Church of the Churchless

"Empty Force" is a Tai Chi and martial arts myth, but people fall for it

Today someone in my Tai Chi class spoke about a Tai Chi master being able to repel people, or knock them down, without using any physical force. You know, just with their mind, their supposedly highly evolved chi power. 

(Note: in Chinese the same word can denote different things. The "Chi" in Tai Chi means boundary. Chi can also refer to vital life force, also known as qi. That's how I used it in the sentence above.)

When I heard this, I thought, that's a Tai Chi myth, because it isn't possible to project a physical force just with the mind. However, I didn't say that out loud. People believe all kinds of things that aren't true. That's the basis of every religion: fantasies that people believe in. 

They do this out of a search for meaning. It can feel good to believe in the supernatural, in God, in "empty force" chi power.

I'm not shy about making fun of those myths on this blog, and in conversations with people who agree with me about the absurdity of supernaturalism, but I don't go out of my way to dump a heaping load of reality on someone else's fantasy if the fantasy works for them.

Fortunately, when it comes to empty force in Tai Chi and other martial arts there's plenty of evidence that has debunked this myth. 

It seems clear that one foundation of this myth is the same foundation that causes followers of a guru to ascribe supernatural powers to them. I know whereof I speak, because for 35 years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form.

That there wasn't any objective evidence of this didn't bother the most fervent of the guru's devotees (I was a bit more on the skeptical side) who believed the guru could know what his disciples were doing and thinking half a world away, and could intervene in their lives if he so chose.

Those devotees, like devotees of a Tai Chi master who claims to have the power of empty force, want so badly for their fantasy to be true, they participate in the manufacturing of supernatural powers which then are taken as truth by other gullible devotees.

Here's a You Tube video that, in 5 1/2 minutes, demonstrates how "Chi Power Woo Woo Fails." (Title of the video.) It's rather sad how the students of a Tai Chi or marital arts master will either consciously or unconsciously go along with his empty force B.S., which is shown to be a fantasy when someone not under the spell of devotion participates in a demonstration that invariably fails. 

If you want more amusement, check out this longer 13 1/2 minute video that shows some additional empty force staged ridiculousness. Again, I'm unsure whether those who participate in the demonstrations know that the supposed master is a fake, or have convinced themselves that he's really got empty force power, so they fall down when he gestures at them. I like the description of the video:

Qi Power, Lin Kong Jin / Empty Force Compilation of Martial Artists desperately in need of psychiatric treatment. Harness the Chi Power of confused minds! ... This kind of belief is common in Chinese and Japanese martial arts as Tai Chi and Aikido. But there are also "sects" out there as Yellow Bamboo and EFO. It seems like many of the "masters" believe themselves in what they do. Apparently some people have a very deep need of believing in magic and mysteries. - "Hey! Look at me! I am special!"

Lastly, "Myth busting in Chinese marital arts" is a good post on The Tai Chi Notebook site. Excerpt:

These more marketing-orientated myths about the prowess of practitioners – how deadly they were, how unbeatable their martial arts was, how the power of Qi was greater than physical strength all fed directly into all that nonsense about no touch knockouts and “empty force” that has marred the image of Chinese martial arts in the modern age.

And politics also gets involved. When obvious myths about the origins of martial arts are dispelled they often get replaced by more politically motivated stories about the arts origins that are equally as unprovable and unreliable yet fit a nationalist agenda. It seems like the Chinese martial arts are forever being used to support some sort of Chinese government propaganda.

In short, the Chinese martial arts world was in need of, and remains in need of, a lot of myth busting, because much of what we are being told and sold is basically not true. But Bowman’s fears, that we are in danger of spoiling the fun for everybody with this relentless search for the truth, holds true, I think. I was certainly attracted to Chinese martial arts by a steady diet of orientalist propaganda from the likes of David Carradine’s Kung Fu TV series and Marvel comics with heroes like Iron Fist. This is often what draws us to the martial arts in the first place and there has to be some way of searching for truth in the martial arts, but keeping the magic that drew us there in the first place. 

UPDATE: Here's a few links to descriptions of empty force by people who believe this myth. They sound a lot like miraculous faith healing stories in evangelical Christianity. My best attempt to be sympathetic about such unfounded beliefs is that it shows the power of the human mind: when someone really wants to believe in something that isn't true, they reshape reality to fit their belief. I just have an old-fashioned attitude that we should reshape our beliefs to fit reality, to the best of our ability.

Empty Force
Empty Force in the Buqi System
Chinese Empty Force

And here's a post that, on a quick read (it's pretty long) puts Tai Chi training in a realistic perspective. I'll share some excerpts that debunk the notion of empty force as something supernatural. By the way, if anyone is wondering, I've practiced Tai Chi for nineteen years. Before that I was into hard style martial arts for about twelve years, earning a black belt in a form of karate. 

What is Empty Force?

Possibly a year after my lifelong friend and martial arts partner, Martin Inn and I had immigrated Chu, Ch’u-fang into the United States, he announced a new and important mission for us. There was someone else, someone of great importance, that we must now turn our efforts toward immigrating. This was a special and secretive individual only known to a few advanced adepts, such as Mr. Chu, and we should be honored to have the job of bringing him to America.

He was so special because he had mastered the technique of “empty force,” the highest achievement of Taijiquan. When one’s circulation of qi becomes high enough, he reaches the point at which he can project it at others, knocking them down at a distance, or even killing them. We all have some idea of what this looks like, having seen it in countless gung-fu movies.

Marty and I were properly stunned, not expecting to be “living the dream” of becoming gung-fu supermen quite so quickly, and Mr. Chu must have noticed, asking next if we believed him, to which, after quickly glancing at one another, we both assured him that of course, teacher, you can bet on it. After nodding solemnly for a moment, he told us, sounding rather disgusted, that we were fools. No one, he emphasized in a slightly louder tone of voice, can do this, and don’t believe anyone that tells you that they can. 

I am sure that no one could righteously fault me for ending the current discussion right here, because Mr. Chu’s warning is definitely the short answer to the whole subject of empty force, given what people take the phrase to mean.

It is a worthwhile warning, because purveyors of this “power” seem to surface every few years with the persistence of some sort of biblical pestilence. It is amazing to see the number and relatively high caliber of people who can be taken in by this “emperor’s new clothes” con, in which an inability to be affected by this “qi attack” identifies an insufficiency in you, rather than in the one mounting the attack. 

...As far as any fantasies concerning what appears to be happening in supposed demonstrations of “empty force,” these should be relegated to the same mental dust bin as similar martial fantasies about making oneself heavier or lighter at will, or fighting multiple assailants while blindfolded. All of these kinds of stories have their origins in some sort of reality, but never the reality that is presumed.

The presumed reality here is that someone is emitting a force that operates at a distance and can affect completely untrained and even unaware opponents. In the words of Chu, Ch’u-fang: no one can do this, and don’t believe anyone who tells you that they can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be here, now.

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

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

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

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

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

The typical object of attention is the breath.

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

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

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

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

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

An important principle is to not crave the jhanas.

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

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

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

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

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

Why teachers are needed, but not gurus

Back in my true believing days, the 35 years that I was an active member of a guru-centered religious organization (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB), I accepted the RSSB adage that a guru was needed because we require teachers throughout our life, and finding God or our true self, pretty much the same thing according to RSSB, really required a teacher, being so difficult on our own.

That made sense at the time, but not now. For in my present way of looking at reality, there's a big difference between needing a teacher (who can be really valuable) and a guru (who can be really problematic). 

I'm not going to rely on dictionary definitions of "teacher" and "guru," because these don't capture the emotional difference between people who embrace someone they call a teacher and someone they call a guru. Being intimately familiar with this difference, having experienced it myself, I'll explain what I mean.

I've had many teachers of various sorts in my life. When I was young, they were classroom teachers in elementary school, high school, and college. When I was working, they were people who knew more than I did about some subject. When I played competitive tennis, they were instructors and coaches who could help me with the flaws in my game. I also consider that every book I've read has taught me something, so all the authors I've read during my lifetime have been teachers.

This just scratches the surface, of course. My wife has been my teacher, along with my daughter and granddaughter. Dogs and cats also. Plus movies and television shows. There's no end to the teachers we encounter, looking upon "teacher" as any entity that helps us learn something. Nature can be a great teacher.

But here's the thing: I've never looked upon any teacher as infallible or irreplaceable. Each of them had strengths and weaknesses. I never worshipped any of them. I never viewed any of them as being different in kind than I was. They simply knew something that I didn't, so there was a flow of knowledge from them to me. Of course, often there was a return flow also, since students can be sources of knowledge for teachers. It goes both ways. 

If a teacher wasn't meeting my needs, I had no problem letting them go and finding a better teacher. Athletes do this all the time with coaches. Students do this all the time with their instructors. For it isn't the person that is important in teaching, it is the knowledge being transmitted from the teacher. If I could get more of that knowledge from someone else, I happily said goodbye to a teacher. 

A guru often, or usually, is looked upon in a different way.

I'm speaking here of real gurus, not those who just have that title applied to them casually, as in "he's a real guru when it comes to fixing computer problems." I'm talking about people who claim to have spiritual, mystical, or religious knowledge that can be conveyed to students, often termed disciples. These gurus typically are viewed as possessing wisdom that others lack, which merits a level of devotion to them that teachers aren't entitled to.

I say this as someone who has been criticized many times by visitors to this blog for not sticking with the RSSB guru who initiated me in 1971, Charan Singh, for my entire life. I'd sometimes reply to those criticisms by saying that I've had two wives, many cars, lots of different teachers, various jobs, numerous houses, and varied political beliefs. So why the heck should meditation or spirituality be the only part of my life that can never change? Why can't I say farewell to Charan Singh, especially since he died in 1990?

The reason offered by avid guru-worshippers was along the lines of, you were initiated by a perfect living guru, God in Human Form; this is a lifetime commitment; even if you don't get the hoped-for results or knowledge, you should have stuck with the guru. 

Well, that's ridiculous.

This attitude assumes that a guru has supernatural powers, so is able to bring benefits to a disciple that an ordinary meditation teacher -- person, book, video, whatever -- can't provide. I heartily disagree with this faith-based assumption. I can easily do this, because I used to be a disciple who felt that way, so I know how wishful thinking can lead followers of a guru astray.

Almost certainly, the human brain and mind is as physical an entity as rocks, trees, and grass are. The only difference is that our brains are hugely complex, capable of so much more than other physical objects are. Given that complexity, sometimes we need teachers to point the way toward a good way to meditate, practice mindfulness, be happier, and other possible goals.

And sometimes we don't need any help at all, being capable of figuring things out by ourselves. It just depends on a person and their situation. Serious mental illness may require a psychiatrist. Merely feeling down may just require a walk in nature. 

I'm not saying that embracing a guru is always the wrong thing to do. This felt absolutely right to me at a certain point in my life. However, I do believe that viewing a guru as divine, as perfect, as beyond criticism, is dangerous. For most of the 35 years I was a part of RSSB, I kept telling myself something that I read in a book by Huston Smith, who heard this from a Zen practitioner.

I have a new koan: I could be wrong. 

Beautiful. I readily admit that I could be wrong about gurus. All I ask is that those who follow a guru say the same thing about the person they're devoted to: I could be wrong. 

Jhanas are the current meditation craze, says TIME magazine

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

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

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

This is how the story starts out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSSB national satsang at Haynes Park leaves attendee with "disbelief and disappointment"

Since I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for 35 years until I became disillusioned with this India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human form, I like to share messages from other people who don't like what RSSB has become.

Below is a comment left on a recent Church of the Churchless blog post by M B Sharma. I enjoyed his honest "review" of a RSSB talk, or satsang, apparently given by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current guru. 

Sharma alludes to the fact that while the RSSB teachings clearly state that the primary purpose of human life is God-realization, which requires living a pure and simple life, Gurinder Singh enjoys a lavish lifestyle and has been accused of financial misdeeds that reportedly enriched the Dhillon family with hundreds of millions of dollars. 

There's many posts about this on this blog. Here's a couple of them:
More details surface about financial fraud involving RSSB guru
Why the RSSB guru is responsible for financial fraud

In 2018 Gurinder Singh Dhillon reportedly said that he'd answer questions about his involvement in the financial misdeeds. I'm quite sure that this never happened. In his comment, Sharma says that people attending the RSSB satsang were told they couldn't ask questions about the guru's involvement in shell companies or his financial dealings.

So much for transparency and truth-telling. Apparently that's something RSSB initiates should do, but the RSSB guru is exempt. Here's what Sharma said:

I recently attended what is referred to as the national satsang in Haynes, Bedford, UK, and I left with a deep sense of disbelief and disappointment. The event, which draws crowds from all over, turned out to be little more than a recital of selected poetry from saints or teachings from previous RSSB leaders. There was nothing new, nothing profound—just a repetitive cycle of words that seemed designed to maintain a facade rather than inspire genuine spiritual growth.

The Q&A session, which I had hoped would offer some clarity, was even more bewildering. The responses were vague and confusing, leaving me with more questions than answers. It felt as though real issues were being sidestepped, and any attempt at deeper inquiry was subtly discouraged.

The satsang took place in a sprawling mansion, a stark contrast to the simplicity one might expect from a spiritual gathering. What struck me most was the realization that GSD has a private residence within the premises, a well-guarded house that raises serious questions. How did he manage to secure such a luxurious home on land bought under the guise of charity? This residence is maintained by sevadaars—volunteers who provide free housekeeping and other services. It seems this place serves as his holiday retreat, where he spends 5-6 months each year.

Observing the opulence surrounding GSD, it’s hard to reconcile his lifestyle with that of a genuine spiritual leader. Yet, his sevadaars, some of whom are reportedly paid handsomely, work tirelessly to project him as a divine figure, a 'God in human form.' The commercialization of the event was evident—after the program, there were stalls selling food, books, and even photographs of GSD. Donation boxes were scattered everywhere, inviting contributions without providing any receipts, making it impossible to account for the funds collected. Not be surprised if it used for money laundry.

Given the substantial income generated, one would expect that the organizers could at least provide free food, especially considering that many attendees travel long distances. However, the irony is that the food sold is prepared by volunteer sevadaars, who then have to pay for it themselves.

I also learned that attendees are not allowed to ask about GSD’s involvement in shell companies or his financial dealings. Questions must be submitted in advance, and only a select few are permitted to speak. This level of control was not seen a few years ago, and it seems designed to prevent any scrutiny.

The security at the event was on par with that of an airport—rigorous checks, and no phones allowed. The atmosphere was more reminiscent of a high-security event than a spiritual gathering.

Having returned after a long time, I couldn’t help but feel that the situation is deteriorating. The contrast between the message of simplicity and humility and the reality of luxury and control was too glaring to ignore. I can only hope that the truth will eventually emerge if there is truly a higher power overseeing all of this.

This is a comment by AAM in response to what Sharma said. 

@M. B. Sharma, I have to agree the atmosphere at these events have deteriorated, as there isn't much spiritual inspiration. Of course, the representatives are quick to tell you that the problem is with you. You are not receptive. You get what you come to get. May not be attending in the future.

Douglas Harding sees God where most people see consciousness

It's a familiar feeling. I'm enjoying a book about spirituality, because the author makes sense to me and doesn't go overboard on religious mumbo-jumbo. 

Then... I reach a chapter where I fill the margins with question marks, because what's being said doesn't make sense to me and sounds like religious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the previous part, but it makes me wonder how the author could shift so suddenly into religiosity. 

That's what happened to me today with Douglas Harding's Face to No Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. I wrote about my initial reading of it in "Love is keeping your mind open for other people and things."

I was cruising along in the second chapter, enjoying how Harding looked upon the "faceless" aspect of him as being a capacity for knowing, which is pretty much how Thomas Metzinger describes pure awareness in his book The Elephant and The Blind.

Harding uses anxiety as an example of how consciousness has space for anything that can be known.

Look, just as I find myself Capacity for you, just as I find myself faceless Here for your face, colorless Here for your color, formless Here for your form, so I find myself Space Here, Capacity Here, for anxiety. I'm Space for it.

This Space, this Capacity for the changing feelings, is always me, always available. So what I'm on about is not a case of feeling. It's a case of fact. I should have said this right at the beginning of the evening. We are not on about feelings. We are on about where they come from, what is upstream of feelings, the facts. 

It's facts which will bring us relief from our anguish. Feelings will not.

Music to my ears. I love facts. I'm not always capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, but I aspire to being as factual as possible in my life. This is a big reason why I've come to dislike religion, which all too often is fact-free.

I guess I should have paid more attention to all the capitalized nouns in the excerpt above from Harding's first chapter. That's often a giveaway when a spiritual writer elevates everyday words to a meaning that is anything but obvious, as in Capacity, Here, Space.

Because it turned out in the second chapter that Harding somehow concludes that our usual human consciousness is God. And this from a guy who just said a few pages before that he was all about facts. Here's some excerpts that show what I mean. 

Harding says that if we're to see God Here and find God Here, "we have to know what we are looking for so that we can tell whether those mystics and sages got it right... something very specific, not something vague."

Well, this makes little sense. After all, there's no proof that God even exists, much less that God has certain well-defined characteristics. Religions heartily disagree on both fronts. (I call Buddhism a religion that has no god.) Harding then says:

And I would say that which we can name God provisionally (or if we prefer, Atman-Brahman or Reality or Essence or even No-thingness -- I don't care what you call it) has five characteristics. 

The first characteristic is that it has no boundaries, no fence around it, no edges. It's absolutely unlimited in all directions. The second characteristic is that it is absolutely clear, clean, empty of contamination. It is utterly simple, totally transparent, empty of everything but itself, empty even of itself, clearer than glass, cloudless, an infinite sky.

The third characteristic is that it is also full of the world. Because it's empty, it's full -- full of the scene, whatever the scene is, absolutely united with it. The fourth characteristic is that it is awake, it's aware, it's conscious. And the fifth characteristic is that it is right where you are. 

The only place you will find Her Majesty is nearer to you than everything else. That's her throne room, her royal palace, right where you are. The Kingdom is within you.To sum up, there are five characteristics of Her Majesty: she is infinite, empty, full of the world, awake, and right where you are. Now that's a description of God. But doesn't the description also fit you?

This is an amazing bit of bad philosophizing from someone who claims to be factual, but obviously is deeply religious in a Christian sense, which is the religion he was brought up in by a fundamentalist father. 

First of all, Harding makes the mistake that Thomas Metzinger warns about repeatedly in his own book about pure awareness. He uses the phenomenology of how awareness appears to us humans to draw unwarranted conclusions about the actual reality those phenomenal experiences point to. 

Metzinger calls this theory contamination, which is exactly what Harding does in the excerpt above. Harding describes how consciousness appears, then claims that those characteristics are those of God, so, using horribly twisted logic, our consciousness is God. 

Circular reasoning gone wild.

Harding neglects to mention that God also is considered by major world religions to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent -- qualities that definitely don't apply to human consciousness, since he only focused on those that match up with how our limited consciousness appears to us. 

Here's some additional quotations to show further how Harding equates God with human awareness.

We should have the humility to be a little bit traditional here and realize that for two thousand years great saints have been working at this, and the common feature of their discovery is: "Not I but Christ liveth in me." Paul goes on and on: "I am crucified with Christ." Father Gerard Hughes, author of the book, God of Surprises, says, "God calls on us to become Christ." Not Christs, but Christ. When I hold out my arms, I see the pattern of the Crucifixion. We're built to that incredible pattern.

It is really true that Who you are is the Origin of the world, everywhichway you look at it. Just think! You never moved an inch. You are the unmoved mover of the world. You are timeless. You have no boundaries.

The big thing for me, a development over the last few years, is the realization of the Incarnation. To put it very, very simply, if it is true what Tennyson says, what the Koran says, that God is nearer to me than my hands and my feet and my breathing, then God is Here and This is where he lives...These feet go on the errands of God, and this voice speaks his words. They are the instruments of Who we really, really are.

I really, really disagree. Harding's first book, On Having No Head, appealed to me because it was almost entirely based on what I considered to be facts about our human consciousness. However, somewhere along the way, Harding merged the Christianity of his youth with his headless perceptions. 

The result isn't useless, but it contains way too much gibberish for my taste.

Love is keeping your mind open for other people and things

I love my wife. Which is why last night was so disturbing.

It was deeply painful to know that soon I'd be holding my wife's hand for the last time, because she was about to die. The more I thought about this, the more distress I felt, until I was on the verge of crying a massive amount of tears.

Thankfully, my wife was fine.

Her death was a product of my imagination, which ran away with me while I was brushing my teeth after we'd finished watching an episode of Shogun on Hulu where a man committed hara-kiri, ritual suicide, because a disagreement with his Japanese lord left him no other choice if he was to maintain his honor.

Death was on my mind, which probably explains why I suddenly began thinking about how sad I would be when my wife died. 

The relevance of this to my rediscovery of Douglas Harding's book, On Having No Head, which I wrote about a few days ago, is that I was almost totally immersed in my own thoughts about my wife dying, to such an extent that they seemed real, until I focused my attention on the world outside my head.

As soon as I returned to looking at the white porcelain of our sink, and the toothbrush filled with toothpaste that I was holding in my hand, the sorrow I had conjured in my mind vanished. The world was much more real than my imagination, and I reacted accordingly.

What this taught me -- and this is a lesson that I keep learning over and over -- is the difference between how I imagine the world to be versus how it actually is. 

I worry about lots of stuff that never happens. I also find that lots of stuff happens that I never worried about, but disturbs me when it rears its unpleasant head. So in my wiser moments, I try to live in accord with what Harding says in On Having No Head. (By Space, he means the capacity for knowing that is awareness.)

This unknowing has no limits. It extends beyond what we perceive to all we feel and think and do. It is ceasing to know how to cope with life, where we are going, what to do after this immediate task is done, what's going to happen to us tomorrow, next week, next year.

It is walking one step at a time and blindfolded, in the assurance that the Space here -- which is nothing and knows nothing but Itself -- will nevertheless come up, moment by moment, with what's needed. It is living like the lilies of the field, taking no thought for the morrow, trusting our Source.

This is where Harding and I begin to part company, when he talks about the Source and God rather than sticking with the bare facts of open-minded awareness. Harding is on solid ground when he speaks about the phenomenology of "having no head," of our sense that consciousness itself is empty and pristine, while the contents of consciousness are full of diverse qualities. 

But when he crosses over into religious territory, drawing implications about the meaning of his "headless way" that aren't part of that experience itself, that Harding is on shaky ground. 

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the way he looks upon love in another of his books that I recently ordered from Amazon, Face to No-Face. In the first chapter, Harding talks about how as a youth brought up by a rigid fundamentalist Christian father who forbid him from reading anything but the Bible, he had come to believe that love is the cornerstone of life and the universe.

Sentiments like that usually leave me cold. They sound nice, but lack substance. I'm not attracted to a philosophy that sounds like it was written on a Hallmark Card. I liked what Harding says about love though, viewing it as the result of a mind, or awareness, focused on a person or thing in the world, not on our own inward self. 

In other words, we are headless for the object of our beheaded love. Our emptiness meets their fullness, and if they return our love, their emptiness meets our fullness. 

You want to love well the person you love. There's only one way truly to love that person. It is to disappear in his or her favor. We are built to give our lives for one another. This is an exquisite design for living, that we give our lives for one another.

I look at my young friend next to me here. The only way that I can receive his face is to die as Douglas and be resurrected as him. I guess it is the same for him. His gives his life for Douglas; I give my life for him. 

We are disappearing in each other's favor. We are built for loving. I'm not talking about the feeling. I'm talking about the ground from which love can grow and flourish. Here, I really am in receipt of him, not because I am a nice person, because I'm not.

Douglas is not a very nice person. My friend is not a perfect person, either. He looks pretty good, but he's not perfect. But he's built for loving.

This disappearance is real disappearance because when I look Here, not a molecule is left, let alone a cell, let alone some goo or chemical stuff -- as you saw for yourself when you looked at the Clarity where you are. There's no dust on this clear Window.

This is real death. It's a more complete death than the one the mortician deals with because he's left with some mess, something to get rid of. There's nothing to get rid of here. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he gave his life for his friend."

Well, those are lofty words, a bit too lofty and abstract for my liking. I look at things more simply and practically. 

When my wife has something to say to me, my loving response is to stop whatever I'm doing, try to shut up the chatter inside my head, and listen to her with an open attentive mind. Same applies to my Tai Chi class. Today, as every time I go to the class, I try to focus on what our instructor is saying, and what we are doing.

Sure, I also wonder about what I'm going to have for dinner, and I'm aware of the sciatica pain in my right leg which is worse when I'm standing still rather than moving. But in general, I figure that since I love Tai Chi and I love my Tai Chi class, the best way to express that love is being attentive to what's happening in the class, not to the going's on inside my head that are unrelated to Tai Chi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look without, not within, is the best spiritual advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, but I deeply doubt it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sees only God.

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

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

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

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

"Theory contamination" is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. 

I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions.

A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun and the planets known at the time orbiting Earth.

To make the observations fit with that assumption, Ptolemy and others came up with the notion of epicycles -- basically circles within circles that, with enough fiddling, could fairly accurately mirror motions of what was observed in the heavens. 

Of course, once the Sun-centered assumption took hold, the epicycles weren't necessary. Well, actually they were to some extent, since it was assumed that planetary orbits were circular, rather than elliptical as they actually are, so some fiddling still was required.

My point is that the interpretation of observations or perceptions rarely, if ever, take place in a theoretical vacuum.

The smell of coffee is much more appealing to someone who enjoys the beverage than to someone who can't stand the taste of it. How big a problem the number of undocumented immigrants entering the United States is depends on how valuable someone considers the immigrants are for this country.

In Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure awareness reported by meditators, he speaks about "theory contamination" as being an issue for every scientific approach.

I'd add that it's an issue for non-scientific approaches also. It's really tough for a group of people to decide on a restaurant to go to when some of the deciders only eat organic food, others are vegetarians, and still others are on a paleo all-meat diet. How they value a restaurant depends on what food they prefer.

Metzinger writes:

In Tibetan Buddhism, pure awareness has long been beautifully described as "the natural state" (rang bzhin gnas rigs). The existence of a label like this may seem unremarkable, or it may be straightforwardly useful. But it also presents us with one example of a methodological difficulty, a major obstacle that every scientific approach has to face.

In chapter 2, I called it the problem of "theory contamination": Theoretical assumptions and belief systems may have strongly colored the reports that we received, and the conceptual instruments available to a practitioner inevitably shape the way she communicates her own experience.

We find many example of such contamination in this book. Our meditators spontaneously and more or less innocently use ancient concepts charged with implicit bias, like "suchness" (chapter 9), "emptiness" (chapter 17), "luminosity" (chapter 18), "witnessing" (chapter 19), "nonduality" (chapters 26 and 27), and "nonmeditation" (chapter 32).

Here's some of the conclusions Metzinger draws from the problem of theory contamination.

But if we adopt an intellectually honest and methodologically sound perspective, then "phenomenality" as such -- the subjective sense of appearance itself, the bare and nonconceptual character of "awareness" or "pure consciousness" -- is only a phenomenal quality too, just as redness, greenness, sweetness, and epistemicity are.

Today, the way to go is not to jump to strong metaphysical conclusions in a naively realistic manner, as if the structure of reality could be directly read from the structure of certain kinds of conscious experience.

Our new model of consciousness must not be constrained only by the phenomenology because other forms of evidence count as well. The elephant approach must involve a multiplicity of perspectives, because it is attempting to satisfy a whole range of constraints entailed by multiple levels of analysis.

Nothing is given here -- no direct form of inner perception. The directness, transparency, and experiential immediacy all belong on the level of appearances, as later reported verbally.

Hard to argue with. Color and taste, as Metzinger observed, aren't part of physical reality, but of human sense organs and brain. Some people are color-blind. Some people are able to taste flavors that others can't. (A professional wine taster, for example.) 

He's saying that experiences of pure awareness are similar. But here it isn't a physical perception that is experienced differently by various people, but the character of awareness or pure consciousness.

Most Buddhists will describe their experience in a different way than most Christians will. An atheist may describe their experience as an embrace of being, while a religious person may describe it as the presence of God.

Metzinger's quest, which he says will take much more research than he's been able to do so far, is to arrive at a phenomenology of pure awareness where the "actual" experience (a problematic word) is separated from the conceptual overlay meditators give the experience via theory contamination. 

It's a noble goal. I'm just skeptical that it's possible to achieve. But that's an assumption of mine which surely suffers from a form of theory contamination.

Pure consciousness isn't an experience. It's the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate.

I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes:

Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to us by coming and going in the mind.

Rather, pure awareness may feel like something that reveals the timeless possibility for all conscious experience itself, and, somehow, its true nature as well.

Makes sense. After all, how could consciousness or awareness (same thing, according to Metzinger) be an experience when consciousness or awareness obviously is required to have any sort of conscious experience?

I've been skeptical of the idea that it is possible to be conscious without some conscious content. I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility, but I find it difficult to imagine how someone could simply be conscious, period. 

No sensations. No perceptions. No thoughts. No emotions. No anything except being conscious. For someone to know that they were in a state of consciousness without conscious content seemingly would require, at minimum, a capacity of being aware that one is simply being aware.

Which would be pretty damn close to consciousness without conscious content, but that extra "aware that one is simply being aware" is a subtle addition to consciousness. And that, pleasingly, seems to be close to what Metzinger is saying in this passage.

Admittedly, it takes some effort to grasp what he's getting at, since Metzinger is a philosopher, and often writes like one.

All physical processes have certain conditions that make their existence possible. But only very few physical systems model and track these conditions. Self-organizing systems like ourselves exist by persisting in dynamic environments, following, as Hohwy explains, an inner norm by which they model the conditions that make their own physical existence possible.

...But what about pure awareness? Can we also internally model the conditions of possibility for knowing -- in meditation, non conceptually, without words, in a state of silence?

If we view the experience of pure awareness as an internal model of epistemic openness, and if the same principle of continuously tracking the conditions of possibility holds not only for whole organisms, but also for conscious processes unfolding in their nervous systems, then it is conceivable that the actual functioning of the principle can sometimes be detected by the model itself (e.g., in exceptionally clear and silent nondual states).

It could be detected by meditators in states of dual mindfulness, but it could perhaps also detect itself in what, in the preceding chapter, we called "reflexively aware mindfulness" or "self-knowing empty cognizance." The currently running model would be continuously tracking its own condition for existence -- epistemic openness, the very possibility of knowledge -- thereby autopoietically re-creating itself over and over.

If this physical process had a conscious correlate (or if it were not correlated with, but were simply identical to, pure awareness "coming alive"), then our predication would have to be that a bare and empty form of wakefulness emerges, a state that cannot be easily compared to any other kind of conscious experience.

The phenomenological prediction would be that it has the experiential quality of continuously refreshing itself, of autonomously holding itself in existence -- and, plausibly, of knowing itself. 

Our dog clearly is aware. But I doubt that she is aware of her own awareness. If she is, this is a much less sophisticated form of self-awareness, or of knowing herself, than we humans possess.

Metzinger seems to be saying that in addition to knowing ourselves as an object, from the outside as it were, humans also are capable of knowing ourselves as a subject, from the inside as it were. Which basically is pure awareness -- a non-conceptual knowing of our capacity to know.

It's temping to draw metaphysical conclusions from this capacity. Soul! Universal consciousness! Enlightenment! Buddha-nature! All that stuff that religions derive from conscious experiences that, in themselves, don't possess any inherent meaning along those lines. Metzinger warns about this.

Conclusions are also easily jumped to when it comes to "phenomenality per se" actually being something nominal, being the "thing in itself" behind all appearances. The C-fallacy arises whenever someone falsely concludes that just because something feels like the true and timeless nature of consciousness itself -- or not like an experience at all -- we have actually found some metaphysical bedrock or ultimately understood consciousness itself. 

...Intellectual honesty is an integral, indispensable part of spiritual practice and it is what connects such practice with modern philosophy and science. 

What the Olympics can teach us about life, love, and reality

Ooh, after just writing the title for this blog post, I realized that it's pretty grandiose. But if I stumble and fall before I cross the blog-post-expectation finish line, this will simply serve to emphasize one of my points about the meaning of the Olympics -- assuming I can remember what it was.

The Paris Olympics are about halfway done. My wife and I watched the opening ceremony in its entirety.  Well, until the ceremony reached the stadium, after which we lost interest.

I thought it was one of the best opening ceremonies ever. Creative, emotional, energetic. Having the athletes on boats was a stroke of genius. I'm always moved by so many nations coming together under a single banner: the Olympics. 

As I recall, the athletes from Iran were on a boat just ahead of the boat that carried the Israeli athletes. Though their countries are mortal enemies politically and religiously, I'm confident that athletes from Iran and Israel would get along fine if they met during the Olympics. 

It gave me hope to see the floating Parade of Nations. I realize that sports is a special case of global cooperation. But if the world can peacefully coexist on the field of athletic competition, it sure seems that one day we can bridge our political, religious, and cultural differences. 

That's why John Lennon's Imagine was played during the opening ceremony, a song with great lyrics, including:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

 

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

A big reason why sports unites rather than divides is that there are agreed-upon rules for every Olympic event. If you can't follow the rules, you can't compete. Breaking the rules has consequences. A warning, a penalty, maybe even a forfeit of the match. 

In part this was a dream of the United Nations, including the International Court of Justice. It still is to some extent, but I'm sorry to say that my country, the United States, is one of those that puts itself above the rule of international law. Which makes no sense, since the United States is pleased to follow international rules that govern our athletes in the Olympics.

People hate to see their favored team or athlete lose. They hate it even more when an officiating error seems to bend the rules unfairly. That happened to American tennis star Coco Gauff when she lost a match after a linesperson called a ball out while Gauff was about to swing at it, which made her mishit the ball, then the referee overruled the call and refused to replay the point. 

This shows how life often isn't fair, or at least appears to be unfair, despite the title of one of my books that argued otherwise. 

Further evidence of this abounds in the Olympics, as in all sporting events. However, I don't see this further evidence as pointing to life's unfairness, but to life's contingency, its unpredictable and chaotic nature. Meaning, large effects often follow from small causes. Very small, sometimes. This helps produce the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

For me, the surfing competition showed this dramatically, which is taking place in Tahiti, at a notorious reef where large waves break with tremendous force in what soon turns into shallow water. Surfing is a unique Olympic sport in that the field of play, so to speak, is constantly shifting -- in line with Buddhist notions of life itself. 

Two competitors have 30 minutes to catch waves, taking turns, basically. Depending on the ocean conditions, there might be a string, or set, of large high quality waves that will showcase the surfer's talents. Or, the competitors might have to wait, and wait, and wait for a decent wave. 

I watched two surfers who were pretty evenly matched. Only a small difference separated their scores as the competition grew close to the 3o minute mark. The surfer who was behind hoped for a large wave to appear, as this was their only hope to get in the breaking "pipeline," pop out cleanly, and earn a good score from the judges.

But it wasn't a big wave day. The horn sounded signaling the end of the competition with the surfer behind never getting another chance. That's how sports, and life, often is. You do your best, but there are forces outside of your control that have the last say in how well you do.

Surfers, like skateboarders and athletes in many, if not most, other Olympic sports, love what they do. They'd be doing it even if fame and money didn't accompany their efforts. I liked watching two male surfers on a really big wave day catch giant wave after giant wave, smiling and laughing with each other as they paddled back out to get another wave.

An announcer, who I believe was a professional surfer himself, said that what the competitors would remember about this day wasn't whether they won or lost, but how great the surfing was. Similarly, I read that after a Japanese skateboarder pulled off a very difficult trick, giving him a gold medal, his competitors applauded him, since they love skateboarding more than they hate losing, and someone who advances the sport via a rarely or never seen trick -- that really pleases them.

I'm a competitive person. I don't like losing, whether it be an argument or an athletic competition (though my days as an avid club tennis player are far in my rear-view mirror). But I'm going to try to keep in mind that losing an argument to someone who makes better points than I'm capable of isn't anything to be ashamed of, but an opportunity to admire the skills of the other person.

The Olympics brings out the best in competitors. It also can bring out the best in us spectators, if we have the right attitude toward watching.

Oh, almost forgot to mention another memorable moment, the last minute or so of the bronze medal match between the United States and Australia women's rugby teams. Australia was ahead 14-7. The Americans were 85 yards away from the goal line. Things looked bleak for the USA team. 

After a few passes that didn't result in much, if any, forward progress, the ball ended up in the hands of an American woman who was almost instantly in the grasp of an Australian player. But she managed to get loose, looked upfield, and saw open territory between her and the goal line.

She took off running. Nobody from the Australian team could catch her. I was worried she'd run out of steam, but she dived across the goal line untouched. The camera showed the joy of the American players and the shock of the Australian players.

They had the game won, seemingly. Until the game was lost. That's life. You just never know for sure what's going to happen next. Something horrible. Something wonderful. You just never know.

Study finds that meditators are prone to "spiritual superiority"

I'm well acquainted with the notion of "spiritual superiority," since I fell prey to that myself back when I thought that being initiated by a guru who supposedly was God in Human Form meant that I was part of a relatively small group of chosen people who had a special relationship with God.

(Sorry Jews, there's a lot of competition in the chosen people contest.)

And it could be argued that I still feel spiritually superior now that I've become an atheist and consider that I'm aware of the drawbacks of being religious that religious believers are clueless about.

Below is a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, relating to spiritual superiority that I came across today. This fits  with my personal experience -- both of observing myself, and of observing other religiously-minded people. Not everybody, for sure, but a good share.

A 2020 story in the Daily Mail has interesting details about the study summarized in the X posts. It's called "The path to enlightenment is an ego trip: Meditation and mindfulness linked to narcissism and feelings of 'spiritual superiority', study finds."

Forms of spiritual enlightenment can 'boost feelings of superiority' by stoking the ego, a new study has found. 

Dutch experts studying questionnaires of nearly 4,000 people found a link between practising spiritual training, like meditation, and feelings of 'spiritual superiority'. 

Thy found that those who were engaged in the more bizarre 'energetic' therapies, such as aura reading, were the most smug. 

Forms of spiritual training – including mindfulness, meditation, self healing and reading auras – are supposed to distance people from their ego and any feelings of self-worth.  

But spiritual training appears to actually have the opposite effect, by enhancing people's need to feel 'more successful, more respected or loved', the experts say.  

'Spiritual training is assumed to reduce self‐enhancement, but may have the paradoxical effect of boosting superiority feelings,' say the authors, from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

'It can, thus, operate like other self‐enhancement tools and contribute to a contingent self‐worth that depends on one's spiritual accomplishments.

'Self‐enhancement motive is powerful and deeply ingrained so that it can hijack methods intended to transcend the ego and, instead, adopt them to its own service.' 

According to lead study author Professor Roos Vonk, spiritual practices were associated with, but not necessarily the cause of, superior feelings. 

'We find evidence for spiritual superiority among both mindfulness and energetic students, but more strongly in the latter group, and in the former group we can't say for certain that it's illusory,' she said. 

'In theory, through spiritual training we become wise people who rise above their private interests, feel connected with others, do not judge, but in actuality it often turns out quite differently. 

'People who educate themselves in, for example, healing and reading of auras and chakras, invariably discover that they have remarkable psychic abilities allowing them to "see" things that others do not see. That makes them feel very special.' 

An important part of getting 'spiritual' is seeking to 'transcend one's current locus of centricity', extending one's perspective beyond the self, according to the team. 

Ironically, however, spiritual training may 'evoke psychological motives and responses that are not enlightened at all'. 

Researchers performed three studies to measure what they called spiritual superiority – defined as a feeling of superiority over those who lack 'the spiritual wisdom they ascribe to themselves'. 

They conducted three questionnaires, the first involving 533 people, the second 2,223 people and the third 965 people.  

The questionnaires asked people to respond on a scale of 1 to 7 to a series of statements, to test their 'spiritual superiority'.  

Example statements include 'I am more in touch with my senses than most others,' 'I am more aware of what is between heaven and earth than most people,' and 'the world would be a better place if others too had the insights that I have now'. 

The authors also created scales that they expected would correlate with spiritual superiority.

For example, the 'spiritual guidance' scale noted aspects of spiritual superiority, such as talking about one's insights, trying to help others acquire the same wisdom and aspiring to be another's spiritual coach or guru. 

It included statements such as 'I help others whenever possible on their path to greater wisdom and insight' and 'I am patient with others because I understand it takes time to gain the insights that I gained in my life and my education'. 

Another scale, 'supernatural overconfidence', assessed belief in 'one's own paranormal powers' and included some highly far-fetched statements. 

Examples included 'I can send positive energy to others from a distance,' 'I can get in touch with people who are deceased,' 'I can influence the world around me with my thoughts' and 'when I randomly open a book on a page number that is meaningful to me, this is no coincidence'.  

Researchers looked at several forms of spiritual training, such as meditation, aura reading/healing, haptotherapy and reiki. 

Energetic therapy generally covers skills that are classified as paranormal, such as reading auras and regressing to previous lives. 

Participants completed the questionnaires and answered questions about their age, sex, education, religion and spiritual training. 

Some of the respondents in the 3,700-strong pool had never undergone any form of spiritual training at all. 

Researchers found that those who had taken part in forms of meditation scored higher in the questionnaires than those who had no spiritual training. 

Specifically, there was a gradual increase in 'spiritual superiority' from people with no spiritual training, to those with 'mindfulness training and those engaged with energetic therapy.  

People who believed that they had been taught to see auras and regress to past lives (types of energetic therapy) were the most spiritually smug. 

Energetic therapy participants scored around 67 per cent more than people with no training, while those who had undergone mindfulness sessions scored about 50 per cent higher than those with no spiritual training at all.  

'People may aim to become more successful, more respected or loved because of their spiritual development,' the researchers conclude.

'Even if these are not their initial motives, they may discover these benefits along the way. 

'They may get a sense of excitement, or wisdom and serenity, and embrace the ideology that brought them this delight, hence becoming less open-minded towards other schools of thought. 

'In sum, the road to spiritual enlightenment may yield the exact same mundane distortions that are all too familiar in social psychology, such as self-enhancement, illusory superiority, closed-mindedness, and hedonism (clinging to positive experiences) under the guise of alleged "higher" values.'  

Researchers had been inspired to apply insights from social psychology to the work of Chögyam Trungpa (1939-1987), a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master.  

According to Trungpa, ‘there are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centred version of spirituality.

'We can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques,' he said.   

The study has been published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. 

Kate Cohen on why America needs more atheists

My wife, who is even more of an avid atheist than I am, gave me an article she'd torn out of American Atheist, the publication of (no big surprise) the American Atheists organization, which she belongs to. 

The article, "Why I Call Myself an Atheist," was by Kate Cohen, who wrote We of Little Faith, a book I've blogged about here and here. I liked the article, but couldn't find it online, probably because American Atheists doesn't want people to be able to read stuff in their publication without joining the organization.

But in searching for the article, I came across a piece in the Washington Post by Cohen, where she is a contributing columnist. It was great also. So here's some excerpts from "America doesn't need more God. It needs more atheists." That's a sentiment I heartily agree with.

I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.

I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.

I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.

I thought of him as a fiction.

Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

(1) The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.

(2) The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

(3) Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

(4) Child rape. War. Etc.

And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.

...Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!

But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.

...Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.

Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.

Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.

My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.

We need citizens like that.

Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.

Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.

We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.

Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.

Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God,” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”

So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell” that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.

Whatever the case, in 2022, Gallup found that 81 percent of Americans believe in God, the lowest percentage yet recorded. This year, when it gave respondents the option of saying they’re not sure, it found that only 74 percent believe in God, 14 percent weren’t sure, and 12 percent did not believe.

...Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.

“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,” “you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”

Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.

...Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.

No wonder we are “the most politically active group in American politics today,” according to political scientist Ryan Burge, interpreting data from the Cooperative Election Study.

That’s right: Atheists take more political action — donating to campaigns, protesting, attending meetings, working for politicians — than any other “religious” group. And we vote. In his study on this data, sociologist Evan Stewart noted that atheists were about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated respondents.

We also vote far more than most religiously unaffiliated people. That’s what distinguishes atheists from the “nones” — and what I didn’t realize at first.

Atheists haven’t just checked out of organized religion. (Indeed, we may not have.) We haven’t just rejected belief in God. (Though, obviously, that’s the starting point.) Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.

I want to be clear: There are clergy members and congregations all across this country working to do good, not waiting for God to answer their prayers or assuming that God meant for the globe to get hotter. You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.

...Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?

Peel back the layers of abstinence-only or marriage-centered or anti-homosexual sex education and you find religion. “Don’t say gay” laws, laws denying trans kids medical care, school-library book bans and even efforts to suppress the teaching of inconvenient historical facts — motivated by religion.

And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.

...In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)

So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?

If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.

But if you go further: You’ll be doing something good for your country.

Why Christians believe in the resurrection is why other people believe in gurus

Recently I got an email from Gary Mason, a former evangelical Christian turned religious skeptic, who shared with me a marvelous approach to arguing against anyone who believes there is solid evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

The post is titled "Best Method to Defeat Evangelical Apologists: The Ghost Buster Counter-Apologetics Technique." 

Since I've never believed in the resurrection, though I dabbled with believing in the historical Jesus briefly during my college days when I got involved with a crazed Greek yoga teacher who blended West and East in his Christananda ashram (the 1960s were weird), at first I thought Mason's post didn't have much relevance for me.

But after reading it, I realized that the reason evangelical Christians believe in the resurrection -- because they feel the spirit of Jesus within them -- is the same reason members of the India-based organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, believe that their guru is guiding them from within.

They feel the guru's spirit. More accurately, they imagine that a sensation within their consciousness is evidence for a massive metaphysical and supernatural assumption: a divine being is communicating with them.

So it's interesting that while Christianity and Sant Mat, the umbrella term for the religious philosophy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas and similar groups -- Sant Mat means "path of the saints" -- have very different core teachings, the basis for believing in those core beliefs is quite similar.

Mason argues that there are two main pillars supporting a belief that Jesus was resurrected, which obviously is very important, if not absolutely essential, to being a traditional Christian: the historical record and an inner communication with the spirit of Jesus.

He points out that the historical record is very weak as regards the resurrection. 

Yet with all this evidence, Saul did not believe in the Resurrection. Really? Dozens if not hundreds  of dead saints were “raised to life” out of their graves on that first Easter Sunday, but Saul still doubted? Was he an idiot? It took a “heavenly vision” three years later to finally convince him.

What about the rest of Jerusalem’s Jews? Thousands greeted Jesus on Palm Sunday as the new King of Israel, but according to the Book of Acts, only 120 of them were still followers of “The  Way” on the morning of Pentecost. So even the Christian Scriptures provide evidence that the overwhelming majority of the people of Jerusalem were not impressed by the evidence for the Resurrection. Why? Were most first century Jews idiots?

Many Christian apologists say there is  another, more sinister, reason why most Jews did not believe. They quote Paul in Acts 28: Jews are a calloused, hard-hearted people who have closed their eyes and ears to the truth. That is why most of them did not, and still do not today, believe the Resurrection evidence. (They are evil.) God has therefore turned his back on the Jews and offered salvation to the Gentiles. Gentiles will believe the (strong) evidence.  

Ok… But what about the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Hindus, and other non Christian theists do not believe the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? No public university history textbook on planet earth lists the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact. Is everyone calloused and hard-hearted against Christianity’s “strong evidence”? Is that why all non Christians, Jews and Gentiles, do not believe in the historicity of the Resurrection? 

This leaves the feeling Christians have that Jesus lives on within them. 

This is why skeptics should not debate evangelical Christians regarding the historical evidence for the Resurrection. It is a waste of everyone’s time. The real issue everyone should focus on is the evangelical belief: “The Testimony of the Holy Spirit”. All Christians believe that the spirit of Jesus  (“the Holy Spirit”) dwells (lives) inside each true Christian. However, evangelicals take it a step  further. Evangelicals believe that they can perceive Jesus’ presence within them and that Jesus’s spirit, living within them, communicates with them in a non-audible voice, giving them life guidance on a daily basis. Evangelicals believe they can feel the presence of Jesus inside their bodies!

Well, that's exactly what many fundamentalist devotees believe is true of the guru who initiated them into Sant Mat: the guru, who is viewed as God in Human Form, guides them just like Jesus on a daily basis, and they can feel his inner presence. 

Mason sums up his position at the end of the post:

Conclusion: Evangelical apologists claim that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very strong, as strong if not stronger than the evidence for any other major event in Antiquity. But no one who believes that Caesar crossed the Rubicon believes that the spirit of Caesar dwells within him, testifying to him of the historicity of the Rubicon crossing in a still, small voice!

For evangelicals to claim that they can objectively evaluate the historical evidence for Jesus’ alleged bodily  resurrection is ludicrous. They are hopelessly biased by the delusion that the ghost of the man in question lives within them.  

Belief that a spirit (ghost) lives inside you, dear Christian, is a delusion. It is nothing more than an ancient superstition. Superstitions are for children, not adults. 

Evangelicals for the most part are good, kind-hearted people but their delusion of a ghost living  inside them, a ghost who gives them life guidance on every facet of life, including politics and social issues, is dangerous for our society and the world.

We must do all we can to help our evangelical friends and neighbors see that their invisible best friend, whom they believe lives inside them and communicates with them, is no more real than the imaginary friend of a lonely child. Jesus is dead, friends. Ghosts are not real. 

Dear Evangelical apologist:

1. You believe the ghost of the man whose resurrection is in question lives inside you, communicating with you in a still, small voice.

2. You appeal to consensus expert opinion only when it supports your worldview (e.g., the historicity of Jesus) and reject it when it doesn’t (e.g., Darwinian evolution).

How can you expect us to believe that you are capable of objectively evaluating the historical evidence for the Resurrection when the perceived ghost inside of you is given more credence than consensus expert opinion? Don’t these two facts strongly indicate that you are hopelessly biased?

I am trying to help you see the folly of your superstitions, my friend.  You are indoctrinating little children and gullible adults to believe in capricious ghouls who punish people for what they believe.  Thought crimes!  You threaten children with eternal torture simply for what they believe.  How horrific.

Yet, the “evidence” for your belief system is the perceived presence of an invisible, inaudible ghost living inside of you.  You have no objective evidence that the spirit (ghost) of Jesus lives inside of you.  None. A small child who has invented an imaginary friend reports the same subjective feelings of comfort and security. Please see the light of reason and rational thinking.

Amen to that, Brother Mason. Read his entire post for a fuller understanding of his arguments. 

Anyone have opinions on the Soami Bagh line of gurus?

I've communicated via email with someone who had questions about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the organization I was a member of for 35 years. Now this person is wondering if any visitors to this blog have an opinion about the Soami Bagh branch of Radha Soami.

Below is part of what they said to me. Leave a comment on this post if you have some experience with Soami Bagh.

I've become a Radha Soami skeptic, but for those who aren't, I just noticed that the Soami Bagh web site has some interesting books and other publications available online. Like, the Phelps Notes, which if I recall correctly, was viewed as sort of an underground, "forbidden fruit" book by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Naturally I had a copy, but gave it away at some point.

Can you please put a post up on your blog asking others what sort of experiences that they have had with the Soami Bagh branch of Radha Soami, the so-called parent line?

 

As I have previously mentioned, I am still holding out some hope that there may be a real Sant Sat Guru someplace. But before I go trekking all the way to India, I was curious to hear from some others who may have already gone to Soami Bagh before me.

 

And just so that I am clear, I am asking specifically about the Soami Bagh line. And not the Dayal Bagh line. The Dayal Bagh line is much bigger, but I do not feel any draw towards them.

If you're trying to control your mind, who is the "you" doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that. 

For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality? 

In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself." 

This sort of issue, or problem, pops up frequently in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. In a chapter I read today, "Ego dissolution," he talks about the epistemic agent model, which typically creates the notion of a knowing self.

I realize that epistemic agent is an unfamiliar term for most people. It certainly is for me. These examples help us understand what Metzinger means by this.

Let us consider a few examples of times when we have an epistemic agent model: the conscious experience of (1) being a thinking self, (2) being a self in the very act of attending, and (3) being a meditator attempting to "have an insight" (e.g., to recognize her true nature).

Let's begin with the first example. Whenever you try to to mentally calculate, to think logically, or to actively form a new concept, you experience yourself as an epistemic agent, as a thinking self that wants to understand something, as an entity that wants to create new knowledge. 

You have a goal, and you act to reach the goal. Mental calculation is effortful, as is forming a new concept or attempting to create a novel philosophical argument. When you do it, you feel like you must control your own mind, and -- if you're successful -- an inner experience of ownership and agency arises.

This experience results from a special form of deliberate, goal-directed mental action, which in turn leads to the transient combination of experiential qualities: a feeling of mental effort, plus a sense of ownership and agency. Perhaps falsely, this combination of experiential qualities can be described as a specific, nonbodily sense of self.

...What about the second example of a context in which we have an epistemic agent model? If you are not thinking at all, but instead carefully attending to the sensations in your feet as you slowly walk, to the sound of a bell vanishing into silence, or to the self-generated sound-shape of a mantra in your mind doing the same, then you have an epistemic agent model.

There is something that you want to perceive and experience as precisely as possible. Again, you try to gently control the dynamics of an inner process, but this time by optimizing for precision. There is also a quality of motivation, maybe even earnestness. In the carefulness of your attuning, there is a sense of effort, which may be more or less subtle.

A goal state has been selected, and the conscious self in the act of attending actively pursues this goal state -- this is our second example of what it means for the self to be an epistemic agent. The self is active, and it wants to know something. It wants to realize the goal state in its own mind. 

And here is the third example. If you are a meditator and have read about fancy theories involving recognition of the "true self" or the effortlessness of spacious awareness, if you're expecting to learn to see your own true nature and "let go" in some profound way, if you intellectually know the difference between dual mindfulness and nondual mindfulness, then you are in serious trouble.

You have become infected with a new kind of goal state, something that can apparently be known and realized. Now it is almost impossible to prevent the birth of a new and particularly clever epistemic agent model in your mind. This time, it purports to want to know pure, nondual awareness -- it is trying to touch the elephant as directly as possible while still cleverly sustaining the blind toucher's own existence.

I realize that the passages I've shared above aren't the easiest reading. But they're important reading. Because what Metzinger has done here -- he's both an experienced meditator and an academic philosopher -- is show that the sense of self or ego is present when thinking logically, when perceiving mindfully, and when seeking one's true nature in meditation.

During the 20 years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've been told many times by commenters that I think too much and that's why I haven't succeeded in my meditation. This assumes, of course, that there's a big difference between thinking and meditating successfully.

Metzinger doesn't see that difference. He's focused on what is typically common to thinking, perceiving, and meditating: the presence of a self that seeks to know something.

The closed-eyed meditator sitting motionless in the lotus posture on a cushion may seem to be engaged in a very different activity from a wide-eyed mathematician scribbling equations on a blackboard, but what unites them is a self that seeks to know something. 

There's an alternative, says Metzinger on the chapter's last page. He says that sometimes the experience of pure awareness leads to a state of "ego dissolution."

In many cases, what dissolves is precisely the inner image of the knowing self, the earnest meditator, or the epistemic agent model in your brain. In almost all cases and for almost all human beings, this epistemic agent model functions as the unit of identification. 

Whenever we have one, we automatically experience ourselves as being this thinking self (just as Descartes did), as being the invisible entity that controls the focus of attention, as being the entity that is curious and longs for pleasant surprises, and as being an informavore who always wants to know more.

The phenomenal character of MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience], by contrast, lacks the craving for novelty and the two elements of dynamic knowingness and egoic identification. MPE's frequently seem to break their inner connection, weakening the process of identification with the fictitious knowing self.

If there is knowledge, it is no longer egoic knowledge.

Our mental experience isn't always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences. 

You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing.

It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.

Part of the simulation includes the capacity to imbue certain characters, human beings in our case, with a conception that they are having conscious experiences. Also, that they are free to choose one thing -- a thought, action, whatever -- rather than another thing, even though the simulation is both doing the choosing and creatingnthe sensation of free will.

Which, in characters like Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and other deniers of free will, is overridden by a sensation of not having free will, just to make the simulation more interesting.

But even if we don't believe that we're characters in a simulation (I consider this unlikely), there's still good reason to consider that much of what we mentally experience isn't actually what is happening in our deeper mental reality.

Thomas Metzinger explains this in the "Meditation and Nonmeditation" chapter in his provocative book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure consciousness. 

According to the reports of about 500 people who described such an experience in sufficient detail to be included in Metzinger's book, pure consciousness or pure awareness (same thing) happens spontaneously. It can't be forced, since any forcing introduces a subject-object duality that destroys the possibility of experiencing pure awareness in its simple unified clarity.

In other words, we can be it, but we can't observe it. 

However this raises the question of where an experience of pure awareness comes from if it is uncaused, which is what's implied by the notion of spontaneity. Metzinger says:

On a physical or functional level of description, to call something "spontaneous" means to describe it as uncaused and lawless -- and therefore doing so without argument or evidence could be seen as a form of hand-waving or deliberate obscurantism. 

If we try to be intellectually honest, set all metaphysics aside, and stay as close as possible to contemplative experience itself, then the term "spontaneity" can only refer to a phenomenological kind of spontaneity.

There is an experience of spontaneity, and this is what has to be taken seriously. As always, jumping to strong metaphysical conclusions is a way of not taking your own experience seriously.

That last sentence is interesting. It deserves careful consideration.

I'm not capable of doing that right now. So I'll simply agree with Metzinger in an intuitive fashion that he does seem to be correct in saying that when we make more of our direct phenomenal experience than is contained within the experience itself ("I felt a great sense of peace. That must be the presence of God!") we're discounting our experience in favor of a metaphysical or conceptual conclusion.

Here's what Metzinger says in the following paragraphs. This fits with my understanding of why we believe we have free will, though there's no evidence of this other than the belief.

The phenomenological fact that nondual MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] often appears spontaneously and effortlessly, that it has an "ahistoric" quality and cannot be fabricated by applying a mental technique, can be explained with reference to the fact that most of its enabling conditions in the brain are fully unconscious.

We do not experience them. Science may be able to find and isolate these causally enabling conditions, but the brain itself doesn't represent them in its conscious model of reality. There is a parallel case in the phenomenology of volition, of suddenly "willing" something.

Many people proceed from the phenomenological fact that, say, the consciously experienced intention to now move their right arm and reach for a beautiful flower seems to spontaneously occur in their mind, "out of the blue" as it were, and interpret this as proof of free will in a strong sense: as demonstrating the existence of what philosophers call "ultimate origination."

Ultimate origination would mean the capacity to start a new causal chain of events in your mind by an uncaused act of will, an act coming from outside the network of dependent origination. But for the experience of free will, as well as for the experience of spontaneously occurring pure awareness, the same principle holds: 

From the fact that you experience something as uncaused, it does not follow that it actually was uncaused.

...Some intelligent systems control their own behavior based on a model of themselves as agents in a strong sense. To successfully control their own behavior -- which may be bodily or mental -- they use a conscious image of themselves as an entity that possesses the capacity for goal selection and ultimate origination. 

Other intelligent systems don't do this. The difference is important. 

We can think of embodied systems intelligently moving through the world, automatically updating and constantly improving their inner portrait of reality, controlling what they will know and what they will not know.

But some of these systems -- for example, self-aware human beings -- sometimes may use a model of themselves as an epistemic agent, now achieving the same goal by using a special computational device. They would experience themselves as possessing free will, as being agents capable of initiating new causal chains out of the blue.

These systems would have an ego in a strong sense. 

Negative emotions are just fine. I'll be angry if you don't agree.

Proving (sort of) that the cosmos agrees with the theme of this blog post, about an hour ago I finished episode 8 of the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu, which I belatedly started watching after seeing Elisabeth Moss in another streaming series and wanting to see more of her acting.

The Handmaid's Tale, of course, is an adaptation of the dystopian book by the same name written by Margaret Atwood. Women are treated extremely badly in the nation of Gilead, which used to be the United States until religious zealots managed to take over the country, motivated by a precipitous decline in birthrates for a reason I'm unsure about.

Hopefully fertile Handmaids are raped by male Commanders while their wives assist, jusifying this horrendous act on a twisted interpretation of Biblical scripture that says, basically, that if a woman can't conceive a child, it's fine to bring in another woman for that purpose.

By episode 8 in the fourth season, some Handmaids have escaped Gilead and made it to Canada, a country that hasn't been infected with the same virus of religious fundamentalism. Some of these women are having a group therapy session headed up by Moira. June is a well-known Handmaid, the main character played by Moss, who has endured lots of atrocities in Gilead prior to reaching Canada.

Here's a bit of dialog after several women in the group talk about how much they hate the men who raped them, describing how they'd like to get back at them and their wives by, for example, cutting off the Commander's penis and sexually abusing his wife with a broomstick.

Moira: We've talked about this. Anger is a valid emotion. It's necessary, important even, to heal. But we can't live there.

June: Why not? Why does healing have to be the only goal? Why can't we be as furious as we feel? Don't we have that right?

This interchange struck me as being in line, pretty much, with an article I read this morning in the June 8, 2024 issue of New Scientist, titled in the print edition: "The happiness trap: The idea that we should always look on the bright side has gone too far and may now be damaging our well-being." I'll share a PDF file of the article. Here's some excerpts.
Download The happiness trap

Our tendency to eschew the darker aspects of human experience isn’t new, especially in Western societies. Longstanding rules about how we display our emotions have led people to develop strategies to avoid negative ones, says Susan David at Harvard Medical School, who calls this the “tyranny of positivity”.

...Social media and the positively curated images of ourselves we create online add to this pressure to be happy, says Brock Bastian at the University of Melbourne in Australia, who was part of the research team. “When we are not willing to accept negative emotions as a part of life, this can mean that we may see negative emotions as a sign there is something wrong with us,” he says. In other words, with an overemphasis on positivity, we are more likely to perceive normal emotions, such as sadness and anxiety, as signs of a mental health condition needing treatment.

Research by Maya Tamir at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem highlights another reason why excess positivity may be toxic. She and her colleagues studied more than 2300 people from eight countries to explore whether the secret of happiness lies in experiencing more pleasant emotions or, as Aristotle argued, in experiencing the emotions we want to experience.

They found that, regardless of culture, greater mental well-being is linked with feeling emotions that we believe are appropriate to our situation, rather than just having positive emotions regardless of context – “feeling right” as opposed to “feeling good”, is how they put it.

We should be concerned if we don’t feel angry when we witness someone being exploited, for example. Such emotional episodes, while experientially unpleasant, indicate that we are ready to behave in accordance with our values. For Tamir, emotions can be thought of as a toolbox that helps us attain those goals that are important to us.

For about three weeks, ever since President Biden had a horrible performance in his debate with Donald Trump, I've been obsessively anxious about Biden being able to defeat Trump in the November election. I'd pour over the latest polls. I'd pay attention to news about the pressure being put on Biden to withdraw from the race. It was just about all I could write about on my other two blogs. 

I was feeling a bunch of negative emotions: worry, anxiety, fear, plus others difficult to name.

The prospect of Trump getting another four years to wreak havoc on our democracy was hard, if not impossible, for me to deal with. Talking yesterday with friends who are members of the monthly discussion group my wife and I belong to made me feel a bit better, because all eleven of us agreed that Biden should withdraw, as I wrote about in a HinesSight blog post. 

Then the news broke this morning that Biden had withdrawn from the presidential race, shortly before endorsing his vice-president, Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket. I was so happy! Not totally, because I realized that Harris still faces an uphill battle to overcome the lead Trump has both in national polls and those of battleground states.

But I sure felt much better.

I'd done what I could to put pressure on Biden -- sending messages to the White House asking him to withdraw, contacting my congressional delegation (Oregon's two senators and our representative) asking them to tell Biden to do this, writing blog posts about the urgent need for Biden to withdraw and sharing them as widely as possible.

If I hadn't felt so anxious and fearful about Biden's chance of beating Trump, my motivation to do those things would have been much less. So, yes, negative emotions often have an important role to play. They alert us of wrongs that need righting, of problems that need fixing, of injustices that need overturning. 

You can't know your "true self," but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments.

All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.)

Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and other teachings that talk about pure awareness from the phenomenology, the actual experience, of people who report an acquaintance with this aspect of consciousness.

His thesis, which makes sense, is that we'll have a better chance of understanding the nature of consciousness if we can reduce consciousness to its barest, simplest form. That's pure awareness, where "pure" doesn't necessarily mean being without content, since pure awareness can be recognized as a backdrop to everyday sensory perceptions.

Metzinger likens this to how we may feel upon awakening from sleep. There's a moment just after our eyes open, or a bit before, when we're unsure who we are, where we are, or when we are. All there is, is the potential for knowing those things later: I'm Brian, in my Oregon bedroom, early in the morning on a July day. 

He writes:

Pure awareness knowing itself is an entirely nonconceptual affair. "Recognizing" pure awareness is not a form of active, conceptual thought, and it does not involve the quality of ownership. In and of itself, it is entirely silent, free of mental action.

...There is no accompanying thought like "Now it is aware of itself!" or "Now I actually am pure awareness that directly knows itself." The phenomenology of pure awareness knowing itself also never contains some knowing self quietly saying "I think this must be it!" to itself, or asking "Is this really it? This is too simple..."

So the beauty of pure awareness is that it involves zero effort to realize it. There is nothing to do. In fact, any effort at all during meditation or at any other time destroys the possibility of realizing pure awareness. It's like a bird that alights on your hand only if you do nothing to make this happen. 

This means that every attempt to willfully fix attention on the quality of awareness per se destroys its originally nondual nature, the baseline quality that William James called 'sciousness,' simply because it reintroduces subject/object structure.

Pure awareness recedes from attention.

We can now see more clearly why this must be the case, and how the underlying principle also holds for reflexive MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience]. Every effortful attempt to fixate attention on MPE, thereby turning it into a reified target of introspection, automatically creates a subtle hallucination, an inner image of a goal state to be reached -- and an epistemic agent model that is directed at this goal state. 

Imagining pure awareness knowing itself is not the same thing as pure awareness actually coming to rest in itself because the latter lacks any form of agency whatsoever. 

...But that which reports experiences, that which perhaps boasts about things that happened during meditation, that which may be slightly complacent when speaking about "stages" and "states" that it has known -- that entity is always something else.

It is an ego; it has personality traits, psychological conditioning, and emotional needs -- and it has had important insights that it feels an urge to share. Perhaps the urge and the complacency are parts of some last-ditch escape strategy?

Maybe there is even a new personality disorder to be discovered, "spiritual teacher personality disorder."

...Be that as it may, my main point is that because verbal communication is something that happens between egos, in a space that opens up between embodied selves in a social context, the nonegoic quality of "pure awareness that knows itself" would never find a place in it.

Makes sense. Consciousness obviously can't know itself, since consciousness is how we know everything else. If consciousness could know itself, actually it wouldn't be consciousness, but a separate object. Awareness and consciousness are the same thing.

So if the true self (Advaita) or true non-self (Buddhism) are considered to be pure awareness, then it isn't possible for us to know the self, but only to be the self. 

The quality of mental agency is really the one that leads to contraction; the sense of effort that comes from hallucinating a goal-state -- the specific experiential quality emerging from the process of quashing prediction error on the mental level -- is what counts.

Whenever you identify with pure awareness, none of this is the case: In a way, you are like a conscious organism running a new operating system. This organism is now employing a different kind of ontology for segmenting reality, navigating the world under a nonegoic unit of identification. If this is correct the remaining MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] mode should be characterized by an all-pervading quality of effortlessness.

Using our new tools, we can also say that the phenomenology sometimes described as "true self" is one in which the experience of knowing is no longer contracted. It is one example of the shift from the first-person perspective of an active, information-hungry self to the zero-person perspective of knowingness itself -- that is, to an uncontracted version of the phenomenal signature of knowing.

The first-person perspective is the perspective that you take when you ascribe conscious experiences to yourself using the first-person pronoun: I myself am having this thought, I hear music from a distance, I am observing my breath, or I am trying to meditate.

...Your first-person perspective, on the other hand, is your very own, individual perspective on the world; it is what makes conscious experience subjective, what makes it seem to be intrinsically tied to a single, knowing self. 

...Pure awareness, whenever it has transformed into the all-encompassing nonegoic unit of identification, strongly resembles what Thomas Nagel called "the objective self" or the "true self," which he described as "the subject of a perspectiveless conception of reality."

...Thus, what was previously outside becomes a new inside. World and body gain a certain quality of virtuality and interiority, for they are no longer independent of consciousness.

An atheist had a near-death experience that challenged his spiritual skepticism

Near-death experiences fascinate me. Maybe a bit less now than they used to, as the older I get, the more accepting I am of the undeniable reality that I'm not going to live forever. 

But I used to devour books about near-death experiences with relish back when I really didn't like the thought of dying. 

Recently I read a review in the Washington Post of a book that I would have loved to read in the days I was more afraid of death than I am now, "Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died."

That's a gift link from my digital subscription. Hopefully it will work for you. If not, this PDF file of the review is another way to read it.
Download Sebastian Junger’s ‘In My Time of Dying’ reviewed - The Washington Post

Here's some excerpts to whet your appetite for reading the entire review of In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

The eventual diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery that had caused a massive abdominal hemorrhage, with enough blood loss to bring Junger perilously close to death. As surgeons worked to save him, Junger experienced the presence of his late father, who invited his son to join him. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to say. “Don’t fight it.”

Junger, a confirmed atheist and an adherent of the scientific method, had been raised by a physicist (his father) and a painter (his mother). His upbringing had left little room for a spiritual experience like this one, which turns out to be the central conundrum of this book and, I’d venture, his life. The meeting with his father was understandably unnerving. “He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him.” But it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only visited him but opened the door to the idea that an afterlife might actually exist.

Really? Show me the proof. Oh, you can’t. Well, how can something be true if you can’t prove it? Ted Kaptchuk, a well-regarded Harvard physician, once told a New Yorker writer that he’d always “believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual and belief,” adding: “All ideas that make scientists scream.”

...Can we prove an afterlife exists? No. Might one exist? Junger gives us reason to believe in that possibility. In any case, how lucky we are that Junger survived and that we’re able to join him on another mind-blowing adventure — this time to a place all of us will one day visit.

I have no doubt that Junger truly did have the experiences he describes that followed a harrowing medical emergency.

The big question, of course, is what to make of his visions. That's an unsettled question, though there's reason to believe that near-death experiences are a product of a brain on the edge of dying. Who knows for sure, though?

No one, including Sebastian Junger.

God didn't save Trump from being killed. But Trump's devotees think so.

On Saturday a 20 year old man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, tried to assassinate Donald Trump with an AR-15 rifle for a reason that likely never will be known, since Crooks was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers and left no indication why he fired numerous shots from a rooftop near the rally where Trump was speaking.

As I said in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog yesterday, "It's good Trump wasn't killed. Now let's defeat the S.O.B." 

There's no one in recent American politics who has been more toxic than Trump.

Trump never tires of attacking people who fail to kiss his ass with sufficient enthusiasm. In his first term he caused hundreds of thousands of needless Covid deaths by failing to endorse public health measures that would have saved those lives. His legal problems stem from him doing illegal things. He had sex with a porn star a few months after his wife gave birth to their son Barron, then tried to cover that up shortly before the 2016 election in a fashion that earned him 34 felony convictions. He encouraged the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol and did nothing to stop it.

This just scratches the surface of all the crap Trump has dumped upon our country in his boundless enthusiasm for destroying all that is admirable about our democracy. Republican politicians don't like it when us Democrats call Trump an existential threat to democracy.

But that's the truth, and it needs to be spoken even more loudly after the assassination attempt, because this likely will garner Trump some sympathy points in upcoming polls.

That's my political attitude. I've also got some theological issues to discuss with the Christian fundamentalists who comprise a large share of Trump's base of support. Also with Trump himself.

A bullet passed through the upper part of one of Trump's ears, leaving him bloodied but otherwise unhurt. 

This close call has led Christian faithful, along with Trump (who hasn't shown any sign of being genuinely religious), to claim that God saved Trump's life. A CNN story says:

“It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”

That sentiment is one Trump has truly internalized, according to some of those who have spoken to him in recent days, and one Trump, who is not an especially religious or spiritual man, has reiterated during the aftermath of Saturday’s traumatic event.

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump said during an interview with the New York Post Sunday. “By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God, I’m still here.”

It’s a conviction that will certainly reinforce the messianic imagery of Trump long promoted by his most ardent supporters and the evangelical communities that have stood by him for years. Indeed, outside the venue Saturday, as rallygoers were evacuated, they passed a truck emblazoned with images of Trump seated in front of Jesus, whose hands rested on the former president’s shoulders.

Obviously I don't think God saved Trump, since I don't believe God even exists. But let's assume for the sake of theological argument that there is a God who intervenes in human affairs, and that this is the God of the Ten Commandments. 

Trump has broken many of the commandments. He lies incessantly. He's committed adultery. He cheats  people. He puts himself first in almost every situation.

All in all, Trump is a despicable human being. There's very little good that can be said about him. Those closest to him know this, which is why so many of those he appointed to high positions during his presidency now refuse to endorse his bid for another term.

So why would God stop a bullet from seriously injuring Trump, while allowing a bullet to kill a valiant firefighter, Corey Comperatore, in the audience who died trying to protect his family? An AP story says:

The former fire chief who was killed at a Pennsylvania rally for Donald Trump spent his final moments diving down in front of his family, protecting them from the gunfire that rang out Saturday during an assassination attempt against the former president.

Corey Comperatore’s quick decision to use his body as a shield against the bullets flying toward his wife and daughter rang true to the close friends and neighbors who loved and respected the proud 50-year-old Trump supporter, noting that the Butler County resident was a “man of conviction.”

“He’s a literal hero. He shoved his family out of the way, and he got killed for them,” said Mike Morehouse, who lived next to Comperatore for the last eight years. “He’s a hero that I was happy to have as a neighbor.”

I haven't heard any Christian Republicans speak about the bravery of Comperatore. They're fixated on the bullet that passed through Trump's ear, not the bullet that killed Comperatore. Partly, I'm sure, this is because it is so difficult for a religious believer to explain why God would allow a horrible person to survive, while allowing a good person to die.

If God is that stupid, I'm proud to be an atheist. Well, I'm proud to be an atheist regardless, but idiotic displays of religiosity make me especially pleased that I no longer believe in supernatural nonsense. 

Oh, by the way, Trump hasn't called the family of Comperatore, though Biden tried to talk with them. This shows what an uncaring egotistical jerk he is. It's always all about him, not other people. Trump has the empathy of a rock. 

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth.

I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light.

Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people do this for their own psychological reasons.

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger addresses this subject in one of the longer chapters in his book, The Elephant and the Blind. It's titled "Emptiness and Fullness."

Emptiness, by the way, is defined by Metzinger in its usual sense of voidness, not in the Buddhist sense of things lacking inherent existence. He makes this clear early on in the chapter. So emptiness can mean an openness to knowing in the context of pure awareness, the subject of his book.

Many of the meditators who completed Metzinger's survey about their meditative experiences claimed that they were able to overcome past patterns of knowing and thinking, arriving at a state of "epistemic openness" or emptiness.

In this chapter, Metzinger talks at length about an obstacle to this, narrative self-deception. He notes that our search for meaning is a foundation for that sort of self-deception. For we imbue events with a flavor that doesn't exist in them as they are in themselves.

As we have seen, the first of these deep needs is to develop a successful and sustainable strategy of meaning-making -- to find a more permanent solution to the constant struggle to make sense of life events. This need is shared not only by meditators, but by all those who are not existentially indifferent.

...One simple conceptual point to make at the outset is that words and sentences have meaning, but events don't. Events just happen. Events as such, as well as whole chains of events connecting birth and death, are intrinsically meaningless  -- but not in the emotionally negative sense that we may attribute to the idea of life as a whole being meaningless. 

So we humans have to supply the meaning to events in our life. The basic way we do this is through telling stories to ourselves.

Human beings are storytellers, and they stabilize the fabric of their long-term self-model by creating a permanent inner monologue. They identify themselves with Harding's "little one" (chapter 8), the entity constantly chattering on about all its extremely interesting and important perceptions and thoughts and emotions to keep the long-term self alive. There is no better way to understand this fact, to observe its continuous fight for survival under the microscope of mindfulness, than to participate in a silent meditation retreat.

For many people, their spiritual or religious path becomes an important part of their life story.

A story encourages us to hallucinate cause-and-effect relationships between events in our narrative ("Nothing ever happens by chance!") and detect patterns in the way they affected us ("I have always been interested in this!"). 

Most of all, a life story offers a chance to insert a single, overarching theme that holds everything together, a normative metacontent that allows us to morally evaluate ourselves and others with the goal of enhancing and sustaining our sense of self-worth.

The romanticism of "being on a path" is a good example of this. Now we can judge, negotiate, plan for the future, and thereby continuously stabilize the long-term self model. There is a way of life, a general theme. The story has a beginning and a possible end; it has characters, episodes, a setting -- and like a dream that has become fully lucid, it even has a plot that can apparently be controlled.

Metzinger says that for spiritual seekers, all this gives rise to a sense of having found something.

Many of us try to find something: something that allows us to live in an insane world without going insane ourselves. Something that creates coherence.

...My first point is that, for many committed practitioners, the core motivation allowing them to sustain a regular practice over many years may consist to a considerable degree in the fact that they have found something, that they have adopted a certain belief system (or joined a group or spiritual movement, identified with a certain lineage or teacher, etc.), and not solely in the intrinsic force of the pure-awareness experience itself. This belief system, the sense of community, the acceptance of an authority, and the ongoing project of making-meaning may be among the major sources of motivation. 

All that is fine. It helps us to feel grounded in a world that often seems to lack any firm foundation. But there are some downsides, including narrative self-deception.

In meditation, as elsewhere in life, what we experience isn't some mythical "things as they actually are," but things as we conceive them to be in the context of the story that our mind fashions about the life we've lived, are living, and will live in the future.

The autobiographical self-model is not a thing, but rather a process. It is also not a little man in the head. This process is mostly subpersonal: to a large extent, it is not something that you do, but an automatic process taking place under the hood, in your unconscious brain. The process constantly tries to minimize surprise and to keep a certain layer in your self-model as coherent as possible (namely, the layer that portrays your life as a whole).

...The model expands into time, creating a past and a future. Whenever this layer is conscious, it can function as what we have termed the "unit of identification." You may think that you simply are your life story, which springs from the ongoing search for thematic stability. But you may also begin to hallucinate an observer, an active narrator, or a stable protagonist within the story itself -- an entity that reflects on and monitors the whole process.

...The good news is that there is probably no better tool than the practice of meditation itself to help us really understand the mechanisms of self-deception that continuously express themselves as the subtle workings of one's own mind.

...Classical insight meditation, for example, consists in nothing other than observing the actual process of narrative self-deception at work: Every single thought arising is an attempt to generate a new self-model, to become "temporally thick," to escape the wholeness of the present moment. 

...Life just happens -- and meditation practice is a perfect way to become aware of that fact.

 

Feeling you know isn't the same as knowing

One of the benefits of reading a book about pure awareness by a philosopher, instead of someone who identifies with a religion or spiritual practice, is that you get a more realistic perspective.

A good example is that Thomas Metzinger, the author of The Elephant and the Blind, speaks in an early chapter about the difference between a feeling of knowing and actual knowing.

This should be obvious to anyone, which really is everyone, who has confidently believed that something was true until they learned that it wasn't. 

Metzinger calls this the E-fallacy. His glossary defines it this way:

A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that a consciously experienced feeling of knowing is a reliable indicator of actually possessing knowledge. 

As such, verbal reports referring to a phenomenal signature of knowing or an intuitive sense of "just knowing" do not imply or license any theoretical claims about consciousness itself, the metaphysical nature of reality, the "true" self, and so on, because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification. 

A related error is the C-fallacy.

A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that just because something feels like the very essence of consciousness, it is also a reliable indicator of actually being in touch with consciousness per se. 

As such, verbal reports referring to having experienced an "essence" or "pure consciousness in and of itself" do not imply or license any claims as to the actual existence of such an essence because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification.

This is a theme I've harped on many times over the years, though not in the rather rigorous way Metzinger describes the fallacies. The simpler way I like to put it is along these lines.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own facts. If someone has an experience of God, spirit, soul, heaven, angels, higher consciousness, or whatever, wonderful. Tell us about it. Personal stories are interesting. But don't claim you've grasped an aspect of objective reality unless you can back up that claim with demonstrable evidence. 

A corollary is that you shouldn't get annoyed if someone else asks for that evidence after you've made an objective truth-claim that's based only on your subjective personal experience. 

Metzinger says this in a chapter on "Suchness," a familiar Buddhist concept of what is. 

Before we move on, please recall how the phenomenal experience of knowing does not entail that one really possesses knowledge. A strong and robust experience of knowing, even of absolute certainty, can occur during hallucinations, in dreams, and during psychiatric diseases or epileptic seizures. In chapter 7, we termed this the "E-fallacy."

Equally, the exerience of having "direct" or "immediate" knowledge of what is does not imply any kind of justification or directness from an epistemological perspective. Epistemologically, there is no certainty here. All we have is the phenomenal experience of immediacy, and "suchness" is being used here solely as a phenomenological concept. 

In connection with the experience of suchness, Rob Burbea also has made clear for contemplative practice itself that any remaining form of intuitive realism is an obstacle that must be overcome.

In interpreting all the reports in this chapter, therefore, we must be careful not to jump to overly naive and simplistic interpretations of "direct perception" and the reported phenomenology of nonconceptually seeing what is. The experiences themselves are simply much too interesting.

Experiences are real. For the person having them. For other people, there's no way to know either (1) what the experience really was like for the person having it, or (2) if the experience points to a fact about objective reality.

Someone who is a big fan of Taylor Swift likely will have a marvelous time at one of her concerts. Their experience has a strong chance of being highly memorable, something to be cherished for a lifetime. Someone who can't stand Taylor Swift likely will have a horrible time at one of her concerts. Their experience has a strong chance of being highly forgettable, something to be banished from memory as rapidly as possible. 

It would be crazy to argue that a Taylor Swift concert is either objectively pleasurable or painful. That depends on the experience of every attendee. Same applies to conclusions about the appeal of religions, mystical practices, or spiritual paths. That depends on the experience of every devotee. 

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody is watching the movie of your life, or mine, or anybody's

Every morning I try to read one of the short chapters in Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness -- Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports.

I particularly enjoy passages that intuitively appeal to me, yet rationally challenge my ability to comprehend exactly what Metzinger is saying. Below I'll share an example from the "Nonidentification" chapter. 

First, though, this introductory mention in the chapter of the traditional movie theatre metaphor.

One classic metaphor for this process [of de-identification], found in many places in the popular literature on meditation, is the image of being fully immersed in a movie and then suddenly realizing that you are not the hero, disengaging from the perspective from which the story seems to be told.

Metzinger then says "we can also imagine another scenario," offering a possible variation on the classic metaphor.

Imagine the cinema is dark and completely empty. All the seats are empty. Running on the screen is a movie of someone watching a movie, a person who is deeply immersed in the plot of this movie-in-the-movie most of the time, but who sometimes has glimpses and vague intuitions that she might actually not be the protagonist, but might instead be a passive viewer in some sort of cinema.

Or that she might even be the whole cinema itself. Not seated in the middle, but somehow everywhere. From time to time, the viewer in the movie even has fleeting and slightly complacent philosophical fantasies that she might be some sort of empty space in which the movie becomes aware of itself, or that she might be the beam of light coming from the projector.

Suspended in the dark, as it were, this movie containing the movie-in-the-movie is the only thing that can be seen. But nobody is watching. Now, very slowly, the light is being turned on, in slow motion as it were. The cinema as a whole emerges out of the darkness, slowly fading in, empty seats and all. Now the lights are on. The movie is still running. Nobody sees it. 

I'm not sure if this additional passage from the "Nonidentification" chapter bears on the above modified metaphor, but it sure is provocative. Turns upside down some common assumptions meditators have.

Perhaps you have already discovered how, phenomenologically, it is not we who get identified or fused with some content (e.g., an arising thought)? In my own experience, I find that it is awareness that gets identified.

"We" -- as the agentive sense of self -- come into existence only after the fact, after awareness has already contracted into a specific content (like the mental image of a future goal state to be reached, a subtle feeling of mental effort, the ensuing sense of control, etc.) -- after, as it were, open awareness has already been lost to itself. 

The breakdown is not your fault. You are not the cause, but the effect. You are the way in which the brain explains away something that was slightly unexpected. That "something" is the surprise of suddenly being able to control a part of the world -- your body, your attention, your thoughts. 

Might as well throw in one more passage relating to this theme.

From a scientific perspective, "being conscious" or "appearing" is a property of a complex, internal model in the brain: What really is conscious is simply a certain part of an organism's model of the world, a specific processing layer in its internal model of reality -- which typically also includes the organism itself plus other agents in the world... At the very least, this is a rational and evidence-based theory, one possible view from the outside.

But from the organism's inner perspective, things are very different. The model is transparent; therefore, the representational medium is invisible. Yet this model is all the organism has. This means that what it experiences is experienced not as a world-model or some sort of inner image, but simply as the world itself.

Consciousness is the appearance of a world; there is full immersion, plus the phenomenology of direct realism. In addition, because the internal model is not being experienced as a model, it now is the organism that seems to be conscious, not the world as a whole or some complex image in the organism's head.

Phenomenologically, the property of "being aware" has been contracted. Now, consciousness is something personal. Now you are conscious.

Blind faith is dangerous: 120 devotees of India "godman" killed in stampede

India has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of religious fervor. I'd call that fanaticism, but I'm trying to be fair to India, since that country also is responsible for some of the most sophisticated faiths in the world.

But when I heard about an estimated 120 devotees dying in a stampede after a popular Hindu preacher, Narayan Sakar Hari, had finished his talk ("satsang"), it was the negative side of religiosity that struck my atheist sensibility.

Sure, the story in our local newspaper said:

About 250,000 people gathered for Tuesday’s event in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh state, about 125 miles from the Indian capital, New Delhi, despite permission being granted only for 80,000, according to an initial police report.

So part of the problem was that way too many worshippers were crammed into the meeting location. However, several stories about this tragedy cited a decidedly bizarre reason for the stampede.

A NPR story says:

According to a police complaint filed on Tuesday night, the organizers had sought permission for 80,000 people to attend but around 250,000 turned up at the venue.

"As the preacher left in his car, many rushed to collect dust rising from the path of the vehicle," a religious practice among some Hindus. "Some of those bent over got crushed by the large crowd exiting the venue," the complaint said.

It adds that the event organizers tried to destroy evidence of the stampede by throwing victims' clothes and footwear into neighboring fields.

A Reuters story also mentions dust:

The preacher at the gathering, Suraj Pal Singh, also known as 'Bhole Baba', said in a statement that the stampede was caused by "some anti-social elements" after the event concluded, without elaborating.

 

Police said they were trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the preacher. A group of devotees had organised the event, according to a poster at the site.

 

The preacher's lawyer, A.P. Singh, said Baba had never asked anyone to touch his feet nor did he give anyone the dust touched by his feet, referring to reports in local media which cited these as reasons for the devotees running towards him.

Well, here's an even better suggestion for Baba, the preacher. Tell your devotees that there's nothing miraculous about the dust either stirred up by your car or by your feet. Of course, if you did that, likely your status as a goodman would take a hit. 

Another Reuters story about Baba says:

A massive gathering addressed by an Indian policeman-turned-preacher, considered an incarnation of God by his followers, turned horribly wrong on Tuesday, as at least 121 people, mostly women and children, died in a stampede.

 

"Bhole Baba", or the Innocent Elder, is the sobriquet of a self-styled godman who was a police constable before he turned to spirituality and became a preacher. Originally Suraj Pal Singh, he later changed his name to Narayan Sakar Hari. He is currently untraceable, and police in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where Tuesday's tragedy occurred, said they were still trying to trace him.

A Washington Post story explains the meaning of the name the once-policeman changed his to.

The event was hosted by a local preacher named Narayan Sakar Hari, whose name translates to god incarnate. In videos from past congregations, he is seen on a thronelike seat wearing a suit and tie, explaining his ostensibly miraculous powers.

Well, his miraculous powers obviously didn't extend to saving the lives of 120 of his devotees. But I suspect this won't matter to those who believe he truly is god incarnate. The deaths of those people argue otherwise.

People mourn next to the bodies of victims of a stampede outside a hospital in Hathras district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, on Tuesday. (Reuters)

 

Meditation is good, but non-meditation can be better

My previous post, "The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness," was an introductory look at this book, which covers a lot of interesting ground in its 500 or so main pages.

It won't appeal to everybody.

But for those such as me, who like their spirituality founded in the natural world, common sense, and science (insofar as this is possible), Thomas Metzinger's discussion of how meditators in 57 countries look upon "pure awareness" is a breath of fresh air.

I say this because it is refreshing to have someone discuss meditation from the standpoint of lots of ordinary people who are meditating, as contrasted with the view of an organized religion such as Buddhism.

However, Metzinger acknowledges that some of the more than 500 experiential reports from meditators  likely were influenced by the belief systems of those who wrote the reports. But he stripped out mentions of where a meditator was from, or their faith, if they had one.

In addition to the 500 or so narrative reports, the book also is based on 1,403 completed questionnaires that asked about 90 questions, if I recall that number correctly. This is some demographic information of the respondents.

We had 1,403 usable questionnaires; our participants had a median age of fifty-two years (ranging from seventeen to eighty-eight), and were roughly evenly split between men and women (48.5% versus 50.0% stated their sex). 

The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3 percent), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4 percent), and did not regularly use any psychoactive substances (84.0 percent). Vipassana (43.9 percent) and Zen (34.9 percent) were the most frequently practiced meditation techniques.

I'm skipping around in the book a bit, as Metzinger says in an introductory chapter that it isn't necessary to read it straight through. Today I read part of a chapter called "Meditation and Nonmeditation." 

I liked the passage below. The non-meditation mention (I prefer a hyphen in the word) reminded me of Zen, Advaita, and Joan Tollifson's writings, which I've become enamored of.

After meditating for most of my life in a manner that required concentration and the suppression of meandering thoughts, I now understand the value of non-meditation, which seems more productive and natural to me, as well as being more useful in everyday life.

I wasn't familiar with the term, "affordance." Here's a definition: the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used. 

Metzinger writes:

Let us stay with actual meditation practice for a moment. Installing false beliefs may work for some people, but I think there is a better, more direct route to effortless pure awareness. When discussing the phenomenon of mind-wandering in chapter 25, we saw that mind-wandering creates an inner affordance landscape.

Every single thought can be seen as an action affordance. In one way or another, they all say "Think me!" or Pursue me, follow me into the future!" or "Can you remember this? Try it!"

However, there is one type of thought that is special: the thought of "noticing" that you, the meditator, have strayed; the thought that you, the meditator, have obviously just had an attentional lapse. If Schooler is right, this thought might be an illusion of control. But there is more to be seen.

That thought ("My mind just wandered!") is an inner affordance as well. It tells you to do something: Return to the breath; bring your attention back to the present moment.

If the system falls for it, that special thought swiftly creates yet another agency illusion, a hallucination of what in chapter 4 I called "attentional agency": the experience of deliberately and actively controlling the focus of attention in a goal-directed manner. 

It includes a subtle sense of effort and successful mental control: I, the meditator, must act with my attention now because I "have noticed" a stray thought, and as I have learned in the past, I must now bring "my own" focus of attention back to the present moment.

I think that not doing this is what is meant by "nonmeditation"; it means not falling for the very last affordance that happened to pop up. There is a deep, but very subtle phenomenological insight to be had: The silence, clarity, and epistemic openness are already there. You do not have to act.

The "special thought," the thought of "noticing," is actually sculpted of that silent clarity, if one looks very closely. This [is] what I mean by the better, more direct route to effortless pure awareness. Perhaps one could say that the noticing itself has already given the silence -- and the only thing that could ruin it would be an attempt to meditate. 

The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived. 

I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab.

Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog posts I wrote about the book (the last one has links to all the posts).

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self 
Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug
My review of "The Ego Tunnel" -- 5 stars

I've just started reading The Elephant and the Blind. It looks really interesting. This is the Amazon description of the book.

An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness.

What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.

Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness. From there, he assembles a big picture—the elephant in the parable, from which the book’s title comes—of what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness. Freeing pure awareness from new-age gurus and old religions, The Elephant and the Blind combines personal reports of pure consciousness with incisive analysis to address the whole consciousness community, from neuroscientists to artists, and its accessibility echoes the author’s career-long commitment to widening access to philosophy itself.

After reading the initial chapters, I decided to head to the final chapter, "The Elephant: What is Pure Awareness?" It turns out that it isn't exactly pure, so it'd be more accurate to say Purer Awareness. Here's five possible answers Metzinger gives. I've shortened some of the answers.

P1 Contentlessness MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] can occur in full-absorption episodes as the only kind of phenomenal character that can later be reported; in these cases, pure awareness appears as a stand-alone, singular feature.

P2 No-thought The second less radical, but equally canonical reading of "purity" refers to the absence of all mental conflict, noise, and perturbation. In a simplified reading, it is the absence of all discursive thought, memory, planning, and "spontaneous-task unrelated thought" like daydreaming or mind-wandering.

P3 Clarity In this answer, pure awareness is the experience of a clear and unobstructed space of knowing... The clarity feature has been described for centuries and is simply the nonconceptual experience of one's own epistemic capacity per se, of an inner space that is pure in the sense of being wide open and lucid at the same time.

P4 Suchness This interpretation refers to the phenomenology of "pure perception"... Here, the conscious experience is of perceptual content spontaneously arising, but with a complete lack of conceptual overlay, including time experience and implicit judgments as to the "existence" or "nonexistence" of what is perceived. It is this lack that makes perceptual awareness pure.

P5 Nonduality In chapters 27 and 29, we saw that one way of defining "purity" is as conscious experience lacking subject/object structure. In this sense, pure awareness is a nondual mode of experience that lacks an epistemic agent model and any sort of egoic first-person perspective.

Why "being at the eye center" isn't possible

In my preceding post, "Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations," I shared quotations from one of her books that clearly demonstrated why it makes no sense for a person at one of her talks to claim that they were able to concentrate their mind at a vantage point that enabled them to be aware of the world from a detached distance that they considered to be positive for them.

Just a bit of clear thinking illustrates why this couldn't actually be the case. Meaning, this person wasn't really concentrating their mind at a certain point in their consciousness. All they were doing was thinking or believing that this was happening, and that thought or belief provided them some comfort.

Awareness, or consciousness, is the only way we know anything about the world inside and outside of ourselves. Absent awareness, there's no world for us. And so far as anyone knows -- neuroscientists, mystics, meditators, anyone -- awareness is singular, not plural, for every individual. Meaning, you and I don't have several independent awarenesses or consciousnesses. 

Sure, split brain patients do have their awareness divided in a certain sense, because if the connection between the two halves of the brain is severed, each half has a somewhat different perception of the world. Since language is primarily in the left half of the brain, if a image is presented to the right half, the patient won't be able to describe that in words.

But my understanding is that the split-brain patient still has a single consciousness that enables them to live pretty much normally. Meaning, they have a split brain, but not split consciousness. So says a 2017 research study.

So Tollifson is on solid ground when she points out that any notion of being aware of awareness, or of being conscious of consciousness, or of having a mental vantage point to observe the mind, is just conceptual thinking, not anything real in the brain/mind. This makes a large share of religious and mystical teachings a bunch of bullshit.

For example, the religious group I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), taught that meditation should be practiced by concentrating at the eye center. You know, that supposedly sacred spot in the forehead between the eyes, often termed the Third Eye.

This is similar to the person Tollifson engaged with believing that they could focus their mind at a vantage point. The problem with this is the same problem with believing it's possible to concentrate at the eye center. Since awareness is singular, not plural, everything we experience is as that singular awareness. Repeat, everything. 

You can't focus your mind at the eye center. There's no such thing as the eye center. That's a concept within awareness. Again, you can believe you're focusing your mind at the eye center, or fantasize you're doing this. But that believing and fantasizing is occurring within awareness, as is everything else you experience. 

If it was possible to be aware of awareness, obviously there would have to be (1) awareness, and (2) another awareness that's aware of the first awareness. Of course, if we then wanted to be aware that we were aware of awareness, we'd need a third awareness that's aware of the awareness that's aware of the other awareness.

The problem with this is that it leads to a never-ending cascade of multiple awarenesses, something that doesn't exist, since I've just shown that awareness is singular, not plural. The same problem arises with believing that it is possible for the mind to be focused at the eye center. Who or what is doing the focusing? Another mind? 

Sam Harris, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a wealth of experience with meditation, primarily of the Dzogchen variety, speaks on the guided meditations in his Waking Up app about this issue. He'll frequently ask if it seems that consciousness is inside the head, which is much the same as it seeming that consciousness is inside the eye center.

Harris points out that the sensation of consciousness being inside the head is part of the contents of consciousness. In other words, each of us is simply conscious. We're conscious, or aware, of many different things. One of those things is that consciousness appears to be inside the head, that we're looking out at the world from a vantage point that seems to be at the eye center or forehead.

But again, this sensation of a vantage point is part of the contents of consciousness. Thus Harris agrees with Tollifson that any sense of awareness or consciousness being localized, here rather than there, is within awareness or consciousness. Meaning, we can't look at our awareness or consciousness as an object that can be manipulated, like an apple or rock. 

Awareness or consciousness is how the world is experienced. There's no "we" or "me" outside of awareness. A simple true idea with profound implications. Tollifson writes:

We imagine "me trying to merge with the flow, or be in the flow, or understand the flow. But actually there is only flow. There's no way in or out and there's nothing separate to be in or out. But it doesn't seem that way because the very nature of thought is to divide up and freeze what is actually indivisible and fluid. 

Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(J is Joan Tollifson; P is the person)

J: What is the perspective?

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

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

P: Yes, there are two things.

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

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

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

What is aware of the vantage point?

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

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

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

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

...P: The frame is emptiness.

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

P: I don't see that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When does it get better? It doesn't" Great line in Pachinko series.

Some streaming shows are easily forgettable for me. I enjoy watching an episode, but then it's out of my mind, pretty much. There's nothing truly meaningful that sticks with me.

Pachinko, on Apple TV, isn't like that. My wife and I find the series deeply meaningful. It's a tale of a Korean immigrant family that spans four generations. The depth of feeling in almost every scene is amazing.

Strong emotions seemingly would be difficult to take when they're so ubiquitous. Actually, I'm finding that the opposite is the case. The emotions displayed by the talented cast, who don't even appear to be acting, because the show is so realistic, make for marvelous TV watching, being so truthful.

Love. Hate. Fear. Hope. Despair. Joy. Warmth. Every episode is filled with a litany of feelings that capture my attention as I realize, "I've felt that way myself, even though otherwise I have little in common with these characters."

I can't stop thinking about a simple bit of dialog in an episode where Sunja, a young woman who has left Korea in the early 1930s to accompany her husband to Japan, is feeling homesick after a few weeks in an unfamiliar country where Koreans are looked down upon.

Sunja asks a female relative who has been in Japan for quite a while, "When does it get better?" Meaning, the feeling of not belonging. The response: "It doesn't." At least, that's my memory of the dialog, which I've gotten mostly correct, even if not perfectly remembered.

There's so much to digest in those seven simple words. When does it get better? It doesn't. 

The way I see it, this is what life is all about. Sure, for most of us there's much pleasure in life. But there's also much pain, much dissatisfaction, much suffering, as the Buddha famously taught. For most of my 75 years, I've been wondering when life gets better. 

It doesn't is my conclusion now also.

Sure, there's ups and downs, just as there is in Sunja's life. Yet an undercurrent of not-good lurks within every experience. Obviously, when an experience is unwelcome. Hidden, yet present, when an experience is welcome, since we come to learn that as good as things are now, it won't be long before that goodness is replaced with not-good.

During my religiously-minded days I felt there was something wrong with me when I was in the grip of a negative emotion such as anger, which the teaching I embraced back then viewed as a bad thing that needed replacing with positive emotions like love, peace of mind, forgiveness, and such.

It's refreshing to have realized that this sort of fundamentalism isn't realistic or desirable for most people, including me.

Now I enjoy watching shows like Pachinko where ordinary people are shown living their ordinary lives, experiencing their ordinary emotions truthfully and openly, no matter what the emotion may be. Sunja and other members of her family don't wallow in despair when they're feeling down.

They feel that feeling even as they're doing what needs to be done to make their imperfect lives as pleasant as possible.

I love how the characters in Pachinko find pleasure in small things. Since the Koreans in the early generations of the family had very little in the way of material possessions, a bowl of white rice (rather than another grain) was a great gift -- since the Japanese occupiers were keeping white rice for themselves.

A watch, or a single pearl, these were riches to those who were materially poor, though wealthy in regard to their family loyalty and closeness to each other.

Watching the show reminds me that an honest display of sadness is hugely preferable to an insincere display of happiness. Being genuine, whatever that entails, is better than being fake.

Quantum mechanics could be less mysterious after particles get smashed

Quantum theory, or quantum mechanics (same thing), is one of my favorite subjects. But it's difficult for me -- or anybody else, for that matter -- to wrap my mind around, because the quantum realm operates much differently than the world in which we live and breathe.

Still, whenever there's an article about quantum theory in New Scientist or Scientific American, the two science magazines I subscribe to, my interest is rekindled. This is the online title of an article in the April  27 issue of New Scientist. It's fascinating, though a bit challenging to read. Here's a PDF file.
Download A new kind of experiment at the Large Hadron Collider could unravel quantum reality | New Scientist

This is how the article starts out.

For Alan Barr, it started during the covid-19 lockdowns. “I had a bit more time. I could sit and think,” he says.

He had enjoyed being part of the success at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland — the particle collider that discovered the Higgs boson. But now, he wondered, were they missing a trick? “I had spent long hours screwing bits of it together. And I thought, ‘Well, we’ve built this beautiful piece of apparatus, but maybe we could be doing more with it,’ ” he says.

The LHC is typically seen as a machine for finding new particles. But now Barr and a slew of other physicists are asking if it can also be used to probe the underlying meaning of quantum theory and why it paints reality as being so deeply weird.

That’s exactly what Barr and his colleagues are now investigating in earnest. Last year, they published the results of an experiment in which they showed that pairs of fundamental particles called top quarks could be put into the quantum state known as entanglement.

This was just the first of many entanglement experiments at particle colliders that could open up a whole new way of studying the nature of the universe. We can now ask why reality in quantum mechanics is so hard to pin down and what this has to do with experimenters — or even particles — having free will. Doing so could reveal whether space-time is fundamental or perhaps unveil a deeper reality that is even stranger than quantum mechanics. “We can do really different things with this collider,” says Barr.

Entanglement gets New Age types all excited who know just enough about quantum theory to misinterpret it. Yes, it is a sort of cosmic oneness, since once two particles have interacted in some way, their states remain entangled even if the particles are separated by a vast distance. 

Entanglement works like this. First, get two quantum particles, such as photons of light, to interact in some way. It might be as simple as them colliding, or both being products of the same quantum event, such as the spontaneous decay of a Higgs boson.

The spookiness becomes apparent when you perform a measurement on one and then do the same on the other. In the right circumstances, this reveals that the properties of the two particles are correlated: action on one has an instantaneous, corresponding effect on the other.

Think of that correlation as like flipping two coins multiple times and finding that they always land as two heads or two tails. After a while, you would suspect that something suspicious was going on — maybe some hidden magnet was causing them to unfailingly land in the same orientation. If you can’t find a hidden magnet, you might just throw up your hands and declare that someone will eventually come up with a reasonable explanation.

The Bell test was how physicists proved that quantum entanglement, which Einstein derided as "spooky action at a distance," is a real thing. Being able to conduct Bell tests on particles whizzing around in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest scientific instrument, opens up the possibility of casting fresh light on entanglement.

One intriguing possibility is that these collider experiments could overturn our assumptions about the nature of space, says Vlatko Vedral, a theorist at the University of Oxford. Traditional Bell tests examine entanglement over large distances, but correlations over tiny distances are equally interesting, he says.

These collider-based tests look at links that span just quadrillionths of a metre and might tell us whether there is no such thing as space — and thus locality — on that scale. Maybe, he suggests, spooky action at a distance is the norm and the world of particles is non-local by default. In which case, perhaps space isn’t fundamental but arises out of entanglement as an emergent phenomenon. “Could it be that we are making a mistake by assuming that things should be local there?” he asks.

I found this part of the article especially intriguing, because I've wondered why, traditionally, physicists believed that measurement of a particle was key to how the quantum realm moves from a probabilistic wave-like nature where the particle might possess various states, to a "collapse of the wave function" where a single state is manifested.

Often human consciousness is held to have a special role in this collapse, leading New Age types to conclude (wrongly) that we create our own reality. 

If all that isn’t enough, what about digging into the very depths of what it means to be a human doing a science experiment? At the LHC, human action has been completely removed from the Bell test.

Usually, an experimenter chooses a particular orientation for the detectors or uses a random number generator to determine the choice. This is part of the process of showing that the correlations between the particles don’t come from some pre-existing property in the particles themselves that is hidden from us.

But in a collider Bell test, the measurement of a particle’s quantum state occurs when it spontaneously decays into other, less massive particles. So these collider-based Bell tests just “happen”, with no human involvement, and before the particles interact with the collider’s detection apparatus, says Christopher Timpson, a philosopher also based at the University of Oxford.

All of which brings into question what a measurement actually is, he says, and whether particles have something akin to free will. “Does the particle get to choose the nature of the measurement that’s done to it?” he asks. “And if the choice of measurement direction is being selected by the particle, not by an independent process, is that the same as a random number generator?”

In other words, this all might have something to contribute to the long-standing “measurement problem”, the source of all the weird ideas in quantum theory about what reality is really like. A quantum particle can be set up so that it is in what looks like multiple different states at once.

This “superposition”, famously exemplified by Schrödinger’s dead-and-alive cat, lasts until a measurement is made on it. But no one has ever been able to agree on what actually constitutes a measurement, resulting in myriad interpretations of what happens when a measurement occurs.

...Barr is also interested in what the LHC might teach us about the validity of certain quantum interpretations. “I’m not going to say it will definitely favour one thing over another, but it does seem to bring the element of subjectivity into question,” he says. “That does tend to favour certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.”

Here's some passages from Dao De Jing, a Philosophical Translation

I have quite a few translations of the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist classic that I've enjoyed since my college days. A few days ago I felt a hunger to revisit this book. After examining several translations, I settled on Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall.

They do a great job of explaining how other translations have gone awry when they try to convert Chinese concepts into traditional Western notions of God, the cosmos, and such. Here's some passages from their "Philosophical Introduction" that resonated with me.

It would seem that the aim of the compilers of the Daodejing is to prescribe a regimen of self-cultivation  that will enable one to optimize one's experience in the world.

... It is important to note that this goal of self-transformation has nothing to do with death, judgment, and an afterlife, not has it anything to do with the "salvation of the soul" (the traditional concerns of Western eschatology). Instead, such personal growth and consummation is meliorative in the sense of producing the quality of character that makes this world itself a better place.

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

The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

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

With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity of any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

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

What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms.

The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, not unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day,

It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.

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

Said another way, if a person is not in fact constituted by some essential, partitioned "soul," but is rather seen as dynamic pattern of personal, social, and natural relationships, agitation must arise as a consequence of poor management of these constitutive roles and relationships.

Hence, agitation in the heart-and-mind is not narrowly "psychological," but is more accurately conceived of as of broad ethical concern: How should we act and what should we do?

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

For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child. 

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

The energy of transformation lies within the world itself as an integral characteristic of the events that constitute it. There is no appeal to some external efficient cause: no Creator God or primordial determinative principle.

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

In fact, the sustained Grand Analogy that pervades the Daodejing is: dao is to the world as ruler ought to be to the people. Dao -- the discernible rhythm and regularity of the world as it unfolds around and through us -- is nonimpositional: "Way-making (dao) really does things noncoercively."

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

There is no final truth either about the nature of things, or about the means whereby that nature is sought. The achievement of order and harmony in nature and society -- that is to say, the achievement of effective way-making or dao -- is a multifaceted effort that is dependent less upon uncovering true principles or right forms of conduct than on the exercise of imagination and creativity within the most deferential of contexts. 

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

Using Western epistemological terms, the thoughts about the world expressed in both the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing represent what we might call a realist perspective. Beyond the mediating confusions introduced by language, and by layers of our own distorted perceptions and tendentious categorizations, there is nevertheless, with properly Daoist qualifications an "objectively" real world. Our task is to experience that world as "objectively" as possible.

From the Daoist perspective, the problem begins when we insist that the "objective world" is a world made up of objects -- namely, concrete, unchangeable things that we encounter as over against and independent of us; things which announce themselves to us by asserting "I object!"

For the Daoist, the objective world cannot be objective in this sense because it is a constant transforming flow of events or processes that belie the sorts of discriminations that would permit a final inventory of the furniture of the world.

Paradoxically, for the Daoist the objective world is objectless.

Consciousness is mysterious, but it's almost certainly not supernatural

Consciousness seemingly should be easy to understand.

After all, every living human with a normally functioning brain experiences consciousness from the inside, so to speak. Meaning, everything we know, including what we know about ourselves, has to be consciously experienced or it doesn't exist for us. 

That includes the entire universe, with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing on average about a hundred billion stars. If there was no consciousness in the universe, all that would be a big bunch of nothing.

Assuming it could even be called "nothing," given that it's impossible for conscious beings like us to understand what, if anything, the universe would be like if no consciousness was aware of it.

There's plenty of ideas about consciousness, but no consensus about either what it consists of or how it comes to be. This description by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel in his book The Weirdness Of The World does a pretty good job of describing consciousness. 

To be conscious is to have a stream of experience of some sort or other -- some sensory experiences, maybe, or some affective experiences of pleasure or displeasure, relief or pain. Possibly not much more than this.

To be conscious is to have some form of "phenomenology," as that term is commonly used in twenty-first century anglophone philosophy. Using Thomas Nagel's famous phrasing, there's "something it's like" (most people think) to be a dog or a monkey and nothing it's like (most people think) to be a photon or a feather.

If garden snails are conscious, there's something it's like to be them in this sense. They have, maybe, simple tactile experiences of the stuff that they are sliming across, maybe some olfactory experiences of what they are smelling and nibbling, maybe some negative affective experiences when injured.

Garden snails are mentioned because this passage is in a chapter called "Is a garden snail conscious?" Schwitzgebel doesn't draw a firm conclusion, being content to describe the reasons for thinking Yes, No, or Who Knows?

There's a lot we don't know about consciousness, so it isn't surprising that it's difficult to decide whether a garden snail is conscious. It's easier to decide that dogs, cats, other mammals, and our fellow primates (monkeys, chimpanzees, etc.) are conscious.

However, Schwitzgebel raises the interesting question of whether self-awareness is necessary for consciousness. Or at least, for the awareness that one is conscious. He writes:

Whenever you are conscious, it seems that you are aware that you are conscious; consciousness seems to come along with some sort of grasp upon itself. This isn't a matter of reaching an explicit judgment in words or attending vividly to the fact of your consciousness; it's more like a secondary acquaintance with one's own experience as it is happening. 

But one thing that Schwitzgebel doesn't question, nor does virtually every other scientifically-minded writer about consciousness that I've come across, is whether consciousness is supernatural. 

It just seems obvious that consciousness is physical. I've noted this obviousness many times in blog posts, noting that if someone doesn't believe this, they can conduct a painful experiment: have someone hit you on the head with a strong blow of a baseball bat and see how that affects your consciousness. 

(Gentler approaches: have a surgery with anesthesia; imbibe some alcohol, marijuana, or any other psychoactive drug; drink caffeinated coffee.)

Physical causes alter consciousness. So this decidedly points toward consciousness being a physical phenomenon.

Those who believe that consciousness is supernatural -- I used to entertain this notion, in large part because I don't like the prospect of being dead and gone forever -- are unable to reconcile this hypothesis with the clear and convincing evidence that consciousness arises from goings-on in a brain or brain-like structure (I'm open to the idea that artificial intelligences could be conscious one day).

As difficult as it is to fathom how consciousness arises in humans from brain neurons connected in sufficient complexity, it's much more difficult to imagine how supernatural soul or spirit could (1) manifest consciousness, and (2) do so in a manner accessible to people who exist as physical beings with a physical brain. 

I've never seen a cogent explanation about how these things could be possible.

If anyone is able to share such an explanation, do so in a comment on this post. Like I said, I'd love it if consciousness existed after the physical body is no more, but I've come to the conclusion that this is wishful thinking, not reality.

If the universe is truly unified, there's no place for supernatural separateness

I'll be the first to admit that some of the stuff I write about on this blog isn't very understandable. Partly that's due to my limitations as a writer. Partly it's because of often esoteric subject matter. 

Whatever the reason, I sympathized with a comment sant64 left on my previous post, "Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't." 

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. "Reality" is far too broad a term.

Well, I disagreed with the notion that reality is far too broad a term. Seems pretty simple to me: reality is what we humans consider to be real, whether that be a personal experience or a collective understanding.

But since my post sort of nibbled around the edges of what I was trying to get at, I took a stab at being more direct in my comment reply.

sant64, as I noted in this post, reality isn't something that is beamed directly into our mind/brain. It is a simulation of one sort or another, because the mind/brain is locked inside the dark confines of our head with no direct connection to the outside world that constitutes our shared reality.

Without our senses -- sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell -- there's no knowledge of the world for us, so no reality.

The Matrix provides an extreme thought experiment along this line. People's bodies are in a warehouse, while powerful computers manufacture reality for them that seems real, except it is a virtual simulation. So this is an example of living in an immersive spatial reality where experienced reality is disconnected from a separate aspect of reality that produces a simulated reality.

That disconnect, as noted in the post, makes it impossible to determine where that separate aspect of reality, in this case a warehouse with stored bodies, exists, or even if it exists. The reason is that reality isn't connected between all of its parts. The creators of the Matrix have the full picture, but the people experiencing the virtual reality don't, because the simulation doesn't contain knowledge of how the simulation is being produced.

Maybe I could have been clearer about this, but I tried to relate Ron's comment about not being attracted to the offerings in metaphysical sections of bookstores, where he said that the "final conclusion" about reality probably is simply our ordinary life -- that which we're experiencing now via our senses.

This is different from how most religions view reality, which supposedly has an extra unperceived dimension akin to the Matrix having a secret: experienced reality is being produced by a un-experienced reality that only a red pill can divulge.

Religions, mystical practices, spiritual paths... they all claim, pretty much, that they possess a red pill that, if taken through a certain discipline, will reveal the hidden truth about reality: God, heaven, spirit, soul, enlightenment, whatever. But they all differ in what the discipline consists of, and what supposedly will be revealed.

So since most people believe in some sort of hidden reality separate from what is perceived by the bodily senses, this creates a situation where humans are assuming different realities that can't be proven to be real, because part of the assumption is that the hidden reality can only be known by those who take the "red pill."

For example, abortion would be much easier to discuss and form policies about if everybody focused on the physical characteristics of an embryo or fetus. When does it have a nervous system that can feel pain? What sorts of congenital abnormalities make it impossible for the unborn child to survive after birth? Among other questions.

But assuming that a soul is part of the embryo at the moment of conception complicates matters. This introduces an unprovable assumption about reality, as does the assumption that God opposes abortion because only He/She can decide whether an embryo grows to maturity and is born alive.

Basically I tried to argue that it would be better if we all agreed that reality is what can be known via the senses (which naturally includes scientific observations that amplify what our senses can perceive), because then we'd just have to deal with the thorny, but more resolvable, problem of how different people "simulate" physical reality through their unique mind/brain.

Hope this further explanation helps to get across my point.

Put even more simply, but echoing what I said above, if the universe truly is one, a single spatial reality where there are connections between everything that exists within it (for example, physics says that quantum fields are present in every corner of the universe), then the sort of disconnectedness posited by the Matrix, or by religions that posit a supernatural realm separate from materiality, isn't an aspect of reality.

I find this inspiring. Also, reassuring. 

Because even though it may seem impossible that we can be affected by, or affect, galaxies billions of light years distant from us, or goings-on at the exceedingly miniscule level of the Planck scale, in principle both the extremely large and the extremely small are part of our human reality, because there is no division anywhere in the universe that inescapably walls some of it off.

(Black holes might seem to be an exception, but matter obviously is drawn into black holes, and Stephen Hawking demonstrated mathematically that black holes radiate matter/energy.)

If all this is still too abstract, or irrelevant, for you, here's an easier-to-read essay by Joan Tollifson that popped into my email inbox recently. I really like both her message and her style. One of her paragraphs is right in line with what I've been trying to say in my previous two posts.

For me, the most liberating realization has been that nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart, and that each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.

I'll share her essay as a continuation to this post.

Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't

Ooh. That's an ambitious title for a blog post.

But since it came to mind, and it fits with some thoughts that have been rambling through my mind today, might as well stick with it -- even if what I write here doesn't really fulfill the ambitious promise of the title.

I'll start with a brief letter to the editor in the April 10 issue of New Scientist magazine. 

From Wolf Kirchmeir
Blind River, Ontario, Canada
If we accept that our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains, then the "self" must be part of the simulation. To ask whether we live "in" a simulation is a category error. We live as a simulation, not in one. 

This fits with both modern neuroscience and a lot of philosophy. Reality isn't something that is channeled directly into the human mind through our senses. Reality is fashioned by us through complex mental mechanisms that are almost entirely outside of our conscious awareness. 

A key part of this is prediction. The brain is constantly making predictions about what is expected to be experienced based on present sensory input and past experiences. So while it goes too far to say that we create our own reality, in some ways we certainly do. 

Eric Schwitzgebel speaks of this in his book, The Weirdness of the World. I'd put it aside for a while, but picked it up again this morning, reading more of the "Kant meets cyberpunk" chapter. This excerpt gives a feel for the rather sophisticated philosophy Schwitzgebel engages in. (Not surprising, since he's a philosophy professor.)

He refers to The Matrix. That movie featured people whose "bodies are stored in warehouses, and they are fed sensory input by high-tech computers." They can do things as they would in the ordinary world, including dancing.

Taking our cue from Kant, let's call the objects laid out around you in your immersive spatial environment empirical objects. In Neuromancer, the computer programs that the hackers see are the empirical objects.

In The Matrix, the dance floor that the people experience is an empirical object -- and the body-storage warehouse is not an empirical object, assuming that it's not accessible to them in their immersive environment.

For you, the reader, empirical objects are just the ordinary objects around you: your coffee mug, your desk, your computer. Our bodies as experienced in immersive spatial environments are also empirical objects.

In The Matrix, there's a crucial difference between one's empirical body and one's biological body. If you are experiencing yourself on a dance floor, your empirical body is dancing, while your biological body is resting motionless in the warehouse.

Only if you red-pill out of the Matrix will your empirical and biological bodies be doing the same things. Note that empirical is a relational concept. What counts as an empirical object will be different for different people. 

What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in.

Guess I should share how immersive spatial environment is defined in the book:

Following David Chalmers, but adding "spatial" for explicitness, an immersive spatial environment is any environment (whether virtual or "real," interactive or static) "that generates perceptual experience of the environment from a perspective within it, giving the user the sense of 'being there.' "

As described in my previous blog post, a few days ago I ingested a gram of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) at The Psilocybin Center here in Oregon, where it is legal to use magic mushrooms in a regulated environment.

That fairly small dose modified my consciousness to some extent, but not by enough for me to have a full-blown psychedelic experience. Or even a partially-blown one. But regardless, a person under the influence of psilocybin is going to have a different experience of empirical reality than someone who isn't tripping on magic mushrooms.

As Schwitzgebel said above, "What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in." I was reclining, listening to psychedelic music with my eyes closed, while the facilitator who had to be with me during the two-hour experience mostly sat across from me doing stuff on his laptop.

We were in the same room, but we were experiencing the room in different ways. Again, if I'd been having a full-blown psychedelic experience, my empirical reality would have been much more different from that of the facilitator. 

So even if we don't assume that there's a deeper reality producing the one we're experiencing now, as in the Matrix, it's still the case that the mind of every human being is simulating reality in a different fashion, as the New Scientist letter to the editor correctly noted.

Then there's the implications of a comment left by Ron E. today on my psilocybin post. I liked the comment for several reasons, including how it relates to the theme of this post.

Have been away – on and off – for a few weeks so just catching up with some of the latest blogs and comments. One of my trips was to London where I visited my one-time favourite bookshops specialising in philosophy, occult literature and a whole gamut of books featuring Advaita, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Judaism etc.

All the usual suspects were featured there – Alan Watts, J. and U.G. Krishnamurti, Nisargadata, Ouspensky (and many more); writers who featured prominently in my early days of enquiry – and apparently, are still popular with today’s seekers. Also, in a curtained section of the shop was an Asian looking chap – long beard, eastern clothes etc., who was giving readings of some sort.

I only stayed for a few minutes, leaving with some nostalgia and realising that a huge part of my life and identity was well and truly over. The same goes for the various spiritual groups I was in and out of years ago.

I’d say that this ‘seeking’ activity is okay and perhaps inevitable when one is younger; it all seems to be mixed in with looking for meaning and identity – perhaps lingering on for many of us into middle and old age. Some settle for some kind of secure base, perhaps an established religious or spiritual organisation, others gravitate toward gratifying projects or perhaps charity work.

It seems to be a type of personal evolution, and one that doesn’t have a final conclusion, a final revelation. Except that is, if one can live with the knowledge that there probably is no conclusion apart from our everyday reality – whatever you are doing, whatever that may be.

I agree with Ron. In large part, the sorts of books and writers spoken of above deal with a supposed hidden reality that underlies or produces the ordinary empirical reality each of us experiences in everyday life. 

Meaning, they posit something akin to the Matrix: a dimension of reality that is separate from what we habitually perceive. Schwitzgebel writes:

We can think of a spatial manifold as an immersive spatial environment in which every part is spatially related to every other part. The dance floor of the ordinary people trapped in the Matrix is not part of the same spatial manifold as the body-storage warehouse.

Suppose you are dancing in the Matrix and someone tells you that you have a biological body in a warehouse. You might ask in which direction the warehouse lies -- north, south, east, west, up, down? You might point in various possible directions from the dance floor.

Your conversation partner ought to deny the presupposition of your question. The warehouse is not in any of those directions relative to the dance floor. 

You can't travel toward it or away from it using your empirical body. You can't shoot an empirical arrow toward it. In vain would you try to find the warehouse with your empirical body and kick down its doors. It's not part of the same spatial manifold.

Thus in addition to the difficulty of people agreeing about the nature of the empirical reality of the ordinary physical world where we all bodily live, there's the added complexity of billions of people, most of humanity, believing in a religious, mystical, or spiritual supernatural place akin to that in the Matrix: a realm spatially distinct from this world, so impossible to discern with ordinary perception.

Call it God, heaven, astral plane, or whatever, debates about the nature of a supposed realm outside of, well, nature, are a big part of what many commenters on this blog like to discuss, as well as the basis for the myriads of different religions, mystical paths, and such.

So the way I see it, to me the mystery isn't why people disagree about what reality consists of, but how it is that we're able to agree to such an extent about reality. (Perhaps the answer is that if we didn't, as a species we wouldn't survive for very long.)

Three takeaways from my not-so-trippy experience at Salem's Psilocybin Center

This afternoon I had my first psilocybin (magic mushroom) experience in about 56 years. So, yeah, a long time, since my college days. I'm 75 now, not 19, a big difference. 

Which helps explain why today's psilocybin experience was much less trippy than the psychedelics I used back when my hippie friends and I ingested LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin during some of the time I spent at San Jose State College in the Bay Area -- 1966-71.

As I said in a post last month on my HinesSight blog, "The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic experiences," I'm kind of wary of jumping into a really intense psychedelic experience right off the bat, since doing this at my age could be considerably different from doing it at 19 and 20.

So after I contacted The Psilocybin Center for, first, a fairly brief Discovery Call, and then an hour long call where I filled out a bunch of forms online to comply with Oregon's regulations for taking psilocybin in a licensed center, Sammy Kahuk, one of the owners, recommended that I start with a 1 gram dose which is billed in the Moderate-High Dose Guided Journey category as offering "self-exploration and emotional insights."

Well, maybe for some. All I can do is describe my two-hour experience today in the form of three takeaways.

(1) Dose matters. I was aware that 1 gram of magic mushrooms is just double the 500 milligrams that is typically viewed as being the upper end of a microdose, where you don't feel much of a conscious experience. But I was hoping for more than the relaxed decidedly non-psychedelic experience I had today.

After being given two half-gram containers of powdered mushroom, complete with an expiration date and such, I mixed the psilocybin into applesauce-in-a-pouch that I squeezed into a bowl. You have to do all that yourself, kind of like Oregon's death with dignity law, where you can have life-ending medication if you have six months or less to live, but no one other than you can assist with taking it.

I then reclined my lounge chair, put headphones on, and started listening to some psychedelic music that I'd added to my Apple Music library. I closed my eyes, though the ceiling of the room I was in had some pleasingly trippy lights that reminded me a bit of how my wife and I put stars on the ceiling of my daughter's room when she was little. 

I kept waiting for some sort of magic to manifest from the magic mushrooms. Never happened. I was in a positive frame of mind, the "set" aspect of the familiar "set and setting" that go a long way toward determining the quality of a psychedelic experience. 

But dose obviously matters. It turned out that 1 gram was, for me, not enough for me to have any recognizable "trippy" experience. And since I went on many trips back in those college days, I'm familiar with what a psychedelic trip consists of.

So while I have no problem with the 1 gram dose Sammy suggested, and which I concurred with, it turned out that I spent $500 on what basically was a two-hour supervised high microdose with no discernible insights, revelations, or whatnot produced by the psilocybin.

(2) The setting is confining. Us aging hippies remember how free we used to feel on psychedelics. I recall a bunch of us guys driving over the mountains to Santa Cruz late at night, dropping acid/LSD, then tripping on the beach while we waited for the sun to rise. Probably we ate breakfast at a waffle house. 

Well, due to Oregon's regulations, I chafed at what was required at today's psilocybin experience. Sammy had to be in the room with me the entire time, aside from a bathroom break he took, during which I snapped the photos of the room. I was in a recliner. Sammy was sitting on a dual recliner directly across from me.

I found this confining. Also, kind of weird. It felt much different from being with friends on a psychedelic trip. Sammy is a nice guy, but he isn't a friend, and he isn't a therapist. He just was there because the State of Oregon requires him to be there. And he was being paid to be there. 

After a bit over an hour, the sciatica in my right leg was making it uncomfortable for me to sit in the recliner. If I'd been at home, I would have gotten up, walked around, or done some Tai Chi. But that didn't feel right at The Psilocybin Center, where you can't go outside the building. I shifted around and got myself as comfortable as possible. 

However, I couldn't shake the realization during the entire two hours that another person who I didn't know was in the room with me. This aspect of the "setting" made it feel restrictive. Now, I realize that someone on a considerably higher dose might have an intense enough psychedelic experience to not be aware of the presence of a facilitator.

For me, though, it was a problem. So much so, when I finally glanced at my watch and saw that it was 1:50 pm, and my wife was scheduled to pick me up at 2:30 pm (you can't drive yourself after taking psilocybin), I actually was disappointed. I wanted the session to be over, because I wasn't having a truly enjoyable experience, just a mildly relaxing one, and I was eager to get back to my usual reality.

(3) Everyday reality is pretty damn good. This will sound strange, but the best part of my two hour psilocybin experience was when it was over. It felt good to have Sammy turn the lights on and for me to be able to stand up, put my shoes on, and get ready to go outside and meet my wife in the parking lot.

I didn't have much to tell her about the two hours I'd just spent. I said that I listened to music with my eyes closed, and it was relaxing. Laurel then told me about what she'd done, including taking our dog for a walk in a park. She actually had a more interesting two hours than I did.

Again, I'd not complaining about The Psilocybin Center. I got the dose of magic mushrooms that I'd signed up for; Sammy did a good job complying with the rules that he needed to follow; there's no guarantees that a psilocybin experience is going to be fulfilling or pleasant.

All I'm saying is that I'm pretty sure I don't want to try a higher dose of psilocybin, because that would mean spending more time indoors at The Psilocybin Center with a facilitator making sure that rules were followed, which includes not allowing a customer to leave before a certain time is up.

Bottom line: while psilocybin might still be in my future in one form or another, I doubt that I'll want to do this in a regulated setting. It was good to have a quality dose of magic mushrooms, but I came away from today feeling that I'm much rather have a psychedelic experience on my own terms, not in a tightly controlled setting where a stranger is my only companion -- not nature or friends. 

Letting go is key in both meditation and psychedelics. Here's why.

I decided to buy a book about magic mushrooms in anticipation of my mild/moderate 1 gram (totally legal) psilocybin experience this coming Thursday.

It was a good choice, as I've enjoyed reading Michelle Janikian's Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms. Well-written, practical, nicely researched.

Today I got to a chapter where Janikian talks about the relation between meditating and tripping on magic mushrooms. Since I've meditated every day for about 55 years, and used psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin) quite a bit in college, I was struck by how "letting go" is a central aspect of both practices.

She writes about a psychedelic experience:

But according to researchers, the most important thing you can do is to approach the experience with an accepting attitude and open mind. Similarly, while you're actually under the influence of a psychedelic, the most important navigation skill is to relax.

It sounds simple -- too easy, even -- but relinquishing your control to the substance, to not resist its powers and just let go and see where it takes you, can be challenging.

...In one of the first trip manuals, The Psychedelic Experience, published in 1964, the main recommendation for tripping successfully still holds true: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

In fact, every psychedelic expert who has written on the subject has given this same advice in their own words.

Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and the first scientist to resume psychedelic research since prohibition, advises something very similar: "It is only through letting go that we find ourselves making the most progress... this surrender is the crux of a successful journey."

...Similarly, in The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, James Fadmian gives more specifics on how to surrender: "Observe what is going on inside your mind and body, but do not try to control the flow of images and sensations. Allow your mind to take its natural course; relax and observe as your thoughts unfold without any effort. Affirm that all experiences are welcome."

Janikian then speaks about meditation:

This is where having a practice of meditation in your daily life can help you navigate the psychedelic space, because in meditation you learn how to relax your mind and let thoughts come and go without engaging them.

Our minds naturally rationalize and judge everything around us -- it's a safety mechanism to keep us alive, so it's completely unnatural for us to stop doing so, whether we're on mushrooms or not. While I'm terrible at meditating, I was still practicing before my latest psychedelic experience, and I was able to use that developing skill to stop resisting and rationalizing everything and, instead, relax and go deeper.

So if you find yourself being overly critical of your thoughts while you're tripping, try taking a deep breath, closing your eyes, and simply focus on your breathing.

For me, thinking "Teach me, I'm listening" helped me to stop rationalizing, judging, and planning everything, and just be in the moment. But sticking to the classic: "Trust, let go, be open," should do the trick, too. Before the trip begins, choose a mantra that encourages you to be calm, present, and accepting of the experience, no matter what it is.

So why is letting go so key in both meditation and tripping? The way I see it, in both cases there's a presumption, or at least a hypothesis, that our usual sense of living in a fractured reality is an illusion of sorts, since there is a wholeness lying largely unknown and unexamined outside of our habitual awareness.

An image comes to mind.

If reality is viewed as a vast, probably infinite, ocean, mostly we see ourselves as individual flecks of foam blown into the air from ocean waves by winds of cause and effect.

Though we do our best to unite with other flecks of foam through love, togetherness, mutuality, and such, there's always a feeling of "I am me, you are you, they are themselves."

But by letting go, by surrendering to a gravitational force that manifests when we stop being flecks of foam in constant motion, the resulting stillness can lead to a sense of being a wave thrown up by the ocean, yet in no way separate from the ocean.

That's the promise of meditation. That's the promise of psychedelics. To relax into a state of consciousness where me is seen as being not very different from thee -- meaning, everything that's usually viewed as being clearly other than me.

This sense of oceanic awareness can be very blissful. It also can be very scary, if the loss of individuality is experienced as something to be afraid of, rather than welcomed. 

Usually meditation brings about this sort of ego dissolution in a decidedly gradual manner. Psychedelics taken in high ("heroic") doses can produce ego loss rapidly. So the psychedelic explorer needs to prepare carefully, have a positive mindset, and ramp up doses to the heroic level in a series of experiences.

Jumping into a deep pool of water can be heavenly if you're a good swimmer. Or hellish if you're not. The good news is, each of us has the capacity to let go and swim in the unified ocean of reality. This may seem difficult, but more and more, I've come to believe that the difficulty lies within our belief that it isn't easy.

But maybe it is. After all, how tough is it to let go? Isn't holding on much more of a chore? After all, you're not trying to get somewhere. By giving up trying, the idea is to become what we always are, yet don't realize this because we're in ceaseless motion, always aiming to be somewhere else.

I share a fascinating message critical of Gurinder Singh, with praise of Flora Wood

Below is a message I received yesterday from someone who describes how Gurinder Singh, the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), created a highly negative atmosphere in the United Kingdom after he became the successor to Charan Singh, a much-beloved RSSB guru.

The message also is filled with praise for Flora Wood, a long-time RSSB initiate, or satsangi, who wrote a book for the organization and was a positive influence in the United Kingdom's RSSB membership.

It doesn't surprise me that Gurinder Singh comes in for such criticism in this message. There's plenty of other evidence that at best, Gurinder's ethics are at odds with how previous RSSB gurus have behaved, and at worst, Gurinder has engaged in financial fraud aimed at enriching himself and his family to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Here's the message. "Sewadars" means volunteers. "Sangat" refers to the RSSB community. "Radha Soami" is a greeting used by RSSB initiates. "Haynes Park" is a large RSSB center in the United Kingdom. The "Dera" refers to the RSSB headquarters in India. "Satsang" is a talk about the RSSB teachings.

Dear Brian, I submit this to you anonymously.

In 2005 Mrs Flora Wood was asked by the Dera to write a postscript to her 1965 book In 'Search Of The Way' in which she recalled her Indian experiences with The Great Master Baba Sawan Singh, as well as the history of the birth and development of the British Sangat.

When Mrs Wood's friend, a secretary to her commanding officer in the British Army in India, told her that the colonel had became a satsangi, she followed him in that respect, but only after she had persuaded him to brief her, over dinner, on the teachings and the Master.

Flora Wood, born in 1923, and an early disciple of Sawan Singh, had served as representative to three masters. No satsangi in the UK could deliver a discourse at her level of spirituality and knowledge both of Sant Mat and of the Persian mystics. Under her quiet seemingly hands-off rule the satsang was intimate, peaceful, happy and without dissent.

All this changed when Gurinder made his first visit to the UK, and when Mrs Wood had booked the large Birmingham Convention Center in order to accommodate what had by then, under the guruship of Charan Singh, as well as mass Indian immigration, become a large sangat.

We sewadars positioned at the door of the VIP entrance were in awe expecting that another Charan Singh, whose bearing was that of emperor of emperors, who bathed in divine light, whose aura was of sanctified purity and spiritual radiance, instead witnessed the entry of an angry young man in a turban, boiling with rage, accompanied by a hired security made up of East London gangster types of the kind seen in Guy Ritchie's movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

 

Gurinder glared past our Radha Soamis and into the main hall leaving behind a shocked air of surprise and disappointment.

 

The word quickly spread that he was furious with Mrs Wood for the expense of the venue. Mrs Wood was quickly replaced by a family relation of Gurinders who may or may not have been very familiar with the English language and who confined himself to the Indian group. It is said that he did give a few satsangs in Punjabi to them.

 

From then the British sangat was butchered and by the time of the purchase of Haynes Park and the changeover of once loving sewadars to a sort of unkind Stasi rule, western satsangis were detaching themselves  from RSSB in droves.

 

A political shift to republican thinking about Northern Ireland saw its very capable secretary fired and all power moved far away to Dublin down in the Irish Republic; a long journey to satsang. As it happened however all the western satsangis in northern Ireland, disciples of Charan Singh, no doubt sharing a feeling of many around the world for westerners that the behaviour of Gurinder and his lack of any of the qualities of mastership including his allergy to giving satsang were intolerable, abandoned the Radha Soami Satsang Beas anyway.

 

Mrs Wood passed away at 100 years of age in 2023.

 

As stated in the beginning of this piece Mrs Flora Wood was asked by the Dera in 2005 to write a postscript to her book In 'Search Of The Way.' It can only be surmised that the reason for the Dera's request for this further addition to the text was that she would note in her postscript the new incumbency of Gurinder Singh at the Dera.

 

However, Mrs Wood did no such thing, she did not even mention Gurinder's succession or anything about him. One can only surmise that this very learned and old satsangi saw the successorship in a different light than the general conclusion.

 

It is one of those fantasies of a Dera Baba Jaimal Singh cut off from the larger Sant Mat world outside its gates that a master will always appoint a perfect successor, what used to be called 'Dera gossips.' In the reality of history this is not always the case.

 

Given the vast size of a possibly multi-billion dollar world-wide institution like RSSB with all its housing dependents and even old sewadar pensioners and huge numbers of Satsangars and other properties (particularly all across India) the last Master cannot just throw in the turban and say "OK, there is no worthy successor, we are closing down the RSSB tomorrow!"

 

No, it is just then allowed to rot at the head, true seekers are no longer drawn to it, or leave it when they find it is no longer true and it deteriorated into another religion. That is the kindest way to go about it, a gradual shutdown.

 

All these years later the surviving satsangis of Charan Singh are still in a daze at what happened and have had no explanation from expert sources. There is an unhealed wound in many hearts, there are disciples of Charan Singh who lost their faith in the confusion some of whom want to find the way back to the path.

 

Today the RSSB to any outsider seems like some closed cult, hidden in plain sight from the world. To the spiritually minded internet seekers it is a black hole out of which no Bani comes. Anyone who goes to YouTube and looks up videos of Gurinder might be forgiven in thinking he is an apparatchic or politician of the Bhrata Janata Party or some sort of Raja.

 

He is ever seen surrounded by a posse of police officers or army men as he arrives in his private helicopter or jet somewhere for some reason. There is no teaching that an enquiring mind can grasp from this output, no satsangs of his to listen to (some say he does not give satsang).

 

Is Gurinder Singh a perfect master? Is there something numbers of people have missed? Or is he simply the manager of a large institution playing it by ear? Many would like to know.

To be real, consciousness must cause something. Sorry, supernatural believers.

People throw around strange conceptions about consciousness. On this blog, and elsewhere. Most of the strangeness comes from those religiously and supernaturally inclined, who put forward notions of consciousness that bear no resemblance to reality.

I'm familiar with this sort of w00-woo, because I used to engage in it myself.

I've finished reading neuroscientist Christof Koch's latest book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.  Not surprisingly, he frequently views consciousness through the lens of integrated information theory, a theory that Koch has embraced and contributed to.

Here's passages from a concluding chapter where Koch describes what consciousness is, and isn't. This will challenge those who see consciousness as something supernatural, non-physical, or ethereal to describe why Koch is wrong and they are right.

Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is intrinsic causal power, not computation. Causal power is not something intangible, ethereal, but something physical -- the extent to which the system's recent past specifies its present state (cause power) and the extent to which this current state specifies its immediate future (effect power).

And here's the rub: causal power, the ability to influence oneself, cannot be simulated. Not now or in the future. It must be built into the system, part of the physics of the system. 

To illustrate this intuitively, consider computer code that simulates the field equations of Albert Einstein's celebrated theory of general relativity, relating mass to spacetime curvature. The software accurately models the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This black hole exerts such extensive gravitational effects on its surroundings that nothing, not even light, can escape its attraction. To absolutely no one's surprise, the astrophysicist simulating the black hole doesn't get sucked into their laptop by the simulated gravitational field. 

Of course they don't. Why should they? This seemingly absurd question emphasizes the difference between the real and the simulated. For if the simulation is faithful to reality, spacetime should warp around the laptop, creating a black hole that swallows everything around it. But it doesn't. Why not?

The answer is that gravity is not a computation. If it were, then the physics simulation engine should affect the gravitational field around the computer. Gravity has extrinsic causal powers, attracting anything with mass. Imitating a black hole's causal powers requires an actual superdense sphere about four million times the mass of our sun.

Causal power can't be simulated; it must be constituted. Aspects of gravity can be simulated but not its raw causal power.

The different between the real and the simulated is their respective causal powers. That's why it doesn't rain inside a computer simulating a rainstorm. The software is functionally identical to weather, yet lacks its causal powers to blow and to turn vapor into rain drops. Causal powers, the ability to make or take a difference, must be built into the system.

...A human brain simulation running on a digital computer can, in principle, do anything a human can do. However, it would not experience anything. It would be an intelligent zombie.

Once again, it is important to emphasize that the brain experiences life not by dint of a soul-like substance but by its massive intrinsic causal power.

I respond to a Sant Mat true believer who sent an email critical of me

Yesterday I got an email from someone who doesn't like that I've strayed from the path of Sant Mat, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) variety, that I followed for 35 years. 

That made me happy, since it had been a while since I've gotten emailed criticism of me. Gosh, I'd been feeling all neglected, so it was a pleasant surprise to get this person's message.

I saved my response for this blog post. No reason to waste the person's message and my reply as being just between us. I've interspersed my responses in italics following their statements in regular type.

It's quite obvious that your lack of true understanding of Sant Mat has led you to totally negate all the teachings.

Hey, not at all. I'm still a vegetarian. Of course, I was a vegetarian before I was initiated into Sant Mat, so it figures that I'd keep on being a vegetarian. I also still meditate every day, though not in the same way I did in my RSSB period. Regarding my "lack of true understanding of Sant Mat," I'll reply to that false assertion below.

Sounds to me from your writings that you basically gave up on the idea of an Oversoul/God, in favor of believing we just die and everything is over and we don't exist.

That's pretty much accurate. However, this wasn't so much a giving up on the idea of God, as of coming to the realization that God is an unnecessary concept for living a meaningful life. If you doubt this, talk to some Buddhists. Or Taoists. Or the large number of people who are agnostics or atheists when it comes to God. Likewise, it wasn't so much that I chose to believe that when we die, we're gone forever. It was more that I realized there was no convincing evidence for life after death. If it turns out that there is, and it's a good life, I'll be pleased to learn this after I die.

If you've ever experienced the sound current and heard it, even for a second, you would understand that this is the essence of consciousness and that this indeed, is what Sant Mat teaches is God.

Well, here's what I said in a 2009 blog post, "Q and A about me about Sant Mat." My experience of the sound current, in the form of a bell sound, lasted more than a second. Yet I didn't understand this as the essence of consciousness and of God. So looks like you're wrong about the even for a second thing.

A few days after I was initiated I heard loud bell sounds inside my head while I was meditating. These never came back. I've had other glimpses of inner light and hearings of inner sound, but these could be (and probably are) produced by the brain, not immaterial soul or spirit.

Not the Master, not following blindly the Master, not being dogmatic, and not following some religious rituals as other religions do.

Hmmmm. You sure sound dogmatic to me. Maybe you should take your own advice.

In fact, if you've read any Sant Mat books you'd see this same teaching about the dogmatic behaviors of religions and that practice of Sant Mat is very practical and scientific, unlike religious rituals which are just the opposite.

Not only did I read every RSSB book published in English up through 2005, when RSSB and I parted ways, I read most of them many times. More: I took copious notes on them in the course of writing three books on behalf of RSSB: God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder; Life is Fair; and Return to the One. So your implication that I don't have an in-depth understanding of the RSSB teachings/Sant Mat is completely wrong. For many years I was a speaker at our local RSSB meetings. I also spoke at regional meetings of RSSB, including one national meeting. Have you read my first book about the relation between the new physics and ancient mysticism? It talks about the scientific nature of meditation, something I still believe in, just not in the same way.

Sounds to me like you're bitter from lack of experience and dedication to the path, even tho you might actually understand it, and have decided to try to turn others against it.

Wrong again. I'm not bitter about my 35 years in the RSSB fold. Those were enjoyable years, by and large. In the same sense, I'm not bitter about my first marriage, which ended in divorce after 18 years -- also mostly enjoyable years. I was extremely dedicated to Sant Mat during those 35 years. Followed the teachings to the best of my ability; did a lot of volunteer service; meditated every day. I do try to convince other people to become spiritually independent, rather than following the dictates of a religion. RSSB is a religion, in my well-informed view, so I use it as an example of the drawbacks of religion because it's the religion I know best. I mostly write about other subjects these days, though for a while I did write many blog posts about RSSB.

That's true ego dominance and it's pretty sad. I hope you can turn from that and become more humble and meditate again if you've learned this.   

I'm always amazed when strangers like you write about me as if you know me better than I know myself. Regarding "ego dominance," it takes a healthy ego to criticize someone you've never met, drawing conclusions about them from very flimsy evidence, none of it direct. I could be wrong, but I don't sense a lot of humility in the message you sent me. Regarding meditation, like I said, I still meditate every day. It's just a Buddhist/mindfulness variety of meditation, not Sant Mat meditation.

God bless --👋

 

Well, I don't really know what that means. Isn't God capable of deciding who to bless, assuming God exists? But thanks for what I'll take to be a kind wish. Nice that you ended on a positive note, since the rest of your message was so negative.

Hey, turns out I'm enlightened! Just not all the time.

Enlightenment is a word that gets thrown around a lot in spiritual circles, even though it's rare that anyone can clearly say what makes someone enlightened, or how it's possible to tell a person is in this supposedly exalted state.

Often enlightenment is viewed as something ineffable that only another enlightened being can recognize. You know, an exclusive club where the members know each other but us ordinary people can only do our best to peek through the curtained windows in a vain attempt to see what's going on inside.

Another problem with the notion of enlightenment is that even when it's described somewhat specifically, there's a curious non-coincidence I've observed: enlightenment just happens to be a spiritual state that the person describing it says they've achieved. 

In other words, when someone has an experience, or transformation, that they consider spiritually significant, frequently they give it a name: enlightenment. Then they can market their accomplishment to others who desire to be enlightened. 

Now, this might be what's going on with Joan Tollifson's take on enlightenment. She's a spiritual rebel of sorts who has studied Zen Buddhism, nonduality, and other pursuits, yet has developed her own original manner of speaking about them in a way that I find appealing. 

While I readily agree that how Tollifson looks upon enlightenment flows out of her own personal experiences (but doesn't that apply to everyone?), what she says in her book Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks & Dialogues About Non-Duality makes sense to me -- in part because her definition of enlightenment applies to everyone at times, though not always. 

I've only read about half of the book. However, I've found enough references to enlightenment to make me confident that these passages accurately reflect Tollifson's perspective.

Enlightenment is the recognition that there is no "me" behind the mask of any persona, and that no person exists as a solid, continuous, separate, independent entity. Enlightenment is seeing that I am everyone and no one. I include everything and I am no-thing in particular. Enlightenment sees from the perspective of unicity. [defined as: the quality or state of being unique of its kind : ONENESS]

...Above all, awakening is seeing through the "me" who wonders if "I' have had an awakening or not. This waking up is very simple. It is not some fantastic, spectacular, one-time event with trumpets blaring and fireworks exploding. Nor is it a personal achievement. We miss it because we're looking for something extraordinary, something that will enhance "me."

...We often seek the experiences we have been led to expect, and then we often frame our experiences according to what we have learned. Christians see Jesus and get born again. Buddhists discover emptiness and the present moment. Satsang people have awakenings. Nondualists imagine a moment when "the self" drops away forever.

People who expect dramatic enlightenments often have them! When I hear some of the big bang enlightenment stories on offer, I sometimes wonder if the teachers in question haven't constructed the whole experience out of thin air, convinced themselves of its validity, and now they're using it to sell themselves or make themselves special.

...The whole notion of a final breakthrough, in which all sense of being an encapsulated individual permanently vanishes forever and ever, never to return, is a total myth. That encapsulated "me" is never really here, ever, and the idea or sense of encapsulation vanishes in any moment that's it's clearly seen for what it is. 

...Enlightenment is Now. It's not a possession or an achievement. There is no final enlightenment. And an enlightened person is a total oxymoron. Enlightenment is the popping of the bubble of separation. It leaves no person to be enlightened or unenlightened. 

As I've said, I think there is often a tendency to confuse unicity, which is all there is, with enlightenment, which is the absence of delusion. Unicity includes both enlightenment and delusion, both Ramana and Hitler. But Hitler was not enlightened. Enlightenment sees unicity. Delusion imagines separation. The very idea of permanently enlightened people is delusion. 

...There are characters running around in the movie of waking life claiming that they no longer experience fear or desire. Whenever I hear this now, it immediately activates my bullshit alarms. Maybe it's true, I don't know. 

But it seems to me that instead of seeing what is going on, many people who swallowed the "I Am Enlightened" story may now be busy denying delusion, even to themselves. This is like putting on blinders. It's all about a new and improved identity -- Me the Enlightened One -- an identity that needs to be defended. 

...Awakening is not a flashy experience. It's very ordinary. It's simply seeing through false ideas. What remains is the ever-present, ever-changing aliveness of Here/Now. And that is actually never not here. 

"Facts and the law" applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law." 

Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election about a sexual affair with Trump that occurred four months after his wife, Melania gave birth to their son, Barron.

Prosecutors had to convince the jury that both the facts and the law merited a conviction, while the defense team tried to cast doubt on the facts presented by the prosecution. But here's an interesting thing: the defense couldn't argue that the law was wrong or doubtful, because the law is what it is, until it is changed.

There's something beautiful about this.

The justice system, when it works correctly (it has flaws, just as every social system does), is a marvelous way of resolving disputes in a reasonable, measured manner. Each side presents its case, the facts of the matter as they see them, before a judge or jury. Then the judge or jury decides the extent to which those facts are believable, and applies that assessment of the facts to the appropriate legal standard. 

To my mind much of the beauty here is akin to why sporting events are so pleasurable to watch. Every sport, such as baseball, has rules. Those are the "law." Umpires or referees observe what players are doing, the "facts." Then they rule on how the facts apply to the law. For example, if a pitcher misses the strike zone four times, the batter being pitched to is entitled to a walk, putting them on first base.

While players and coaches may disagree with a decision, usually they don't, or the disagreement is mild. By contrast, what drives me and others crazy about politics is how Donald Trump, an extremely poor loser, has complained about the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden being rigged against him, even though there's no evidence, no facts, that this is true. 

When it comes to religiosity, both the facts and the law typically are disputed. As I have noted many times on this blog, and will surely do so again many times in the future, there's a lack of demonstrable evidence that a supernatural realm even exists, much less that it has certain characteristics claimed by every religion -- all of which describe the supernatural in their own unique fashion. 

So both facts and the law are a matter of debate in religiosity. There's no way to adjudicate claims and counter-claims -- Jesus is the Son of God sent to absolve our sins; no he isn't! -- in such an amorphous situation. This leaves religions in the realm of personal belief, not impersonal facts. 

Complicating things even more, believers in the supernatural are unable to come up with a coherent explanation for how an immaterial entity, such as God, is able to interact or communicate with material entities, such as we humans. In my first book, I observed that this is akin to supposedly immaterial ghosts being able to show signs of their presence by turning on a light or knocking on a door.

As much as I'd like the supernatural to exist (reality would be a lot more interesting if it did), the laws of nature as they're currently understood by science fail to show any solid evidence, any facts, that this is the case. Thus both the facts and physical laws argue against believing in the innocence, so to speak, or religiosity.

Today I read this passage in neuroscientist Christof Koch's book, Then I am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. This is from a section on near-death experiences.

There are persistent reports in the popular media that patients who undergo near-death experiences have "flat-lined," with their electroencephalograms (EEGs) showing no significant electrical activity. A completely inert brain would indicate a brain in a deep coma, a brain that had lost its causal powers and that certainly wouldn't feel anything.

Therefore, according to this narrative, "conventional medicine" (voiced with dripping sarcasm) fails to explain their visions. Instead, we just have to accept that these patients have been granted a vision of the Afterlife.

I am extremely skeptical, as I've never seen a patient with a flat, isoelectric EEG soon thereafter wake up and claim to have been conscious. A key difficulty is aligning the clock time of the near-death experience with the EEG record, given the patient's confused recollections hours later, often under sedatives.

Remember what I called the neuroscientist's dictum, "No brain, never mind"? Neuroscience operates under the hypothesis that all thoughts, memories, percepts, and experiences are an uneluctable consequence of the natural extrinsic and intrinsic causal powers of the brain -- not supernatural ones. 

Unless there is extraordinary compelling evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon the principle that a silenced brain does not support consciousness. 

Note that Koch called this a hypothesis. That's the openness of science. If compelling fresh facts come along that argue for overturning our current understanding of the laws of nature, then some of those laws may need to be modified. 

That's how the justice system works also. It's fairly common to have a guilty verdict overturned when new evidence, such as a DNA test that wasn't available during the original trial, shows the innocence of someone who was convicted of a crime.

But simply saying so doesn't make it so. Not in the law, and not in religiosity. Facts matter. A lot.

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A multi-dimensional extravaganza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's manjit's informative, passionate comment in praise of psychedelics

Yesterday manjit left a marvelous comment on my post, "Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization." It deserved more attention than most comments get, so I've copied it in below.

There's a lot to appreciate in the comment. For now I'll simply note that manjit correctly draws connections between mystical experiences arising from meditation (often or usually) and psychedelic experiences arising from ingestion of a substance such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, or mescaline.

This is not at all a crackpot idea. The June 2024 issue of Scientific American has an article called "Beyond the Veil: What near-death experiences tell us about human consciousness." Here's an excerpt that pertains to what manjit says in his comment.

Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who pioneered studies of psilocybin and who died last October, reported similar findings [to the similarities between people who have had near-death experiences, NDE, and people who have had a DMT experience] with his colleagues in 2022.

The authors compared 3,192 people who had undergone an NDE, a psychedelic drug trip or a non-drug-induced mystical experience. The team found "remarkably similar" long-term outcomes across subjects in all three groups, including a reduced fear of death and lasting positive effects of insights they had gained.

Of course, to have a NDE you have to almost die; to have a non-drug-induced mystical experiences you either have to trust it will happen unexpectedly sometime or try to induce it through intense meditation or some other spiritual practice; but to have a psychedelic drug trip you just need to ingest a psychedelic substance.

Here's manjit's comment. It's lengthy, but well worth reading. I've inserted an image that was linked to and broken up some long paragraphs into several shorter ones.

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

Congratulations on making one of the best decisions in your life! My upmost respect to you for having the courage to try new and potentially "scary" (it won't be, it will be amongst the most beautiful, loving & healing experiences you will ever have in your life, if not THE most!) things in the spirit of open-mindedness, curiosity and exploring the depths of mind, existence and reality itself. Bravo Sir, Bravo.

If I may take a few moments to round up a few of the usual suspects from the comments section and re-capitulate previous comments of mine on this blog before I return to your upcoming sojourn with the sublime.....

"Brian dives down one rabbit hole after another - all mind games. Brian received Nam........ My answer to all of you is to receive Nam and prove it for yourselves."
No Kool-Aid

The Gratuitous Grace of Nam?

Yes sir. Follow these lifelong vows, wherever your life may take you. Meditate on my form for 3 hours a day, every day, for the rest of your life. However dull and joyless that 12.5% of your day that may be. Do this for 30 years and you may, just perhaps, if you're very, very lucky, get a snippet of a lucid dream that lasts 1 minute which you can obsess and fetishize over for the few remaining years of your life!

But only if you're one of the lucky ones (I mean, check out the endless stream of initiates in RSSB Q&As, many of whom are in the later stages of life, who have achieved precisely nothing with their "gift" of "nam", truth be told)!

The author of this comment has not considered how absurd and disconnected from reality this comment must be, to call "Nam" a "gift" to somebody who has not only been initiated and meditating using the prescribed method for DECADES, but was also considered "knowing" enough to be both a satsang speaker and official book author, and for whom this so called "gift", for which he and every initiate has had to pay a very large and oppressive price, has done absolutely fuck all for in that time. Maybe DO consider that, before flinging around claims of non-existent "gifts".

The Sacred Mushrooms on the other hand? Come, come one and all.....this way, entrance is free, just partake of this REAL Gratuitous Grace, no sacrifice or vows to make, just eat! Success is assured, regardless of one's worthiness or preparation.

That is what a gift is, or at least should be. You just need to have the balls to accept it, like Brian courageously has.

Ingesting the sacred mushrooms is like a GENUINE initiation into the mysteries, the real deal which the initiations of the son of men is a mere shadow of a reflection of. The "connection" will be immediate and known with 100% certainty, unlike the drab soul-less "initiations" of the son of men, beturbaned cultural patriarchs, conmen and fraudsters, which even 40 years and thousands upon thousands of hours of meditation later has "connected" you with absolutely nothing of any note beyond feeling slightly relaxed and a partially recalled lucid dream.

Where Mushrooms are like a wild, raging ocean, the initiations of man are like a singular drop of water in a vast desert....pointless. I know of someone who was shabd this and shabd that, but their entire "naam" bhakti was torn away with a few swigfuls of Ayahuasca, it was nowhere to be found. Imagine that, the drop gets swallowed by the ocean! This is not allegorical or even exaggerated, it is literally a true story. Y'all can't even get through a psychedelic experience without losing "nam", and think you will be able to cope with death by clinging to it? Hehe. Ahhh, jokes.

Sant64 wrote:

"Shrooms are totally safe."

Yes, they absolutely are (with a reasonable degree of certainty, with the right precautions taken)! Here is a chart from a scientific study showing the social and personal dangers of a variety of drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. As you rightly state, mushrooms are extremely safe, the safest of all the substances listed, which is incredible:

https://images.app.goo.gl/KSPpPXMrRUGsT2nJ6

"Did we learn nothing from the 60s?"

Yes; Civil rights, women's rights, anti imperialist war sentiments, awareness of the corruption of our own governments, the explosion of colour in our culture, be it through music, movies, tv, writings or other art forms, all of which by extension has revolutionised and evolved the human consciousness across the globe.

You see, like most of us, the author of these comments does not appreciate how the cosmos (our physical reality) and psyche (mind, being) are intimately related, and co-evolve. It is no coincidence that LSD was discovered just 2 years before the atom bomb, or that colour TV was invented, or that there were vast cultural and existential upheavals in all areas of life from the scientific, social, political and individual level which totally radicalised and revolutionised the western mind and society. It was literally a black and white world, and LSD was clearly one of the chief sacraments which helped catalyze this change.

Some people may be sad to see black people and women get equal rights, for colour to implode into our culture, but I suspect history will see this as evolution in a participatory epistemology.

In regards the alleged lack of benefits on the individual level, in Lennon, Ram Dass et al....really? Who is anyone to judge the subjective lived experience of these people? The evidence, scientific and anecdotal, is in and it is clear, and it is everywhere; psychedelics can be and very often are extremely beneficial for the user on multiple levels, increasing their sense of connection with life, joy, happiness and love for months if not years from just one dose!

The benefits in my life have been persistent and I suspect permanent. The world, from the outside, like Sant64, may question the value of these things, but the experiencer themself will have a knowing, inner smile, born of contentment which far transcends such petty, close-minded, impoverished views. The fraudulent "Satgurus" get less criticism than those who don't pretend to be holy but have, nonetheless, truly kissed the Divine. We are all human. But to be human has oh so much untapped potential!

To Ron, I would just say consider open-mindedness, curiosity and courage are positive and healthy human traits. Living in a small box, don't conflate it for the cosmos at large. In regards your constant referral to the "brain" and "chemicals" generating or altering human consciousness, I referred earlier to the remarkable, psychedelically soaked 50s & 60s.

I would suggest those who abide within a materialist reductionist worldview, and think that saying things like "the brain creates consciousness" is a smart, full and complete "explanation" for reality, move beyond 17th century Newtonian physics, catch up on 18th century Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant, then make your way to the glorious 1960s, 1962 to be precise (again, it is no coincidence), and familiarise yourselves on Popper's Conjectures and Refutations & Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The "brain creates consciousness" is just a word-prison. And a banal one at that, dress it up how you might.

Reality is Mystery. With a capital M. Mystery on all sides, infinite and vast, and if you think your simple human conceptions of "brain creates consciousness" explains a single thing, you are suffocating in your little human conceptual word-prison.

Perhaps a healthy dose of psilocybe mushrooms can help you break out of that tiny word-prison and face the real, vast, incomprehensible Mystery that is being, consciousness and cosmos? :)

If you are not experiencing perpetual awe, astonishment, joy and love....truly and absolutely.....then you have not understood reality.

As for psychedelics not being "natural", this is one of those dualistic, conceptual canards, a belief system grounded in conceptual confusion and ignorance. Our everyday "normal" waking state of consciousness is itself connected to, modulated, mediated or filtered by, a whole cascade of "chemicals". Plants and fungi have co-evolved with humanity, and it is no accident that some of them have the ability to so profoundly alter our consciousness that it can generate huge & rapid leaps in human evolution (Indian religions are grounded in the Vedas, which praise "soma" as the vehicle to God realisation, and Soma is clearly described as a psycho-active fungi or plant.

Greek philosophers, mystics and all other culturally significant persons participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, or other Mystery schools, which consisted of ingesting a psychedelic sacrament. They considered this the most important aspect of their culture, and the ground of their knowledge and understanding of higher things. The ideas that emerged from these experiences has profoundly influenced and guided the entire course of human history, thought and reality to this very day with the whole of western philosophy being essentially a cyclical recapitulation & evolution of the Plato-Aristotle dialectic.).

Our "natural" body contains within it DMT, it has been found in both the brain and lungs of human subjects. The chemical structure of psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-DMT. Yes, both the human being and the fungi have co-evolved with DMT running through their very breath and brains....a remarkable and "natural" connection!

So, whilst the yogi sits in a dark cave, squatting with his thumbs in his ears, following a strict diet and lifestyle restrictions, for hours upon hours, years on end, in the hope of releasing some endogenous (already existing within the body) DMT, the other fella falls upon some Gratuitous Grace and accidentally eats some psilocybe mushrooms, and finds themselves, even more reliably, in the same space of light and sound phantasmagoria. Nature provides.

For, isn't that, scientifically speaking, what is happening here? Isn't it clear with what we now know, that Soami Ji's Sach Khand and beyond were just intense internal cascades of endogenous DMT release enabled by the intense, "unnatural" practice or technologies of meditation? Is it a coincidence that DMT is found most heavily concentrated in the lungs, and that the original and most efficacious practices of shabd and most other yoga technologies involves breathwork or pranayama? God has given us a brain, so just as somebody evolved the shabd yoga practice, we have now evolved to understand what that technology is actually doing to our brain and bodies, so we can, nay, are obliged to evolve "shortcuts"......just when our society and culture requires them. Gratuitous Grace.

Having experienced an intense, completely "natural" kundalini and non-dual awakening some 25 odd years ago, I can from personal experience attest that the most intense aspects of that "kundalini awakening" were incredibly similar, if not entirely identical to, a very high dose of psilocybe mushrooms. Same same.

As for the cost, or people making money off it.....c'mon, what kind of BS idealist planet are people on! Are you expecting commercial enterprises to provide this service for free? In America? Isn't that a bit disingenuous? I've checked out the site Brian linked, and whilst I don't know anything about them or the price they charge, they seem perfectly respectable and I'm sure will provide a very decent and safe environment for Brian to have his first experience in.

Brilliant! It is SO about time decent human beings are able to explore their own consciousness and not be criminalised for it, and with such ease and security, especially for those who are a bit older. If he can afford it, why not? And besides, if money is a factor, mushrooms can of course be grown very easily and cheaply at home, especially for anyone with green fingers.....

In regards the above comments, there are an awful lot of experts around here who clearly disagree. Are they, however, "experts" who have absolutely no knowledge of the history & science, or personal experience of, psychedelics themselves, choosing instead to stick with their ignorant, small minded conceptual prejudice and biases? To each their own limiting reality.

To Brian - congratulations!

I had posted here in the past about taking large doses, 7g+, of good quality mushrooms to dive deeply into the nature of consciousness and reality...however, recent experiences in group Ayahuasca ceremonies with 20+ other people has shown me I may have been a bit reckless with my advice as I appear to have an abnormally high tolerance to these things. So it is not about the "correct" objective dosage amount per se, but rather the correct subjective dosage to get you where you want to go.

You are absolutely right to start low with 1.5-2g. There is a lot of machoism around dosages, and this is not the way to go, it's not about size of dose but the experience you have. That said, I don't want to lie or misrepresent truth. I have personally never taken less than 3.5g of good quality, regular cubensis mushrooms. At 3.5 to 5-6g, you can have exceptionally beautiful, moving, ecstatic experiences, experiences that far exceed anything most people ever experience in their entire lifetimes (I hesitate to say it, but it is true for me nonetheless, I feel a life lived without at least one genuinely powerful psychedelic experience in it is a tragic one, in today's world....:(....).

However, as I noted on the RSS forum years ago, I did not feel they were "spiritually significant", or comparable to the power of full on kundalini phenomena. However, when I got to 6-8,9 grams........that's when you enter the Holy of Holies.....Caveat Emptor: this is my personal experience, for someone else it may be 1.5g gives you the beautiful light and sound phantasmagoria, and 3.5g gets you fully immersed into the ocean of the divine, or even less!

Point is, Brian, be clear what it is you want. 1.5-2g will probably give you very joyous, beautiful experiences, experiences which will heal and soothe many of your mental and physical ailments, This is great, beautiful! Gratuitous Grace! However, if you feel comfortable with those experiences, don't be afraid to, perhaps 3 or 4 or even 24 months later, try again, but at a higher dose.....if you want, and feel up to, penetrating deeper into the heart of reality and consciousness. But also, nothing wrong with going again at the same dose, or even being happy with just that one experience! It's all good.

I'm sure they will provide a good set and setting for you, but you should know the effects peak between 1-4 hours after ingestion, this is best spent eyes closed, perhaps listening to music. Electronic music is perfect for me, but you may prefer something along the John Hopkins psychedelic playlist, which I believe is mostly classical music (I have listened to this on psychedelics, but I can't remember it at all :), which I'm sure your centre will have on their playlist as it's very well known.

When the effects start to transition from otherworldly to this-worldly, which can last from 5-12 hours after ingestion, you will be basking in a beautiful, warm afterglow. This is the time to enjoy yourself more "recreationally", ie. watch movies, listen to your favourite music in a more normal manner (during peak, music turns into multi-dimensional shape-shifting structures and is not music as you conventionally know it! :), hug a human or a pet, eat some fruit etc.

This is also an optimal time to smoke some cannabis, if you have been able to cope with the intensity of the main part or peak of the journey, smoking cannabis can re-intensify and vivify the experience in a most pleasant way (again, caution, ONLY if you have been entirely comfortable with your experience, some people find smoking with psychedelics too intense). Nature or science documentaries are great, but if you can get your hand on them, the films Samsara or Baraka are the perfect visual accompaniments to the mushroom afterglow.

I think mushrooms, when used in a responsible manner as you are preparing to do, are an incredibly safe tool to explore your consciousness, reality and the "Divine".

With all due respect to your conceptual and ideological beliefs, I suggest you go armed with open-mindedness, a humble attitude, an acknowledgment and respect for your/our puny human mind's limited ability to understand reality and consciousness, surrender, and most importantly, love....rather than scepticism and conceptually reductionist beliefs about reality. For, at least at higher dosages, mushrooms WILL confront you with the Divine. The only question is, does one take the difficult or the easy route. Do not struggle, surrender.

Love is key. It is the secret mantra that opens all locks, removes all barriers.....banishes all "bad" or difficult experiences. Seriously, remember this if nothing at all from this long winded post, LOVE! If you feel overwhelmed, or encounter negativity of any sort, just remember, and say it in your mind or even out loud, just like a mantra; ALL IS LOVE, ALL IS LOVE.

Watch, read and listen to positive, uplifting materials on the lead up to your journey. Go lightly on the atheist stuff, and lean more heavily on the "spiritual", even if neutral or non-religious like Daoism, or Goethe, Whitman or whatever. Basically lean into mystery, connection, love, nature to whatever degree you are comfortable. Perhaps read or reread Huxley's Doors of Perception, that kind of ennobling stuff.

Watch documentaries like

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81183477

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80229847

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81409016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVIfQaqVG4

Etc. There are several more great documentaries available on Amazon Prime.

Anyway, best of luck with your journey, I am sure it will be absolutely amazing. When are you planning on doing it? I will keep an eye out for your report.....and will ask the Mushroom Gods to go easy on you ;)

Blessings.

What if reality was much better than it seems to be? (Good news, it is!)

I've had a "what if?" blog post on my mind for quite a while. Might as well try to get it off my mind and into written form, though if this was easy for me to do, I'd have done it sooner. Anyway, here goes...

Most of us, me certainly included, are looking for ways to make reality more pleasant.

This quest goes in many different directions: family life, career, health, friendships, religion, hobbies, athletic pursuits, spirituality, art, romance, and all the other areas where we wish there wasn't such a large gap between what is and what we'd like to be.

Often these efforts require a lot of work. It may not be easy to alter the trajectory of life so that it better matches where we'd like to land our personal Flight to Happiness. 

Another complication is that both popular culture and religious teachings hold out the hope that it's possible to attain a state of consciousness, or being, where in one fell swoop, one major transformation, one overturning of old understandings, we look upon life in an entirely different fashion.

A better fashion, usually, though not always, because some people would prefer knowing how the world really is, even if that reality is disturbing.

So The Matrix presents a choice between taking the red or blue pill, with red leading to a life-changing truth, and blue to reality as it currently appears to be. Some forms of Zen Buddhism embrace the possibility of a sudden enlightenment or realization that overturns existing worldviews. Rumi and other mystical story-tellers speak of seekers looking for truth in far-off places, only to discover that what they longed for was right at home, so close it required no searching at all.

I've got my own "what if?" fantasy. Yet to me, it isn't a fantasy, though I recognize that it will appear that way to other people. 

What if, I wonder, it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all of the apparent problems of life, all those things we wish were different from how they actually are, were seen to be just fine, unable to be anything other than their current state?

I also wonder, what if it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all the things we have done, are doing, and will do were seen to be equally just fine, unable to be anything other that what actually occurred?

And lastly, I wonder what if it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all efforts aimed at preserving our sense of identity as a separate, independent, enduring self were seen to be unnecessary, because who we are right now is just fine, as is whoever we might become in the future?

Wouldn't these three what if attainments be a huge relief? Wouldn't we feel a large weight lifted from our psychological shoulders? Wouldn't life be much more pleasant without the worries caused by viewing the past, present, and future as filled with problems that demand our attention?

I'd say so. 

I also say that for me, you, and everybody in the world, without exception, each of those what if's isn't something to be attained, but something to enjoy right now. 

Because there's good reason -- no, excellent reason -- to believe that (1) determinism controls what happens in the world, which includes us, so whatever has happened, is happening, and will happen necessarily had to be just as it was, is, or will be; (2) in line with this, free will is an illusion; and (3) the notion of a enduring self or soul also is an illusion, since we are a wave temporarily tossed up by the ocean of the world, not an entity separate from the ever-changing reality that surrounds us and indeed is us.

Too good to be true? Absolutely not. This is both scientific truth and spiritual truth, so long as "spiritual" is understood to mean a deep understanding of life, not anything supernatural. But it isn't easy to truly grasp this truth and experience it in everyday life.

I suspect the reason is that it is so simple and close at hand, we look in vain for something complex and distant.

The fallacy of believing psychedelics aren't "natural"

Just as I hoped, my previous blog post, "Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization," elicited some thought-provoking comments. 

(Note: by legalization I meant that psilocybin is available through licensed service centers, where it has to be consumed. So it isn't legal in the same sense that marijuana is legal in Oregon, capable of being bought in licensed stores and then taken home to be used however you want.)

One commenter's point is easily dismissed. They said that because I was initiated by a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru in 1971, 53 years ago, I should stick with the RSSB teachings for my entire life, not explore other possibilities such as psychedelics. 

That's ridiculous. I was devoted to RSSB for 35 years. That's plenty of time to determine whether a religion or spiritual practice is a good fit for me. I came to decide that it wasn't, just as I've changed in so many other ways over years and decades.

Different political views. Different jobs. Different wives. Different homes. Lots of differences, including my philosophy of life.

Another commenter made a reasonable point, but one which I also disagree with. They said:

But I find it strange that for the averagely healthy person with the ability to immerse themselves in the wonders of the world that we inhabit, why the need or desire to alter or escape the reality of just this.

Well, because there is no such thing as "just this," other than a subjective reality unique to each person. This is an obvious truth stressed by neuroscientist Christof Koch in his new book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. He writes:

Brain scientists frequently refer to a mythical creature, the neurotypical. This individual of unspecified sex stands in for the typical member of Homo sapiens, born with a full complement of eyes, ears, and other sense organs and a "normal" brain.

The last chapter described the experiences of such a neurotypical person. However, in contrast to the "standard kilogram" -- a cylinder of platinum-iridium hidden away in a vacuum chamber in Paris that once defined a mass of one kilogram -- there is no "standard" human brain.

Instead, there is vast genetic and developmental diversity among the eight billion people living on planet Earth, reflected in the astonishing diversity of their brains and their ways of experiencing the world.

We humans are limited to knowing only how reality appears to members of our species. Other creatures know reality quite differently. And within humankind, each person has a different understanding of what "just this" (a Buddhist term) is for them. 

For example, the commenter spoke of enjoying a runner's high. When I used to jog, in the 1980s, I'd feel this occasionally. I feel it now to some extent when I lift weights. However, this form of "high" isn't any more or less natural than a psychedelic high.

And it certainly isn't more or less physical. Every experience we have, without exception, is present to our consciousness because of a certain brain state. Often serotonin is involved in pleasurable experiences. I'm guessing it is involved in a runner's high, just as I know that serotonin is involved in a psychedelic high.

Meditators are experiencing changes in the brain when they sit with closed or open eyes on a cushion or chair. Coffee drinkers are experiencing changes in the brain when they ingest caffeine. And people who enjoy psychedelics are experiencing changes in the brain when they take a dose of psilocybin. 

All of this is natural. In fact, it's hard for me to think of anything that isn't natural. To do that, I'd have to make an artificial divide that doesn't exist in reality. Is LSD unnatural because a scientist discovered it in a lab? What makes that unnatural? Aren't we humans part of nature, along with what we do and create?

But even if someone wants to divide our world into natural and unnatural, psilocybin, coming from a mushroom, would be decidedly in the natural camp. So would marijuana, a plant that grows wild. (The mother of a friend of mind would talk about how they had to keep their horses from eating "loco weed" that used to grow along the side of the road in Oklahoma. That was marijuana.)

Koch speaks about transforming the brain through psychedelics in several chapters. Here's excerpts from his "Transforming lives by transformative experiences" chapter. This helps explain why I want to use psilocybin again after a 55 year hiatus.

Best studied is psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, a large and diverse group of fungi. Psilocybin's effects can be remarkable -- one or two consecutive psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions in patients with serious depression improved their well-being and depression scores for months.

A single high dose of psilocybin in patients with life-threatening cancer triggers large decreases in depression, anxiety, and mood disturbances, with concomitant increases in quality of life and ability to find meaning in life and acceptance of death.

Furthermore, patients who have full-blown mystical experiences are more likely to enjoy these benefits that those who do not. Michael Pollan evocatively described, in a famous New Yorker essay, how even for those patients who did succumb to their cancer, the treatment had an extraordinarily positive outcome for their way of living and of dying.

This is astounding and defies belief: well-entrenched attitudes and beliefs are so difficult to modify that conventional psychotherapy, a.k.a. the talking cure, takes years of weekly sessions with uncertain outcomes. The results are equally astonishing next to the results of more conventional psychopharmacology.

One study directly compared two doses of psilocybin over six weeks to a daily pill of escitalopram, a common selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment for depression. It found that patients taking the psychedelic had reduced rumination, "sticky" negative thoughts about their self and their situation, and thought suppression, compared to their peers given the standard treatment. 

...One study estimates thirty million people in the United States, about one tenth of the population, have used these [psychedelic] molecules at least once. Their physiological toxicity is low, and they do not damage organs or cause neuropsychological deficits.

The risk of lethal overdosing or fatal accidents is small. Importantly, psychedelics are nonaddictive (they do not target the dopamine system) and engender neither cravings nor compulsive drug seeking. There are no drug cartels trafficking in psychedelics.

Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization

Psychedelics were a big part of my college life for a few years, 1968-69. I took quite a few trips via the travel agents of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin (magic mushrooms).

So naturally in 2020 I voted to make psilocybin legal here in Oregon, under the auspices of licensed growers and providers of supervised psilocybin experiences. As I wrote about on my HinesSight blog a few days ago, "The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation."

It's taken several years to get psilocybin centers up and running because rules and regulations had to be developed after the 2020 ballot measure was passed by voters, then prospective centers had to apply to a state agency, get approved, and finally open for business. 

I noted in the above-linked blog post what my motivation was for trying psilocybin again.

My primary motivation now is what Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind refers to as shaking up the snow globe. My mind has fallen into some senior citizen habits that I'd like aid in revising, which psychedelics are great at. In college, everything was fresh and new, so my psychedelic experiences just added fuel to that already flexible fire.

Yesterday I had a Zoom call with the owner of The Psilocybin Center, the first step. It was supposed to last just fifteen minutes, but Sammy and I ended up talking for almost 45 minutes. He thought that it made sense for me to start with the moderate-high dose guided journey. In fact, I believe the Hero Dose Sessions are off limits for new users until they've done the moderate dose.

That dose is about 1 gram and the journey lasts 2-4 hours, depending on the dosage. I'm leaning toward 1 gram and two hours. Might as well start low and ramp up later if I enjoy the experience. Sammy said that senior citizens like me make me a large share of their clientele, since many of us baby boomers used psychedelics in our younger years.

Here's a chart that shows various doses and usual effects. 

           Low Dose: 0.5 to 2 Grams

0.5 to 2  grams of mushrooms is considered a low dose.

Unlike microdosing, this dosage should offer some mild effects, likely a euphoric state and sensory experiences. Depending on the strain, you can expect to feel the effects for anywhere from 2 - 8 hours, so plan accordingly.

You can expect to feel light, euphoric, and may see visuals. This is often beautiful when in nature, and comes through bright, vivid colors, and smiling trees. 

Your judgment may be impaired, so it’s not recommended to take a low dose of magic mushrooms if you’re planning on driving, going to work, taking care of children, or hosting a board meeting. 

Sammy said that the "official" psilocybin used by his center is high quality, better than what is found on the black market. 

Here's some passages from Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, a modern take on psychedelics. The image refers to the first passage.

In its normal state, shown on the left, the brain's various networks (here depicted lining the circle, each represented by a different color) talk mostly to themselves, with a relatively few heavily trafficked pathways among them.

But when the brain operates under the influence of psilocybin, as shown on the right, thousands of new connections form, linking far-flung brain regions that during normal waking consciousness don't exchange much information. 

In effect, traffic is rerouted from a relatively small number of interstate highways onto myriad smaller roads linking a great many more destinations. The brain appears to become less specialized and more globally interconnected, with considerably more intercourse, or "cross talk," among its various neighborhoods. 

...One way to think about this blooming of mental states is that it temporarily boosts the sheer amount of diversity in our mental life. If problem solving is anything like evolutionary adaptation, the more possibilities the mind has at its disposal, the more creative its solutions will be.

...A high-dose psychedelic experience has the power to "shake the snow globe," he says, disrupting unhealthy patterns of thought and creating a space of flexibility -- entropy -- in which more salubrious patterns and narratives have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles. 

...Reading Robin's paper helped me better understand what I was looking for when I decided to explore psychedelics: to give my own snow globe a vigorous shaking, see if I could renovate my everyday mental life by introducing a greater measure of entropy, and uncertainty, into it.

Getting older might render the world more predictable (in every sense), yet it also lightens the burden of responsibility, creating a new space for experiment. Mind had been to see if it wasn't too late to skip out of some of the deeper grooves of habit, that the been-there and done-thats of long experience had inscribed on my mind. 

Sounds good. Reminds me of a story about one of my college psychedelic experiences that I shared in 2007 in a post called "Loosening the bounds of 'I am...'"

I'm no Buddha, that's for sure. But with the aid of mescaline, or some other psychedelic, I have a distinct memory of a '60s experience that at least was in the ballpark of what Thurman is talking about.

I was with a group of fellow "stoners" who'd headed off to a San Jose-area park to be high with nature. The path we were on led around a hill.

I felt energetic and forged on ahead by myself. My feet were flying through the northern California landscape. Until I rounded a corner and saw a different sort of group on the left side of the trail a short ways ahead of me.

Bikers. Drinking beer. Next to their choppers. With their equally tough-looking old ladies. At the time San Jose was a headquarters for the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, which had a reputation rivaling the Hells Angels.

I didn't know anything about the bikers I was walking toward. But my first reaction was that I was an isolated peaceful hippie dude stoned on mescaline with long hair, glasses, and a corduroy coat, and they were cultural near-opposites in almost every way. Not good.

However, something snapped in me the very next moment. As I walked nearer to them I didn't feel like there was any difference between us. I could see them looking at me. I looked at them. More, I became them.

"What's happening, man?" someone called out. "Hell if I know," I said with a smile. They laughed. I laughed. I felt like I could sit down with them, have a beer, and fit right in.

My fear vanished as soon as I stopped thinking "I am…" and "They are…" Sure, it was partly (or mostly) the mescaline talking, but I suddenly felt that I was them and they were me, and we were all in this park getting high together.

Not exactly akin to the Buddha's enlightened experience of selflessness under the Bodhi Tree. But, hey, I'll take a speck of understanding any way I can get it.

Passing the biker group I realized that "I am…" can be flexible and boundless, not rigid and restricted.

Some things we always are; some things we always aren't; but there's a huge store of being-possibilities available to us moment to moment.