A refugee is desperate to recover his wife’s gold bangles: won’t Statistics Babu help him? Those bangles still circle his wife’s wrists, however, and she lies at the bottom of a well. It is a detail perhaps lifted from the case of the real-life village of Thoa Khalsa, now in Pakistan, where almost a hundred Sikh women drowned themselves and their children.

We don’t have the figures for women killed by their own families or forced to kill themselves in the name of protecting their honor. There are no records of those who died of heartbreak. My family migrated from an area not far from Thoa Khalsa. Only my great-uncle remained; he lay beheaded in the courtyard of his home. Three months later, his wife died—of grief, some say. Their children were scattered. There are no firm figures available for orphaned children, or for children abandoned along the journey because they were too small to walk quickly enough.

What I find difficult to understand, from my perspective here in the United States, is how it can be that India is still convulsed by Hindu-Muslim violence, with Prime Minister Modi's political party being devoted to Hindu nationalism.

Don't the people of India realize that the horrors of the Indian Partition must never be repeated, even on a much smaller scale? The United States has had to come to grips with the horror of slavery and the injustices African-Americans have had to deal with from 1619 to the present.

But at least there's an almost universal consensus that discrimination against Blacks has to be a thing of the past, though there's a lot of debate about how this is to be achieved. In India, though, my understanding is that Modi and his political party are dedicated to the proposition that Muslims are second-class citizens, and that India is basically a Hindu nation.

Sure, we have Christian nationalists in the United States. However, they are a fringe political movement.  Some Christian nationalists get elected to political positions, but they're nowhere close to controlling the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party, which controls the presidency and Senate, totally rejects Christian nationalism.

Which is why I worry about India. If Modi retains power in the 2024 elections, which recent polling says seems likely, Hindu nationalism will have even more of a foothold in India. That strikes me as really unfortunate, if it happens.

India's Modi doesn't want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them.

Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question."

TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against a BBC documentary exploring Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which the officials deemed a “propaganda piece.”

In a series of posts, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.” He said that both Twitter and YouTube had been ordered to block links to the film, before adding that the platforms “have complied with the directions.” Gupta’s statements coincided with posts from Twitter users in India who claimed to have shared links to the documentary but whose posts were later removed and replaced with a legal notice.

...The Gujarat riots, as the violence is sometimes known, occurred in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state. A group of militants aligned with the Hindu nationalist movement, which encompasses Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, launched a violent campaign against local Muslims. Modi, who has been accused of personally encouraging the violence, reportedly told police forces to stand down in the face of the ongoing violence, which killed about 1,000 people.

“The documentary has unnerved Mr. Modi as he continues to evade accountability for his complicity in the violence,” Naik, the journalist, said. “He sees the documentary as a threat to his image internationally and has launched an unprecedented crackdown in India.”

Of course, when the Indian government tells people not to watch the documentary, that's tremendous free advertising for it.

I haven't watched the documentary yet. It's difficult to find it online without paying for a subscription to some video/movie service. The best source I could find was the IslamiCity web site, which says it provides "a non-sectarian, comprehensive and holistic view of Islam and Muslims."

Part 1 of the documentary is here on that site. Part 2 of the documentary is here on that site.

The BBC is a respected organization, so my bet is that the documentary mostly, if not totally, tells the truth about the Gujarat violence and Modi's subsequent embracing of extreme Hindu nationalism. 

Courageous people in India are screening the documentary despite the government's threats against those who do this. It's really disturbing that police in riot gear were sent to a university in advance of a planned screening. 

If Modi thinks the documentary is untrue or unfair to him, he could have commented on it prior to its release, as the BBC requested. But he didn't do this, which indicates to me that Modi just doesn't like the truth being revealed about his role in the Gujarat killings.

This episode puts Modi, and India, in a bad light. A Washington Post story is scathing. Here's excerpts from "Censorship, arrests, power cuts. India scrambles to block BBC documentary."

NEW DELHI — The film had already been banned, the social media posts censored. Now, the students huddled without light or electricity around glowing smartphones to watch what their government had deemed to be subversive foreign propaganda.

China? No. They were in India, ostensibly the world’s largest democracy, and watching the BBC.

The Indian government over the past week has embarked on an extraordinary campaign to prevent its citizens from viewing a new documentary by the British broadcaster that explores Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in a deadly 2002 riot that saw more than 1,000 people — mostly Muslims — killed.

Indian officials, invoking emergency powers, ordered clips from the documentary to be censored on social media platforms including YouTube and Twitter. The Foreign Ministry spokesman lambasted the BBC production as a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” One junior minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declared that watching the film amounted to “treason.”

On Tuesday evening, authorities cut electricity to the student union hall at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in an attempt to prevent the film being screened — a move that only provoked defiant students around the country to try to host more viewings.

...All told, the remarkable steps taken by the government seemed to reinforce a central point of the BBC series: that the world’s largest democracy was sliding into authoritarianism under Modi, who rose to national power in 2014 and won reelection in 2019 on a Hindu nationalist platform.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director of the digital rights group Access Now, said the episode should “give more attention” to the “dangerous situation” of eroding civil liberties in India. The government has become “far more efficient and aggressive” in blocking content during moments of national political controversy, he said.

“How is it acceptable for India, as a democracy, to be ordering such a large amount of web censorship in the country?” Chima said. “You have to look at this incident as part of a cumulative wave of censorship.”

More on why mindfulness is better than mantra meditation

It goes without saying, but I'll say it regardless, that my Church of the Churchless blog posts reflect what I find interesting and what makes sense to me. 

If you disagree with a post, naturally that's wonderful. You're you. I'm me. We're different people, so we're going to look at some things differently. Maybe a lot of things differently. 

All I can do is explain myself as best I can, while all you can do is explain yourself as best you can in comments on my blog posts -- should you choose to do that.

So here's another try at explaining why I view mindfulness as being better than using a mantra, either in meditation or outside of meditation, which is what I did for the 35 years I embraced a mantra when I was devoted to the spiritual practice taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

I'll start by sharing what a friend said to me recently. She was meditating in the evening before going to bed. She likes the idea of oneness (as do I) and was getting frustrated with how her busy thoughts were keeping her from the inner quiet that she thought was needed to feel a sense of oneness.

Then a realization came over her: oneness means accepting everything, including her thoughts. Thus by viewing her thoughts as unwelcome, she was moving further away from oneness, while accepting them would bring her closer to oneness.

That happens to be a basic tenet of mindfulness, which typically is defined along this line: "a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations."

A mantra, on the other hand, generally is used as a means to stop thoughts other than the repetition of the mantra. 

That can be a way to practice concentration, a laudable aim. But it comes with a cost, since obviously when the mantra is the focus of attention, that leaves the mantra-repeater with less of an ability to focus on other things, both outside in the world and inside their mind.

In the case of RSSB, this was taken to an extreme. The mantra was composed of the five names of supposed rulers of supernatural regions of reality. By repeating these "Five Holy Names," the idea was that the consciousness of the meditator would leave behind the physical world and enter a higher one.

Thus this is an example of a mantra being a world-denying technique. RSSB disciples also were supposed to repeat the mantra as much as possible during the rest of the day outside of meditation, so long as they didn't have to concentrate on other things.

The "so long as" echoes what I've been saying in both my previous post on this subject, and this one. By its very nature, a mantra prevents us from paying full attention both to things out there in the world, and to things in here in our mind.

Imagine having an intimate conversation with someone who, while you're talking about something important to you, is mentally repeating a mantra instead of closely listening to you. If their mantra is "God," they're saying God, God, God... with their inner voice rather than focusing on you and what you're saying.

Aside from being impolite, this shows that a mantra can divide us from the reality both outside and inside us. It isn't quite like a child yelling at a parent "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" as they stick their fingers in their ears after being told it's time to get ready for bed.

But it's damn close to that. I know, because like I said, for 35 years I did my best to repeat my RSSB mantra when I didn't have to concentrate on something else during my time outside of mediation. 

I'll admit that during the latter part of those 35 years I repeated the mantra less and less, since by that time I'd come to realize that repeating it was distancing me from other people, nature, and many other things.

That said, I understand why a mantra appeals to people. It's a simple way of meditating. It's easy to repeat a mantra. If you want to stop unwelcome thoughts, a mantra can be an effective way of doing this.

However, I've come to view a mantra as being akin to the hard style martial arts I embraced for about 13 years during my karate phase. It can knock down thoughts and feelings with a sort of brute force. Often effective, it isn't very elegant.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, is more difficult to learn than mantra meditation. It's akin to soft style martial arts like Tai Chi, which I've been practicing for the past 19 years. Mindfulness accepts whatever is present in reality, gently dealing with feelings, thoughts, and other things that need redirecting not through force, but by welcoming them as they are, then altering their direction with minimal exertion.

Again, though, you may disagree. This is just my experience.  

Mantra versus mindfulness -- which is better?

Paying $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course based on a mantra, that is roughly akin to the Transcendental Meditation approach, had at least one immediate benefit for me.

It got me to pondering the pros and cons of using a mantra, versus pursuing mindfulness.

This is going to be a fairly short blog post, because after a couple of days where I experimented with repeating the one-word mantra that I chose for the course -- "peace" -- it dawned on me why I gave up on using a mantra and made mindfulness my meditation. 

Yes, I still play around with repeating a mantra. 

But almost always I've been doing this when going to sleep, when my eyes are closed and I'm not doing anything except falling asleep. As I said in the above-linked post:

When I was really into repeating a mantra, I found that this created a distance between what I was doing physically and my awareness, because part of my mental energy was devoted to the mantra while, say, I was doing the dishes.

Not surprisingly, that same distancing popped up when I tried repeating my "peace" mantra during the day when I was doing things. It was fine when I spent ten minutes or so in closed-eyes meditation during my morning reading/meditating time.

Not so fine when I was trying to repeat the mantra while doing anything else. I didn't like the split between that word being repeated in my head and what I was doing with my body.

So I found that what I wrote about in 2015 still held true for me: Mantra meditation basically is useless. For me, at least. In that post I quoted from a 2012 post. Guess I needed a $24.95 reminder.

I've never practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). But for over forty years I've meditated daily, mostly using a mantra (a word or words repeated over and over) just as TM does.

...For most of those forty years I used a mantra taught by a Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, that was known as the Five Holy Names. The mantra bore some resemblance to the ones used by the Transcendental Meditation folks. 

...I've come to much the same concluson as Sudarsha has: following the breath mindfully is a better meditation approach than is repeating a mantra mindlessly. 

...Why would you repeat a mantra in your mind when your goal is to be aware of what exists in what I like to call really real reality?

It'd be ridiculous to remain focused on mentally repeating sex, sex, sex, sex, sex when a beautiful willing partner is lying next to you on a bed, arms outstretched for your embrace. 

Likewise, it'd be ridiculous to keep saying sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset as the REAL sun is dipping below the horizon, displaying gorgeous colors across the sky.

And even if your aim is religious, does it make any sense to utter God, God, God, God, God (or other supposed names of divinity) instead of being receptively open to whatever divine presence might be capable of being experienced at the moment?

Occasionally I still use a mantra, but more and more it seems pointless to speak repeated words inside my head. Life is going on all the time I'm awake and aware; experience is happening all the time I'm awake and aware.

A mantra now seems like an unnecessary distraction from life and experience. When I'm ballroom dancing, I don't think to myself dance, dance, dance, dance, dance. I just dance. 

I pay $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course

As I was reading Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.", I read a mention by Stawson that he'd tried out psychologist Patricia Carrington's approach to meditation, liked it, but didn't stick with it for very long.

Curious, I headed to Carrington's web site, which has sort of an old-fashioned internet vibe to it. I poked around the site for a while, focusing on what she has to say about meditation, and liked her emphasis on meditation being as effortless as possible.

Since I'm a firm believer in spiritual laziness, I decided to fork over $24.95 for her Learn to Meditate course.

When the materials were delivered to me via an email message, I realized that if her web site seemed like something out of the early 2000's internet era, Carrington's meditation instruction manual and accompanying audio files seemed even more ancient.

Kind of charming in an old-fashioned way. Also kind of irritating. But I figured that for $24.95, the cost of some hard cover books that I buy, I shouldn't expect the meditation course to be packaged in a fancy manner.

Since I've been meditating every day for more than fifty years, I didn't expect to learn anything wildly new. Which I didn't. Carrington basically has repackaged the mantra-based approach of Transcendental Meditation into a pleasingly secular format with no religious overtones.

You get to pick your own one-word mantra. She suggests 16 or so. I settled on "peace."

Carrington says that you shouldn't share your mantra, though it isn't secret. So I've broken that rule. Her manual contains lots of other rules, which is kind of strange, since she says that her meditation approach is flexible, with the meditator being free to adapt her approach as desired.

For example, Carrington doesn't want you to chew gum while meditating because you might become so relaxed, you swallow the gum and choke yourself to death. And you're not supposed to ingest caffeine before meditating. Or alcohol. Or recreational drugs. Or eat more than a very light meal.

Naturally I ignored all those "should's," which drastically shortened the time it took for me to read her meditation manual. I think because Carrington is a licensed psychologist, she felt like she needed to cover her legal bases by warning purchasers of her meditation course to not do anything that might be remotely risky.

I did listen to several of her audio recordings. They were fine. Nothing new to me. Just a pleasant introduction to meditation. I'm enjoying my "peace" mantra, which is a nice change of pace from the mindfulness meditation I've been focusing on for quite a few years, after immersing myself in a more complex form of mantra meditation for over three decades.

I like how Carrington says that while effortful concentration works for some highly motivated meditators, her approach is to just let the mantra do its thing with as little effort as possible. If the mind wanders, no problem. Return to the mantra gently.

She appears to view positive change as happening naturally in meditation. It isn't something to be pursued, as that just makes meditation into another item on our to-do list.

There's some comparisons between mindfulness and mantra meditation on her web site that are fairly interesting. That link contains a description of her own approach.

My meditation program is not meant to “numb” any individual from experiencing and expressing our natural human tendencies to feel emotions of compassion, empathy, and full engagement with one’s surroundings.

I teach a type of mantra meditation, Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM), which has much in common [with] Transcendental Meditation (TM).  I also teach Woolfolk’s breathing meditation, which is much like Benson’s technique.

CSM is a modern form of meditation that has been widely used, both in clinical practice to support psychotherapy, and as a self-taught method to create profound individual personality and life changes.

Unlike TM, or other forms of meditation, CSM, has no ceremonious or pre-conceptive goals, rather the meditator makes preparations to create a quiet space in which to relax and repeat a short, personally selected, standardized soothing sound, a “mantra.”

CSM is, ultimately, a non-directive form of meditating that is remarkably effective in bringing about profound positive changes in the meditator and it is very safe and simple to use. Furthermore, its beneficial effects have been widely supported by research. It is not based upon any religion or strict protocol.

With the CSM instruction, you can experience both mantra and breathing meditations to see how each feels for you, your family, and what comfortably compliments your goals for a meditative experience.

Believing in free will isolates us

Before I head off into other directions in my blog posts, I want to share some additional thoughts about free will, and the lack thereof -- a subject that has been a theme of mine recently.

(And also non-recently, since I've written a lot about free will over the years.)

The main reason I don't believe in free will is that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe in it. By and large I prefer truth over falsehood, reality over illusion. Especially when it comes to science. Movies, novels, and TV shows -- I'm fine with falsehoods and illusions there.

While it certainly seems that we humans possess free will, that subjective feeling doesn't count for much when it comes to understanding reality.

After all, it also feels like consciousness is something ethereal, whereas actually it is the product of electrochemical goings-on in the brain. If you truly believe that your consciousness is non-physical, ask someone to hit you on your head with a baseball bat and see if your consciousness is unchanged.

Often an objection is raised to those who, like me, don't believe that people are ultimately morally responsible for their actions, since we humans lack free will. If nobody believed in free will, goes the argument, how could society hold people accountable for bad behavior and reward people for good behavior?

The usual response is that echoed by Galen Strawson in his book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc." Strawson, a philosopher, rejects free will. But he says in an interview that comprises a chapter in his book:

You may be convinced that determinism is true: You may believe that in five -- two -- minutes' time you will be able to look back on the situation you are now in and say truly, of what you will by then have done, "It was determined that I should do that."

But even if you do fervently believe this, I still don't think it's going to touch the feel of DMR [deep moral responsibility] that you have right now as you stand there. 

...Given that the experience of DMR is seemingly inevitable in our everyday lives, can we shake free of it, can we at least diminish it, can we somehow truly live, breathe the impossibility of DMR, and not just accept it as a merely theoretical context?

We have to remember that evolution isn't much concerned with whether living beings are in touch with objective reality. Evolution favors changes in living beings that enhance their survival value, their ability to reproduce and pass on their genetic heritage to their offspring.

A feeling that we humans have free will seemingly has survival value. It puts our individuality front and center. Those two words, "free" and "will," are inherently egoistic. Here I am, an isolated being, free to do as I want by exercising my will.

This attitude, of course, ignores reality.

We all are dependent on the laws of nature and other people for our existence. We all are heavily influenced by our genetics that's handed down by countless generations of our ancestors, both human and non-human. We all are also heavily influenced by the experiences we have from the first breath we take at our birth until the last breath we take at our death.

All of that determines what we do and think and feel, even if it seems like we are able to freely choose what actions we take, what thoughts are in our mind, and what emotions impact us.

I'd much rather view myself as an integral aspect of the whole of reality, rather than as an isolated part disconnected from outside influences by my supposed free will. Aside from that second option not making any sense, it's unappealing.

There are too many divisions in the world: political, cultural, religious, etc. A belief in free will is one more division that leads people to see themselves as a stand-alone island rather than as a tiny bit of ground in a vast shared continent. 

Another good reason to not believe in free will

I'm addicted. To many things. One of them is reading about why free will makes no sense. I ingest books and essays on this subject with delight. Until another one comes along. Then I eagerly imbibe it also.

This morning I got my No Free Will fix courtesy of a chapter in Galen Strawson's book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.

The chapter, "Luck Swallows Everything," started off in a familiar fashion.

Strawson, a philosopher, picked apart the easily pickable argument that free will exists in the form of compatibilism, an incoherent argument that we humans have free will even if determinism holds true, because free will is compatible with determinism so long as our determined actions take place without us being forced to act that way, such as by someone holding a gun to our head.

He says about compatibilists:

Free will, they say, is simply a matter of being unconstrained in such a way that one has genuine options and opportunities for action, and is able to choose among them in the light of what one wants or thinks best.

It simply doesn't matter if one's character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set are entirely determined by things for which one is in no way responsible -- by one's genetic inheritance, upbringing, historical situation, chance encounters, and so on.

Einstein also found this point of view absurd.

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will do something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will light up my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.

Strawson expands upon the point Einstein alludes to in this quotation. Free will requires genuine unfettered freedom. Sure, just as the compatibilists argue, we all carry out lots of actions every day. I drive my car into Salem.

Like an annoying three year old endlessly asking a parent, "Why?," the question becomes, why did I drive my car into Salem. Answer: to go to my Tai Chi class. And why do I go to Tai Chi classes? Because I like Tai Chi. Why do I like Tai Chi? Partly because I like Taoist philosophy and Tai Chi can be viewed as Taoism in motion. And why do I like Taoism?... on and on go the string of Why's, which are rooted in determinism, causes and effects.

Strawson says that the basic reason we decide to do something, why we decide to do anything, is that this is simply the overall way we are. I guess this is akin to an exasperated parent finally saying, "Just because, that's why!"

But Strawson argues persuasively that free will requires that a person be able to trace it to a self-caused state, causa sui. 

In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.

There's a more concise way of putting the point: in order to be ultimately responsible, one would have to be causa sui -- the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one's mental nature. But nothing can be causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it can't plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings.

Obviously we don't originate ourselves. We are born because we were conceived. After our birth, countless influences other than genetics determine how we are. These experiences all have their own causes.

So nothing is self-caused, and nothing has free will.

Is it necessary to make our life into a narrative, a story?

As I noted a few days ago in "Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I'm a bit of both", there was more to say about this distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients).

Part of that additional saying relates to what Galen Strawson, whose book ("Things That Bother Me") is where I'm getting these ideas, calls a narrative approach to one's life.

Meaning, we not only recall events in our life, but make a story out of those events in somewhat the same way as a novelist would. If someone asks, Tell me about yourself, a person with a strong tilt toward narration likely would relate their life in a chronological order: birth, childhood, schooling, marriage, jobs, children, grandchildren, retirement, and such.

Someone who wasn't into a narrative approach probably would be inclined to speak more about their life right now, giving little or no attention to telling a story about how the past turned into the specifics of now. Strawson writes:

Psychological narrativity clearly involves putting some sort of construction -- a unifying or form-finding construction -- on the events of one's life, or parts of one's life. This needn't involve any clearly intentional activity, nor any departure from or addition to the facts, but the narrative attitude must amount to something more than a disposition to grasp one's life as a unity simply insofar as it is the life of a biologically single human being.

Nor can it consist just in the ability to give a sequential record of the actual course of one's life, even if one's life does in fact exemplify a classical pattern of narrative development, independently of any construction or interpretation. One must have some sort of relatively large-scale, coherence-seeking, unity-seeking, pattern-seeking, or most generally form-finding tendency when it comes to one's apprehension of one's life (or relatively large-scale parts of one's life).

Religion or spirituality often is part of that form-finding narrative tendency. I'm not a Christian, but I'm pretty confident that when devout Christians get together they like to talk about how someone found Jesus or was converted to Christianity.

I know this to be the case with the India-based group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). Learning how someone learned about "the Path" and was initiated by the RSSB guru was a frequent conversation topic. I certainly engaged in this, in part because I had such an interesting, and unusual, initiation story to tell.

But here's the thing about engaging in this sort of story-telling: as Strawson says, it involves more than just a straightforward description of the facts. This happened, then that, and afterward something else. In my experience a narrative view of life injects meaning into those facts that obviously isn't present when the facts are looked at from an objective point of view.

A key thing to remember is what I wrote about recently in "It had to be" -- a great four-word secular philosophy.

Looking forward from now, the future is uncertain. Looking backward from now, the conditions of this present moment were completely determined. Which means, everything that occurs in the future will eventually become the past that was also completely determined.

So It had to be, while a truism, is a valuable reminder of how reality outside of our subjective perceptions actually is. 

We worry about an uncertain future, losing sight of the fact that it really isn't uncertain at all. Only one thing is going to happen: that which happens. Likewise, we engage in regrets about a past that didn't turn out as we wanted, losing sight of the fact that the past could only turn out in one way: that which occurred.

The big bang had to be. The formation of the Milky Way Galaxy had to be. The creation of our solar system had to be. Earth had to be. Evolution had to be. Extinction of the dinosaurs had to be. The rise of Homo sapiens had to be. The birth and death of each of our ancestors had to be. The circumstances of our life from infancy to the present moment had to be.

Pretty damn simple: It all had to be. No exceptions. Our joys and sorrows had to be. Our successes and failures had to be. My writing this blog post had to be. Your reading it had to be.

So the problem I now have with a narrative attitude toward my life is that I've come to feel that it doesn't make sense to view events as pointing toward a predestined conclusion. I'll use marriage to Laurel, my second wife, as an example, though I could have used my RSSB invitation and subsequent history with the group as another example.

A lot of things had to happen just so in order for Laurel and I to end up getting married in 1990. I've spoken about some of these things in other blog posts. 

If I hadn't overheard a conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria back in 1970 about being able to get a Master's of Social Work degree in two years, almost certainly I wouldn't have applied to the school of social work at Portland State University here in Oregon, which brought me to this state in 1971, where I've never left.

And if I hadn't picked up a copy of Willamette Week, Portland's alternative paper, to pass time before a meeting of the state legislature started in 1989, I wouldn't have seen Laurel's personal ad, which appealed to me, and which I responded to. 

When people ask how we met, there's a story I've cobbled together from these and other facts. And I admit that I tend to tell the story as if it was "meant to be" that Laurel and I met, dated, and decided to get married, since if any of the key facts in my story had happened differently, we wouldn't be celebrating our 33rd anniversary in a few months.

Here's the problem, though, with that sort of story-telling, whether it be about how someone found a religion or a marriage partner or a job or anything else. 

Everything in life is meant to be once it has happened. That's a truism, and the point of my "It had to be" blog post. If I hadn't gone to a School of Social Work after getting a B.A. in Psychology, I would have done something else, and probably not in Oregon.

In that other place, doing that other thing, my first wife and I would have had a much different life than we actually did. Maybe we never would have gotten divorced. If we did, it wouldn't have been at the same time. And if I'd gotten divorced and remarried, it would have been to a different woman, not Laurel.

In that alternative reality, I'd be telling a story about how all that was "meant to be," because it was what actually happened. But in real life, only one thing happens. So making a story out of what had to happen isn't at all like a novel where the author can fabricate all kinds of different plot lines.

In real life there's only one plot line: what actually happened. And for that, we don't really need a story. Just a recollection of what happened.

Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I'm a bit of both.

In Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes an interesting distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients).

There's a lot to say about this.

For now, the hour is late, I've been working on getting new iPhone 14's up and running for my wife and I today/tonight, so I'm simply going to share how Strawson defines "endurants" and "transients." He says he's a strong transient, while most people are endurants. Me, I kind of split the difference.

To take this further, it helps to distinguish between one's sense of oneself as a living embodied human being, a human being considered as a whole, and one's sense of oneself as an inner mental entity or "self" of some sort -- I'll call this one's "self-experience."

When Henry James says of one of his early books "I think of... the masterpiece in question... as the work of quite another person than myself... a rich... relation, say, who... suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship," he has no doubt that he's the same human being as the author of the book, but he doesn't feel he's the same self or person as the author of the book.

This feeling is familiar to most of us: one of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves (wholly independently of any religious belief they may have) is as things whose conditions of persistence aren't obviously or automatically the same as the conditions of persistence of a human being considered as a whole.

Petrarch, Proust, Parfit and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression. I'm going to take its viability for granted and set up another distinction in terms of it: a distinction between "transient" and "enduring" self-experience. (In the past I've called these forms of self-experience "episodic" and "diachronic.")

The core form of endurant self-experience is simply that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future -- something that has relatively long-term temporal continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life (the word "further" is intentionally indefinite). I take it that many people are naturally endurers and that many who endurers are also narrative.

If one is transient, by contrast, if one is a transient, one doesn't figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. 

God should be able to find us, so give up the God search

After spending 35 years searching for God, some time ago I came to the belated conclusion that this is a really stupid thing to do.

For if God is too ignorant, or too uncaring, or too weak, or too busy with other stuff to find us, why should we exert any effort to search for a God who is much more limited than a human being?

Consider: experts say that if you're lost outdoors here on Earth, the best thing to do is stay put if you're unsure where to go and get unlost. (See here, here, and here.)

One reason to do this is that those looking for you will have it easier if you aren't wandering around aimlessly, expanding the area that needs to be searched. 

Note that I said "those looking for you." When people are lost, other people jump into action to try to find them, often at considerable risk to themselves. We humans care about each other. If someone needs help badly, almost always they'll get it.

God, though, assuming God exists (a highly dubious assumption), clearly isn't as compassionate as an average person, since God demands that we search for Him/Her/It rather than finding us and taking us to safety in God's abode, often termed "heaven."

It's understandable why an ever-increasing percentage of people decide to give up on this ridiculous game of hide-and-seek.

If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, and present everywhere, then why does God hide and demand that we do the seeking? That's what an asshole of a supreme being would do. Rather than waste time trying to please such a jerk, just say no to searching for God.

If you have an urge to know God, and feel there's a non-zero probability God exists and is worthy of being known, I suggest that you heed the advice of survival experts.

Stay right where you are. Ask God to find you. Then relax and live your life. If God shows up one day in a can't-be-denied fashion, great. If God continues to be absent, also great. Either way, you haven't wasted time and energy searching for a God who probably doesn't even exist.

I'm an atheist. That word means "not a theist." Meaning, us atheists don't believe in God because there's no demonstrable evidence God exists.

But most atheists, me certainly included, aren't 100% certain that God is a fiction. Being scientifically minded, I'm not 100% certain about anything, the way of science. So I'm open to the remote possibility that God could appear and make me into a believer, a theist. 

This is why I like to spend a bit of time in that drowsy period when I'm in bed at night, about to fall asleep, saying "God...God...God...".

I don't view this as a means of searching for God, as a mantra might be used. Instead, I see it as a sort of atheist locator beacon. Climbers will take a physical locator beacon with them in case they run into trouble while climbing a mountain.

My "God...God...God..." is like a GPS signal to me. Sure, if God exists and is omniscient, God should be able to know where everybody and everything in the universe is. I just like the idea of sending out a one word communication to God just in case God needs a mental locator beacon.

Plus, this helps me get to sleep. Not surprisingly, so far I've gotten no sign that God has found me. If this does happen, I'll be sure to write a post about it. And maybe change the name of this blog to Church of the Churched.

Could this happen? Sure. Is it at all likely to happen? Absolutely not.

Image of Muhammad causes uproar. I'm pleased to share it.

It's bizarre how fundamentalist Muslims get so upset over images of their Prophet Muhammad, whether these be paintings or cartoons. Just another example of the utter irrationality of religious believers.

Today the New York Times had a story, "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job." This happened even after the instructor told her students in advance what she was going to do and on the day of the showing gave the students another chance to say if they had a problem with this.

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

...After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.

Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.

After reading the story, naturally my first thought was, I've got to share the image on my blog. Here it is, along with two other Muhammad images in the New York Times story.

Over the years I've taken pleasure in writing other blog posts about Muslim sensitivity regarding images of Muhammad. It's really disturbing that Muslim fanatics have killed people over this absurd religious dogma.

Cartoons of Muhammad create huge uproar
Muslims have been depicting Muhammad for centuries
If a cartoon inflames religious passions, so what?

"It had to be" -- a great four-word secular philosophy

At my age, 74, it gets more common to have worries pop up in my life that are different from younger person concerns.

Health problems, for example. They occur at any age, but when you're young, things that are wrong with you tend to get better. However, the older we get, the more likely we have to deal with chronic problems, things that aren't going to go away. 

Best we can do is manage them so they're annoyances, not major obstacles to living an enjoyable life.

I find that when I have a doctor appointment scheduled where I'm not sure whether the news I'm going to get about a health problem will be good or bad, my mind sometimes gets anxious over the uncertainty.

Then, when the day of the appointment comes and I learn what the doctor has to say, I feel better -- no matter what happened. 

One lesson from this is what I've known for a long time: our minds are adept at imagining both the worst that can happen, and the best that can happen, even though usually what actually happens is somewhere in-between. 

A related lesson is how comforting four simple words can be when I take them to heart: It had to be.

When I say that to myself, no matter what the "It" is that has occurred, I feel grounded, in touch with reality, part of the whole of life that is so much greater than my small self. 

Sure, in a sense It had to be is a truism. After all, if something has happened, obviously it had to be, or it wouldn't have happened.

But saying those words reminds me that just as religious believers like to submit themselves to what they regard as God's will, or God's plan for them, us atheists can enjoy our submission to the marvelous chains of cause and effect, or determinism, that produce everything in existence.

Including the state of our health. And happiness. And all the other thoughts, emotions, actions, and states of being that combine to produce what we call "my life."

Looking forward from now, the future is uncertain. Looking backward from now, the conditions of this present moment were completely determined. Which means, everything that occurs in the future will eventually become the past that was also completely determined.

So It had to be, while a truism, is a valuable reminder of how reality outside of our subjective perceptions actually is. 

We worry about an uncertain future, losing sight of the fact that it really isn't uncertain at all. Only one thing is going to happen: that which happens. Likewise, we engage in regrets about a past that didn't turn out as we wanted, losing sight of the fact that the past could only turn out in one way: that which occurred.

The big bang had to be. The formation of the Milky Way Galaxy had to be. The creation of our solar system had to be. Earth had to be. Evolution had to be. Extinction of the dinosaurs had to be. The rise of Homo sapiens had to be. The birth and death of each of our ancestors had to be. The circumstances of our life from infancy to the present moment had to be.

Pretty damn simple: It all had to be. No exceptions. Our joys and sorrows had to be. Our successes and failures had to be. My writing this blog post had to be. Your reading it had to be.

We can complicate life all we want, or simplify it all we want. Regardless, it had to be. That's why I love those four words: It had to be.

The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter

The Portland Oregonian sometimes has the New York Times Book Review section in its Sunday online edition. Looking it over last weekend, I noted an ad for a book containing 133 essays from the Times' award-winning philosophy series.

I gave "Question Everything" to myself as a belated Christmas present. It arrived recently, and I read one of the essays by Galen Strawson this morning: Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter.

Wow. Really interesting and thought-provoking.

Strawson presented a fresh view of consciousness that I'd never come across before. This is the power of philosophy, which to me simply means clear thinking -- not the academic version of modern-day philosophy that in large part is devoted to linguistic games, in my decidedly personal opinion.

Here's excerpts from the essay that capture Strawson's main points.

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don't know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery.

...I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is -- where by "consciousness" I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It's the most familiar thing there is, whether it's experience of emotion, hearing, touching, tasting, or feeling. 

It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious. 

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour... Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. 

This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay "Mind and Matter": "We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events," he wrote," except when these are mental events that we directly experience."

In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff. I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and particularly the brain. 

...We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don't have to think about it (it's really much better not to). You just have to have it.

It's true that people can make all kinds of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.

...So we all know what consciousness is. Once we're clear on this we can try to go further, for consciousness does of course raise a hard problem. The problem arises from the fact that we accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on, but can't see how this can be so.

We examine the brain in ever greater detail, using incredibly powerful techniques like fMRI, and we observe extraordinarily complex neuroelectrochemical goings-on, but we can't even begin to understand how these goings-on can be (or give rise to) conscious experience.

...Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.

We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. 

We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical. 

We don't see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it's what matter is -- what the physical is... Physics is silent -- perfectly and forever silent -- on this question.

This point was a commonplace one a hundred years ago, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes it dramatically in his book A Brief History of Time. Physics, he says, is "just a set of rules and equations." The question is what "breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"

What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don't know -- except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.

We can say that it is energy that breathes fire into the equations, using the word "energy" as Heisenberg does when he says, for example, that "all particles are made of the same substance: energy," but the fundamental question arises again -- "What is the intrinsic nature of this energy, this energy-stuff?"

And the answer, again, is that we don't know, and that physics can't tell us; that's just not its business. This point about the limits on what physics can tell us is rock-solid, and it arises before we begin to consider any of the deep problems of understanding that arise within physics -- problems with "dark matter" or "dark energy," for example -- or with reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.

...So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn't be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. 

But physics doesn't do any such thing. It's not the physics picture of matter that's the problem; it's the ordinary everyday picture of matter.

It's ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the grounds that everything is physical, and that consciousness can't possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us -- except insofar as it is consciousness.

Mind-blowing idea to start 2023: thoughts aren't about anything

Might as well make my first churchless blog post in 2023 about a subject that first caught my attention back in 2011, which was the first time I read Alex Rosenberg's book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. 

It's the notion that our thoughts aren't about anything at all. That link leads to a blog post where I did my best to describe why Rosenberg says this. I won't repeat most of what was said in that post, so I invite you to read it if you want to have your mind blown so early in the new year.

This quotation from the book that I included in the previous post lays out what's at stake here, according to Rosenberg, a philosopher at Duke University and codirector of the Duke Center for Philosophy of Biology -- a pleasingly cool title.

What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.

It's this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can't happen at all. The brain can't have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that matter.

When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong. 

Don't misunderstand, no one denies that the brain receives, stores, and transmits information. But it can't do these things in anything like the way introspection tells us it does -- by having thoughts about things. The way the brain deals with information is totally different from the way introspection tells us it does.

Seeing why and understanding how the brain does the work that consciousness gets so wrong is the key to answering all the rest of the questions that keep us awake at night worrying over the mind, the self, the soul, the person.

As I said in the blog post, this question of the about'ness of thoughts is the most difficult part of the book, which I've been re-re-reading parts of. Rosenberg tries different approaches to convince the reader that he's correct, several of which I described in the earlier blog post.

One approach I didn't describe, but noted in my recent re-re-reading (third time, I'm pretty sure), concerns an admittedly difficult to understand conception of the regress necessary if neurons in the brain were to be about something. 

I won't try to summarize this concept, as Rosenberg does a good job himself in these paragraphs.

Now the problem is clear. We see why the Paris neurons can't be about Paris the way that red octagons are about stopping. It's because that way lies a regress that will prevent us from ever understanding what we wanted to figure out in the first place: how one chunk of stuff -- the Paris neurons -- can be about another chunk of stuff -- Paris.

We started out trying to figure out how the Paris neurons could be about Paris, and our tentative answer is that they are about Paris because some other part of the brain -- the neural interpreter -- is both about the Paris neurons and about Paris. We set out to explain how one set of neurons is about something out there in the world.

We find ourselves adopting the theory that it's because another set of neurons is about the first batch of neurons and about the thing in the world, too. This won't do.

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted -- by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain) -- as being about the stuff outside the brain. 

What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for "being about") another clump of matter outside the brain. 

But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort. There are just fermions and bosons and combinations of them. None of that stuff is just, all by itself, about any other stuff. There is nothing in the whole universe -- including, of course, all the neurons in your brain -- that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter.

So when consciousness assures us that we have thoughts about stuff, it has to be wrong. The brain nonconsciously stores information in thoughts. But the thoughts are not about stuff. Therefore, consciousness cannot retrieve thoughts about stuff. There are none to retrieve. So it can't have thoughts about stuff either. 

Now, I view this excerpt, and Rosenberg's entire book, as evidence that philosophy is a good marriage partner with neuroscience. What Rosenberg has done is apply a form of philosophical analysis to neuroscientific knowledge about how the brain works.

Which demolishes many common sense notions, including that we can think about things in the world, and that there is an independent self having such thoughts.

However, I can understand why others might view what Rosenberg says as gibberish. My response to that is this: if you look upon his book that way, do your best to grasp why he dismisses the idea that thoughts are about stuff in the world. Only then can you make an informed judgement about what he says. 

Best wishes for a pleasant 2023

This being New Year's Eve, with several hours to go here on the west coast before 2022 departs, I want to share a few thoughts about how this year has gone on this blog, and what I look forward to in 2023.

First, I'm thankful for those who visit the Church of the Churchless, especially the regular visitors. Without people reading what I write, this blog would be a private diary, not a public square. 

Those who leave comments on my blog posts earn a special thank you. 

Just as those posts appeal to some, but not to others, I agree with some comments, but not others. No matter. The tagline of this blog is Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. Independently minded people will agree about some things and disagree about other things.

What's important is the conversation, the dialogue, the exchange of ideas.

Even if someone reads a post on this blog and doesn't comment on it, that's still a valuable communication if what I wrote stimulates them to think more deeply about some aspect of our shared humanity.

After writing 3,310 posts for this blog over a bit more than 18 years, occasionally I feel that there isn't a whole lot left for me to say. This may be true for some subjects, especially since I no longer have as strong a desire to bash religion and praise atheism as I did previously.

But there's always more to say about living life as pleasantly and wisely as possible, no matter if we're a fervent religious believer or a committed devotee of godlessness. 

More binds us than divides us. I'm sure about that. Yes, religion and politics can be divisive, since it is natural to feel that our way is the best way. (Of course, we should remember that others feel the same about their own way.)

However, when it comes to family, love, health, misfortune, accomplishments, tragedy, and all the other ups and downs that come with being a human, almost everybody struggles with the same sorts of problems and enjoys the same sorts of pleasures.

So I wish for you in 2023 what I wish for myself and my family/friends. Happiness. Safety. Health. Peace of mind. However, it's virtually impossible to enjoy these things without their opposites popping in for an unwelcome visit.

But hopefully we all will have more of the positive side of life next year and less of the negative side. If this blog can play a small role in that overall positivity, I'll be pleased. Not that I won't be critical of people and things that strike me as deserving of criticism. 

I just want us to feel like we're part of a community of people seeking truth and wellbeing in a wide variety of ways, supporting each other in our individual pursuit of the good life.

Paradox: loss of self becomes deeply meaningful to our self

Recently I picked up Kevin Nelson's book, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience, after reading it quite a few years ago. I first heard of Nelson, a leading researcher in near-death experiences, via a New Scientist article that I blogged about in 2010.

Not surprisingly, in his book Nelson concludes that spiritual experiences are decidedly physical. In his Epilogue, he writes:

We have placed fragmented consciousness at the heart of many of our spiritual experiences and stripped away the illusion of the seamlessly integrated self. Odd as it may seem, we have shown that primal brainstem reactions seem to be at the root of the experiences that we think of as spiritual and that make us most human.

This concept of "knee-jerk spirituality" deals a strong blow to the idea that free will is necessary to connect with whatever we feel is sacred.

At the neurologist's command, a flicker of electrical current to the brain makes it seem that our consciousness has been lifted from our body and is floating freely in space. The brain pathways used during "natural" spiritual experiences are the same pathways used by spiritual drugs, indistinguishable from otherwise genuine religious conversions, transforming lives long after the drug is flushed clear from the body.

Clinical neurology tells us that these are the same pathways distorted by some diseases of the brain that produce disorders fitting criteria for religious experience. Are spontaneous and authentic spiritual experiences nothing more that "experiments of nature" telling us how the brain works?

We have strong indications that much of our spirituality arises from arousal, limbic, and reward systems that evolved long before structures made the brain capable of language and reasoning. Neurologically, mystical feelings may not be so much beyond language as before language.

...We are all of this world, and my experience optimistically compels me to believe that understanding the brain as a spiritual organ strengthens our quest for meaning and complements a mature spirituality. My deepest hope is that this quest will ultimately bring us to a new birth of wisdom.

In his chapter, "The Fragmented Self," Nelson makes an interesting point. An obvious one, really, but something that gets ignored by those who claim that they went beyond their self into a sense of spiritual or mystical oneness.

If someone truly has no self, they have no way of remembering that they had an experience where they lacked a self. In other words, it takes a self to know that you don't have a self. Nelson writes:

The self, like consciousness, can fragment. And when we look closely, it may be that a little piece of the self remains even in the most powerful experiences of self-transcendence. After we delve into the way the brain constructs the self, we see that the complete loss of self, even in the most powerful of mystical experiences, is a dubious proposition.

...It is strange, even paradoxical, that the loss of self becomes one of the most powerful experiences that we can own, usually becoming deeply embedded in our lifelong self-identity.

There is no doubt afterward that the "me" of the experience owns the feelings, sensations, knowledge, and aftermath of the types of spiritual experience that involve loss of self! So powerful is this ownership that it often becomes integrated into our enduring religious beliefs and deepest aspirations.

Often we know, but don't understand how we know

I used to be in love with mysticism, where hidden secrets of the cosmos supposedly are revealed in a mysterious fashion. 

I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life.

This is one of the fascinating messages of Blink, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell that a friend gave me, along with two other books by Gladwell that I'd never read before. 

Its subtitle is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." This too is a notion that mystically inclined people like to claim as their own. Actually, it is an integral part of human nature. Of course, early on in his book Gladwell points out several caveats.

Yes, "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. But, "it's not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the 'truth' of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled."

What's surprising, though, is how often our intuition understands what's going on in the blink of an eye, no time-consuming thinking or reasoning required. 

This morning I finished the book's second chapter, "The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions." It starts off with the story of how Vic Braden, a top tennis coach (and former star player) found that he could tell whether an expert tennis player was doing to double-fault. 

Meaning, fail to get a serve in twice in a row, which gives a point to the opponent. Tennis pros might serve hundreds of times in a match and double-fault only three or four times. Yet in one tournament Braden correctly predicted sixteen out of seventeen double faults in the matches he watched.

But here's the catch: much to Braden's frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

Gladwell goes on to say this.

This is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. 

...Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door. Vic Braden tried to look inside that room. He stayed up at night, trying to figure out what it is in the delivery of a tennis serve that primes his judgment. But he couldn't.

...If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that -- sometimes -- we're better off that way.

...In high stakes, fast-moving situations, we don't want to be as dispassionate and purely rational as the Iowa ventromedial patients. We don't want to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us.

...Ted Williams could hit a baseball as well as anyone in history, and he could explain with utter confidence how to do it. But his explanation did not match his actions, just as Mary's explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

...After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute confidence, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision," psychologist Joshua Aronson says. "But how on earth could she know that? What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often."

Of course, there is a second, equally valuable, lesson in the Maier experiment. His subjects were stumped. They were frustrated. They were sitting there for ten minutes, and no doubt many of them felt that they were failing an important test, that they had been exposed as stupid. But they weren't stupid. Why not?

Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every possible clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them -- silently and surely -- to the solution. 

Beautiful. Religious believers like to ask God to give them a sign as to what to do. Or they pray for guidance. 

There's no need for any of that. Each of us has an astounding piece of intelligence within us: the human brain's unconscious workings. Sure, often we need to use our conscious intelligence to wend our way through life's many problems and opportunities. 

But we also need to trust the much vaster part of our cognition, the unconscious that has ways of knowing beyond our ability to know what those ways are. All we can do is be grateful for that often right-on intuitive capability.

Worst thing about religions is unreasonable expectations

Since today is Christmas, supposedly the day Christ was born of a virgin (a crazy idea explored here), I feel like I should write about why I've come to dislike religions so much, whether of an Eastern or Western variety.

That's a difficult question to answer, because there's so much to criticize about these belief systems founded on supernatural premises that basically have zero grounding in any sort of evidence-based reality.

Here's an attempt that discusses something I haven't emphasized much in previous blog posts, at least not explicitly: 

One of the worst things about religions is how they encourage people to have unreasonable expectations about their life.

I say this as someone who enjoys what I've learned from various teachers of mindfulness.

Paying attention as much as possible to what is actually happening in the present moment, rather than mentally time-traveling to the past or future where regrets, memories, hopes, anxieties, anticipations, and such reside strikes me as a wise way to live. 

Part of mindful activity, I've found, is keeping comparisons of our current situation with that of other people to a minimal degree. Meaning, we should primarily be aware of our life as it is, not as how it would be if we were someone else.

I have sciatica pain in my right leg.

That physical pain bothers me, but it doesn't prevent me from doing what I need to do. However, sometimes I'll look at other people in a grocery store where I'm shopping and think, Most of them don't experience pain while standing or walking like I do.

This creates some extra emotional pain. I'll feel bad that I have sciatica and others don't. This isn't a massive emotional upheaval, just a disturbance in my feelings caused by a momentary expectation that instead of my right leg feeling the way it does, it should feel the way it used to: pain free.

Put another way, arguably contentment, or happiness, is when there's no gap in our life between what is and what should be. Or at least just a minimal gap. 

This doesn't mean having no goals. But I can have a goal of my sciatica going away someday without feeling that there's something wrong with me having sciatica now. A goal is an aspiration that might not happen. Achieving or not achieving a goal lies in the future.

However, when I have an expectation that something true about my life at this present moment should be different than it is, that creates an uncomfortable feeling. Life is giving me this, whereas I expect life should give me that.

I've read that surveys show that someone's satisfaction with their income is partly based on the actual amount they're getting, yet is heavily influenced by the person's comparison of their income with how others like them are faring. 

And it's clear that social media like Instagram affect the body image of girls: wow, everybody else looks so thin and beautiful, and I don't look that way, so there's something wrong with me.

Well, no, there's nothing wrong with you. You're fine just the way you are.

What's wrong is being led to feel that because you lack qualities others have, you expect that you should be like those other people. Since there's always someone who has what we lack, playing the Expectation Game dooms us to frustration.

Religions play that game to the fullest possible extent. This makes religions destroyers of contentment and happiness. 

Without religion, we'd accept that everyone who is born, eventually dies. Without religion, we'd accept that everyone is a mix of positive and negative qualities, of good and bad, as it were. Without religion, we'd accept that if change is needed in the world or our life, some physical work is needed to make that happen.

With religion, though, we get an expectation that eternal life can be ours; that it is possible to become a saint, an elevated being, even attain perfection; that prayer can tap into the grace of God and produce miracles at odds with the laws of nature and everyday goings-on.

Religious believers then strive mightily to attain the expectations that their chosen faith has put forward. No longer is it enough to live an ordinary human life, with all that this entails: education, play, work, marriage, child-raising, volunteering, and so much else.

Instead of simply accepting that what life offers us humans is what's possible for us, religions set forth unreasonable expectations of what we're supposed to do between our birth and death. Not only do what everyday living demands of us, but attempt to achieve divine or supernatural outcomes.

I don't know about you, but I'm happiest when I'm able to accept the circumstances of a present moment. If my leg hurts, that's OK. If our driveway is covered in ice, that's OK. If I'm unable to balance our checkbook, that's OK.

These are problems, for sure. But worse than having a problem is considering that you shouldn't be having that problem -- because now the problem is magnified by not only being a problem, but also being a problem that shouldn't be happening, so the problem is doubly wrong.

Agonizing over how to make your health better, your family more secure, your world more sustainable, or any of the countless aspirations we may have is absolutely fine. However, agonizing over how you're going to please God, ensure life after death, or enter heaven rather than hell is absolutely a waste of time.

My icy driveway experiment: what slides furthest?

Following up on my previous post where I spoke about the freezing rain that coated my area of Oregon with a sheet of ice yesterday, I'm pleased to present the video results of an experiment I conducted today on our very icy driveway in rural south Salem.

My quest was to determine what would slide furthest: a shoe, a banana, or a stuffed wolf? After the experiment, I then attempted to rescue the wolf from the middle of the driveway, which didn't go so well, as shown in the video. Nonetheless, I await my senior citizen scientist award.

Here's our 2022 Christmas letter, along with freezing rain thoughts

First, I'm pleased to share the 2022 Christmas letter that I wrote for my wife and I, which we call a Holiday Greetings to be all inclusive and non-religious. If you're addicted to reading Christmas letters, you can help feed your habit by clicking here, where you'll find the letters I wrote from 1995 onward.

After the letter, which is in both PDF and JPEG formats, I'll share some thoughts from unusually frigid Oregon about what freezing rain has to say about the Big Questions of Life. And also, mundane questions.
Download 2022 Christmas Letter PDF

Regarding freezing rain, it is one of many pieces of evidence that the laws of nature which govern our world weren't designed by a benevolent Creator, since freezing rain is the nastiest form of precipitation. Rain can be pleasant. Snow, which is frozen rain, also can be pleasant.

But freezing rain is just flat-out nasty. In February 2021 a freezing rain ice storm decimated our part of Oregon, including our rural property, as documented in photos I took. 

At the moment a milder, but still damaging, bout of freezing rain is causing problems in northwest Oregon, where the temperature was a chilly high of about 26 today. Luckily, we live in an age of pretty damn accurate weather forecasting. Yay, science!

So meteorologists gave advance notice that after eastern Oregon got hit with the edge of a polar vortex that is causing very low temperatures and nasty weather in most of the United States, an approaching low pressure system from the Pacific would cause east winds to funnel cold air through the Columbia River gorge and other mountain passes into western Oregon, where I live.

Now that cold air from the east is combining with warmer moisture coming from the west to produce freezing rain. This graphic shows how freezing rain happens, which is related to sleet. Again, yay, science!

If you've never experienced freezing rain, congratulations. It's nasty stuff. Driving or walking in rain or snow is completely doable. I have winter tires on my Subaru Crosstrek. Snow is no big deal to me, aside from worries about other people with less capable vehicles running into me.

But freezing rain produces black ice. Usually you can't see it on roads or walkways. It's a sheet of ice. No matter what car you have, or what tires you have, going down a hill covered in ice is not something you want to experience (unless you have a love for frequenting auto body shops).

Yet currently some major roads in Oregon, including parts of I-5, are closed due to accidents, almost certainly because of freezing rain. Which leads to a Big Question: what causes someone to head out on a freeway, or any road, when freezing rain is forecasted?

For days, news stories have told people that if they don't have to drive on Thursday night or Friday morning, they shouldn't. It's just too dangerous with freezing rain a near certainty.  Not a complete certainty, as this forecast from one of my weather apps for our location says.

I'm hoping that the ice we get tonight and part of tomorrow morning, before freezing rain becomes regular rain, is at the bottom end of the probability, rather than the full .4 of an inch forecasted. Currently we only have a tenth of an inch or so -- enough to make things really slippery, but not enough to topple limbs or trees on to power lines. I'm suspecting we might get a quarter of an inch by tomorrow.

But the odds obviously were that some freezing rain would hit western Oregon. Now, I realize that some people don't pay as much attention to news as I do. I also realize that some people don't believe the news, or weather forecasters, because sometimes they get things wrong.

Thus those are the people out on the roads right now, causing accidents. Maybe they saw that the weather was really cold but dry for most of today and figured that the forecast of freezing rain was wrong. 

Now some of them, maybe a lot of them, are paying the price for believing that their personal thoughts about the weather overshadowed what professional meteorologists were saying about the weather. Probably few of them liked to say Yay, science! 

Life is difficult. There's no way around that inescapable fact.

However, we make life more difficult when we fail to gather as much information about reality as possible in any given situation. If you go out driving when you don't absolutely have to when freezing rain is forecasted, you're causing yourself a preventable problem.

I'm not saying that I always practice what I preach. Yesterday I decided to start our Honda generator to make sure it was working if the electricity goes out in this ice storm. I found that the battery was completely dead. Thankfully, the generator started with a single pull of the manual cord.

It wouldn't recharge, so I ordered a replacement battery.

Then I recalled all the times I'd walked by the trickle charger connected to the generator battery in our garage, noting a single green light. There should have been two lights on: the green power light, and another light that shows the charging status, green if fully charged.

So that one green light meant there was a problem with the battery. I ignored what I kept seeing. I don't know why. Maybe because the battery was fine the last time I started the generator. Maybe because I simply wanted to assume that the battery was OK, and something was wrong with the trickle charger.

Whatever the reason, I neglected a fact that I should have paid attention to. Live and learn. That's all we can do, since mistakes are going to be with us as long as we're alive. My advice, though, is to do your best not to make the mistake of taking freezing rain lightly.

How Armin Navabi became an atheist after trying to die for God

At the end of Armin Navabi's book, Why There Is No God, a book I've written about several times before, I came to a fascinating description of Navabi's efforts to know God as a devout Muslim boy. It was written by a friend of his, Mohammad Savage.

Armin Navabi

Enjoy these excerpts. I find this tale highly inspiring. It shows that many atheists have pursued God with tremendous effort and determination, choosing to disbelieve only after giving belief a very good chance. 

Armin was born and raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was indoctrinated quite thoroughly since early childhood in the Muslim tradition. He would pray regularly five times a day, as all Muslims are mandated to. Growing up, he was afraid of all the things which good Muslims are supposed to be afraid of: hell, sin, the devil, etc.

...During his formative years, Amin attended Muslim classes. In such classes, he learned that according to his Islamic teachers, if a boy were to perish before the age of 15, access to heaven would be guaranteed, regardless of any other extenuating circumstances. 

The same rule also applied to girls; however, for them, the cutoff age is 9. This thought stuck with Armin, and driven by the fear instilled in him by his religion, it began to consume him.

In his young mind, there it was: a surefire, absolute method to gain access to that which many Muslims strive for their entire lives. It confounded him to no end that none of his peers or elders had discovered or taken advantage of such a wonderful and easy shortcut. 

He would not be one such sheep; he wouldn't allow the joys of a full life to pull the wool over his young eyes. His future course of action became crystal clear. At age 14, after making up his mind and steeling his resolve, Armin launched himself from one of the higher windows in his school.

This was his attempt to end his life and guarantee his future ascendance. Needless to say, it didn't work out quite as he had hoped. Armin survived his suicide attempt but was ravaged by injury. Among the injuries he suffered were a broken wrist, two broken legs and an injured back. 

After the accident, Armin was confined to a wheelchair for the next seven months. Even after regaining permission to ambulate further, he still required months before he was able to travel with some semblance of independence. 

Wracked by more than the physical injuries of his failed suicide attempt, Armin was torn apart by the effect his actions had on his parents. Seeing the impact it had on them, Armin was no longer deluded by the temptation of an easy way to heaven, and so, he dedicated himself even more so to his religion and finding a better path to God.

...While his newfound dedication and studies did lead him to become more familiar with the intricacies of his religion, it also led to some rather unexpected and quite unwelcome thoughts. For every question his studies answered about his religious beliefs and the nature of God, ten more popped up in their stead, leading to a seemingly endless and inconclusive search.

The more he studied, the more questions he had and the more confused he became. He started to question God as well as God's motives, and judgments. For example, why would a benevolent God send people to hell simply because they picked the wrong religion?

Such novel questions did not come without a price. Every time Armin found himself questioning God, he felt the cold, creeping fingers of guilt grip his heart. Led by his thirst for knowledge and knowing that seeking Islamic knowledge is encouraged in his religion, he convinced himself that studying the nature of his God could never be a reprehensible act.

Emboldened by his newfound sense of purpose, he set out to study and learn all he could about more religions, including some dead religions. He was fueled by curiosity for why, according to Islam, these religions were so evil that all of their followers were damned to eternal hellfire and brimstone. What did they get wrong? What were their major errors?

The more he studied, the more he learned and the more and more he began to see the fallacies of all of these other religions, including his own. Through countless hours spent studying, researching and pondering, he began to see the greater possibility that religion could indeed have been a manmade concept.

...The more he began to think of religion as a manmade concept, not a divine statute, the stronger his doubt became. No longer able to abide the growing storm inside of him, Armin resolved to face the matter directly, disregard his doubts and attempt to convince himself simply that God was real and that he could be absolutely certain of this.

He simply needed proof, actual, verifiable proof, not the mythos of a centuries-old novel. He believed once he managed to locate this proof, his faith would be stronger than ever.

Failing to find proof, he settled on any logical reasoning for the existence of God, including examining philosophical concepts and theories. However, once all of the logical explanations supporting God had been thoroughly debunked, he grew desperate. 

He prayed harder, begging God to help him. He wanted a sign, a message -- anything at all to assure himself of a divine presence. Of course, his prayers were never answered. All of this transpired during most of Armin's relatively young life, and by the age of 18, he had lost all of his faith.

He felt cheated, betrayed and taken advantage of by society, his country, teachers, and those who impose the belief in God as an absolute truth without any proof, denying all other alternatives. He felt angry, depressed, and broken. He had sacrificed so much, even almost his life, all for the sake of a fairytale.

...Armin was the only atheist he knew. Being the proactive go-getter he had always been, he wished to let more people know about his lack of belief as well as the amazing journey which had led to this conclusion. 

...He started the Atheist Republic in 2011. The main purpose of this community was to let everyone know about the many people who didn't believe in God and provide an invitation for them to explore these ideas if they were interested.

Today I beheld the glory of blessed Lionel Messi

It was meant to be, I guess.

Being guided by a higher power, the Soccer God, referred to as the Football God by parts of the world other than the United States who don't recognize that if God wanted everyone to worship her as the patron saint of football, she wouldn't have created the genuine sport of football in my country.

Anyway, I must be viewed with special favor by the Soccer God, since just before turning our television off last night after watching the 11 pm news from Portland, a thought burst unbidden into my mind: "Thou shalt record the World Cup final match between Argentina and France."

Well, actually there was no thou shalt in that thought. But my tale sounds more impressive with those words substituted for "Hey, dude..."

Earlier in the day I'd considered recording the match. But since it was going to start at 7 am Pacific time, and I don't get up anywhere close to that early in my retired life, I figured that by the time I watched the recording, I would have known the outcome.

Plus -- and forgive me, Soccer God, for I have sinned against you -- I've never been all that interested in soccer. I described my viewing approach back in 2010 in "My tips for watching World Cup soccer."

(1) Record the event.

(2) Press "Play."

(3) Then -- this is really important, because life is short and you don't want to waste it on meaningless stuff -- immediately press the fast forward button repeatedly until it is at the fastest speed where the score being shown is still readable.

(4) Wait a while until you see the score has changed. Could be a long while, even at fast forwarding speed.

(5) Press "Play."

(6) Rewind/go back to fifteen seconds or so before the goal was scored.

(7) Watch the goal. Say "Nice, "Cool," "Crappy goalkeeping," or whatever else pops into your head.

(8) Repeat 3 through 7 until the game is over.

(9) Turn the TV off, content that you've watched hockey or soccer in the most efficient and enjoyable fashion if you're part of the 99% of humanity (in the United States, at least) who couldn't care less about the sport but sometimes want to act like they do, sort of.

Today, though, I woke up around 7:30 am to go the bathroom and, as suspected, noted a news alert on my iPhone that Argentina was leading France 2-0. That's like 63-0 in football terms.

So when I woke up again after getting back to sleep and saw that France had scored two goals near the end of regulation and the match was going to extra time, I rushed to turn the television on and, for maybe the first time in my life, watch a soccer match live. 

OK, part of a soccer match. But this was a major conversion for me. By no means had I joined the Soccer Religion that so many people in the world worship, but I'd taken a small step toward being baptized into it.

A revered holy man, Argentina's Lionel Messi, was a main reason why. I'd seen highlight videos of some amazing Messi performances in previous World Cup matches, and read laudatory news stories about him. 

Messi does seem to have a magical way about him. He makes moving with the ball (assume that isn't called dribbling, but I don't know the correct term) look so smooth and easy. Yet he leaves defenders clutching at where he isn't, not where he is.

Not quite walking on water miracle stuff.

Close enough for me to become a worshipful fan, though, given my almost complete lack of experience with anything involving a soccer ball. I also liked the fact that reportedly Messi walks much of the time during a match, running only when necessary. And that while walking around he's visualizing where the defenders might be at some point, and how he'd respond if they ended up there.

That struck me as pleasingly meditative. Or at least mindful. 

Anyway, the end of the Argentina-France match was a delight to watch. Really exciting, with each team scoring a goal in the extra time to keep the match a 3-3 tie. That meant the outcome would be determined by penalty kicks.

I enjoy penalty kicks, though I'm largely clueless about the strategy used by the goalkeeper and the kicker. Each player apparently tries to guess, or surmise, what the other will do.

Which gets complicated when a player thinks things like, "The goalkeeper probably thinks that I'll kick the ball in a different location than I did last time, so I should kick the ball in the same way, except maybe the goalkeeper thinks that I'll think he's thinking that, so I should kick the ball in a different location."

Watching Messi take the first penalty kick for Argentina, he made it look much easier than it must be. But that's the magic of Messi. He's like a Zen master of soccer. You don't really know how he plays so effortlessly with such great results. 

You just marvel at his blessed soccer skill. Along with the entire country of Argentina, and countless other fans around the world, since Argentina kicked France's ass in the penalty kicks, to use an American expression, giving Messi his first World Cup title.

Fitting, since I believe this was his last World Cup.

Scientology gets much-deserved ridicule in South Park episode

There's so much competition for The World's Craziest Religion, it's impossible to pick a clear winner. But Scientology has to be somewhere near the top of Mt. Crazy.

I say this even though I don't know very much about Scientology.

Well, until today. For after watching a South Park episode that was on one of the televisions in the aerobics room of my athletic club where I exercised this afternoon, I feel like I do know a lot about Scientology.

You can too, if you watch the 22-minute episode. Wikipedia has a summary of the plot of "Trapped in the Closet" if you're more into reading. And below I'll share some You Tube clips from the episode. 

South Park is wonderfully irreverent. Not just about religion. About everything. It's an animated series that appealed to adults. I've never laughed harder than at some South Park episodes. 

In the Scientology episode, Stan gets exposed to what Scientologists actually believe. Again, this sounds really, really crazy. However, every religion, pretty much, is equally crazy, just in different ways. Here's the clip:

Through a series of events, Stan is considered by Scientology leaders to be the reincarnation of L. Ron. Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Trotted out to reveal Stan's fresh revelations, which are supposed to earn him and a Scientology leader $3 million, Stan goes rogue and tells the truth in this clip.

Proving that crazy religions don't have a sense of humor, the Church of Scientology targeted South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone by investigating them with the goal of finding embarrassing stuff that they'd done. 

Obviously Scientology didn't realize that the twisted minds who came up with South Park wouldn't be at all easily embarrassed. Apparently the investigation fell flat. 

I've only watched about half of this video. It was made by a guy who was a Scientology member for many years. He shares clips from the South Park episode, adding in his commentary on what was right-on about Scientology, and where South Park took some liberties with Scientology dogma in the name of comedy.

A systems view of reality shows the hollowness of religion

It dawned on me this morning that one reason people have so much difficulty understanding why free will is an illusion, a subject I've written a lot about over the years, is that most of us are addicted to a linear hierarchical view of the world.

So when presented with a perspective that undermines the simplistic "I wanted to do X, so that's what I did," substituting a vision where influences that determine our thoughts and actions come from many sources, with our thoughts and actions then affecting the world that determines our thoughts and actions, people tend to accept a simple but wrong view.

For reality isn't like an organizational chart with a Board of Directors and CEO at the top, and boxes showing underlings laid out in a hierarchy below the Big Boss. But this is what religions would have us believe. 

God is the CEO. God is in charge of things. There's angels and other supernatural entities who are subservient to God.

Here on earth, religions mirror this organization. Some people have a closer connection to God than other people. They're given names such as Pope, Master, Guru, Swami, Reverend, Imam, Rabbi, and such. Others in the religion are supposed to acknowledge them as leaders.

To which I say, of course, to hell with that. Not just because I no longer believe in God. Also because I've always believed in reality, and reality doesn't work like a corporate structure where power flows downward and obedience flows upward.

In the 1970s I was fortunate to have an opportunity to enroll in a Systems Science Ph.D. program at Portland State University here in Oregon, soon after I got a Masters in Social Work from PSU. My first job was as a Research Associate in the Family Practice Department at the Oregon Health Sciences University Medical School. I was encouraged to take Systems Science classes, which I happily did, eventually completing the coursework for a Ph.D. but not the other requirements.

An anecdote from my Systems Science days provides a good glimpse into systems thinking. 

I was sitting in the front row of a small seminar-like class taught by Magoroh Maruyama, a professor in the program who had a bit of a Zen master in him. Another student asked whether taking another class he taught had a prerequisite.

Maruyama jumped up, dashed to the blackboard, grabbed a piece of chalk, and emphatically said (almost yelling), "No prerequisites! That is not systems science! We start here, and then we go anywhere!!" as he started with a point and drew an expanding circular maze of scribbles with no discernible pattern.

I've forgotten a lot about what I learned about Systems Science. But I sure remember that moment when Professor Maruyama demonstrated how reality tends strongly toward creative non-linearity rather than predictable straight lines.

Here's a more traditional definition in a book by Fritjoj Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (See here and here for some posts I wrote about the book.)

The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the twentieth century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking -- thinking in terms of connectedness, relationships, patterns, and context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts.

...In the systems approach, the properties of the parts can be understood only from the organization of the whole. Accordingly, systems thinking does not concentrate on basic building blocks but rather on basic principles of organization. Systems thinking is "contextual," which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.

If this sounds to you like Buddhism, or Taoism, that wouldn't be surprising.

After all, Fritjof Capra wrote the classic The Tao of Physics in 1975. When Buddhism and Taoism are stripped of their supernatural excesses, they end up being quite compatible with modern science, which is increasingly embracing a systems perspective.

This causes that is simplistic. It isn't how reality operates.

Yet religions have always used this way of thinking. God created the world. Jesus saves. The guru clears a disciple's karma. All statements like these are false. All are mired in a worldview that's so uncreative, it uses the tired metaphor of a king ruling his kingdom to describe the secrets of the cosmos.

Which is why I found more truth in The Systems View of Life than in any of the religious books I used to  read so avidly.

Why not believing in free will is so wonderful

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. More accurately, my posts on this subject have been about the near certainty that we humans lack free will. At least, as it is normally considered to exist.

Meaning, almost everybody who believes in free will considers that it means we're able to choose one thing instead of another without any causal influence affecting that choice.

Tonight I pondered whether to have leftover spaghetti for dinner, or to make tempe with rice. I decided on the tempe and rice. I had some reasons for that decision. This means that my will wasn't free, since those reasons influenced my choice.

In fact, this is always the case. There's absolutely zero evidence that the human brain is able to act or choose without being affected by prior experiences, brain states, the condition of the world, and such. 

The only way free will could exist is known as compatibilism. And this way negates free will as it is commonly understood.

Those who believe in the philosophical notion of compatibilism say that as long as a person isn't constrained by outside influences, such as someone holding a gun to my head and saying "You must choose to have spaghetti tonight," then that person is acting freely.

But this is a much watered-down version of genuine free will, which is viewed as the ability of a human being to choose between two actions, thoughts, or whatever in a way that is unaffected by the inward and outward state of that person's reality. 

In other words, neither the person's brain nor the external world has any effect on the person's choices. Those choices are made through some sort of unexplained supernatural Free Will Fairy Dust, which is such an absurd idea, I reject it (almost with most neuroscientists).

One big reason why I don't believe in free will is that I much prefer reality to unreality. I'd rather embrace an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable falsehood. That's why I no longer believe in God, soul, life after death, and other fantasies that used to give me comfort in my true believing days.

It's impossible to live a "spiritual" life, leaving aside the thorny question of what that word means, if that life is founded on untruths. Thus science is the cornerstone of any genuine search for meaning.

Imagine if we still had a medieval understanding of how the universe came to be. No knowledge of the big bang. No knowledge of the astounding vastness of the cosmos. Our worldview would be hugely constricted compared to the modern understanding astronomers and cosmologists have gifted us with.

I see a belief in free will as being similarly constricted. It imagines that each of us is, essentially, the "god" of our own thoughts and actions that are created by us independently, freely, out of nothing other than our own unfettered ability to choose between this and that.

Believers in free will typically don't try to justify their belief. They just accept what seems obvious to them: "It feels like I can choose freely, so that must be so." Of course, it also feels like the sun sets each day, rather than the sun standing still and the earth revolving.

The truths of science take quite a while to filter down into widespread understanding. So I look forward to the day that free will is viewed as akin to the earth-centered cosmos: a mistake caused by a superficial knowledge of reality.

Consider all the findings of modern science: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and so many other disciplines. These countless findings all have something in common. Regularities rooted in the laws of nature and other forms of causes and effects. 

There is no finding that free will exists, because if it did, this would be the only instance of an effect occurring in the everyday world without any cause. (I said "everyday" because arguably some quantum effects in the subatomic realm occur without a cause, though even here the wave function is a cause based on probabilities.)

Thus the interconnectedness of our universe, the marvelous oneness where causes and effects multiply without end across not only our planet but the vast expanse of time and space beyond earth, all that is not only compatible with the lack of free will, it demands it. 

Free will is a medieval'ish bastion of human separateness, specialness, individuality, and isolation.

Believers in free will imagine that they are islands of unfettered action unto themselves, rather than what we humans actually are: beings who are an integral part of everything in existence, both affected by everything that surrounds us, and affecting everything that surrounds us. 

What I or you or anybody does isn't based on our individual self. Every thought and action, no matter how small, requires an entire cosmos to carry out. My fingers typed this blog post, but the words and ideas didn't spring from my free will. They emanated from elsewhere. 

Understanding that "elsewhere" is what science is all about. Also, in my view, what spirituality is all about. We don't need to imagine supernatural realms beyond the physical to have a grasp of our place in the oneness of the cosmos. 

That oneness is right here, right now. And in large part it is glimpsed by giving up a belief in free will.

 

Open Thread 44 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. I'll copy in some examples of off-topic comments that I unpublished recently and included in this new Open Thread.

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Free will is the missing ingredient in self-improvement

I've almost finished reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, a book I've been writing about lately. 

I have few criticisms of it. But after I read the "Emotion and the Law" chapter, I realized what was missing from Barrett's book: a discussion of free will. Meaning, the lack thereof.

Most of that chapter made sense to me. I'll explain the part that didn't. This passage struck me as fine.

The third type of responsibility relates to the content within your conceptual system, separately from how your brain uses that system to predict when breaking the law. A brain does not compute a mind in a vacuum. 

Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not purely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the cultural influences you were pickled in.

...All of your predictions are shaped not just by direct experience but also indirectly by television, movies, friends, and the symbols of your culture... Your mind is not only a function of your brain, but also of the other brains in your culture.

OK. I've got no problem with these thoughts. However, this passage strikes me as problematic.

This third domain of responsibility cuts two ways. Sometimes it's trivialized as "society is to blame," a phrase lampooned as bleeding-heart liberal sentiment.

I am saying something more nuanced. If you commit a crime, you are indeed to blame, but your actions are rooted in your conceptual system, and those concepts don't just appear in a puff of magic.

They are forged by the social reality you live in, which gets under your skin to turn genes on and off and wire your neurons. You learn from your environment like any other animal. Nevertheless, all animals shape their own environment.

So as a human being, you have the ability to shape your environment to modify your conceptual system, which means that you are ultimately responsible for the concepts that you accept and reject.

So Barrett is saying that while past experiences, both personal and cultural, go a long way toward determining our actions in the present, we still have the ability to choose different experiences in the future which will modify the conceptual system that guides our behavior now.

This assumes that we possess some sort of magical free will that operates outside of the causes and effects that are described in much detail by Barrett as creating the conditions that produce both human emotions and other behavior.

To confirm that Barrett has a flawed understanding of free will, I dug out my copy of Sam Harris' short 66 page book aptly called Free Will. It didn't take me long to re-read it. The way Harris talks about choices makes more sense than how Barrett views this subject.

Harris writes:

When we consider human behavior, the difference between premeditated, voluntary action and mere accident seems immensely consequential. As we will see, this distinction can be preserved -- and with it, our most important moral and legal concerns -- while banishing the idea of free will once and for all.

Certain states of consciousness seem to arise automatically, beyond the sphere of our intentions. Others seem self-generated, deliberative, and subject to our will... Within certain limits, I seem to choose what I pay attention to.

The sound of the leaf blower intrudes, but I can seize the spotlight of my attention in the next moment and aim it elsewhere. This difference between nonvolitional and volitional states of mind is reflected at the level of the brain -- for they are governed by different systems.

And the difference between them must, in part, produce the felt sense that there is a conscious self endowed with freedom of will.

As we have begun to see, however, this feeling of freedom arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions. The phrase "free will" describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness.

Thoughts like "What should I get my daughter for her birthday? I know -- I'll take her to a pet store and have her pick out some tropical fish" convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. But from a deeper perspective (speaking both objectively and subjectively), thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions. 

...And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they don't matter. If I had not decided to write this book, it wouldn't have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being.

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe.

But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being... From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.

...You can do what you decide to do -- but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. Of course, you can create a framework in which certain decisions are more likely than others -- you can, for instance, purge your house of all sweets, making it very unlikely that you will eat dessert later in the evening -- but you cannot know why you were able to submit to such a framework today when you weren't yesterday.

...You have not built your mind. And in moments in which you seem to build it -- when you make an effort to change yourself, to acquire knowledge, or to perfect a skill -- the only tools at your disposal are those that you have inherited from moments past.

Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior -- but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter -- and there are paths toward making wiser ones -- but I cannot choose what I choose.

And if it ever appears that I do -- for instance, after going back and forth between two options -- I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable. 

...To say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought "I could have done otherwise" after doing whatever I in fact did. This is an empty affirmation. It confuses hope for the future with an honest account of the past. 

What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery -- one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature (including the contribution of chance). To declare my "freedom" is tantamount to saying, "I don't know why I did it, but it's the sort of thing I tend to do, and and I don't mind doing it."

...You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise. 

...Why did I order beer instead of wine? Because I prefer beer. Why do I prefer it? I don't know, but I generally have no need to ask. Knowing that I like beer more than wine is all I need to know to function in a restaurant. Whatever the reason, I prefer one taste to the other.

Is there freedom in this? None whatsoever. Would I magically reclaim my freedom if I decided to spite my preference and order wine instead? No, because the roots of this intention would be as obscure as the preference itself.

So we see that while Barrett considers that we're able to modify our past mental programming by filling our brain/mind with different future experiences we consider to be better for us, she fails to realize that our choice of those different future experiences doesn't spring from our unfettered free will, but from the same sorts of influences that created our past mental programming. 

This seems clear to me, as it is to Sam Harris. But it's a fairly subtle notion that, as Harris says, is irrelevant to most of our everyday life. Nonetheless, it's an important notion, because it points to the wonderful awe-inspiring interdependency of everything in our world. Harris writes:

We do not change ourselves, precisely -- because we have only ourselves with which to do the changing -- but we continually influence, and are influenced by, the world around us and the world within us... In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with.

The universe has a plan for me. It's what's happening right now.

Religious people often say, "God has a plan for me." People who fall into the spiritual-but-not-religious camp often say, "The universe has a plan for me." Deepak Chopra assures us this is the case.

Some Googling revealed lots of examples of the second variety of planning. I looked at a few. 

In The Universe Always Has A Plan, I read: 

You aren’t sad because you are an unhappy person. You are experiencing sadness as part of your healing journey, to create space for more light to be embodied. You will receive everything you desire at exactly the moment in time it is meant to arrive.

There is a destiny. It is guaranteed, and it also requires your participation. It may include outcomes the ego may desire, but it can only be fulfilled by the light of your soul.

In 6 Ways to Accept the Universe's Plan For You, I read:

However, eventually things turned around for me and I did find some answers by learning to trust that the Universe had simply put me on a much more suitable path. In the process of making my life better, the first step that I made was to put aside my university dreams and study astrology instead.

I did much of my coursework from my bed during my illness, but, as I made changes, the Universe showed me signs that I was on the right track. At first, I didn’t understand these signs. I didn’t know the meaning behind seeing the number 11:11 everywhere I looked, or by seeing other number patterns and coincidences. At this time I had no idea that other young people all over the world were having the same experiences with seeing 111, 222, 333, etc.

Well, I have difficulty understanding the difference between God having a plan for me and the universe having a plan for me, since in either case a supernatural sentient being is aware of me and is actively working to change the direction of my life in a way that the being views as desirable.

Seemingly the main benefit to viewing the universe as my planner, rather than God, is that the universe doesn't demand that I do anything special, like going to church or praying. And the universe is, not surprisingly, universal, while God comes in all kinds of guises depending on what religion is followed.

My personal position is that I see no reason to believe that anyone has a plan for me. Sure, it'd be nice to have an all-powerful being on my side. But the idea that such a being exists makes no sense, and the notion that this being wants to direct my life in a certain fashion makes even less sense. 

However, I do accept that the universe has a plan for me in this way.

There are laws of nature. Causes and effects take place in accord with the laws of nature. Whatever happens occurs in accord with those causes and effects. So whatever is happening right now in my mental and physical life can be thought of as the universe's plan for me. 

It isn't a conscious plan. It isn't a plan created prior to happenings. It is simply that portion of the unimaginably vast network of causes and effects in the universe that impact little me.

Tonight I was drawn to write this blog post. I know this was the universe's plan for me because it is what happened. Now I'm going to eat a small slice of frosted carrot cake, my favorite evening snack. That also was the universe's plan for me, assuming it happens in the next few minutes, as I suspect it will.

Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic theologian, had a similar view about God's will, as I quoted him in a 2006 post.

Now I hear you ask: “How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will. If God’s will is pleasing to you, then whatever happens to you, or does not happen to you, will be heaven.