Church of the Churchless

No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality

It isn't surprising that, as an atheist, I find a lot not to like in Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. However, what does surprise me is how weak Douthat's arguments are. 

For while I admire his clear writing style, as befits a New York Times opinion columnist, often he simply tosses off glib statements about the marvelousness of religious belief without backing them up with either solid facts or persuasive reasoning.

Here's an example from the book's "Big Faiths and Big Questions" chapter, which argues that the world's major religions are a better bet than minor religions for someone wanting to dip their spiritual toe into religious waters -- or if they're gung-ho, their entire being.

I think the process whereby we moved from localized religion to the world religions was in fact a movement toward greater understanding and wisdom, while the (partial, incomplete) abandonment of those religions has been the late-modern world's great mistake.

Rather than just being a way station on an unstoppable march from pervasive supernaturalism to disenchanted secularism, the great religions represented -- and still represent! -- a balancing that comes much closer than either modern materialism or primeval religions to capturing the full story of the world.

So if you are a seeker on the threshold of religion, a browser in the Bookstore of All Religions, it's entirely reasonable to let yourself be drawn toward a major world religion rather than fretting that religious truth might be hiding from you in some minor Californian sect or exotic mystery cult.

These religions spread around the world for a reason, they're available to you for a reason, they triumphed over primeval belief systems for a reason, they have moral and metaphysical commonalities for a reason -- and that reason is that they represented an advancement, a convergence, toward a truer picture of reality.

I'm far from being an expert in the history of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism (I don't consider Buddhism a religion, though Douthat does). But I'm pretty sure that the reason these became major religions wasn't because they were so great at describing a truer picture of reality than other religions consigned to minor status.

For example, Christianity prospered when emperors made it the Roman Empire's state religion in the 4th century. And Islam prospered through early Muslim conquests. Yet Douthat would have us believe that the major religions attracted followers through some sort of Darwinian Survival of the Truthiest. 

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

Similarly, a religion does well when it meets the needs of people who encounter it. If being in touch with truths about reality was the greatest need of people, then science would be hugely more popular than religion. 

But this isn't the case. Many more people are devoutly religious than are devoted to science. The reason is that religions meet needs other than conveying truth. In fact, religions prosper by denying certain key truths, such as:

-- Everyone dies, and there is no persuasive evidence for life after death.
-- There also is no persuasive evidence of the supernatural.
-- Since something must always have existed, this is more likely to be nature than God.

Religions appeal to people because they offer an alternative to the sometimes bleak truths of secularism and science. We are born, we live, we die. There is no God looking after us. In the grand scheme of things, we matter very little.

A religion typically brings like-minded people together in a communal fashion. It feels good to be a part of something greater than yourself, to worship with others in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. I don't deny all that, having experienced these benefits during the 35 years I was a member of an Eastern religion (a minor one). 

However, now I still feel I'm part of something greater than myself: reality. I still have a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood: friends, family, acquaintances. Religions don't offer anything that can't be obtained from other sources. 

Heck, even if what you desire is unreality, a lack of truth, the far corners of the Internet beckon. There's no need to join a religion to unmoor yourself from reality, if that's what you want. Just seek out your favorite conspiracy theory.

Academy Awards speech about Palestinian suffering shows power of compassion

Having just spent much of my evening watching the Academy Awards (thankfully, I recorded the show, so could skip the commercials and boring parts, as it ran for three hours and forty-five minutes), I had been planning to write something short on a different subject for this blog.

That plan changed when I saw the acceptance speech for Best Documentary, which went to "No Other Land," a film about the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank by the Israeli military.

The men who gave the acceptance speech were Palestinian co-director Basel Adra and Israeli co-director  Yuval Abraham. I'm assuming that Adra is Muslim and Abraham is Jewish, though I could be wrong about this.

Regardless, this shows the power of moving beyond narrow confines of religion to something much more universal: compassion for the suffering of our fellow human beings. This has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with opening our hearts and minds to the plight of other people less fortunate than ourselves.

After listening to so many traditional acceptance speeches tonight where an Oscar winner thanks their spouse, parents, agent, others who worked on a film, blah, blah, blah, it was refreshing to hear Adra and Abraham talk about those who are suffering grave injustice under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which was acquired by Israel after a brief war in 1967.

Here's a video of the acceptance speech and a transcript of those remarks that was in an email I got from Zeteo, an independent American news organization founded by ex-MSNBC broadcaster Mehdi Hasan.

BASEL ADRA

“Thank you to the Academy for the award. It’s such a big honor for the four of us and everybody who supported us for this documentary. About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope to my daughter is that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing violence, home demolitions, forced displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is facing every day. ‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”

YUVAL ABRAHAM

“We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other. The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end; the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of Oct. 7, which must be freed. When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws, that destroy lives, that he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say, as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path. Why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is another way. It’s not too late for life, for the living.”

Zelensky's meeting with Trump shows danger of cults, political or religious

As I've noted before and surely will again, because it's the truth, the slavish devotion of almost all Republicans to Donald Trump mirrors the slavish devotion of cult members to their own Dear Leader who, in their eyes, can do no wrong.

Further proof of this was on plain display today after the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, met with Trump at the White House to sign a deal they'd negotiated regarding the mining of mineral deposits in Ukraine, along with discussing how to end Ukraine's war with Russia.

That meeting started off fine (a full video is here), but degenerated at the end into a shouting match in which Zelensky bravely attempted to speak the truth about the Russian dictator, Putin, and Ukraine's valid concerns about making a bad deal with Putin.

But in what appeared to be a pre-planned effort by Vice-President Vance and President Trump to undermine Zelensky and promote Putin, the last part of the meeting featured Vance and Trump acting like the cowardly dictator-lovers that they are, talking over Zelensky in a bizarre attempt to prevent him from speaking the proverbial truth to power. 

This video shows Trump and Vance acting like mafia bosses, threatening Zelensky with the loss of his country if he doesn't express enough fawning appreciation to Trump.

Zelensky is a real man, a warrior who has been fighting on behalf of his people for the past three years after Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Trump, on the other hand, is a weak cry-baby who has so little confidence in himself, he looks upon any criticism as a vicious attack rather than as something to be discussed and coherently responded to.

That's why Trump abruptly ended his meeting with Zelensky. The Ukrainians wanted to stay, have lunch, and then proceed with what had been planned for the rest of the day. However, Trump kicked Zelensky out because he can't tolerate anyone correcting his lies -- which in this case were plentiful. PolitiFact highlighted three of them. 

How this meeting ended was disturbing enough. Almost as disturbing was the virtually universal support Trump got for his outrageous behavior from his fellow Republican politicians. Senator Lindsey Graham has been a strong supporter of Ukraine. A few weeks ago he lavishly praised Zelensky at a European security conference.

But since he belongs to the Cult of Trump, Graham issued a statement condemning Zelensky. That's what Republican politicians have to do these days: kiss Trump's fat ass out of a fear that if they don't, Trump and his billionaire buddy, Elon Musk, will fund a primary challenge to them next time they run for re-election.

This is the political equivalent of followers of a religious cult leader keeping their mouths shut about the immoral and illegal things they know the leader is doing, but can't talk about because they're afraid of what will happen to them if they do. Being ostracized, for sure. Facing physical danger, a real possibility. 

Cult leaders get their power from the subservience of their followers. Whether it be Trump's authoritarianism or a religious cult leader's dominance over helpless followers (often women abused by the leader, which Trump also has done), the key to their success is creating a climate where criticism of the leader is a thought-crime and praise of the leader keeps a follower out of trouble.

To which I say, to hell with that. I'll never be silenced, nor will the majority of Americans who disapprove of the horrible way Trump is acting as president. European leaders were quick to support Zelensky, a great sign. Hopefully now they will be even more inclined to give aid to Ukraine, which already surpasses the value of American aid (Trump lied about that).

Thomas Friedman, a New York Times opinion writer, had a great short piece today about the meeting between Zelensky and Trump, "This Never Happened With an American President Before." Here's the whole essay.

What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously planned ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.

You want an analogy? Imagine if, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel came to the White House this month, Trump and Vance told him that the war with Hamas had gone on too long, too many lives had been lost and it was costing America too much money, so it was time for Bibi and the Israeli people to do a deal with the Hamas aggressor.

Because Russia did to Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, what Hamas did to Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — a surprise invasion, murder and the ensuing sexual violence to wreak destruction on another nation and its society. Trump took Bibi’s side 110 percent against Hamas, and now he is taking Putin’s side 110 percent against Zelensky and Ukraine.

It is hard to express what a break this is in American foreign policy. We stood on the side of liberty and those fighting for it around the world. There are times the isolationist forces in our population have held us back and had to be persuaded. There have been times when — in support of the larger cause of liberty — against dangerous foes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we had to align ourselves temporarily with dictators.

But I can’t think of a single time when an American president declared that the democratically elected leader of a country preserving liberty was a “dictator” who started the war with his neighbor — when it was the vicious neighboring dictator who actually started the war.

If you listen to Trump, everything we have done for Ukraine is pure altruism. We have no actual interests at stake ourselves in its fate or the triumph of liberty there. We have no actual interest in the fact that Ukraine is protecting the European Union — a giant, pro-American alliance of free markets and free people. It doesn’t matter a whit to Trump what happens to the E.U. or Ukraine. All that matters is that Zelensky says “thank you” louder for our altruism and that, in the middle of his war of survival, sign over a generation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to us.

This is a total perversion of U.S. foreign policy practiced by every president since World War I. My fellow Americans, we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president, who — well, I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.​

---------------------
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. 

If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation.

For example, the Bible says in Genesis:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

And an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which I know a lot about because I was a member of the organization for 35 years, similarly taught that humans are the top of creation -- and that it is only possible to return to God if one has a human form (the group believes in reincarnation). Further, supposedly there always is at least one human who is God in Human Form, and who is responsible for taking "marked souls" back to the highest supernatural realm of creation.

Since I love to delve into weird theological questions, even though I no longer believe in God or the supernatural, a couple of way-cool graphic depictions of human origins in the National Geographic story got me pondering some pertinent issues about the whole "top of creation" thing.

Here's photographs of the graphic depictions. I've made them as large as possible.

The top graphic says: 

Homo sapiens are the only humans left on Earth today, but at one point we shared the planet with other species of ancestral humans, collectively known as hominins. As climates and ecological opportunities shifted, hominins migrated out of Africa, reconnecting and interbreeding with the descendants of their relatives who had made similar journeys thousands of years before.

So do all of the hominin species count as being the "top of creation," or only our species, Homo sapiens? The bottom graphic shows that hominins have been around for over four million years. If they count as ancestral humans, then the RSSB philosophy implies that Gods in Human Form have been on our planet for that length of time.

But let's assume that only species in the genus Homo count as humans. That graphic says:

Homo sapiens are the only remaining humans. Our genus, Homo, features relatively larger brains, full bipedalism, and the ability to make tools. 

The right side of the graphic shows that there have been about ten species in the genus Homo. Seemingly they all would count as being the top of creation, being humans. This includes our closest relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. 

From the graphic, our species diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 800,000 years ago, though the top graphic says that the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil dates from about 300,000 years ago. Thus those who believe in the RSSB teachings have to accept that there were Gods in Human Form at least that long ago, and almost certainly they killed animals and ate meat -- which is against the current RSSB teaching.

Another question is whether Homo sapiens is the species that will forever be the "top of creation." After all, evolution hasn't stopped. There's a good chance our species won't last forever. The National Geographic story says:

The disappearance of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other groups around 40,000 years ago marked the end of millions of years when multiple groups of hominins walked the Earth. The current epoch is a historical anomaly, and Stringer [a paleoanthropologist] advises us not to be smug in our status as the last ones standing.

Neanderthals and Denisovans survived for half a million years; Homo erectus lasted nearly two million years. At the rate we're going, how successful will we look in 2,000 years, much less a million?

Ross Douthat's five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in.

However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase.

(1) Generic mystical experience. 

The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience -- "generic" not because it is boring or predictable but because it seems to be most commonplace and the most readily accessible through certain kinds of spiritual technique, common to religious traditions in both the East and West.

This is an experience in which the self's relationship to reality undergoes a dramatic transformation, and some deeper pattern of reality is apparently revealed. The revelation may take the form of a sense of oneness with the universe, of dissolving boundaries between the self and the world, of interconnection rather than separation within creation, with the ego and the individual personality seemingly evaporating. 

(2) Encounter with something absolutely other.

The second kind of mystical experience... involves a sense of encounter with something absolute and absolutely other. The first kind of experience can turn into the second kind; the line I'm drawing is hardly a clean one, but you see a definite difference when that transition happens, and the person having the experience is left with no doubt that Something is looking at them or pressing into and through them.

Here is an example...

"All at once I felt the presence of God... as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether... I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God has neither form, color, odor, nor taste... God was present, though invisible, he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him."

(3) The supernatural condenses to a particular being.

...The third category of mystical experience [is] in which the supernatural condenses to a person, a particular being, a face, words. In these cases the sense of otherness doesn't go away; these are still encounters with the numinous, unsettling and eerie or just seemingly impossible in their nature and effects.

But what's experienced is made manifest in a singular figure, a personality or group of personalities, a voice giving instructions, not just a harrowing or joyful experience of divinity or mystery. A vision of Jesus or Krishna would fall into this category; so would the innumerable encounters with gods and saints and angels, departed relatives and the Virgin Mary; so would the external voice speaking to you suddenly at some crucial moment in your life.

(4) The experience involves effects on material reality. 

This brings us to the fourth kind of mystical experience, from the point of view of Official Knowledge the most disreputable of all -- the kind of mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality, whether miraculous, uncanny, or simply really, really weird.

...The most consistently attested example of the mystical interacting with the material is the phenomenon of miraculous healings -- seemingly impossible recovery after intercessory prayer. That attestation takes many different forms, with the simplest being the share of contemporary people who claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing.

It's about a third of Americans, according to survey data, with higher shares in other parts of the world, meaning that hundreds of millions of people around the globe believe that they witnessed a concrete supernatural intervention in their lives.

(5) Encounter with a being or force that has agency.

But the religious worldview assumes that these [miraculous] happenings are, at least in the more dramatic cases, the results of the free decisions of nonhuman persons with whom we can interact through prayer or magic -- God Himself, the gods, angelic or demonic beings, the holy dead, unclassifiable forces.

The most common kinds of mystical experience, the ones that just involve the self's experience of its relationship to the cosmos or to its own mortal flesh, can be reproduced to some degree under laboratory conditions. You can put the meditating monk in the MRI machine, you can get general replications of experiences (the details are another matter) among people going on an ayahuasca-mediated spiritual trip.

But the encounter with something entirely other, in which the other being or force or personality has agency as well, is just not the kind of thing that the scientific method is designed to measure or test, nor is the kind of event to which it makes sense to assign definite probabilities.

...The miracle or the vision of the demonic reaching-in is supposed to be specific to the individual; your own internal conditions play some unmeasurable role; and likewise the external agents can't be subjected to normal scientific forms of scrutiny because they're agents and not just impersonal forces -- and their own purposes and interests, for our good or ill, involve not being subjected to the rules that govern our material existence.

Now, I didn't include Douthat's mention of arguments against the validity of reports of mystical experience. That's a whole other subject, whether it makes sense to believe in any or all of the five varieties.

The probability of 1 through 5 being a genuine reflection of reality clearly seems to be in inverse relationship to their number. Meaning, a sense of being in touch with a deeper dimension of reality seems so commonplace, it's hard to argue that something real isn't going on in the mind of the person having the first kind of mystical experience.

Just standing on the top of a mountain, looking out upon the majesty of nature, often stimulates an experience of unity with everything in existence. I've had that sort of experience. Most people have. 

However, being in touch with a supernatural being that has agency, the ability to act and intervene in the lives of humans, this is much less common -- and also much less likely to be true. Yet its rarity makes such an experience more memorable when it happens to someone.

That's why a book about sitting on a beach feeling one with the cosmos while watching the sun set over the ocean won't be of much interest to people, while a book about meeting Jesus and getting a tour of heaven stands a good chance of being a best seller.

Photos of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, with rich and political people

Below I've shared twenty photos of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, that were sent to me by someone who said:

Hello Brian, I want to put your attention on one matter that effects on the heart of common satsangi, the matter is Why do Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his intern Baba Gill like to visit only the houses of rich and political people and get photographed with them? Whereas none of them is a follower of Radhaswami cult and most of them are corrupt, jail inmates, non vegetarian, heavy drinker. Many of them are involved in drug business and have gone to jail.

I'm sending you few of photographs of GSD with rich and privileged people who are mostly corrupted and indulged in business which are dubious in nature. Plz make an article blog on this email with your effective writing which could convey the real message to common people. When even saints and sages, Baba start jumping around to meet rich people and politicians, then understand that the power is in authority, not in God. Thanx

 

I agree that the guru's propensity to associate with the rich, famous, and well-connected is at odds with a longstanding Radha Soami Satsang Beas principle that the main purpose of human life, as exemplified by the RSSB gurus, is God-realization, with worldly pursuits being secondary.

 

It sure looks like that principle now is for RSSB disciples to follow, while Gurinder Singh Dhillon is exempt from it. The captions below each photo are from the person who shared them with me.

 

Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon bowing before the photo of Om Parkash Chautala, former Chief Minister of Haryana State, who was arrested on charges of smuggling and spent the last years of his life in jail on corruption charges.

With chief minister of rajasthan bhajan lal sharma.

With ex minister of punjab state Anil joshi

 

With chief minister of Jharkhand state Hemant Soren

 

With governor of punjab state gulab chand kataria

With chief minister of haryana state nayab singh saini

With bollywood actor Shaheed kapoor

 

With minister of punjab aman arora and baba gurinder and apprentice baba gill paid visit minister home

 

With Abhay singh chautala , ex opposition leader of haryana state , son of ex chief minister of haryana , and grand son of deputy prime minister of india Devi lal 

With Ashwani kumar chopra , owner and chief editor of oldest and leading newspaper of punjab state Punjab Kesari

 

With Ex chief minister of jammu and kashmir Farooq abdullah and with current chief minister of state jammu and kashmir Umar abdullah and both are known for non vegetarian

With ex minister of punjab state Rana gurmit singh sodhi 

 

With ex minister of punjab sunil jakhar and current head of BJP party in punjab 

Visiting home of minister of punjab aman arora's house

 

With ex minister of punjab state bikram singh majithia, grand son in law of maharaj charan singh, who spent time in jail in charges of drug rackets and drug trafficking and give shelters to drug mafia of punjab

 

Attending the party of ex deputy chief minister of Punjab's daughter wedding

Visiting house of minister of punjab aman arora

 

Doing Orthodox hindu rituals Agni prajvalit at the moment of visiting home of punjab minister with intern baba gill

 

With ex minister of punjab pratap singh bajwa

 

With bollywood actress, model  shehnaz kaur gill and her family

 

I'll also share a photo that I found, as I was curious about whether Gurinder Singh Dhillon had ever met with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. Turns out that he did.

 

AI, artificial intelligence, points to the mystery of how the mind works

Religiously-minded people like to invoke mystery as a reason for believing in God and the supernatural. They adore how holy books teach that the workings of divinity are beyond human comprehension, you know, the whole man proposes and God disposes thing. 

But it isn't necessary to go anywhere outside of the closest entity any of us has to ourselves to come face-to-face with a gigantic mystery, because that entity is the mind that experiences both mystery and everything else from our birth until our death.

In my previous post, "No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity,"  I included a passage from Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

At the heart of their wonder was the technology's air of mystery, its oracular quality, the way it seemed to break with the patterns of Enlightenment science, in which sequences of replicable experimental processes are supposed to yield results that are trustworthy and verifiable because we can see, step by step, how the entire process works.

With AI, by contrast, the systems can be so complex that we don't always understand how they are generating answers to our questions... There's a black box at the heart of the machine, a hard-to-pin-down element inside the algorithms.

That description of AI was correct. But Douthat's conclusion was false.

But the quest to build an artificial intelligence also represents a place where the supernatural has returned to haunt the scientific project.

This is a ridiculous thing to say.

It reflects the weakness of Douthat's arguments in favor of being religious that he has to throw out absurdities like AI research being haunted by the supernatural. For actually, AI is merely demonstrating how the human mind, Non-artificial Intelligence, works. And the mind is thoroughly physical, being nothing more than the brain in action.

The February 24, 2025 issue of TIME magazine has a story, "DeepSeek's hidden warning for AI safety." Basically, that warning is that AI systems are becoming disconnected from human language, which means that it will be increasingly difficult to understand how the systems arrive at responses to queries posed to them.

In other words, the AI response may be in words, but the process that produced the response will be beyond the reach of words. Here's an excerpt from the story:

Of course, even human-legible AI has its problems. It might look like an AI is faithfully showing its work but some experts aren't sure if these explanations reveal how the AI really makes decisions. It could be like asking a politician for the motivations behind a policy -- they might come up with an explanation that sounds good, but has little connection to the real decision-making process.

As it is, our ability to know exactly how an AI model arrives at its answers is already riddled with uncertainty. It's true that today's most powerful models express chains of thought, in words, that appear to show their reasoning. But the process that creates those words happens at a deeper level: via complex mathematical operations inside a neural network.

Nobody truly understands how that math works. And so the worry is, an especially powerful AI system could potentially craft its chains of thought to conceal dangerous capabilities from monitors, all the while keeping its real logic hidden from view.

Well, this might turn out to be a valid worry. However, at the moment my attitude is that what's being described about how an especially powerful AI system could work is very much, if not exactly, like how the mind of every person on earth works.

Namely, the human mind comes up with thoughts, actions, and such that typically can be expressed in language, yet don't arise from expressible language. Instead, the products of conscious awareness flow from a hundred billion or so neurons that have trillions of interconnections.

How the heck could all that neuronal activity be described in any language? All that we humans are capable of is expressing in words or some other symbolic fashion the tiny conscious tip of a hugely larger unconscious neuronal iceberg.

Why did I decide to write this blog post? I can attempt to describe my conscious motivation, but that would be woefully incomplete. After I read the TIME story about AI, I had a wordless urge to use it as the basis for tonight's blog post.

Yet I have no idea what produced that wordless urge. It just appeared in my mind, in the same fashion as outputs of an AI model just appear without even the creators of the model understanding how this happens.

So as AI systems come ever closer to manifesting the goal of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, it seems to me that we're just going to have to get used to the idea that AGI processes will be as much a mystery as the workings of the human mind already is.

Nobody freaks out because how we arrive at our everyday thoughts and actions is hidden beneath the veil of unconscious mental operations. At present, this means I'm not going to freak out about AI models behaving in a similar way. 

Until a freak out truly is justified, which I readily admit could happen in the not-so-distant future. (By the way, my computer just typed out "not-so-distant future" as soon as I'd typed "not-." This is a glimpse of how AI soon will become embedded in even routine daily activities.)

No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity

A trend is evident.

With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing.

Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon reason.

In his "The Mind and the Cosmos" chapter, Douthat attempts to demonstrate that our current knowledge about how the mind works points to divinity, albeit in a circuitous fashion. 

For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI). What he says here is correct. Referencing a 2023 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Douthat writes:

At the heart of their wonder was the technology's air of mystery, its oracular quality, the way it seemed to break with the patterns of Enlightenment science, in which sequences of replicable experimental processes are supposed to yield results that are trustworthy and verifiable because we can see, step by step, how the entire process works.

With AI, by contrast, the systems can be so complex that we don't always understand how they are generating answers to our questions... There's a black box at the heart of the machine, a hard-to-pin-down element inside the algorithms.

So far, so good. However, he then goes off the rails by saying:

But the quest to build an artificial intelligence also represents a place where the supernatural has returned to haunt the scientific project.

This is Douthat doing his God of the Gaps thing, as I've noted in previous posts about his book. Just because it is impossible to tell exactly how AI arrives at its answers to problems doesn't imply that because it also is impossible to tell exactly how the human mind operates, something supernatural must be lurking behind the scenes. 

Douthat correctly says that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is still a mystery, though some persuasively argue that the hard problem of how conscious selfhood arises isn't really a problem at all, but a failure of looking upon the mind/brain correctly.

For all the advances in brain mapping, the mind itself is still irreducible, an enigma, a mysterious substance unto itself... If reading an argument makes you angry, if reading a novel makes you sad, if reading a poem stirs a sudden childhood memory, there is no material account of how that happens, how the outward act generates the inner experience.

Okay, I generally agree. But there's no immaterial or supernatural account of how that happens either. So I find Douthat's criticism of neuroscience to be unfair, in that he's equating a current gap in scientific knowledge about the mind/brain with a fatal flaw in the materialist outlook on reality.

In the end, the emperor is always naked: redescribe as you will, reduce as you may, nobody has any idea how or why the physical inputs that go into conscious experience, the stimuli from particular chemicals or light waves or exchanges between neurons, yield the actual experiences themselves.

Yet he also acknowledges the obvious fact that physical causes affect our experience.

Of  course consciousness exists in some kind of dynamic relationship to physical reality; nobody who's encountered alcohol or pot or caffeine doubts that the experience of selfhood can be altered by conducting chemistry experiments in your bloodstream or your brain.

I kept waiting for some convincing argument from Douthat about how the mind isn't just the brain in action, but is a link or emissary from a supernatural realm, but that argument never materialized. About the best he could do is roll out a weak argument that because it feels to us like the mind is something immaterial, it must be.

Which is to say that after five hundred years of scientific discovery, consciousness still looks just as supernatural in the colloquial sense -- meaning "super-material" or "super-physical," not just another arrangement of atoms but a distinct irreducibility of some kind, acting on physical reality without being physical itself -- as it did in the era of Descartes or Leibniz.

As he often does, in this chapter Douthat falls back upon a weak argument that despite science's best efforts, there is still a strong element of mystery about the brain/mind, this shows that religiosity is a better way of understanding reality.

In the end, the idea that we have available some clearly more rational or more scientific alternative to a "naively" supernatural understanding of the mind is itself fundamentally naive. Whatever consciousness may be, soul or mind, dream or spell, it self-evidently has its own integrity, its own being, which is intertwined with physical reality without being reducible to physical substances and their interactions.

We all know this, at some level, because we cannot not know it; the attempt to refuse the knowledge is itself a manifestation of the very thing that's supposedly being refused or overthrown. Mind cannot reduce mind; consciousness cannot explain itself away. The soul may not be exactly as ancient religions imagined it, but under any conceivable paradigm it will always be very much alive.

I'm confident that Douthat is wrong. I say this because his attitude is just like those who long ago couldn't conceive that thunder and lightning could be anything other than the acts of gods; and who not so long ago couldn't conceive that the speed of light could be constant and that light doesn't require a medium to propagate, or that natural processes could result in the evolution of species over hundreds of millions of years.

Words like "self-evidently" favored by Douthat can't substitute for the fact that often science overturns self-evident conceptions of reality. I'm highly confident that he is wrong about the mind being an exception to the rule that whatever science seeks to know, it makes steady progress in gaining that knowledge -- certainly to a much greater degree than religions do.

Pieces of churchless string too short to save

Many years ago, in that far-off time when local newspapers were much more vibrant and successful than they are now, our town's paper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a column written by someone who occasionally started his piece with "pieces of string too short to save."

Meaning, he was going to mention a bunch of unrelated things in his column that day, each of which was interesting, but didn't merit taking up the entire column. Today I figured I'd dust that saying off and do my blog post imitation of it, otherwise known as three-dot writing.

...Yesterday I heard from someone who asked me why I wanted to get the copyright for Life is Fair back from Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based spiritual group that I wrote the book for. The question surprised me. He'd heard about this from other members of RSSB. I just replied to him.

I’ve never asked for any changes to the Life is Fair copyright. It’s always been in the hands of RSSB. All I did was research and write the book, with help from other volunteers. I have no idea how anyone got the notion that I wanted to take back the copyright, especially since I never had it to begin with. Working on Life is Fair was simply an act of devotion to Charan Singh for me. 

I was told by Faith Singh that Charan dreamed of being able to hand out a little book about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism. When she asked me if I wanted to attempt writing such a book, I instantly said yes, motivated by love for my guru. I guess the lesson here is not to believe all the gossip that spreads around RSSB circles. Like gossip in general, sometimes it has a bit of truth behind it, and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case the gossip has zero truth behind it.

...I'm reading a book that appeared on a New York Times list of best nonfiction books published in 2024,  A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. Kevin Fedarko, the author, is really talented. Here's a paragraph that caught my eye as I was reading the book in the bathtub last night.

Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached -- and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves -- only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.

This passage also is amazingly well written.

The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath. But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your shoulders, as if it were a blanket braided from material that was already in flames when delivered into the hands of its weaver. 

...This morning and yesterday I labored on writing an email to officials at the City of Salem that the Oregon Government Ethics Commission website informed me was a prerequisite for filing a complaint with the commission. In my case, I want to have them find that the Salem Mayor, Julie Hoy, engaged in a prohibited "serial communication" with members of the City Council that led to the City Manager being forced to resign.

The email was necessary to give the City of Salem 21 days to respond to the facts and circumstances of what I consider to be a breach of Oregon's public meeting law. After that, I can file a complaint with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, either appending the city's response, or telling the commission the city officials never responded. 

It was strangely satisfying to spend several hours writing a difficult email. I wanted to sound reasonable and factual while still conveying a sense of outrage at what the Mayor had done. Standing up for what I think is right often brightens my mood. National politics is far removed from my everyday reality. With local politics, I have a chance of making a difference, even if just a small change. The email became a blog post. If you're into geeky subjects like this one, check out "I just initiated an ethics complaint against the City of Salem."

...A recent issue of New Scientist has an article called "Wearables for the mind: A new wave of monitoring devices claim to improve our mental health, but do they work?" I've tried one of the devices, the Mendi headset, buying it when it was a Kickstarter project a few years ago. After liking the Mendi at first, I then got irritated with it.  

I like the idea of making concentration/meditation more scientific with neurofeedback, but the reality is that these sorts of devices are still in an early stage of usefulness. The person who wrote the article seemed to like the Muse brain-sensing headband the most. I agree with him that getting feedback via sounds is preferable to having to look at a screen, which the Mendi requires, as I prefer to meditate wit my eyes closed.

For now I'm going to stick with good old-fashioned meditation. Just me and my brain, doing our thing (assuming there is any difference between "me" and "my brain," which I suspect there isn't.

No, the big bang doesn't point to a divine creator

In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them."

Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book. 

It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's clearly an excellent writer and is knowledgeable about many subjects, as befits his status as a New York Times opinion columnist, it's almost disappointing to see him rely on trite God of the Gaps arguments. Wikipedia says:

"God of the gaps" is a theological concept that emerged in the 19th century and revolves around the idea that gaps in scientific understanding are regarded as indications of the existence of God.This perspective has its origins in the observation that some individuals, often with religious inclinations, point to areas where science falls short in explaining natural phenomena as opportunities to insert the presence of a divine creator. The term itself was coined in response to this tendency. This theological view suggests that God fills in the gaps left by scientific knowledge, and that these gaps represent moments of divine intervention or influence.

So it's a pretty lazy way to argue for a religious view of reality. All you have to do is find an area where science doesn't know something and claim, "See, that's evidence for God; science is clueless about this, while religion isn't."

Of course, that isn't true.

Religion is just as clueless as science is about how the big bang came to be, which includes where the laws of nature that guided the big bang came from. The difference is that science is open about its lack of knowledge in this area, while religion makes unverifiable claims about a creator God being behind it all.

Douthat writes:

The first blow to the idea of an indifferent cosmos was the twentieth-century realization that our universe appears to have a specific beginning, a point of origin prior to which not only space but time itself did not exist. 

If Darwin's theory arguably undermined a traditional Christian understanding of human origins, then the Big Bang theory offered a striking support for the Christian understanding of cosmic origins -- offering particular vindication to Augustine of Hippo, who insisted in the fourth century AD that God created time as well as space ex nihilo and exists outside both, in contrast to pagan critics of Christianity who assumed that the universe had to be eternal.

Okay, Augustine was correct about time being created along with space. But it was science, not religion, that came up with demonstrable evidence for the big bang. Douthat does make a good argument against the view of some scientists that the universe sprang out of nothing, the laws of quantum mechanics acting upon quantum fields. 

I agree with Douthat that quantum fields and laws aren't nothing. However, I have no problem envisioning that the cosmos has always existed, along with the laws of nature that allow universes to come into being within the eternal reaches of the cosmos, as this makes more sense to me than an unseen creator God having always existed.

Douthat also notes that the laws of nature are marvelously fine-tuned in a fashion that allows the universe, and life within it, to exist. I've read many science books that make the same point. He disparages the idea of the multiverse, which explains why the laws of our universe are so amenable to life: countless other universes in the cosmos aren't suitable for life, but obviously we are in one that is.

To escape the possibility of a single invisible God, it [the multiverse concept] posits an infinite number of invisible universes that we can never hope to reach or see. To avoid the mind-preceding-matter immaterialism suggested by the universe's apparent fine-tuning and the strange role of human observation in collapsing potentiality into reality, it posits an infinite system that by definition cannot ever be studied from within our material existence.

Well, neither can God. At least the multiverse concept builds on something indisputably real, our universe. Notions about God have no connection with here-and-now reality, being creations of the human mind divorced from anything that can actually be known by our usual senses.

By the way, Douthat's comment about human observation collapsing potentiality into reality at the quantum level is just one of various ways quantum theory accounts for the possible turning into the actual. It's incorrect to hold that consciousness is needed for this to happen. Other theories are popular in the area of quantum physics.

As noted before, Douthat has an annoying habit of choosing an unproven scientific hypothesis, elevating it to a scientific certainty, and then arguing how ridiculous science is for believing in it -- whereas actually science is comfortable with simply saying, "This might be true, or it might be false. More research is needed to determine which it is."

Because religions are so dogmatic, Douthat seems to believe that science is also, while the exact opposite is true. Science loves gaps in knowledge, for those mysteries are what allow science to make progress at learning more about the unknown.

"Believe" is a book that claims religions are true. I doubt it can do that.

I bought Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, not because I agree with that thesis. Rather, I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them.

After reading 25 pages, I'm impressed with Douthat's lofty goal, but not with his reasoning so far. Being a New York Times opinion columnist and a former senior editor at The Atlantic, it isn't surprising that Douthat is a talented writer.

He makes his points clearly. So kudos to him for that. And I admire how in his Introduction, he says that he doesn't want to take the easy way out when it comes to defending religion. Which is:

In contemporary arguments with atheists and skeptics, religious writers tend to make a few familiar moves. One is to insist that both critics and defenders of religion spend too much time focusing on dogmas and doctrines and specific claims about reality, when religion should be understood primarily as a practice, a habit of being that can be fully understood only communally and liturgically.

...To people who hover on the threshold of religion, open to belief but unable to quite get there, the implied advice is to set aside your skepticism, swallow your doubts, and just act as if you actually believe: pray and go to church, love your neighbor, sing the hymns or keep kosher, immerse yourself in religious literature and art, try to reap the psychological and communal benefits of faith.

The idea is to embrace religious practice somewhat in defiance of the reasoning faculties, making experience rather than argument your guide, and see what happens next. 

Instead, Douthat wants to convince the reader of his book that religions are a reliable guide to truth and reality, more so than a secular worldview that naturally includes science. 

This isn't a book about how religious stories are psychologically helpful whatever their truth content, or about how religious communities offer a valuable solidarity even if their doctrines are made up, or about how embracing the mystery of existence can make you happy in the day-to-day. Such benefits to religion clearly exist for many people, but those benefits accrue precisely because religious perspectives are closer to the truth about existence than purely secular worldviews.

And the benefits are not the best place to start, if we're after something more than just contentment and good vibes. Rather, we'll start with religion's intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.

Okay. Great. Rather than trying an end run around the formidable structure of modern science and secularism in general, Douthat wants to attack head on, busting right through the castle walls that, in his opinion, do a poor job of containing the truth about reality.

For Douthat, that includes the supernatural.

I'll be defending beliefs and practices that fall squarely on the supernatural and dogmatic side: real belief in a creator God or ghostly ancestors or a divine pantheon, real commitment to following Jesus or Muhammed or the Buddha, not just general ideas about the good life or cultural practices that you'd like to see handed on.

Being a Christian, Douthat admits "there is no way for me to be perfectly fair to the other religions I'm discussing, especially at the level of generality that this book is aiming for." Fine. But someone should have told him that in no way does the Buddha belong in the company of Jesus and Muhammed. 

Buddhism famously advises, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Meaning, Buddhist teachings not only don't require a belief in the divinity of the Buddha, such a belief in actively discouraged, since Buddhists are encouraged to be a light unto themselves -- a far cry from Christianity and Islam.

This morning I just made a start at reading Douthat's first substantive chapter, The Fashioned Universe, where he argues for the universe having been created by a supernatural entity, which for him is the Christian God. So far, I'm not impressed. 

Amazingly, somehow Douthat finds in the order of the universe as revealed by science evidence for religiosity.

For a general religious attitude to be safely discarded as irrational, modern science would need to have proved more than just the fallibility of the Ptolemaic system, or done more than sow doubts about the historicity of the early books of Genesis. It would need to have demonstrated that it's a fundamental mistake to interpret the universe as a whole as something structured, ordered, seemingly artistically created and mathematically designed.

This shows the flimsiness of his arguments. Modern science does indeed find that the universe is structured and ordered. But science doesn't view the universe as artistically created or mathematically designed. Those are religious sentiments.

Douthat wants us to believe that the orderliness of the universe needs to be explained. Who says? Maybe someday science will be able to do this. But maybe it won't. Perhaps we humans will never know why there are laws of nature rather than chaotic randomness. All we can be sure of is that if the universe wasn't ordered, we wouldn't be here, debating the origin of order.

This makes no sense to me. It is a classic God of the Gaps argument.

Douthat admits that cosmology and evolution are settled truths about the universe. Science has succeeded in presenting solid explanations for how the universe came to be as it is, and how life evolved on our planet. Yet because science only has unproven hypotheses about how order itself arose (the multiverse is one hypothesis), Douthat sees this as a reason to embrace religion's equally unproven hypotheses about a Creator God who designed the universe.

Darwinism established, with uncertainties around the edges of the theory, that an algorithmic process running over an extended period of time can generate increasingly complex and increasingly diverse machines made of cells and atoms. From small acorns, mighty trees; from the building blocks of life and the complex pressures of Earth's environment, stags and fungi, orcas and armadillos, praying mantises and human beings.

But those building blocks, that orderly environment, the system of the world in which the algorithmic process takes place, Hinduism's rta -- all this Darwin assumes as a given, not explained as the result of a blind process in its own right.

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

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

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

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

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

First Shukman describes koans in this fashion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This... This... This 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is this...

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

Thank you for being open to trying this.

Empathy is a sign of maturity, which is why Trump is so childlike

It's difficult to define morality, or for that matter, to define any other characteristic that most people would agree is part of being a decent human being. But that shouldn't stop us from speaking about morality, since common sense and intuition are a pretty good guide here.

In the February 2025 issue of Scientific American, there's an article about how the adolescent mind develops, "Growing the Adolescent Mind." 

The geeky details are interesting. However, what caught my eye was the mention of transcendence, which I usually think of as referring to something in the religious or spiritual sphere. After all, TM is shorthand for Transcendental Meditation, which has been popular since it started being taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1950s.

The psychologist who wrote the Scientific American story, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, says that transcendent thinking takes us beyond the here and now.

This emerging capacity to muse in abstract ways enables teenagers to understand themselves, their family, friends and society at large and to imagine what their own place in the world might be. Over time such transcendent thinking constructs resilience to adversity and places young people on a path to future satisfaction with life, work, and relationships.

No matter what age we are, being able to look beyond the narrow confines of Me is key to a mature vision of reality. The more we can expand our circle of caring, the greater our morality will be. Sure, it is natural to care most deeply about the people closest to us, family, friends, co-workers, and such. 

Knowing them intimately enables us to recognize their joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, hopes and fears. Empathy is fairly easy to come by when we feel like we know someone's interior life in addition to their exterior appearance and doings.

Yet we also can empathize with strangers, people we've never had any contact with and likely never will. For they share our basic humanity, no matter how their nationality, religion, political leaning, or any other characteristic differs from ours. 

And why stop with humans? Animals also deserve our empathy. This is the main reason I became a vegetarian about 55 years ago. I knew that I'd be upset (to put it mildly) if someone killed me in order to eat my flesh. So I empathized with the animals that often die cruel deaths to become a human meal. 

In the book I wrote for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Life is Fair, which presented the karmic rationale for vegetarianism, a quote from Albert Einstein was included:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited by time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This consciousness is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few people closest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

There are many reasons why I dislike Donald Trump. I readily admit that I have a lot of difficulty mustering up much compassion or empathy for him.

Still, when my wife watched The Apprentice, a movie about Trump, I did feel some empathy, as it was clear that his father didn't shower him with love and his relationship with Roy Cohn, a jerk of an attorney who schooled Trump in how to manipulate people for his own ends, seemed to be a second-chance attempt with a father figure.

(My parents divorced when I was very young, and I only spent one hour with my father, so I understand the pain of not having what so many people take for granted.)

What bothers me the most about Trump -- even though I realize this isn't under his control -- is how he demonstrates such little compassion and empathy. Every relationship is transactional for him. He always wants to know what's in it for him, not what is best for the other person (or group, or nation). 

Not once have I seen Trump show that he deeply cares about the suffering of others. I've never seen him shed a tear for those less fortunate than he is. Yesterday I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "A USAID worker I know died helping others. Trump is trashing his memory."

In the post I shared some of the wonderful things that the United States Agency for International Development does for people around the world. Sure, this agency isn't perfect. No government agency is, just as no person is. I wouldn't mind if Trump set out to fix the things that are wrong with USAID, leaving its core humanitarian mission intact.

But Trump is taking a wrecking ball to USAID. His America First policy is the political equivalent of a Me-Me-Me narcissist who only wants to see their own reflection in a mirror. In my blog post I shared an excerpt from a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. 

I’ve seen genuine improvements in U.S.A.I.D. over the years. Its public-private partnership to tackle lead poisoning, announced last year, was a model of American leadership. And so from my travels, this is what U.S.A.I.D. has come to mean to me:

I’ve seen women and girls with obstetric fistula, a horrific childbirth injury, get a $600 surgery that gives them back their lives — and this is something that U.S.A.I.D. supports.

I’ve seen men humiliated by elephantiasis and grotesquely enlarged scrotums, occasionally requiring a wheelbarrow to support their organs as they walk. And U.S.A.I.D. has fought this disease and made it less common.

I’ve seen children dying of malaria (and I’ve had malaria), and I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. help achieve major strides against the disease over the last two decades.

I’ve seen southern Africa ravaged by AIDS. And then President George W. Bush’s landmark program against AIDS, called PEPFAR and implemented in part through U.S.A.I.D., transformed the landscape. I saw coffin makers in Lesotho and Malawi grumble that their business was collapsing because far fewer people were dying. PEPFAR has saved 26 million lives so far. (In the coming months, I’ll see if I can calculate how many lives are lost to Trump’s cuts in aid.)

I’ve seen the suffering of communities where people in middle age routinely go blind from trachoma, river blindness or cataracts — and the transformation when U.S.A.I.D. helps prevent such blindness.

Trump scoffed that U.S.A.I.D. was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?

If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in International Justice Mission, which, with U.S.A.I.D. support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?

Trump’s moves are of uncertain legality, not least because U.S.A.I.D. was established by Congress, but the outcomes are indisputable. Around the world children are already missing health care and food because of the assault on the agency that Kennedy founded to uphold our values and protect our interests.

To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.

Science is the best guide to spirituality

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

I've never believed this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is pretty damn direct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinion piece makes me wonder, why choose a religion at all?

Today I came across a New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat, "Looking for Faith? Here's a Guide to Choosing a Religion." (That link should open for everybody, being a gift article from my online subscription; if not, here's a PDF file.)
Download Opinion | Looking for Faith? Here’s a Guide to Choosing a Religion. - The New York Times

Douthat, a regular NYT columnist, based his piece on a book he's written that has a release date later this month: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

While I obviously don't share this assumption, being an atheist, I just put in an advance order with Amazon, because I want to learn more about the arguments Douthat makes, which, based on his opinion piece, supposedly include new scientific evidence pointing to our universe being designed and the existence of a supernatural realm.

I can guess what this evidence is. If I'm right, Douthat is on shaky ground. But I could be wrong, so I'll read this book to see how persuasive he is.

My take on the opinion piece is that Douthat doesn't make a compelling case for either (1) the desirability of becoming religious, or (2) following his advice about how to choose a religion. If he had simply said, choose a religion that appeals to you, if you have a desire to be religious, I'd have no problem with that.

After all, how we choose what to eat or what music to listen to, assuming those options are open to us (prisoners and castaways on a desert island aren't able to make those choices) is based on personal preferences. Likes and dislikes are subjective. They're hard to argue with, given that we all have them and they differ from person to person.

But Douthat goes further in a fashion I found confusing. Here's an excerpt from his opinion piece:

So the religious seeker, looking out across a diverse religious landscape, should assume that there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought, not one truth and a million fictions. And this suggests, crucially, that even if you start in what turns out to be a wronger-than-average place, you can still draw closer to ultimate reality by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.

Let’s call this the Emeth principle, after a character in one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels. Emeth is a devout adherent of the religion of Tash, a vulture-demon, who ends up being welcomed into heaven on the grounds that in performing works of virtue, he has served the true god of Narnia, the lion Aslan, without knowing it.

This principle does not presume that all religions are identical, that there is no scenario in which any soul is ever lost. (Certainly it was not a matter of indifference to Lewis whether people worshiped Aslan or Tash.) The idea, rather, is that if God ordered the universe for human beings, then even a flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality — such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward.

Well, that's a really big "if" in the last sentence: ...if God ordered the universe for human beings... . This indicates that Douthat believes in just that, because elsewhere in his piece he also strongly implies, if not stating this directly, that a religious seeker will be guided to correct the errors in their seeking by a higher power.

Douthat also throws in some language for those who don't believe in a supernatural being who created the universe and helps people realize the nature of God.

Alternatively, does too much supernaturalism place an obstacle in the way of belief? Then it makes more sense to initially embrace the religious traditions that emphasize human ethical action or obedience to God’s law over and above miracle and mysticism.

It's clear by that "initially" that Douthat views Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions as the most true and real. Elsewhere in his piece he describes how someone was attracted to Zen Buddhism, practiced it for years, then realized that Christianity was their thing. He doesn't have any stories about people who start out Christian, then realize that Zen Buddhism is their thing.

What perplexes me is how Douthat can claim that the rightness or wrongness of a religion will become clear over time. I'd agree with this if he entertained the possibility that all religions are wrong that assume the existence of a supernatural God, since there is no objective evidence of this. 

This is why religiosity actually is akin to food or music preferences. It's a matter of taste. People can argue about their favorite types of food or music, but it comes down to a simple notion: I like it. Similarly, people belong to various religions because they like them. If they stop liking them, they either choose a different religion or give up believing in religiosity.

I reject Douthat's contention that it makes sense to choose a religion.

His opinion piece is incorrect when he claims that religiosity is making comeback. I haven't seen any evidence of this, just evidence to the contrary -- that the percentage of "none's" in the United States, at least, is steadily increasing. More and more people are choosing to be spiritual but not religious, or to just live life as it is without any form of spirituality. 

Likewise, the largest political group in the United States is nonaffiliated people, those who don't want to be Republican, Democrat, or a member of any other party. This doesn't mean they don't care about politics or improving our country. They just don't want to be confined in the box of a political party.

Douthat argues for the primacy of established large religions, somehow believing that having hundreds of millions or billions of members shows that a religion offers truths in accord with ultimate reality. No, it just shows that a religion is popular with lots of people. 

Falsehoods often are wildly popular, while the truth is shunned by many or most, being attractive to only a few. 

Everyone is a creator, says Rick Rubin

I've done a lot of creating in my life. But I've never thought of myself as an artist. Artists create paintings, music, sculptures, pottery, all that stuff that most people, including me, think are art'y.

Rick Rubin is leading me to expand that limited point of view. Recently I encountered Rubin when I was watching some episodes of 60 Minutes that I'd recorded and hadn't gotten around to viewing. The segment on Rubin was fascinating.

Here's a guy who claims to know nothing about music, yet is a highly successful record producer. (These days maybe it's more accurate to say recordings producer.) The Wikipedia page for Rubin says that he has meditated since he was 14.

The 60 Minutes episode was the first time I've ever seen an interview start with the interviewee requesting it begin with a bit of meditation. There's a short video on You Tube of about a third of the 60 Minutes piece that captures the essence of what Rubin is all about. Basically, he's into feeling. (I couldn't embed the video in this post, as it needs to be watched on You Tube.)

Wanting to know more about Rubin's outlook on life, I bought his book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I'm enjoying it. The many chapters are pleasingly short and written in an engaging style. Here's the first chapter where Rubin talks about creativity and art.

Those who do not engage in the traditional arts might be wary of calling themselves artists. They might perceive creativity as something extraordinary or beyond their capabilities. A calling for the special few who are born with these gifts.

Fortunately, this is not the case.

Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It's our birthright. And it's for all of us.

Creativity doesn't exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.

To create is to bring something into existence that wasn't there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam.

What you make doesn't have to be witnessed, recorded, sold, or encased in glass for it to be a work of art. Through the ordinary state of being, we're already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive. 

In each moment, we are immersed in a field of undifferentiated matter from which our senses gather bits of information. The outside universe we perceive doesn't exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions, we generate a reality internally. 

We create forests and oceans, warmth and cold. We read words, hear voices, and form interpretations. Then, in an instant, we produce a response. All of this in a world of our own creation.

Regardless of whether or not we're formally making art, we are all living as artists. We perceive, filter, and collect data, then curate an experience for ourselves and others based on this information set. Whether we do this consciously or unconsciously, by the mere fact of being alive, we are active participants in the ongoing process of creation.

To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us away. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead.

Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.

Here's an excerpt from his "Tuning In" chapter that describes more about how Rubin views creativity.

We are all translators for messages the universe is sending. The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.

Often art arrives in movements. Bauhaus architecture, abstract expressionism, French New Wave cinema, Beat poetry, punk rock to name a few from recent history. These moments appear like a wave; some artists are able to read the culture and position themselves to ride that swell. Others might see the wave and choose to swim against the current.

We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn't sensitively tuned, you're likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.

Most of the time, we are gathering data from the world through the five senses. With the information that's being transmitted on higher frequencies, we are channeling energetic material that can't be physically grasped. It defies logic, in the same way that an electron can be in two places at once. This elusive energy is of great worth, though so few people are open enough to hold it.

How do we pick up on a signal that can neither be heard nor be defined? The answer is not to look for it. Nor do we attempt to predict or analyze our way into it. Instead, we create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum. Drawing down the ideas that the universe is making available.

This freedom is not as difficult to achieve as one might think. We all start with it. As children, we experience much less interference between receiving ideas and internalizing them.

We accept new information with delight instead of making comparisons to what we already believe; we live in the moment rather than worrying about future consequences; we are spontaneous more than analytical; we are curious, not jaded. Even the most ordinary experiences in life are met with a sense of awe. Deep sadness and intense excitement can come within moments of each other. There's no facade and no attachment to a story.

Artists who are able to continually create great works throughout their lives often manage to preserve these child-like qualities. Practicing a way of being that allows you to see the world through uncorrupted, innocent eyes can free you to act in concert with the universe's timetable.

Why it can be easy to talk with someone who has very different beliefs than you do

In these divisive times marked by so much animosity between people who believe in radically different things, whether these be in a religious, political, or some other "hot button" area, it was refreshing for me to read a book with a core message that deeply resonated with me. 

Namely, that it can be easier to share ideas with someone on the opposite side of a dualistic spectrum -- liberal vs. conservative in the realm of politics, believer vs. atheist in the realm of religion -- than to converse with someone who believes very much as you do.

Tim Urban explains why in his book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. I've written several posts about this book, which I found highly creative and engaging.

One of Urban's core concepts is the difference between horizontal and vertical approaches to investigating or discussing any controversial subject. He focuses on politics, but since I'm writing on a churchless blog, I'll use as an example the question, Does a supernatural realm exist?

Normally most of us think that addressing this question gets us into the sphere of religiosity. On one side there's people who have a strong belief in God, heaven, angels, and other supernatural entities. On the other side there's people who lack that belief, considering that this physical world is all there is.

This is the horizontal aspect of the question, similar to the left vs. right divide in politics. But Urban points out that there's a vertical aspect to the question: the manner by which the question of whether a supernatural realm exists is investigated and discussed. 

He calls this Higher Mind vs. Lower Mind. So if the horizontal axis of the question is Atheist vs. Believer, the vertical axis is Higher Mind vs. Lower Mind. This results in four possibilities: Higher Mind Atheist, Lower Mind Atheist, Higher Mind Believer, Lower Mind Believer.

Someone operating from their Higher Mind (we all have both, a Higher Mind and Lower Mind) on this question will be open-minded, respectful of differing views, eager to use reason and evidence, willing to admit uncertainty, dedicated to finding truth even if it undermines their current viewpoint.

Someone operating from their Lower Mind on this question will be closed-minded, dismissive of opposing views, reluctant to use reason and evidence, unwilling to admit they could be wrong, firmly committed to their current viewpoint even if the truth points in a different direction.

So two Higher Mind people likely would have a pleasant productive discussion about whether a supernatural realm exists even if they disagree about the answer to that question, because they share an outlook that allows for the possibility of learning more about the question through an open exchange of views where each person recognizes that while they currently lean one way or the other on the supernatural question, they could be convinced otherwise through reason, evidence, and other Higher Mind methods. 

Conversely, two Lower Mind people could get into an intense argument about the existence of a supernatural realm even if both of them have much the same perspective on this question, because they differ on exactly what that realm consists of and how it can be accessed, and they lack the capacity to discuss these issues in an open-minded, respectful fashion. 

Urban argues persuasively in his book that what ails not only American society, but societies all around the world, isn't really political, religious, and other sorts of disagreements. It's the increasing spread of Lower Mind viewpoints that prevent productive discussions of those disagreements.

Sure, we humans have always faced a choice between using our Higher Mind or Lower Mind in our interactions with other people. However, it does seem that Urban is correct in warning that various forces are driving us in the direction of Lower Mind interactions, which makes it much more difficult to find common ground on important societal issues.

Higher Mind people may disagree with each other, but at least they will understand each other. And from that foundation of understanding, agreement about what to do about a societal problem or question may eventually arise. Lower Mind'ness just leaves us stuck in our opposite corners.

Cults can be political as well as religious

Here in the United States we're watching the Cult of Trump expand its hold on people who used to be independent thinkers and believers in democracy, but now have become total sycophants to a man who stands for nothing except his authoritarian impulses.

This shows that cults come in different forms, not just of the religious variety. Unfortunately, we humans are prone to excessive loyalty toward our own "tribe." When this happens, truth is sacrificed on the altar of self-interest, something that has been on full display ever since Trump appeared on the national political stage, yet is even more clear now that he's become president for a second term.

I won't bother to recite all the crap that Trump has buried the country in during the first week of his presidency. Some examples are:

-- Pardoning all of the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who were found guilty of assaulting police officers.
-- Illegally firing 18 inspector generals in federal agencies whose job is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, so that Trump and his billionaire buddies can indulge in their own waste, fraud, and abuse.
-- Ordering that all federal health agencies stop communications with both the general public and health workers just as bird flu is becoming a more serious problem.

Nonetheless, I want to believe that most of those who voted for Trump either didn't think that he'd do all the bad stuff that was promised during his campaign for president, or didn't pay sufficient attention to those authoritarian promises, choosing instead to focus on his commitment to bring down the price of groceries, strengthen the southern border, and deport undocumented immigrants.

Last month I wrote several posts about Tim Urban's creative and engaging book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. (See here and here.) Today I finished the book. I liked it a lot, even though Urban devotes a lot of pages to criticizing what he calls Social Justice Fundamentalism, as contrasted with Liberal Social Justice, which he favors, and fewer pages to similar excesses by right-wing zealots.

That's because he wrote the book during the Biden administration, when the Cult of Trump wasn't nearly as obvious as it is today. So I enjoyed finding criticisms of Social Justice Fundamentalism that apply equally to the Cult of Trump. I share some of them below because they're a useful guide to cults of all varieties, political as well as religious.

Click on the links to my previous posts about the book to learn, or refresh your memory about, how Urban describes various approaches to truth, ranging from the highest (Scientist) to the lowest (Zealot), and the difference between our Higher Mind and Primitive Mind.

Again, just substitute "Cult of Trump" for "Social Justice Fundamentalism" and you'll see that Urban's criticisms of the latter apply equally well to the former.

I said earlier that my problem with Social Justice Fundamentalism isn't the ideology itself. I strongly disagree with most aspects of SJF, but there are hundreds of ideologies floating around today's world that I don't like. My problem is with SJF's tactics -- the fact that it's an expansionist golem [an entity with strict conformity internally and an Us vs. Them mindset externally] that attempts to spread itself not through persuasion but through bullying, smear campaigns, loyalty oaths, guilt by association, and other coercive measures.

...When it comes to the state of our politics, negative sentiment like grievance and outrage are shorthand for righteousness in SJF, while positive sentiments like optimism and gratitude are taken as a sign of false consciousness, callous privilege, or both. When positivity is shamed out of the conversation, the air ends up filled with gloom, resentment, and nihilism -- not sentiments that energize people to fix problems.

...SJF speaks instead to people's Primitive Minds using the "with us or against us" language of "common enemy" rhetoric -- while stigmatizing common-humanity rhetoric like "there is only one race, the human race" as bigotry. Common-enemy rhetoric creates division and limits the movement's size and ability to make enduring change.

...We talked about the way high-rung politics sees people as a mess of gray complexity, an evolving jumble of virtues and flaws. Through a high-rung lens, all people are worthy of compassion, and no one is above criticism. On the low rungs, people are either perfectly righteous 1s or morally reprehensible 0s.

...The Lower Right and Lower Left both are illiberal. They're both anti-science. They're both hypocritical. They're both authoritarian. They're both bigoted. The political uniform that low-rung movements wear is just a facade under which lies a golem with all the trademark low-rung qualities. If one golem is causing more trouble than the other during any given year, it speaks not to that golem being worse but to that golem having more power to do damage at that time.

...My problem isn't with progressivism or conservatism but the fact that, at the moment, Americans are being deprived of the high-rung version of both by low-rung groups wearing blue and red uniforms.

Miracles aren't so miraculous in the light of mathematics

We humans have some innate amazing capabilities. However, intuitively grasping mathematical principles, including statistics and probability theory, isn't one of them. Or at least, this is very rare.

That's why almost everybody mistakenly overestimates the rarity of unusual events. I wrote about this in a 2014 post, "Miracles" happen all the time. Mathematics demands them. In that post I included this question from a book I was reading:

How many people must be in a room to make it more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday?

The answer is 23. I would have thought the answer was many more. Even after I've read the reason why 23 people is the answer (it has to do with exponents, basically), I still have difficulty understanding that reason. 

The December 2024 issue of New Scientist has a story by mathematician Sarah Hart, "The surprising maths that explains why coincidences are so common." (It's a British magazine, so they say maths.)
Download The surprising maths that explains why coincidences are so common | New Scientist

Hart starts off by relating an experience.

I had a strange experience in a cafe recently. When paying for coffee, I asked to use the toilet. After I tapped my PIN into the card reader, the barista handed me a slip of paper that was blank apart from a single number – the same one I had just tapped into the keypad! It turned out that this was also the entry code for the bathroom door.

Was this evidence of a shadowy plot by the agents of Big Caffeine? No, it was just a fluke, but the event got me thinking about coincidences more generally. Occasionally, we are faced with events that seem so improbable we can’t help but feel the universe is sending us a message. As a mathematician, I know that coincidences are often far more likely to occur than we think – and this fact can have serious consequences everywhere from the science lab to lottery kiosks and the law courts.

My coffee shop experience is a good place to start because we can calculate the exact probability of it happening by chance. There are 10,000 possible four-digit numbers, meaning a 1 in 10,000 probability that the door code matches my PIN. Unlikely, yes, but let us put it in context. The cafe was in York, UK – a popular tourist destination with 8.9 million visitors annually. If each visitor has one bank card, we would expect around 890 cards each year to have the same PIN as that cafe’s bathroom door code. I don’t feel so special now.

Looking more broadly, there are so many events happening to every person each day, coincidences are bound to happen frequently. But we aren't aware of all those seemingly unusual events. Usually we only know about them when they happen to us or a close friend.

Or when they're so unusual, they become a news story, as was the case with the Bulgarian National Lottery when the same six winning numbers came up on two consecutive draws. Hart explains why this actually was to be expected.

Such analyses can help explain some of history’s most breathtaking coincidences, such as the curious case of the Bulgarian national lottery. In September 2009, the same numbers – 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 – came out in two consecutive draws.

It sounds like a fix, but the statistician David Hand calculated that the game would only have to run for 43 years before it becomes more likely than not for the same numbers to be drawn at least twice. (The lottery had, by this point, been running for 52 years.)

So when someone says of a seemingly unlikely event, "It was a miracle," almost certainly it wasn't. (I was inclined to omit almost, but science tells us that nothing is absolutely certain, just extremely likely.)

Coincidences appear to share with miracles this psychological phenomenon: it's all about us. This was pointed out in the explanation of why it only takes 23 people in a room for it to be more likely than not that two of those people share the same birthday. 

Skeptical about how this could be true, we picture ourselves going up to the other 22 people and asking them if their birthday was the same as ours, July 18, say. What we don't picture is each of those 22 people doing the same thing with everybody else in the room. The author of the explanation says:

Take a look at the news. Notice how much of the negative news is the result of acting without considering others. I’m an optimist and do have hope for mankind, but that’s a separate discussion :).

In a room of 23, do you think of the 22 comparisons where your birthday is being compared against someone else’s? Probably.

Do you think of the 231 comparisons where someone who is not you is being checked against someone else who is not you? Do you realize there are so many? Probably not.

The fact that we neglect the 10 times as many comparisons that don’t include us helps us see why the “paradox” can happen.

It's natural to feel that the world revolves around us. After all, the only person who we're in direct intimate contact with as a subject rather than an object is ourself. But statistics and mathematics shows us that we're less important in the grand scheme of things than we typically view ourselves as being.

Having someone call us just when we're thinking of contacting them may seem miraculous from our personal point of view (which happened to me), yet isn't at all surprising when we look at things from a broader perspective where billions of people are contacting each other.

We like to think that the universe is sending us meaningful messages through rare or unexpected events. Actually, laws of probability are sending us non-meaningful messages.

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Germany surviving Hitler doesn't reassure me about Trump

I don't believe that evil exists.

At least, not in the way that word typically is used, as someone or something with wholly negative qualities that border, if not actually inhabit, a dualistic metaphysical realm where Good is inherently opposed to Evil as opposite cosmic forces.  

I do believe that sometimes people do really bad things. Not because they are evil. Because they are people with both the capability and the intention to do those bad things. 

Murder. Rape. Torture. Whether those who carry out horrendous acts like these do so of their free will, or via deterministic causes, doesn't affect the pain and suffering they inflict on their fellow humans.

Hitler frequently is cited as the epitome of evil, or as I prefer, of acting really badly.

Yesterday the Salon discussion group my wife and I have belonged to for many years held our monthly meeting at the home of one of our members. Politically we all lean in the leftward direction, so Donald Trump featured prominently in our conversing. 

Not in a positive way, of course, though I did say that I hoped Trump would find a way to save TikTok, something I wrote about on my Salem Political Snark blog last night. And several of us noted that it made sense to deport undocumented migrants to the United States who have committed serious crimes.

After we'd talked quite a bit about the danger Trump poses to our country and the world during his second term as president (which begins tomorrow), a woman who was a young child in Germany during World War II said:

A German friend who I keep in touch with told me, "If Germany survived Hitler, the United States will survive Trump."

Well, while I appreciated the attempt to assuage my concerns about Trump, that statement didn't do much to reassure me. I replied with, "But millions of Germans died in World War II along with six million Jews; though Germany survived Hitler, those people didn't."

Some Googling just revealed that Germany had 5,553,000 military deaths in World War II and 6,600,000-8,800,000 combined civilian and military deaths -- which I assume doesn't include the 6,000,000 Jews killed in concentration camps. 

Yes, Germany now is a prosperous democracy. That's great.

However, the blunt fact remains that an autocratic ruler, Hitler, did tremendous damage to Germany and the entire world. I understand the desire to look upon history as being on a long-term positive course, but a more realistic view is that history can take a dark turn lasting hundreds of years in which human progress toward prosperity, democracy, and equality first stalls, then reverses.

History, it often is said, is written by the winners.

Though I'm no expert in the history of World War II, my understanding is that absent some blunders made by Hitler (such as invading Russia, and an inability to construct an atomic bomb), the Axis could have won the war -- obviously with far-reaching negative consequences. Our history books now would look upon Hitler with admiration, not criticism.

On a personal level, we humans seem to have a bias toward negativity, since evolution primed us to see danger lurking even where it wasn't, given that a single failure to recognize a mortal threat would leave a prehistoric human dead, while reacting to unreal threats just ended up being a waste of time.

However, when it comes to long-term historic trends, I sense that nowadays most people (including me, usually) have a bias toward seeing things steadily improving, albeit with inescapable temporary downturns along the Way of Progress.

I hope that outlook is correct. But I suspect that it isn't. The Dark Ages lasted a long time in medieval Europe. The Renaissance eventually occurred, thankfully. Now we live in times that are much more fast-moving, volatile, and unpredictable. 

Hopefully the United States will survive the next four years of another Trump presidency. There's a chance, albeit slim in my decidedly personal opinion, that my country will not only survive, but thrive. 

And yet... some paragraphs from the Wikipedia page, "Adolf Hitler's rise to power," concern me, because they show how an autocrat or dictator can come to power through a democratic process, then undermine democracy in a highly scary fashion. 

Hitler ran for the presidency in 1932 but was defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg; nonetheless, he achieved a strong showing of second place in both rounds. Following this, in July 1932 the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, albeit short of an absolute majority. 1933 was a pivotal year for Hitler and the Nazi Party. Traditionally, the leader of the party who held the most seats in the Reichstag was appointed Chancellor.

However, President von Hindenburg was hesitant to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Following several backroom negotiations – which included industrialists, Hindenburg's son Oskar, the former chancellor Franz von Papen, and Hitler – Hindenburg acquiesced and on 30 January 1933, he formally appointed Adolf Hitler as Germany's new chancellor. Although he was chancellor, Hitler was not yet an absolute dictator.

The groundwork for the Nazi dictatorship was laid when the Reichstag was set on fire in February 1933. Asserting that the communists were behind the arson, Hitler convinced von Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which severely curtailed the liberties and rights of German citizens. Using the decree, Hitler began eliminating his political opponents.

Following its passage, Hitler began arguing for more drastic means to curtail political opposition and proposed the Enabling Act of 1933. Once enacted this law gave the German government the power to override individual rights prescribed by the constitution, and vested the Chancellor (Hitler) with emergency powers to pass and enforce laws without parliamentary oversight.

The law came into force in March and by April, Hitler held de facto dictatorial powers and used them to order the construction of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau for communists and other political opponents. Hitler's rise to power was completed in August 1934 when, following the death of President von Hindenburg, Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency and became Führer, the sole leader of Germany.

In retrospect, Hitler's rise to power was aided in part by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members willing to do the same. The party engaged in electoral battles in which Hitler participated as a speaker and organizer. Street battles and violence also erupted between the Communists' Rotfrontkämpferbund and the Nazis' Sturmabteilung(SA).

Once the Nazi dictatorship was firmly established, the Nazis themselves created a mythology surrounding their rise to power. German propaganda described this time period as either the Kampfzeit (the time of struggle) or the Kampfjahre (years of struggle).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like how Henry Shukman views love

Well, I'm on Day 2 of an approximately year-long journey on what meditation teacher Henry Shukman calls The Way.

Pleasingly, I don't have to journey to India or Tibet, nor go on lengthy meditation retreats. All I needed to do was install an app on my iPhone and pay $89.99 for a year's worth of daily talks and guided meditations that comprise The Way.

One thing that I like about Shukman's approach is that The Way is unique, to my knowledge, among online meditation instruction with its "no choice" format. I've tried quite a few meditation apps. They all have offered a large array of material -- guided meditations, interviews with spiritual teachers, talks on various subjects, videos, and such.

By contrast, with The Way, you start at the beginning and proceed step by step along a single path. Nice and simple. I ordered Shukman's most recent book, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. I started reading the book today. 

It's well written and has an appealing message, based on the first 20 introductory pages. I usually shy away from spiritual writings that talk about love as being the most important thing. Not that love isn't important. It is. I just don't enjoy lofty paeans to love that aren't grounded in practicality.

From what I can tell, Shukman views love in much the same way as I look upon oneness. It's an evident fact, not an abstraction or emotion. The basis of love is connection, which is facilitated by a recognition that what we normally consider to be our self actually doesn't exist. His first paragraphs are:

This is a work of unabashed advocacy. It seeks to persuade you that a radical reversal in our ordinary understanding of self and world is available. And that it matters because it not only brings us closer to reality, but also has far-reaching benefits, both for an individual and for society at large.

This book is about the best subject. It's about the single most astounding fact you will ever come to know. It's about you.

You yourself are the most astonishing reality in the whole universe. You -- right where you are, right now, whether you are reading these words while standing at an airport newsstand, slouching in a subway car rattling under the streets of a great city, sagging behind the wheel on a gridlocked freeway, or sitting at a lamp-lit desk at night scrolling down the Amazon home page -- are not what you have taken yourself to be.

Yes, you are the person with the history, hopes, relationships, physiology, aptitudes, and fallibilities that help to define who you think you are. But you are also both much more, and much less. When we get right down to it, our sense of self is an illusion, like a mirage over a hot road, no more substantial than a reflection on the surface of a lake. To "awaken" is to realize this, and this book is a guide to catching glimpses of what that means.

If this book succeeds even a little, it will open a crack in your sense of self -- a chink in the armor of your certainty, of your confidence in the basic assumptions we all make about life -- that will allow a revelation to begin to unfold in your life, as well as in the lives of those around you, and ultimately, perhaps, in the whole human family, and through it, in the great family of all animate beings.

This book is about joining wholeheartedly in the play of this cosmos, which bursts forth in a spectacular array of life on this planet. Here, the bare mineral desert of the galaxy, in its vast, austere beauty, explodes in the wild play of life. This is the universe's garden. This right here is the treasured hothouse. Right here is where the cosmos blooms. 

And among the many forms in which it blooms, here is the creature -- you -- that has enough consciousness to be cognizant of its situation, to know how it evolved to be what it is, and to be aware of its own awareness. And to discover in its very bones that it is part of the whole of creation. The universe is blooming right now as you. 

So it appears that Shukman looks upon reality much as I do. That we live in a highly interconnected cosmos, bound by universal laws of nature. Any feeling of being separate from reality, of being a stranger in a strange land, a soul tossed out of some supernatural paradise who needs to find its real heavenly home -- that is an illusion fostered by our sense of being a distinct self.

Less self, more connection with everything else. We are a wave, or a ripple, tossed up by the ocean of the universe. It is possible to relax back into that ocean through meditation and other approaches that lessen our sense of being separate and distinct from all that surrounds us. Pain and pleasure, hate and love, war and peace -- whatever we experience emerges from the whole called the universe.

Shukman writes:

The proposition of this book -- and of the deep meditation traditions from which it draws -- is that it is possible to see through our sense of ourselves as separate entities, and to break an enchantment we didn't know we had been caught in.

Far from this risking a dissociative tumble into a vortex of nihilism, breaking the spell that separates us from the universe can be the single most healing, positively life-transforming event that can happen to us, with massive beneficial impacts on our priorities, orienting us away from self-protection and self-promotion and toward concern for the well-being of others, arising from a deep sense of connection. 

And the reason awakening can accomplish all this is that it opens up a boundless love -- the "original love" of this book's title.

Today I got this email message from Shukman about meditation. I like his style.

They say the only bad session is the one you didn’t do. A good reminder to try and keep a consistent practice.

But there is a deeper truth here. We often think that a sit where we had a calm mind we did ‘right’, and a sit where we got distracted by thoughts we did ‘wrong’.

But there is no performance here. There really  is no good or bad meditation session. There is simply our experience in the moment – each moment has its own intrinsic value just as it is. And the key thing is being still and quiet, knowing there is nothing to live up to, no special condition we have to find. 

In the next session on The Way we explore arriving in the present moment, to observe our experience just as it is. No expectations, no preconceived notions of good and bad – just you being you. If you'd like to experience this, click the button below from your mobile phone to start your next session.

Why general relativity leads me to prefer Zen'ish meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Vox article: How meditation deconstructs your mind

Recently I came across two articles on the same subject -- how mindfulness is just the tip of the meditation iceberg, and how advanced meditation approaches can be described scientifically.

Here's the introductory passages from "Beyond Mindfulness" by Matthew Sacchet and Judson Brewer in the July/August issue of Scientific American.

Millions worldwide practice mindfulness meditation, not just for their mental health but as a means to enhance their general well-being, reduce stress and be more productive at work. The past decade has seen an extraordinary broadening of our understanding of the neuroscience underlying meditation; hundreds of clinical studies have highlighted its health benefits.

Mindfulness is no longer a fringe activity but a mainstream health practice: the U.K.’s National Health Service has endorsed mindfulness-based therapy for depression. Mobile apps have brought meditation techniques to smartphones, enabling a new era in meditative practice.

The approach to research on meditation has been evolving in equal measure. Looking back, we can identify distinct “waves.” The first wave, from approx­imate­ly the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, assessed meditation’s clinical and therapeutic potential for treating a broad set of psychological and physical health concerns.

The second wave, starting in the early 2000s, focused on mechanisms of mindfulness’s effectiveness, revealing why it yields benefits for mental health that are at times comparable to those achieved with pharmaceuticals.

Meditation science is now entering a third wave, exploring what we call advanced meditation—deeper and more intense states and stages of practice that often require extended training and can be experienced through increasing mastery. University research programs are being established to study these altered mental states, similar to new academic endeavors to investigate the merits of psychedelic drugs for personal well-being and a variety of medical conditions.

More interesting to me, because the article is written in a more readable fashion and clearly summarizes  what the above-mentioned third wave of meditation research consists of, is a January 8, 2025 Vox piece, Oshan Jarrow's "How Meditation Deconstructs Your Mind."

It's based on Vox's five-day course on deepening one's meditation practice, More to Meditation. Naturally I signed up for up. Here's some excerpts from the Vox article.

Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.

Which is great — basic mindfulness practices that help us concentrate on the present are both relaxing and useful. But as psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term “McMindfulness,” writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever.

One way to pursue happiness is to try and fill your experience with things that make you happy — loving relationships, prestige, kittens, whatever. Another is to change the way your mind generates experience in the first place. This is where more advanced meditation focuses. It operates on our deep mental habits so that well-being can more naturally arise in how we experience anything at all, kittens or not.

But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.

Part of my hope for this course is to change that. Even if you don’t want to join a monastery (I do not), there’s still a huge range of more “advanced meditation” practices to explore that go beyond the mainstream basic mindfulness stuff. Some can feel like melting into “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurably electricity,” and ultimately change the way you relate to pleasure, like the jhānas. Others, like non-dual practices (which I’ll get into later), can plunge you into strange modes of consciousness full of wonder and insight that you might never have known were there.

...In a pivotal 2021 paper by cognitive scientists Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter, that big picture — a model of how meditation affects the mind that can explain the effects of simple breathing practices and the most advanced transformations of consciousness alike — finally began coming together.

Let’s start with plain language. Think of meditation as having four stages of depth, each with a corresponding style of practice: focused attention, open-monitoring, non-dual, and cessation.

Near the surface,“focused attention” practices help settle the mind. By default, our minds are usually snow globes in constant frenzy. Our attention constantly jumps from one flittering speck to the next, and the storm of activity blocks our view of the whole sphere. By focusing attention on an object — the breath, repeating a mantra, the back of your thigh, how a movement feels in the body — we can train the mind to stop getting yanked around. With the mind settled on just one thing, it’s easier to see through the storm.

“Open-monitoring” practices help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind, opening the aperture of our attention to notice the wider field of awareness that all those thoughts, feelings, and ideas all arise and fall within.

Once you’ve settled the mind and gotten acquainted with the more spacious awareness beneath it, “non-dual” practices help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it, as we normally do. (I know this probably sounds weird, we’ll get more into it later. Some things in meditation are irreducibly weird, which is part of what makes me think it’s worth paying attention to.)

And finally, for practitioners with serious meditation chops, you can go one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears. If you sink deep enough into the mind, you’ll find that it just extinguishes, like a candle flame blown out by a sudden gust of wind. That can happen for seconds at a time, called nirodhas in Theravada Buddhism, or it can last for days at a time, called nirodha-sammapati, or cessation attainment.

...Now, bear with me. We’re going to retell that story, but using Laukkonen and Slagter’s innovation — the general theory of meditation. The key to this framework is a theory that’s risen to dominate cognitive science in the past decade or so: predictive processing.

Predictive processing says that we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. We don’t see the world through our eye sockets; we don’t hear the world through our ear canals.

These all feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world from scratch — like when we dream — only that in waking consciousness, they’re at least trying to match what they whip up in our experience to what might actually be going on in the world outside our skulls.

The building blocks for these conjured models of the world we experience — the predictive mind — are called “priors,” those beliefs or expectations based on the past. Priors run a spectrum from deep and ancestral to superficial and personal.

For example, say you ventured an opinion in front of your third grade class and everyone laughed. You might have formed a prior that assumes sharing your thoughts leads to ridicule. If that experience was particularly meaningful to you, it could embed deep in your predictive mind, shaping your behavior, and even perception of the world, for the rest of your life.

Similarly, our bodies know how to do some of their most basic functions — like maintaining body temperature around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — because we’ve inherited priors from our evolutionary history that holding our body in that range will keep us alive. According to predictive processing, consciousness is constructed via this hierarchy of priors like a house of cards.

With all that in place, science’s new meditation story can be put nice and short: Meditation deconstructs the predictive mind.

But hold on. It took billions of years for evolution to slowly, patiently build us these predictive minds. They’re one of the great marvels of biology. Why would we want to deconstruct them?

Well, evolution doesn’t care whether survival feels good. Conscious experience — as we know it — might be a really useful trick for adapting to our environments and achieving the goals that further life’s crusade against entropy and death. But natural selection cares about ensuring our bodies survive, not that we achieve happiness and well-being.

Which is why you often hear meditation teachers talking about “reprogramming” the mind. We don’t want to just leave the predictive mind in pieces. Again, it’s one of the most useful adaptations life on Earth has ever mustered. But in some departments, we might want to kindly thank evolution, while taking the reins and revising a bit of its work to make this whole business of living feel better.

Each step, from focused attention through to cessation, is a deeper deconstruction of the predictive mind. But “deconstructing” doesn’t mean, like, breaking it.

Instead, the key idea is “precision weighting,” which you can think of as the volume knob on each of the priors that make up your predictive mind. The higher the precision — or volume — assigned to something, the more focus your mind pays to it. The more your experience warps around it.

Deconstructing the mind is to progressively turn down the volume on each layer of stacked priors, releasing the grip they ordinarily hold on awareness. By definition, then, the deeper meditation goes, the stranger (as in, further from ordinary) the resulting experience will be.

Fascinating. And the five-day course, which comes via email, goes into all this in more depth than the Vox article does. In the second day's message (at least I think that's where I'm at currently), Jarow provides some suggestions for where to go to get more instruction in meditation.

I'm quite familiar with focused attention and open monitoring from my fifty-five years of daily meditation. Non-dual approaches, not so much, though in this regard Jarow mentions the book by Thomas Metzinger I wrote about extensively last year, The Elephant and the Blind.

He also mentioned a couple of online sources of instruction in non-dual awareness. One had a bunch of videos, the first of which was about 90 minutes long. I watched a few minutes of it, then decided I wasn't willing to devote that much time to the guided meditations.

I then checked out the Loch Kelly web site. I've heard Kelly speak on Sam Harris' Waking Up app and liked his style. Today I signed up for a 14 day free trial of his Glimpses app that I now have on my iPhone. Kelly says that short glimpses of nonduality can bring about a transformation of consciousness, though it takes longer to do this in those brief chunks than if you meditate for longer periods regularly.

The Cessation thing is intriguing, but at the moment it doesn't really appeal to me. The Scientific American article describes cessations by a single advanced meditator that were examined by the authors using EEG data. What they call "cessation" of consciousness isn't what the word sounds like, but more like a selfless state with echoes of mindfulness.

When we discuss the loss of consciousness during advanced meditation cessation events, it is crucial to differ­entiate it from unconsciousness that is caused by anesthesia, coma (including medically induced coma), physical trauma such as head injuries, and naturally oc­curring events such as sleep. Unlike these states, cessation events in advanced meditation represent a peak meditative experience in which ordinary self-aware­ness and sensory processing are tempor­arily suspended.

...The lowest levels of alpha power and connectivity occurred immediately before and after cessation. The results of this study are consistent with the suggestion that this type of meditation diminishes hierarchical predictive processing—that is, the mind’s tendency to predict and rank self-related narratives and beliefs. The cessation process can ultimately result in the ab­sence of con­sciousness and the emer­gence of a deeply present form of aware­ness and thought that accepts whatever arises, whether positive or negative.

I'm not impressed with NotebookLM or weird notions of oneness

I do my best to accept the diversity of opinions expressed by people who leave comments on this blog. Diversity is good. If we all believed in the same things, life would be super boring. 

However, I'm also big on coherent conversations. While I understand that it is difficult to accomplish this via blog post comments, there's much more value in comments that can be understood by other people, as understanding is the foundation for agreements or disagreements. 

Here's an example.

A few days ago I wrote "Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't." It wasn't one of my best blog posts. Adequate, but not more than that. I was hoping that someone else would have something wiser to say about oneness.

Because I've found that Osho Robbins, a regular commenter on this blog, often makes good sense, I did my best to understand what he was getting at in his comments on my oneness post. I failed. Here's quotes from his comments that seem to summarize his position on oneness. 

I have not claimed the existence of ONENESS.
What I have done is shown that ONENESS cannot be known or experienced.
ONENESS is non-existent because it ticks all the boxes for a non-existent thing.
ONENESS has NO CHARACTERISTICS hence it does NOT exist.

OK. I can understand those statements. Oneness doesn't exist and, not surprisingly, it can't be known or experienced. What I can't understand is how Robbins says a whole lot of other stuff in his comments that apparently he considers to be related to nonexistent and unknowable oneness. 

Look, over the years I've been fond of saying that existence exists, and wow, isn't that amazing, that there's something rather than nothing. I readily admit that in one sense, existence can't be known or experienced, since all we can know or experience are entities that exist.

So when I say that existence exists, I'm not claiming that existence is something that stands apart from what exists. This appears to be similar to Robbins' statement that oneness can't be known or experienced, just the unity of things that can be known or experienced. 

However, the difference is that Robbins seems to have a lot of fondness for oneness that doesn't exist. He isn't expressing admiration for love and other manifestations of the unity that undergirds reality, as manifested in universal laws of nature, ecological interconnectedness, and such. 

And that's what I don't get. His take on oneness isn't that it is beyond speech, reason, perception, and other human ways of knowing and communicating. That would put oneness in the sphere of Zen. Rather, it is that somehow we should care about oneness even though it doesn't exist in any fashion.

I can understand the appeal of mysticism, even though I've fallen away from embracing it. What I don't understand is talk about oneness that doesn't exist.

I also don't understand the appeal of NotebookLM, which is capable of fashioning "podcasts" from videos, recordings, or writings, creating two personalities from the thoughts communicated by a single person.

Previously I shared a NotebookLM podcast from Osho Robbins. Then Jim Sutherland, another regular commenter on this blog, emailed me about a NotebookLM podcast fashioned from reports of his about a 2017 visit to the Dera, the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India. 

I listened to about a third of the 17 minute audio podcast. I guess I have a low tolerance for NotebookLM, because I found the artificial intelligence generated voices so irritating, I wished that Sutherland that simply shared a written version of what the podcast is about, rather than having those reports filtered through Notebook LM.

The way I see it, NotebookLM simply is regurgitating a communication that already exists in a podcast form. Nothing new is added by NotebookLM. It merely fashions a pseudo-dialogue between two AI generated "people," each of whom reflects the content of the original communication.

Sure, I can understand the appeal of having the NotebookLM personalities gush over the wisdom contained in something a person has created, be it a video, audio recording, or document. But for me, the listener/watcher of NotebookLM, I don't see what benefit there is in having the original communication fashioned into a "podcast" with the same content.

If I'm wrong about NotebookLM, I'll be pleased to be corrected. That's just how I see it at the moment. 

Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't

Oneness comes in for quite a bit of discussion in comment conversations on this blog.

Not surprisingly, there's no consensus about whether oneness exists or what form it takes. That's to be expected, since debates over whether reality is inherently marked by unity or duality have been raging for thousands of years. 

Though I've written a book called "Return to the One," which describes in a lot of detail the teachings of Plotinus, a 3rd century Neoplatonic Greek philosopher, I don't feel like I have anything genuinely wise to say about oneness. 

Nonetheless, here's some non-genuinely-wise thoughts on the subject. They really don't have anything to do with Plotinus, or at least very little. In fact, my current attitude toward oneness is at odds with Plotinus's teachings on the subject in this sense:

Plotinus believed that this physical realm was marked by multiplicity, while the supernatural spiritual realm demonstrated much more unity. Well, that presumes that such a realm exists, so obviously I don't have anything cogent to say about it, as my experience is only of this world.

So let's consider how much oneness there is in the physical reality we all inhabit. There's quite a bit, actually. 

For example, science knows that quantum fields pervade the entire universe. In fact, quantum fields are the universe. No quantum fields -- such as electromagnetism and the nuclear forces -- no universe. 

This was made clear in a provocative article in a recent issue of New Scientist, Volatile cosmology. The teaser after the title says, "The universe as we know it could vanish in an instant. What does our continued existence tel us about the reality we can't see, asks Miriam Frankel." 

A couple of paragraphs gives the gist of the article.

Quantum fields are the fundamental building blocks of the universe, which then give rise to the more familiar particles and forces of the standard model of particle physics. Chief among them is the Higgs field, associated with the Higgs boson, which permeates the universe and gives elementary particles their mass.

The Higgs had been hypothesized for decades, but we were in for a surprise when the particle was finally measured at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva in 2012. The result suggested that the Higgs field isn't stable because it isn't in its lowest possible energy state. We know that objects like atoms or particles tend to want to minimize their energy, so in theory the Higgs could suddenly drop to its lowest possible state in a process known as a phase transition.

This is similar to the phase transition that occurs when liquid water boils to make steam. If you look inside a saucepan of near-boiling water, you will see tiny bubbles of gas nucleating at the bottom. Similarly, a phase transition in the Higgs field would create bubbles of its lowest possible energy.

Those bubbles would contain very strange physics. As a bubble formed, the quantum fields would suddenly shift, effectively rewriting the laws of physics and creating chaos. Terrifyingly, the bubbles would expand at light speed, swallowing everything around them.

Fortunately, this is just a hypothesis, albeit one founded on some solid science. I include it because I think the notion of the universe as we know it dissolving through a phase transition of the quantum field that gives particles their mass is pretty damn cool. I've got more pressing things to worry about, of course.

There's a unity to our universe, as is clear from the "uni" in both words, and the possibility that the universe could swallow itself, so to speak, by the Higgs field undergoing a phase transition. Thus we don't have to look beyond the reality in which we live and breathe to experience a certain oneness. 

For we humans are made of quantum fields, as is everything else. It isn't that we inhabit the universe; we are the universe. How could it be otherwise?

Our conceptions of duality or multiplicity are just that: concepts imagined by the fertile human mind, which has evolved to be capable of fantasizing things that aren't physically real, unless we consider neurons firing in a brain to be physically real, which they are in a limited sense that most of us wouldn't view as genuine reality.

This is where I feel most "spiritual" discussions of oneness go awry. I readily admit that I contributed to this in my book about Plotinus. While I used some concrete examples of oneness -- most of us prefer the unity of love to the division of hate, for example -- I also embraced the other-worldliness of Plotinus's philosophy.

Absolute oneness would be extremely boring. Nothing would happen there. Nothing could happen there.

Any happening would involve change, as all change is from one state to another state, duality. Plotinus recognized this when he noted that it would be crazy for a seeker of oneness to have to fail to exist in order to be one with oneness, for then he or she would lack the ability to experience oneness just when it was at hand. 

Thus oneness can't exist in an absolute form. If it did, like the Higgs field causing all that we know to vanish in an instant, absolute unity would have no entities within it capable of knowing that unity.

So let's be content with the glimpses of unity we enjoy in our better moments where the world seems to hold together in a pleasing sense, and we feel like we're an integral part of the world, not someone looking out upon it from an imaginary vantage point in a separate reality that doesn't exist.

Wow. Here's an AI generated podcast discussion of the RSSB guru's message.

When I got an email yesterday from Osho Robbins, a regular visitor to this blog, at first I didn't know what to make of his description of a new video on his You Tube channel. (Osho Robbins is a pseudonym; I assume Art Ashta is his real name.)

He said:

Hi Brian, one of my friends showed me how to get AI to do an indepth analysis of a video, in the form of a podcast. So I used my previous video, to get a perspective of how AI would handle this. The result is very interesting. 

https://youtu.be/tTXCgAAbh2c?si=Yn8Gqe1aII5oj7Ty

This is solely generated by AI, which is creating two different personalities to discuss and analyse the implications of the statements made on the video I previously posted. Will make an interesting discussion because they conclude, on the podcast, that the statement of oneness cannot be ignored, and if it is accepted then it means the efforts to merge are all in vain. 

 

Hence most disciples just ignore it when the current guru makes such statements because they cannot reconcile these statements with the duality teachings. 

 

kind regards

Osho Robbins

The AI generated video is below, or you can click on the link above. I just listened to the "podcast."

Maybe I missed something on my one-time listening, but I didn't get the impression that the AI generated personalities, one of whom is Robbins/Ashta, arrived at a solid conclusion about the nature of oneness. Rather, I came away with the message that different people will arrive at different conclusions about the oneness message that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is conveying in his talks. And that's absolutely fine.

Since this is an AI generated conversation based on a single video that Robbins/Ashta believes points in the direction of oneness, and away from the traditional dualism of RSSB where disciples are to rely on the guru in a journey from this physical realm to higher supernatural realms, obviously it isn't surprising that the conversation is sympathetic to how Robbins/Ashta sees things. Here's the "podcast" video.

So I came away less interested in the message of the "podcast" and more interested in how it was AI generated. Some Googling revealed a September 2024 post with the provocative title, "I tried Google's new one-click AI podcast creator, and now I don't know what's real anymore." Here's most of the text, absent the video made by GoogleNotebookLM.

I’ve had a glimpse of how AI will change the world, and it’s filling me with both fear and wonder in equal measure.

The source of my consternation is Google NotebookLM. NotebookLM takes an article, blog post, or web page, and with just one click produces an audio file of a conversation between two people about it that sounds so natural and realistic that there is no way you’d believe you weren’t listening to two real people talking. They talk with passion and authority about the subject, sound engaged and interested and riff off one another in such a natural way that it takes your breath away. There are even the little sniffs, slight mispronunciations, slurs, and little giggles that all make it sound completely human.

Here's what happened. In my spare time I write a blog about Tai Chi called the Tai Chi Notebook. So, having heard about NotebookLM (the 'notebook' in the name is just a coincidence) I thought I’d throw one of my Tai Chi articles at it, just to see what it did.

Creating the audio is easy. It took it a few minutes to think about it, but it very quickly generated a .WAV file that I could download to my desktop. The audio clip lasted around eight minutes and after I’d listened to it, the world simply wasn’t the same anymore; I no longer had confidence that I could tell what was real and what wasn’t.

The AI had taken my article and explained the key concepts via the 'presenters' having a conversation. It had even expanded on it in new and interesting directions that I hadn't thought of, drawing analogies about what I was saying to other areas of life. The presenters had even introduced practical examples of what I was talking about, and these examples weren't taken from my article but from their wider knowledge of the subject. And, most importantly, it didn’t get any of it wrong.

Obviously, we’re just at the start of the new AI-age at the moment, with key players such as ChatGPT, Gemini and more recently Apple Intelligence only just getting started. NotebookLM doesn’t have that many options right now – you can speed up or slow down playback and that’s about it – but it won’t be long before it lets you choose the type of presenter you want, their accent, their expertise, their political leaning, their personality and, once we move into AI-generated video as standard, how they look. As I wrote recently, AI is already being used in films, and we can imagine a world where a movie is generated on the fly, with the plot changing to suit your whims.

Yes, this will sound terrifying to some, but movies are already flights of fancy that exist in the world of the imagination. It’s when AI intrudes on the real world that I get most concerned. I’ve got a friend whose daughter is applying for university right now, and he tells me that many institutions are saying they don’t require a personal statement anymore because so many are doctored using AI that there’s little point to them.

All of which brings me back to NotebookLM. It can already produce a fantastic podcast out of one of my articles at the click of a button, and it feels like we're on the dawn of a very big change in the way media is produced. I'm not sure I know what's real anymore, and that's something I'm just going to have to get used to.

Free speech is as important in religion as in politics

I'm continuing to enjoy Tim Urban's book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies.

He's a wonderfully creative thinker. It's rare that I can read 245 pages of a non-fiction book without coming across something that just seems wrong to me. But Urban's arguments are so compelling and well stated, so far he's convinced me of the rightness of every point he's made.

Recently I read his take on free speech. I'll just describe a few aspects of what he says about this important topic, which is enshrined in the United States constitution in a way that few other countries can match: The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

However, private organizations can restrict speech. And various influences, including cultural norms, can make it difficult or awkward for someone to speak freely. Urban writes:

Putting the Higher Mind and Primitive Mind aside for a minute, let's break every human into two parts another way: their Outer Self and their Inner Self. The Inner Self represents what a person thinks; the Outer Self represents what a person says. If we take any given topic, we can depict each of their viewpoints by where they're standing on the Idea Spectrum, and by the color of their head:

We can combine these using a shorthand notation. And we can color these to show what a person is thinking (brain color) and what they're saying (ring color). When a person is being honest and saying what they really think, the two colors are the same, allowing the thoughts of the Inner Self to pass unimpeded through the Outer Self and out into the world.

So, for example, when three people are having a conversation about a topic and everyone is saying what they really think, their brains link together into a three-brain thinking system:

In Chapter 1, we saw how human brains can have emergent properties, combining together into larger superbrains called genies. This only happens when the brains actually connect, which they do by way of expression.

So when people are able to speak their mind freely, good things can happen. This is a foundation of brainstorming. And of psychotherapy, scientific discussions, conversations with friends -- the list is almost endless of positive results through free speech. However...

When a person isn't allowed to say what they think, their ideas become quarantined inside their head, isolated from the outside world. From the communal brain perspective, where each individual human mind is a single neuron in a larger brain, it's as if the axons of the neurons have been hijacked, and any real neural communication ceases.

When I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru, for several years I did quite a bit of speaking on behalf of RSSB at meetings called satsangs. 

That word literally means association with truth. Yet often there was a large difference between the truth of what RSSB members were thinking inside their brains and what they were saying outwardly in public. 

Frequently I'd say something in a satsang along the line of "The easiest RSSB vow to keep is the prohibition against revealing inner mystical experiences, because hardly anyone is having any." Usually some people would come up to me after I'd finished speaking and say, "Thanks for saying what you did. I thought I was the only person who felt this way."

Urban writes:

A phenomenon that psychologists call "pluralistic ignorance" begins to set in when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. Over time, hearing everyone expressing the same viewpoint, people start to doubt their own beliefs and assume that if everyone is saying it, there must be something to it.

...Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed. You could dictate the values, the morals, and the customs. You could decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You could create the laws, dole out the rewards, and inflict the penalties. If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette.

The most effective puppet masters came up with depictions of reality that tapped directly into people's Primitive Minds. Some would stoke fear with stories of imminent danger or invoke rage toward a common enemy to fuel the Primitive Mind's natural fires. Or they might write stories of their own ruthlessness and inflict fear of torture and death on subjects. 

Others would claim knowledge of the divine in order to bring the afterlife into the picture and drive incentives to astronomical heights. 

Free speech is an antidote to these negative outcomes.

Beyond protecting against tyranny, free speech laws open the gates to a dynamic free-speech market -- the marketplace of ideas. In the marketplace of ideas, scientists freely do their research, philosophers freely philosophize, activists freely protest, journalists freely report, and artists and comedians freely challenge norms and test the edges of what's socially acceptable.

If the market's "supply" is made up of the ideas of millions of free-speaking humans, "demand" consists of millions of free-listening ears. To win the key currency of the market -- attention and influence -- ideas have to outcompete other ideas in the market.

In the same way that a free economic market has a natural tendency to push bad products to the fringes while elevating the rest, the marketplace of ideas serves as a vast information filter. Ideas are stripped naked and analyzed from every angle. This exposes and embarrasses false or unwise ideas and prevents them from spreading too widely.

The marketplace of ideas is messy, and it doesn't always succeed at sorting right from wrong and good from bad, but it's a far better system than the alternative: allowing the most powerful people to decide what's true and what's good.

Breathing exercises can calm a frazzled mind

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to breathing when it comes to meditation and relaxation.

The don't interfere approach, which I generally use, advises that we simply notice inhalations and exhalations with close attention without trying to change our breath. This makes the breath an object of awareness, thereby focusing the mind.

The breath exercise approach, which I also enjoy, advises that we follow certain patterns of breathing to achieve desired ends, like relaxation, increased energy, and such. This makes the breath akin to a muscle that benefits from exercise.

Today the Washington Post had a story that caught my eye, "How to calm your mind with breathing, according to science." Here's how it starts out:
Download How to use breathwork to calm your mind - The Washington Post

Take a deep breath.

Now exhale and notice how you feel.

If you feel even a bit calmer, you have just experienced the power of conscious and intentional breathing.

Research shows that breathwork practices and slowing our breath can alleviate stress and improve mood by harnessing the often subtle but profound influence our breathing has on how we think, feel and behave.

Our “breath accompanies us from birth until death,” said Helen Lavretsky, a geriatric integrative psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of research for the Integrative Medicine Collaborative. As a result, breathing is “an immediate tool available to a human being to self-regulate emotions.”

The relationship between our breath, body and brain has been known for at least 1,500 years, said Paul Dallaghan, a breathwork expert and researcher who is publishing a review on the history of yoga. “One reflects the other. As the breath moves, the mind moves,” he said, citing yoga texts.

More recent research has found evidence supporting this ancient insight.

Several breathing patterns are mentioned in the article, including: "Box breathing involves equal time spent inhaling, holding, exhaling and holding, with each step lasting three or four seconds."

One reason I subscribe to the Calm meditation app on my iPhone is that the app includes six different breathing exercises. Each features a colored ball with a moving cursor around the circumference that's matched to different tones for inhale, exhale, and hold. 

So I can either close my eyes and match my breathing to the exercise via the tone, or open my eyes and watch the moving cursor while hearing the tone. Today I tried the Focus exercise -- "Sharpen concentration and improve performance" -- which uses the Box Breathing technique of inhale, hold, exhale, hold, where each of the four is an equal time. Calm uses four seconds. 

Thus one full inhale and exhale using Box Breathing takes sixteen seconds. This equates to 3.75 breaths per minute, which is quite slow. The Washington Post article says:

Most people breathe an average of 12 to 20 times a minute, though the rate varies from person to person and circumstance to circumstance. More anxious people tend to breathe faster. However, the “magic number” of calming breaths is around 5.5 to 6 breaths per minute — far slower than most people hit, Dallaghan said. This number comes from observations of people in meditative states — moments of calm, quiet and clarity when breathing would spontaneously slow.

I did Box Breathing for four minutes today, via the Calm app. It did feel considerably slower than my usual breathing, especially with the four second pauses after each inhale and exhale. I felt good doing the exercise.

Usually I do the Relax technique -- "Quiet your mind and relieve stress" -- which is a four second inhale and an extended six second exhale. This equates to 6.00 breaths per minute, which feels nicely comfortable to me. The Calm app lets you choose how long you want to do a breathing technique, ranging from one to sixty minutes, or endless. 

I often do the Relax technique for five minutes, which the article says is enough to gain some benefits from a breathing exercise.

A recent study reported that even just five minutes of breathwork each day for about a month could reduce breathing rate, improve mood and reduce anxiety. A 2023 review found that breathwork could help adults with clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders with their symptoms while other research has found breathing interventions helped patients with depression.

"The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," an essay by Mark Lilla

My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla.

(That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.)

Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know,” which I've gotten but haven't read much of yet.

I liked his entire essay.

My favorite part, though, because it rings so true with my own personal experience, which is decidedly not ego-less, is where he speaks about how we consider our opinions being extensions of ourselves. So when they're attacked by someone with a differing opinion, we take that personally, as if we were being accosted in a dark alley by a would-be thief of our money. 

But it's just our beliefs being attacked. And no one can forcibly remove them from our brain. Well, not without a lot of work, such as torture and psychoactive drugs used by intelligence agencies (I enjoy reading spy novels). In everyday life, we have nothing to fear from our opinions and beliefs being interrogated to see if they hold up under skeptical questioning.

Yet it sure seems like we do.

This appears to be one of the benefits of meditation: not reacting so strongly to discomfort, whether it be physical or psychological. The June 2025 issue of National Geographic had an article, "An Antidote to Stress," about meditation. Here's an excerpt about an experiment that contrasted the pain felt by a group that had gotten mindfulness training and a control group that listened to a "pretty tame" book.

Volunteers who meditated reported feeling less pain. "We see a 33 percent drop in pain intensity and unpleasantness during meditation, while the pain levels in the control group actually go up," Zeidan says.

Why does meditation provide relief? Zeidan says analysis of the meditators' scans showed pain relief induced by meditation was associated with reduced activation in neural networks involved in self-awareness. The greatest decrease in activation is seen in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a neural hub that plays a prominent role in self-reflection and valuing oneself.

"During the meditation, the self-value is deactivating," Zeidan says. "And the more it goes down, the greater the analgesia, the greater the pain relief." Pain signals are still being received by the brain, but "they are not going into the brain networks that are saying, This is my pain," he explains. In essence, mindfulness appears to help detach the self from the suffering.

This is the essay by Mark Lilla. It's encouraging to think that mindfulness meditation may be able to reduce the discomfort we feel when our beliefs are being attacked, allowing us to be more open and welcoming to those who view those beliefs skeptically. 

Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.

Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.

It is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these surges in the irrational — war, economic collapse, social change. But doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper, in ourselves and in the world itself.

The world is a recalcitrant place, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves; those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that, once revealed, steal from us beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better, easier to live — or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from an otherwise forgotten English poem became a common proverb: Ignorance is bliss.

We can all find reasons we and others avoid knowing particular things, and many of those reasons are perfectly rational. A trapeze artist about to climb the pole would be unwise to consult the actuarial table for those in her line of work. Even the question “Do you love me?” should pass through several mental checkpoints before being uttered.

But each of us also has a basic disposition toward knowing, a way of carrying ourselves in the world as experiences come our way. Some people just are naturally curious about how things got to be the way they are. They like puzzles, they like to search things out, they enjoy learning why. Others are indifferent to learning and see no particular advantage to asking questions that seem unnecessary for just carrying on.

And then there are people who, for whatever reason, have developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know. These attitudes are not limited to the uneducated: We have all also fallen into moods where they emerge in ourselves, however uncharacteristically.

Why does this happen? Because seeking and having knowledge is not just a cognitive pursuit; it is also an emotional experience. The desire to know is exactly that, a desire. And whenever our desires are satisfied or thwarted, our feelings are engaged.

Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn’t it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know? Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs us within, so, too, we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions, with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it.

One source of this clash is that we consider our opinions to be an extension of our selves, a prosthetic device. When they are attacked or dismissed, we feel that something intimate has been touched. And when our opinions are shown to be wrong, we feel ashamed. Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it’s not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors.

No argument is disembodied. Behind every assertion there is an asserter, and it is he, not his assertion, who wounds our pride. Strange as it may seem, mathematicians and scientists debating matters at the furthest remove from their daily lives can be as dogmatic and touchy as any political partisan. A new elementary particle has been discovered: Is that one giant leap for mankind or one point for our side?

At some point we all decline the opportunity to discover what really is the case. We willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worse sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.

So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know — and want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.

"The Mindful Geek" is a meditation guide for secular skeptics

Do I really need another book about meditation? No, I've got lots of them at the moment and have read many more over the 55 years I've been engaged in daily meditation.

But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely.

That's why Amazon delivered The Mindful Geek by Michael W. Taft to me recently. I was in the mood for a meditation guide that was based on secular non-religious principles that were in accord with modern neuroscience. Taft has a strong background in various sorts of traditions. His first paragraph is:

From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves in India, I've been meditating for over thirty years. As a result, I have extensive experience in both Buddhist and Hindu meditation techniques. I started in the late 70s, because I was experiencing so much teenage anxiety. Meditation gave me some relief and I was hooked. In the 1990s, I worked as editorial director for Sounds True, a publishing company specializing in spiritual and psychological teaching programs. While there, I had the good fortune to meet dozens of the most popular and interesting spiritual teachers in the world. I produced their programs, which meant that I got exposed to the workings of dozens of traditions.

Taft starts out by talking about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, then observes:

If you are a card-carrying geek, however, the upside of all these possible benefits may be strongly counterbalanced by the downside of having to deal with religion, spirituality, or other things you may consider nonsense. Mindfulness meditation is mainly associated with Buddhist religion, and for that reason can seem deeply suspect to skeptical, rational people.

I'm here to lay that worry to rest. In my experience, you can get many of the benefits of meditation without joining any religion, going to church, or believing in reincarnation or karma. By treating mindfulness as a scientifically-based psychological technique, you can keep your atheistic or agnostic secular skepticism and still maintain a powerful, regular, and deeply effective meditation practice.

Meditation is really a technology. And like any good technology, if you use it correctly, it will do the job reliably whether you believe in it or not. At its heart, meditation is a technique for hacking the human wetware to improve your life. And this book is a manual for how to make the most of that technology for yourself. Let's look more deeply at what meditation actually is.

The definition of meditation offered by Taft is: a psychological practice which makes the unconscious conscious and which improves life. 

For me, "unconscious" points to that part of the brain which is hidden from conscious view. Taft notes that this is the majority of the brain. So I prefer "unaware," making the definition something like a psychological practice which makes us aware of what we're often unaware of and which improves life. This fits with Taft saying:

What does it mean to make the unconscious conscious? It means that meditation calls your attention to things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. It gives you insights, in other words... When you use meditation to become more aware of what you're feeling, the unconscious or semi-conscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus.

Speaking of neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change, Taft says that "all learning is neuroplasticity at work," adding:

It means that you can almost "sculpt" your brain in an intentional and directed manner. Whatever you focus your attention on, regularly over time, will change the brain itself -- physically alter it, some parts becoming larger or smaller -- to get better at processing the thing you're focusing on. Within limitations, you can make the brain you want.

He describes what mindfulness is.

What is the difference between meditation and mindfulness? Why use two different words? In short, mindfulness is a type of meditation, a subset of meditation. Specifically, mindfulness means paying attention to your present moment sensory experience in a nonjudgmental manner. That's the basic definition. 

The way the word is used in modern America, mindfulness not only means to meditate, but can also mean a way of directing attention in everyday life, even when you're not practicing formal meditation. 

"Mindfulness" is the modern American translation of at least two words from the ancient Pali language: vipassana and sati. When we're talking about a type of meditation, mindfulness represents the term vipassana, which actually means "insight" or "clear seeing" in Pali. This technique (really a whole group of techniques) is sometimes called insight meditation or vipassana.

When we're talking about a way of directing attention at any time, during formal meditation or not, mindfulness is the translation of the Pali term sati.  Sati actually means "mindfulness," to pay close attention to what you're doing. To go even deeper, sati literally means "to remember," as in "to remember to pay attention to what you're doing."

I like how Taft points out misconceptions about mindfulness meditation. 

The first is that mindfulness meditation means to "clear your mind" or to "have no thoughts." Nothing could be further from the truth. In mindfulness meditation, it doesn't matter how much thinking is going on during the meditation. It literally doesn't figure into the equation. The goal is not to empty your mind of thoughts; the goal is to pay attention to some aspect of your current sensory experience.

...Remember that there are a lot of different kinds of meditation. And some of these techniques do, in fact, ask you to clear your mind. For some reason, those techniques became one of our cultural images of what meditation is about, and that's unfortunate, because "stopping thinking" is not only very difficult to do, even for an advanced meditator, it's also not all that useful. So just let go of that image completely.

The second misconception is that meditation is something that is supposed to be blissful or pleasurable. The cultural image attached to this idea is that of a yogi seated in full lotus posture, fingers curled into a mudra (gesture) of perfection, face suffused with radiant ecstasy. The process of meditation, in this misconception, involves disappearing into a cloud of bliss.

Again, nothing could be further from the case. Mindfulness meditation involves paying attention to your present moment sensory experience nonjudgmentally. That counts no matter if your present moment sensory experience is painful or pleasant, positive or negative. Rather than acting like Ren wearing the "happy helmet" (from the Ren & Stimpy episode "Stimpy's Invention"), in mindfulness meditation, you welcome whatever experience is arising whether it's "happy, happy, joy, joy" or not.

It's possible to have a perfectly good mindfulness meditation while meditating on the body sensations of a headache, for example, or sitting in line at the DMV. There is no need to invoke, produce, or expect any sort of bliss. If bliss happens, that's fine, but you're not trying for it, and you're not trying to hold onto it if it does arise. That's the nonjudgmental part.

Drone fever and prosperity gospel point to religious myth-making

A couple of news stories I came across today are examples of both the limitations of human reason, and how those limitations help to produce religious myths.

The New York Times had a story about the drone sightings that have gotten lots of people in New Jersey and New York all excited. Everyone should be able to read "How Drone Fever Spread Across New Jersey and Beyond," because I'm a digital New York Times subscriber and am sharing the story as a gift link.

Here's some excerpts:

It was a dry and cool Wednesday evening outside the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, a longtime military installation that once made the bombs and shells that led to victory in World War II. A contractor there knocked off work and decided to wait out rush hour traffic. He picked up some takeout from Wawa, parked outside a nearby wildlife preserve and settled in to watch an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast on his phone. Then he saw a flash in the side mirror.

A light rising straight up from the tree line and toward the arsenal. He started recording. Could it have been a plane?

Or was it a drone?

And so began what seems to be the origin story of the ongoing drone saga. The contractor called in his sighting to his superiors on Nov. 13, and others followed quickly, first throughout the county, then the rest of New Jersey, then into neighboring states.

Countless people have reported mysterious hovering objects dotting the night skies and posted blurred images — a white light, a black background — on social media. Every day, for weeks. Drones. Drones?

Small drones. Drones big as vans. Blinking, stationary, speeding and zipping and buzzing.

...Was it a foreign government? Our own government? Kids? Visitors from space?

The story grew to consume police departments, sheriffs, the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, a former reality TV star with a supposed inside line to NASA, mayors, governors, the White House and the president-elect.

But now it appears increasingly likely that if there were any drones at all, it was very few, and that most of the drones people did see — stay with this — were up there looking for the drones people thought they were seeing.

Mounting evidence, and lack thereof, suggests that perhaps the whole craze has been a sort of communal fever dream fueled by crowd mentality, confirmation bias and a general distrust in all things official.

Mass hysteria, by whatever name it is called, is a well-recognized phenomenon. Afflictions can spread in a school system after one child reports some mysterious symptoms. Soon after, many other children claim to have the same health problem. They aren't lying. They're just manifesting a form of social contagion.

In the drone case, conspiracy theories have been thrown around with no evidence to back them up. Whenever government officials reassured residents of New Jersey and New York that there wasn't any reason to be concerned about the drone sightings, this didn't stop the conspiracy theory of a government cover-up, it served to strengthen it.

"Obviously the government is hiding something," went the crazy reasoning, "because they're assuring us that everything is fine." Of course, the more likely explanation for why government officials were saying everything is fine is because everything is fine. 

But simple truth is less interesting than complex myths. The most likely explanation for why there's no compelling evidence for the existence of God is that God doesn't exist. That's not an entertaining explanation, though. So religions use faith as an explanation, saying that God's absence from the world is a test of religious faith.

Belief in an unseen God requires strong faith. If God was obvious, no faith would be required, so religious believers wouldn't need to exercise their faith muscle.

Which brings me to a second story in the Washington Post, "For some Latinos, 'prosperity gospel' led them to Trump." I also am a digital subscriber to this newspaper, so that gift link should be readable by everybody. Excerpt:

The Lehigh Valley Barbershop was bustling with the next generation of American strivers. The mood among the young men, mostly first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean, was hopeful. Their candidate, Donald Trump, had just won the presidential election.

Sitting in high-end silver chairs, the young men talked about the businesses they had built, or would build. That would be more possible, they hoped, with the return of Trump, someone to whom they could relate — a businessman who has made mistakes, they said, but still keeps striving.

“Kamala said, 'Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”

Next to him, his best friend, Willy J. Castillo, 39, who owns the shop and others, worked the register as he talked about Trump’s drive to succeed, overcome and survive. Castillo, who also voted for Trump, identifies with that: “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?”

The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments, has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. The belief system is sometimes called “seed faith,” “health and wealth gospel,” or “prosperity gospel.”

In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being poor and disenfranchised people, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.

What happened to this passage from the Bible? I guess it is no longer operative for believers in the prosperity gospel.

Matthew 19:23-26 King James Version (KJV) Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The most obvious absurdity here is Christians believing that they know what God wants, even though there isn't even any demonstrable evidence that God is real, leaving aside the question of what God values -- which supposedly is making a lot of money.

Another absurdity is related to the familiar adage, correlation is not causation. Meaning, just because two things happen in proximity to each other, doesn't mean that one thing caused the other thing.

In this case, some Christians believe that God wants them to be financially prosperous. They then go and work hard to make money, in part because they feel this pleases God (as well as themselves). But many other people simply work hard to make money, with no belief in God. The Post story says:

The movement started in the United States with healers and televangelists such as Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn, who told followers that giving them money would lead to divine blessings, conjuring a transactional God. By extension, personal wealth was seen as a goal for the faithful. It focused on the power of the self, and the idea that God would reward positivity, hard work and confidence.

Well, positivity, hard work, and confidence typically bring their own rewards, no God required. But just as with the drones, many people prefer a complex myth to simple truth. 

Here's our 2024 Holiday Greetings letter

I'm not a Christian, but I have no problem with saying "Merry Christmas." After all, tomorrow is as much a secular day devoted to giving and receiving presents as it is a celebration of Jesus' supposed birthday.

The problem with this celebration is that it's virtually certain Jesus wasn't born on December 25. Wikipedia says:

In the third century, the precise date of Jesus's birth was a subject of great interest, with early Christian writers suggesting various dates in March, April and May.

Steven Hijmans of the University of Alberta writes that "cosmic symbolism" inspired the Church leadership in Rome to choose 25 December, the Roman date of the winter solstice and the birthday of Sol Invictus ('Invincible Sun'), as the birthday of Christ.

Regardless, my wife and I are pleased to flow with the Christmas river, even though we have no interest in the religious side of this holiday. For me, it's a reason to write an annual Christmas letter, which we prefer to call a Holiday Greetings.

Here's this year's letter in PDF and JPEG formats. Because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year. I do note in the 2024 letter that I'm feeling increasingly like a soon-to-be-extinct creature. 

Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF

The greatest sin is certainty

If I believed that the universe communicates with us, I'd view what happened during some television watching a little while ago as being a message to me from the universe. But since I don't have such a belief, I'll go with coincidence.

My last blog post was called "A clear mind sees a foggy world. A foggy mind sees a clear world." I found this wonderful notion in Tim Urban's book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. Urban does a masterful job arguing against zealotry, where a person is so sure that a belief they hold is correct, they're unwilling to entertain the possibility that the belief could be wrong.

I mentioned the clear mind/foggy mind adage to a friend today in the course of our usual Sunday get-together at a coffeehouse where we talk politics, sports, television, life in general, and any other subject that comes to mind. I told Jim that after watching a gripping, though rather unrealistic disaster movie (La Palma) on Netflix, now I was going to turn to a higher quality movie, Conclave.

Conclave is about the election of a new pope after the previous pope died unexpectedly. I've just started watching it, so don't spoil my enjoyment of it by mentioning an important plot point in a comment. As I was eating dinner, grilled tofu and mushrooms in a whole wheat tortilla, I watched the beginning of Conclave. 

The actor Ralph Thiennes plays Thomas Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals whose job is to select the next pope. He gives a homily, or short sermon, to the assembled cardinals prior to them beginning the process of choosing a new pope. Lawrence starts with some boring and predictable remarks, then changes gears. 

Here's a two-minute You Tube video of his from-the-heart portion of the sermon, which I like a lot. I've also shared a transcript that I made from the Netflix subtitles. 

Let me speak from the heart for a moment. Saint Paul said, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." To work together, to, uh, to grow together, we must be tolerant. No one person or - or faction seeking to dominate another.

And speaking to the Ephesians, who were of course a mixture of Jews and gentiles, Paul reminds us that God's gift to the Church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views, which gives our Church its strength. 

And over the course of many years in the service of our mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others.

Certainty.

Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He cried out in agony at the ninth hour on the cross.

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith.

Let is pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts. And let him grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

Certainty is indeed undesirable, whether we see it as a sin or some secular term.

Certainty eliminates any possibility of taking a scientific view of reality, for science knows that nothing is 100% certain, that even the most well understood laws of nature could prove to be incomplete or even wrong as more evidence about them is gathered.

Certainty precludes our being able to engage in productive discussions with others. Take this blog, for example. I've become a proud atheist after being a religious believer for about 35 years. But I'm not completely certain that God doesn't exist. If someone who believes in God isn't completely certain that God does exist, we can have a reasonable conversation about God, for each of us is at least somewhat open to the other person being correct about God. 

Zealotry requires certainty. A zealot has no doubt that what they believe is absolutely true. Not only does this make them annoying, it also makes them unable to have a reasonable discussion with anyone who doesn't share their certainty. 

Uncertainty is a mark of humility, as is doubt. Uncertainty and doubt point toward mystery, as Cardinal Lawrence says in Conclave. Mystery makes life much more interesting. It opens the door to increased knowledge, while certainty closes the door.

A clear mind sees a foggy world. A foggy mind sees a clear world.

In my previous post I talked about how science is viewed in Tim Urban's creative and engaging book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. I've continued reading the book, finding Urban's writing style highly appealing.

Here's a terrific passage that offered up a compelling way of looking upon the difference between a Scientist and a Zealot.

While the Scientist's clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot's foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions. When you're thinking like a Zealot, you end up in a a totally alternative reality, feeling like you're an omniscient being in total possession of the truth.

As explained in my "Your Higher Mind thinks like a Scientist" post, Urban views the Scientist's dedication to truth as the top rung of how beliefs are formed. Next comes Sports Fan, followed by Attorney, and the bottom rung, Zealot. 

Sports Fan. I was pleased to see this get such a high ranking, as I enjoy sports. I've stopped playing competitive tennis, but I like watching sports on television, primarily college football and baseball. (The University of Oregon has the #1 football team in the country!)

Urban says this about thinking like a Sports Fan.

Most real-life sports fans want the games they watch to be played fairly. They don't want corrupt referees, even if it helps their team win. They place immense value on the integrity of the process itself. It's just...that they really, really want that process to yield a certain outcome. They're not just watching the game -- they're rooting. 

When your Primitive Mind infiltrates your reasoning process, you start thinking the same way. You still believe you're starting at Point A, and you still want Point B to be the truth. But you're not exactly objective about it. Weird things happen to your thinking when the drive for truth is infected by some ulterior motive. Psychologists call it "motivated reasoning."

...Sports Fans are stubborn, but they're not hopeless. The Higher Mind is still a strong presence in their head, and if dissenting evidence is strong enough, the Sports Fan will grudgingly change their mind. Underneath all the haze of cognitive bias, Sports Fans still care mostly about finding the truth.

Drift down any further, though, and you cross the Ladder midpoint and become a different kind of thinker entirely. Down on the low rungs, the Primitive Mind has the edge in the tug-of-war.

Attorney. I've always admired how our legal system is centered around the idea that in a court of law, opposing attorneys will do their best to argue the merits of their client's case, even when the defense attorney seems to be representing an obviously guilty person or entity.

However, when it comes to thinking like an Attorney, there are downsides if our goal is truth. Urban writes:

An Attorney and a Sports Fan have things in common. They're both conflicted between the intellectual values of truth and confirmation. The critical difference is which value, deep down, they hold most sacred. 

A Sports Fan wants to win, but when pushed, cares most about truth. But it's as if an Attorney's job is to win, and nothing can alter their allegiance... When you're thinking like an Attorney, you don't start at Point A at all. You start at Point B. The client is not guilty. Now let's figure out why. 

From there, you'll go through your due diligence, cherry-picking evidence and piecing together an argument that leads right where you want it to. 

...In the hypothesis-testing phase, the Attorney's refusal to genuinely listen to a dissenter, combined with a bag of logical fallacy tricks and their strong sense of conviction, ensures that they're an absolutely infuriating person to argue with.

The Attorney's opponents will feel like they're arguing with a brick wall, and by the end, it'll be clear that nothing they could have said -- nothing whatsoever -- would have made the Attorney say, "Hmm that's a good point. I need to think about that. Maybe I'm wrong."

The result of thinking like an Attorney is that your brain's incredible ability to learn new things is mostly shut down. Even worse, your determination to confirm your existing beliefs leaves you confident about a bunch of things that aren't true.

Zealot. This is the bottom rung of the thinking ladder. "Zealot" often has a religious connotation, for good reason. Some of the most dangerous Zealots have been religious fanatics. But zealotry comes in other forms, such as political. 

Urban says about thinking like a Zealot:

Imagine you've just had your first baby. Super exciting, right? And every day when you look at your baby, you can't believe how cute it is.

This is the relationship Zealots have with their sacred ideas: the ideas aren't rugged experiments to be kicked around, they're fragile, precious babies to be adored and protected.

Just like no parent has to research whether their baby is lovable, the Zealot doesn't have to go from A to B to know their viewpoints are correct -- they just know they are. With 100 percent conviction. 

Likewise with skepticism. If someone told you your actual baby was super cute, you wouldn't assess their credibility, you'd be in automatic full agreement. And if someone told you your baby was an asshole, you wouldn't consider their opinion, you'd just think they were a terrible person.

That's why the Zealot's flip-flop goes from one extreme to the other, with no in-between. When a Zealot hears confirmation, It's obviously true. When a Zealot hears dissent, It's obviously not true. 

When Zealots argue, things can quickly get heated, because for someone who identifies with their ideas, a challenge to those ideas feels like an insult. It feels personally invalidating. A punch landed on a Zealot's idea is a punch landed on their baby. 

When the Primitive Mind is overactive in our heads, it turns us into crazy people. On top of making us think our ideas are babies, it shows us a distorted view of ourselves.

It's easier to see when other people are acting like a Sports Fan, Attorney, or Zealot than when we ourselves are. But with some introspection and being open to how other pe0ple see us, we can spend more time as a Scientist whose focus is centered strongly on truth, and less time on the lower rungs of the thinking ladder.

The way I see it, and I believe Tim Urban has the same viewpoint, we're all prone to thinking like a Scientist, Sports Fan, Attorney, and Zealot at different times and in different circumstances. However, it also seems to be true that each of us has a dominant style of thinking, and it can be difficult for us to recognize when we're not seeking truth, but confirmation of a cherished belief that could be wrong.

Your Higher Mind thinks like a scientist

I've followed Tim Urban and his Wait But Why blog off and on for quite a few years. Not long ago Urban published a book online, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. I took a look at it, but I much prefer reading print books. Fortunately, Urban eventually came out with a "real" book.

When I got an offer from Urban to buy his book directly from the printer (it's self-published), I did just that. It arrived a few days ago. I'm enjoying it, in part because I like the quirky illustrations crafted by Urban. The book also is on Amazon, for a higher price.

Here's what Urban has to say about the difference between our Higher Mind and Primitive Mind, and how the Scientist is a manifestation of the Higher Mind. You'll see that dissent and skepticism is how the Scientist pursues truth, which is why these are values I promote on this blog and aspire to myself.

Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision. Because when beliefs are revised, it's a signal of progress -- of becoming less ignorant, less foolish, less wrong.

Your Primitive Mind disagrees. For your genes, what's important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior -- whether or not those beliefs are actually true. The Primitive Mind's beliefs are usually installed early on in life, often based on the prevailing beliefs of your family, peer group, or broader community.

The Primitive Mind sees those beliefs as a fundamental part of your identity and a key to remaining in good standing with the community around you. Given all of this, the last thing the Primitive Mind wants is for you to feel humble about your beliefs or interested in revising them. It wants you to treat your beliefs as sacred objects and believe them with conviction.

So the Higher Mind's goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind's goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs. These two very different types of intellectual motivation exist simultaneously in our heads. This means that our driving intellectual motivation -- and in turn, our thinking process -- varies depending on where we are on the Ladder at any given moment.

In the realm of thinking, then, the Ladder's four rungs correspond to four ways of forming beliefs. When your Higher Mind is running the show, you're up on the top rung, thinking like a Scientist. 

When you're thinking like a Scientist, you start at Point A and follow evidence wherever it takes you...The Scientist's default position on any topic is "I don't know." To advance beyond Point A, they have to put in effort, starting with the first stage: hypothesis formation.

Top-rung thinking forms hypotheses from the bottom up. Rather than adopt the beliefs and assumptions of conventional wisdom, you puzzle together your own ideas, from scratch. This is a three-part process. 

(1) Gather information. When Scientists want to learn something new, they try to soak up a wide variety of information on the topic. The Scientist seeks out ideas across the Idea Spectrum, even those that seem likely to be wrong, because knowing the range of viewpoints that exist about the topic is a key facet of understanding the topic.

(2) Evaluate information. If gathering info is about quantity, evaluating info is about quality. There are instances where a thinker has the time and the means to collect information and evidence directly -- with their own primary observations, or by conducting their own studies. But most of the info we use to inform ourselves is indirect knowledge: knowledge accumulated by others that we import into our minds and adopt as our own.

...That's why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust. Trust, when assigned wisely, is an efficient knowledge-acquisition trick... But trust assigned wrongly has the opposite effect. When people trust information to be true that isn't, they end up with the illusion of knowledge -- which is worse than having no knowledge at all.

So skilled thinkers work hard to master the art of skepticism. A thinker who believes everything they hear is too gullible, and their beliefs become packed with a jumble of falsehoods, misconceptions, and contradictions. Someone who trusts no one is overly cynical, even paranoid, and limited to gathering new information only by direct experience. Neither of these fosters much learning.

The Scientist's default skepticism position would be somewhere in between, with a filter just tight enough to consistently identify and weed out bullshit, just open enough to let in the truth.

(3) Puzzle together a hypothesis. ...As the gathering and evaluating processes continue, the Scientist grows more confident in their puzzling. Eventually, they begin to settle on a portion of the Idea Spectrum where they suspect the truth may lie. Their puzzle is finally taking shape -- they have begun to form a hypothesis. 

Imagine I present to you this boxer, and we have this exchange.

You'd think I was insane.

But people do this with ideas all the time. They feel sure they're right about an opinion they've never had to defend -- an opinion that has never stepped into the ring. Scientists know that an untested belief is only a hypothesis -- a boxer with potential, but not a champion of anything. 

So the Scientist starts expressing the idea publicly, in person and online. It's time to see if the little guy can box. In the world of ideas, boxing opponents come in the form of dissent. When the Scientist starts throwing ideas out into the world, the punches pour in. 

Biased reasoning, oversimplification, logical fallacies, and questionable statistics are the weak spots that feisty dissenters look for, and every effective blow landed on the hypothesis helps the Scientist improve their ideas. This is why Scientists actively seek out dissent. 

As organizational psychologist Adam Grant puts it in his book Think Again:

I've noticed a paradox in great scientists and superforecasters: the reason they're so comfortable being wrong is that they're terrified of being wrong. What sets them apart is their time horizon. They're determined to reach the correct answer in the long run, and they know that means they have to be open to stumbling, backtracking, and rerouting in the short run. They shun rose-colored glasses in favor of a sturdy mirror.

...It's a long road to knowledge for the Scientist because truth is hard. It's why scientists say "I don't know" so often. It's why, even after getting to Point B in the learning process, the Scientist applies an asterisk, knowing that all beliefs are subject to being proven wrong by changing times or new evidence.

...When you're thinking like a Scientist -- self-aware, free of bias, unattached to any particular ideas, motivated entirely by truth and continually willing to revise your beliefs -- your brain is a hyper-efficient learning machine.

 

Sabrina Wallace's ("Sheena") connection to a far-out conspiracy theory

I'm sharing this information not because I believe in it, but for other reasons.

(1) The person at the heart of the conspiracy theory is Sabrina Wallace. I've been told by someone who knows her that Sabrina is the "Sheena" who wrote a book about her spiritual experiences in India that included some unflattering references to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. (See here, here, here, and here.) 

(2) The person who knows Sabrina said that she now is fine with being identified as "Sheena." Before, she wanted her real name kept confidential. The web page link that was given to me by that person in an email message, Snowdens Phoenix: Sabrina Wallace, contains this cryptic description of Sabrina:

Sabrina worked at CISCO, at the backend of the space force servers and facilitated the shift to broadband. She was responsible for 300000 dollar a minute in case of issues and only one other person in the USA knew what to do. She is from the top end of the spystate, currently in an EMF free zone, 4 clearances over law enforcement (Her authenticity has been background checked multiple times, old handwritten wedding lists of her parents, family photos, etc.).

(3) If that sounds like part of a conspiracy theory, that's because it is. Of course, just because the web page sounds almost completely crazy to me doesn't mean there's no truth to it. I simply strongly suspect that the grains of truth in the Snowdens Phoenix web page are vastly outweighed by the falsehoods. By sharing this information in a blog post, basically I'm crowdsourcing my skepticism for review by others.

I admit that I haven't studied the Snowdens Phoenix web page very closely. I lost interest in it after reading enough to convince me how unlikely it is that the conspiracy theory revelations have any basis in fact.

It's a difficult document to summarize, due to its incoherence. That said, I have to admire whoever wrote this for their dedication to revealing what they must believe is a danger to humanity. There is just enough solid science in the document (neurons in the brain can indeed be activated by a certain type of light, if dyed in a certain way) to give it some credence -- if you put your skeptical mind on hold.

Here's some excerpts to whet your appetite for looking at the whole thing. I've chosen some of the more sensational claims. 

What Sabrina Wallace reveals to us- is nothing short of groundbreaking:

A human bodypart, the bioenergetic field- got purposefully erased from scientific & public discourse, for about 100 years- and is being abused to route data through our body, aided by self assembling biosensors2 in the blood, for the WBAN 802.15.63 (wide body area network). Neural Lace has already been deployed, since 1995 (hydrogel, mesogens, qdots, aluminium, titanium, nickel, cadmium… then GO & other metamaterials, self assembling plasmonic nanorectennas etc.)!

“Sensor hunters” can log in to people, with EEG headsets and controllers, to change biophysical parameters through electromagnetic pulsing, by using the “light frequency” language of our own DNA (photonics): the biophotons from our bioenergetic field.

Companies like your insurance company, can log into your body, abusing the telemetry of your aura/biofield- based on your veins, arteries, chakras, meridians & nodal points. Welcome to remote controlled humans like SIMS.

...The Weaponisation of our bio-electrical field…
…to manipulate our biology, read and write data, interface human brains, cells, tissues, bone marrow.

“I’m not sure if people are grasping the importance of Sabrina Wallace’s information. Her information is consistent with and helps to explain a whole raft of hitherto unexplained or inadequately understood phenomena, including the TI program. 

Here are some of the capabilities of this system, which has been evolving over many decades:

1) Remote covert Transhumanism; the creation of cyborgs/bio-robot slaves, per the original 1952 memo-mandate for CIA’s Project Bluebird, MKULTRA and MONARCH.

2) Life extension technologies, electromagnetic tissue healing and genetic alterations via CRISPR-Cas-9. Now the elite can live forever and everyone else can be “offed” or “cyborged,” as desired.

3) Precision AI-driven Health Care, a cover for the above two operations as well as many others.

4)Electronic/ Information/ Cognitive/Netcentric/ Mosaic Warfare operations.(Thank you Joint Chiefs of Staff and DOD for torturing your own citizens and soldiers via Project MAVEN, Project SALUS, Project Pegasus, and other “Peacetime Operations.”)

5) Telecommunications industry, police, Sheriffs, military, black ops, para-military, civilian groups, Silicon Valley, etc. carry out these (network killing) operations.

6) Bill Gates’ demented 060606 crypto-currency4 to body activity patent of 2020.

7) WEF’s (World Economic Forum’s) “under the skin surveillance” using biosensors, intra-body nano-network, EM frequencies and WBAN, and drones and cube satellites. This is HOW they do it.

8) Mik Anderson and La Quinta Columna’s graphene- and Radio Frequency -supported Intra-body nano-network. The same principle is used in geoengineering and weather warfare: First, add electrically conductive nano-materials into the system (be it human or atmospheric), then second, zap with electromagnetic radiation/frequencies. Now you get to CONTROL the systems.

9) Operation Pegasus: Israeli Defense Forces’ (NRO’s) application of Phoenix(civilian torture-murder) Program to dissidents, journalists, whistleblowers (i.e., the Targeted Individual Program),

10) Operation/Project SALUS: Drones watch everyone think and everyones cells phase and phage states in real time with DoD’s Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (C2TWS). Project SALUS is watching your biosensors and YOU from the inside out, using your body area network (WBAN). Project SALUS has been around since 1969.

11) The real purpose of the COVID jab (and the creation of COV-BAN) is to get more metamaterials such as graphene into the body, for greater electronic WBAN throughput. (Again, see La Quinta Columnas work and that of Mik Andersen on graphene, self-assembling nano-technology, and intra-body nano-networks.)

12) THE TI PROGRAM involves all of the above and much more. Please study Sabrina’s videos (NonVaxer420 Channel)

13) OPERATION CRESTONE/BACA New age-interfaith religious cum mind/behavioral control experiment in crestone/baca, colorado from the 1980s to present.

If we can help people to understand these technologies and connections, Sabrina Wallace’s information may provide a huge breakthrough. And yet, even this is apparently the tip of a much larger iceberg, that has to do with the creation of a transhuman/ posthuman world. Most of humanity and indeed all the biosphere, could be wiped out and changed to silicon-based EBE’s (engineered biological entities) with these technologies.

Well, though I don't believe 99.9% (at least) of what was said above, the good news for me is that whatever crazy stuff Donald Trump says during the next four years of his presidency, it can't be any crazier than the message of the Snowdens Phoenix web page.

But if anyone wants to argue that this stuff is true, have at it in a comment on this post. Some of the people who visit this blog believe in some really strange things, so maybe this particular strangeness won't seem so weird to them as it does to me.

 

I've had little direct exposure to conspiracy theories. This one is interesting, being so detailed and filled with pseudo-scientific jargon. Of course, maybe that's common with conspiracy theories of this sort. So at least I've gotten some education in that regard. 

 

(Note: if my brain is turned to jelly while I'm sleeping tonight through the remote destruction capabilities of nefarious individuals and agencies made possible by the nanomachinery I ingested through my Covid shots, I'll admit that I was completely wrong about all this. Of course, I'll be dead, hence the need to make this extremely low probability admission now.)

 

Here's a video that supposedly supports some of the contentions made by Snowdens Phoenix. I haven't watched the video. 

Plotinus, a Greek philosopher, spoke a lot about the One

My previous post was about the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas referring to oneness, rather than duality, as being a characteristic of God. So much so, the guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, says that you can't get to God through meditation if you think that God is there and I am here.

Osho Robbins, who messaged me about Dhillon's remarks, viewed this as being in accord with the teachings of Advaita, an Indian philosophical system centered on the notion of not-two, the meaning of Advaita. Which does indeed sound a lot like One.

However, I believe that Dhillon's discussion of divine oneness is closer to the teachings of Plotinus, a 3rd  century Greek mystic philosopher, than to Advaita. I can claim this with some confidence, because I wrote a book about Plotinus's teachings, Return to the One.

When I wrote the book, I was still an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). It was Dhillon, the RSSB guru, who suggested several names of Western mystics that I could write about on behalf of RSSB. Plotinus was one of those names, obviously the one I chose. I have no idea if Dhillon has read my book, but I had several discussions with him about the book.

Now, before sharing some quotations from Return to the One pertaining to the nature of the One, I want to be clear about this: I have no idea if what Plotinus says about the One (or what Dhillon says about oneness) is objectively true. Meaning, part of the nature of reality. This is different from a subjective sense of oneness -- which almost everyone has from time to time.

Here's what I said about the One on the first page of the Introduction to Return to the One.  The Enneads is Plotinus's collection of writings, which were edited by one of his students, Porphyry.

A central message of the Enneads is that what each of us truly longs for, even if we don't consciously realize it, is to return to the One -- which may be thought of as "God," if this more familiar term for ultimate reality is stripped of its personal or theistic connotations.

The One, for Plotinus, is unequivocally and indisputably one. It is the root of everything in existence, for the One is both the source of being and the ground of being (even though, as we will learn, it also is beyond being). So at a deep, mystical level you are the One, I am the One, this book you are holding is the One, and everything else outside and inside of us is the One.

Why is it, then, that the world appears to be constituted of so many distinct entities? I certainly seem to be separate from you, and you from me. Each of us feels closer to some objects, people, and concepts than to other objects, people, and concepts, but always there remains a gap between one's self and all that is other than one's self.

It is natural to try to bridge this gap because humans have an innate longing for intimacy and union, not isolation and separation. Indeed every urge -- such as to worship, to act rightly, to love, to create, to know -- flows from a primal drive for fulfillment. We want to make whole what has been broken, to find what has been lost, to do what demands to be done, to return from where we have come.

It isn't easy to summarize the means by which Plotinus said it is possible to return to the One, in part because Plotinus was a notoriously difficult-to-understand author. But I attempted to encapsulate his teachings in this regard in a final substantive chapter, Vision is Veracity. Again, I'm struck by how similar Dhillon and Plotinus seem to be. But like I said, this doesn't mean they are objectively correct.

Consciousness is its own confirmation. I may be misled about how real something is within my consciousness, since it is possible to see and hear things that exist only within my own mind. But consciousness itself must be accepted as a given, the bedrock on which stands all else I am and do.

This allows Plotinus to move beyond what the Greek Skeptics considered an impassible barrier to knowing absolute truth: the seeming fact, as Richard Tarnas puts it, "that any conflict between two apparent truths could be settled only by appeal to some criterion; yet that criterion could itself only be justified by appeal to some further criterion, which would thereby require an infinite regress of such criteria, none foundational. 'Nothing is certain, not even that,' said Arcesilaus."

In contrast, Plotinus teaches that the One serves as the immutable foundation of reality. Everything in existence emanates from the One and the human soul is able to return to the One, sharing in a universal consciousness of what is true and eternal. 

This is accomplished not by perceiving the One as something separate from ourselves, for then, as the Skeptics argued, we would indeed need some means of determining whether the object within consciousness was real or unreal, and then need some means of determining the reality of that means, and on and on and on it would go, endlessly seeking validation of the highest truth but never finding it.

Rather, Plotinus says that when the soul is purified its seeing is identical to what is seen. To disbelieve in the sight of God at that point would be to disbelieve in our very seeing, consciousness itself, an impossibility. 

...Plotinus tells us that the means by which we now know the creation must become the end we seek. Like a snake that swallows its own tail, the sage turns his attention back upon the consciousness that usually attends to outer things and thoughts. Uniting within himself the knower and the known, the One is revealed as the ground of the sage's own self. We've seen this quotation before but it is well worth repeating.

We must believe that we have seen him when, suddenly, the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from him and is identical with him... This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and to behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by some means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see.

...Presently each of us lives in a realm of duality. There is an individual and there are entities other than that individual. It is extremely difficult to break out of this manner of being, even to merely envision the possibility of existing as simultaneously one with ourselves and one with the cosmos. Thus Plotinus warns us not to assume that spirituality can be confined within the bounds of what is familiar.

To be spiritual isn't a matter of moving this way or that along the customary dimensions of everyday life: time and space. We can't know God by becoming as small and insignificant as an atom or by becoming as large and momentous as the universe. Spirit and the One do not lie in a particular direction, nor is divinity realized by having more or less of anything possessed now.

Returning to the One means embracing mystery, cultivating another way of seeing, leaving aside visions and becoming sight.

...There, in the higher reaches of the spiritual world, the light that dazzles the soul doesn't illuminate anything, for manyness has not yet emanated from oneness. Here, we see things that are separate from the light that makes seeing possible. But when all separateness and multiplicity have been eliminated from the soul, what remains is awareness of the conscious power that produces separateness and multiplicity, spirit, the creative energy of the One.

...Becoming the One is the only way of knowing the One.

The RSSB guru appears to be teaching Advaita

Today I got a message from Osho Robbins, which I've shared below. He titled it "Radha Soami guru is teaching Advaita." Advaita can be described simply or complexly. Here's a simple description. 

Advaita is a philosophical and spiritual tradition of self-realization. At the heart of Advaita is the concept of unity. The Sanskrit word Advaita means "not two," or nondual. This philosophy asserts that there is something essentially good, intelligent and awake in each of us—and that something is no different from the essence of this creation.

Advaita’s approach is fundamentally experiential. Deep peace and connection to the love and consciousness that underlies all can be understood and experienced with guidance, practice, and self-examination.

Previously Robbins has shared his views on this blog about how the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious organization headquartered in India that I belonged to for 35 years, have been updated by the current guru (Gurinder Singh Dhillon) to Versions 2.0 and maybe even 3.0.

Here's how I summarized the differences between Versions 1.0 and 2.0. Sant Mat is another term for the RSSB teachings.

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

Five years later, I wondered if the RSSB guru had moved to Version 3.0, quoting someone who is familiar with what Dhillon has been saying in his talks.

I was at the national satsang [gathering of disciples] in the UK last weekend. Gurinder has changed from the old days. His teachings are going through a noticeable change - and so is he himself.

What I noticed is that
(1) He talks a lot about The ONE
(2) He laughs and jokes a lot
(3) He tells people not to be so serious
(4) He tells them that the master will not come at the time of death - that they have mis-understood the teachings. Just as it does not take four lifetimes.
(5) He says there are no regions - that Sach Khand does not exist - neither does Sat Purush. He says they are levels of consciousness

He says the purpose is to REALIZE that there is only the ONE - and that we are caught in maya - duality.

Having the darshan of the physical master is not even mentioned anymore. He says seva will not help you make any progress - it simply makes you humble if done correctly. There is no spiritual merit.

You will NOT be able to succeed through meditation. Meditation is just to make you give up. You can never get there through your efforts.

Now these kind of teachings have never been given before in rssb.

With that background for those unfamiliar with the RSSB teachings and how they appear to have changed under the leadership of the current guru, here's the message from Robbins. Sach Khand is basically heaven in the traditional Sant Mat teachings. Seva means volunteer service. GSD means Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru.

Hi Brian, I just uploaded this video:

I am just pointing out that the Radha Soami Guru is saying THERE IS ONLY ONE - no separate soul. He also says "You will never get to God through meditation as long as you think of it as duality - I am here - God is there."

 

Now in the old days, others would object and say I have misunderstood. However, now the videos are on YouTube. Now there can be no doubt about what He has said

 

So another strange phenomena happens now. Satsangis DISAGREE with the Guru - they say he is just pretending.

 

He has said many times "I am not coming at your death" because obviously there is nobody that can come and nowhere to take the soul.

 

There is no Sach Khand.

 

My conversation with Him back around the year 2000 (early days).

 

Me: My God is here!

GSD: My God is also here.

Me: No, the God of RadhaSoami resides in Sach Khand - the fifth region.

The soul has to go through four regions to reach Sach Khand and meet Sat Purush.

GSD: There are NO REGIONS - it was just a way of explaining. They are levels of awareness.

Me: But the books explain... in detail...

GSD:  Burn the books.

Audience member: Turn off his mic.

GSD: Then turn my mic off too. 

 

What all this shows is that the Guru does advocate the non-dual path.

 

However, he has inherited a duality path and cannot just transition to non-duality without objections from followers.

 

He used to say "I am not coming at your death" but followers were offended, so after a while he changed it to:

 

"The Guru does not come - GOD himself comes...He comes for EVERYONE - not just satsangis...and He is also here NOW - the question is do you recognize Him?"

 

This is just a way of saying ONENESS - non-duality. Without spelling it out.

He still says "meditate" because that is his method of getting people to be serious about God-Realisation. He also adds "You will not reach through meditation..."

 

The obvious question is "Why meditate then?" But nobody asks that question.

 

He says "Just do - don't count..." but that is impossible. Nobody can do that unless they are already beyond duality.

 

Whatever we do - the counting comes first. The motivation comes first - then the action. If the motivation is gone - the action will not take place.

 

You go to work because you will get paid at the end of the week. No pay - no work.

 

Seva is an attempt to do the impossible. Do seva, for no reward. But it's not what is really happening. The reward is just hidden. The hidden reward is "I get promoted to a higher seva position. OR Guru is watching and giving me the credit OR I can't meditate - so I'll do seva instead." The counting is still there.

 

If there is no benefit - nobody will do the seva.

 

How do most of the followers take all this? Their conclusion:

 

The Guru IS coming at death - he is just saying he won't come to make me meditate - but he will definitely come anyway. So they remain in duality and cannot even understand ONENESS. ALL they have is belief and they think that ONENESS is just another belief.

 

Chances of getting realized: zero

 

Osho Robbins

Robbins told me which Radha Soami Satsang Beas video on the RSSB YouTube channel contained the question for Gurinder Singh Dhillon that he shared in his own video. Here's that video. I made it start at the second question in the Q&A session, the one Robbins shared in part. The entire question and answer is worth watching as it gives additional context for the guru's remarks.

Meditators need to avoid mistaking subtle dullness for meditative joy

As noted in a previous post, I've been re-reading the first part of a book by Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. 

I'm almost back to where I stopped my reading about six years ago for a reason I can no longer recall. The book is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive approach to Buddhist meditation. I find it refreshing, because there's hardly any mention of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist terms, or Buddhist stories. 

The whole focus is on guiding the reader through ten stages of meditative practice. So far I've read about  the first five, each of which I'm fairly competent at. Which shouldn't be surprising, since I've been meditating every day for about 55 years.

Stage One: Establishing a Practice
Stage Two: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering
Stage Three: Extended Continuity of Attention and Overcoming Forgetting
Stage Four: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and Strong Dullness
Stage Five: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing Mindfulness

There's also Interludes in-between some of the stages where Culadasa discusses general principles that apply to various stages. I've read these.

First Interlude: Conscious Experience and the Objectives of Meditation
Second Interlude: The Hindrances and Problems
Third Interlude: How Mindfulness Works
Fourth Interlude: The Moments of Consciousness Model

I find the discussion on dullness both interesting and helpful. Here's how strong dullness is described.

Dullness occurs when we turn the mind inward, which reduces the constant flow of thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind energized and alert. Therefore, the overall energy level of the mind drops. With less stimulation, the brain winds down toward sleep, and the mind grows dull. This normally happens when we're fatigued or at bedtime.

In meditation, it's not just turning inward that decreases mental energy, but when we focus on the breath too intensely and for too long, we are also excluding the thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind alert. This is another reason why "looking beyond" the meditation object with peripheral awareness is so important. When we stay aware of things in the background, we continue to stimulate brain activity and won't sink into dullness.

This helps explain why some meditators practice with their eyes open, and why it isn't important to block out noises, like in my case, the sound of our heat pump blowing air into the room or a dryer/washing machine operating in the nearby utility room. When I'm meditating, those sounds are part of my peripheral (background) awareness, while my main focus is on my breath.

Subtle dullness is, not surprisingly, not as easy to recognize as strong dullness. That makes it more difficult to deal with. This is discussed in the Stage Five chapter.

This new level of stable attention is precisely what makes us more vulnerable to slipping into a deeper state of sustained subtle dullness. That's because the mental agitation that stimulated the mind and helped keep us awake in the earlier Stages has subsided. As subtle dullness deepens, it causes both peripheral awareness and subtle distractions to fade. 

If we don't recognize this as a sign of subtle dullness, it can easily be mistaken for the strong exclusive focus of Stage Six. The pleasant feelings that accompany subtle dullness can also be misinterpreted as first signs of the meditative joy of advanced stages. Without guidance, meditators often confuse a deeper state of subtle dullness with having achieved the more lofty states of later Stages.

We can sustain this type of subtle dullness for very long periods. It's often described in these kinds of terms: "My concentration was so deep, an hour seemed like only minutes." Or, "I don't know where I went, but I was just gone, and felt so peaceful and happy." 

When the pleasure of dullness is particularly strong and our peripheral awareness of thoughts and sensations fades completely, our meditation can even seem to fit the description of a meditative absorption (jhana). We can quickly get attached to such experiences, prizing them as proof of our meditative skills. Yet, relative to the practice goals in this book, they are complete dead ends. It's crucial we learn to recognize and overcome subtle dullness to progress in your practice. Therefore, do not skip this Stage!

...At first, it may be difficult to distinguish between the wholesome pleasure of stable attention and the pleasure of subtle dullness, but in time, you will recognize the warm, soft, quiet pleasure of subtle dullness as something quite different from the bright, alert enjoyment of being in the flow of mindfulness.

There are various ways to detect and combat subtle dullness. Here's a couple of them.

Remember, dullness arises when perceiving moments of consciousness become non-perceiving mind moments. A strong intention to perceive actually reverses this process by producing more perceiving moments of consciousness. By just setting the intention to observe the breath clearly and vividly while sustaining introspective awareness, you directly influence the root cause of dullness.

Sharpen up your observation of the meditation object when you notice a decrease in the quality of awareness and attention. Use the techniques of following and connecting. Follow the sensations of the breath while intending to perceive the details as clearly and vividly as possible. It's especially important to connect changes in the breath with the degree of alertness or dullness of the mind.

When you're more alert, does the breath tend to be deeper or shallower, longer or shorter, and how do the pauses change? What about when you're dull?

Another way to counter subtle dullness is by expanding the scope of your attention to include the sensations of the body. This works to energize the mind because we automatically use more conscious power to observe sensations in a larger area. You will even find that your scope of attention tends to spontaneously expand at this Stage. 

For instance, you might find yourself observing the sensations of the breath in both the chest and abdomen when you were intending to focus only on the nose.

...You've mastered this Stage when you're able to consistently sustain a high level of intense and clear perception -- of both attention and introspective awareness -- during most or all of your session. 

Attention will gain intensity, making all the details of the meditation object quite vivid. It will also gain in clarity, so you experience the actual arising and passing away of individual breath sensations.

Your brain has three gears. Gear 2 is the best.

Buddhism has the middle way. There's a saying, "Everything in moderation." The fable of Goldilocks and the Three Bears involves three choices where "the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, in the middle, is just right."

So it isn't surprising that, according to a recent article in New Scientist, Take control of your brain's master switch to optimize how you think, the human brain has three gears that are coordinated by a small bundle of cells called the locus coeruleus, Latin for 'blue dot."
Download Take control of your brain's master switch to optimise how you think | New Scientist

This research has now reached a critical mass, with multiple scientific papers calling for a greater appreciation of the locus coeruleus. Of particular interest is the discovery that it has four different modes of activity, each with distinct effects on our thinking and behaviour. It is this that led Storoni to describe the blue dot as the brain’s “gear system” in her new book Hyperefficient: Optimise your brain to transform the way you work.

According to this metaphor, Gear 0 is the state of the locus coeruleus when you are asleep. It is almost completely silent at this point, apart from transient bursts of activity that seem to enhance the long-term storage of memories.

,,,Once we awaken, the locus coeruleus moves into Gear 1 – a low hum of baseline activity. The noradrenaline eases the brain into consciousness, but it is a state of low arousal. As a result, sharp focus is lacking and we may be prone to mind-wandering.

As levels of noradrenaline increase, communication across the different regions of the brain becomes easier. Neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the area typically associated with self-control and abstract reasoning, respond first because they are sensitive to low levels of noradrenaline. Crucially, the hum of activity in the locus coeruleus is now accompanied by spikes of noradrenaline released in response to relevant stimuli.

This combination of moderate baseline activity and short-lived bursts of neurotransmitter release is characteristic of Gear 2 and allows the brain to process new information more efficiently. If they are large enough, these spikes can trigger a “network reset” – a shift in focus to new and important information – which is essential for flexible thinking. “It reorganises the forebrain, precisely at the moment when you need to switch your attention and adapt your behaviour,” says Sara.

Problems may arise when the hum turns to a roar. This is what happens in Gear 3. Here, high levels of noradrenaline streaming from the locus coeruleus can activate areas of the brain associated with emotional processing. These tend to have receptors that respond only when concentrations of the neurotransmitter have reached a higher threshold.

This can lead to the fight-or-flight response – useful if we are in danger and need to be hyperalert. Unfortunately, many situations that don’t involve danger, such as pressure at work, can also put the locus coeruleus into its top gear. We may then feel overwhelmed when what we need is greater focus.

In people with anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, the locus coeruleus may become too easily locked into the high-arousal mode of Gear 3. “We know that there is increasing release of norepinephrine, both in wakefulness and sleep, in patients suffering from PTSD,” says Sara.

...Given these findings, many neuroscientists now consider moderate locus coeruleus activity – that is, Gear 2 – to be key to optimum cognitive performance, a sweet spot between dreamy and frantic. “It’s when the prefrontal cortex is completely engaged and working at its best,” says Storoni.

So how do we get our brain to spend more time in Gear 2, which is associated with the pleasant "flow state" marked by being totally engaged in a task and losing track of time? The article contains some tips.

Flow occurs when you engage in an activity that is just challenging enough for you. So choosing the right task difficulty may be one way to change mental gears and harness the power of the locus coeruleus. Shine also points to evidence that practices like meditation can enhance overall focus and emotional regulation. “I think of it as a way of training the arousal system – which the locus coeruleus is a part of – so that you have much more conscious control in everyday life,” he says.

Another strategy is to make the most of the mind-body connection. Storoni says the locus coeruleus has a direct relationship with the autonomic nervous system, which regulates things like our heart rate and breathing. This means physical movement can influence its gearing. For instance, light exercise – such as a brisk walk – in the early morning can move us from Gear 1 to Gear 2. To wind down from Gear 3, meanwhile, we might engage in yoga and controlled breathing.

...We might also reconsider the way we manage our work. Monotonous or boring tasks can shift us down into Gear 1, for example, so that we lose focus and begin daydreaming. Here, the solution involves increasing mental load. “Perhaps by doing something in parallel, a form of multitasking,” says Storoni. Listening to music is one option, but sometimes you may need something that requires more concentration, such as an audiobook. With intense work, we face the opposite problem: the brain can only spend so much time in Gear 2 before it starts feeling fatigue. That’s why we should arrange regular breaks.

...But simply knowing about your brain’s gears can make a difference. The key is self awareness: noting when your brain is under- or overstimulated and adapting your behaviour appropriately. It may have taken more than two centuries, but it is time we all learned to respect our little blue dot.

Doty's book, Mind Magic, made sense to me. With one glaring exception.

Well, today I finished reading James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. I started off liking the book more than how I ended up liking it. 

The general thrust of Mind Magic is hard to argue with. The human mind is like an iceberg: the conscious tip, which we're aware of, is much smaller than the subconscious bulk, which we aren't aware of.

Yet thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such mostly bubble up from the subconscious rather than our conscious awareness. We all are familiar with thoughts that appear unbidden and depart without a conscious goodbye. Emotions, even more so.

Still, the conscious aspect of us is important, obviously. Leaving aside the question of whether we have free will (Doty says it doesn't really matter if we do), every experience, whether it be conscious or subconscious, has an impact on us.

This means that we can influence how the subconscious operates through our conscious thoughts, visualizations, intentions, and goals. In this way our mind can become attuned to facilitating what we want to have happen. 

In my first post about the book, I shared a passage from the introduction that summarized the Mind Magic approach.

There is much confusion about manifestation in popular culture, so before I go any further, here is what I mean by the term: manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy.

In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock. Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions.

In fact, the first step in successfully manifesting is to separate yourself from the belief that there is an external source for solving your problems and that this external source is what is manifesting in your life. If you want to live a rich, meaningful, and prosperous life, you do not have to appease any power beyond yourself.

I really liked what Doty said here, including how he began his book.

THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

It may not sound like it, but this is good news. The universe doesn't give a fuck about you, not because you are not worthy or are out of alignment with the cosmos or have been put under a curse for ten generations. No, the universe doesn't give a fuck about you because it has no fucks to give.

Many of us are taught to spend our lives hoping for something outside of ourselves to fix our problems and make us whole: a winning lottery ticket, a wise guide who knows all the answers, a guru, a guardian angel, or some magical being, force, energy, or genie sitting out there in the universe who will make everything work out for us. For years I longed to believe this, too.

I thought there was a stern cosmic parent tracking all our actions and deciding if we were worthy to receive our dream house or to meet our soulmate or to be cured of cancer. As a neuroscientist and physician, I know today that we have no proof of such a force or being but we have a great deal of scientific evidence of the power of our own minds to produce changes in our lives that may at first appear impossible. This is the practice of manifestation. 

However, I got the feeling after reading the final chapters that either Doty decided to alter the message of the universe not giving a fuck about us, or an editor of his publisher advised he do this, since manifesting is a trendy topic and likely most of those interested in this subject believe that, as in The Secret, the universe actually does bring us what we desire if we approach the "I do give a fuck about you" universe in the correct way.

The best example of this in Mind Magic is in the final chapter before the conclusion, "Step Six: Release Expectations and Open to Magic."

Doty describes the tale of Lynne Twist, an executive for the Hunger Project, who took a trip to Guatemala and  "had an extraordinary experience, led by a shaman in the mountains" that led her to feel she should "devote her energies to the project of protecting the Sacred Headwaters and its Indigenous people."

Soon after, Doty says, Twist received a gift.

"It sounds terrible," she says, "but the gift I received from the universe was malaria." In fact, there were two strains of it at once, one from India and the other from Ethiopia.

For many months she couldn't do her Hunger Project job. When she got better, she realized that she didn't need to go back to that job.

As Lynne describes it, the mystical power of the rainforest and the power of the Indigenous people's voices drew her toward them, and the seduction of the natural world became almost an obsession... "I believe the circumstances of my illness arranged themselves to ensure this huge life pivot or reallocation of who I am and what I was about."

Doty says:

This is indeed a subtle practice, because part of the power of the manifesting techniques is to ground our intention in highly specific and emotionally coded visualizations. However, we have to remember that the high level of detail in our visualizations is for classifying our intention as important within the subconscious, not for actually exerting influence on our external world.

In other words, holding a powerfully imagined and emotionally resonant vision of our intention in our minds allows our subconscious to guide our activity, but the results of that activity come from the world around us and what it needs... The reality is that we rarely need to know exactly how our intention will be realized or how we will reach our destination. We only need to look for the next right step.

Now, I readily admit that these passages are much less objectionable than the craziness of The Secret, which did indeed claim that thoughts alone can change the objective circumstances of one's life. All I'm pointing out is that Doty is skating on the edge of the universe responding to our intentions, though he doesn't quite go that far.

I did end up with quite a few question marks penned in the margin of that final chapter. Also, in the Conclusion, where Doty writes:

In my life, I have experienced the power of manifesting in ways that I cannot explain. When I first began the practice, I devoted all my energy and attention and heart to making sure my family's rent was paid so that we would not be evicted from our apartment. Out of the blue, a man who owed my father for a job showed up at our door and handed me an envelope full of money -- enough to pay our rent with plenty left over for food.

I remember the excitement and joy I felt as I rushed as fast as I could on my bike, with tears in my eyes, to share the news with Ruth. That was my first taste of the true power of the practice. From a neuroscience point of view, I cannot say how I influenced the situation, but the wonder I felt laid the foundation for my belief in manifesting.

Since then, I have had countless similar experiences that may defy scientific logic but nonetheless speak to the inner power of setting an intention in the heart and mind.

To me it isn't a good sign when an author uses the phrase "that may deny scientific logic" in a book whose subtitle says "the neuroscience of manifestation." But I liked the final paragraph of the book, though it seems to be somewhat at odds with what Doty said above.

Lying back and taking in the beauty, abundance, and connection in my life, I remember the good news: it is the realization that the universe isn't separate from you but that you are the universe, and it is only you who can give a fuck. It is only you that can harness the power within yourself. And that is the real magic.

Learning new skills is key to improving both mind and body

Like most people, I'm a big believer in improving my skills. This is such an obvious thing to do, it hardly bears mentioning. But I feel like I need to stress the obvious, because some visitors to this blog seem to view spirituality as a "one and done" sort of thing. 

Meaning, you find a religion, meditation technique, mystical path, or whatever that suits you, and you stick with that approach with no modifications for the rest of your life. Yeah, I realize this sounds ridiculous, and it is. Yet I've encountered people who actually seem to believe it's the way to go.

Which goes against how we deal with just about every other activity of mind or body. 

I started playing tennis at a young age, twelve or so. I played competitively into my 30s. I never stopped trying to improve my game: taking lessons, trying new racquets, stringing racquets at various tensions, hitting balls against a backboard.

I began learning Tai Chi in 2005. Nineteen years later, I'm way past being a beginner. My Tai Chi instructor, even more so. Yet my instructor is continually teaching new techniques. Naturally they become subtler since almost everyone in our classes is well versed in the basics of Tai Chi. There's always something more to learn about Tai Chi, though.

When it comes to meditation, I've meditated daily for about 55 years. Just as with tennis and Tai Chi, I'm always open to fresh ideas about how to make my meditation more pleasant and fulfilling. That's why I like to read new books about meditation and mindfulness, along with re-reading old books -- since I've found that as I change over the years, how I look upon a meditation/mindfulness book will change also.

Teachers are helpful in improving skills, whether they be an actual person or a virtual person (book, video, web site, etc.). I've never agreed 100% with any teacher I've had. All I look for in a teacher is the ability to help me learn something new. They always will look upon some things differently than I do, so I pick and choose what I accept from a teacher and what I reject.

For example, I'm enjoying James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. However, some of what he says doesn't resonate with me, either because Doty is wrong, or he's right and I don't understand what he's getting at.

Doty speaks about synchronicity being a way for us to manifest what we desire through unexpected connections that arise in our life.

Okay, we've all experienced amazing coincidences that can seem as if the universe is sending a message to us. That's possible, though unlikely. Given how many happenings there are every day in everybody's life, coincidences and synchronicity are going to occur once in a while just by chance, like rolling a pair of dice and getting two sixes five times in a row.

Yesterday I stopped by our bank to deposit a check. I wanted to get that errand done as quickly as possible, since I needed to go grocery shopping afterwards and then walk our dog before it got dark, which happens pretty early this time of the year in Oregon.

I had to wait a while before a teller was free. I got a woman who I'd noticed had spent quite a bit of time with a previous customer. That transaction required the assistance of a supervisor. When I was called to her station, I was mildly irked at having to wait so long. I handed her a deposit slip and a check, but she asked, "What do you need to do?"

"A deposit," I said, "I just gave it to you." "Anything else?" "No." She then fiddled with her terminal before asking me for my I.D. I dug out my drivers license, gave it to her, and said, "Why do you need I.D.? I've been banking here for a long time." "Because I'm new and don't know you."

That changed everything. Now I knew why she was taking so long to help customers. She needed assistance from a supervisor to do my transaction, but that didn't bother me after I realized she was learning on the job. 

After going grocery shopping at a couple of stores, I decided to get a grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte at the Starbucks within the south Salem Fred Meyer store. The barista, an older man, needed me to repeat my order several times before he got it right on the terminal. Eventually he had to call another barista over to show him where "vanilla" was on the screen.

This was fine with me, as I'd noticed that he had to use a "cheat sheet" of how to make Starbucks drinks with the customer ahead of me. Meaning, he also was learning his job. This is rare for me, encountering someone who is new at their job. Yet it happened twice in the space of an hour or so.

Doty might say that was synchronicity, that I needed to learn something about patience and compassion for slow employees. However, I just see it as a coincidence. Regardless, I learned something about myself. Next time I won't be so quick to get irritated at an employee who takes extra time to do something for me.

That's all we can hope for from life. Learning. Becoming more skilled. Having more compassion and love. As my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Marshall, was fond of saying, "Do your best. Angels can do no better." 

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I eventually realized that this had some major drawbacks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My fear of death is less now. But is there anything to fear, really?

I used to have a strong fear of death. So much so, as I described in a 2004 HinesSight post ("Give me liberty or give me gerbil"), I made an attorney say gerbil rather than death whenever she needed to refer to my eventual demise. 

Kathleen Evans, the attorney, did a masterful job at a whiteboard injecting into our legal-impaired brains the gist (but not the details, blessedly) of why what we did in 1993 still made sense in 2004, even with arcane changes in some estate and tax laws whose sole purpose seemed to be to make things so complicated that you had to hire a lawyer to explain them to you. Isn’t that the reason behind most laws?

When we first sat down in Kathleen’s office, I reminisced that in 1993 we did our talking at a table by her Court Street window. That was where I made Kathleen substitute the word “gerbil” for “death” when she was referring to my eventual, um, gerbiling. It just was too uncomfortable for me back then to hear, “So, after Brian’s death, Laurel will need to….”

I’m not sure if “So, after Brian’s gerbil” was much better, but it added a certain levity to what otherwise was a not-so-pleasant discussion. Laurel has no trouble talking about her own death. I admire her. Death scares me shitless, though the older I get, I suppose enough shit has been scared out of me already to make what remains less noticeable.

Early on yesterday I noticed that Kathleen wasn’t saying “death” when she spoke to me. She wasn’t saying “gerbil” either, but was substituting the usual sorts of euphemisms: “gone,” “no longer with us,” and such. I told her, “It’s OK to say ‘Brian’s death’ now. I’ve gotten past the whole gerbil thing.”

It's interesting that I was so afraid of death in 1993, as that was when I still believed in the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization led by a guru considered to be God in Human Form who supposedly would guide his disciples after their death -- either to heavenly realms beyond the physical, or, if your karmas were in bad shape, into a new human form through reincarnation.

Yet it was during my true-believing days that my fear of death was greatest. By 2004, when I wrote the gerbil post, I had started to distance myself from the RSSB teachings, which coincided with an increased willingness to speak directly about my eventual death. 

Now I'm even more accepting of death. Sure, that may be partly due to my age, 76, since the older I get, the more I feel like I've enjoyed a decently long life. Plus, with age comes increasing aches and pains, along with other health problems, so it becomes easier to visualize a time when life becomes so difficult, death will seem like a relief.

However, it seems to me that the main reason why death doesn't seem so scary is that I no longer feel like I'm a special spiritual person, a disciple of a Perfect Living Master whose destiny is to be united with the highest manifestation of God, far above the limited godliness that members of ordinary religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam will attain.

Instead, now I have rejoined the ranks of ordinary human beings. And that feels extraordinary. 

Occasionally a sense of "one day I'll die and be nonexistent forever!" will wash over me. I'll be in awe of the amazing preciousness of whatever I'm doing when that realization strikes my mind like a bolt of reality lightning. This usually-taken-for-granted activity -- doing Tai Chi, washing the dishes, walking the dog, whatever -- suddenly seems infinitely valuable, since after I die, there won't be any moments of living at all.

But here's the thing: if I reflect upon that sense of leaving life behind forever, I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing than whatever I'm doing right now. I'm not big on "bucket lists," those activities people come up with that they're determined to engage in before they kick the bucket. (Meaning, die.)

I don't feel that taking a trip to Europe would make death more acceptable than staying at home. I don't feel that writing another book would make death more acceptable than composing a blog post every night. I don't feel that meditating twice as long in the morning would make death more acceptable than how I currently meditate. I don't feel that contemplating nature would make death more acceptable than watching a football game. 

Since I'm back to looking upon myself as an ordinary human being, which is how I saw myself before I joined RSSB, I'm comfortable with the fact that death comes to everybody. I had no control over being born. I have no control over being dead. Both are inescapable aspects of life.

This is a big relief for me. When I was religiously-minded, I'd feel like I had to make every moment count, since I'd been taught that this physical plane of existence wasn't my real home, that my destiny lay elsewhere. 

Now, I don't see myself as a spiritual being experiencing physical existence, but simply as a physical being experiencing physical existence -- along with everybody else in the world. One day my experiencing will end, as will that of everybody else. And that's just the way things are. Which is fine by me.

Understanding how our mind works requires going back to prehistory

Before I share more about what I'm learning in James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, here's a revelation that I found germane to Doty's message.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, there was an article about what happened to the Neanderthals. You know, our prehistoric relations who aren't around any longer but live on in the fact that most humans of non-African ancestry have a genetic makeup that's about 1-4 % Neanderthal, which shows that us Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred.

The article said that recent archaeological discoveries, notably from a cave in France, indicate that the last Neanderthal died about 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. Prior to that, Neanderthals and early humans took turns living in the cave over a lengthy span of time, many thousands of years.

This brought home to me an important fact: the brain and body of us modern humans are essentially unchanged from that of our ancestors who lived in the French cave along with Neanderthals. What's changed is human culture, technology, and such, not how our brain and body function. 

As noted in a post on my HinesSight blog, Doty points out that the sympathetic nervous system evolved to aid prehistoric humans in dealing with the many threats that endangered them long ago. Speaking of the autonomic nervous system, he says:

This part of the nervous system developed early in our evolution as a species and has two divisions. The first to evolve was the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), whose job it is to ensure our physical survival and the survival of our genes, and whose primary activity is to engage the fight, flight, or freeze response. 

...Because it evolved to act in life-or-death situations, it moves along very short neurons and therefore has the power to completely commandeer our physical and emotional resources in a split second, filling our body with stress hormones like cortisol and tensing our muscles for action.

Later, the human nervous system evolved further with the addition of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), also known as the rest-and-digest response, whose job is to return the body to a peaceful resting state, a process known as homeostasis. 

The switch to rest-and-digest is accompanied by a wide variety of physiological changes to promote balance and harmony: our muscles relax, our heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and we produce more saliva for digestion.

We still have a bias toward negativity, in line with the fact that fight, flight, or freeze responses were an earlier evolutionary adaptation than rest-and-digest responses.

This helps explain why voters appeared to be so swayed by Donald Trump's appeals to fear and anxiety: Migrants are streaming across the border raping and killing Americans! (ignoring the fact that migrants have lower crime rates than other people); Your child can go to school as a boy and come back as a girl! (ignoring the fact that parents have to give approval for transgender operations and these are very rare in childhood).

So it takes more effort to overcome that negativity bias than to give in to it. This applies to our negativity toward ourselves, as when we want to improve our life in some way and come up short. If our weight loss program doesn't work, we blame our lack of willpower. Ditto for exercising more, being less stressed at work, or other goals we might have.

That's why Doty, along with other neuroscientists, is big on positive affirmations and visualizations. These send a signal to our mind about what is important in our life. I like his analogy about the filing clerk and the bloodhound.

We teach our subconscious what is important through repetition and and positive emotion. As we repeat our rituals and visualizations, we enter a state of flow, or complete absorption in our inner activity. Deep experiences of positive emotion, whether from real or imagined experiences, teach our subconscious to associate the goals we wish to pursue with the biological reward systems of our bodies.

In this state, our sense of self-consciousness is dialed down and we transcend the limiting beliefs of our mental habits and invite guidance from our deeper resources, such as our capacity for compassion or the creations of our imagination. Absorption in our inner vision is the state that connects us to creativity and clarifies our intention in our subconscious.

The magic is that, as we go about our daily lives, while we may not be directly thinking about our inner intention with our conscious mind, the subconscious goes on processing it and attuning toward it.

We might think of the subconscious as comprised of a filing clerk and a bloodhound. The filing clerk oversees a limited filing cabinet governed by the brain's conservation of energy and the needs we've placed on it. Once the filing clerk places a file in the cabinet, the bloodhound gets the scent and relentlessly scans our environment for the slightest whiff of it.

The bloodhound will then be on the trail at the subconscious level, attending to manifesting our intention around the clock, employing whatever powers, focus, or opportunities it can find. This is the experience of synchronicity, when seemingly unexpected connections begin to appear in service of a particular desire. This is a fundamental component of manifesting.

As we can see, the real estate of the subconscious is precious and has the power to shape our destiny. What the subconscious seeks, the conscious mind finds. So, if we feel threatened and believe on a subconscious level that we live in a threatening world that is out to harm us, our bloodhound will scan for threats and we will find ourselves discovering more and more threatening elements in our outer environment. 

If we have taught our subconscious mind to seek connection, joy, fulfillment, and thriving, we will naturally find ourselves discovering more and more opportunities to experience those positive emotions in reality. 

...The important thing to understand about the subconscious is that it responds to repetition. The more we focus on a particular outcome, visualize it, imaginatively experience it with our five senses, and repeat the desire to ourselves and to the world, the more the filing clerk will catch on to the salience of our desire and the more our bloodhound will get to work to have our mind manifest our intention.

...As long as the SNS [sympathetic nervous system] is curating the subconscious, the filing cabinet will be filled with fears, phobias, insecurities, and habitual beliefs that will be skewing our experience of life to the negative, the frightening, and the limited. Before we bring the light of awareness to our subconscious, we must see that it is really the domain of our survival fears and desires, the legacy of our evolutionary inheritance.

And so the first step in harnessing the power of our subconscious is to sublimate all the whims and wants of the SNS. In practice, this means recognizing that our tendencies to be stressed and anxious derive from the experiences of evolutionary predecessors that have been embedded in the subconscious and become the default software. 

As we learn how the subconscious works, this gives us the power to get information into the system. We begin to put the information we choose into the subconscious and thereby replace the information it is getting by default from the SNS. We are manifesting our own agency.

What we are doing is using the cortex, the higher level control system in the brain, and changing how the vagus nerve responds to our intentions on a conscious level. By doing so we are creating a direct neural route to influencing the subconscious. 

When we consciously practice repetitive visualization techniques and rituals to conjure powerful positive emotions around our desired outcomes, we are increasing the power of the PNS [parasympathetic nervous system] and diminishing that of the SNS.

The subconscious has both expansive and contractive sides. In other words, the SNS has the power to subconsciously influence the subconscious, while the cortex has the power to consciously influence the subconscious. 

As we access this power, we begin to break up the SNS's unholy monopoly on our subconscious, freeing ourselves from the grip of survival fears that we find hard to ignore and that distract us from our deepest intentions. Using practices of suggestibility and conscious repetition, we limit the SNS's own direct path to the subconscious and gain the power to positively choose its contents.

Tiny Habits is a good way to change our behavior for the better

As I was making my way through James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I came across an intriguing mention of another book: Tiny Habits, by B.J. Fogg. 

After perusing the Amazon listing, and seeing how well liked the book was by thousands of readers, I decided it was worth $11.67 to click on "Buy Now." I've only read the first 40 pages, but I'm liking what Fogg has to say. 

Sure, it appears that Tiny Habits has become a sort of cottage industry since it was published in January 2020. The Tiny Habits web site is testimony to that. However, I suspect that the appeal of the Tiny Habits approach to behavior change isn't so much due to clever marketing, but to the simplicity of the basic notions.

The Introduction describes what they are.

Over the last twenty years, I've found that most everyone wants to make some sort of change: eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, reduce stress, get better sleep.

...When our results fall short of our expectations, the inner critic finds an opening and steps on stage. Many of us believe that if we fail to be more productive, lose weight, or exercise regularly then something must be wrong with us.

If only we were better people, we wouldn't have failed. If only we had followed that program to the letter or kept those promises to ourselves, we would have succeeded. We just need to get our act together and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and do better. Right?

Nope. Sorry. Not right.

We are not the problem.

Our approach to change is. It's a design flaw, not a personal flaw. 

Building habits and creating positive change can be easy -- if you have the right approach. A system based on how human psychology really works. A process that makes change easier. Tools that don't rely on guesswork or faulty principles.

Popular thinking about habit formation and change feeds into our impulse to set unrealistic expectations. We know habits matter; we just need more good habits and fewer bad ones. But here we are, still struggling to change. Still thinking it's our fault.

All my research and hands-on experience tell me that this is exactly the wrong mindset. In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things:

-- Stop judging yourself.
-- Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.
-- Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

I've been trying out the first two exercises in the book. I usually never do exercises in books, because they're too damn hard, like those in Doty's Mind Magic book. He'll say to do a progressive relaxation exercise for 10 minutes or so, then engage in visualizations of some sort, like what's most important for the reader to achieve in this life, then spend five minutes writing down those insights, and so on.

By contrast, Fogg says: 

I won't prescribe exact habits in this book. I'm sharing a method for wiring in any habit you want. You pick the habits. But right here, right now, I'm making an exception. I invite you to start practicing a new habit each and every morning. It's simple. And it takes about three seconds. I call it the Maui Habit.

After you put your feet on the floor in the morning, immediately say this phrase, "It's going to be a great day." As you say these seven words, try to feel optimistic and positive. The recipe in Tiny Habits format looks like this.

I've been doing this for a few mornings. It really does make me feel better when I say, "It's going to be a great day." Or "I'm going to have a great day." I liked that Fogg said that if saying this feels phony to him, he modifies it to "It's going to be a great day -- somehow."

A basic notion of the Tiny Habits approach is that to be successful with a new habit, it has to be easy to do and pleasurable. 

Here's another exercise that I also like a lot and have been doing regularly.

If there's one concept from my book I hope you embrace, it's this: People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. For that purpose, I have created this exercise for you.

Step 1. Write this phrase on a small piece of paper: I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. 

Step 2. Tape the paper to your bathroom mirror or anywhere you will frequently see it.

Step 3. Read the phrase often.

Step 4. Notice how this insight works in your life (and for the people around you).

I've put this phrase in my iPhone's Reminders app, which I use as my to-do list. It reminds me that my long-standing habit of feeling bad when I make a mistake, screw up, say something that I regret, or otherwise fail to live up to my expectation about myself isn't at all productive. 

It's almost like I've been addicted to beating myself up. I guess that would be fine if this sort of self-inflicted punishment caused me to be a better person, but it doesn't. That's why I've enjoying saying "I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad," quite a few times a day. It reminds me to be as compassionate toward myself as I seek to be with other people.

There's much more to say about the Tiny Habits book, of course, as I get deeper into it. Here's the basic model of the book's approach. You can probably figure out what it means on your own, but I'll talk about the model, which makes sense to me, in another blog post. B:MAP means "behavior happens when motivation, and ability, and prompt converge at the same moment."