Church of the Churchless

Sometimes the RSSB guru sounds like he doesn't believe the RSSB teachings

Sort of weirdly, in a recent post, "RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form," atheist me was arguing that the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), my spiritual home for 35 years, say that the RSBB guru is God's right hand man (no female gurus yet) while some current members of RSSB were arguing the opposite -- that the guru is just a regular human like everybody else.

This perplexed me for a while. 

Then I came up with a theory. Being an ancient 73 years old, I was initiated into RSSB way back in 1971 when Charan Singh was the guru. He died in 1990, appointing Gurinder Singh as his successor. So my formative years as a member of RSSB were in the days of what I've called Sant Mat 1.0.

(Sant Mat means the path of the saints; Radha Soami Satsang Beas is part of the contemporary Sant Mat movements.)

In that original Sant Mat philosophy as taught by RSSB, there's absolutely no doubt that a central tenet was that the RSSB guru was God in Human Form, just as Jesus is considered to be in Christianity. In fact, several RSSB books relate the New Testament to the RSSB teachings. 

More: the RSSB teachings v. 1.0 also clearly said that it isn't possible to return all the way to God, a realm known as Sach Khand, without being initiated by a Perfect Living Master, another way of saying God in Human Form. This was noted in the quotes from RSSB gurus prior to Gurinder Singh that I included in the above-mentioned post. 

But in 2006 I wrote a post called "Sant Mat, version 2.0."  Here's what I said.

I’m wondering if there’s been a new release of Sant Mat, a north Indian spiritual philosophy centered around the need to follow a God-realized guru. It certainly seems that way from the remarks of several Church of the Churchless commenters.

Maybe version 2.0 has superceded the original Sant Mat that I was initiated into thirty-five years ago, and which I’ve written about in two books distributed or published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Though now I’ve been called “Beas’ most articulate critic” (and not only by myself), I still have a genuine fondness for Sant Mat, a.k.a. Radha Soami teachings, and I want to be sure that I’m keeping up with the latest theological developments.

So if you’re a member of RSSB, help me out here. Am I wrong in assuming that the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, has updated the Sant Mat philosophy? Since Gurinder Singh doesn’t write anything for publication, nor allow his talks to be recorded, nor permit attendees to take notes about what he says, it isn’t easy to make a comparison between the original Sant Mat teachings and the new guru’s version.

But here’s the impression that I get from hearing Gurinder Singh speak four times, spending two weeks at the Dera in India eight years ago, and reports I’ve gotten via this weblog and other sources about what he’s said more recently.

Sant Mat v. 1.0
--The guru is God in human form
--The guru is perfect, possessing God’s divine qualities
--God has chosen certain souls to return to Him
--God delegates the guru to initiate these “marked souls”
--Without initiation by a perfect guru, God-realization is impossible

Sant Mat v. 2.0
--The guru is a human who is seeking God, just like us
--The guru is imperfect, just like us
--Whether we want to pursue God-realization is up to us
--The guru is a spiritual guide, not a savior
--There are many paths to God, not just Sant Mat

This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head summary of several seeming differences between the old and new Sant Mat (or more accurately, RSSB) philosophies. However, if I’m even halfway right about v. 2.0, then kudos to Gurinder Singh. For this is a considerably improved Sant Mat, being closer to a science and further from a religion.

However, I’m a bit skeptical that either the RSSB organization or formal teachings really have changed to this extent. My take is that Gurinder Singh’s breath of fresh spiritual air is being diluted by those RSSB’ers who are either unwilling or unable to understand that this 2006 version isn’t your grandfather’s Sant Mat.

For example, a friend told me that when he went to India he’d hear Gurinder Singh say “We are all gods” when asked if the guru indeed was God. After the meeting ended my friend would ask other attendees what they thought of that rather heretical utterance. Most of them didn’t know what he was talking about. They only had heard what fit with their v. 1.0 conception of Sant Mat.

The winds of change may be blowing, but not in the mind of the typical RSSB initiate. Which isn’t surprising, given that Gurinder Singh has been so reticent to write or speak on the record. The current guru likes to say that he has nothing to add to the historical Sant Mat teachings, so the old books, tape recordings, and videos still serve as the official RSSB party line.

I could be wrong (naturally), but in my more optimistic moments I sense an increased openness in RSSB. This supposedly mystical organization has been heading down the road of becoming a hidebound religion, but maybe Sant Mat v. 2.0 will fix the dogmatic, fundamentalist glitches that are keeping this mystic philosophy from being a true spiritual science.

We can only hope.

After 16 years, now I'm not as positive about RSSB as I was in 2006. But I'm still interested in the apparent mismatch between what Gurinder Singh says in his talks and Q&A sessions, and the original RSSB teachings that I was exposed to for so many years.

It's as if the RSSB guru doesn't believe in some key parts of the RSSB teachings. I have no problem with that, since I'm a big believer in changing one's mind when it comes to religion and spirituality. In fact, in 2011 I suggested that Gurinder Singh has gone further and now has embraced Sant Mat v. 3.0. 

The roots of RSSB are traced back to Shiv Dayal Singh ("Soamiji Maharaj"), who taught from the 1850s until 1878. After him, a lineage of RSSB gurus continues to the present day. So for over 150 years, 1850 to 2000 or so, there was a consistent RSSB teaching.

This is obvious to those of us of the Charan Singh era who repeatedly read all the RSSB books ever published, including Shiv Dayal Singh's Sar Bachan. I'm not aware of any guru who made a significant change to the RSSB teachings until Gurinder Singh in the early 2000s. And then only verbally, since the current RSSB guru hasn't written any books as the previous gurus did.

So the past 15-20 years have been an aberration. I'm not saying Gurinder Singh is a RSSB heretic, though from what I've heard, sometimes he can sound that way. Which to me is a good thing, since I like heretics.

Again, my big insight, which I guess will sound obvious, is that members of RSSB in the Gurinder Singh era have been exposed to a considerable different version of the RSSB teachings than those of us who were part of the Charan Singh era. 

The mystery of Julian Johnson's death at the Dera in 1939

Recently I heard from someone who asked if I had read a book about the death of Dr. Julian Johnson. Johnson wrote "The Path of the Masters," a book about the philosophy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization headed up by a guru.

I told the person that I wasn't familiar with the book about Johnson's death and asked if the person could summarize it. With their permission, here's what I received. I did some minor editing and added a few links.

Dear Brian,

The extremely short version is that the Dera tried to cover up a crime that happened there and by doing so ruined the life of a man who was innocent. Paul Pezoldt spent his whole life living with this heavy cloud over his head. 

 

Here is my summary of the book. It is a bit long but the book is far more detailed.  

 

It is The Mystery of Dr. Johnson’s Death: A Scandal in the Punjab by David Christopher Lane. The book tells the story about the death of Dr. Julian Johnson at the Dera in India which the RSSB is curiously silent about. Dr. Johnson wrote the book Path of the Masters.

 

Johnson never finished the book as he died on January 25, 1939 before it was published. But how he died is still a bit of a mystery today. There were three major rumors about his death:

 

The first was that a young mountaineer named Paul Petzoldt murdered him at the Dera.
The second was what most satsangis get told, that he just fell, hit his head and died.
The third is what outsiders think, that there were dark occult forces that killed him.

 

It’s a complicated story as eyewitnesses are dead and all they had to go on was some documents and memoirs of those now deceased. (All copies of these documents are printed in the book.)

 

At the time Johnson lived at the RSSB headquarters, the Dera, in the Punjab with his master Sawan Singh, who was called the Great Master. The book recounts how he became a follower of the guru. Johnson met his wife Elizabeth Bruce in India as she was at another ashram following another guru and had become despondent with them.

 

She then joined Johnson at the Dera and also became a devotee of Sawan Singh. Bruce was in her mid thirties at the time. She was a herbalist and a nurse who assisted Johnson at the hospital he formed at the Dera.

 

They used to summer in Kashmir due to the weather. In 1938 that is where they met Paul, a young mountaineer who at the age of 16 had already scaled one of the highest peaks in Wyoming USA. The reason he was in India at the time was he had just finished a route up the K2 mountain with a team of mountaineers.

 

He and his team split as they were hiring a bus to go through Afghanistan and Iran but there was no way Paul could afford to join them. Paul, although sceptical, had a deep interest in spiritual matters. Eventually Johnson invited him to work as his assistant at the Dera.

 

At the end of that summer Paul came down to the Dera. Paul's wife never saw him for months. Arrangements were made for her to join him. Paul's wife was Catholic. In her accounts of staying at the Dera, she reported about liking Johnson and the Great Master but Johnson's wife Elizabeth had been cold.

 

At the time in the Dera, there were only a handful of westerners. It was Johnson and his wife, a older man named David Elliot and an American couple with the surname of Rimstone. Also, there was Bhagat Singh, a lawyer, who in 1938 was considered that he was going to be Sawan’s successor. He attended to all the legal work of the master.

 

Paul was intrigued but he was not convinced of the philosophy. According to Paul’s wife’s recollection, he did not stick to the diet and also drank whiskey on some nights. He had also kept a loaded shotgun in the kitchen to shoot the rabid dogs that came to the Dera. Nobody else there would kill them for fear of bad karma so Paul was the one who did it.

Paul’s wife had become sick from nausea at the Dera which was not uncommon for newcomers to India. She was too sick to get out of bed.

 

For some unknown reason, Paul and his wife suspected Elizabeth’s cooking as Elizabeth was feeding them different food than what she was feeding the others. They even suspected Elizabeth was poisoning her.

 

On that fateful winter’s night at the Dera, there was an argument that broke out between Elizabeth and Paul or Elizabeth and Paul's wife. The accounts of what transpired differ.

 

The reason for the heated arguments is either about the raising of the kundalini or Elizabeth’s cooking.  In Paul's version, he made a bad crack in poor judgment. He was interested in mysticism and the kundalini. He commented that he wondered if you kick someone in the butt if it would help raise the kundalini. This remark was supposedly what sent Elizabeth into a rage.

 

The other account is that it was Paul's wife who said the same remark which made Elizabeth mad. The other version is that Paul picked up a plate of food to take to his wife and Elizabeth tried to stop him and wanted him to give it to a servant to take to his wife. He then turned and told her that he would take it himself and she got into a rage.

 

But what transpired out of the argument was this: Elizabeth screaming that she was going to kill Paul. She picked up the shotgun and pointed it at Paul. Paul pounced on Elizabeth to take the gun away from her. Singh the lawyer and Elliot for some strange reason attempted to stop Paul from taking the gun from Elizabeth.

 

Johnson either also attempted to stop Paul at the time or was trying to pacify Elizabeth in this commotion.

 

Paul allegedly in one version of the story tried to punch Elliot to get him off him and missed and hit Johnson by mistake who fell and hit his head. The other version is Paul managed to get away from the men and ran out and collided with Johnson and he fell and hit his head.

Johnson was put onto the couch where he died from his injuries at about one am.  After the incident, the lawyer went to Paul and his wife and convinced them Paul should plead guilty to a charge of hurting someone (similar to manslaughter). He claimed that it would be better for Paul, otherwise they would put a case against him. So he concocted a story leaving out the part that there was a shotgun involved and an argument.

 

The police came and arrested Paul on charges of culpable homicide. His plea of guilty had stopped any help from the courts for his case. He pleaded guilty to simple hurt, meaning he would face at least one year in jail.

 

The story gets even muddier. Paul states the reason he pleaded guilty is because of the lawyer Singh. He said this was because Singh did not want the Dera to have bad press and word getting out to foreigners. This he saw as damaging and could stop the cash flow from foreigners. He was also at the time thinking he would be the next guru.  

Paul, while under arrest, then contacted the US consulate and sent a lawyer and some members to investigate what had happened. The Rimstones then told the consulate official that Elizabeth had picked up the shotgun to shoot Paul.

 

Elizabeth then confessed to the official that she had picked up the gun but she knew it was not loaded.  The information about the shotgun would not have come out if the US consulate had not investigated and questioned the witnesses.

Paul then changed his plea to innocent and the court found him innocent because of the conflicting statements from the witnesses and the information about the weapon.

Strangely, the Dera then paid for Paul and his wife to take a lavish trip, including visiting Europe on the way back to the USA. Plus they gave his wife a gold bracelet as compensation for the trauma they had experienced.

 

Bhagat Singh the lawyer died a few years later, so Sawan Singh then appointed Jagat Singh as the next RSSB guru. The Rimstones also left India and went back to the States. Elizabeth and Elliot were the only ones left at the Dera. Elizabeth spent the rest of her years close to the Great Master and then died from dysentery.

 

What is also interesting is that Lane adds a transcribed letter that Johnson wrote that was never published. In it, Johnson recounts an encounter where he met Jesus.

 

He said Jesus was a tall, thin man with dark hair and light eyes. He said he told him his mother had become much higher spiritually than him. He also told Johnson that he was higher spiritually than him (Jesus). He also said that he had married Lazarus’s sister Mary during his life. (No wonder RSSB never published the letter.)

RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form

Since I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization, for about 35 years, wrote several books for RSSB, and did a lot of speaking on behalf of RSSB, obviously I'm very familiar with the RSSB teachings.

So when I saw this comment appear on a recent post about the idea of a guru being more than human, it struck me as astoundingly wrong. (GIHF refers to God in Human Form.)

Clearly Karim Rahmaan knows very little about the RSSB teachings. So I'm pleased to correct him.

I can easily do this because because in the course of writing my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, which ended up being sold under the auspices of RSSB even though it was published commercially, I took copious notes on certain subjects from every book sold by RSSB at the time (early 1990s).

Here's quotes regarding the RSSB guru and his relationship to Shabd, otherwise known as the Sound Current, which is believed to be the power that creates and sustains the cosmos. All of these quotes come from books written by one of the RSSB gurus (name in parentheses).

The True Form of the Guru is Holy Sound, and in that form the Guru permeates every hair on your body and is seated within you. (Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, p. 220)

The Master is only one -- Shabd -- and whosoever initiates you will project himself from that Shabd, because the Source is one. All Masters are one, which means the Shabd is the Master... Your real self is the soul, and the real self of your Master is the Shabd, the Word. (Charan Singh, Die to Live, p. 213)

The body is not the Master. The Master is that Power, that Shabd, manifested in human form; but the form itself is not that Power or Shabd, which is the real Master. Through the body we are in touch with the Shabd. Masters are nothing but the waves of the ocean of the Lord. (Charan Singh, The Master Answers, p. 65)

There is no difference between the Master and the Sound Current inside. The Sound Current is your Master. Every human being needs a Master who is in the human form, to connect him with the Master, the Sound Current inside. (Charan Singh, The Master Answers, p.216)

The Master is the beach of the limitless ocean of the consciousness of the Lord. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 3, p. 122)

However virtuous a man may be, he cannot, by his own efforts alone, contact the Sound. Unless the Master gives him the gift of the ray of life and initiates him, he cannot contact the Divine Sound. At the time of initiation by the Master the soul becomes fit for being connected with the Shabd... The Master 'injects', as it were, his consciousness and light into the soul of the disciple at the time of initiation. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 17 )

The Shabd or divine Music is the perfect Master. The Shabd is indistinguishable from the Supreme Lord. It is a conscious current of that great power which created the universe and which fully pervades it. All the universe emanated from this Shabd. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 66)

The Master, so to say, is the bulb is which the electric light is made to appear... The Sat Guru is the place where the sun of Reality rises. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 173)

The Lord is hiding behind the garb of the Saints and speaks through them. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 185)

True Masters bear the same relation to the Lord as the waves bear to the sea. Huzur Maharaj Ji [Sawan Singh] used to explain this by giving the example of a large number of radios lying in a room but not connected with either a battery or electricity. Under those conditions you may tune as much as you like, but you can never hear the news from any station. Similarly, Masters are radios who are connected with the Lord. (Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, p. 171)

So it's absurd to claim that the RSSB teachings don't clearly say that the guru is God in Human Form. This is a central tenet of both the RSSB teachings and the broader Sant Mat philosophy. 

I was totally correct when I wrote in the above-mentioned blog post:

Again, I'm talking here about gurus who are viewed as being more than human, as possessing some sort of divine quality, as having attained knowledge of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. I'm not talking about a "guru" who is merely a meditation teacher or a moral guide.

Of course, just because the RSSB teachings say that the guru is God in Human Form, this doesn't mean that the RSSB guru actually is the closest thing to God than God herself.

My point is simply that any attempt to make the guru into just a regular human being (which I believe is the truth) is at odds with what the RSSB teachings say the guru is. And that claim is so grandiose -- that a human can possess the consciousness of God -- it deserves to be subjected to serious criticism.

Sure, religions make all sorts of claims. But to elevate a living person to the same level as God, that is especially dangerous, since it encourages a special sort of fanaticism on behalf of the guru who is believed to be God in Human Form.

The idea of a guru being more than human makes no sense

Sometimes the obvious escapes us because our mind has been distracted with other stuff. This just happened to me.

I was idly thinking about what I should write about in tonight's churchless blog post, remembering that my previous post was about how to prove that a guru is a fraud.

What suddenly struck me was the simple reason why this is so difficult: believers in a guru typically consider that he or she is qualitatively different from other humans. 

Meaning, the guru isn't just someone with some special talents, abilities, and traits. That's true of lots of people. Sports stars. Talented actors. Brilliant scientists. Masterful politicians. Amazing musicians. So many other examples.

No, a guru often is viewed as being more than human, possessing some sort of special attribute that makes them stand apart from other people. 

The weird thing is that whatever this attribute is, it isn't apparent.

If a dozen people were put in a room and the goal was to determine which person was a guru who, say, was God in Human Form, there's no test, examination, questions, or any other means that would distinguish the guru from the others.

The guru wouldn't be more intelligent. Or more wise. Or more ethical. Or more kind. Or more eloquent. Or more anything. 

Gurus stand out only because other people say, "He or she is a guru." So it's virtually impossible to prove that a guru is a fraud, because there is no way to tell the difference between a non-fraud guru and a fraudulent guru.

Again, the reason is that there's no way to tell the difference between any sort of guru and other humans.

I'm reading a story in The New Yorker about a talented big wave surfer from Hawaii. He has many videos showing how he not only can surf giant waves, but can do tricks on them in pretty much the same way other surfers do tricks on much smaller waves.

There's no problem identifying this person as a big wave surfer. But there's a big problem identifying a person as a guru. 

Again, I'm talking here about gurus who are viewed as being more than human, as possessing some sort of divine quality, as having attained knowledge of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. I'm not talking about a "guru" who is merely a meditation teacher or a moral guide.

That sort of guru is firmly in the category of other teachers and guides, a normal human being with a talent that can be conveyed to others. 

Since the other sort of guru, the God in Human Form variety of guru, has no attribute that sets them apart from other people, it's no wonder that they typically get the title of Guru in one of two ways. Either they are anointed as guru by another guru, or they start calling themselves a guru.

Pretty good game. It fools many people. No talent required.

All you need to set up shop as a guru is the title, which you can give to yourself or inherit from a previous guru. Then money, prestige, and power can be yours if you play your guru cards properly.

While some may call you a fraud, there's no way for them to prove this, since there is nothing that distinguishes a guru from a non-guru other than the fact that people have chosen to believe that one of them is a guru and one isn't.

How is it possible to prove the RSSB guru is a fraud?

A few days ago I got a message from someone who said this in her email regarding Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years.

I am not a member, my close friend has been a member for 5 years and I started to research it as I wanted to know more. That’s how I found your blog. Some of the things I’ve read are alarming and I found even the information on the RSSB official website disturbing.

 

My friend is very set on the organisation, and the master. I have tried to show her various posts regarding other peoples bad experiences and she is adamant that they’re all lies. 

 

I would love to be able to find some sort of evidence that shows this master is a fraud but it would have to be more than peoples experiences. Is there any information you could share with me which might help to open her eyes?

 

I am just someone who wants to help my friend, she is very vulnerable and I strongly believe she has been swayed during a time when she was fragile. 

This was my response.

 

Probably there’s no evidence regarding the guru that would convince your friend he’s a fraud. Someone has to come to that conclusion for themselves.

 

There’s plenty of evidence on my blog and the Internet, but true believers in RSSB just explain it away. The basic problem is that disproving the existence of something can be very difficult.

 

Is the guru God in Human Form? There’s no evidence of this, but of course there also isn’t any evidence disproving it. God works in mysterious ways, say believers. Even if the guru does bad stuff, that could just be God’s mysterious way — making hundreds of millions of dollars in a shady fashion, for example. Here’s one of many news stories.

 

https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/corporate/story/pay-up-singh-brothers-dues-in-30-days-delhi-hc-tells-rssb-chief-dhillon-wife-ex-religare-chief-godhwani-231660-2019-10-09

 

I’ve written a lot about the guru in the “Radha Soami Satsang Beas” category of my blog. One post included 27,000 words shared in comments on my blog from a RSSB insider who revealed a lot about the inner workings of RSSB and the guru. See:

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/07/devastating-criticism-of-gurinder-singh-dhillon-by-a-rssb-insider.html

 

I singled out financial dealings in this post:

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2019/03/rssb-gurus-shady-financial-dealings-were-known-on-this-blog-5-9-years-ago-1.html

 

But again, if your friend doesn’t want to open her eyes to all this, the blog posts and newspaper stories won’t make any difference. Keep trying, though. Eventually your efforts may help her see the reality of RSSB.

We delude ourselves into believing we're a conscious "I"

Going through a stack of unread magazines, I came across a Scientific American from September 2018 that was a special issue devoted to the subject "Humans: Why we're unlike any other species on the planet."

All of the articles are interesting, but I found Susan Blackmore's Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness: The Hardest Problem to be especially so.

Blackmore has an affinity for Zen, which is reflected in the concluding excerpts from her article that I've shared below.

I resonate with her leaning toward the illusionist theory of consciousness. Meaning, we certainly do have subjective experience, but our sense of free will and being a separate conscious self is an illusion with evolutionary benefits.

I also feel that many other, if not most or all, animals are conscious. Anyone who lives with a dog or cat has a strong sense that they have an inner life just as we humans do -- which is one of the best moral arguments for vegetarianism.

Enjoy...

Yet the more biology we learn, the more obvious it is that we share not only anatomy, physiology and genetics with other animals but also systems of vision, hearing, memory and emotional expression. Could it really be that we alone have an extra special something -- this marvelous inner world of subjective experience?

The question is hard because although your own consciousness may seem the most obvious thing in the world, it is perhaps the hardest to study. We do not even have a clear definition beyond appealing to a famous question asked by philosopher Thomas Nagel back in 1974: What is it like to be a bat?

...The crux here is this: If there is nothing it is like to be a bat, we can say it is not conscious. If there is something (anything) it is like for the bat, it is conscious. So is there?

...Even worse is the "hard problem" of consciousness: How does subjective experience arise from objective brain activity? How can physical neurons, with all their chemical and electrical communications, create the feeling of pain, the glorious red of the sunset or the taste of fine claret?

This is a problem of dualism: How can mind arise from matter? Indeed, does it?

The answer to this question divides consciousness researchers down the middle. On one side is the "B Team," as philosopher Daniel C. Bennett described them in a heated debate. Members of this team agonize about the hard problem and believe in the possibility of the philosopher's "zombie," an imagined creature that is indistinguishable from you or me but has no consciousness.

Believing in zombies means that other animals might conceivably be seeing, hearing, eating and mating "all in the dark" with no subjective experience at all. If that is so, consciousness must be a special additional capacity that we might have evolved either with or without and, many would say, are lucky to have.

On the other side is the A Team: scholars who reject the possibility of zombies and think the hard problem is, to quote philosopher Patricia Churchland, a "hornswoggle problem" that obfuscated the issue. Either consciousness just is the activity of bodies and brains, or it inevitably comes along with everything we so obviously share with other animals.

In the A team's view, there is no point in asking when or why "consciousness itself" evolved or what its function is because "consciousness itself" does not exist.

...This is the well-known, though much misunderstood, claim that consciousness is an illusion. This approach does not deny the existence of subjective experience but claims that neither consciousness nor the self are what they seem to be. 

Illusionist theories include psychologist Nicholas Humphrey's idea of a "magical mystery show" being staged inside our heads. The brain concocts out of our ongoing experience, he posits, a story that serves an evolutionary purpose in that it gives us a reason for living.

...This illusory self, the complex of memes, is what I call the "selfplex." An illusion that we are a powerful self that has consciousness and free will -- which may not be so benign. Paradoxically, it may be our unique capacity for language, autobiographical memory and the false sense of being a continuing self that serves to increase our suffering.

Whereas other species may feel pain, they cannot make it worse by crying, "How long will this pain last? Will it get worse? Why me? Why now?" In this sense, our suffering may be unique.

For illusionists such as myself, the answer to our question is simple and obvious. We humans are unique because we alone are clever enough to be deluded into believing that there is a conscious "I."

RSSB guru in poor health, cancels satsangs for six months

Today someone left this comment about the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. (Quite a few people who visit this blog have an interest in him, being either currently associated with RSSB or having done so in the past, as I was for 35 years.)

Well, it appears RSSB has finally updated their website. All satsangs in India and abroad have been cancelled, including the dera effective immediately until end of November. The update says GSD has been told to rest for his health. Sounds serious if he's cancelled the next 6 months of satsangs and initiations. Hope he recovers quickly from this.

I visited the RSSB web site and confirmed this is true. Here's a screenshot. Baba Ji is a term of respect for the RSSB guru.

It seems a bit strange that more information about the guru's health wasn't communicated. Yes, usually health and medical care is a private concern. But in the case of a public figure, it makes sense to share more information publicly. Maybe this will be done at some point.

Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity

If you're at a party, talking to someone, and the conversation is lagging, consider saying the title of this blog post: Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity. 

One of two things could happen, the first being most likely. Either the person will look at you like you're crazy and make an excuse to leave your company, or they'll reply, "That's so interesting. Tell me more."

Having read physicist Carlo Rovelli's book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity," I could talk some more about quantum gravity, but only a little bit. It's an esoteric subject, not to mention it isn't scientifically proven, just conjectured for some good reasons.

One reason is that something seems to be more fundamental than the two pillars of modern physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Rovelli writes:

A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning, and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon, might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or they haven't talked to each other for at least a century.

In the morning, the world is a curved spacetime where everything is continuous; in the afternoon, the world is a flat one where discrete quanta of energy leap and interact. 

The paradox resides in the fact that both theories work remarkably well. With every experiment and every test, nature continues to say "you are right" to general relativity, and continues to say "you are right" to quantum mechanics as well, despite the seemingly opposite assumptions on which the two theories are founded.

It is clear that something still eludes us. 

That something, in this way-cool chart Rovelli shares in a What Is The World Made Of? section, is covariant quantum fields -- the one ingredient he and other fans of quantum gravity believe constitutes reality.


In his book, Rovelli fills out this chart line by line, starting with Newton and ending with quantum gravity. Along the way, he discusses how science keeps refining that core question, what is the world made of?

The Big Idea of quantum gravity is that, as shown in the chart, unlike other quantum fields like electromagnetism that exist in spacetime, the covariant quantum field of quantum gravity is spacetime. Here Rovelli explains what "covariant" means.

Fields that live on themselves without the need of a spacetime to serve as a substratum, as a support, and which are capable by themselves of generating spacetime are called "covariant quantum fields."

The substance of which the world is made has been radically simplified in recent years. The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time -- all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.

Don't worry about the mention of "nodes of the graph" in the passages below. Basically it just means a web of relations.

The crucial difference between photons, the quanta of the electromagnetic field, and the nodes of the graph, the "quanta of gravity," is that photons exist in space, whereas the quanta of gravity constitute space itself.

Photons are characterized by "where they are." Quanta of space have no place to be in, because they are themselves that place. 

...Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations. The lines themselves are nowhere -- they are not in a place but rather create places through their interactions. Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

Another cool thing about quantum gravity is that it does away with infinity. Or at least, certain types of infinity.

When we take quantum gravity into account, the infinite compression of the universe into a single infinitely small point, predicted by general relativity at the Big Bang, disappears. Quantum gravity is the discovery that no infinitely small point exists.

There is a lower limit to divisibility of space. The universe cannot be smaller than the Planck scale, because nothing exists that is smaller than the Planck scale.

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true.

Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe.

My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics related to ancient mysticism. Of course, the mysticism I spoke about happened to be that preached by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), since mysticism comes in many varieties.

I made fun of the notion that a religion should be accepted as true just because a holy book or holy person says it is true.

Aside from this being an obvious circular argument, I said that it was akin to someone writing to the Nobel Prize committee saying that they deserved the physics prize because they'd laid bare all the secrets of the cosmos, the caveat being that the members of the committee would have to wait until after they die to see the evidence of this person's marvelous scientific accomplishment.

A letter like that would quickly find its way into the trash.

But it reflects the core of the world's religions. The claims of a holy book or holy person are accepted on faith, usually accompanied by a belief that a person with such faith will be presented with evidence after their death that the religious teachings they followed while alive are true.

So where does that leave a believer in religion or mysticism?

I argued for the existence of an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality. It could be experienced by a meditator who, not surprisingly, given what I believed at the time, followed the meditative approach of RSSB. However, that domain couldn't be described in any fashion.

My attitude now is, good try, Brian. But unconvincing.

Well, by "unconvincing" I mean that if there actually is an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality, nothing can be said about it other than Nothing can be said about it. So religious believers and mystics should, to put it bluntly, just shut the fuck up. 

Enjoy your supposed religious or mystical experience, but don't burden the rest of humanity with bullshit about how marvelous your revelation is, even though it can't really be put into words, so just believe that what is said is true -- which gets us back to the guy/gal who wants a physics Nobel Prize merely because they claim without evidence they've discovered every deep truth about the cosmos.

I'm not a philosopher of science. But I've read a heck of a lot of science books during my 73 years. There isn't a single scientific method, just a wide variety of approaches aimed at understanding what's true about our world and universe.

Some approaches are based on observation. Some are based on experimentation. Some are mostly mathematical. Some are entirely mathematical. All scientific approaches, though, must be capable of being described via words, images, numbers, something. 

This enables scientists to examine a potential fresh truth, subject that claim to rigorous criticism and examination, then decide whether it deserves to be accepted or rejected, with the proviso that, either way, additional research may call into question the first determination of truth/untruth.

Science is grounded.

It makes mistakes, for sure. But the general thrust of scientific inquiry is toward an ever-increasing store of knowledge. Science works so well because it is a public enterprise, many scientific minds collaborating at learning truths about the universe that can be proven provisionally, until an even better truth is revealed.

By contrast, religions and mysticism never progress. A key reason is that they are thoroughly subjective and individualistic. A religious or mystical claim can't be proven to be true, because the claim only exists within the confines of a human mind.

There's no grounding in an observation, experiment, mathematical equation, or other communication that allows for the claim to be tested against objective reality. Almost certainly this is because religion and mysticism have no connection with any objective reality other than this physical world which we all share.

So religious believers and mystics aren't devoted to truth. They are devoted to feeling good about themselves. This makes it frustrating for scientifically-minded people, who are seeking truth about objective reality, to have a discussion with religious or mystically-minded people.

This happens all the time in the comments section of my blog posts. Someone scientifically-minded challenges a claim made by a religious or mystically-minded person. In science, that challenge would be taken seriously, because both sides share the same goal: truth.

But in the comments section (I'm thinking of exchanges between Appreciative Reader and Spence Tepper, for example), the religious or mystically-minded person is seeking to defend their personal perspective or experience. 

They want to continue to feel good about their religious or mystical beliefs. So they engage in all sorts of "word salad" techniques in which all kinds of things are said, except for a saying that directly addresses the challenge directed at them by the scientifically-minded person.

And so it goes. Two ships passing in the night, because one ship is navigating toward truth, and the other ship is navigating toward defending their indefensible personal beliefs. 

Science lacks the blind conviction of the zealot

One of the reasons I absolutely love science and dislike religion is this: scientists the world over see reality in much the same way, while religious believers agree only on the need to believe without evidence, not on what they believe is true about their God fantasies.

So I wasn't surprised when, several days after writing "Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too," which was based on a book by physicist Carlo Rovelli, an Italian, I came across very similar sentiments about certainty in a book by a British physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science.

Here's passages from the "Don't be afraid to change your mind" chapter.

If a theory survives, it is because it has been through this process of rigorous interrogation and we can be confident that the new scientific knowledge it gives us about the world can be trusted.

And it is here where we find one of the most important features of the scientific method: all of these careful steps are built on acknowledging and quantifying uncertainty, because a good scientist will always retain some degree of doubt and rational skepticism. 

This does not necessarily mean that the scientist is sceptical of others' views, but rather that we as scientists should acknowledge that we may ourselves be wrong.

...While doubt and uncertainty are important in science, so too is certainty; otherwise we would likewise never make progress, and of course we do. The scientific method has many imperfections, and it is true that the process of scientific discovery is often messy and unpredictable, and full of blemishes, blunders and biases.

But after the dust has settled on some aspect of our understanding of the world, we usually find that progress has been made not through doubt, but through well-founded conclusions based on carefully justified steps that gradually reduce our levels of uncertainty.

...And yet uncertainty forms part of every theory, every observation, every measurement. A mathematical model will have built-in assumptions and approximations with a well-defined level of accuracy.

...Measuring uncertainty and accepting it as an integral part of scientific investigation is ingrained into every science student.

The problem is that many people not trained in science see uncertainty as a weakness rather than a strength of the scientific method. They will say things like, "If scientists are not sure of their results and admit that there is a chance that they might be wrong, then why should we trust them at all?"

Quite the opposite, in fact: uncertainty in science does not mean we don't know, but that we do know. We know just how likely our results are to be right or wrong because we can quantify our degree of confidence in them.

To a scientist, 'uncertainty' means a 'lack of certainty'. It does not mean ignorance. Uncertainty leaves room for doubt, and this is liberating because it means we can critically and objectively assess what we believe.

Uncertainty in our theories and models means that we know they are not absolute truths. Uncertainty in our data means our knowledge of the world is not complete. The alternative is far worse, for it is the blind conviction of the zealot.

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific.

This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity."

In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science so much, I'm sharing portions of it below.

This really is brilliant. Nothing astoundingly new. Just stated in a fresh appealing fashion. Rovelli captures why I love science so much, and why I've come to dislike religiosity so much.

This acute awareness of our ignorance is the heart of scientific thinking. It is thanks to this awareness of the limits of our knowledge that we have learned so much. We are not certain of all that we suspect, just as Socrates was not sure of the spherical nature of Earth.

We are exploring at the borders of our knowledge.

Awareness of the limits of our knowledge is also awareness of the fact that what we know may turn out to be wrong, or inexact. Only by keeping in mind that our beliefs may turn out to be wrong is it possible to free ourselves from wrong ideas, and to learn.

To learn something, it is necessary to have the courage to accept that what we think we know, including our most rooted convictions, may be wrong, or at least naive: shadows on the walls of Plato's cave.

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing in what everyone says. Not having absolute faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers.

We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.

Had they trusted the knowledge of their fathers, Einstein, Newton, and Copernicus would never have called things into question and would never have been able to move our knowledge forward. If no one had raised doubts, we would be still worshipping pharaohs and thinking that Earth is supported on the back of a giant turtle.

...A scientist is someone who lives immersed in the awareness of our deep ignorance, in direct contact with our own innumerable limits, with the limits of our understanding.

But if we are certain of nothing, how can we possibly rely on what science tells us? The answer is simple. Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us.

It is precisely its openness, its constant putting of current knowledge in question, that guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science. 

When Einstein found better answers than Newton, he didn't question the capacity of science to give the best possible answers -- on the contrary, he confirmed it.

...The nature of scientific thinking is critical, rebellious, and dissatisfied with a priori conceptions, reverence, and sacred or untouchable truth. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty. 

This means not giving credence to those who say they are in possession of the truth.

For this reason, science and religion frequently find themselves on a collision course. Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth.

This distrust is found to be disturbing in some religious quarters. It is not science that is disturbed by religion: there are certain religions that are disturbed by scientific thinking.

...To live with uncertainty may be difficult. There are those who prefer any certainty, even if unfounded, to the uncertainty that comes from recognizing our own limits. There are some who prefer to believe in a story just because it was believed by the tribe's ancestors, rather than bravely accept uncertainty.

Ignorance can be scary. Our of fear, we can tell ourselves calming stories: up there beyond the stars there is an enchanted garden, with a gentle father who will welcome us into his arms. It doesn't matter if this is true -- it is reassuring.

There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves.

There is always someone who has the presumption to be the depository of Truth, neglecting to notice that the world is full of other depositories of Truth, each one with his own real Truth, different from that of the others.

There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words: "Follow me, I am the true way." 

...For my part, I prefer to look our ignorance in the face, accept it, and seek to look just a bit further: to try to understand that which we are able to understand.

Not just because accepting this ignorance is the way to avoid being entangled in superstitions and prejudices but because to accept our ignorance in the first place seems to me to be the truest, the most beautiful, and above all, the most honest way.

God can be an imaginary friend, even if you're an atheist

Recently I heard from a woman who has distanced herself from the Indian religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Her family is still very much into RSSB, so she asked me some questions about how I adjusted after being, like her, initiated by the RSSB guru and then coming to see that the RSSB teachings no longer made sense.

Here's one of her questions, along with my response. "Babaji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

Question for me: I find myself saying when I need help (to myself) Babaji help me- and then I realise that I don’t believe in him anymore and I don’t believe in god either- do you think there’s some sort of universal energy around us? 

My response: I wish there was, but I don’t think there is. But I could be wrong. Like you, I don’t believe in the RSSB gurus or in God. But I still talk to my guru, Charan Singh, and also to God. Life can be difficult. I like having imaginary friends.

To me it’s like watching a compelling TV show or reading a good novel. I can believe the show or novel is real and get all excited about what’s happening, even though I know that both are made up and aren’t real.

In the same way, I like to pretend at times that I believe in guru/God, just because it makes me feel better to do that, and I enjoy telling my problems to my imaginary friends, since my wife can get tired of hearing me complain about the same things after so many years of marriage (32 years).

Like I said, I don't find anything unusual in talking to someone who isn't real as if they could actually hear you. This isn't so different from sports fans yelling at the TV in a bar, exhorting their team to win the game.

 

Or me getting so nervous about what's going to happen in the Israeli spy thriller "Tehran" that I'm watching on AppleTV+. I realize that Tehran features actors, not real spies. But when there's a cliffhanger at the end of an episode, I can hardly wait to see if the woman who plays an undercover agent in Iran is going to succeed in her mission.

 

So it's no big deal for atheist me to lie in bed and say to myself, as I'm drifting off to sleep, "Hey, God, how are you doing? I doubt very much that you exist. However, if you do, it'd be great to get to know you. Feel free to pay me a visit, either while I'm awake or in a dream. And if you could do something to fix the sciatica in my right leg, that'd be great. Good night."

 

I talk in a similar fashion to Charan Singh, the RSSB guru who initiated me (by proxy) in 1971. I used to carry on a one-sided conversation with Charan Singh when I was a RSSB believer and thought it likely that the guru actually did reside within a corner of my consciousness, where he could guide me as need be.

 

Now I find that to be extremely unlikely.

 

However, occasionally I still have some things to say to Charan Singh, just because it makes me feel good to have him as an imaginary friend, along with God. This seems absolutely fine to me, since I'm well aware that an imaginary friend is much different from a real friend. 

 

 

Christian nationalism a threat to American democracy

Most Christians are normal people who happen to believe in Jesus as their savior. I've got no problem with that, though I think they're wrong about Jesus, plus the rest of their Christian dogma.

Religions can be false (all are, in my atheist opinion) but not dangerous.

However, Christian nationalists are a distinct threat to American democracy, as evidenced by Doug Mastriano winning the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor in last Tuesday's primary election.

A day after the election, Greg Sargent, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote "Say it clearly: Republicans just nominated a pro-Trump insurrectionist." In his piece Sargent describes how Mastriano views himself as doing God's will by overturning election results where a Democrat wins.

This is exceedingly dangerous. Mix right-wing political fanaticism with Christian nationalist religious fanaticism, and you've got a double-dose of zealotry devoted to overturning democracy.

Here's excerpts from Sargent's column pertaining to Mastriano's twisted worldview.

For the love of democracy, please stop using the phrase “election denier.”

Now that Doug Mastriano has won the GOP nomination for governor in Pennsylvania, countless news accounts are describing him with that phrase. This is meant to convey the idea that Mastriano won’t accept Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection loss.

That’s true, but it’s insufficient. Let’s state this plainly: Pennsylvania Republicans just nominated a full-blown insurrectionist who intends to use the power of the office to ensure that, as long as he is governor, no Democratic presidential candidate wins his state again.

Mastriano’s victory also highlights another story that’s bigger than this one contest: The role of Christian nationalism in fueling the growing insurrectionist streak on the right. This nexus underscores the danger this movement poses in a way that also demands more clarity about the worldview of candidates like Mastriano.

...Mastriano is running on what is functionally an open vow to use the power of the governor’s office to nullify future election losses, even if they are procedurally legitimate, and even if he knows this to be the case.

This becomes unavoidable once you look closely at Mastriano’s own conduct. And his Christian nationalist sympathies underscore the point.

...As governor, Mastriano would likely handpick a secretary of state who would resist certifying a razor-thin legitimate Democratic victory. And Mastriano would likely try to certify sham electors for Trump or another GOP candidate.

The 2024 election in Pennsylvania might not be close; either the Republican or the Democrat might win easily. Alternatively, such an effort by Mastriano might fail. But let’s be clear: He’s telegraphing a willingness to attempt such a thing, and that he’d likely see it as a righteous act as well, even if there’s little actual voter fraud, and even if he knows this.

This may seem like a leap, but to experts in Christian nationalism, it makes perfect sense. Sarah Posner, a scholar of the religious right, has extensively demonstrated that Mastriano’s efforts for Trump were infused with Christian nationalist fervor, which holds that Trump was installed in the White House by God as “restorer of America’s white Christian heritage.”

Mastriano hinted at this in his victory speech Tuesday night. “God is good,” Mastriano said. “He uses people like you and me to change history.”

The idea that Mastriano’s victory shows God using him to “change history” is a textbook Christian nationalist trope, notes Posner. As she says, this worldview holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that this is being subverted by satanic and secular forces that Christian nationalists are duty-bound to resist.

“It’s their patriotic duty as believers to fight for that Christian nation,” Posner told me. That’s been “orthodoxy” for a long time, Posner says, but the new ingredient is the eagerness to overturn elections in service of that higher end.

Mastriano is saying he’s “empowered as a believer to overturn election results to achieve God’s will,” Posner said. To prevent the subversion of the “Christian nation,” Posner added, he hopes to take “the God-given power to change election results” to the governor’s mansion.

In this telling, liberal democratic proceduralism is inherently nonbinding. Even procedurally legitimate electoral outcomes can be deemed out of step with God’s plan and subject to nullification. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp describes these tendencies as “American Orbanism,” after Hungarian leader Viktor Orban: It relies on religiously inspired culture-warring to energize and justify the curtailment or abandonment of democracy.

It should be obvious that phrases like “election denialist” and “election conspiracist” don’t do justice to what we’re really seeing here. Getting it right on what’s at stake in places like Pennsylvania is truly urgent.

RSSB training produces zero results in satsangis

I always enjoy getting emails from people who used to be churched, and now are churchless.

Usually I hear from initiates of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), as that was the "church," Eastern religion variety, I belonged to for 35 years.

Recently I've gotten two messages from former satsangis, as RSSB initiates often are called, using an Indian term. Each warmed my heart, since the emails described how the people realized that the RSSB dogma didn't match up with truth.

One person included a nicely caustic observation about RSSB satsangis.

I have pointed out that you could compare Satsangis to Navy Seals. They train every day by meditating, they eat only certain things. Eventually, you should see some form of result. All I have seen are fat lazy Navy Seals. That training produces zero results. In fact I think it creates more psychological disorder.

You won't get much of an argument from me about that. My main caveat regarding the Navy Seal analogy is that members of this elite American military group actually do train hard every day. 

But RSSB initiates, not nearly as much, especially when it comes to meditation, which is supposed to be done for 2 1/2 hours a day. 

However, most satsangis do seem to stick to a vegetarian diet, along with not drinking alcohol or using recreational drugs. And quite a few attend the equivalent of RSSB church services every week, satsangs.

So you'd think all this religious activity would produce some positive changes in RSSB initiates, even if their meditation didn't match up to the ideal. I agree that those changes often aren't apparent, which makes the "fat lazy Navy Seals" analogy an apt one.

I also agree that many satsangis end up more psychologically screwed-up after years of RSSB practice. My theory about why this happens is that the RSSB teachings are highly dualistic. 

Satsangis are supposed to make their top priority leaving this physical world behind and supposedly rising to higher regions of reality. This fosters an over-attachment to the RSSB guru, and under-attachment to family members, friends, and other loved ones. 

Thus rather than being of service to people in your immediate surroundings, many satsangis prefer to travel long distances to perform "seva" (volunteering) for RSSB, such as building or maintaining the centers where RSSB meetings are held.

Often this leads to an unhealthy attraction to their chosen religion, RSSB, since that focus takes time and energy away from being a good spouse, parent, friend, companion, or whatever to people who previously were near and dear to the satsangi.

In December 1977 I went to India for two weeks around Christmas. I'd been initiated into RSSB in 1971 and had never seen my guru, Charan Singh, in person. I was married with a five year old daughter. I'd gotten a temporary appointment as a manager with Oregon's State Health Planning and Development Agency and was waiting for it to become permanent.

My wife, Sue, wasn't happy with me going to India, given our circumstances. It cost quite a bit to get there. We'd gotten Celeste, my daughter, her first real bicycle. Sue wanted me to be home for Christmas. But I chose to put my devotion to RSSB above my devotion to family.

It turned out that I had an amazing two weeks in India, a time with Charan Singh I'll never forget. And after I got home, I ended up getting a permanent appointment to the manager position. But I readily admit that perhaps spending Christmas with my wife and daughter would have been as memorable as going to India, though I doubt it. Regardless, I put my relationship with RSSB above my family duties.

I also believe that the RSSB teachings lead initiates awry by emphasizing the Five Deadly Sins of lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism -- which actually are normal aspects of being a human, so long as they aren't engaged in to an extreme.

This causes many satsangis to be hyper-conscious of engaging in "bad" thoughts and actions, sort of like Christians who fear the Devil leading them astray. Not mentally healthy, for sure.

Cliché but true: death is what makes life precious

I'm no poet, but I admire poetry.

Some evidence is that after my wife got tired of watching Dickinson on Apple TV+, a streaming series about the poet Emily Dickinson, I continued on until I'd seen every episode of the first three seasons.

I loved how Dickinson looked at life in such a fresh and creative fashion, even taking into account how loosely the series probably adhered to the literal facts of Emily Dickinson. 

For example, she spent quite a bit of time in a carriage with Death, a cool Black guy who was overworked, particularly after the Civil War started. Did Dickinson fantasize those meetings? Was she mentally ill? 

Or was her fascination with Death a reflection of her poetic sensibilities? That rings most true to me. Reality is a slippery notion when it comes to poets and their poetry. 

Which really is no different than how slippery each of us becomes when we try to describe to someone else how we feel about something. There always is a gap between our intuitive experience and whatever means we use to convey that ineffable something to another person.

Poetry is one way of narrowing that gap. So is music, art, dance, tears, laughter, facial expressions, writing, hugs, plus so much more.

I'm toying with the idea of finding ways of writing blog posts for the Church of the Churchless that do a better job of capturing how I look upon various subjects. This wouldn't be poetry as such, but words with more of a poetic feeling tone.

Might as well start with death.

I'll be going about my day, doing routine stuff, when suddenly a message pops into my mind, surprising me.

"One day you won't be doing this. Or anything else. Because you'll be dead."

It's a message that rings true. No big surprise. It is true. 

We can make up stories about an afterlife. I've done that. Most people do. It's a foundation that religion rests on.

A very shaky foundation. Because no one knows if there is life after death. All we know is there is death after life. The proof is all around us. 

A million deaths in the United States from COVID-19. Deaths of friends, family, famous people, ordinary people, cats, dogs, cows, chickens, fish. 

Everything that lives, dies. But we humans, me certainly included for much of my life, we can visualize ourselves living on forever.

Kind of takes the sting out of death. Or so it seems. Because actually the stinger is still attached to the scorpion of death.

It has to be. Death is inevitable. 

And if we're honest, we say to ourselves, "I'm going to die, and I have no idea if there's any living after my death."

That honesty is what breaks through my ordinary mind from time to time. 

I'll be washing the dishes and suddenly realize, not for that much longer. Like I said, the realizing is a sudden burst of nothing else also for that much longer.

So it doesn't do me any good to vow that from this death-realizing moment onward I'll only do what is so deeply meaningful, in that way I will cheat death by living life so fully, I'll die satisfied. 

Fine. But I'll still die. Which will bring to an end satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and everything else.

There's a stark divide between existing and not-existing. We try to use our well-honed techniques for dealing with life's problems to handle our knowledge that death is the end of life.

But they don't work. They can't work. Something, anything, is utterly incapable of dealing with nothing.

I'm left, then, with a simple feeling of gratitude when I have one of my meetings with death. The encounter wakes me up. For a while it stops me from taking my life for granted. Also, my wife's life. Our dog's life. All lives.

No matter if I'm having a good day, a bad day, or a so-so day, I'm having a day. Yay! I'm alive. Who knows for how long. I sure don't. No one does. 

Whatever I do, at least I'm doing something. Which is a heck of a lot better than being nothing. If I could always realize this, I guess I'd be a Zen master. Or at least, a Zen student who does the dishes.

My response to someone wanting to know how my views on Plotinus have changed

I hate to let an interesting question emailed to me and my (hopefully) interesting response go unused, so here they are as a blog post. 

Greg, my correspondent, said in his message that he had been initiated into a different form of Sant Mat than the RSSB version I was a member of for 35 years. That explains why my response mentions Sant Mat. 

He also said that he lives in Ashland, a town in Oregon close to the California border, so I figured he would recognize my mention of the 2021 ice storm, even though it didn't affect southern Oregon. I added a couple of links to the portion of Greg's message pertaining to Plotinus.

Greetings Brian,

I wanted to reach out to say I’m really enjoying your book on Plotinus. So much so that I went to your site to know more about you, especially given that so many other books on him seem to be deeply academic while yours has a different flavor- sharing a research of a different kind.

I was wondering about a statement on your site regarding your work- “Given the reality of evolution, it isn't surprising that my views on science, spirituality, and philosophy have changed quite a bit over the years. Which doesn't definitely mean that some of what I said in these books isn't true. I just feel that it isn't true for me any more, or that likely it isn't scientifically true given humanity's current understanding of reality.”

I was hoping to know what of this relates to your work on Plotinus- given I am reading it and I read things like this to learn and generally only those things I feel are worth reading. Are there critical pieces of this work you now see differently ?

This was my reply.

Greg, nice to hear from you. As a good start at answering your question about how my views have changed since writing Return to the One, you could take a look at the “Plotinus” category of my Church of the Churchless blog. The most recent entries are at the top, so if you want to see how my attitudes have changed, you could scroll to the bottom and work your way up. Or the reverse. Up to you.

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/plotinus

 

A brief overall answer is that Plotinus, sort of like capitalism if I remember Marx correctly, contained the seed of his own destruction. Meaning, I immersed myself in Plotinus at about the same time I was having increasing doubts about RSSB, the branch of Sant Mat I was a member of for 35 years.

 

I’d always had a decidedly scientific and non-religious approach toward Sant Mat, not being a big fan of strong guru-worship, which many initiates practiced. That became stronger as I absorbed Plotinus’ blend of Greek rationality and mysticism. Yes, reason and science can tell us a great deal about the universe, our world, and ourselves. But mysteries inevitably remain.

 

Notably, the whole Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing thing. My human mind can’t grasp the possibility that nothing could produce something. So it sure seems like something must always have existed. I used to think this was God, spirit, cosmic energy, whatever you want to call it. But the obvious alternative is that the cosmos always has existed. After all, if something always has existed, why not assume that it is what we can sense, rather than something other-worldly?

 

So the appeal Platonic dualism once held for me, which Plotinus shared, gradually diminished. The idea that this physical world is the dregs of creation, though the best it could be (a Plotinian idea) came to seem less appealing. If this world is all there is, a very real possibility, aren’t I diminishing my appreciation of what likely is my one and only life by spending so much of my attention in meditation and elsewhere trying to rise above this world to a supposedly better one?

 

I came to answer “Yes” to that question. I more strongly embraced Buddhism, especially the Zen variety. Taking up Tai Chi practice in 2004 after many years of hard style/karate martial arts, I fell more in love withTaoism (Tai Chi basically is Taoism in motion).

 

Sure, some people take a dualistic attitude toward both Buddhism and Taoism, but I liked the simple chop wood, carry water side — maybe in part because we live on ten acres outside of Salem and there’s a lot of wood and water to deal with (especially after the 2021 ice storm, and the recent very wet spring that is stopping me from mowing some grassy areas until the standing water disappears).

 

Anyway, this is a start at addressing your comments and questions. I still agree with a lot in Return to the One. It’s the idea that the One is separate from and less positive than the Many that I’ve pretty much let go, though who knows, I might come full circle and embrace that view again. Of course, being 73, I don’t have a heck of a lot of time left to do that circling.

 

— Brian

A believer in Putin's propaganda reminds me of religious dogmatism

Proving that I'm able to tolerate people who embrace absurd conspiracy theories, for several weeks I've been engaged in an exchange of emails with an acquaintance who also lives in Salem, Oregon.

His name is Jack. 

In the past Jack and I have corresponded about subjects we agreed on, both of us being on the left side of the political spectrum. But Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed another side to Jack.

He buys in almost 100% to Putin propaganda about the war. Jack's sources for this disinformation are web sites biased toward Russia, if not controlled by them.

When he started sending me links about how Ukraine is led by a bunch of Nazis, it took me just a minute of Googling to learn how those stories emanated from Russian sympathizers or agents. I figured that Jack would be grateful when I pointed this out to him.

I was wrong. 

In the same way that religious fundamentalists often view an attack on their faith as a sign to redouble their commitment to God, the more I showed Jack the error of his Ukraine ways, the more adamant he became that he was right.

It didn't matter that reputable scholars, journalists, and intelligence experts all debunked Putin's lie that he needed to invade Ukraine to "de-Nazify" the country. Each time I pointed out the truth to Jack, he replied with more evidence from his unreliable sources.

Sort of like a Christian quoting from the Bible to show that the Bible is true. 

Given how much crap exists on the internet, it almost always is possible to find a web page, or many pages, that supports whatever crazy idea someone has. One way to avoid this trap is to cast your intellectual net as widely as possible, so you aren't taken in by some barely-true specifics that can masquerade as truth.

For example, it's true that Ukraine has some Nazis. But so does the United States. So does Russia.

I sent Jack a FactCheck piece about "The Facts on De-Nazifying Ukraine." It quoted experts on this who said there's a higher percentage of right-wing extremists in the United States and Russia than in Ukraine. So if Putin wanted to de-Nazify a nation, he should have started with his own.

However, when someone is more attached to an incorrect view of an aspect of the world that, for whatever reason, they find more satisfying than learning the truth about that aspect, it's really difficult for them to admit that they're wrong.

So I'm about ready to give up on my email correspondence with Jack. There's just little value in communicating with someone whose mind is closed.

I'm not saying that my own mind always is open to the truth. Like everybody, I've got my biases and blind spots. However, in my religious-believing days, which went on for about 35 years, I wasn't so much denying evidence as embracing a lack of evidence.

Meaning, to offer one example, I couldn't prove that the guru I followed was God in Human Form, as his teachings proclaimed. But nobody could prove that the guru wasn't God in Human Form, which allowed my blind faith to rush in where evidence to the contrary was lacking.

What's much more problematic is when, say, a religious believer denies evolution, since there's lots of evidence that evolution is true.

Similarly, I've told Jack that the atrocities and war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine really bother me, citing Bucha as one example. Today I got this bizarre message from Jack.

Now, about Bucha. The Russians were gone by the time those bodies were getting scattered about. It was either two or three days after the Russians left that the mayor himself publicly noted that all was well in the town.  No bodies were visible. But subsequent to that Ukies then began going house-to-house looking for evidence of residents who had been friendly with the Russians, killing them, and arranging their bodies neatly along the side of the street to make it handy for the photographers and to please Zelensky when he came to visit.

I have no idea where Jack got these totally false ideas. It seems almost too absurd for even the Kremlin to promulgate. though likely Jack's source was Russian propaganda. Because I can't stand lies that ignore the Russian war crimes committed in Bucha, I sent this reply to Jack.

Jack, you truly have bought into Russian propaganda 100%. The New York Times proved that bodies in Bucha were there weeks before the Russians left. The Times also did an in-depth investigation of the Russian atrocities in Bucha. Read and believe:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/world/europe/bucha-ukraine-bodies.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/11/world/europe/bucha-terror.html

Unfortunately, Jack won't believe the New York Times, or the many other journalists who have reported on the horrors that the Russian military brought upon residents of Bucha.

Once a truth-denying mental virus has infected someone, it can be extremely difficult for them to heal themselves and be in touch with reality. At first I felt a duty to help Jack see the light of Ukraine truth. But I've come to realize that if someone is addicted to conspiracy theories, they have to want to be free of their addiction.

No one else can do that for them.

"Reality is Not What It Seems," a book by Carlo Rovelli

My new favorite book, until a fresh one arrives from Amazon, is Carlo Rovelli's Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity.

Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who, not surprisingly given the title of his book, is focused on resolving the mismatch between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The key to doing this is to find a theory of gravity that is more fundamental than Einstein's general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time and isn't compatible with quantum mechanics.

That's a fascinating subject, made more fascinating by Rovelli's impressive writing ability, albeit in an English translation.

I've only just begun the book but am already liking it a lot. Rovelli starts off with a chapter about the atomic theory of ancient Greek thinkers such as Democritus. They broke away from the superstitions and religions of their time by extolling the ability of reason and observation to lay bare the secrets of the universe, which is still the basic scientific approach.

I found Rovelli's description of how Democritus concluded that reality had to be composed of discrete parts enlightening, having never heard it put this way before.

Democritus observed that matter could not be a continuous whole, because there is something contradictory in the proposition that it should be so. We know of Democritus's reasoning because Aristotle reports it.

Imagine, says Democritus, that matter is infinitely divisible, that is to say, that it may be broken down an infinite number of times. Imagine then that you break up a piece of matter ad infinitum. What would be left?

Could small particles of extended dimension remain? No, because if this were the case, the piece of matter would not yet be broken up to infinity. Therefore, only points without extension would remain. 

But now let us try to put together the piece of matter starting from these points: by putting together two points without extension, you cannot obtain a thing with extension, nor can you with three, or even with four. No matter how many points you put together, in fact, you never have extension, because points have no extension.

Therefore we cannot think that matter is made of points without extension, because no matter how many of these we manage to put together, we never obtain something with an extended dimension.

The only possibility, Democritus concludes, is that any piece of matter is made up of a finite number of discrete pieces that are indivisible, each one having a finite size: the atoms. 

Pretty damn brilliant. Just through clear thinking, around 450 BCE Democritus was able to come up with an atomic theory of what matter consists of that has stood the test of time. Sadly, all of Democritus' writings were destroyed by Christian emperors who didn't like that his ideas conflicted with Christian dogma.

So we're left with indirect mentions of Democritus' teachings. A Latin poet, Lucretius, says Rovelli, "adheres to the philosophy of Epicurus, a pupil of a pupil of Democritus." Here's how Rovelli describes how Lucretius viewed reality, comparing it to medieval notions that were much farther removed from modern science,

The medieval cosmos so marvelously sung by Dante was interpreted on the basis of a hierarchical organization of the universe that reflected the hierarchical organization of European society: a spherical cosmic structure with Earth at its center; the irreducible separation between Earth and heavens; finalistic and metaphorical explanations of natural phenomena; fear of God, fear of death; little attention to nature; the idea that forms preceding things determine the structure of the world; the idea that the source of knowledge could only be the past, in revelation and tradition.

There is none of this in the world of Democritus as sung by Lucretius. There is no fear of the gods; no ends or purposes in the world; no cosmic hierarchy; no distinction between Earth and heavens. There is a deep love of nature, a serene immersion within it; a recognition that we are profoundly part of it; that men, women, animals, plants, and clouds are organic threads of a marvelous whole, without hierarchies. There is a feeling of deep universalism, in the wake of the splendid words of Democritus: "To a wise man, the whole earth is one, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe."

There is, too, the ambition of being able to think about the world in simple terms. Of being able to investigate and understand the secrets of nature. To know more than our parents. And there are extraordinary conceptual tools on which Galileo, Kepler, and Newton will build: the idea of free and rectilinear motion in space; the idea of elementary bodies and their interactions, out of which the world is constructed; the idea of space as a container of the world.

And there is the simple idea of the finite divisibility of things. The granular quality of the world The idea that stops the infinite between our fingers. This idea is at the root of the atomic hypothesis, but it will also return with augmented force with quantum mechanics, and today is revealing itself to be powerful again -- as the keystone of quantum gravity.

Life is Simple, a fascinating book about Occam's razor

I've been making my way through Johnjoe McFadden's book Life is Simple:How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. It traces the history of science through the lens of Occam's razor.

William of Occam, who was born in the late 13th century, is famous for favoring the simplest solutions in theology, science, and other areas of life.

The book says, "Three centuries after his death, the French theologian Libert Froidmont coined the term "Occam's razor" to refer to William's preference for shaving away excess complexity."

But contrary to how many people look upon Occam's razor, this doesn't mean that reality is simple. McFadden says:

Kepler's next step was, albeit reluctantly, to add more complexity. This is of course perfectly compatible with Occam's razor, which, contrary to many of its detractors, does not insist that the world is simple, only that in reasoning about it we should not multiply entities beyond necessity.

If the existing entities cannot do the job then the razor gives you free rein to add as many entities as needed, so long as they are not 'beyond necessity'.

...'Entities' refers to the parts of an hypothesis, explanation or model of any particular system.

Models come in for a lot of attention in the book.

The most familiar example is the numerous epicycles in the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, which assumed Earth sits at the center of it. In order to match observations of the sun and planets, smaller circles had to keep being added on to the large circles that was wrongly assumed to be how the planets moved. 

(Now we know it is an ellipse, and the sun is the center of the universe.)

What's interesting is that very different models can each be a reasonable-sounding explanation for some aspect of reality. Thus a good model is one that can be used to steadily improve our knowledge of reality, something that religious models, theologies, are utterly incapable of doing.

Our scientific model remains, not in the world, as Aristotle insisted, or in some mystical realm, as Plato proposed, but, according to Occam, in our head. The ultimate reality of what is really out there in the world will always be beyond our reach, as unknowable as Occam's omnipotent God.

...Models instantiate knowledge. They model the structure, dynamics and function of machines [among other things], usually in the language of geometry and mathematics. They can be as simple as the drawing of a steam engine, such as Newcomen's in 1712 that refers to Boyle's 'weight of air' to account for the motion of the piston.

The feature that makes them so useful is that improvements can be fed back into the model as a positive feedback loop that leads to exponential increases in performance. Yet models are useless without Occam's razor.

Imagine trying to build a steam engine if your model of how it works was based on More's 'knowing spirit'. How would you improve it? Perhaps you might pray to its spirit?

When this approach failed, your only recourse would have been the geologically slow process of trial and error that has been responsible for most innovations on our planet, including life itself, since the dawn of time. 

This all changed when scientists and engineers shifted to using models that instantiated their knowledge and their scientific laws and, as Boyle had urged, were 'the Simplest it must be: at least from all that is superfluous, free'.

With razored models in hand, scientists and engineers could predict modifications that would improve performance. If their prediction was realised, then the engineer knew their model was good; if not, the engineer would modify their model until their predictions held true and they obtained the desired improvement.

Their improved model would then be a starting point for further advances. With this positive feedback loop in place, technological development went from the linear rate of improvement delivered by trial and error to the exponential advances that characterise the modern age.

Well, religious and mystical beliefs don't even improve at a linear rate. They never improve at all, at least not in regard to explaining the nature of reality. 

One big reason for this is that dogmatism and blind faith prevail in religions.

So a religion isn't even capable of proving itself wrong -- with logically must be the case for nearly every religion given that religions contradict each other (or indeed every religion) -- because theological models don't include a capacity to test how well they match up against reality, with feedback providing a way to improve the theology.

Such as by discarding it as totally false. 

Instead, the same old dogmas are preached year after year, decade after decade, century after century. This is why science constantly progresses and religions remain the same insofar as their capacity to explain reality.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" a compelling story of religion gone bad

Having just written the title of this of this blog post, the question that comes to mind is whether there's ever a compelling story of religion gone good. 

In my current atheist frame of mind, the answer is no. But during the 35 years I was a believer, Eastern religion variety, I would have said, "Of course there is, my chosen faith."

Problem is, everyone who buys into a religion thinks the same way. Their faith is absolutely great, almost faultless. It's those other faiths who give religions a bad name.

My wife and I have started watching Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu, which is based on a true crime story involving the Mormon religion. The first episode shows the grisly murder of a woman and her child.

At first the husband is the prime suspect. But it doesn't take long for the Utah detectives on the case to realize that a lot more is going on involving a very large Mormon family. (Is there any other kind? Mormon tend to have many children.)

Several things struck me about what we've watched so far.

One is how religion does bind people together strongly. This can be good or bad, depending on the nature of the religion. When Allen, I think his name is, brings his girlfriend to a gathering of his Lafferty family, everybody there greets her warmly in a decidedly Mormon fashion.

They do so because she's introduced as a devout Mormon.

That makes her part of the religious club to which they all belong. So there's much talk of Heavenly Father this and Heavenly Father that. (So far, it appears Mormons don't use "God" very much, preferring "Heavenly Father.")

I used to enjoy this feeling of belonging when I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian religious organization headed up by a guru. I knew that I could go anywhere in the world and be warmly welcomed at a meeting of the group, especially if I said some magic words.

Not "Heavenly Father." Rather, "Radha Soami." That was an all-purpose greeting of the group. Also, a way of saying thank you with hands folded. Or a way of ending a talk. Kind of like Aloha, I guess. 

During the many years I was the secretary/leader of our local RSSB group, my phone number was listed as a contact person for the organization. My wife, Laurel, wasn't a satsangi, as members of RSSB were called. 

Often when the phone rang and it was a RSSB initiate on the other end, Laurel would hear "Radha Soami." She'd then say, "Hello." Typically the other person would repeat, "Radha Soami." Laurel would keep saying "Hello" until she heard "Hello" in reply.

I thought this was great.

Every religion has some cult-like aspects. Radha Soami was used as a phrase in much the same way the Mormons in the show we're watching would say Heavenly Father. It marked you as part of the in-group.

But my wife wasn't part of RSSB, though she supported me during the time I was a member of RSSB. So people didn't know what to think when they'd phone my number and hear "Hello" rather than "Radha Soami."

Of course, this wasn't a big deal. It just indicated how every religion has ways to tell the difference between those who belong to that faith and those who don't. Mostly those ways don't cause any real problems.

It'll be interesting to learn, as we get further into Under the Banner of Heaven, what caused some members of the Mormon religion to murder the woman and her child.

I suspect those who did this ghastly deed were under the sway of an extreme cult-like frame of mind, as opposed to the usual "normal" religious cult-like attitude.

 

A really unusual Lululemon miracle story

I'm going through old emails today (I have some really old ones) and just came across a not-so-ancient message from November 2021 that a woman sent me after reading a post I'd written about miracles.

The miracle story she shared struck me as so strangely wonderful, it deserved to be made into a blog post. The person who sent it to me called it a boring story, but I heartily disagree. Her story was so honestly told, I didn't find it boring at all. 

My wife is hyper-conscious of matching colors, so even though Laurel is an atheist, I can easily see her becoming a believer in Goddess if She were to perform a miracle along the line described below.

Enjoy...

I had a sort of insignificant and measureable (but significant to me) miracle. It is a boring and wordy story be forewarned.

 

Lululemon came out with the perfect workout top design, which is their most copied design (but poorly copied). But this design was discontinued by Lululemon loooong long ago and are unavailable. It's the only top I'm almost perfectly comfortable in and hugged in smoothly all over. Their materials are superb. It is expensive but lasts probably 10+ years if one avoids destroying the 4 way elasticity in high heat drying. 

 

So I bought one or two used ones on ebay since they are very pricey even there, used. Oh LULULEMON has a HUGE used market.

 

So I'm super invested in this top. I found it several years ago in wine-red straps/trim and overall it is that color but blended ("heather"ed).

 

On the back there is a small section which is very fine net and it is a lighter unpleasant red, I was sad that it wasn't that deeper red, but ....particularly when I saw someone ELSE with the exact top at my fitness club and that back net section in their top is the deepest cool-toned purpley red.

 

It just killed me that that top looks so beautifully restful in that color in the back and my top seems garish in the light red on that small back section.

 

This went on probably for many months of me irking about my top, and more so when that lovely woman would come to my class and my eyes would follow that section of her top, how beautiful it looks, and I'm like why oh why oh why oh why is my top not that deep calm beautiful dark cool color, instead of the garish red color in that section.

 

Sometimes we"d wear our tops on the same day.

 

One day after many many months of agonizing about the garish red section in contrast with the rest of the top, I put that top on and the back section was now that deep darker restful tone, the part which used to be the garish red area. I kid you not. 

 

Magically the garish red disappeared in the back and it was a darker cool toned purpley red. I have never told anyone this. Who'd care? Or believe it. 

 

That material couldn't accidentally "get dyed" without the blended parts being affected. It is really hard to dye that kind of material at all. Nothing could have accidentally bled into that section that deep of a color and stayed, contained to that area. I also never mentioned this longing to anyone. 

 

It's a small thing and probably didn't change the course of anything except made me VERY happy. Maybe that's why that miracle could happen. It is concealed and relatively insignificant. It was a shock. Maybe also because that implies someone hears all my inner whining.

"Nature versus nurture" is just wrong

This morning I noticed a book in my office languishing under a pile of papers. I'd read most of it quite a while ago, except for a few pages at the end. 

Having finally finished "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" by neuroscientist David J. Linden, I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing some excerpts on subjects that I found particularly interesting.

First up is the familiar "nature versus nurture" phrase that I remember from my schooling. The idea is that who we are is a function of just two things, heredity and upbringing. Linden makes clear that this way too simplistic. In fact, wrong.

The oppositional construction of "nature versus nurture" is just wrong. But the part of this horrid expression that really chaps my ass is "nurture." The word means how your parents raised you -- how they cared for and protected you (or failed to do so), when you were a child. 

But of course, that's only one small part of the non-hereditary determination of traits. As we will explore in this chapter, a more correct term would be "experience," which I mean in the broadest sense.

Not just social experience and not just the experience of events that you have stored as memories, but rather every single factor that impinges upon you, from the moment that the sperm fertilizes the egg to your last breath.

These experiences start even before the embryo implants in the womb and encompass everything from the foods your mother ate while she was carrying you in utero to the waves of stress hormones you secreted on the first day of your first real job.

And there's another important factor that is neither heredity nor experience. That's the random nature of development, particularly the self-assembly of the brain and its five hundred trillion connections. 

As I mentioned earlier, developmental randomness is a large part of what we measure in twin studies in the category of non-shared environment. This self-assembly is guided by the genome, but it is not precisely specified at the finest levels of anatomy and function.

The genome is not a detailed cell-by-cell blueprint for the development of the body and brain, but rather a vague recipe jotted down on the back of an envelope. 

The genome doesn't say, "Hey you, glutamate-using neuron #12,345,763! Grow your axon in the dorsal direction for 123 microns and then make a sharp left turn to cross to the other side of the brain." Rather, the instruction is more like, "Hey, you bunch of glutamate-using neurons over there! Grow your axons in the dorsal direction for a bit and then about 50 percent of you make a sharp left to cross the midline to reach the other side of the brain. The rest of you, turn your axons to the right."

The key point is that the genetic instructions for development are not precise. In one growing identical twin, 40 percent of the axons in this area will make the left turn; in an another, 60 percent will. The example here is from the brain, but the principle applies to all the organs.

That's the main reason why identical twins, who share the same DNA sequence and nearly the same uterine environment, are not born with wholly identical bodies, brains, or temperaments. 

This means that your individuality is not a matter of "nature versus nurture" but rather "heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development." It's not nearly as fun to say but, unlike the former expression, it's true.

Then there's the question of how our memories are altered to some extent every time we recall them. Meaning, memories aren't like photographic images. They're more like Photoshop, which allows images to be edited, changed, altered. I've always thought this was a defect of human memory, but Linden says otherwise.

Another answer to the question of what memory is for is that the particular features of autobiographical memory are actually features rather than bugs. For memory to be useful, it must be updated and integrated with subsequent experience, even if it alters the memory of the original event.

In that way, it's helpful for recollection to render the memory of an event malleable, so that it may be integrated with the present.

In most situations, a generic memory compiled from many trips to the beach is more useful in guiding future decisions and behavior that fifty stand-alone, detailed, and accurate beach trip memories. The repetition-driven loss of detail allows for the efficient use of the brain's limited memory resources.

In other words, it's not surprising that our memories for events are often inaccurate, because the particular way in which memories are compromised is often useful. What's surprising is that we mostly fail to recognize this in our daily lives.

We humans all have an inborn tendency to create a plausible story out of memory fragments. Because of this ongoing narrative construction, we are often confident about the veracity of blurred memories and allow them to form the basis of our core beliefs about ourselves.

Free will fascinates me, for reasons outside of my control. Here's part of what Linden says about free will.

We like to imagine that we are fundamentally creatures of free will. We reliably call certain facts, events, and concepts to mind. We make conscious decisions and act volitionally. Our individuality is inextricably bound up with a deep sense of agency and autonomy.

To a large degree, this is a trick our brain plays on us. Most of our behavior is subconscious and automatic. In the words of neuroscientist Adrian Haith: "Almost everything you do is a habit."

A habit is not just a behavioral routine that is formed and then performed at a subconscious level, it must become divorced from an ultimate goal. Your goal might be to stop off at the Thai restaurant for takeout after work, but instead you habitually drive straight home.

...As Haith writes, "Atop this massive conglomeration of habits sits a thin sliver of cognitive deliberation that steers only the highest-level decisions that we need to make." Without habits, our brain would be instantly overwhelmed with a multitude of tiny decisions better left to rapid, automatic processes.

The extent to which traits are inherited/genetic is a topic of great interest, since this gets at the extent to which we can control those traits (assuming we have free will).

Overall, adults in the United States are pretty good at estimating the heritable components of traits. In one recent online survey, most people guessed more or less correctly that, for example, political beliefs have a very small heritable component, height is strongly heritable, and musical talent falls in the middle.

There are a few traits for which people's estimates tend to be inaccurate. For example, most people think that variation in sexual orientation is about 60 percent heritable, whereas it's really only about 30 percent (about 40 percent in men and 20 percent in women).

On the other side, most people think that variation in BMI [Body Mass Index] is about 40 percent heritable, when it's really about 65 percent. It's interesting to imagine the ways in which cultural ideas inform these mismatches.

In the case of BMI, I imagine that many people want to believe that food consumption is more a matter of personal willpower than it really is. This is a frequent, if mysterious, theme.

In most cases -- from the accuracy of memory to the heritability of personality traits -- people imagine that they (and others) have a greater degree of autonomy and personal agency than they really do.

Bullshit: "What you dislike in others is what you dislike in yourself"

There's a lot of New Age absurdities that irritate me. One of them is the ridiculous notion that if I dislike something about someone else, it's because I actually dislike that something in myself.

Oh, really? That's absurd. Sure, perhaps it is true in a few cases, but almost always we have a good reason for our dislikes.

I dislike Donald Trump because he lies incessantly, has a monstrous ego, lacks any genuine sense of morality, and exhibits an almost total lack of self-awareness and self-criticism. 

(Those are the dislikes that come most readily to mind. I could come up with more after a bit of additional thought.)

What I dislike about Trump isn't a reflection of my own mind, as a couple of annoying web pages I found say: "What You Dislike in Others is What You Dislike in Yourself" and "Introspection: Why You Hate in Others What You Hate in Yourself."

That makes no sense. Are we to believe that everybody who dislikes Trump, mostly liberals, share the qualities that they believe Trump possesses, while everybody who likes Trump, mostly conservatives, have none of those qualities?

It's a fact that what I dislike about Trump is part of Trump's personality. No doubt about it. Fact checkers have proven that he lies all the time. Most of us lie occasionally, but we feel bad when we're caught in a lie. Trump revels in lying, and he never admits he was wrong.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as projection. Sometimes people do indeed project their own disliked qualities onto others. There's been some notable instances of Republican politicians who were vehemently anti-LGBTQ, then were discovered to have engaged in homosexual behavior themselves.

In general, though, I agree with the thrust of what Jeff Foster says below in his book, "The Joy of True Meditation." His emphasis is a bit different from what I've been speaking about, but the theme of Foster's short chapter is in line with it.

The Path of the Broken Heart

"Clear up our vibration and you'll stop attracting bad things to yourself."

"If you have fears, if you have resistance, if you have anger, doubts and shame, then you must be in your ego, and totally unenlightened."

"If you think there's a problem with someone's words or actions, you are always the one who's confused."

"Everything is just your projection. Everything is in your mind. Everything is unreal."

"You attracted your pain because you desired and deserved it."

"You are too attached to the body. Go beyond the body. It's not who you are."

"The past is an illusion. Let it go immediately."

No, it's not always your projection. Sometimes you are seeing very clearly indeed.

No, everything isn't always "only in your mind." Sometimes you need to trust your gut instinct more, not less.

No, your doubts and fears are not a sign of your lack of spiritual evolution.

No, you do not attract abuse through a faulty "vibrational frequency."

No, you do not deserve to be violated in any way, in the name of truth, in the name of God, in the name of love, or in any other name. Your boundaries deserve to be respected, your "yes" and your "no" equally.

No, it's not okay for spiritual teachers to shame people "for their own good" (to shock them into awakening, to enlighten them, to help them drop their "ego").

I cannot support any spirituality that dismisses our tender, vulnerable, fragile humanity, that shames us for our precious human thoughts and feelings, that divides self from no self, sacred from human, holy from profane, absolute from relative, heaven from earth, duality from nonduality.

I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman. He said, "Your heartbreak is totally unreal and only the activity of the separate self. You are pure Awareness, and nothing more. Your son, and his death, are just a convincing illusion of mind. One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering."

And in that moment, I saw a deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the divine feminine.

And I vowed to bow to that broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

Leaked Supreme Court opinion shows abortion rights about to be overturned

Christian fundamentalists in the United States are happy right now.

Today Politico reported that a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion indicates that Roe v. Wade, which found a constitutional right to abortion in that 1973 case, is about to be overturned.

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wadedecision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

This is the first time a Supreme Court opinion has been leaked to the press.

It shows that someone at the court, perhaps a law clerk, recognized how horrible overturning abortion rights will be, and wanted to give a head start to the outrage rather than wait until late June or early July when the abortion decision was expected to be released to the public.

There are decent reasons to oppose abortion and even better reasons to support the right of women to choose an abortion. But a truly lousy reason to be against abortion is that this is what God wants. As in Texas Governor Greg Abbott saying, "Our creator endowed us with the right to life."

That's absurd. 

Since there is no demonstrable evidence of a creator God (or any other sort of God), obviously there's no basis for claiming to know what God has done or wants people to do.

I can understand why someone objects to abortion. A fetus is a potential human life. But a pregnant woman is an actual human life. Women are at greater risk of dying from pregnancy than from an abortion. 

So abortion is justified for that reason, along with other reasons, including simply this being what a woman chooses.

A terrible reason is that an embryo must be treated as a person at conception, which is the teaching of the Catholic Church, according to a BBC article. Obviously a few cells isn't a person. Thus probably the notion of an immortal soul is the reason for viewing those few cells as deserving more protection than the woman in whose womb the cells reside.

Six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are Catholic, with five of those six being part of the 6-3 conservative majority. The sixth conservative, Neil Gorsuch, is Episcopalian but was raised Catholic.

So even though the final decision on abortion will be couched in legal terms, pretty clearly religious belief plays a large part in how the justices view abortion. Opposition to abortion flows largely from fundamentalist churches.

Those opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, appear to have won this Supreme Court battle, but the war for women's rights and individual freedom will continue. Hopefully the backlash over the forthcoming Supreme Court decision will lead to voters punishing Republicans at the polls in the November election.

Lieh-tzu is a Taoist complement to Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu

When most people think of classic Taoist writings, likely they'll recall the Tao-te Ching and the Chuang-tzu. But there's a third classic, the Lieh-tzu.

Eva Wong has written an eminently readable translation of the Lieh-tzu: Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living. 

Here's how she describes "The Voice of Lieh-tzu" in that portion of her introduction.

What then, is the voice of the Lieh-tzu? To me, it is a friendly voice, a casual voice, and not the voice of an all-knowing sage or master. It is the voice of someone who gives advice not because he is an expert, but because he has made mistakes and learned from them. It comes from a person who allows us to listen. He speaks, pauses, and when we respond, he speaks again.

I do not get the same feeling when I read the Lao-tzu. Lao-tzu speaks as a sage who presents his ideas in an organized manner. I can almost imagine him lecturing from a podium. Moreover, when the lecture is over, there is no question period. It is up to us to understand him.

The Chuang-tzu conveys yet a different feeling. Chuang-tzu is an eccentric who chuckles to himself and is not concerned about being understood. Chuang-tzu wanders in a world different from ours, completely removed from everyday affairs. He lives in a world where things come and go in fleeting moments, and the ground of reality is always changing. We can catch a glimpse of him now and then, but it would be impossible to stay at his side and talk to him.

The Lieh-tzu is different. Lieh-tzu lives in our world. He talks about experiences we can understand. He speaks about life and death, fortune and misfortune, gain and loss, things we are concerned with, and problems we want to solve in our lives. He talks about the mad race for wealth and renown and the hazards of seeking social recognition.

He scorns social pressure and the empty pursuits of the rich and famous. He talks about friendship, human communication, dreams, reality, and learning. He speaks things we do not dare to speak of, but when we listen to him, we may smile, laugh, or nod in agreement. The awakening from ignorance is not rude but soft. It is as if someone gently shook us and woke us from a deep sleep. 

Thus, while Lao-tzu talks at us and Chuang-tzu talks to himself, Lieh-tzu speaks to us.

...The Lao-tzu and the Chuang-tzu talk about the state of enlightenment. They describe what it is like to merge with the Tao and be filled with the undifferentiated breath of the origin. We are not told how these sages attained enlightenment or what they had to go through. 

On the other hand, the Lieh-tzu shows us the struggles of a person who tries to become enlightened. We see Lieh-tzu fumble in his attempts; we see him laughing at himself. We see the kind of training he had to go through and the obstacles he had to overcome. We are shown what it is like on the path to enlightenment rather than what it is like after we get there.

...Many people do not take the stories of the Lieh-tzu seriously and write them off as fairy tales. But it is precisely because some stories are so removed from our everyday reality that they can talk about things we would otherwise find hard to accept. 

If the Lao-tzu is poetry and the Chuang-tzu is prose, then the Lieh-tzu is a series of comic strips. By exaggerating the ridiculous aspects of human actions, it portrays the human condition as humorous and pokes fun at social taboos. When we laugh at humor in comic strips, we are in essence laughing at ourselves. 

Thus, while the Lao-tzu is the voice of serious wisdom and the Chuang-tzu is the voice of crazy wisdom, the Lieh-tzu is the voice of humorous wisdom.

The philosophy in the Lao-tzu comes from above us; we can admire it and hope to follow it, but it is hard to reach. The philosophy in the Chuang-tzu comes from a world that is very different from our own; we may try to grasp it, but it is too elusive to catch. The philosophy in the Lieh-tzu comes from where we are. It speaks to us at our level and talks about experiences we can relate to and understand.

Like, drinking wine and enjoying sex. That's the only story in the Lieh-tzu that I've shared so far on this blog. As I continue re-reading Wong's book, I may share some other stories that appeal to me. 

Well, here's one I read this morning. Enjoy...

King Shun asked his minister, "Can I possess the way of heaven and earth and make it go according to my wishes?"

His minister replied, "Even your body is not your own; how can you think about bending the way of heaven and earth to your will?"

"If my body does not belong to me, then to whom does it belong?"

"Your body does not belong to you; its form was lent to you by heaven and earth. Your life does not belong to you; it came into existence with the interaction of the energies of heaven and earth. Your mind and your spirit are not yours to control; they follow the natural way of heaven and earth. Your children and grandchildren are not yours to possess; they are like flakes of your skin, for procreation was granted to you by heaven and earth.

"A person who understands this is one who is not bound by the ideas of what a mind is and what a body is. Forgetting his body, he can travel anywhere in the world without knowing where he goes. Forgetting his mind, he can succeed at everything he does because he does not think about how it is done. He follows the way of heaven, going when he needs to go, staying without knowing what made him stay, and eating without knowing how he is fed.

"Life is but the coming together of the energies of heaven and earth, and the source of these energies has no beginning and no end. How can one ever possess the way of heaven and earth?"

Don't repress your feelings because you think that's "spiritual"

I'm coming to dislike that word, spiritual. It conjures up an image of something ethereal, other-worldly, supernatural, divorced from the messy reality of this physical world.

Which, of course, is the only world there is -- because there's precisely zero demonstrable evidence that any other realm exists. No heaven. No hell. No divine regions of reality. 

This is it. So rather than say something like "I'm a spiritual person," how about simply "I'm s person." Just as we all are. Doing our best to live a good life in a world that's filled with challenges.

That includes dealing with challenging emotions, such as anger. 

I've continued reading a book I mentioned in my previous post, "The Joy of True Meditation" by Jeff Foster. Below I'll share some wise words he has to say about anger, and by implication, any sort of supposedly negative emotion.

I say supposedly, since there is no such thing as a negative emotion. Or, a positive emotion. There's just emotions. How we label them is up to us. Emotions don't come with labels attached. That's a human invention. So I"m not saying that Foster's view of anger is objectively correct. It's just his perspective. 

I enjoy reading books like "The Joy of True Meditation" not because I think they point to some cosmic truth.

For many years I did do that, in my religious phase -- which lasted about 35 years. I'd consider that writers about meditation or spirituality might have achieved a vision of something true about a realm that transcended the physical world.

Now, I look upon people like Jeff Foster as I do novelists or movie makers.

They are communicating creative insights that mean a lot to them, and can be entertaining for other people. If I find something in their vision that resonates with me, great. I can learn about what I find interesting and valuable by noting what I find attractive in someone else's perceptions.

Keep that in mind as you read what Foster has to say about anger. He makes some good points. It fits with observations I've made of so-called "spiritual" people who are so afraid of normal human emotions, they become almost robotic in how they talk and act, not natural at all.

But this is just one person's point of view. If you find something useful in what Foster says, wonderful. If you don't, that's fine also.

Spiritual teachings that tell us to extinguish our anger completely, that judge anger to be a categorically 'negative' and 'destructive' emotion, or call it 'unhealthy' or even 'unspiritual', can be very misleading teachings indeed.

Anger is life, a powerful expression of the vital life force that infuses and flows through and animates all things, and must be honoured as such.

Of course, we don't want to be ruled by our anger! We don't want anger to speak for us, put words in our mouths or control our bodies and behaviours. We want to have space around our anger, be able to use it consciously, as a tool, when necessary and appropriate and kind.

We don't want to be consumed by it, identified with it, blocked by it, or lose ourselves to it. We want a healthy -- and even loving -- relationship with this most powerful and fiery of friends.

When we try to be 'spiritual' and suppress our anger, when we push it deep down into our bodies and into the waiting room of the unconscious, it festers there and wreaks havoc with our immune systems. We no longer 'have' anger. Anger 'has' us.

Anger is no longer a feeling that comes and goes. We are angry now; anger is in our bones, we are identified with it. We find ourselves perhaps exploding in aggression and rage in our search for relief from the pressure within.

Or maybe we become passive-aggressive, simmering quietly with resentment and hostility towards the world and others -- the neighbours, politicians, family members, our partners. We find other unconscious ways to express or deflect from the anger: lying, blaming, sarcasm, complaining, or simply giving others 'the silent treatment'.

All ways to avoid ourselves. We are still angry inside.

Even if we think we are "spiritual" and "beyond anger". There are stories of the most "peaceful" and "enlightened" and "spiritually evolved" gurus and self-help teachers exploding with rage behind the scenes at students or shaming and blaming staff members or participants. 

The anger never really goes away, you see, it just finds new and creative ways to move.

There is a healthy, sacred middle between numbing out anger on the one hand, and habitually acting it out and hurting others on the other hand. Between repression, pushing the anger down, and unconscious reactive expression, pushing the anger out in search of relief.

In the middle, which is the sacred realm of meditation, we can breathe, and we can begin to actually feel our anger deep inside our bodies. We can come out of our minds -- out of the drama in our head, the blame and the attack on others and the revenge fantasies -- and go right into our own bellies, chests, throats, solar plexus, head.

Go right to the core of the aliveness, to the raw fiery sensations of the present moment... We can slow down and respond lovingly to our anger instead of unconsciously reacting to it. 

Embrace everything about yourself, including the good, bad, and the ugly

I'm cured!

But before I get too excited over this news, I need to remind myself that what happened yesterday was, after three counseling sessions, Wayne, the counselor I was seeing, agreeing with me that there wasn't any need for me to continue seeing him.

What caused my therapeutic breakthrough is interesting, because it fits with the blog post I wrote about a week ago, "Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy."

I mentioned that post to Wayne in the course of explaining my Big Realization. Namely, that the goal I'd written down at Wayne's request after our first session, which I brought to our second session, no longer made sense to me.

The details don't matter, which relate to a couple of nagging health problems I have. The broad goal is what's important, as this pertains to just about everyone. It was that I wanted to not feel upset when a health problem was going badly for me. Or at least, only minimally upset.

I told Wayne that I realized this didn't make sense. After all, it's natural to feel better when my life is going smoothly, and to feel worse when my life has some annoying problems. 

It struck me that what really had been bothering me wasn't so much feeling bad now and then when a health problem was more active, but a sense that I shouldn't be feeling that way. So I'd fallen into the common trap of being sad that I was sad, or angry that I was angry, or upset that I was upset.

Instead of just having a simple emotion -- sadness, anger, upsetness -- I now had a double dose of emotion: the original feeling, plus a secondary feeling caused by my reaction to the original. 

Wayne agreed with my take on this. It's better to accept unpleasant emotions, he said, rather than try to pretend that you're not feeling them, or otherwise submerge them under a fake facade of positivity.

I told Wayne that in his guided meditations, Sam Harris frequently observes that when an emotion like sadness, fear, or anger arises, the "half life" of the emotion is much briefer when it is felt intensely rather than pushing it away. Embracing the feeling burns it up quite quickly, instead of letting it smolder under a covering of repression.

This also is the message of a book I've just started reading, The Joy of True Meditation by Jeff Foster. I ordered it after seeing that Foster had created the cartoon You Tube video that makes fun of those who take nonduality and Advaita too seriously.

Checking out Foster's web site, I saw that he'd written a book about nonduality, so I ordered it. He starts off by talking about how he felt as a youth that he didn't belong anywhere and contemplated suicide in his darker moments even though he'd been admitted to Cambridge and was a star student.

He writes:

And then, one ordinary day, all my defences against life, all my resistance to being alive, all my conditioned protection against the pain and pleasure of raw experience, started to break down.

All the repressed unconscious material, all the thoughts and feelings and desires I had held down in order to appear 'normal' and 'civilised' started leaking, then pouring, then gushing into conscious awareness.

Pandora's Box had broken open inside of me. I could no longer run from the darkness within, no longer push life away and seek refuge in the conceptual mind; there was no longer any safe haven to be found there.

I was being called to face life. The joy, the terror, the rage, searing feelings of abandonment suppressed since childhood, waves of unspeakable grief -- I could no longer escape them now. Raw trauma had been unleashed inside, everything held back was now rushing into me, like an unstoppable torrent of life!

I thought I was going to die, convinced that I would not be able to tolerate the intensity of it all for another moment. 

But I did not die. In fact, I was beginning to heal. The old unhappy 'me' was beginning to break down. My no to life was burning up and my true self was coming alive. Something deep inside me was starting to say yes -- yes to being alive, yes to not knowing, yes to the joy and the sorrow of existence, yes to the mess of being an imperfect human being, yes to the darkness and the light, yes to all of it!

...This sense of being alive was so intense sometimes, I thought it would kill or damage or at least overwhelm me, or perhaps send me spiraling into a void I would never escape from.

But feelings are always safe. It is our defences that hurt so much. 

I will say that again. Our feelings are safe, no matter how intense they are. It is our tensing-up around our human feelings, our rejection and refusal of them, our unconscious efforts to destroy and annihilate and purify them inside of us, our shaming of our vulnerable inner life and the smothering of the inner child, which causes so much pain and suffering. Not the feelings themselves.

Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is

Following up on my previous post about David Loy's book, Nonduality, here's some additional thoughts on a subject that both intrigues me and irritates me.

The intrigue part stems from a desire most of us have, me certainly included, to look upon the world without feeling so separate from it. That separateness is inherent in a central fact about we humans.

Each of us views things from an inescapable subjective perspective.

Meaning, we are subjective beings in an objective world. Or at least, what sure appears to be an objective world.

No one knows what it is like to be us other than ourselves. I can do my best to describe how I feel about something, but in the end, all that describing can't encompass my direct subjective experience of that feeling.

Same is true for you. Same is true for everybody.

We are subjects to ourselves, and objects to other people. Each of us assumes that other people also have a subjective life, but their subjectivity is off limits to us, as our subjectivity is off limits to them.

As Loy notes in his book, Western philosophy has pretty much accepted that reality is dualistic.

Even though it has moved beyond the dualism of Descartes, where mind and body are distinct entities, there's still an assumption that the subjective inner side of us is qualitatively different from the objective outer world.

Eastern philosophy, though, has explored ways we humans could attain a nondual way of experiencing reality. 

Basically, Indian philosophy (Vedanta, notably) holds out the idea that soul, or atman, can merge with God, Brahman. You know, the whole drop becoming the ocean thing. So nonduality is achieved by consciousness expanding to become the entire cosmos.

The emphasis here is on an experience of an ethereal universal force/energy/power that lurks behind everyday reality yet is distinct from it. So closed-eye meditation is viewed as a means of achieving a state of being one with everything.

Chinese and Japanese philosophy, Loy points out, is quite different. Here the emphasis is on experiencing the physical world. Instead of expanding to become everything, the goal is to shrink one's personal perspective as much as possible so only the world remains.

Bingo! Nonduality, but approached from the opposite direction favored by Indian/Vedanta philosophy. Nature is revered. Making tea is revered. Chopping wood and carrying water is revered. 

I've over-simplified Loy's arguments here, which are considerably more sophisticated. Check out this 2015 blog post for a more expansive description of how Loy analyzed how various Eastern philosophies view the relation between dualism and nonduality. 

He concludes that an experience of nonduality can be interpreted in various ways. Thus experience can't tell us how reality actually is. A nondual experience can be compatible with the soul merging with God thing, or compatible with the consciousness being absorbed in the world thing.

Loy also shows that for Taoism and Yoga, both nonduality and duality can be "real." That word is in quotation remarks, because the reality being spoken of in a consistence with those philosophies, not with how things really are in an objective sense.

Which gets me to the irritating part of nonduality. 

I'm fine with viewing nonduality as a word game, or as philosophical speculation. I'm also fine with the notion that nonduality and duality aren't incompatible opposites but the extremes of a continuum. Meaning, we humans can look upon the world as more or less nondual or dual. 

There isn't a right or wrong way to do this. Just different ways. At times we can feel separate and distinct from the world; at times we can feel that we're an integral aspect of the world.

But all those feelings say nothing about how the world actually is in an objective sense. So when people have some sort of experience that leads them to claim nonduality -- basically, oneness -- is an inherent feature of reality, that's irritatingly absurd.

Their experience is simply an experience. They're entitled to speak about it, obviously. However, a subjective experience of nonduality in which the difference between us and the world narrows markedly shouldn't be mistaken for a groundbreaking discovery about the nature of reality.

We've all had those kinds of experiences.

Maybe in deep meditation. Maybe in a breathtaking connection with nature. Maybe in a psychedelic drug trip. Maybe in an intense sexual orgasm. There's no end to the ways people feel closer to other people, to the world, to the cosmos.

Yesterday I mowed part of our property, plus our lawn, on a dry Saturday that was a break from an unusually rainy April here in western Oregon. About a month ago I wrote a blog post about how much I'm liking the John Deere X394 lawn tractor that I bought last year.

Now that I'm familiar with what the X394 can do, and am comfortable with the controls, mostly I can sit back and enjoy the power, the four-wheel steering, the power steering, and yes, the cup holder. 

I can't say that yesterday afternoon I became one with my lawn tractor. But I definitely felt a pleasing harmony where the mowing flowed harmoniously, in part because mowing on the challenging non-lawn parts of our property requires constant attention.

Branches fall in high winds. I have to look out for them. There's rocks and tree stumps I don't want to mow over, so I have to remember where they are. I have to miss trees and shrubs. All in all, it was a nondual'ish experience, since I felt that the mower and the mowing and the person controlling the mower (me) weren't really separate.

But in no way can I claim this says anything about reality. It was just an experience that I had.

"Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject

Since I've been writing about nonduality in a couple of previous posts (one explicitly, the other implicitly), I was drawn to pick up David Loy's book, Nonduality, after noticing it gathering dust on a bookshelf.

I've written three posts about the book:
Pink Panther and Alan Watts 
Cutting out the bullshit from "nonduality"
Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality

A favorite part of the first blog post (September 2013) is a You Tube video by Jeff Foster, The Advaita Trap, in cartoon form. Brilliant. Hopefully I've never sounded this bad, but for sure I've written some posts that included language which, though not so annoying, hit some of the same themes.

What I like about Loy's book, which I've started rereading, is that an early draft of Nonduality was his doctoral dissertation. So there's an intellectual rigor to this book that's lacking in other New Age'y books about nonduality that I've read -- then given away for the annual Salem Library book sale fundraiser.

Yet the back cover says that David Loy "has been a student of Zen for over twenty years and is a qualified Zen teacher." Thus he has some direct experience with the philosophies of nondualism discussed in his book: Hindu Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism.

This morning I skipped to a chapter that Loy calls his most important, "The Deconstruction of Dualism." It starts off by discussing a subject that I find fascinating: how two philosophies arose in India that in large part are incompatible with each other.

So when people glibly speak of "Indian philosophy," that's pretty much meaningless unless we know exactly what philosophy is being spoken of. Here's the initial paragraphs of that chapter.

After rejecting the dualism of Sankhya-Yoga, in chapter 5 I suggested an affinity between Buddhism and Vedanta in several ways. But the most important differences between them have not been resolved. As a starting point, we may ask why these two traditions rather than a single tradition arose in India -- and traditions that are not just inconsistent with each other but diametrically opposed in their ontological categories.

T.R.V. Murti summarizes the situation and the contrasting views of each party:

There are two main currents of Indian philosophy -- one having its source in the atma-doctrine of the Upanisads and the other in the anatma doctrine of Buddhism. They conceive reality on two distinct and exclusive patterns.

The Upanisads and the systems following the Brahmanical tradition conceive reality on the pattern of an inner core or soul (atman), immutable and identical amidst an outer region of impermanence and change, to which it is unrelated or but loosely related. This may be termed the Substance-view of reality....

The other tradition is represented by the Buddhist denial of substance (atman) and all that it implies. There is no inner and immutable core in things; everything is in flux. Existence (the universal and the identical) was rejected as illusory; it was but a thought-construction made under the influence of wrong-belief. This may be taken as the Modal view of reality.

However, on the next page Loy writes provocatively:

My intention is rather to demonstrate that both extremes, in trying to eliminate duality, result in much the same description of nonduality -- just as one may travel east or west halfway around the world to arrive at the same place.

I can't remember whether I found Loy's attempt to bridge that gap persuasive. Will have to reread more of his book.

Sam Harris speaks eloquently about non-dual mindfulness

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about my Zen'ish adage that when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. 

I mentioned that part of the inspiration for that post came from listening to a conversation Sam Harris had with Nikki Mirghafori on his Waking Up app. 

Mirghafori believes that equanimity is central to spirituality. She has a dualistic approach to enlightenment, or realization, where the goal is to attain an inward state of silent/pure consciousness that is separate from everyday consciousness. 

I skipped quite a bit of the more than two hour conversation. But at about the 1:18 mark of the "Practicing With Ease" recording, I came across a response, or retort, from Sam Harris that I liked a lot. So today I made a transcript of what Harris said.

He's talking about the difference between dualistic mindfulness and non-dual mindfulness.

Dualistic mindfulness is akin to thinking "I'm washing the dishes" while you're washing the dishes. There's a doer separate from the doing, a perceiver separate from what is perceived, a feeler separate from what is felt.

Non-dual mindfulness doesn't make those distinctions. As Harris says in the transcript, it's not where people begin mindfulness practice. But his Dzogchen training, which fits with his neuroscience Ph.D., leads Harris to consider, along with most Buddhists and many or most neuroscientists, that an enduring self is an illusion.

A little while ago I Googled "Sam Harris non-dual mindfulness" to see what has been written on this subject.

The description of a search result on the first page of results looked promising, so I clicked on it. It turned out to be a 2014 blog post I'd written, Non-duality is simply this: observer and observed are one. Cool. What I was searching for turned out to be something the searcher had written. Nicely non-dual. 

So if you want to learn more about non-duality, that's one place to look. This web page also has a good description of non-dual mindfulness. Here's the transcript of what Sam Harris said in the course of his conversation with Nikki Mirghafori.

When I look at how I suffer psychologically, in what sense is mindfulness really an antidote to it? The mindfulness that really is an antidote to it, is the mindfulness that cuts through to this non-dual recognition.

There certainly is some kind of significant relief from suffering possible even with dualistic mindfulness. I'm not going to deny that. It's very useful to learn to be strategically aware of everything, thoughts and feelings and everything you can be aware of. And to have that kind of unhook you from the gross identification with thought that keeps you ruminating and perseverating and miserable.

But take an experience of sadness or anger or fear. You have the full-blown energy of one of those classically negative emotions arising in your mind. And the default state for most people is to feel that as suffering. It's unpleasant, and it's also being sort of connected to thoughts about one's life or one's past or one's future, or the state of the world.

Whatever is occasioning the grief or anger or fear. And now we're not talking about some version of the impersonal vale of tears you went through on your first retreat, but you have reasons, presumably, for being unhappy in this case. You're thinking about those reasons. 

The feeling state is provoking the thought. And the thought is ramifying the feeling state. The whole wheel works of psychological suffering is turning. Yes, you can interrupt that with dualistic mindfulness. But when you ask, what is the recognition that truly equalizes the energy of sadness or fear or anger with anything else?

It's like your freedom is no longer contingent upon this even disappearing, because in this moment even the energy of it has no meaning and no implication. That, to my eye, requires this full insight into non-duality. 

Short of that, there's still this sense of -- I could be slightly overstating this -- but for most people, and perhaps for everyone practicing dualistic mindfulness in a moment like this, there's still this subtle sense that you're paying attention to it in order for it to go away. Right?

Like you've got some distance from it. You've recognized that you're not identical to it. But there is a bit of a vigil still happening where you think your freedom is elsewhere. Your freedom is in no longer experiencing this thing, even though, yes, you've managed to convince yourself that you're just going to patiently experience it and pay attention and you're open to it and you're feeling it and you're not resisting it.

But there's still this sense of "I" in relation to the energetics of experience in that moment. That's enough dukkha [suffering]. The problem still has its usual structure. And you're vulnerable to the next moment of it not going away, or your getting captured by the next thought about it.

Whereas, if in the seeing of just seeing, and the feeling of just feeling, there really is no problem. Right? There's no one to have a problem in that moment. I guess what I'm arguing for here, the assumption that you might have detected, is that this is an inconvenient thing to be arguing for as a teacher. I don't want to say anything that discourages people wherever they are in their practice.

It's fantastic to be starting a practice, and everyone starts dualistically. That's the place you have to start from. But I guess the other message is, I want to say to people, you shouldn't be satisfied with mindfulness until it really does meet the test of, in this moment is there something you can be aware of that is synonymous with freedom?

Like, it actually meets the requirement -- however you form that requirement -- of, if freedom is this, well then, that is good enough. Right? The search actually is over in this moment. If you can't do that, to put it into terms of doing, you still do have a problem to solve, as much as you might spend a lot of your time convincing yourself that there's no problem to solve and you just have to be aware.

The final statement I'll make here is that it felt like so much of my practice, in the first few years -- I think I'd probably spent a year on retreat -- and this still would have been true of me even after a full year on retreat, my practice was a kind of vigil. 

What I was mindful of was the evidence of my unenlightenment. That's not to say that it wasn't punctuated by beautiful, joyful experiences of where I would have said, if I could just keep this, that seems like the mind of the Buddha. This is fantastic. But all of that is impermanent, obviously.

I couldn't recognize that ordinary consciousness that is compatible with having a conversation like this or driving a car is already totally empty of a self that would seek enlightenment.

Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy

Whenever I have a Grand Intuition about something that really is obvious, I'm never sure whether (1) I deserve to be honored in the Great Hall of Enlightened Beings or (2) laughed at for not realizing sooner what I should have understood long ago.

(Personally, I'll go with #1, but I can't argue with someone else who favors #2.)

The core of today's Grand Intuition is the title of this blog post: When you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. It's an emotional echo of some familiar Zen sayings.

Chop wood, carry water. 
When hungry, eat. When thirsty, drink. When sleepy, sleep.

Probably what got me to pondering this today was a slightly delayed reaction after listening to part of an interview on Sam Harris' Waking Up app yesterday. Harris spoke with a woman who said that equanimity was a central pillar of spiritual practice.

I didn't listen long enough to learn what she meant by equanimity. I'm assuming that this refers to remaining in a more or less steady calm emotional state no matter what happens to you: good things, bad things, neutral things.

This is in line with what the Sant Mat teachings I followed for thirty-five years as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization, taught.

Lust. Anger. Greed. Attachment. Egotism. 

Those were the five deadly sins RSSB books and speakers warned against. Each has an emotional component. And in my current state of mind, each seems perfectly fine to me. They're simply a part of being human.

Sure, it makes sense to keep emotions within certain bounds. But those bounds are pretty damn loose. 

For example, lusting after someone you find attractive is how relationships, and marriages, often get started. Forcing them to have sex is out of bounds. Otherwise, lust is a natural feeling. Ditto with anger, greed, attachment, egotism, and every other feeling/emotion.

What I realized today more clearly than ever before was how, even though I'm no longer overtly religious, I still carry around vestiges of the religious teachings that were such a big part of my life for over three decades.

One vestige is how I've been considering that meditation and mindfulness were supposed to help me not get very upset when something went wrong in my life, nor unduly attached to the pleasure I feel when something goes right in my life.

In other words, I'd bought into that whole equanimity thing, albeit semi-consciously. 

Suddenly it hit me that life would be a whole lot simpler if I took a different approach. Be sad when I feel sad. Be happy when I feel happy. Be angry when I feel angry. Be ________ when I feel _________.

Again, not crazily emotional. Not emotional in a way that harms anyone. Just honestly emotional, embracing whatever I'm feeling at the moment without wondering, "Is it OK to feel this way?"

Yeah, it sure is OK. In fact, I've been feeling especially good today, because it feels like a weight has been lifted from my emotional shoulders. For a long time, more than 50 years, I've felt a need for self-improvement.

Simply being the person I already was -- not good enough.

I needed to meditate every day, read spiritual books, write spiritual books, improve how I related to other people, be kinder, more loving, less prone to negative emotions, you know, all that stuff the self-improvement/spiritual realization proselytizers tell us is necessary to truly be a Decent Human Being.

Which mostly is bullshit. Yes, if someone has a serious psychological problem that prevents them from functioning well or being satisfied with life, that points to a need for improvement.

But the notion that we need to become anyone other than the natural human being we already are is entirely false. When you feel good, feel good. When you feel bad, feel bad. Likely neither feeling will last very long. Embrace each while it lasts.

No pressure to become your "higher self." For one thing, there's no high or low when it comes to being human. For another thing, you aren't a self. You're simply you. 

I aspire to a radical embrace of reality

There's quite a bit to unpack in the title of this blog post, but I'll try to keep it fairly simple. 

"Aspire" obviously means that a radical embrace of reality is something that I'd like to be able to do, but often this is more of a hope than an actuality for me.

"Radical" refers to the fact that I, along with just about everybody else in the world, chooses to not embrace reality much of the time. Too disturbing. Too painful. Too whatever. So we cling to a form of unreality instead. If we always turned toward reality, that would be really radical, being so unusual.

"Embrace" is another word for acceptance. I prefer embrace, because it conjures up an image of actively reaching out to reality, rather than grudgingly accepting it.

"Reality" is, not surprisingly, what's real. Of course, a lie also is real, as is a fantasy, or dream, or hope, or imagination. But those things, being subjective, aren't real in the sense that a mountain is, or a cancer diagnosis, or a missile striking an apartment building. 

(The Ukraine war is on my mind.)

I was planning to illustrate this saying, "I aspire to a radical embrace of reality," by sharing some anecdotes from my life that I've written about in other blog posts.

However, some Googling of my blogs via the search box in the right sidebar led me to a 2oo5 Church of the Churchless post, Why bad tsunamis happen to good people. I was both pleased and, in a way, dismayed, by the fact that over seventeen years ago, I was aspiring to the same embrace of reality.

I liked what I said then. Not being able to improve much on it now, I'll share a portion of the 2005 post that most closely relates to the theme of embracing reality.

A believer in karma will consider that those affected by the tsunami are reaping the effects of actions committed in previous incarnations. So even though the ocean may seem to have meted out life and death arbitrarily, on a deeper level destiny was in control of who lived and who died, who needed rescuing and who became a rescuer.

Still, I don’t know if karma is true. In the past my belief in karma has helped me get through some difficult times, such as a car accident on the Santiam Pass where I walked away unscratched and a woman in the other car was killed. The accident wasn’t my fault, but I was one of the drivers. Why her and not me? Further, the accident wouldn’t have happened at all but for some amazingly precise timing and positioning of the two vehicles. Was this accident truly accidental, or were the five of us involved in it brought together by some unseen hand of providence?

I have no idea. I used to think that I did. But now I’m willing to admit my ignorance about the answer to the hidden “why?” that may or may not underly the obvious “why?” (ice on the road’s shoulder; rear-wheel drive; loss of traction by one tire that led to my car lunging into the other lane).

I understand the desire of religious believers to make things that happen in their lives—especially the dramatically “good” and “bad” things—part of a greater spiritual design. I’ve done this myself, a lot. I’ve found comfort in believing either that a benevolent higher power was guiding the course of my life, or (less comfortably) that whatever I’m getting I deserve, because I’ve penned destiny’s invitation in my own hand.

More and more, though, I’m inclined to just take events at their face value. The tsunami occurred because of an earthquake. People died because they lived near the ocean. Why make life more complicated or mysterious than it already is? At the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld: what we know we know, and what we don’t know we don’t know; if we think we know what we don’t know, we know less than we would if we simply don’t know.

(Actually, Socrates expressed ideas like that way before Rumsfeld, and I prefer to associate my not-knowing with a true philosopher rather than a Defense Department poseur.)

If we want comfort, I believe there is much comfort in simply accepting reality as it is. Not as we imagine it to be, or as we wish it would be, but just as it is. If what happens comes from God—great. We have accepted God’s will. If what happens comes from some other source, such as the mechanical workings of nature or man’s free will, then this also is great. We have accepted what is, regardless of how it came to be.

Whether we live just this life or many lives, life is too precious to be denied. To deny any part of life that is real is to rob ourselves of something that will never come our way again. This includes the good as well as the bad.

Eyes wide open is how I aspire to live. Seeing what is real, not seeing what isn’t. Pretty simple to say. Very hard to do.

To expand on that last thought, saying or thinking "I wish this wasn't happening to me" (or to someone else) is a statement in line with reality if that is how you really feel. But that wish presupposes a clear-eyed view of what is actually happening.

Today I was talking with a friend about how I follow Ukraine war news closely. She said, "I can't do that, because it is so disturbing."

I understand her reluctance, and I don't spend as much time reading about the atrocities being committed by Russian forces as I do reading positive stories about the bravery and skill of the Ukrainian military. 

But I'm a news junkie in part because I consider it my duty to stay informed about what is happening in the world, even when the news is dismal, bleak, depressing. Job #1 is to know what's going on. Job #2 is to handle that knowledge as productively as possible. 

Same applies to the news of our own life.

What hitting a fastball tells us about the brain

I'm not sure what to make of this seemingly correct fact, but I find it so interesting, I feel that it must have some deep significance to those of us who aren't professional baseball players.

In the course of rereading a chapter in Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, I came across his analysis of baseball pitchers and hitters in the "When Does a Thought Begin?" chapter.

Here's the crux of the issue:

Professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities in the range of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Elapsed time from the moment of release to the ball crossing home plate ranges from approximately 380 to 460 milliseconds.

Minimum reaction time -- from the instant the image of the ball's release reaches the retina to the initiation of the swing -- is approximately 200 milliseconds. The swing takes another 160 to 190 milliseconds.

The combination of reaction and swing time approximately equals the time it takes for a fastball to travel from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

So how is a batter ever able to hit the baseball?

It can't be by following the path of the ball with their eyes, deciding it is a hittable pitch, and then swinging their bat at the ball. Physics and human biology don't allow for that. Burton explains what actually happens.

Once the ball is in flight, it is too late for detailed deliberation. The batter sees the release and the beginning of its path, and then goes on automatic pilot. Sounds suspiciously like an inner machine at the helm, some robotic neuronal clumps that are responsible for a hitter like Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.

Yet we all know that a hitter's skill, beyond mere athleticism, is dependent upon prior practice and extensive study of the game. Great hitters keep extensive notes on the tendencies of opposing pitchers, including what type of pitch and where it will be thrown in various conditions.

A 3-0 pitch with the bases loaded is more likely to be down the middle than a 0-2 pitch with the bases empty. The combination of circumstances is infinite, yet each hitter develops a probabilistic profile of the speed, trajectory, and location of the next pitch. It is in this realm that great players have a greater accuracy than novice players.

The act of hitting the ball involves two fundamentally different strategies inextricably linked together -- conscious analysis prior to the event, and reliance upon nearly instantaneous subconscious calculations at the onset of the event.

The cortex sets out general guidelines for when to swing and where, then hands the controls over to quicker subcortical mechanisms. 

A simplified schema provided by a computer scientist-engineer after extensive study of the physics of a pitch:

"We divide the pitch into thirds. During the first third the batter gathers sensory data; during the middle third he does computations (predicting where and when the ball will collide with his bat); during the last third he is swinging. During the swing he could close his eyes and it would not make any difference. He can't alter the swing. The most he can do is check the swing." (Italics mine.)

Lastly, Burton explains why an onlooker thinks the batter should have been able to do better with a pitch, and how conversation is a lot like pitching a fastball and trying to hit a fastball.

To further complicate the problem of the timing of perception, consider how different the approaching baseball looks to the batter and to you, an observer sitting behind home plate. The pitcher fires three successive ninety-five-miles-per-hour blazers.

The batter whiffs the first and fouls off the next two. He prepares himself for another smoker. Instead, the pitcher lobs a deceptive sixty-five-miles-per-hour change-up. The batter swings far too early and strikes out. You watch in amusement and ask yourself how the batter can make five million a year and so misjudge a ball that, to your uninvolved eye, a Little Leaguer could hit.

The difference is that while the batter's decision to swing begins prior to his full conscious appreciation that the pitcher has thrown a slow pitch, you have the luxury to see the ball's entire path toward the plate. By not being forced to immediately decide whether or not to swing, you see a batter being badly fooled by a pitch that doesn't fool you.

The basic neurobiological principle is that the need for an immediate response time reduces the accuracy of perception of incoming information. Though most of aren't involved in high-speed sports, we all experience these limitations in the most crucial of daily activities -- normal conversation.

In fact, conversation is as much a high-speed competition as a top-flight table tennis match. 

First, consider the act of listening. We are bombarded with the rapid presentation of individual phonemes strung together to make words, phrases, and sentences. Processing takes time. A word may not be initially decipherable; only with further speech is it clarified.

...Now visualize conversation as a means for the exchange of complex ideas with each participant's response dependent on whether or not he believes the idea is correct. Instead of throwing a fastball, each discussant is throwing an idea at the other. 

If the listener judges the idea as correct, he will not swing (he will accept the idea as is). If he thinks the approaching idea is incorrect, he will swing (formulate an immediate rebuttal and/or interrupt the speaker to interject his correction).

Here's the windup, and here's the thought. The listener's decision as to the thought's correctness will be based upon a quick glimpse of the idea leaving the other's lips, snap judgements of body language, sighs, gestures, facial expressions, and all the various verbal and nonverbal contributions to interpretation of the spoken word. 

If the listener is forced to make a quick response, the decision as to the thought's correctness will be subject to the same physiological restraints as a batter's assessment of an incoming pitch.

...How different conversation sounds when we don't feel obliged to respond. As uninvolved spectators luxuriating in our more leisurely processing time, we easily see the shallowness, evasiveness, and lack of real exchange of ideas in most dialogue.

...Sadly, the problem is at least in part a matter of the physiology of conversation. As we move from silent observer to active discussant, we become mired in the very processing problem we're trying to overcome.

How neural networks operate in the hidden layer of our brain

ln my previous post, I referred to the hidden depths of the brain without including much of a description of what goes on in those depths.

Neuroscience is still working on that problem. But even though Robert Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, wrote the book I spoke about in the blog post (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not) in 2008, the basic points he makes are still valid.

(Neuroscience doesn't evolve that fast.)

Here's passages from his chapter on Neural Networks that will give you a good feel for how the hidden layer of the brain operates. Fascinating stuff. 

As you can read below, the brain operates very differently from how most people believe it does -- as a reliable instrument for knowing reality as it is, a phrase that often pops up in spiritual books that aren't grounded in neuroscience.

Yes, in large part we humans agree on the basics of how the world is. If that wasn't the case, traffic signals would be useless. Most of us see red as red, green as green, and know that red means stop and green means go.

But as Burton says in these excerpts, there's a tremendous amount of personal subjectivity in what our brain presents to us as reflective of reality. And this isn't a bad thing, not that we can do anything about it. Life would be boring if we all experienced the world in the same way.

In the human brain, a typical neuron receives incoming information from approximately ten thousand other neurons. Each bit of information either stimulates (positive input) or inhibits (negative input) cell firing. 

The neuron acts like a small calculator.

If the sum of the inputs reaches a critical threshold level, an electrical charge travels down the nerve fiber (axon) to the region where neurotransmitters are stored. The transmitters are released into the synaptic cleft -- a tiny gap between adjacent neurons. If a neurotransmitter finds  a receptive site (receptor) on the adjacent neuron, the process will be repeated on this adjacent neuron.

...Despite a veritable symphony of interacting mechanisms, the neuron ultimately has only two options -- it either fires or it doesn't. At this most basic level, the brain might appear like a massive compilation of on-off switches. But the connections between neurons are not fixed entities.

Rather they are in constant flux -- being strengthened or diminished by ongoing stimuli.

Connections are enhanced with use, weakened with neglect, and are themselves affected by other connections to the same neurons. Once we leave the individual synapse between two neurons, the complexity skyrockets -- from individual neurons to a hundred billion brain cells each with thousands of connections.

Although unraveling how individual neurons collectively create thought remains the Holy Grail of neuroscience, the artificial intelligence (AI) community has given us some intriguing clues as to how this might occur.

Using the biological neuron and its connections as the model, AI scientists have been able to build artificial neural networks (ANN) that can play chess and poker, read faces, recognize speech, and recommend books on Amazon.com.

While standard computer programs work line by line, yes or no, all eventualities programmed in advance, the ANN takes an entirely different approach. The ANN is based upon mathematical programs that are initially devoid of any specific values. The programmers only provide the equations; incoming information determines how connections are formed and how strong each connection will be in relationship with all the other connections (or weightings).

There is no predictable solution to a problem -- rather as one connection changes, so do all the others. These shifting interrelationships are the basis for "learning." The AI community has labeled this virtual space where the weightings take place as the hidden layer. 

...In the human brain, the hidden layer doesn't exist as a discrete interface of specific anatomic structure; rather it resides within the connections between all neurons involved in any neural network.

...The hidden layer, a term normally considered AI jargon, offers a powerful metaphor for the brain's processing of information. It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic predispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information.

It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn't mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident, or why we don't put all our money on the same roulette number.

...Now let's up the ante and watch a human neural network in action. A bright light is briefly flashed into your eyes. The retina turns the flash of light into electrical data that travel along the optic nerves and into the brain (input).

But instead of a direct route to consciousness with a precise and unaltered duplication of the flash, the data first goes to a subconscious holding station where it is scrutinized, evaluated, and discussed by a screening committee representing all of your biological tendencies and past experiences. This committee meets behind closed doors, operating outside of consciousness in the hidden layer.

Consider each committee member as being one set of neural connections. 

One might represent a childhood memory of having seen a similar flash of light when a toaster shorted out and started an electrical fire; the second is a general alarm system that has recently become highly sensitive and vigilant to the possibility of terrorism; the third is composite memory of rock concerts; the fourth is a genetically based predisposition for a heightened startle reflex for bright lights.

Each member has his own opinion and each gets one vote.

After hearing all the arguments, each committee member casts his vote and they are tallied (weighted). At the most elemental level, a decision is made -- either to entirely suppress the flash or send it on to consciousness (output). The degree of awareness generated is yet another function of this decision -- ranging from a barely noticed flash at the periphery of vision to a bright flash, front and center.

The childhood memory votes yes: Send the flash into awareness. The terrorist alarm network, fearing that the flash could indicate an explosion, votes yes. The rock concert memory is blasé, has seen the same flashes a zillion times at rock concerts, and feels the flash should be ignored. It votes no. The genetic predisposition reflexively votes yes.

The third member is outvoted, and the flash is sent on high priority into consciousness. You look around, heart pounding, on high alert for everything from a gunshot to a terrorist bomb exploding. But you are at a wedding, and everyone is taking pictures of the bride. You sigh and tell yourself not to be so anxious.

...To get an idea of the magnitude of this process, imagine billions of committee members, each with at least ten thousand hands reaching out to shake hands, prod, poke, seduce, or fend off the other members. Miraculously, this orgy of utter chaos is transformed into a relatively seamless and focused stream of consciousness.

...The schema of the hidden layer provides a conceptual model of a massive web of neuronal connections microscopically interwoven throughout the brain. Such neural networks are the brain's real power brokers, the influence peddlers and decision makers hard at work behind the closed doors of darkened white matter. How consciousness occurs remains an utter mystery, but conceptually, it must arise out of these hidden layers.

The concept of neural networks also helps explain why established habits, beliefs, and judgments are so difficult to change. 

Imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random -- there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek has been formed, water is more likely to follow the newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens and a river develops.

...The brain is only human; it, too, relies on established ways.

As interneuronal connections increase, they become more difficult to overcome. A hitch in your golf swing, biting your nails, persisting with a faulty idea, not dumping your dot.com stocks in late 1999 -- habits, whether mental or physical, are exasperating examples of the power of these microscopic linkages.

Our sense of knowing flows from hidden depths of the brain

The human brain remains largely mysterious, even though modern neuroscience has learned a lot about it. It's unclear to what extent computer artificial intelligence will come to mimic our brains.

But at the moment this much seems clear. Just as "deep learning" takes place in artificial intelligence in a manner that even AI programmers can't figure out, our own sense of knowing arises from hidden depths of the brain that we can't figure out.

Meaning, when you've been trying to figure out what to do about some problem -- like whether you should take a new job that's been offered to you, even though you aren't unhappy in your old job -- and suddenly you have a feeling, This is what I need to do, there's no way you can tell how your mind, the brain in action, came up with that conclusion.

This is a key theme in Robert Burton's fascinating book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. 

Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, says that a sense of knowing is closely tied to our feeling of having a life purpose. I wrote about this in a 2009 blog post based on his book, "Science and religion share a sense of purpose." 

Scientifically-minded people have a sense of purpose and meaning just as much as religiously-minded people do.

Burton talks about how Richard Dawkins, a noted atheist scientist, is ferociously dedicated to debunking mythologies and irrationality -- such as a denial of how evolution has guided the course of life on Earth.

Dawkins lives for this, just as the Pope lives to serve the cause of Catholicism, or a woman lives to raise her children, or a man lives to become the best at some sport.

So a felt sense of meaning and purpose is the root out of which grow stalks of action and commitment. Scientists do science because it is meaningful to them. Religious people do religion for the same reason.

Different strokes for different folks. Whatever turns you on.

We should force ourselves to distinguish between separate physiological categories of faith -- the basic visceral drive for meaning that has real purpose versus the unsubstantiated cognitive acceptance of an idea. Compassion, empathy, and humility can only arise out of recognizing that our common desires are differently expressed.

Nicely said, Dr. Burton. Both science and religion need to recognize that their common ground is a sense of meaning and purpose.

Fairly frequently a commenter on this blog will argue, "science is a form of religion." That's wrong. He or she says that because scientists are deeply devoted to the pursuit of truth about the physical universe.

But devotion grows from a sense of meaning. It doesn't need religion. People can be devoted to all sorts of non-religious things, such as improving one's golf game.

So religious believers should differentiate between the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of their faith. Meaning, the feeling they have toward divinity, the meaning they derive from religiosity, is shared by scientists (and everyone else on Earth aside from the deeply clinically depressed).

However, the cognitive side of their faith is something different. These are the concepts that accompany the feelings. "Jesus is the Son of God." Well, you think so. But where is the proof?

I'm not justified in questioning the meaning someone gets from his or her religion. I am justified, though, in questioning their purported facts about the cosmos.

Facts can be challenged. Meaning can't.

If you wrongly believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election, even though there is no evidence that the election wasn't fairly decided, I have some hope of convincing you otherwise by correcting your facts. 

However, I've got very little chance of getting you to give up your conservative political views, or your fervent allegiance to Trump. Your political persuasion, like your religion, is a source of profound meaning to you that isn't given up lightly.

In large part because you aren't capable of altering what gives your life meaning. Neither am I. Nor is anybody else. Yes, what we find meaningful can change over time. But not through our conscious efforts. 

Burton writes in a final chapter about an exercise earlier in the book in which he shared a paragraph about a mysterious object that had various qualities. Spoiler alert: the object was a kite. He says:

Once imbedded within the conclusion that this paragraph refers to a kite, the feeling of correctness cannot be consciously dislodged or diminished. We can consciously input new contrary information; only the hidden layer of the neural networks can reweight the values.

The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren't deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us. 

I've written a few other blog posts about Burton's book:

Knowing that you know: impossible
The three wisest words in the world: "I don't know"

 

Lose yourself to find yourself

For a long time, over three decades, I assumed that a central goal of my life was to know myself. Another way of saying this was self-realization. The idea was that somewhere hidden away in my psyche was a True Me who was different from the current Untrue Me.

So I diligently meditated every morning. Sometimes as long as two and a half hours, sometimes for a shorter period, but never less than an hour. 

I don't regret all that meditating, which totaled well over 20,000 hours. Plus, I've continued to meditate every day since the end of my religious phase some 18 years ago.

Now, though, I'm much more inclined to believe that (1) I don't have an enduring self, so (2) being mindful of what I'm doing in the world, and what the world is doing to me (could be the same thing) is the best way to know who I am at any given moment.

This attitude is in line with a story in the March 5 issue of New Scientist, Lose Yourself. A subtitle says, "Transcendent experiences, where our sense of self takes a back seat, seem to be good for us -- and there is no need to go to extremes to get the benefits, finds Jess Craig."

The story starts out by describing a study by Roland Griffiths where fifty-one people facing imminent death were given the psychedelic psilocybin, which the state where I live, Oregon, voted to legalize for therapeutic purposes. Sixty-0ne percent had a clinically significant reduction in depression symptoms and 51 percent had a reduction in anxiety symptoms.

 Craig writes:

Frederick Barrett, part of Griffith's team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, says it isn't clear that the therapeutic effect was entirely down to the transcendent experience. But "a lot of people believe that is the case," he adds, "and I am one of them."

If he is right, it is a striking example of how self-transcendent experiences, though temporary, can provide a lasting boost to well-being. And they don't have to be the intense experience induced by psychedelics. Just staring in awe at magnificent trees or concentrating intensely on a challenging task also seems to have the capacity to make you happier, less stressed and kinder to others.

The story includes a quote from William James: "We can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace."

In my experience, that's absolutely true. But union comes in many forms. It doesn't mean totally losing yourself in another entity, such as someone on LSD feeling they've become a giant oak tree. That way lies madness, were it to continue.

Rather, greater peace and pleasure comes from any degree of moving away from a focus on our own self. For most of us, that involves inward-directed thinking and feeling. 

What makes self-transcendent experiences so beneficial? At first blush, you might think it would be unsettling, even terrifying, to suddenly lose your sense of self. Indeed, many people report that intense transcendent experiences are "psychologically challenging and difficult," according to Yaden. For that reason, clinical trials aimed at inducing these states are under close supervision.

But there is ample evidence from clinical psychology to demonstrate that excessive self-focus can have negative effects -- it is a hallmark of depression, for instance -- which could explain why reducing that focus, even temporarily, can be helpful.

When I'm not feeling very positive, I find that going for a walk with our dog in nature (we live in the country) helps a lot. So does going to my Tai Chi class, which requires concentration on what my body and the bodies of others are doing, which is akin to dancing. 

Even simply washing the dishes can improve my mood. That gets me out of my head and into soapy water, a sponge, the drainer, and such. Writing a blog post makes me feel better also, since I can't be thinking about my problems when I'm focusing on what to say about some subject outside of me.

If being inside our own head was so great, prisoners would want to be in solitary confinement, rather than fearing it. Sure, meditation can seem like an inward pursuit, but usually it isn't. When I'm focusing on my breathing, I'm aware of something that's happening in my body.

That awareness obviously is part of my subjective consciousness. However, what I'm aware of is part of the objective world. Breathing is real in a way that a thought or emotion isn't. It anchors me in outward reality, while my thoughts can rattle around in the confines of my mind with little purpose or meaning.

When I used to play competitive club tennis, a ploy was frequently used when, if we were playing doubles, one of the guys on the other team was serving really well. During a changeover of sides, my partner or I would say to that guy, "Hey, your serve is great today. Wow, no double faults."

Often that not-so-innocent statement would cause the person who had been serving so well to start thinking of his serve, rather than simply serving. Then his serve went downhill. This relates to the notion of "flow," something mentioned in the New Scientist story.

Supposedly a state of flow happens when we're competent at something, yet find it challenging. There's truth in that. However, I find that flow can also occur in unchallenging situations, such as raking leaves or mowing grass. 

It's getting out of our head and into the world that's important. Which is my cue to share one of my favorite dance videos, Alex and Twitch dancing to "Outta Your Mind" on So You Think You Can Dance. Absolutely mesmerizing. 

Calm acceptance of what is -- my newest adage

I enjoy coming up with new pieces of advice that I can tell myself. They become temporary mantras, something I can repeat in my mind now and then to keep myself as centered as possible in an unpredictable world.

Calm acceptance of what is. This is my newest adage. 

I've always been impressed by people who can stay calm in stressful circumstances. Soldiers fighting in war. Emergency room doctors and nurses. Parents of a two year old having a temper tantrum. So many other examples of humans handling difficult situations with poise and competence.

That requires a certain detachment from a natural impulse of fear, anxiety, freaking out. "Calm" doesn't mean Buddha-like serenity. The way I see it, calm is founded on an ability to stand back a bit from whatever storm is raging around us, sort of like a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean.

The massive waves break upon the rock, but the lighthouse keeps on shining a light all around itself, illuminating what is there. That's the "what is" part of my adage.

It doesn't do any good to be calm if we're not in touch with reality.

For example, even though the United States intelligence services were warning that Russia was poised to invade Ukraine, in the period before the invasion President Zelensky and other top officials in his country were discounting the possibility of an invasion.

They didn't prepare the Ukrainian people for this. They didn't move military assets in preparation for war. The calm being preached by Zelensky was a false calm that wasn't based on the what is known to American intelligence, but on an attitude of I hope this turns out to be based on wishful thinking.

Another example is the raid of Seal Team Six into Pakistan that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. This mission succeeded because the highly trained special forces operatives kept their calm in the face of serious problems, such as one of their helicopters being disabled, and were completely in touch with the reality of what they faced in bin Laden's compound. 

Regarding "acceptance," I don't see this as being content with a bad situation.

That's the way I used to view the word, perhaps because one of the stages of coming to grips with grief, or one's impending death, is acceptance -- which connotes a sort of grudging realization that nothing can be done about what either has happened, or will happen.

Instead, acceptance is better thought of as an embracing of reality. It doesn't mean we don't want to change reality, to alter what is into what could be. But before we can make things better, we need to understand how things are now -- both within and without us.

Yesterday our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a nice piece by Leah Burkhart, a Salem Health educator. Here's part of what she said in "When it comes to stress, begin with acceptance." 

Fun Fact: April is Stress Awareness month (as if any of us needed help being aware of our stress).

Search any wellness book, online video or social media outlet and you’ll see all sorts of techniques for combatting stress, reducing stress, or even numbing it. You’ve seen the headlines: “Feeling stressed? We have the answer!” All you have to do is drink more of this, eat more of that, practice more of this, or give more of that. Easy peasy. Right?

We are bombarded with images of smiling faces — people who have found “the way” and are now liberated from the shackles of anxiety, fear and frustration. They are either peaceful and serene or blissed out, giggling with joy.

Naturally, then, we are left wondering why we aren’t stress-free, too. What are we doing wrong?

The answer is … nothing. You are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Stress, loneliness, frustration, sadness — these things are hardwired into the human body. Stress doesn’t have to be the enemy. At the very least, it can be considered a messenger. It can even be a powerful ally.

The key to making friends with stress is to first incorporate the practice of acceptance.

What is acceptance?

To be clear, acceptance does not mean saying, “Oh, well. There is nothing to be done. I guess I’ll just be miserable.”

Acceptance is being able to simply look at how something is without immediately seeking to change it.

In your mind, acceptance sounds like:

“Huh, I’m feeling really lonely right now.”

“I am feeling overwhelmed. There is a lot to do, and I don’t think I can get it all done as quickly as I would like. No wonder I am so tense.”

“I am really tired right now.”

“Yikes! I’m angry right now. I mean really, REALLY angry. I’m enraged.”

Why on earth might this be helpful? Because acknowledging where we are is the first step to understanding what needs to come next. Trying to reduce stress without first accepting it is like trying to read a map in a theme park without having a “you are here” dot. Acceptance represents the place to start.

Once you see, clearly, that you are overwhelmed or tired, it’s easier to ask questions like, “Okay, I’m exhausted. What is the next right thing I can do (or not do) now?” The answer might be to recruit support from people around you, get up and take a walk or go home early. But the answer is not the important piece. The important piece was being clearheaded enough to ask the question.

What can help you reach acceptance and identify what needs to come next? Often the best answer is to learn the art of slowing down and engaging in a moment of mindfulness. That might look like:

Practicing a few moments of slow, deep breathing.
Taking a moment to pull up a guided meditation practice.
Going outside and sitting still for a few moments and simply observing your surroundings.

In other words, the best way to learn acceptance is to practice slowing down.

War crimes in Bucha show depravity of Russia

Religious believers have a lot of trouble explaining evil. How could a loving God allow people to suffer so much at the hands of their fellow humans? 

The usual unpersuasive religious bullshit is trotted out. God works in mysterious ways. God allows humans to have free will, even if they freely will cruelty. Karmic connections from past lives cause some people to harm others in a settling of karmic accounts.

I don't accept any of that. People do terrible things because some people are terrible.

Sure, there may be psychological reasons for their horrible behavior. But this doesn't excuse horrors such as what Russian soldiers did to Ukrainians in Bucha, a town held by the Russian military until it was liberated by Ukrainian forces a few days ago.

President Zelensky of Ukraine is calling what the Russians did genocide. President Biden of the United States is calling it war crimes. Whatever word is used, every decent person should be repelled by what happened in Bucha.

If anyone wants to defend Vladimir Putin and his Russian military after reading this Politico story, 'They killed everyone." Fury in Ukraine at Russian troops' barbarity, I have a two word response: Fuck you. I have zero respect for anyone who tries to explain away what happened in Bucha. 

Here's how the story starts out.

KYIV — U.S. army veteran Ryan O’Leary looks a little unsteady and draws heavily as he smokes — unsurprising after what he’s seen and done over the past month during some vicious firefights on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, for weeks among the most intense front lines in Ukraine.

Added to that, he was clearly aghast at what he had seen in the last 48 hours, assisting with clean-up operations in the town of Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, in the wake of a Russian withdrawal that was part rout.

The 35-year-old Iowan, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, is one of hundreds of foreign volunteers who enlisted with Ukraine’s foreign legion immediately after Russia invaded. He says he did so to “support democracy.” He reached Kyiv on March 1, and within hours was sent with about a dozen American and British military veterans to Moshchun, a village near Bucha, part of an uneven line of settlements blocking the Russians from entering Ukraine’s capital from the north.

O’Leary was in combat for a month without much pause; and then on Saturday, he was ordered to Bucha, the same day Ukraine declared the once-quiet suburban town liberated from Russian troops.

Bucha is now the focus of an international outcry. Ukrainian officials and rights groups accuse Russian forces of massacring civilians in Bucha, as well as other villages on the outskirts of Kyiv. The barbarity being uncovered in Bucha after Russian forces pulled out a few days ago is fueling demands for international war crimes investigations — and adding to Ukrainian fury.

“I’ve had seven years in combat zones fighting ISIS, fighting the Taliban, and what the Russians did to civilians is insane,” says O’Leary. The veteran adds: “They killed everyone — not just men, like the media is reporting right now. They killed women, too. It is something I am never going to forget. When you go into some of the villages, you see civilians dead with their hands tied behind their backs.

“The photos and videos you’re seeing right now only tell half the story,” he says. “We went into one house, cleared the house of mines, and in the back yard there was a van and inside there were five dead women. They had been shot; then someone had tried to burn them.” There have been other reports of scorched and semi-burnt female bodies, prompting suspicions that whoever set them alight was trying to destroy evidence of rape.

Naturally Russia is lying about the war crimes their troops committed in Bucha. Echoing what right-wing conspiracy theorists said about the killing of dozens of school children in the Sandy Hook tragedy, Putin's liars are claiming that the bodies in photos of Bucha were "crisis actors" pretending to be dead.

But the New York Times has debunked that obvious fabrication, proving that satellite images show that 11 of the bodies were in the same location when found by Ukrainian soldiers since March 11, when Bucha was controlled by Russia.

Further, Russia has a track record of war crimes. Wanton killing of civilians occurred in Chechnya and Syria at the hands of the Russian military. 

Now it is happening in Ukraine. Sadly, almost certainly more reports of war crimes against women, children, and men who had no connection to the Ukrainian forces will come out after additional cities are liberated from Putin's invading force.

I doubt anyone who reads this and thinks that Russian soldiers were justified in murdering innocent civilians would be willing to say so in a comment, using their real name. However, if you're OK with war crimes, I think you should be OK with letting the world know who you are.

Someone with no sense of morality.

Some of the dead in Bucha

Bruce Lee's Six Diseases of a competitive attitude

I'm prone toward feeling competitive. That was obvious when I was playing competitive tennis. I didn't like to lose. It's been less obvious now.

But today when I started reading Be Water, My Friend, a book written by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, after putting it aside for a while, I came across her description of how Bruce Lee viewed a competitive attitude in everyday relationships and situations.

I saw myself in these Six Diseases. Maybe you will also. Shannon Lee says: (the indented passages are from Bruce Lee)

If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up.

When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser.

The Six Diseases are:

The desire for victory
I have to be the winner. If I don't win, I'm a loser. If I win, everybody else is a loser.

The desire to resort to technical cunning
I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am?

The desire to display all that has been learned
Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it's dumb).

The desire to awe the enemy
I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention.

The desire to play the passive role
I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn't like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that's important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you?

The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by
I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I'm not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I'm not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I'm trying.

With all of these pitfalls, there's an attachment to an outside outcome, which ultimately disconnects us from people and situations. There is only the desire to manipulate or shock and awe the "opponent." Even in the noble desire to be rid of the disease, there is a characterization of oneself as "the afflicted one" and therefore a denial of your own power.

I offer you these six diseases to consider as possible avenues of self-exploration because we have all participated in them when relating to another person or a situation. Can you recognize any of these in yourself?

If you were to dig a little deeper, where would you find the wounding perception that motivates the disease and where could the healing begin? Allow yourself the awareness to notice your tactics and the freedom to feel your pain points. Realize that the diseases are just a delusion of the mind and the ego.

You complain about how judgmental people are? Guess what you're being -- judgmental. You give someone the cold shoulder for not being nicer to you? Guess what -- you're not being nice. You gossip about what a gossip someone is? You're a gossip yourself. You get mad at someone for not loving you the "right" way -- that's not very loving.

Take a look in the mirror and see how you are extending the life of the disease rather than finding the cure and, ultimately, the healing.

These diseases are traps. They will keep you locked in isolation and stagnate your growth. They will keep your success always outside of yourself and out of your hands as you chase victory and validation through the eyes of someone else.

And what's more, they will keep you from being fully yourself. Attachment to outcome is denial of one's true commitment to self.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of an engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through.

Our reactions are a "second dart" that can cause a lot of distress

I'm certainly no Buddha, nor even much of a Buddhist, since while I enjoy non-religious Buddhist teachings, in no way do I consider myself a Buddhist.

But occasionally i have some moments that are in line with Buddhist wisdom, such as what's espoused in an excellent book, "Buddha's Brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom."

Last night my wife, Laurel, and I started watching the fourth season of Yellowstone, a streaming series that I like more than Laurel. (Often we alternate in our nightly TV watching between a series she likes more than me, like Bridgerton, and a series I like more than her, like Yellowstone.)

Laurel places much more of an emphasis on realism in movies and television than I do. So yesterday she spoke up several times in the first few minutes of Episode 1 of Season 4, pointing out how this or that couldn't really have happened the way it did in Yellowstone.

I was tempted to argue with her. But after 32 years of marriage, I've learned that some things are worth arguing about with Laurel, and some aren't. Like this one. So I basically kept saying things like, "OK, I see what you mean," which acknowledged her claim of unreality without endorsing it.

(Me, I figure that if I want reality, I just need to look at everyday life. What I want from television or movies is entertainment, getting away from everyday reality into an alternative view of the world.)

What I did, in terminology used by the Buddha's Brain authors, was keep the First Dart of Laurel's criticisms of Yellowstone from becoming a Second Dart caused by my reaction to her comments. Here's how Hanson and Mendius describe the two darts.

Some physical discomfort is unavoidable; it's a crucial signal to take action to protect life and limb, like the pain that makes you pull your hand back from a hot stove. Some mental discomfort is inevitable, too.

For example, as we evolved, growing emotional investments in children and other members of the band motivated our ancestors to keep those carriers of their genes alive; understandably, then, we feel distress when dear ones are threatened and sorrow when they are harmed.

We also evolved to care deeply about our place in the band and in the hearts of others, so it's normal to feel hurt if you're rejected or scorned.

To borrow an expression from the Buddha, inescapable physical or mental discomfort is the "first dart" of existence. As long as you live and love, some of those darts will come your way.

First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are "second darts" -- the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts. 

Suppose you're walking through a dark room at night and stub your toe on a chair; right after the first dart of pain comes a second dart of anger: "Who moved that darn chair?!" Or maybe a loved one is cold to you when you're hoping for some caring; in addition to the natural drop in the pit of your stomach (first dart), you might feel unwanted (second dart) as a result of having been ignored as a child.

Second darts often trigger more second darts through associative neural networks: you might feel guilt about your anger that someone moved the chair, or sadness that you feel hurt yet again by someone you love. 

In relationships, second darts create vicious cycles: your second-dart reactions trigger reactions from the other person, which set off more second darts from you, and so on.

Remarkably, most of our second-dart reactions occur when there is in fact no first dart anywhere to be found -- when there's no pain inherent in the conditions we're reacting to. We add suffering to them. For example, sometimes I'll come home from work and the house will be a mess, with the kid's stuff all over.

That's the condition. Is there a first dart in the coats and shoes on the sofa or the clutter covering the counter? No, there isn't; no one dropped a brick on me or hurt my children. Do I have to get upset? Not really. I could ignore the stuff, pick it up calmly, or talk with them about it.

Sometimes I manage to handle it that way. But if I don't, then the second darts start landing, tipped with the Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally.

Saddest of all, some second-dart reactions are to conditions that are actually positive. If someone pays you a compliment, that's a positive situation. But then you might start thinking, with some nervousness and even a little shame: Oh, I'm not really that good a person. Maybe they'll find out I'm a fraud.

Right there, needless second-dart suffering begins.

Will Smith thinks God called on him to slap Chris Rock

In case you're one of the few people in the world who isn't aware of what happened at the 2022 Oscars show last night, here's a recap in a New York Times story. 

Will Smith apologized to the comedian Chris Rock on Monday evening for slapping him during Sunday night’s Oscars telecast after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the awards, denounced his actions and opened an inquiry into the incident.

...The incident unfolded Sunday night after Mr. Rock made a joke about the buzzed hair of Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, a condition that leads to hair loss. Mr. Smith responded by walking onto the stage of the Dolby Theater and slapping Mr. Rock, leaving stunned viewers wondering at first if the blow might have been scripted until Mr. Smith returned to his seat and warned him to stop talking about his wife, using expletives.

Here's a You Tube video that explains the incident, complete with some annoying ads that can be skipped after a few seconds.

I watched every minute of the Oscars, mostly because I wanted to see how many times Ukraine was mentioned by a presenter or Oscar winner. As I said in a post on my HinesSight blog, Ukraine got a disturbingly small amount of attention from the Hollywood elite.

The Will Smith slap made a lot more news. At first I thought it was scripted, but when Smith won an Oscar for his role as tennis father Richard Williams in "King Richard," his annoying acceptance speech made clear that he had something to apologize for. 

Here's the first part of that speech.

Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world.

Making this film I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the most strongest, most delicate people I ever met. I got to protect Saniyya and Demi, the two actresses that played Venus and Serena. I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.

I know to do what we do, you gotta be able to take abuse, and you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business, you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that‘s OK.

But Richard Williams, and what I loved, thank you D. Denzel (Washington) said to me a few minutes ago, he said, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”

It’s like I want to be a vessel for love. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena.

I just spit, I hope they didn’t see that.

I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That’s what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador of that kind of love and care and concern.

I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees.

I called his speech "annoying" because I find religious hypocrites way worse than regular hypocrites. Will Smith said he's overwhelmed by what God is calling on him to do and be in this world.

That must include going up on stage at the Oscars and slapping a comedian who makes a joke about your wife's hair, after which Smith yelled profanities at Chris Rock. Sure sounds like something God would approve of -- particularly the Old Testament God, who was big on killing people.

Smith actually believes he's a loving person. Delusion has no bounds when you're a religious believer who thinks God is guiding you. A loving person doesn't do what Smith did. 

Someone who loves his wife and considers that a joke about her hair was out of comedic bounds could have sat in his front row seat and loudly said something like this to Chris Rock: "Hey man, that joke about my wife was tasteless. We need to talk about this after the show."

That would have been defending your wife, while not acting like a complete jerk. But, hey, when you think God is guiding you, there's no limit to what you feel is justified. That's how we get religious wars. Plus, the speech by Smith shows that he views himself as a martyr, just like Jesus.

It was dismaying to see Smith get a standing ovation from the Oscars audience. Sure, winning Best Actor deserves acclaim. However, slapping a comedian for making a joke about your wife deserves criticism. 

So the audience should have sat in their chairs and given Smith some polite applause. What's galling to me is that no award winner or presenter spoke up about the horrendous damage Putin is doing to Ukraine, shelling residential areas, killing women and children, destroying entire cities.

Since the Oscars audience gave Smith a standing ovation, maybe they're OK with violence. Which would be decidedly strange, since most of Hollywood leans liberal, being eager to defend attacks against Blacks,  the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups.

Apparently the 3.5 million refugees from Ukraine aren't marginalized enough for the Hollywood elite. Nor is a comedian at the Oscars. Maybe if they claimed God is on their side, as Smith did, they'd get more attention.

LIfe lessons from Ukrainian military success

As I've noted before, and surely will again, I find the courage and determination of the Ukrainian people deeply inspiring.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian tyrant, thought he could send his forces into Ukraine and enjoy an easy victory.

President Zelensky would flee the country. Russian tanks would roll into Kyiv after minimal resistance. A puppet government would be installed, making Ukraine part of the Russian sphere of influence.

Thankfully, Putin was very much wrong.

He underestimated the Ukrainian military. He underestimated the will of the Ukrainian people to keep their country independent. He underestimated the willingness of the United States and our allies to back Ukraine in its fight against Russia's unprovoked invasion.

Yesterday The Atlantic published a story, "Ukraine's Three to One Advantage: It’s not technology or tactics that has given Ukrainian fighters their greatest edge."

Before sharing what does give Ukrainian fighters their greatest edge, the story's author, Elliott Ackerman, discusses other reasons they're doing so well. I see some parallels here with religious fundamentalism versus open-minded inquiry.

First, Ackerman talks about the benefits of an anti-platform-centric military. Meaning, instead of basing a battle plan around gigantic tanks and ships like an aircraft carrier, small portable missiles can demolish much larger weapon systems.

A single Ukrainian solider can carry a Javelin missile capable of destroying an armored Russian vehicle like a tank. So bigger doesn't always mean better. 

Second, Ukrainian tactics rely much more on individual initiative. Top-down control, which is how most religions are organized, lacks creativity and flexibility.

Russian doctrine relies on centralized command and control, while mission-style command and control—as the name suggests—relies on the individual initiative of every soldier, from the private to the general, not only to understand the mission but then to use their initiative to adapt to the exigencies of a chaotic and ever-changing battlefield in order to accomplish that mission.

...“The Russians don’t empower their soldiers,” Zagorodnyuk explained. “They tell their soldiers to go from Point A to Point B, and only when they get to Point B will they be told where to go next, and junior soldiers are rarely told the reason they are performing any task. This centralized command and control can work, but only when events go according to plan. When the plan doesn’t hold together, their centralized method collapses. No one can adapt, and you get things like 40-mile-long traffic jams outside Kyiv.”

So thinking for yourself as a situation changes is better than sticking to a rigid plan of attack. This fits with my long-held commitment to spiritual independence, rather than obeying the dictates of a religious leader, guru, holy book, or such.

Then there's the Three to One Advantage -- the most important of all.

When someone is fighting a righteous battle against a malevolent aggressor who has invaded their homeland, the advantage goes to the defender, who holds the moral high ground.

The longer we talked, the more the conversation veered away from the tangible, technical variables of Ukraine’s military capacity and toward the psychology of Ukraine’s military. Napoleon, who fought many battles in this part of the world, observed that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” I was thinking of this maxim as Jed and I finished our tea.

In Ukraine—at least in this first chapter of the war—Napoleon’s words have held true, proving in many ways decisive.

In my earlier conversation with Zagorodnyuk, as he and I went through the many reforms and technologies that had given the Ukrainian military its edge, he was quick to point out the one variable he believed trumped all others.

“Our motivation—it is the most important factor, more important than anything. We’re fighting for the lives of our families, for our people, and for our homes. The Russians don’t have any of that, and there’s nowhere they can go to get it.”

This also explains why most of the world, aside from a few autocracies like China who support Putin's authoritarianism, is backing Ukraine. As Zelensky frequently observes, Ukraine isn't fighting just for itself. Ukraine is fighting for democracies everywhere.

If Ukraine can be invaded by Russia for no good reason, then other large countries will be emboldened to do the same.

And to those who may be thinking, What about the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?, I'd respond that those situations are quite different from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Afghanistan harbored those responsible for 9/11 and was dominated by the repressive Taliban. Iraq was ruled by a cruel tyrant, Saddam Hussein. 

True, Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, as the Bush administration wrongly alleged. But the United States set a goal of making Iraq into a democracy, which was to our credit. Putin has no interest in democracy. He only cares about the raw exercise of power and re-establishing the old Soviet Union to the greatest possible extent.

Susan Blackmore on falling into Zen

I have a steadily decreasing tolerance for spiritual dogmatism, whether of the religious, mystical, New Age, or any other variety. 

So when I need some inspiration, I don't look nearly as often to people with supposed answers to life's mysteries as I used to. Instead, I resonate with people who focus on facts rather than faith, and probing questions rather than superficial answers.

Which is why I enjoy Susan Blackmore's book, "Ten Zen Questions." 

Picking it up this morning, after having first read it in 2010, I liked what Blackmore says in her initial Falling Into Zen chapter. 

Alongside my science I have explored many alternative world views from witchcraft to spiritualism and Theosophy to chakras, but in spite of their superficial appeal they all proved deeply unsatisfactory.

They provided answers all right, but the answers were dogmatic and confusing; they didn't fit with scientific understanding, and neither did they lead to any new discoveries. Worst of all, their doctrines did not change in response to change, but remained rigidly dependent on ancient books or the claims of their proponents.

That is, until I stumbled across Zen. I was encouraged to have 'Great Doubt', told to 'Investigate!', and taught how to do it.

...Although based on the teachings and insights of the historical Buddha, Zen puts far less emphasis on theory and studying texts than do other branches of Buddhism, and far more on practicing meditation to gain direct experience of one's true nature.

This may be why, from its appearance in the West in the late nineteenth century, Zen has appealed to academics, philosophers, and other thinkers who enjoy its strange paradoxes and who don't want to be involved in religious practices or dogmatic beliefs.

Like science, Zen demands that you ask questions, apply disciplined methods of inquiry, and overthrow any ideas that don't fit with what you find out. Indeed Zen is just like science in being more a set of techniques than a body of dogma.

Blackmore talks about how, for seven weeks, she worked diligently on trying to live in the present moment and avoid thoughts of past and future. She describes some findings.

Letting go of what you've done immediately afterwards is enormously freeing but, in conventional terms, rather worrying. A natural fear is that you will behave idiotically, make a fool of yourself, do something dangerous or, more worrying still, that you will let go of all moral responsibility.

Oddly enough this did not seem to happen.

Indeed, the body seemed to keep on doing relevant and sensible things, apparently without all the agonising I had assumed was essential. Time and again I found that mind had summed up the options, chosen one, carried it out, and moved on.

I didn't need to fret over every decision, or ask whether it was the 'right' thing to have done. It was past.

Last night I heard a crash in the part of our house that had been set up as a separate apartment area. My wife, Laurel, had tried to pull a shade down because the sun was coming in.

But the entire shade fell off, leaving a gouge in the bottom molding and apparently a broken string, because after I put the shade back up, it wasn't working right.

After the shade fell, Laurel said, "I had to lean awkwardly over your mini-trampoline to reach the shade." I told her, "I know you don't like my mini-trampoline, but don't blame it for the shade falling down."

We were both irked at each other. I went and did something else for a while.

Then I returned to the apartment living room and started to take off the handles on the side of the mini-trampoline. Laurel was watching the TV in the living room.

She asked what I was doing. I said, "Since you don't like the mini-trampoline, maybe it's time to get rid of it."

In line with how Blackmore spoke of living in the moment, I hadn't given a lot of thought to selling the mini-trampoline. It just seemed like the right thing to do, because it had led to a mini-argument between Laurel and me.

"You should leave the handles on," Laurel said. "That way you can take a photo of it and advertise it as it actually looks." "I'm just taking the handles off so I can roll it into the bedroom for now," I told my wife. 

This is how the apartment living room looks with the mini-trampoline removed. It had been sitting in front of the windows on the left, where I could look out upon our yard when I used it. I have to admit that the living room looks more open, with more room for the potted plants, without the mini-trampoline. 

So Laurel is happy about that.

What I realized, though, after I'd rolled the mini-trampoline into the apartment bedroom, is that there was plenty of room for it there. Again without much thought, last night I put the handles back on the mini-trampoline.

That made me feel better, because I really didn't want to sell it. I also didn't want to have Laurel upset. What happened, then, is by doing what felt natural at the time, without thinking much about it, resulted in a win-win situation.

Today I used the mini-trampoline in its new location. I enjoyed the view just as much as in the old location. 

The lesson, which I hesitate to elevate to a "Zen lesson," but will just for the heck of it, is that following feelings as honestly as possible often leads to a desirable outcome that a bunch of thinking couldn't have accomplished as easily.

It always was possible to put the mini-trampoline in the bedroom. I just hadn't thought of that before.

But when I simply did what seemed like the right thing to do -- decide to sell it, take the handles off, roll it into the bedroom, see how it looks there, decide not to sell it, put the handles back on -- a series of present moment actions led to a positive result.

Blackmore writes:

To explain the Zen method more clearly, John used to say, 'Let it come. Let it be. Let it go.' This roughly means -- when any ideas or feelings or troubles come along in meditation [or I'd say, out of meditation], don't fight them, don't engage with them, don't push them away or hang onto them, just go through the same gentle process again and again: let them arise in the mind, let them be whatever they are without elaboration, and let them go in their own time.

Death is the only victor in Russia's unjustified war against Ukraine

Apartment buildings can be rebuilt. So can hospitals, shopping centers, elder care homes, and all the other structures being destroyed by Russia's purposeful bombing of civilian areas, a clear war crime.

What can't be undone are the many thousands of deaths: soldiers on both sides, plus women, children, the elderly, and other Ukrainians unable to flee Putin's invasion.

That's heartbreaking. 

After Russia started this war, I've had this thought whenever I feel like my day isn't going well: I do have some problems, but I'm alive, and I don't have to worry about a missile demolishing my home.

There's a stark divide between life and death. Nothing else is so clear-cut.

Often I wish that my life was better in this way or that way. But when death comes to us, as it will for everyone, there's no better or worse for us after we take our last breath.

Because there's nothing at all. At least, that's the most likely outcome. If you believe in life after death, great. Whatever works for you. 

However, you must admit that this belief isn't proven reality. It's a hope, not a certainty, nor even a reasonable possibility. 

So when I hear reports of, say, 56 people being killed at an elder care home by a Russian tank, I'm saddened by lives needlessly cut short. (I wrote about this yesterday on one of my other blogs.)

Yes, I understand that many or most Ukrainians would rather die fighting against Russia than surrender  to Putin. Their courage is amazing. Along with most of the world, I admire Ukraine's determination to battle Russia's unprovoked invasion without any hint of surrender. 

It's the death of innocents that disturbs me the most, not the death of those who choose to take up arms against Russia.

Life is tremendously precious. Nobody knows this better than us atheists. We don't have a belief in life after death to assuage the pain of someone dying much too soon, or much too horribly. Yet it also is true that most religious believers lack a confidence that death is a beginning, not the end.

Russia has become more religious in the past few decades. But I'm confident that when the parents of the thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in Ukraine so far learn the fate of their sons, they will be as grief-stricken as atheist parents would be.

Death is the great equalizer. Few people want to die. Almost everyone wants to live as long as possible, and as well as possible.

Thus if the Russian people really understood the horrors Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, almost certainly their approval of the war would be much less than it is now -- since Putin has squashed independent reporting on the war and has made it a crime to criticize the war, with a punishment of 15 years in prison.

I'd like it if the United States and our NATO allies would establish a peacekeeping force in Ukraine to minimize further civilian casualties. Probably this won't happen, but I can hope. Life and death shouldn't be left in the hands of politicians, especially tyrants like Vladimir Putin.

Open Thread 42 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Salvation has no meaning in Zen Buddhism

I don't believe I need salvation. Neither does Zen Buddhism. This is one reason, among many, I've been a fan of Zen since my college years. 

A few days ago I started re-reading Hubert Benoit's marvelous book, The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought. 

I've written lots of blog posts about the book, which I've read about a half dozen times. Back in 2005 I wrote a post, "'The Supreme Doctrine,' thirty-six years overdue." 

Since this is 2022, the book I couldn't bear to return to the San Jose Public Library is now 53 years overdue. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd worry about being reborn as a librarian tasked with fining people who don't return library materials.

Benoit devotes a short chapter, three pages, to The Idolatry of 'Salvation.' Excerpt:

In many 'spiritual' systems, religious or otherwise, man has the 'duty' of achieving his 'salvation'; he denies all value to that which is temporal and concentrates all the reality imaginable on the 'salvation.'

It is evident, however, that there is again here a form of idolatry, since realisation, seen thus as something which excludes other things, is then only one thing among others, limited and formal, and that it is regarded at once as alone 'sacred' and immeasurably superior to all the rest.

All the determining, enslaving reality which man attributed to this or that 'temporal' enterprise is crystallised now on the enterprise of 'salvation', and this enterprise becomes the most determining, the most enslaving, that can be imagined.

Since realisation signifies liberation one arrives at the absurd paradox that man is subjected to the coercive duty to be free. Man's distress is concentrated then on the question of his salvation; he trembles at the thought that he may die without having attained his deliverance.

Such a grave error of understanding necessarily entails anxiety, inner agitation, a feeling of unworthiness, an egotistical crispation on oneself-as-a-distinct-being, that is to say, it prevents inner pacification, reconciliation with oneself, disinterestedness toward oneself-as-a-distinct-being, the diminution of emotion -- in short all the inner atmosphere of relaxation which governs the release of satori.

In my current re-reading of The Supreme Doctrine, I noted Benoit's mention of a book by D.T. Suzuki, a noted Zen practitioner, called The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind. I ordered it from Amazon and just started reading it.

Suzuki's book is about the teachings of Hui-neng, a famous Zen master (638-713). Hui-neng is noted for engaging in a Zen contest of sorts between himself and another Zen practitioner, Shen-hsiu. The disagreement between them is key to understanding the two main schools of Chinese Zen, southern and northern.

The southern school, which traces its lineage to Hui-neng, believes in sudden realization, while the northern school, which traces its lineage to Shen-hsiu, believes in gradual realization. Neither is akin to religious salvation, but Hui-neng is less salvation'y than Shen-hsiu, as can be seen in the words each presented to the Fifth Patriarch.

Shen-hsiu said:

This body is the Bodhi-tree.
The mind is like a mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean
And let not dust collect upon it.

Hui-neng responded with what amounted to a Zen smackdown.

There is no Bodhi-tree,
Nor stand of mirror bright.
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?

Suzuki writes:

There are as many kinds of binding as there are kinds of clinging. When we cling to purity we thereby make a form of it, and we are purity-bound. 

For the same reason, when we cling to or abide with emptiness, we are emptiness-bound; when we abide with Dhyana or tranquilization, we are Dhyana-bound.

However excellent are the merits of these spiritual exercises, they inevitably lead us to a state of bondage in one way or another. In this there is no emancipation.

The whole system of Zen discipline may thus be said to be nothing but a series of attempts to set us absolutely free from all forms of bondage.

Even when we talk of 'seeing into one's self-nature', this seeing has also a binding effect on us if it is construed as having something in it specifically set up; that is, if the seeing is a specific state of consciousness. For this is the 'binding'.

...The seeing is the result of his having nothing to stand upon. Hui-neng is thus in one way looked upon as the father of Chinese Zen.

I'm more proud of being married for 32 years than of being religious for 35 years

Today is our anniversary. Easy to remember, since Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, 1990. That makes 32 years we've been husband and wife. Or as Laurel might say, wife and husband. 

Whenever I look at our wedding photo, naturally I think, Damn, we looked so young back then! Well, yeah, that's what 32 years will do to you. Forty-one is way younger than seventy-three.

Another thing 32 years of being married will do is teach you a lot. (Actually, I've been married for 50 years, since my first marriage lasted 18 years; Laurel had never been married before.)

My theory is that if Buddha had really wanted to learn how to be selfless, he should have gotten married rather than going off on his own as a wandering sadhu, seeking his own spiritual development. 

Enlightenment is easy compared to living harmoniously with someone for a long time. Not completely harmoniously, of course. If two people always got along perfectly, I doubt they would be human. More like robots, since friction comes with every close relationship.

When I met Laurel, I was smitten not only by her beauty and wonderful personality, but also by how easily she and I could talk with each other.

And not just about easy subjects. Difficult ones also. 

I'm convinced that the key to a satisfying marriage, or indeed any relationship, is honest communication. Two people are going to disagree about many things. Laurel and I frequently debate whether we should do this or that.

But we rarely lose our temper with each other. Sometimes, just not often. We listen to each other. We do our best to compromise. We understand that while we have a lot in common, we also see the world differently.

Which is natural.

If two people were exactly alike, they wouldn't be in a relationship, but in something else that defies description, since it is impossible for two humans to be completely identical -- even identical twins.

By contrast, during the 35 years I believed in God, eastern religion variety, I never had a disagreement with God. Sure, that was because there's no sign of God. Impossible to have an argument with a nonexistent being.

So when religious believers are all proud because they have a personal relationship with God, I laugh at their folly. They have a personal relationship with an imaginary God. 

It's hugely easier to get along with a fantasy companion than with a real life companion.

This is why I look upon my 32 years of being married to Laurel as being much more of an accomplishment than the 35 years I was devoted to a guru and the God he taught his disciples to worship.

Not only God is beyond words, everything is

Often people say "God is beyond words."

No argument from me there, for several reasons. First, if God doesn't exist (the most likely scenario), then naturally God is beyond words, since no word describes nonexistence.

Second, everything is beyond words. It simply isn't possible to capture all of the characteristics of something in words, numbers, concepts, images, or any other means.

Even a single cell in our body defies description.

A recent article in The New Yorker made that clear. Every cell is completely filled with complex entities, all engaged in constant motion, and so far scientists have been unable to create a living cell from the raw materials that make them up.

Even more so, then, when it comes to describing ourselves. 

I got to thinking about this after having an initial counseling session yesterday with a Salem Health social worker, Wayne. I wrote about this on my HinesSight blog. 

Like most people -- which might really be all people -- I have some habitual ways of describing myself and my life. 

Meaning, I've concocted a story of who I am and how I came to be that way which I retrieve from my memory and use when the occasion demands. Naturally that story is both extremely brief compared to the 73 years I've lived, and also extremely selective, since it focuses on only certain aspects of my life.

There's no other option, of course. Neither for us, nor for reality as a whole.

Questions asked of us determine how we describe ourselves. The same is true of any other entity. As noted above, there's no way to fully communicate the nature of a single cell. All that can be done is point to certain characteristics that come to light via certain means of investigation.

Wayne asked me about my childhood. That wasn't his central focus, but like most counselors, he wanted to get a feel for my early years. 

In part, I said something like, "I was raised by my divorced mother, an intellectual who happened to be an alcoholic, which made my high school years difficult. She desperately wanted to learn the secrets of the universe, yet died without having succeeded. I've written a blog post about the 0ne hour I spent with my father. Not the best or worst hour. The only hour. He also was highly intelligent, along with being a jerk."

OK, better than saying nothing.

However, this doesn't begin to capture the full nature of how I see my mother and father, leaving aside the fact that what I know about them is just a tiny fraction of their life, and even that small part is necessarily viewed through the lens of my personal perspective, which is biased in many respects.

What I liked most about my 50 minutes or so with Wayne was the insights he got from talking with me in his office. It wasn't so much what I said, but how I was saying it. Indeed, each of us has certain ways of talking (and writing) that reflect our usual way of relating to the world.

Wayne correctly noted that I tend toward reason, rationality, thinking, and such. Yet I told him that frequently I'm also emotional and intuitive. For example, I never plan out what I'm going to say in a blog post, other than to have a very general idea of the topic.

I start writing, and then the post writes itself. That's the way I've always written.

I told Wayne that in college I sat down to write a 50 page paper, and in a flash the conceptual framework of the paper appeared in my mind. Then it was just a matter of typing what essentially was an already-written term paper.

Still, my ability to write is just a minute part of who I am, and I don't really know how my thoughts become words which become sentences which become something I share with the world. 

Even less do I know how my emotions work. I didn't make an appointment to see Wayne because I was dissatisfied with my thoughts. I wanted to get some counseling because a few health problems are making me anxious, and I want to learn how to reduce that anxiety, if possible.

It's really difficult to know ourselves, and even more difficult to know other people.

It's enjoyable to try, though. That's why we meditate, contemplate, walk in nature, become intimate with loved ones, talk with friends, read, write, create art, and so much else that bridges the gap between our consciousness and that of others.

That gap is never completely closed, though. Each of us is both an island unto ourselves, and a well-populated continent inhabited by everyone we have ever come in contact with -- for they have left countless marks on us that have helped us become who we are now.

Which can never be completely described. Nor even felt.

The mystery of us is inseparable from the mystery of the cosmos. We struggle to find words that cast light upon those mysteries, yet what they illuminate is so much less than what remains hidden.

"May I be free of fear" -- my addition to loving kindness meditation

For quite a while, maybe five years, I've been repeating a form of loving kindness meditation that I learned from listening to Tamara Levitt's guided meditations on my iPhone's Calm app.

It starts like this. Then "I" is replaced by "you," someone I care about (usually my wife), followed by "all" replacing "you."

May I be happy.
May I be safe.
May I be healthy.
May I be at peace.

Recently I've added a fifth sentiment.

May I be free of fear.

When I do the "all" thing, previously I envisioned the entire world, as if I was floating in space and casting loving kindness hopes over our planet.

Now, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I picture the Ukrainian people as I mentally say...

May all be happy.
May all be safe.
May all be healthy.
May all be at peace.
May all be free of fear.

As I wrote about in "What do you find inspiring about Ukraine?", the strength and courage of Ukrainians in the face of relentless aggression, bombing, and war crimes by Putin's forces is deeply inspiring.

Especially because fear must be omnipresent in Ukraine. Not in everybody. Not all the time. But when the air raid sirens sound, tanks are approaching, or missile strikes are heard nearby, it's entirely normal to feel fear.

How we handle that feeling is the important thing. I have little desire to read the book, Feel the Fear... and Do It Anyway, but I like the title. Here's how the author, Susan Jeffers, summarizes her take on fear.

FEAR TRUTH #1

The fear will never go away as long as you continue to grow!
Every time you take a step into the unknown, you experience fear. There is no point in saying, "When I am no longer afraid, then I will do it." You'll be waiting for a long time. The fear is part of the package.

FEAR TRUTH #2

The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and…do it!
When you do it often enough, you will no longer be afraid in that particular situation. You will have faced the unknown and you will have handled it. Then new challenges await you, which certainly add to the excitement in living.

FEAR TRUTH #3

The only way to feel better about yourself is to go out and…do it!
With each little step you take into unknown territory, a pattern of strength develops. You begin feeling stronger and stronger and stronger.

FEAR TRUTH #4

Not only are you afraid when facing the unknown, so is everyone else!
This should be a relief. You are not the only one out there feeling fear. Everyone feels fear when taking a step into the unknown. Yes, all those people who have succeeded in doing what they have wanted to do in life have felt the fear - and did it anyway. So can you!

FEAR TRUTH #5

Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the bigger underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness!
This is the one truth that some people have difficulty understanding. When you push through the fear, you will feel such a sense of relief as your feeling of helplessness subsides. You will wonder why you did not take action sooner. You will become more and more aware that you can truly handle anything that life hands you.

Everybody can benefit from being, if not free of fear, at least less in the sway of fear. I think those of us of advancing age -- a gentle way of saying old folks -- especially need to find ways to be less fearful.

Sure, it's natural to become more cautious as we grow older. Our strength is less. Health problems limit what we can do. Sticking to routines can seem safer than pushing our boundaries. I spoke with a friend today about this.

I told him that not so long ago I was practicing karate rather than Tai Chi; I was riding around on a Suzuki Burgman scooter rather than a car; I was longboarding (big skateboard) rather than bicycling. Where did the more fearless me go who did those things? 

Nowhere, really. I'm still the same person. I just have fallen into what most 73 year old people do: play it safe whenever possible.

I'm not saying that we should lose all sense of fear and do dangerous things, though having written those words, actually that sounds like a pretty good idea. But we can be more daring and less fearful.

One of the reasons I like the streaming series Yellowstone is that it shows cowboys on a very large (and very beautiful) Montana ranch acting fearlessly. They can do this because they're highly skilled at riding horses, roping, and doing all the other stuff that a cattle ranch requires.

Last night my wife and I watched an episode where the ranch hands want to help out the family of a horse breeder who committed suicide after a bank foreclosed on his property. Their plan is to round up his several hundred horses, then sell them and give the money to the dead guy's family.

"They're all up at the top of that slope," a cowboy says. "How are we going we get them down without being killed in a stampede." "Well," replies another cowboy, "we could be cautious and figure out a safe way to do this, or... we could just say fuck it, ride up there, and do it." 

"Yeah, fuck it. That's a good plan," they all agree. The resulting scene was marvelous. Must have been difficult to film. Hundreds of horses galloping down a hillside with cowboys herding them along, also at full speed.

I found this really inspiring. When they got all the horses in a big corral and closed the gate, the cowboys looked at each other and said, "Damn, we did it!" A dangerous job. Scary, to normal people.

But no matter what fear they might have felt, they got on their horses and did it anyway.

Secret of happiness revealed by Pearls Before Swine

Time to stop searching for the secret of happiness. A week ago, it was revealed in a comic strip.