Church of the Churchless

Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age

Before I started to write another post (this one) about James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I Googled "critique of manifestation" to see what critics of this fad were saying about it.

And fad it is, something I hadn't realized. I'd figured that after The Secret had been decried by thoughtful people as a New Age book full of cosmic B.S., where you can get whatever you want by aligning yourself with the esoteric Law of Attraction, people had stopped believing in this crap.

But no, the crap has made a comeback in the form of manifestation. I learned this by quickly looking through a bunch of articles just now, including "The Problem With Manifesting," "Is 'manifesting' dangerous magical thinking or a formula for success?," and "Shut up, I'm manifesting!"

What I learned from this peek into the New Age variety of manifesting is that I'm grateful I bought Doty's book, which is founded in neuroscience rather than woo-woo. Here's part of the New Scientist review by science writer Kayt Sukel that spurred my interest in the  book.

Ever since Rhonda Byrne’s bestselling self-help book The Secret came out nearly 20 years ago, manifestation, or the idea that you can transform desire into reality by thought alone, has gone mainstream.

While many have deemed it nothing more than new-age nonsense, two brain experts – James Doty, a neurosurgeon and founder of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, California, and Sabina Brennan, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – have written books exploring how to use the brain’s own design to help guide your thoughts and perceptions to better achieve your goals.

In Mind Magic: The neuroscience of manifestation and how it changes everything, Doty kicks off with what he calls the “real” secret: “The universe does not give a fuck about you.” This sets the tone for the book, letting readers know that the following chapters won’t offer any advice on how to make the universe bend to our will.

Instead, Doty offers a unique primer – and a six-week plan – to help us learn how to adjust our thoughts to better activate parts of the brain to cultivate “a fierce belief in possibility”. In doing so, he argues, we can become more resilient, open and intentional.

Doty offers a step-by-step approach to demonstrate that manifesting isn’t magic, per se, but a way of clarifying what you truly want, embedding your intention in your subconscious and then releasing your expectations to allow that intention to take root. Along the way, he explains why introducing positive, goal-directed thoughts can help rewire important brain networks to help us pay better attention to the opportunities that will help us realise our potential.

While a good bit of Doty’s six-week plan reads like a meditation guide, complete with instructions to scan your body and let go of unnecessary attachments, he takes the time to explain why manifesting is really about focus. By directing your attention (as well as your time) to what you want, you can get into the right mindset to achieve the things you want most in life.

In his "Networks and Vibrations" chapter, Doty discusses the physiology of manifesting, which has nothing to do with anything supernatural or outside the realm of science. Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog that was inspired by what Doty had to say about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

I included some quotes from Doty's book in "Constant worrying about Trump is a threat to your health." My basic point was that our brain and body are basically unchanged from prehistoric times when physical dangers such as being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger were what early humans had to worry about.

Now, we're mainly stressed not by life-or-death dangers, but by other sorts of problems, including the result of the recent United States presidential election -- if someone was firmly opposed to Trump winning. 

Doty says that moving from the fight, flight, or freeze response of the sympathetic nervous system, which enables us to quickly respond to both actual and imagined dangers, to the rest-and-digest response of the parasympathetic nervous system...

Brings with it the ability to process our emotions, memories, and plans, which then allow us to be much more thoughtful and discerning in our reactions to our experience. This spacious processing ability is the key to claiming your agency to change how you are going to react to the world itself. When we have choices about how we are going to act, those choices affect our physiology, which then affects how we respond to our environment.

He calls this the Green Zone of well-being, "in which we are calm, focused, in the flow, and able to care responsively for others. The Green Zone is also the state in which our consciousness can be mustered most effectively to visualize and pursue goals."

So one of the first practices Doty recommends is familiar to most meditators -- relaxing the body through a body scan. Breathing deeply. Focusing on different parts of the body and letting tension in them go. Simply being.

Imagine your body in a state of complete relaxation. See if you can bring your awareness to a sense of simply being as you slowly breathe in and out: nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. Do you feel a sense of warmth or stillness or contentment? You might feel as if you are floating and be overcome with a sense of calmness.

Use your intention to take in the feelings of pleasure and peace and install them in your nervous system so you can recall these feelings in the future. Let your nervous system know that this state of relaxation is possible, desirable, and accessible when you need it.

From what I've read so far, Doty's book is about getting out of our own way when it comes to achieving our goals. Or, to use the trendy language, manifesting our goals. This takes it out of the realm of New Age ridiculousness and into the realm of psychology and neuroscience. 

Mind Magic is a science-based book about manifesting what you want

If I hadn't read a review in New Scientist of James Doty's new book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, the title and subtitle would have turned me off, since "manifestation" sounds New Age'y, and "how it changes everything" sounds over-the-top.

But the review stressed the neuroscience part, which I liked. And after the book arrived via Amazon a few days ago, I really liked the first sentence of the introduction, along with the entire first few paragraphs.

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. 

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.

You simply must believe that the source of your well-being and success is nothing other than the power of your own mind. The reality is that the same mind that creates the obstacles in the life you want is also the source of the intention that will make the life you want real. This is the real secret.

The fuck you give must be your own. This is the real magic.

I say this to you as a neurosurgeon who has studied and operated on the brain and as a neuroscientist who has spent decades investigating the human mind and brain, as a practitioner of spiritual techniques who has collaborated with the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders to teach compassion to thousands of people, and as a human being who has learned it all the hard way.

I'm looking forward to reading Mind Magic. I've only read the first two chapters and am liking the book so far. Doty has various exercises that he invites the reader to do. I'm usually not big on doing exercises, but Doty says that if someone already is meditating, like me, some of the exercises can be integrated into their meditation.

I suspect that Mind Magic refashions fairly familiar neuroscientific findings into a different sort of package. That's fine, though I'll admit that browsing Doty's web site, I found it a bit, well, over-the-top, like the subtitle of his book. But since this isn't a scholarly book, but a popular self-improvement book, I guess that's to be expected. 

What's said on the home page of his web site resonates with me. I'll write more about Doty's book as I get deeper into it.

For decades the practice of manifestation has been widely dismissed as self-involved, materialistic pseudoscience. But as neuroscientist and recognized compassion leader Dr. James Doty reveals, manifestation introduces us to different possibilities, and it lays the groundwork for a kinder, better world.

Doty grounds us in the practices that change our brain structures: attention, meditation, visualization, and compassion. This mind magic allows us to move through the world in ways that help us see clearly—reclaiming our agency, realizing our dreams, and reaching out to help others along the path.

Where previous works about manifestation have focused narrowly on outward success and individual benefit, Mind Magic delivers an openhearted call to make manifestation part of a deeper contribution to healing the problems we face today.

Is meditation about feeling better or about knowing what's true?

I just came across a piece of paper where I'd jotted down some thoughts about meditation that could serve as the basis for a churchless blog post. 

I have no idea how long ago those thoughts came to mind. Must have been a while, since I have no recollection of doing this. No matter. I'll make use of them regardless.

My first thought was, "Is meditation like learning to play music, where you practice and get better and better, or is it openness where beliefs about how things are is let go in favor of how things actually are?"

The next thought was, "Is the goal of meditation to feel better or to know what's true about reality?"

My last thought was, "Reality can be anything permitted by reality. So, be open. Our reality is here/now."

The way I see it, someone whose goal in meditation is to feel better won't be motivated to know reality as it is, since often reality is painful, disturbing, or otherwise unpleasant. 

On the other hand, someone whose goal in meditation is to be open to however reality presents itself -- which is the essence of mindfulness -- will do their best to embrace ugliness as well as beauty, pain as well as pleasure, disappointment as well as satisfaction, failure as well as success.

And if this person enjoys truth, then knowing how things actually are rather than how they'd like things to be will give them a certain peace of mind.

I'm not saying that I am 100% that sort of person, since while I preach the benefits of mindfulness, often my actual meditation practice is aimed at feeling better about my life, rather than accepting everything that's true about my life, which encompasses some stuff that I'd prefer to be rid of. 

So I guess this isn't an either/or proposition. Most people who meditate probably are like me, seeking both greater pleasure and greater truth. 

However, it makes sense that if we restrict ourselves to being more fully aware of what appeals to us, and ignoring the dark side of both ourselves and reality as a whole, we're going to be unbalanced. 

For reality isn't only beautiful rainbows and bright sunny days. It also is scary storm clouds and dark moonless nights. That's why I believe that openness is more important for me to pursue in my meditation than feeling good, even if I have difficulty doing this. 

But if you have a different view of meditation, I'm not going to try to argue you out of it. As my Tai Chi instructor likes to say, "There's no right/wrong here, no good/bad." Just different ways of seeing things.

Lessons for meditation based on psychedelic experience research

As a long-time daily meditator -- I've been doing this for 55 years -- I found an article in the October 2024 issue of Scientific American interesting both for what it says about the use of psychedelics like LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin, and meditation that doesn't involve any psychoactive substance. 

The title of the online version of the article by Gary Stix is provocative: "What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug, it Turns Out." I'll share a PDF file of the article for non-subscribers.
Download What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug It Turns Out | Scientific American

How could that be? Seemingly a psychedelic experience requires a psychedelic drug. Conversely, doesn't taking a psychedelic drug always result in a psychedelic experience?

Well, from my extensive experience with LSD and mescaline during my college days in the 1960s, I can confidently say that the answer to the second question is no.

As I may have related before on this blog, once I took four college friends to Sequoia National Park in California, as I grew up in Three Rivers, a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains that is at the gateway to the park.

We hiked five miles or so to a scenic area away from other people. After spending a night in our sleeping bags, each of us took the same dose of mescaline. I wandered off with a guy who I felt close to. We had a great time walking through the woods, climbing to a scenic granite overlook, marveling at a jet that zoomed past high overhead.

Our psychedelic experience was very different from the three people who stayed where we were camping. Asking how they were doing when we got back to them, they complained, "It was a bummer. We never came on." Meaning, they didn't have any psychedelic experience from the same drug that we'd taken.

The article is an interview with an anesthesiologist. Here's how it starts out:

A debate has long percolated among researchers as to what happens after a person takes a psychedelic drug. The experience may stem at least in part from the placebo effect, which is rooted in the belief that taking psilocybin or ketamine will somehow be transformative.

Boris D. Heifets, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has been tackling this question amid his broader laboratory investigations of what exactly happens in mind and brain when someone takes a psychedelic.

How much of their sometimes life-altering experience is chemical or empirical, and how much is mental and subjective? It turns out the effects may consist of a lot more than just a simple biochemical response to a drug activating, say, the brain’s serotonin receptors.

The first question posed to Heifetz was this:

Are we coming any closer to understanding how psychedelics work, including in the context of therapy? Are we closer to using these transfor­mational experiences to treat psychia­tric disorders?

Having been in this field for a while, I still face this inescapable problem of how to study psychedelics. One framework that I find very useful is thinking about it in three categories.

There’s the biochemical drug effect, which involves basic brain biology—chemicals interacting with receptors on cells. That happens whether or not you can “feel” the effect of the drug. Then there is the conscious experience related to changes in sensation and revelatory, hallucinatory and ecstatic feelings. These experiences are closely tied to taking the drug, and usually we think of them as caused by the drug. But it is quite difficult to say whether a lasting change in mood or outlook was a result of the drug—a biochemical effect—or of the trip itself, the experiential effect.

The third factor, then, is all those aspects of the overall drug experience that are independent of the drug or trip, the nondrug factors—what psychologist and psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary called the “set and setting.” How much do your state of mind and the setting in which you take a drug influence the outcome?

This category includes expectations about improvement in, say, your depression, expectations about the experience, the stress level in the environment. It would also include integration: making sense of these intense experiences afterward and integrating them into your life. And it’s useful to put each of these things in its own box because I think each of them is somewhat isolated. The goal is to make each box smaller and smaller, to really deconstruct the pieces.

Heifetz found that when ketamine was given to depressed patients under general anesthesia, which they were getting as part of surgery for medical problems unrelated to their depression, so they didn't have any experience of getting ketamine, this group had their depression markedly reduced. But so did a placebo group that didn't get ketamine, yet went through the same pre-operation interviews and such. 

Heifetz observes:

What I take from that is that these nondrug effects, such as expectations of a particular outcome, are almost certainly present in most psychedelic trials and are independently able to drive a big therapeutic effect.

Now, here's how I see this research applying to meditation. Meditation obviously isn't a drug, but it still changes the brain. Every experience changes the brain, of course. Thinking is neurons firing. Not thinking is neurons not firing, or perhaps other non-thought areas of the brain firing. So meditation has physical effects, just as a psychedelic drug does.

It also seems clear that the expectations of meditators also plays a role in the effect meditation has. For example, if a mantra is given to someone by a respected guru or teacher, there may be a strong expectation that repeating the mantra in meditation will lead to positive experiences. 

If these occur, it is very difficult, if not impossible to separate out the different effects of (1) meditation itself, and (2) expectation itself. Just as people who didn't get ketamine during surgery felt less depressed just by the attention they got from someone else, along with an expectation that the study they were a part of could benefit them, likely followers of a guru or other spiritual teacher feel better just by being part of a like-minded community, regardless of whether they meditate as instructed.

Here's another interesting question and answer:

How does giving an actual psychedelic drug to someone in a clinical trial relate to the three categories you mentioned earlier?

Let’s circle back to this idea that psychedelic transformation could rely on the biochemical effect, the experience of the trip itself or nondrug factors. Our study of ketamine during anesthesia really highlighted the role of nondrug factors such as expectation but didn’t really get at the question of “Is it the drug or the trip?”

To answer that, some of my scientist colleagues are testing “nonpsychedelics,” or nonhallucinogenic psychedelic derivatives, to see whether patients with depression, for example, get better after treatment with a drug that can cause some of the same biochemical changes as a classical psychedelic but doesn’t have a “trip” associated with it. That’s “taking the trip out of the drug.”

But what if you could “take the drug out of the trip,” meaning creating an experience that is reproducible across people that checks many of the same boxes as a classic psychedelic-induced trip but doesn’t actually require the use of a psychedelic molecule? So what, in this context, you provide people with is a profound experience that can even be somewhat standardized so you can study it. And it would be powerful and vivid and revelatory, with a long-lasting impact. Do you get the same effects without a psychedelic?

That would not be definitive evidence. But it would strongly suggest that maybe there’s nothing intrinsically special about the activity of a drug that activates a particular receptor that mediates the effects of psychedelics. What that would do is put front and center the role of human experience in psychological transformation.

So maybe a meditator can benefit from their meditation even if they don't have any sort of profound experience. That would be akin to "taking the trip out of the drug."

And it seems obvious that people can achieve the same experiential benefits that meditation provides by doing things that have nothing to do with meditation, like volunteering at a food bank or concentrating on a jigsaw puzzle. That would be akin to "taking the drug out of the trip."

If consciousness is immaterial, why does ultrasound boost mindfulness?

I realize that those who believe that consciousness is immaterial are pretty much immune to the evidence that it is a physical phenomenon. 

That evidence is ubiquitous, as I've pointed out many times in blog posts. Anesthesia makes us unconscious. So does being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Caffeine makes consciousness more alert. MDMA ("Ecstasy") makes consciousness feel more loving. 

The October 2024 issue of Scientific American has a short article that presents more evidence for the physical nature of consciousness. Being a daily meditator for most of my life -- I started meditating in 1969 -- I know how difficult it can be to keep the unruly mind under a semblance of control.

The article describes how ultrasound stimulation of a certain part of the brain was able to produce a state of heightened mindfulness.

Again, this isn't exactly breaking news, aside from the ultrasound part. I experienced heightened mindfulness when I worked the night shift at a San Jose fruit cannery one summer during my college years. I hated my job of hosing fruit pulp that dropped from overhead conveyor belts into floor drains. It was wet and messy work.

But after "lunch" at midnight, or whenever it was, I'd take a Benzedrine tablet. This amphetamine changed my mood completely. Now I found my job to be highly enjoyable. All that had changed was a chemical that affected my brain by enabling it to focus much better.

Ultrasound can affect the brain also. Here's the article.

Even when you aren’t doing anything, your brain is relentlessly active—daydreaming, ruminating, contemplating the past or future. How this mind wandering functions can significantly shape a person’s internal conscious experience.

In a recent study of 30 participants, researchers applied low-­intens­ity ultrasound waves to a brain region associated with introspection and off-task mind wandering. Participants who underwent five minutes of ultrasound stimulation reported significantly heightened mindfulness—the ability to be fully present in the moment, without judgment toward others or the self. The results were published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“I haven’t seen ultrasound technology used in this way, but this type of neuromodulation has significant potential to change how we think about and enhance mindfulness,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison social psychologist Hadley Rahrig, who also studies that state of mind.

The researchers targeted the brain’s default mode network (DMN), a constellation of interconnected areas that become particularly active when the mind disengages with the outside world and drifts into activities such as reminiscing or envisioning the future. Abnormal DMN activity and connectivity have been linked to anxious rumination and depressive symptoms. “You get stuck, where your mind just keeps going and you can’t stop it. We hypothesized that we could use ultrasound stimulation to remove some stickiness and let the network cool off,” says the new study’s lead author, Brian Lord, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Arizona.

Since the DMN was described in 2001, scientists have sought to manipulate itthrough broad-brush methods such as meditation and psychedelic drug therapy. But it remained difficult to precisely adjust DMN function because of its deep-brain location.

To overcome this challenge, Lord and his team used transcranial-focused ultrasound, a technique that converts electric current into concentrated and localized acoustic waves. (Half the participants received sham ultrasound as a control.) These waves can penetrate brain regions with millimeter-level precision and with greater depth than other noninvasive stimulation methods, which typically use magnetic fields or scalp-attached electrodes to induce electric currents spread over several centimeters.

Functional MRI scans showed that the researchers successfully inhibited activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a key area in the DMN linked to emotional regulation and concentration during meditation. Through questionnaires and an interview, participants in the treatment group reported at least 30 minutes of subjective effects akin to entering a deep meditative state: a distorted sense of time, fewer negative thoughts and an improved ability to detach from their feelings. Other scientists at the University of Arizona are testing this technique to treat mood disorders such as depression.

“One of the greatest barriers to meditation and mindfulness is the steep learning curve. Brain stimulation can act like training wheels for the mind, helping people achieve that deep state of consciousness,” Lord says. “That’s our larger goal.”

Awareness is more important than peace of mind

Every day I repeat a brief loving kindness meditation.

It starts with "May I be happy; may I be safe; may I be healthy; may I be at peace." Then I visualize someone I care about, usually my wife, and say the same things but substituting "you" for "I." After that, I zoom out to visualize the entire planet, and say "all" instead of "I."

It's interesting that I have little trouble envisioning myself or someone else being happy, safe, and healthy. But while I enjoy the sentiment, "May ______ be at peace," it's more difficult for me to picture what being at peace consists of.

Is it not being bothered by troubling things? Is it embracing everything that happens with calm acceptance? Is it being detached from the usual ups and downs of life?

Whatever being at peace is, it seems that if I, or anyone else, had it, then being happy, safe, and healthy wouldn't be nearly as important, since even if I or anyone else was unhappy, unsafe, and unhealthy, if we were at peace with that, life would be fine.

I used to think that this was something that meditation would eventually bring to me: peace of mind. Well, that hasn't happened yet, and I doubt that it ever will. I've even become doubtful that peace of mind is something to strive for.

For it seems to be unnatural, not really human, an artificial concept that sounds wonderful, yet is never observed as a living reality -- especially if we're talking about lasting or permanent peace of mind. 

Mindfulness strikes me as not only much more attainable, but more desirable. Meaning, non-judgmental open awareness of what is actually happening within and without us in the present moment.  (Which, of course, is the only moment possible, since the past is gone and the future hasn't happened.)

There's no way I'm always going to be happy, safe, healthy, at peace, or any other quality. Life is constant change. That's what life is, movement. When our mental and physical movement ceases, we're dead. 

So if I want a foundation to my life that offers a solid place to stand no matter what my circumstances are, it won't be peace of mind, which comes and goes depending on the state of my joys, sorrows, anxieties, worries, satisfactions, and all that. 

Mindful awareness, though, that seems doable.

Sure, currently I drift in and out of mindful awareness. Evidence of this is me walking back to my car to make sure I locked it; not being sure whether I took my vitamins and other supplements at the time I usually do; missing a move in a Tai Chi form because I was thinking about what I was going to have for dinner after the class ends.

I've been slowly making my way through a short book by Toni Packer, The Wonder of Presence and the Way of Meditative Inquiry. I bought it because I'm a fan of Joan Tollifson's writings, and she studied with Packer for a while and speaks highly of her. 

Here's passages from a chapter called "Is Awareness Enough?" It isn't crystal clear what Packer is getting at here, but I'm fine with some murkiness when the general thrust of an idea makes sense to me, which these passages do.

Waking up during the night and looking out the window, such bright stars! The earth is enveloped in a fresh, white blanket of innocence. No footprints yet. No car tracks. No dirt. An amazing thing -- everything wiped clean. Like turning over a new leaf.

Yesterday I said, "Awareness is not enough." Why did I say that, some people were asking. Feeling the pain and sadness with tears welling up at memories of my late husband, Kyle, I said, "Awareness is not enough."

As I said it I wondered if someone would ask me about that. Somebody did. I do need to say more about what I meant at the time. Feeling love and pain and grief and sadness, one realizes how instantaneously remembrance creates a surge of sensations and emotions.

Memories and physical reverberations are as one -- it seems as though nothing could interrupt that immediate connection. Awareness appears to be there, but the remembering-paining-grieving cycle does not cease just because of it. And that's all right.

Awareness is like a mirror that shows what is happening, what we are at this instant, the joy and grief, pain and well-being, turmoil and peacefulness. Awareness reveals these memory connections but no one  intending or creating them. There is no I to be found directing things -- there is only what has been described. 

What does it mean, "Awareness is not enough?"

Where is our true abiding place at the rock bottom of everything -- an immovable presence? Is it just in the fleeting flow of events, both external and internal -- the thoughts, the feelings and emotions, the organism's reverberations -- and moving along with it all? Or is it simply awaring it all?

...People ask, "Would I be aware if there was nothing to be aware of?" Yes! Awareness needs no object. No subject I! Objects come and go and may even stay away in the depth of meditation. It doesn't matter. What matters is presence. 

Awareness, in which there is no fragmentation, no division, no me here and "everybody else" out there. All that is mind-made stuff. It needs to be seen as such.

Let me answer questions that may be lingering right now in people's minds: Does meditation mean I need to quiet down and be without thoughts? Does it mean I need to see everything about myself?

It's both. It's neither. It is without I. 

In seeing the hills and valleys now shrouded in fog, now lit up by sunlight -- do we see the ideas about them, or is there just unlimited space in which things freely appear and disappear? The open space being oneself, and what appears and disappears oneself, without division.

I'm learning some things by caring for my wife

As I said in my previous post, "My wife's shoulder surgery is a growth opportunity for me," since Laurel had shoulder replacement surgery last Tuesday, I've been her caregiver -- and will be for the 4-6 weeks she'll have to wear a sling on her right arm (we're hoping for four weeks).

Until you can't use an arm for much, it's difficult to know all the things you won't be able to do anymore. We're rediscovering those things, since Laurel had rotator cuff surgery on the same arm about ten years ago that also required her to use a sling for a month. Of course, we were a decade younger then, so everything is a bit tougher now that we're in our mid-70s rather than mid-60s.

I've been having to do a lot more around the house than I usually do.

For example, Laurel used to walk our dog in the morning and I did it most afternoons. Now I handle both walks. We shared cooking duties before her surgery. Now I have to help Laurel with her meals, unless it's a simple one that doesn't require two hands. For the first 48 hours my wife was constantly using a machine with a timer to ice her shoulder, 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off. My job was to rotate three sets of 12 frozen water bottles into the machine every eight hours, making sure a thoroughly frozen set always was available.

What I've discovered from all this extra taking care of Laurel is that the more I'm focused on her needs, the less it bothers me when something goes wrong in my life. This both surprised and pleased me. The first time it happened, it felt like I'd taken a pill that reduced the sensation of the problem I was having by about half. 

Meaning, what used to irritate me considerably now irritated me only a little. It was as if constantly putting Laurel's needs before my own, even for just a couple of days, considerably lowered the feeling of Me I normally carry around. Having less Me rattle around in my mind, and more She (my wife), left less for an irritation to latch onto. 

Someone asked in a comment on my first post about Laurel's surgery why I'd said that she had doubts about the surgery beforehand. The basic reason is that my wife still could use her right arm, and with physical therapy sometimes it didn't even hurt her. Since all surgery has risks, Laurel had to weigh the pros and cons of shoulder replacement surgery.

In the recovery room, where we got instructions for post-operative care, Laurel mentioned to her doctor that she hadn't been sure whether she really needed the surgery. The doctor unhesitatingly said, "You did; though you don't have a complete rotator cuff tear, it would have torn completely at some point." This made us both feel better, especially since the surgery went well. It strengthened my feeling that as difficult as it will be for my wife and me in the next 4-6 weeks of recovery, that will pay off with an increased quality of life for Laurel once she can use her right arm with confidence again.

So I'm doing my best to adjust to the changes in my routine caused by my new caregiver role. I used to enjoy my hour or so of reading and meditation time in the morning. Now I have to take our dog for a walk then. Mooka is a very active Husky mix who needs two lengthy walks a day, which are mostly off leash since we live in a rural area with nature trails on easements through the properties in our development.

Yesterday I was walking with Mooka to our nearby 9-acre community lake. I'll share a photo of it that I took as we were crossing the earthen dam. Our house is in the trees at the far end of the lake, about in the middle of the photo. Our ten acres doesn't adjoin the lake, but just one lot separates us and the lake.

Soon after Mooka and I started our walk, I'd been idly thinking about how I wasn't going to have time to meditate that morning and would have to squeeze in some meditation time later in the day. Then it dawned on me, That's crazy talk. In my current frame of mind, meditation is simply being as fully aware as possible of what I'm experiencing. I'm on a walk now. If I can be fully aware of that walk, this is meditation, just as sitting in a chair with eyes closed is.

That realization brought peace of mind. I stopped worrying about missing my meditation time, because any time is meditation time if it's mindful. I knew this before, but it took the big change in my routine following Laurel's surgery to truly grasp what I already knew conceptually.

"Everything is spiritual" says Joan Tollifson. I heartily agree.

When I've got a hunger for a meal of some tasty spiritual wisdom that appeals to my heart as well as my mind, and is free of unhealthy ingredients like dogmatism, holier-than-thou pretensions, and supernatural fantasy, lately I've been turning toward writings by Joan Tollifson.

Here's excerpts from her book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that appealed to me in my most recent Tollifson reading. I don't agree 100% with everything she says, but her overall thesis strikes me as sound.

This radical perspective points relentlessly to the choiceless nature of reality and the absence of anyone running the show. Everything is a spontaneous and automatic happening that can never be captured or grasped by words, concepts or formulations. 

Our brain sees patterns where none actually exist. It turns chaos into order. But the order is imaginary. We are always clueless. Life is an unresolvable, incomprehensible, indeterminate mystery. And that's not a horrible or depressing thought, but rather, a liberating and beautiful realization.

In discovering our complete and absolute powerlessness, our utter lack of control, there is immediately great peace, true freedom and unconditional love. It is the freedom for everything to be just as it is. It is not the peace that is the opposite of war or upset, but rather, it is the peace that includes war and upset, the peace that is at peace with war and even with our resistance to war.

It is the unconditional love that accepts everything. In this discovery of choiceless unicity, there is immediately compassion for ourself and all beings, knowing that in every moment, we are all doing the only thing possible. No wave can ever go off in a direction other than the one in which the whole ocean is moving.

...Paradoxically, though, every time I've gone through therapy or delved deeper into some spiritual path or non-path, what has always emerged front and center at the root of it all is the willingness to be as I am; to be, on the human level, in some sense imperfect, incomplete and unresolved; and to see that this very person, warts and all, is already whole and complete; that this bodymind and everything it thinks and wants and does is a movement of the whole universe.

Rather than trying to reach some ultimate perfection of "me," or some imagined supreme enlightenment, it turns out that true happiness is a matter of simply being Here-Now, which is actually unavoidable; but what can fall away or no longer be believed are the thoughts and stories about this present happening, the interpretations, judgments, and ideals. 

Even when people take up meditation to reduce stress and improve well-being, as many people do nowadays, even then, they soon learn that the usual result-oriented, end-gaining approach of trying really hard to get somewhere else -- seeking, resisting, evaluating, judging, and so on -- doesn't work.

Meditation, even as a wellness practice, begins with allowing everything to be as it is. In a way, even to say "allowing" or "accepting" is saying too much. Everything already is allowed to be as it is -- obviously! -- because it is as it is. So it's more like simply acknowledging how it is, being present experiencing, which we already are. 

It's not a doing, in other words. It's more like not doing anything extra. Relaxing. Being what you cannot not be. And as the pathless path unfolds, everything is discovered to be an expression of this radiant presence that we are. Nothing needs to be pushed away or kept out.

Everything is spiritual.

We cling to our center even while saying "I am nothing"

I'm a fan of Sam Harris' Waking Up app, which I subscribe to on my iPhone. Usually I just listen to Harris' daily guided meditations, a habit I've had for quite a few years.

But occasionally I'll see a talk by someone else that's featured on the app. That's how I started listening to "Life Without a Center" by Adyashanti. (There's lots of free material on that website, along with lots of material you have to pay for.)

I've read one of his books and recall that I liked it. Wikipedia says that his original name was Stephen Gray. He became Adyashanti ("primordial peace") with the approval of his Zen master after he started teaching. In 2023 he stopped teaching "due to PTSD resulting from a very long period of intense physical pain." 

I've still got 20 minutes left to listen to on the 52 minute talk by Adyashanti. Here's some key thoughts from the portion of the talk I heard this morning. His style appeals to me. Adyashanti sounds sincere, humble, and straightforward. 

Control. This had never occurred to me before, but it makes a lot of sense. Control can't last. When we try to control our mind through concentration, a mantra, positive thinking, visualization, or any other means, that may work for a while, but every means of control -- whether mental or physical -- has its limits.

Why? Because control takes effort, an expenditure of energy. Eventually we get tired, worn out, unable to continue the effort of control. Ups and downs in our spiritual practice then occur, just as an attempt to run a marathon, even if it succeeds, necessarily ends with exhaustion. 

Meditation. He says that meditation is always happening. There's no need to try to bring the feeling we have in meditation into everyday life. Our everyday life should be identical to meditation. Sam Harris makes a similar point.

We shouldn't feel like the time we spend on a cushion or chair meditating in a formal way is different from the time we spend washing the dishes, driving to work, or talking with a friend. Awareness of the here and now is always possible. Meditation isn't anything special. It's just another opportunity to be vividly  aware of what's present inside and outside of us. 

Center. I don't recall Adyashanti speaking of ego. Instead he says "center." We cling to being a center, the pivot around which everything in our life revolves. I totally related to his remark that even if we say "I am nothing," this is a way to show both other people and ourself how elevated our spirituality is.

We're so attached to our center, we keep it strong and fortified even (or especially) as we profess our devotion to whatever religion, mystical pursuit, or spiritual path we're following. The only difference is that the manifestations of our center-clinging become more subtle as we learn how to appear like a egoless being even as we become proud of how egoless we supposedly are becoming.

Illusion. He says that illusion is very smart, very clever. I'm assuming that Adyashanti is referring to the illusion of being a distinct separate self possessing free will. At least that's how I see the core illusions from a Buddhist perspective. 

From a scientific perspective, it is frequently said that evolution through natural selection doesn't have a goal of truth, it has a goal of survival of the organism. (Not that evolution really has goals; this is just a manner of speaking about the outcome of natural selection.) 

After I finish listening to the rest of the talk, I'll share Adyashanti's final remarks about living without a center. Regarding clinging to our center, here's an excerpt from a 2005 blog post. (RSSB refers to Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the religious organization I belonged to for 35 years.)

I’ve been to RSSB gatherings where I’ve thanked someone for giving me a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Instead of the volunteer simply saying, “You’re welcome,” I hear: “Oh no, brother. Please don’t thank me. I’m doing everything on behalf of the guru. He is the real doer, not me. I am just an instrument in his hands.”

I think to myself, “Hmmmm. This humble selfless instrument standing before me sure sounds like a self-willed someone, given the lengthy response I got to my pithy ‘thank you.’” Why can’t religious people act as naturally as non-religious people?

How to have less of a distracted mind

As evidenced by the title of the first blog post I wrote six days ago about The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, a book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen -- "Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn't make much sense" -- I'm interested in the spiritual implications of the book, even though the authors pay zero attention to this.

They're concerned with how three modern innovations, the Internet, smart phones, and social media, are screwing up our ability to concentrate, though it isn't as if these innovations are forcing us to obey their whims.

For we are willing co-conspirators in the theft of our undivided attention, being driven to do this by foraging rules evolution has imprinted in our minds which have become turned into approaches guiding our foraging for information, rather than food.

The authors say that in addition to attention, an undistracted mind also requires good working memory and goal management. They present lots of research showing that excessive use of the Internet, smart phones, and social media causes us to shift our attention rapidly instead of keeping it focused on a single subject. 

Multi-tasking, which they say isn't really possible, for what we're doing is rapidly shifting attention between several tasks, like watching TV and texting a friend, not only messes up our attention but also working memory and our ability to choose the most important goals to work on.

This passage has implications for meditation in general and mindfulness in particular. 

One interesting aspect of this penchant for combining tasks is that we seem to have lost the ability to single task. Glance around a restaurant, look at people walking on a city street, pay attention to people waiting in line for a movie or the theatre, and you will see busily tapping fingers.

We act as though we are no longer interested in or able to stay idle and simply do nothing. We appear to care more about the people who are available through our devices that those who are right in front of our faces. And perhaps more critically, we appear to have lost the ability to simply be alone with our thoughts.

Since I started meditating every day in 1970, a habit I've continued for the past fifty-four years, obviously I wasn't influenced by the Internet, smart phones, and social media for much of the time, since those things hadn't been invented yet. 

So I'm well aware that it is difficult to either do one thing in meditation (concentration) or nothing in particular (open awareness) whether or not we're tempted to follow the allure of the Internet, smart phones, and social media. However, these things do seem to have a negative effect on our ability to be undistracted.

The information foraging theory that they favor, which I won't describe in any detail, says that external diminishing information resources, like having read all the stories you're interested in on a news web site, combine with internal factors such as boredom and anxiety to draw us away from a current focus of attention to something more appealing.  

There we are, meditating away, perhaps repeating a mantra, or being aware of our breathing, or simply being open to whatever is present within our consciousness. The book has a chapter called "Why Do We Interrupt Ourselves?"

Great question. What prevents us continuing to meditate in the way we set out to do at the time we sat down on a cushion or a chair? How is it that when I set out to count my exhales from 1 to 10, fairly often I'll get to 4 or 5 and then drift off into a thought that takes me away from my breath-counting?

The authors don't address these questions directly.

But having finished the book, I'll hazard a guess and say that our distracted mind in meditation, often called "monkey mind," follows the same rules as I outlined above: when we feel bored with the task we're doing and feel anxious that we're missing out on something better than doing that task, we're inclined to shift our attention.

Relaxing into complete acceptance of the present moment is probably the best way I've found to be undistracted in meditation. If I'm feeling peaceful, great, I just feel peaceful. If I'm feeling bored, great, I just feel bored. In other words, I try to follow a basic principle of mindfulness: nonjudgemental acceptance of what's happening here and now. 

This makes my meditation more interesting, because I'm not dividing what's in my mind between good thoughts and feelings and bad thoughts and feelings. Whatever is there is worth paying attention to. By not having a set goal for meditation, I'm less inclined to be bored with a single focus of my attention.

Which isn't to say that I don't try to be single-minded, usually on my breath, but sometimes on a mantra. Some days I can stay focused for pretty much the entire meditation period.

I'm just saying that by having minimal flexible goals -- I'm no longer seeking god-realization or enlightenment -- I'm better able to be content with small pleasures, like the slight tingling of the breath at the tip of my nostrils as I breathe in and out.

There's isn't a fear of missing out (FOMO) on something more and better if I'm content with whatever is happening right now. That reduces my desire to forage for information and stimulation somewhere else, since where I'm at is fine with me. Or at least, fairly fine with me.

Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn't make much sense

Recently I got to thinking about the many years (about thirty-five) that I did my best to mentally repeat a mantra not only during my morning meditation, but also as much as possible during the rest of my daily activities.

UPDATE: I meandered quite a bit in coming to the conclusion expressed in this post's title. Here's the short version: The world is always changing. Unexpected challenges, surprises, problems, opportunities, and such continually pop up. Our minds should be similarly flexible to deal with these happenings in the world and our life. Rigidity should be avoided. But some meditation practices have a mentality of "you should always do..." or at least "You should do ... as much as possible." If that ... is being mindful of the reality both without and within us, great. If it's anything else, that's too much rigidity.

What spurred these thoughts was a book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. I bought it two and half months ago, but it had been sitting in a pile of unread books until I decided to pull it out and start reading it.

It's more interesting than I thought it would be. The general thesis is familiar: that smartphones, social media, and other twenty-first century innovations are messing up our ability to focus and concentrate. 

Of course, anyone who reads books about meditation written hundreds of years ago, and I've read a bunch of them, knows that people back then also were having trouble keeping their minds from straying to extraneous subjects. So the distracted mind is by no means a modern problem. 

However, Gazzaley and Rosen describe why our current technological devices and the internet made the habitual problem of distraction an even bigger problem. I haven't gotten to their recommendations yet for how to deal with this.

The first book of their book lays out why our minds aren't designed to stick with just one thing. This isn't a bug, but a feature. For they say that likely evolution selected for distraction as an effective foraging method.

There an early human is, happily picking berries from plants growing wild (no agriculture yet) in a particular berry patch. Eventually this person notices that the berries are becoming harder to find, since so many have been picked. What to do?

Staying in that spot would be easy, but increasingly unproductive. Searching for a better supply of berries somewhere else would take time and energy, but it makes sense to do this when a current foraging location no longer is paying off.

So we humans are wired to forage. The difference now is that most of us don't forage for food, but for information. The authors write:

Now let's consider the MVT [marginal value theorem] and replace foraging for food resources with foraging for information resources, and insert you as the information foraging animal. Here, the patches are sources of information, such as a website, an email program, or your iPhone. Note that each of these patches exhibits diminishing returns of resources over time as you gradually deplete the information available from them, and/or you become bored or anxious with foraging the same source of information. 

And so, given both your inherent knowledge of the diminishing resources in the current patch and your awareness of the transit time to reach a new information patch, you will inevitably decide to make a switch to a new information patch after some time has passed. Thus, the model reveals factors that influence our decisions about how long we fish in a particular information pond before moving on to fish in the next pond.

A basic point here is that our minds are flexible. Sometimes we're drawn to concentrate on a certain thing. Sometimes we're drawn to leave that thing and search out something else. This is one of the messages that is conveyed in the book through an easy to visualize scenario:

One of our thirsty ancestors is prowling through a deep forest and emerges into an unfamiliar clearing where he spots an enticing stream. Success! But, despite the powerful, actually reflexive, drive to drink, he does not charge forward. Rather, he pauses...suppresses the impulse, evaluates, reaches a decision, and formulates a goal.

Previous experience in this forest has taught him that where there is water, there is often also a highly effective predator hiding nearby -- the jaguar. This is where that critical pause in the perception-action reflex of "see water -- drink water" allows him to undertake an initial rapid evaluation of the situation to determine if this setting deserves more careful assessment. 

This leads him to decide that there may indeed be an invisible threat. He then advances to establishing the top-down goal of carefully evaluating the safety of approaching the stream.

To accomplish his goal, he now engages his selective attention to focus his hearing on detecting a specific sound that he knows a jaguar makes when lying in wait for prey: a deep, nearly inaudible, guttural grumbling. He selectively directs his vision toward detecting the characteristic pattern and color of the jaguar: a strippled orange and black.

And knowing the distinctive odor of this creature, he selectively focuses his olfactory sense on its characteristic musky smell. In addition, he has the insight to know that this particular predator tends to hunt in the thick brush that lies along the left bank of the stream, and so he directs this multisensory selective attention like an arrow at that specific location in space: he fires and waits for a signal.

This scenario gets discussed in more detail by the authors. I'm sharing it to illustrate that our attention involves both top-down and bottom-up influences.

Top-down is what I'm doing right now: deciding to write a blog post about the book I'm reading, then using my attention to carry out that decision/goal. Bottom-up is what would happen if our smoke alarm went off while I was writing this post. That would instantly grab my attention and spur me to find out why the alarm is sounding. 

Which gets me back to the mantra-repeating that I used to do. I still repeat a mantra occasionally when I meditate, and usually when I'm going to sleep. However, I have stopped repeating a mantra at other times during the day, which was encouraged during the thirty-five years I practiced a form of meditation taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an spiritual organization headquartered in India.

This now strikes me as making little or no sense. I talked about this in a 2024 blog post: "A time for mindfulness, a time for mind wandering."

During my intensely meditating years, when I'd spend about two hours a day in disciplined meditation, I also tried to repeat a mantra as much as possible during the rest of the day.

I'm not sure how to classify this activity, as mindfulness or mind wandering. Repeating a mantra while doing everyday activities like driving a car, washing dishes, or even talking to someone, seems to have characteristics of each.

For example, I started to do my mantra meditation thing seriously just after I graduated from college with a degree in psychology. While waiting to start in a master's of social work program, I had a job as a teacher's aide at Santa Clara High School.

Part of that job involved counseling students with behavioral problems. I didn't really know what I was doing when I talked with a student. Plus, I was so enthused about repeating my mantra as much as possible during the day, even at work, often I wouldn't be listening very attentively to what a student was telling me.

Looking back, I wasn't very mindful of the moment in which I found myself. My mind wasn't wandering, but it also wasn't paying full attention to the here-and-now of sensory/external reality. I was focused on repeating some words in my mind, my internal subjective reality.

So I can see the wisdom in the New York Times piece. It's good to let the mind wander, and it's good to let the mind be concentrated. No hard and fast rule here. Whatever seems appropriate at the time.

This is similar to the ancestor coming to a stream where a jaguar could be hiding. Mindfully walking to the water, bending down, and taking a drink while repeating a mantra to keep the mind focused on that activity risks becoming jaguar food. Using all of his senses to determine whether a jaguar is present is what our ancestor needs to do.

Likewise, we need to be flexible in how we use our minds, especially since there is no difference between us and our mind. Our mind is us, which is why we're constantly changing and adapting to new information, just like our ancestor approaching a stream.

Rationality has a lot to do with spirituality

For the thirty-five years I was an active member of an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of my favorite Indian words was sat, truth. 

For example, there was the satguru, the true guru, and satsang, association with truth. Eventually I came to feel that truth was the most important thing. When I concluded that for me, truth was best pursued outside the bounds of RSSB, there was only one thing I could do: leave RSSB.

When I came to the epilogue of Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, an examination of pure awareness, his thoughts on intellectual honesty resonated with me. That's something I aspire to, though I certainly don't claim that I'm always capable of intellectual honesty. Far from it.

I can be wrong about lots of things within and without my own mind. As Metzinger notes in excerpts I've shared below from the epilogue of his book, our beliefs directly influence how we experience the world. I have great difficulty looking upon Donald Trump with an open mind, because I believe he is a great danger to the United States and the world.

But at least I'm aware of that bias. Being aware of it, I can at least try to be receptive to Trump's words and actions that might contain a glimmer of truth. Maybe even more than a glimmer (though I'm doubtful about that).

In short, I aspire to rationality, intellectual honesty. I've never considered that rationality and spirituality are opposed. As Metzinger says below, actually they're closely linked, because rationality and spirituality both aspire to know the truth about reality, a goal they share with science.

Enjoy...

Yes, there has been a successful rebellion against organized religion and a fresh global counterculture has emerged. Millions have taken things into their own hands, and this can be seen as one of the major cultural innovations of the twentieth century.

But if one looks at the reality of all the different movements, traditions, and groups that have formed -- especially their irrational belief systems and the resulting social dynamics, which are often pathological and cultlike -- one may conclude that the original innovative impulse has long been outweighed by more mortality denial and self-deception, just in slightly subtler forms than they used to take.

Many of the spiritual movements that have developed in recent decades in Europe and the US have long lost their progressive impulse, and most sectors of spiritual counterculture seem already to have morphed into experience-based forms of privately organized religious delusion.

...We therefore have grounds to wonder whether the people labeling themselves as "SBNR" [spiritual but not religious] or "SBNA" [spiritual but not affiliated] are religious after all, just in a slightly new way. In most of these contemporary forms of "nonreligious spirituality," something is sorely missing: a particular kind of honesty. After all, the opposite of religion is not science, but spirituality.

The ethical principle of intellectual honesty can be analyzed as a special case of the spiritual stance and, in their purest form, the scientific and the spiritual stances emerge from the same basic normative idea. But what exactly is "intellectual honesty"?

"Intellectual honesty" means simply not being willing to lie to yourself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity, and sincerity, as well as to a certain kind of "inner decency." 

Perhaps one could say that striving for intellectual honesty is a very conservative way of being truly subversive. Intellectual honesty might be exactly what the many "teachers" and representatives of cults, organized religions, and theologians of almost any type simply cannot have -- even if they often like to make claims to the contrary.

Intellectual honesty means not pretending to know or even pretending to be able to know the unknowable, while still having an unconditional will to truth and a commitment to the growth of knowledge, which includes being genuinely open to new scientific results.

...A flood of empirical data, as well as the mathematical models of modern computational neuroscience, show how the beliefs we hold directly influence the way that we consciously experience the world -- a simple empirical fact whose importance is hard to overstate when it comes to meditation practice.

Whoever wants to become whole -- a person of integrity -- by gradually resolving all conflict between their actions and values must pursue this harmony with their inner actions as well. This requirement is especially true for their "epistemic actions" -- actions for the sake of knowledge.

We act epistemically whenever we strive for insight, knowledge, true belief, sincerity, and also authentic self-knowledge. To the extent that meditation is an epistemic practice, it cannot work without radical honesty toward oneself, without a self-critical ethics of belief.

There is a bridge between spiritual practice and the ideal of reasonable, rational thought: Both involve an ethics of inner action for the sake of knowledge. Moreover, in both cases, the goal is a systematic enhancement of mental autonomy, of inner freedom.

...The sincere intention of being honest toward oneself is what connects critical rationality and the nonconceptual insight of contemplative practice.

.... But you cannot choicelessly observe your own thoughts as they arise and disappear again if you are not prepared to honestly face what you will now begin to see: the painful restlessness of your very own mind, your violent fantasies, your desire for retaliation, your boredom, your loneliness, your existential despair, or your envy.

...I hope that you are beginning to sense that a strict and altogether old-fashioned form of rationalism could have a lot to do with spirituality -- and with what is still missing in large parts of the spiritual counterculture. 

...Here, my point is that rationality is actually a special form of mindfulness. In order not only to think clearly but also to listen properly -- in order to understand one's opponent -- critical rationality first needs the sincere and nonreactive quality of mindful attention. And then it also needs careful, rational thinking, a way of handling concepts that is as precise as possible.

...Real meditation practice cultivates the conditions of possibility for rational discourse by cultivating the sincere intention of being honest toward oneself. If it doesn't, there is something wrong. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be here, now.

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

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

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

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

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

The typical object of attention is the breath.

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

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

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

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

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

An important principle is to not crave the jhanas.

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

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

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

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

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

Why teachers are needed, but not gurus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, that's ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

I have a new koan: I could be wrong. 

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

Jhanas are the current meditation craze, says TIME magazine

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

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

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

This is how the story starts out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look without, not within, is the best spiritual advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, but I deeply doubt it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Theory contamination" is a big problem in spirituality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metzinger writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Study finds that meditators are prone to "spiritual superiority"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

Pure awareness recedes from attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Meditation is good, but non-meditation can be better

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

It won't appeal to everybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metzinger writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letting go is key in both meditation and psychedelics. Here's why.

I decided to buy a book about magic mushrooms in anticipation of my mild/moderate 1 gram (totally legal) psilocybin experience this coming Thursday.

It was a good choice, as I've enjoyed reading Michelle Janikian's Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms. Well-written, practical, nicely researched.

Today I got to a chapter where Janikian talks about the relation between meditating and tripping on magic mushrooms. Since I've meditated every day for about 55 years, and used psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin) quite a bit in college, I was struck by how "letting go" is a central aspect of both practices.

She writes about a psychedelic experience:

But according to researchers, the most important thing you can do is to approach the experience with an accepting attitude and open mind. Similarly, while you're actually under the influence of a psychedelic, the most important navigation skill is to relax.

It sounds simple -- too easy, even -- but relinquishing your control to the substance, to not resist its powers and just let go and see where it takes you, can be challenging.

...In one of the first trip manuals, The Psychedelic Experience, published in 1964, the main recommendation for tripping successfully still holds true: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

In fact, every psychedelic expert who has written on the subject has given this same advice in their own words.

Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and the first scientist to resume psychedelic research since prohibition, advises something very similar: "It is only through letting go that we find ourselves making the most progress... this surrender is the crux of a successful journey."

...Similarly, in The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, James Fadmian gives more specifics on how to surrender: "Observe what is going on inside your mind and body, but do not try to control the flow of images and sensations. Allow your mind to take its natural course; relax and observe as your thoughts unfold without any effort. Affirm that all experiences are welcome."

Janikian then speaks about meditation:

This is where having a practice of meditation in your daily life can help you navigate the psychedelic space, because in meditation you learn how to relax your mind and let thoughts come and go without engaging them.

Our minds naturally rationalize and judge everything around us -- it's a safety mechanism to keep us alive, so it's completely unnatural for us to stop doing so, whether we're on mushrooms or not. While I'm terrible at meditating, I was still practicing before my latest psychedelic experience, and I was able to use that developing skill to stop resisting and rationalizing everything and, instead, relax and go deeper.

So if you find yourself being overly critical of your thoughts while you're tripping, try taking a deep breath, closing your eyes, and simply focus on your breathing.

For me, thinking "Teach me, I'm listening" helped me to stop rationalizing, judging, and planning everything, and just be in the moment. But sticking to the classic: "Trust, let go, be open," should do the trick, too. Before the trip begins, choose a mantra that encourages you to be calm, present, and accepting of the experience, no matter what it is.

So why is letting go so key in both meditation and tripping? The way I see it, in both cases there's a presumption, or at least a hypothesis, that our usual sense of living in a fractured reality is an illusion of sorts, since there is a wholeness lying largely unknown and unexamined outside of our habitual awareness.

An image comes to mind.

If reality is viewed as a vast, probably infinite, ocean, mostly we see ourselves as individual flecks of foam blown into the air from ocean waves by winds of cause and effect.

Though we do our best to unite with other flecks of foam through love, togetherness, mutuality, and such, there's always a feeling of "I am me, you are you, they are themselves."

But by letting go, by surrendering to a gravitational force that manifests when we stop being flecks of foam in constant motion, the resulting stillness can lead to a sense of being a wave thrown up by the ocean, yet in no way separate from the ocean.

That's the promise of meditation. That's the promise of psychedelics. To relax into a state of consciousness where me is seen as being not very different from thee -- meaning, everything that's usually viewed as being clearly other than me.

This sense of oceanic awareness can be very blissful. It also can be very scary, if the loss of individuality is experienced as something to be afraid of, rather than welcomed. 

Usually meditation brings about this sort of ego dissolution in a decidedly gradual manner. Psychedelics taken in high ("heroic") doses can produce ego loss rapidly. So the psychedelic explorer needs to prepare carefully, have a positive mindset, and ramp up doses to the heroic level in a series of experiences.

Jumping into a deep pool of water can be heavenly if you're a good swimmer. Or hellish if you're not. The good news is, each of us has the capacity to let go and swim in the unified ocean of reality. This may seem difficult, but more and more, I've come to believe that the difficulty lies within our belief that it isn't easy.

But maybe it is. After all, how tough is it to let go? Isn't holding on much more of a chore? After all, you're not trying to get somewhere. By giving up trying, the idea is to become what we always are, yet don't realize this because we're in ceaseless motion, always aiming to be somewhere else.

Hey, turns out I'm enlightened! Just not all the time.

Enlightenment is a word that gets thrown around a lot in spiritual circles, even though it's rare that anyone can clearly say what makes someone enlightened, or how it's possible to tell a person is in this supposedly exalted state.

Often enlightenment is viewed as something ineffable that only another enlightened being can recognize. You know, an exclusive club where the members know each other but us ordinary people can only do our best to peek through the curtained windows in a vain attempt to see what's going on inside.

Another problem with the notion of enlightenment is that even when it's described somewhat specifically, there's a curious non-coincidence I've observed: enlightenment just happens to be a spiritual state that the person describing it says they've achieved. 

In other words, when someone has an experience, or transformation, that they consider spiritually significant, frequently they give it a name: enlightenment. Then they can market their accomplishment to others who desire to be enlightened. 

Now, this might be what's going on with Joan Tollifson's take on enlightenment. She's a spiritual rebel of sorts who has studied Zen Buddhism, nonduality, and other pursuits, yet has developed her own original manner of speaking about them in a way that I find appealing. 

While I readily agree that how Tollifson looks upon enlightenment flows out of her own personal experiences (but doesn't that apply to everyone?), what she says in her book Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks & Dialogues About Non-Duality makes sense to me -- in part because her definition of enlightenment applies to everyone at times, though not always. 

I've only read about half of the book. However, I've found enough references to enlightenment to make me confident that these passages accurately reflect Tollifson's perspective.

Enlightenment is the recognition that there is no "me" behind the mask of any persona, and that no person exists as a solid, continuous, separate, independent entity. Enlightenment is seeing that I am everyone and no one. I include everything and I am no-thing in particular. Enlightenment sees from the perspective of unicity. [defined as: the quality or state of being unique of its kind : ONENESS]

...Above all, awakening is seeing through the "me" who wonders if "I' have had an awakening or not. This waking up is very simple. It is not some fantastic, spectacular, one-time event with trumpets blaring and fireworks exploding. Nor is it a personal achievement. We miss it because we're looking for something extraordinary, something that will enhance "me."

...We often seek the experiences we have been led to expect, and then we often frame our experiences according to what we have learned. Christians see Jesus and get born again. Buddhists discover emptiness and the present moment. Satsang people have awakenings. Nondualists imagine a moment when "the self" drops away forever.

People who expect dramatic enlightenments often have them! When I hear some of the big bang enlightenment stories on offer, I sometimes wonder if the teachers in question haven't constructed the whole experience out of thin air, convinced themselves of its validity, and now they're using it to sell themselves or make themselves special.

...The whole notion of a final breakthrough, in which all sense of being an encapsulated individual permanently vanishes forever and ever, never to return, is a total myth. That encapsulated "me" is never really here, ever, and the idea or sense of encapsulation vanishes in any moment that's it's clearly seen for what it is. 

...Enlightenment is Now. It's not a possession or an achievement. There is no final enlightenment. And an enlightened person is a total oxymoron. Enlightenment is the popping of the bubble of separation. It leaves no person to be enlightened or unenlightened. 

As I've said, I think there is often a tendency to confuse unicity, which is all there is, with enlightenment, which is the absence of delusion. Unicity includes both enlightenment and delusion, both Ramana and Hitler. But Hitler was not enlightened. Enlightenment sees unicity. Delusion imagines separation. The very idea of permanently enlightened people is delusion. 

...There are characters running around in the movie of waking life claiming that they no longer experience fear or desire. Whenever I hear this now, it immediately activates my bullshit alarms. Maybe it's true, I don't know. 

But it seems to me that instead of seeing what is going on, many people who swallowed the "I Am Enlightened" story may now be busy denying delusion, even to themselves. This is like putting on blinders. It's all about a new and improved identity -- Me the Enlightened One -- an identity that needs to be defended. 

...Awakening is not a flashy experience. It's very ordinary. It's simply seeing through false ideas. What remains is the ever-present, ever-changing aliveness of Here/Now. And that is actually never not here. 

If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless

Whenever I'm reading a spiritual or philosophical book and am generally enjoying its message, then come across a passage that I heartily disagree with, I remind myself of one of my early blog posts from 2005, "Become a religion of one." 

(I'll copy it in below, I like it so much.)

For the way I've come to view spirituality is as an intensely independent pursuit. After all, our search for meaning and purpose in life necessarily is personal, not collective. There's zero chance that any other person in the world is going to have exactly the same goals, values, and such as we do.

So while it can make sense to explore ready-made religions, philosophies, mystical teachings, and other approaches that promise to be a foundation for a satisfying life, my advice is to pick and choose what you most like about them and fashion your own unique "religion of one" from those pieces, along with what springs from your own imagination/intuition.

One advantage of this is that it enables you to more easily belong to a spiritual organization without feeling like it's stifling what you truly believe and care about. Accept the rules and dogmas that make sense to you while paying little or no attention to the rest. Don't expect the organization to perfectly meet your needs, because this is impossible.

This is akin to people eating at a restaurant with an extensive menu. Each person should order what they like to eat. Nobody should worry that their selections don't match those of anyone else in the restaurant. Spirituality is subjective. There's no objective truth here, unlike in science. 

Well, generally. My own personal philosophy of life includes a belief that free will is an illusion, along with the illusory notion of a separate unchanging self or soul. I consider that these are scientific truths, but I admit that there is room for debate with those who see things differently. 

Thus when I read a book by a scientist who I generally admire, yet who contends that free will is part of our human repertoire, something I'm doing now, I do my best to be open-minded about his arguments in favor of free will even though I'm virtually certain that he isn't going to markedly alter my basic perspective. But I might do this on my own.

Such is another benefit of a religion of one: it is exceedingly easy to modify the tenets of your unique belief system, just as it's equally easy to worship within that religion. Just be yourself.

Here's what I wrote in that 2005 blog post.

Most people belong to a religion with many members. There are about two billion Christians in the world, over a billion Muslims, and nearly a billion Hindus. Sure, company is nice, but here are some reasons to become a religion of one:

--You can hold a worship service whenever and wherever you want. Your church just needs to be as big as you are.

--No contentious arguments about leadership. Any jockeying for power in your religious organization will be between you and you.

--Doctrinal disputes are easily resolved. What you say, goes.

--If you’ve ever wanted to be known as “Most eminently enlightened great being” or “Her highly esteemed holiness,” within your own mind at least, this is your chance.

--Beer and tortilla chips can be your holy sacraments. Or, cake and chocolate.

--Sex between clergy and parishioners is absolutely fine. Encouraged even. It’s all in your own hands. Literally.

--Finding a name for your religion is easy: just look at your driver’s license. The hard part is deciding between “ism,” “ity,” or whatever. In my case, Hinesism sounds OK, Hinesity terrible. Hinesiosity, maybe. I need to schedule a meeting with myself on this.

--No worries about declining membership. You’re already as low as you can go (death will take your religion down to zero devotees, but that’ll be the least of your worries).

--Salvation is assured. All you need to do is write “salvation is assured” on a holy post-it note and then have faith in your divine revelation Heck, if it works for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it’ll work for you.

--The next time someone says, “Who died and made you the pope?” you can reply with a straight face, “What do you mean? Nobody had to die, I’ve always held that office.”

But seriously…I’ve got shelves of books from each of the world’s great mystical traditions—Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu—that support the contention, “Become a religion of one.”

Science seeks universal material truths through a collaborative process of rigorous investigation. Mysticism seeks universal spiritual truths through an individual process of rigorous investigation.

Don’t believe it when you hear, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I” in reference to spiritual presence. In truth, that’s when God is not present—in a group.

Believe it: the best religion has a membership of one.

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet.

I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say. 

For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality.)

Awareness has no goals, no strategies. It seeks nothing and goes nowhere. It simply illuminates what is. Awareness is our True Nature -- the groundless ground that is always Here/Now.

I don't really disagree with this sentiment, but I wouldn't say awareness is our true nature. To me it is simply how we perceive reality. Without consciousness, reality doesn't exist for us. (I consider awareness and consciousness to be the same thing.)

I doubt that awareness is a thing, though, notwithstanding that last sentence. It's how we know things, without being a thing itself. So in that sense, I guess you could say it is indeed our true nature, since absent awareness, we'd have no nature at all. At least, to ourselves.

When she talks about dogmatic religiosity and gurus, on the other hand, I'm essentially 100% on board with what Tollifson says. Today I read this right-on passage about gurus.

There is a great deal of spiritual mythology about enlightened people who are imagined to be totally beyond ego.

I am not saying that there are not some remarkably clear, very awake people, but they all have poop chutes, as a friend of mind once astutely pointed out, and all too often these gurus who are supposedly so fully enlightened are also molesting young girls or embezzling money or drinking themselves to death or sending out hit men to kill or terrorize ex-devotees, and of course, the faithful devotees manage to convince themselves that all such behavior is either untrue or else it's some form of "crazy wisdom" that the guru is doing deliberately as some kind of teaching.

But really, what difference does it make who has more egoic moments or fewer egoic moments -- who cares about this? It's the phantom me again. All we can work with is what is actually arising right now. What good does it do to worry about how enlightened or deluded someone else is?

Given the title of my previous blog post, "Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans," a quote from a noted particle physicist, I was struck by this response Tollifson gave to someone who asked her if there really was a difference "between all of us and Ramana Maharshi, that we are all as deeply realized as he was."

I'm pointing out that this question is a form of suffering, rooted in delusion. It assumes that Ramana and you are separate, bounded entities, rather than different waves in a single fluid ocean. Both waves are equally water, equally ocean. It was to this wholeness, this emptiness, this nondual reality that Ramana was always pointing. No one owns wholeness. Wholeness appears as everything, including me and you and Ramana.

Lastly, I like Tollifson's expansive view of meditation. I used to narrowly define meditation as concentration upon a single object. But that's just one form of meditation. There are countless, according to Tollifsion, since awareness and meditation are synonymous to her.

True meditation as I mean it is simply awareness... Instead of our habitual attempt to get what we want or to get rid of what we don't like, meditation is an invitation to not move toward anything or away from anything, but simply to discover what actually is -- even if it's something we find unpleasant or painful or something we think is "not very spiritual."

Instead of trying to get away from it and get to something better, what if instead there is complete openness to what is? Openness is the heart of true meditation. This isn't some grueling task I'm talking about. It's the opposite of a task. It's not doing anything at all. It's not seeking a result. It's what Here/Now is -- the open space of awareness beholding everything just as it is.

So I would recommend sitting quietly if this invites you, if it interests you. You don't have to be sitting, you can be lying down -- sitting is not the essence of it. And you certainly don't need to in any special posture. You can be in a recliner or on a park bench or on an airplane or anywhere at all. You can move when you feel like it -- you don't need to be motionless, rigid, or bolt upright.

There is a natural stillness that occurs by itself, and a naturally open, relaxed and grounded posture that the body finds. There are no special hand positions. You don't have to close your eyes or open them or keep them half closed or anything in particular.

This isn't about forcing your mind to stop thinking and focus instead on your breathing. It isn't about visualizing deities or repeating a mantra. It's nothing more or less than being silently present, doing nothing other than being here.

And if this attracts you, as it does me, then I encourage you to take time and make space to be still, to do nothing, to simply be aware, to explore and enjoy the present moment, exactly as it is.

Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel

Recently I got an email with an offer to read and comment on a book by Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer, Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel. (It comes with stickers that you apply at various places in the book.)

Naturally I said, "Absolutely!" to Rabbi Brian.

Hey, we share a first name. Also, a state, since Rabbi Brian lives in Portland, the more with-it city some 50 miles north of where I live in sleepier Salem. And both of us don't like organized religion. Plus, we each have a beard, though Rabbi Brian's is way darker, since he's way younger.

I've read most of the book, which is pleasingly quirky. When I'm done with it I'll write a laudatory review that Rabbi Brian can use in his marketing. The book hasn't been released yet, but you can sign up to get a notification when it's available on his Religion Outside the Box web site. 

This isn't a religion bashing book in the style of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, or Brian Hines. (I don't belong in the company of these noted authors; just couldn't resist seeing my name in the same sentence as theirs.)

Rabbi Brian's general attitude is summed up in a newly coined word that is featured a lot in the book:

Spiritualigiousness
The quality of being Spiritual + Religious
Without the baggage

Can't disagree with that, though I've gone so far down the non-religious rabbit hole that I'm coming to have a distaste even for the notion of "spiritual." However, I almost totally agree with the book's description of Spiritualigiousness, which Rabbi Brian says in a footnote is based on Erich Fromm's work in his book And Ye Shall Be Gods.

This is a portmanteau of the words spiritual and religious. Why not just use the word spiritual or religious? Because people carry a lot of baggage about each of these words.

Some people hear spiritual and think woo-woo wackadoodle. Some people hear religious and think only in terms of organized religion -- a set of paths and goals. 

Spiritualigiousness shouldn't have that baggage. Spiritualigiousness is that part of life that is not physical, emotional, or intellectual. Spiritualigiousness has six qualities.

(1) A spiritualigious life is marked by valuing questions more than answers
(2) A spiritualigious life is one in which values are hierarchical
(3) A spiritualigious life is marked by transformation
(4) A spiritualigious life is about connection, connectedness, oneness, unity
(5) A spiritualigious life is not about you
(6) A spiritualigious life is best understood via paradox, both/and thinking -- e.g., while it's not about you, it's also not not about you -- opposites are true

Please, let's take a moment. 

Notice the lack of creed or mentions about God in our six qualities of a spiritualigious life. I'll repeat this a lot: one doesn't need to believe in God to have a very healthy spiritualigious life.

Here's totally valid claims about the book on the ROTB web site. 

Yay! Atheist friendly. Being an atheist now, I can confirm that the book did indeed come across as friendly to me.

Since I was religious, Eastern religion variety, for about 35 years, I found it easy to relate to how Mayer started off as a "real" rabbi, albeit an unconventional one, then eventually found that he wasn't happy in that role and set out to preach an unorthodox spiritualigious message.

Not knowing much about Judaism, I'm enjoying Rabbi Brian's descriptions of how he became a rabbi, did all the usual rabbi stuff, got into occasional trouble for going outside the usual rabbi mold, and decided to devote himself to pursuing a path that better suited him. 

There's lots of interesting observations in the book about how the Bible is misinterpreted, why Jewish dietary and other rules don't make sense (great to see that my inability to comprehend "kosher" is largely shared by Rabbi Brian), how the Talmud is made out to be more than it really is, and such.

Rabbi Brian comes across as a really nice guy. It's easy to see why he was popular with the non-dogmatic Jews he served as rabbi for. Mayer is intellectually rigorous (he's a mathematics teacher) yet has a good sense of humor. 

As do his friends. Since I don't like kale, I enjoyed this anecdote from when he lived in Van Nuys, California:

I'm chatting with Lisa, a friend and neighbor mom, as our preschool-aged boys play together in her hot San Fernando Valley backyard.

We chat kitchen wisdom -- something that isn't of interest to either of our spouses.

"I found a great tip about kale," she says. "If you put a bit of coconut oil in the pan before you cook it, it'll  slide off into the trash so much easier."

Lisa is been-on-a-nationally-televised-sketch-comedy-show type of funny. When you live in LA, these are your next door neighbors.

I'll have more to say about the book once I've finished it.

The endpoint of spirituality is breaking the addiction to spirituality

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

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

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

 

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

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

I feel pain. So does our dog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P: So does suffering imply a me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing that the mind's resources are non-limited allows more mental effort

Beliefs are powerful. We need to use them wisely. Not by believing crazy stuff wildly out of touch with reality, but by believing in possibilities firmly within our potential to achieve. 

The placebo effect is a good example of this. Taking a sugar pill that is believed to be efficacious isn't going to cure a Stage 4 cancer. However, it can have other positive effects, such as reducing pain. 

Reading David Robson's book this morning, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change the World, I came across an interesting example of the power of belief in his "Limitless Willpower" chapter. 

Experience in any profession tells us that some people find the same mental effort much more tiring than others. Just think of the people you know. While some are exhausted at the end of the working day, others seem to have boundless reserves that allow them to read hundreds of novels, play in an orchestra, or write a screenplay.

These individual differences may partly depend on our beliefs about the tasks themselves. You might have been brought up to think that reading is hard work, whereas playing music is a form of relaxation, or vice versa, and those beliefs will determine how tiring you find the respective activities.

That's worth bearing in mind if you're a parent, teacher, or manager giving instructions to other people. Dutch researchers have shown that simply being told that we may find an exercise to be energizing, rather than fatiguing, can reduce the sense of depletion so that participants are more persistent and focused -- so don't overemphasize the difficulty of a task before someone has tried it for themselves. 

Even more powerful, however, are our expectations about our own capabilities and our reactions to hard mental work in general, according to some game-changing work by Veronica Job at the University of Vienna in Austria.

She has shown that our beliefs about the brain's resources -- whether we see them as finite or non-limited -- can powerfully change our experience of ego depletion and our capacity to remain self-controlled and focused under pressure.

This has to do with the brain's propensity to predict and expect certain things. If we expect that we'll be physically exhausted after running for a mile, likely that's what we'll experience. The brain tells the rest of our body, in effect, "This is as far as you're able to run, so the fatigue you're feeling is a message to stop running."

Likewise, if we believe that a certain mental activity is going to deplete our brain's limited resources, then probably we're going to feel tired after doing that thing. Expectations become reality. Robson writes:

Astonishingly, Job's results seemed to show that the consequences of ego depletion are real -- but only if you believe in it. 

Since I've been meditating almost every day since 1970, some fifty-four years, I was particularly interested in the part of the "Limitless Willpower" chapter where meditation and Eastern philosophies were mentioned. 

The limited view of willpower may be far more common in the West, but this attitude is not universal. Working with Krishna Savani at Nanyang Technological Institute in Singapore, Job has shown that the non-limited view of the human mind is much more common among Indian students than among people in the United States or Switzerland -- and their mental stamina is much greater as a result. 

Job and Savani argue that the greater prevalence of the non-limited belief in India may arise from various religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism: adherents practice mentally taxing activities that are explicitly designed to boost concentration and self-control.

They point to the yogic practice of trataka, which involves concentrating your vision on a single point -- such as a black dot or the tip of a candle flame -- while ignoring all other distractions. Trataka is essentially the kind of attention task that would have been used by Western scientists to deplete our resources.

For practitioners of yoga, however, it is seen as a way of "cleansing" the mind, preparing it for further concentration, and regular repetition of the exercise appears to cement the idea that focused mental effort can be energizing rather than fatiguing -- leading to greater concentration and self-control in many areas of life.

It is interesting to contemplate how different the scientific understanding of willpower could have been if the first experiments on mental fatigue had been conducted in a non-Western culture. 

Meditation isn't about doing it right. It's about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat."

I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head. 

Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires.

You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed, doing whatever sort of practice appeals to me that day. 

The online version of the TIME story also has a good title: "How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Retreat." Here's a PDF file if that link doesn't work for you.
Download How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Retreat | TIME

Dorie Chevlen's description of the retreat made me realize why I've never wanted to go on a 10-day Vipassana meditation session.

So off I went, first to Chicago, then the middle of seemingly nowhere, for the retreat. I signed away my wallet and cellphone; I listened to the rules: No speaking, no eye contact, no physical contact, no drugs or alcohol, no sex or masturbation, no technology, and (scariest to me) no writing. I felt like screaming, but I trusted my boyfriend more than my own instincts; if this was good for him, this will be good for me, I assured my racing heart.

Had I bothered researching Vipassana prior to attending one, I would have read plenty about the hours. We awoke at 4 a.m. each day to make it to our first meditation by 4:30 a.m. After two hours of that, we’d congregate for our 6:30 a.m. breakfast. Then a brief break. Then more meditation. Lunch. A break. More meditation. Tea. More meditation. Then a viewing of a taped lecture by an esteemed teacher of the practice. More meditation. Then bedtime to prepare to wake up and do it all again.

That sounds ghastly to me, though I know many people enjoy retreats of this sort. It just strikes me as unduly structured and artificial. Shouldn't meditation be aimed at helping us navigate life as it usually is, not as how life is lived during a rare Vipassana retreat? 

(Vipassana basically is meditation based on Buddhist mindfulness principles.)

Initially, Chevlen doesn't do well with her meditation, or other aspects of the retreat.

In our nightly lectures, the teacher encouraged us not to think while meditating, and when a thought inevitably did cross our minds, to pass it aside without judgment. I floundered at this initially. Unintentionally, I’d screen entire films in my head (mostly M. Night Shyamalan, because even my subconscious has no taste), and analyze years-old interactions.

Constantly, helplessly, my mind kept replaying “Closing Time,” for which, unfortunately, I didn’t know all the lyrics. The result was a horrible mental performance in which Cohen would croon “And the bupbupbupbup dun-dun and the ladadadada and the Johnny Walker wisdom runnin’ high,” Plus, the campus’s picturesque geese were in the midst of mating season, so Cohen’s half-wrong lyrics were punctuated by the honking of fornicating waterfowl.

What I mean is meditating was difficult for me. But so was the time spent not meditating. Have you ever heard a cafeteria full of people eating in silence? An entire room echoing with the sound of conversation-less human mastication—all wet chewing and slippery gulps, suppressed belches and scraping silverware. 

But after a few days, she did better.

To my relief, meditating became easier, slowly, as the first days of the course passed. Whereas initially I couldn’t sit for five minutes without needing to shift my hips, I found myself still for longer and longer stretches of time. My hummingbird brain, too, slowed its vibrations; my thoughts still fluttered, but I could go stretches of time before they pulled me away. And yet, I still fantasized about leaving. Yes, I can sit here and not think, but what is the point, my mind demanded. “Run,” it urged. “Run!”

Chevlen ends up running, leaving the retreat after a few additional days. Her boyfriend was disappointed. So was she. Eventually, though, she realized that she also needed to run from the relationship with her boyfriend.

I considered leaving the life we’d built. But I didn’t. Not at first. I spent a few more months unhappy; I was sure, more so now than ever, that there had to be something wrong with me. I couldn’t meditate right. I couldn’t love right. Was there anything right about me?

Eventually, my fast-expanding misery burst like a balloon in my mouth. Pop!  “This isn’t working.” The words felt like poetry on my lips. My boyfriend helped pack up my stuff and drove me to the airport. This lovely man, with real sheets on his bed and the generosity to schlep me all the way to O’Hare International Airport—I was leaving him?

My intuition shouted to be heard over reason and though I thought it would break me, I hugged him goodbye and walked away. My legs nearly collapsed with relief on arrival. I was in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, yes, but I wasn’t wrong. That toilet was probably busted before I ever used it [at the retreat, where she had to deal with a clogged toilet].

Her final paragraphs appealed to me. It mirrors, in a way, how I felt when I trusted myself and ran from the India-based religious organization that I'd belonged to for 35 years. It was a difficult decision, but I embraced the notion that after practicing a form of spirituality that involved a lot of rules, commandments, dos and don'ts, it was time to relax into a less rigid approach to life.

I’d love to say I’ve followed my instincts since then, but trust is a muscle, like any other; it only grows with pain and repetition. So I kept writing, even though it seemed doomed. I moved to New York, then I moved to LA. I got rejected; I got published; usually I got ignored. I fell in love and fell out of love and fell in love all over again.

I made a lot of mistakes, is what I mean. But they were my mistakes, at least; made from listening to my own inner voice, a voice which sometimes stuttered or misspoke or vocal-fried, but always rung true as my own. I made a lot of mistakes. But slowly, I started trusting that I could fix them. Even better, I could learn from them.

I didn’t finish the meditation course my ex-boyfriend recommended, but I sometimes still try to meditate. I’ll sit for 20 minutes and try to focus on my breath, on nothing else but just being, until my alarm goes off. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right. But I trust, now, that I don’t have to.

The spiritual journey leads nowhere, and that's absolutely fine

My last post was a digression of sorts, as I explained in the opening paragraphs. 

Today I was planning to write a post about a central theme in a book I've been blogging about recently, Joan Tollifson's Nothing to Grasp. I was struck by how Tollifson has come around to viewing reality in simple terms, "as it is." Leaves falling. Birds flying. Pain happening. Dishes being washed.

She came to this outlook after a lengthy period of seeking the Truth of It All via meditation, Zen Buddhism, nondual teachings, therapy, and other means. I wanted to write about how weird and wonderful it is to have sought reality in esoteric teachings, then realize that, hey, it's been Here/Now all that time.

But that intention brought a long-forgotten term to mind: naive realism. I remembered that I'd written a paper on this subject in college. That led me to poke through a stack of folders in a rarely opened cabinet where I keep stuff that I'd written way back when. Amazingly I found it.

A paper I'd written at San Jose State College on December 20, 1968 for Phil. 111 ,a class about epistemology, the theory of knowledge. I titled it, "Psychology, Zen, and the Naive Realist." Reading it, I found that the 20 year old me who wrote that paper sounded quite a bit like the 75 year old me I am today.

I'll take off from that last sentence in an attempt to recapture what was on my mind a couple of days ago before I digressed from it. Though really, the fact that I could see my current self in what I wrote 55 years before points to what I'd intended to say originally.

Which is, basically: the whole idea of a spiritual journey now makes no sense to me, even though I've embraced that notion for most of my life.

I say this for a couple of reasons.

One is that the chance of such a journey leading to a supernatural realm of reality is exceedingly slim, given the lack of demonstrable evidence that anything supernatural exists. Thus anyone who believes that all their meditating, praying, good works, and such is going to lead to God, heaven, angels, or anything else other-worldly almost certainly isn't going to have that belief come true.

Simply put, you can't take a journey to a place that doesn't exist. Sure, you can imagine going to such a place. You can hope you'll go to such a place. But almost certainly the actual journey is a fantasy.

However, this leaves what may be the most common conception of a spiritual journey -- a trip that isn't geographical but psychological. Meaning, the spiritual journey'er sets out to modify their state of mind, their consciousness, their way of looking upon the world, with the goal of leading a more fulfilling life.

It's more difficult for me to find fault with this aspiration, for it seems doable. However, I've come to feel that while we can obviously make discrete concrete changes in our psychology, our fundamental personality usually doesn't change much once we enter our 20s, or thereabouts.

Reading the paper I wrote when I was 20 reminded me of this. Much of it, most of it, really, seemed like something I'd write today at the age of 75. So where have I journeyed to after more than half a century of avid spiritual seeking? Pretty much the same place where I started.

And that's totally fine with me, as it should be for anyone else who finds that whoever they were when they began their spiritual journey is essentially the same person they are now.

This is what I was getting at in my 1968 college paper, where I noted the Zen adage about "first there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is," as I recall Donavan paraphrasing it. When I was a child, I never had the slightest idea that mountains weren't simply mountains.

(I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, in a picturesque small California town, Three Rivers, at the gateway of Sequoia National Park, so I had a lot of direct experience of mountains.)

Then I go to college, get exposed to new and often radical ideas, experiment with psychedelics, learn yoga, become initiated into a mystical Eastern religion, spend hours a day meditating, read lots of spiritual books, write several spiritual books, become convinced that there's much more to reality than what earthly existence offers, and then... in my old age, now, I realize that all of my spiritual seeking has led to me seeing mountains as mountains again, after so many years of believing that mountains, and everything else in physical existence, were an illusion, a pale reflection of a higher reality.

So in a sense I've come full circle. As, I'd suggest, most spiritual seekers do, if they're honest with themselves. What we seek is right before our eyes. It just takes looking elsewhere to come to that realization.

I've finished Joan Tollifson's engaging little book, Nothing to Grasp. Here's how she puts her own realization in a concluding chapter.

Here/Now is the Beloved that we long for. We are attracted to the Beloved, drawn to the Beloved, and this attraction, this longing actually comes from our own Heart, our own True Nature, but we don't realize this at first.

We search for the Beloved "out there" in many different forms -- in an intimate relationship, a teacher, a guru, an enlightenment experience. And finally, in a moment of awakening, we pass through the gateless gate.

We realize the Beloved is Here/Now, and in love, we find there is no separation, that the Beloved is all there is, the emptiness bursting forth as clouds and trees and pencil sharpeners and thunderstorms and light bulbs and concentration camps and meditation centers and words on a computer screen.

Here/Now is formless, and yet it is appearing as every form. It is invisible, and yet it is visible everywhere. It is as subtle as space, and yet it is more solid than the ground beneath your feet. No word can capture it, and yet every word is only it.

It's not a particular experience or state of consciousness, it's not an object or a substance that can be seen or grasped, it's not a conceptual formulation, it's not some mystical essence or transcendent reality apart from the messiness of ordinary everyday life. It is just this, exactly as it is.

When we are awake, our whole spiritual journey loses its seriousness. It melts away like a cloud formation. No one was actually running from a tiger, and no one was actually saved from the danger. The whole problem never really existed. It was only a dream.

To realize this is to be totally intimate with the world as it actually is (and not as we think it is), open to everything, holding on to nothing.

Joan Tollifson's Pathless Path to Here/Now

For thirty-five years I was a member of an organization, Eastern religion variety, that taught how to pursue a spiritual Path. That word was capitalized, because it was no ordinary path, but a Path from the illusion of the physical world to supernatural realms of existence. 

It feels great to be free of that fantasy. 

Here's passages from "The Pathless Path to Here/Now" chapter in Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. She beautifully captures the wisdom of giving up the notion of a Path in favor of experiencing the reality of what is what right before us at every moment.

As you walk the spiritual path, it widens, not narrows, until one day it broadens to a point where there is no path left at all.
      -- Wayne Liquorman

The pathless path from here to here is an imaginary journey, somewhat like Dorothy's journey from Kansas to Oz and back. Like Dorothy, we end up right where we started. In reality, we've gone nowhere, for Now/Here is all there is.

But the stories and beliefs that confuse us into thinking otherwise have become transparent, allowing the ever-present obvious to emerge to emerge into full awareness.

When we think back, there appears to have been a journey over time or maybe a sudden moment of awakening sometime in the past, but all of this is a kind of dream. It takes memory and imagination to conjure it up. 

We haven't really gone anywhere. We've always been right here. It's always been now. And in fact, "we" are only a mirage.

Often we have the idea that the spiritual path involves working very hard to cleanse and purify ourselves. We think our goal is to get rid of anger, depression, confusion, anxiety, addiction, laziness and everything we consider "negative" and "unenlightened."

We think that we must strive to become somebody who always feels awake, happy, zestful and expanded, someone who exudes loving-kindness and who never gets upset or defensive. We're trying to turn "The Bad Me" into "A Good Me," which works about as well as trying to turn Chicago into Los Angeles.

We imagine spiritual practice to be a kind of policing operation in which we endeavor to control, improve, polish and perfect ourselves until finally we achieve our Ideal Self, the Enlightened Me who is perfectly me-less at last. We want to become somebody who has no self and no flaws. 

But this whole endeavor is a total misunderstanding of the pathless path. This approach leads to momentary highs (often accompanied by uptightness, self-righteousness or grandiosity) followed by frustration, disappointment, discouragement and the story of being a failure. 

Trying to be in any particular experiential state "all the time" is suffering. It doesn't work.

Instead of focusing primarily on the differences between one experience and another, we may begin to notice what is the same in every different experience, whether it is a contracted experience or an expanded experience, whether there is thinking or no thinking, whether we are washing the dishes mindfully or doing them on autopilot, whether we are making love with our partner or yelling at them, whether we are watching a crime drama on TV or sitting in meditation -- the beingness, the here-ness, the now-ness, the suchness is ever-present, like the water in every wave.

...As we walk the pathless path, the dividing line between "meditation" or "satsang" and "the rest of life" gradually dissolves, along with any notion of what is "spiritual" or "not spiritual."

We are no longer trying very hard to be mindful as we wash the dishes, or trying very hard to identify ourselves as awareness and not as the character, or trying very hard to observe and "be aware" and not get caught up in our drama. All of that spiritual efforting disappears. 

There may still be a devotion to presence and an interest in seeing through illusion. We may still meditate, go to satsang or read nondual books, but it happens without gaining ideas, without expectations, without any added purpose other than simply doing it because it is the happening of life.

Special experiences may happen, but they are not important. This isn't about having experiences. Nor is it about philosophy. Nonduality is not a philosophy anymore than the taste of coffee or the sound of traffic is philosophy. This is waking up from philosophy.

If thought pops up and says, "I only have an intellectual understanding, not an actual, direct experience," this is a thought and it tells a story.

If this story is believed, immediately we begin seeing some special experience other than the one we are actually having right now. But who is it that has this problem? Who is this "me" who supposedly hasn't had a direct experience yet? And where would we find this experience other than Here/Now?

Is there not an undeniable direct experiencing right now (hearing, seeing, sensing, awaring, breathing, being)? 

Be aware of how thought pops up and creates the imaginary problem and then tries to solve it. This isn't about having some special experience that you've never had or that you remember having once years ago, but rather, it's about noticing the actual experiencing that is Here/Now, no matter what form it takes.

That takes no effort because it is already the case. It's simply the falling away of the idea that "this isn't it."

Does liberation or enlightenment or awakening take effort and practice? Maybe, maybe not. It takes what it takes to realize that nothing is needed to be what you already are.

The trick is that this realization is not a belief that we can arrive at intellectually and then superimpose upon life, but rather, it is a present moment seeing through of the thoughts that create the illusory problem -- thoughts like "I'm not there yet," or "This isn't it," or "If only I could stop getting caught up in all these false thoughts, then I'd be enlightened."

Seeing the false as false is the spontaneous activity of Life itself.

I hear from someone who experiences mystical sound and light

Recently I got an email from a man in Austria who started to experience mystical sound and light, even though he had no connection with a teaching that claims to produce such experiences. Since, we've exchanged several messages.

I asked him if I could share his messages on my blog. He asked that I remove some of what he said that wasn't germane to what he's been experiencing, which I've done. You'll find his email address at the end of this post, as he'd welcome being contacted by anyone who has experienced something similar.

Enjoy...

I came across your critical perspective on Sant Mat during my research, and I would like to seek your advice on it. My story is a bit strange; although I have always been somewhat interested in spiritual matters, I had little experience with meditation, except for a bit of Zazen and Buddhist Tantrism years ago.

 

But now that my children are older, I thought I could spend some of my free time meditating, mainly to reduce stress. At the end of September 2023, I sat down to simply count my breaths when suddenly I heard (church) bells in my head loud and clear. I couldn't make sense of it and thought it might be a mental disturbance, but then I began to research. Initially, I also came across Nada-Yoga, in which such phenomena are quite common.

 

The experiences then became more clear and light phenomena were also added. The process was extremely intense, as it was also very physical, feeling like my body energy was changing. As I know now, I had one of the promised experiences of Sant Mat – only, I was never initiated into the system nor have I ever even heard of it. In my further research, I came across Sant Mat and the different groups.

 

My problem is: I don't believe in a guru system, as it often leads to abuses of power and, unfortunately, in many cases, sexual abuse. I also can't comprehend how Westerners simply surrender their entire thought process. I don't believe in all the stories of journeys to distant astral worlds; it just sounds like Indian mystical tales, their version of Superman comics.

 

But on the other hand, I still have very mystical experiences during meditation. I hear different sounds (from thunder to bees and flutes), see light in various forms, and my body feels completely asleep during the sessions while the mind is extremely awake. By the way, I wouldn't have thought this possible or considered myself a freak before that September mentioned.

 

In my personal experience, the process seems to work on its own once you attune yourself to the sound. Initially, I must admit, I had quite a bit of fear as extremely sexual energy from the lower energy centers made its way upward, and my body would start to breathe rapidly and assume peculiar positions.

 

During this time, I meditated for up to three hours a day, simply because the process was so intense that I had to. Fortunately, in this phase, I met a very kind woman from a Sant Mat group who assured me that at least I wasn't going crazy. Later (and especially now), it became much more peaceful, and I am now confident that there is a kind of inner guidance that takes you through the entire process. An outer Guru is not necessary, at least I am not seeking one.

 

But, of course, a question arises: Why me? I had never heard of Sant Mat; I'm just an ordinary guy living in Vienna, Austria, with my wife and two children. I am not chosen, and no special grace of God has been bestowed upon me.

 

I have only one explanation: Three years ago, my father died of cancer, and my family more or less entrusted the entire process to me, and I also became his legal guardian. In the end, I had to decide whether he would continue therapy or not. I chose against it and had to explain this to him during one of his lucid moments; it was a truly terrible time.

 

After he passed away, I developed hypochondria, which became so severe that I sought psychological help. I ended up with a therapist who practiced Brainspotting. With this method, unresolved unconscious traumas, which we probably all have, can be addressed. It resonated with me to the extent that I worked through almost every trauma of my life over 1.5 year long period.

 

I came upon this idea when reading a book, I believe by Kirpal Singh, mentioning that the Guru takes on the karma (which I don't believe in) during initiation. If someone truly believes this and consciously and unconsciously releases all their traumas, then the path may open up to them. Or that someone, while reciting the names of God, opens up and releases these blocking traumas. That's the only explanation I could come up with.

 

I now believe that while my experiences may seem supernatural, they are not truly so. The perceptions are simply part of our psyche, to which we have lost access for whatever reasons. Once the process has started, one just needs to allow it to unfold because one can't actively contribute to it, except by listening.

 

The most important question now is, of course, how to gain access to it. I don't think the guru activates the third eye during initiation; otherwise, everyone who receives it should have experiences like mine. I believe it is either (as in my case) that the psyche undergoes a purification process and then simply has access to the Sound and Light, but in the majority of cases, it might be a placebo effect.

 

The psyche is capable of incredible things, so I think it can initiate the process simply because it is convinced, through initiation, that it now has access. As I mentioned, I consider this to be a part of our reality to which we have lost access, but is entirely normal. However, I now also believe that the process could ultimately lead to a mystical union with God, which I have not yet experienced.

 

I would be very pleased to connect with individuals who have had similar experiences to find out if there might be a way to access the Sound and Light without having to be part of any specific group or have a guru. If anyone would like to reach out to me, I welcome it: [email protected]

 

Maybe the biggest problem with life is believing there's a problem with life

It sort of feels to me like a rapidly descending elevator. You know, when it seems like the floor is falling away beneath you even though you're standing on it. Except in an elevator you know what the lowest level is. 

I'm not sure how much further I have to sink. And that's okay with me. At least I'm moving in the right direction: away from the heights of religious supernaturalism toward a grounding in here-and-now reality.

Reading Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, has made me more aware of that descending elevator feeling. For she ably undercuts what I used to hold onto with such fervor in my true believing days. Gurus. Dogmas. Commandments. Goal-seeking meditation. Altered states of consciousness. 

But that's just the beginning, the upper floors that my personal Meaning of Life elevator has been leaving behind since my deconversion from a religion, Eastern mysticism variety, about nineteen years ago.

Once I let go of overt religious precepts, I was drawn to what I view as "halfway houses" in between my addiction to a highly organized religion and a complete disinterest in what usually is called spirituality, for want of a better term.

Those halfway houses, where I could dwell for a time before moving to lower levels via the Meaning of Life elevator, were Taoism and Buddhism. I was attracted to both philosophies -- which they really are, rather than religions -- from an early age. 

Here's what I said in "Taoism isn't mystical. It is natural."

Taoism appeals to me.

I started to add "because..." to that last sentence.

But I'm reluctant to try to explain why I enjoy reading Taoist books and practicing Taoism-in-motion, Tai Chi, so much. When I was about twelve years old, I visited San Francisco's Chinatown for the first time. I spent my allowance on buying cheap scrolls of what I now realize were images of Taoist wanderers in Chinese nature scenes. That artwork decorated my room until I went to college. 

At the time, I had no knowledge of Taoism. I don't think I'd even heard of that term. Now, some 50 years later, I still don't know much about Taoism. Great news! I may be a Taoist sage!

In college, Zen Buddhism grabbed my attention. It appealed to me more than non-Zen Buddhism, which has much more structure to it, what with the Eightfold Path and logical analyses of why and how suffering arises. 

But whether it was the Eastern religion (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or Sant Mat) I became initiated into in 1970 and stuck with for 35 years, or the much looser Taoism and Zen Buddhism philosophies that I enjoyed so much, I still was driven by a desire to reach an end point.

Enlightenment. Satori. Peace of mind. Oneness. 

I'd given up the idea of finding an end point on the upper religious floors that the Meaning of Life elevator was connected to. However, I had a sense that lower down, in the realm of naturalism rather than supernaturalism, I could still achieve a goal that would make me feel, "Ah, this is what life is all about."

Well, I'm having increasing doubts that this is either desirable or possible. It's a weird feeling -- the notion that after some sixty years (age 15 to 75, roughly), of believing that I was on a Path to Somewhere, now I'm inclined to believe that I'm going nowhere.

And that's absolutely fine with me. 

Joan Tollifson is just the latest in a string of people who I think of as non-spiritual writers about spirituality. Meaning, they not only undermine the foundations of religion, but also, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how radical they are, the very idea that life is a problem that needs fixing.

I've been preaching that same message on this blog in various ways for quite a while. Except, it's been more along the lines of a question: sure, there are problems in everybody's life that need attention, but is life itself a problem?

Buddhism says "yes." Life is suffering. Here's an approach to ending that suffering, or at least much diminish it.

Taoism basically agrees, though not so obviously. Taoism doesn't have anywhere near the structure that Buddhism has, but Taoist teachings still encourage us to learn how to be more in accord with the Way of Tao.

Zen Buddhism, though, is similar to Tollifson's point of view: the only problem with life itself is believing that life itself has a problem. That perspective has always been sitting there in the Zen literature, in the Zen stories, in the Zen koans, in the Zen teachings. 

Until recently I didn't see it very clearly.

Which isn't surprising, because Zen Buddhism is notoriously reluctant to spell things out, preferring subtlety, misdirection, paradox, poetic metaphor. Or, maybe not. I readily admit that after all those years of embracing Zen, without ever actually practicing Zen, I may have failed to grasp what was always within reach, but didn't appeal to me.

Namely, that there's nothing to do, and besides, there's no one to do it. All there is, is doing that happens naturally by life and existence itself -- no doer required. 

Is this the ground floor? Maybe, but probably not.

Likely the whole idea of levels, of floors, or greater or lesser distance from reality, that's all just spiritual/religious mumbo-jumbo. A bunch of words and concepts that appeal to billions of people, definitely including me, yet not only aren't necessary for a satisfying life, but actually interfere with a satisfying life.

Well, I love to say to myself, "Don't know" and "Could be wrong." So I'll end with those sayings.

For me, the real spiritual quest is to stop searching for spirituality

A few days ago I wrote about how discovering Jean Toliffson was a gift not only for myself, but for the readers of this blog. Since, I finished listening to her interview with Sam Harris on his Waking Up app, which made me even more appreciative of Toliffson's naturalness and humility.

She's a spiritual teacher who doesn't actually believe in either spirituality or teaching. At least, not as how those words are generally defined and used in Zen, Buddhist, Advaita, Nonduality, and similar pursuits.

That's what made her discussion with Harris so interesting. I like and respect Harris a lot. But compared to Toliffson, he comes across as much more traditional in some respects.

Over and over, Harris would express a view of his, and Toliffson would gently but firmly say something like, "I understand where you're coming from, Sam. What you're saying has value. I used to believe much as you do. However, now I don't find this perspective to be useful."

One of her favorite words is Here/Now. Toliffson is all about embracing what is happening here and now, which she correctly says is the only place and time anything can happen. For thoughts of the past or future can only occur now, and thoughts of another place can only occur here.

So what's the place of goals in spirituality? Well, to begin with, Toliffson isn't big on the very idea of spirituality, from what I can tell. I say this because "spirituality" is an abstraction. You can't experience it with your senses. This concept only exists in the human mind, not anywhere in the natural world.

Okay, but regardless of what we call it, isn't there a place for goals aimed at making us a better person? I certainly have believed in this for most of my life. Listening to Toliffson, though, it seems clear that she views goals as contrary to her view of living.

Toliffson is a practical person. She realizes that intentions, plans, goals, and such  are necessary in everyday life. Today I had the goal of doing our grocery shopping. I achieved it. Now I have the goal of writing a blog post. Likely I will achieve it.

However, this is different from viewing Life Itself as needing goals.

Like, enlightenment, self-realization, mystical experiences, discarding negative emotions, higher state of consciousness. Toliffson sees these as distractions from Here/Now, especially when they're idealized as necessary components of a "spiritual" life.

Toliffson finds value in all kinds of teachings. She just doesn't view any of them as must have's for a particular person.

When Harris would talk about how he gained a lot from a certain Buddhist teacher, Toliffson would respond with something like, "That's wonderful, Sam. You got what you needed from this person. However, different people need different things at different times. What benefitted you wouldn't appeal to someone else."

This is an obvious observation. But often what's obvious gets overlooked. Of course, people differ in what they need to be content. Yet we tend to universalize our personal experience and try to fashion it into a recipe that everyone should cook up in their own minds. 

I do this. Most people do. Maybe not consciously, but it is reflected in my judgments about other people when they don't adhere to some standard that I've set for myself as a desirable quality. Well, it is desirable. For me. Not for others.

I'm not setting Toliffson up as some sort of guru for those of us who don't believe in gurus. She clearly doesn't want that job. I just look upon her as a example of the sort of person who appeals to me in my increasingly non-spiritual form of spirituality.

Non-dogmatic. Open-minded. Humorous. Humble. Down to earth. Flawed. Imperfect. Human. 

In a way it's crazy that I have to be reminded of how pleasant it is to manifest those qualities, whether in myself or as perceived in another person. This is simply the way lots of people are naturally. They don't have to spend years studying Zen or, like me, years studying the people who study Zen and similar practices.

But to some extent I'm still recovering from my thirty-five years of immersion in a religion, Eastern style, that taught this world is a place to escape from with the aid of a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form.

For those three and a half decades I wasn't into Here/Now. I was heavy into There/Then, as most followers of dualistic religions are, since their goal is to attain a state of consciousness far different from that of ordinary life.

Now I'm pleased to just be an ordinary person. As is Toliffson. Which helps explain why I enjoy her so much. By the way, check out her list of recommended books with reviews. Wow. Really extensive. I've read many of the books, but not nearly all of them. Very impressive list. 

Happy New Year. Here's my gift of Joan Tollifson.

In a few hours it will be 2024 here in Oregon.

Of  course, in one sense tomorrow is just another day, another rotation of Earth on its axis. But we humans have come up with the calendar, so in another sense tomorrow is the beginning of a brand new year.

At any rate, I want to express how grateful I am that in 2023 not only was I able to write a Church of the Churchless post every other day (on the other days I tend to my HinesSight and Salem Political Snark blogs), but that my posts were enriched by the comments left on them by visitors to this blog.

I've learned a lot from those comments. I've been entertained by those comments. I've gotten recommendations for books and videos from those comments. And of course, since I'm human (what else could I be?), I've been irritated by comments that I disagree with.

Just as there's no doubt that my blog posts have irritated people also. Hey, if we're alive, we're prone to irritations. That's part of the nature of life -- unless, of course, someone subscribes to a idealized vision of what life is all about where perfection is possible, a vision I heartily disagree with.

Which gets me to my New Year's gift, courtesy of Sam Harris' Waking Up app. 

Recently I started listening to an interview Harris did with Joan Tollifson. After listening to an hour of it, with 45 minutes left to go, I really like her style. She's one of the most natural and unaffected spiritual practitioners I've ever come across. 

Tollifson gets into some fascinating discussions with Harris, who I also like a lot. But Tollifson is even more non-dogmatic that Harris is, being unafraid to puncture assumptions that Harris accepts quite uncritically.

Today I enjoyed her take on the notion that Harris promulgates that awareness, or consciousness, is like the open sky in which everything appears. Tollifson gently but firmly said that while she's enjoyed this conception of awareness, her problem with it is that open awareness can become one more thing that a spiritual seeker is supposed to aspire to, and Tollifson doesn't like aspirations.

So what does she like? Well, take a look at her web site.

There's a lot of material there to peruse, particularly in the Outpourings section, where each of those links points to a fairly lengthy writing. I've ordered one of her books to see if I like her written words as much as I'm enjoying listening to her spoken words.

Sure, almost certainly I'll get irritated by stuff Tollifson says, but like I said, that comes with being human. And from what I can tell, Tollifson is all about being fully human, flaws and all. Here's what's on her home page, which will give you a feel for her approach to spirituality. I like her approach.

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

We can doubt all our ideas about what this is and what we are, but not the bare actuality of present experiencing and being here, present and aware. This presence has no inside or outside, and there is nowhere it is not. It appears like ever-changing kaleidoscopic Rorschach blots that the pattern-seeking mind is always reifying and interpreting—labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—and presto, the apparently solid and fractured world appears. But how solid and divided up is it really?

The beauty we see, the love we feel is in the listening presence that we are. We imagine we are something small and separate, a character in a movie, and we identify as the voice in our head, the thoughts posing as “me.” But can this mirage-like thinker behind the thoughts actually be found, and is presence-awareness divided up or encapsulated? A person is like a waving of the ocean—a movement inseparable from the whole.

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

Ouspensky leaving Gurdjieff has lessons for spiritual independence

As noted in my previous post, "Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen," after reading the first chapter in P.D. Ouspensky's book about his time with Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous, I decided that I'd only read one additional chapter -- the last one where Ouspensky describes why he parted company with Gurdjieff.

Having done that, here's the reason Ouspensky gives.

In regard to my relations with G. I saw clearly at that time that I had been mistaken about many things that I had ascribed to G. and that by staying with him now I should not be going in the same direction I went at the beginning. And I thought that all the members of our small group, with very few exceptions, were in the same or a similar situation.

This was a very strange "observation" but it was absolutely a right one. I had nothing to say against G.'s methods except that they did not suit me.

A very clear example came to my mind then. I had never had a negative attitude towards the "way of the monk," to religious, mystical ways. At the same time I could never have thought for one moment that such a way was possible for me or suitable. 

And so, if after three years of work I perceived that G. was leading us in fact towards the way of religion, of the monastery, and required the observance of all religious forms and ceremonies, there would be of course a motive for disagreeing with this and for going away, even though at the risk of losing direct leadership.

And certainly this would not, at the same time, mean that I considered the religious way a wrong way in general. It may even be a more correct way than my way but it is not my way.

The decision to leave G.'s work and leave him exacted from me a great inner struggle. I had built very much upon it and it was difficult for me now to reconstruct everything from the beginning. But there was nothing else to do.

Of course, all that I had learned during those three years I retained. But a whole year passed by while I was going into all this and until I found it possible to continue to work in the same direction as G. but independently. 

I went into a separate house and again began work abandoned in St. Petersburg, on my book which afterwards appeared under the title A New Model of the Universe.

Since the tagline, or slogan, of this blog is "Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence," naturally I believe that Ouspensky did the right thing in following his own way, when the way his teacher, Gurdjieff, was espousing ended up taking Ouspensky in a direction that didn't feel right to him.

This fits with my own deconversion from an Eastern form of religion, though, I stuck with Radha Soami Satsang Beas for thirty-five years, while Ouspensky studied with Gurdjieff for just three years, or four, if we include the year Ouspensky spent transitioning away from Gurdjieff.

In my case, also, it took quite a while before I was able to separate what made sense to me in my previous religiosity (being a vegetarian and daily meditation, for example) versus what no longer made sense to me (devotion to a guru considered to be God in Human Form, for example).

Trust yourself. Those two words hold the key to knowing when to stick with a form of spiritual practice, and when to discard that form. After all, as we gain experience with a practice, we become more knowledgeable about it. 

That enables us to discern both what works for us, and what doesn't work for us. Keep doing the former. Stop doing the latter. Again, trust yourself.

Having read all I wanted to of In Search of the Miraculous, this morning I read, or rather re-read, the first chapter of a book Ouspensky wrote after he left Gurdjieff, The Fourth Way: A Record of Talks and Answers to Questions based on the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff.

My mother kept this book on a table next to her bed, where I found it after she died of a stroke in 1985. My sister and I donated almost all of my mother's books to the library in the small California town where she lived after moving there with me in 1954. But I kept The Fourth Way.

Pleasingly, I found that the notes and underlinings in pencil that my mother left in the book weren't obscured by my yellow highlighting. Also pleasingly, there was quite a bit in the first chapter that I read today which agreed with me, along with some weird stuff that made no sense to me.

I resonated with Ouspensky's emphasis on what seems very much like mindfulness, though he doesn't use that term. Here's some examples.

So, in self-observation for some time you may notice some strange things. For instance, you will find that what is really difficult in observing is that you forget about it. You start to observe, and your emotions connect with some kind of thought and you forget about self-observation.

...So, at the same time as self-observing, we try to be aware of ourselves by holding the sensation of 'I am here' -- nothing more. And this is the fact that all Western psychology, without the smallest exception, has missed.

But then there's this astrological sort of craziness.

So plants, animals and men serve a definite purpose: they serve for communication between earth and planets. With the help of organic life which can receive and retain them, planetary influences penetrate to the earth. This is the meaning and reason for organic life on earth.

I don't have to agree with everything in a book, or a spiritual practice, to enjoy it. However, if central assumptions of a book or practice strike me as absurd, I won't take the book or practice seriously. We grow. We learn. What appeals to us at one time in our life may not appeal to us at another time.

Again: trust yourself. 

Renunciative versus life-affirming types of meditation

I'm an easy sell when it comes to books about meditation. Especially when they have a title like Opening Awareness: A Guide to Finding Vividness in Spacious Clarity. 

Hey, give me some of that vividness, especially if it's found in spacious clarity, leaving aside the minor problem that I had no idea what those lofty words meant. So I sent $15 off to Amazon.

(When I just checked out the group that published the book, Evolving Ground, I noticed that portions of this little book are available online, but not the whole thing.) 

The basic meditation approach presented in the book is what I think of as open awareness. Not focusing or concentrating on anything specific, just being aware of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, breathing, whatever, without seizing on any of these contents of consciousness. 

Here's a description of the approach in the online version of the book.

The method is simple: sit and remain uninvolved with whatever arises.

Ordinarily, we remain involved with experience. For example, an itching sensation arises on the skin and we scratch it. We tend to cognitively elaborate what is occurring, with ideas, thought-stories, imagination, even the focusing of attention. Remaining uninvolved is to experience whatever is happening without engaging, elaborating, or acting in response.

Remaining uninvolved is not ignoring.

Imagine lying in a tent, hearing the sounds of the night outside. They take place in your field of experience: you are neither straining to hear them nor actively shutting them out. So long as you remain aware of experience as it arises, potential for involvement is available, even while it is suspended. While lying in your tent, if you heard an animal in distress, you could decide to become involved and help it. By contrast, ignoring experience eventually shuts it out of awareness completely, until there is no potential for involvement.

Without involvement, conceptual elaboration of experience tends to subside. As elaboration subsides and awareness remains, immediate, unelaborated experience becomes more apparent. This unelaborated awareness is sometimes called “direct experience” or “as it is.”

Remain uninvolved … with what? 

With anything, with everything.

Well, this makes sense. Sort of. Because the printed version of the book also says:

This may seem paradoxical at first. The overall aim of the path is passionate engagement with the fullness of life. That is the opposite of uninvolvement. However, opening awareness leads to spacious clarity, within which we perceive all of life with new, more vivid accuracy. 

We can find that spacious clarity in every other activity. Opening awareness trains us, through remaining temporarily uninvolved during practice sessions, to find clarity even when fully involved.

I've got some problems with this, because I've come to view meditation and everyday life as being pretty much the same thing, since mindfulness is my current way of meditating and I aspire to mindfulness during the rest of my day.

However, otherwise I'm enjoying the book. It takes a relaxed approach to meditation.

Whatever works for you is the basic advice. And in a section called "Scaffolding practices," familiar methods like remaining aware of the breath, or counting breaths, are recommended as adjuncts to the sit and remain uninvolved approach.

What I definitely resonated with in an early section was a discussion of two basic views of what meditation is all about: renunciative and life-affirming. For about 35 years I was a member of an India-based organization headed up by a guru whose teachings were definitely in the renunciative camp.

The goal was to leave this physical world behind and find a better one in higher realms of reality. To do that, it was necessary to beware of the Five Deadly Foes, lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism. So really serious stuff. Vows were taken of no sex outside of marriage, no use of alcohol or recreational drugs, no meat, fish, or eggs. 

Nothing wrong with all that if that's what you want in life. But I observed many instances of fellow initiates becoming rigid, moralistic, judgmental, holier-than-thou, and generally not pleasant to be around. Stifle normal urges and emotions and you've got a textbook renunciative theology.

Here's what the book says on this subject.

A meditation system's view profoundly shapes its goals, and so its path, and so then its methods. "View" is a term for an overarching collection of assumptions about how the world is and what meditation is for.

Contemporary society has inherited many different, sometimes incompatible views from multiple eras and cultures. Ancient views may remain implicit in a meditation system, informing its attitudes and goals. Making views explicit draws attention to potential internal contradictions. It may reveal unexpected ways a path is incompatible with your own views and purposes.

In Evolving Ground we draw attention to two broad categories: renunciative views and life-affirming views.

Many religious systems are renunciative: they see everyday life as inherently impure, and so to be abandoned. Most meditation methods originally evolved for renunciative purposes in renunciative settings.

They were designed to help you sever human relationships, in combination with a life of celibacy and abstinence in a monastery. Meditation was meant to enable a metaphysical escape from a cycle of suffering and rebirth by withdrawing from all connection with the defiled and defiling world.

The aim was enlightenment: a state of eternal perfection, free from the emotional turbulence of ordinary life.

Opening awareness is not designed for cloistered, monastic life. It is accompanied by a life-affirming view, and is designed to help you experience aliveness and connection in relationships.

A life-affirming view regards emotions and self, suffering and enjoyment, relationship and involvement in practical affairs as natural and pervasive aspects of human experience. Opening awareness practice prepares you for spacious involvement with all life's circumstances -- work, family, and society. This spacious involvement is the basis for enjoyable, useful activity in the world.

The renunciative view accompanying a meditation method may sometimes go unnoticed. How do you know when a worldview is implicitly renunciative? If emotions, self, and suffering are seen as inherently problematic obstacles, and it aims to overcome them with meditation, that's a sign of a renunciative view.

Most widely-available meditation methods, ancient religious ones and modern secular ones, were devised to subdue emotions by detaching from them altogether. "Non-attachment" and "letting go" commonly describe such renunciative methods. The purpose may be to "calm the mind."

"It wasn't until I realized how lonely and frustrating it was for my wife being married to the equanimous, distant version of Jared that I started to wonder if there was a different way to approach my meditation practice." -- Jared James, Evolving Ground cofounder

By contrast with renunciative methods, opening awareness clarifies the mind so that the full range of physical and emotional experience is available without conceptual elaboration. With a life-affirming attitude any experience you encounter is welcome.

Spacious clarity includes everything that arises in experience, without ignoring, rejecting, or cutting it off. No sound is distracting, no thought is bad, no experience is wrong. Emotions and sensations come and go in awareness. Disturbing thought-stories and images gradually dissipate when they have space to do their own thing.

As your mind clears while maintaining awareness of everything you perceive, you feel more connected with the world, not less. In this experience of vivid connection, everything seems immediate and fresh.

Developing this friendly attitude towards everything that arises in your sitting practice will have positive repercussions in your relationships. Although opening awareness is most often a solitary practice, its aim is relational transformation, and beyond that social transformation.

This is a path of celebration, of down-to-earth realism, of uplifting courage, of gentle precision, and of open hearts.

Sam Harris speaks truth to Russell Brand's B.S.

I'm a big fan of Sam Harris, the noted atheist who richly deserves his reputation as a rational mystic. For Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and also is deeply experienced in meditation, primarily the Dzogchen variety of Buddhism. 

Whenever I read Harris' books, listen to his guided meditations and conversations with other people, or view his videos, I come away impressed with his ability to clearly reason about difficult issues concerning all sorts of subjects -- notably including consciousness, religion, mindfulness, and social issues.

It takes me about 10 minutes to do my weekly watering of two bonsai plants that I bought at the Salem World Beat Festival about five years ago and have managed to keep alive even though I've never changed the potting soil and never trimmed them. I do fertilize them. So I've mastered the art of growing bonsai through benign neglect.

While I could mindfully do the watering without distraction, I've gotten into the habit of using that time to watch You Tube videos on my iPhone. Lately I've been looking at videos of Sam Harris. I was drawn to view an 86 minute video of Harris being interviewed by Russell Brand even though it took much more time to watch than a single watering session.

Brand is an English comedian and actor. While he occasionally makes sense in his interview with Harris, mostly I found his attitude irritating and his arguments faulty. Of course, my worldview is much closer to that of Harris than of Brand, so that helps explain why I think Harris came away the winner in their lengthy conversation.

Which I've shared below. I've made the video start about 11 minutes from the end. The final part of the interview, which begins a ways before when this video starts, is where Harris and Brand talk about consciousness, meditation, and religion. I really like what Harris says about the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- here.

He cogently argues that there's absolutely no doubt that the holy scriptures of these religions are human made, not divinely inspired. However, Harris neglected to give specific examples of how an omniscient God could have included knowledge in those scriptures that would provide proof of a godly being.

One example that has been cited by other religious skeptics would have been for God to direct a writer of some holy scripture several thousand years ago to include a mention of a scientific fact that would have made no sense to people of that time, yet would be proven true by modern science. Extra credit would go to God if the fact were expressed mathematically.

Anyway, here's the video. Harris's argument about why religions are clearly human made comes a few minutes after where I've made the video start. 

 

If we're only happy when life has no problems, we'll never be happy

After recommending a conversation between Sam Harris and André Duqum after listening to only ten minutes of it, now I can really recommend the conversation after listening to two hours of the 2:20 talk between them.

Harris is in fine form here. Having been an avid user of his Waking Up app, I've heard quite a few talks between Harris and some other spiritually inclined person. He tells some of the same stories in the Duqum conversation but much of what Harris says is new to me.

I haven't been taking any notes, so will simply relate what I remember most about what I've heard in the two hours, figuring that since it stuck in my mind, that's what appealed to me, and maybe the same is true of others.

When Harris talks about finding happiness, I was blown away by how clear and eloquent he is. My description of what he said won't do justice to his words,  but this is the best I can do.

Harris is right on when he observes that for most of us -- certainly true of me -- life is a never-ending battle between problems that arise for us and our desire to make those problems go away. We feel satisfied when something is checked off our to-do list. That gives us a happiness boost.

Briefly. Until the next problem comes along. Now, "problem" doesn't quite capture what we're dealing with. Sometimes it's a gap between what we want and what is present now. Some sticky spots on my car's windshield have been bugging me (they might even be squished bugs).

When I notice them, right in my field of vision, I'm driving along and can't clean the windshield. When I get home, I forget to clean it. Today I did. That felt good. I'll feel even better next time I drive my car. Until new spots appear.

Harris' point is that if our happiness depends on having every problem or unmet goal dealt with successfully, we're never going to be able to experience lasting happiness, or satisfaction. Somehow we have to find a way to to be happy even though there's a gap between what we'd like to have happen, and what is actually happening. 

This is fairly easy to do with minor gaps. It's much tougher when the gap is larger, as when we're having to deal with a serious illness or the death of a loved one. In these cases basic Buddhist precepts can be of some help.con

We can embrace the notion of emptiness -- that all things are marked by interdependency, change, lack of inherent existence. We can feel whatever pain, distress, and suffering is present in our consciousness while recognizing that it will arise and pass away as all things do.

Well, unless death comes upon us before the passing away does, in which case the passing away will be complete, since almost certainly we won't exist anymore.

Harris stresses that our thinking plays a large role in our unhappiness. Much of the time, if not most of the time, the problems we're worried about don't exist in the  present moment. They're anticipated problems, potential problems, concerns about events that we imagine happening, yet haven't yet.

So even when things are going well for us, our mind is prone to envision things going badly in the future. Or we remember past problems and worry that they'll pop up again. 

Mindfulness of what's occurring in the present moment helps to tone down thoughts of past and future. Sure, thinking is a great tool. However, it needs to be used appropriately, not indiscriminately. Too much or too little thinking can both be unproductive, which is why the Middle Way of Buddhism makes a lot of sense. 

I also liked what Harris had to say about Advaita Vedanta. Nonduality, which is what Advaita is all about, is a wonderful perspective on reality. Who isn't attracted to oneness?

But Harris cogently criticizes teachers, or preachers, of Advaita who irritatingly blab on about how there is no one to be enlightened, since the Self doesn't exist, so every spiritual effort is misguided, because there's nothing to attain. Just be what you already are, blah, blah, blah. 

The Advaita Trap makes this annoyingly clear.

Regarding consciousness, I like how Harris discusses the Hard Problem, which basically is why there is something to be like a conscious being. Me, I'm more open to the notion that the Hard Problem will disappear when the nature of consciousness is better understood, while Harris seems to believe that it will always be with us.

His discussion of Artificial Intelligence was well-informed and thoughtful. I think he's right that soon we will be able to recognize an AI not because it lacks human mental capabilities, but because it surpasses them. 

Anyway, I look forward to hearing the last twenty minutes of the Harris-Duqum conversation. Harris does most of the talking in it, which is as it should be, since while Duqum asks good questions, Harris is an exceptional explainer of meditation and spirituality from his rational mystic perspective. 

Don't watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life.

Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment.

If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.

As is everything else in life, since Harris and most other meditation teachers emphasize that there's no real distinction between formal meditation and what we do the rest of the day. It's all about attention and experiencing life as fully as possible in the present moment.

This morning I only had time to listen to about ten minutes of a several hour conversation between Harris and André Duqum. I liked what I heard. Duqum has a video of the conversation on his Know Thyself web site. It's in the middle on the bottom row, "Sam Harris: A Rational Mystics Guide to Consciousness and Awakening."

It's a YouTube video, which I'll share:

In what I heard today Harris speaks about the familiar theme of how our thoughts can prevent us from genuinely experiencing reality. Obviously there's nothing wrong with thinking. It's essential for much that we do. However, thinking interferes with experience when it isn't needed.

Though we can become fully absorbed in thinking, which makes it a form of meditation, typically thinking creates distance between us and the world. We're paying attention to thoughts inside our head rather than attending to the outside world.

For a long time, 35 years, I practiced a form of meditation that aimed at "going within." This wasn't only closed-eye meditation. It also was closed ear meditation for much of the meditation session. Since, I've learned that the best thing I can do to feel more in touch with both myself and the world is to go without, not within.

When I meditate now, which includes everyday activities, since mindfulness has become my meditation, I try to focus on the sensations of what I'm doing and what's around me rather than thoughts. One thing at a time. Look out, not in. Those are two of my basic principles.

Harris spoke about how there can even be a watcher in meditation/mindfulness. By "watcher," he means the feeling, or assumption, that there's a person inside our head who is viewing reality like an air traffic controller in a high tower.

The watcher is mistakenly considered to be our true self, not the body/brain. But actually the watcher is an illusion. For when we try to find that person inside our head, the Self who is in charge of things, we come up empty.

It's better to experience life directly, not through a made-up watcher. We all know how pleasant it is to lose ourself in dance, music, walking, conversation, sex, work, or any other activity marked by a minimal distinction between us and what we're doing. 

This is a flow state, which is much different from a thinking or watching state, for those are marked by duality.

I find that usually it makes sense to trust my deeper mind or consciousness. After all, I heartily agree with Harris that both free will and an independent self are fictions. We don't need to worry that if we stop thinking, worrying, and fretting about the past and future, nothing will get done.

In my experience, I get more done when I simply trust that whatever I need to do will appear as something that needs doing. Yeah, I realize that sentence doesn't make logical sense. But it resonates with me. 

I do use to-do lists. I find them helpful in lessening my need to think, since I'm outsourcing some of my thinking to a piece of paper, my iPhone, or laptop. Often, though, some task that I've forgotten to jot down yet needs doing will pop into my mind unbidden, which strengthens my faith that a part of me beyond thinking can handle things just fine much or most of the time.

Tomorrow I'll listen to more of the conversation between Harris and Duqum. I find Harris to be my kind of spiritual teacher. He truly is a rational mystic. Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, yet also is well versed in Dzogchen and other forms of Buddhist meditation. 

I'm enjoying the Stoic test. Haven't gotten an A or A+ yet.

As noted in my previous post about a modern approach to Stoicism, "Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have," the idea is to be content (or at least as content as possible) with what life brings us.

That doesn't mean we don't try to deal with problems. But we'll be better able to deal with them if we're not in the grip of a strong negative emotion like anger, despair, self-pity, and such.

And in accord with the Buddhist notion of two arrows, it's preferable to just have a single arrow strike us -- such as an illness or losing our job -- rather than having another arrow strike us: the above-mentioned negative emotions that can cause more distress than whatever caused us to become upset in the first place.

My previous post talked about how William B. Irvine looks on framing in his book, The Stoic Challenge. This isn't about what you put around a painting or photograph, but what you put around your problems. Change your frame of reference, and a problem can appear quite different.

The main way Irvine advises to do this is to take up the challenge of Stoic tests -- which means looking upon a setback as an opportunity to grow and learn something about yourself by viewing the setback as a test sent to you by the Stoic Gods (which Irvine views as imaginary, yet a helpful illusion, akin to Santa Claus, who some parents invoke when they want a child to behave: "you won't get any presents if you don't stop teasing the cat").

By employing the Stoic test strategy, your conscious mind can likewise shape the behavior of your credulous and rather childlike subconscious mind. It sounds strange, I know, but it works.

I've been experimenting with the Stoic test for the past few days. Obviously I'm just a beginner at this, but I'm finding that it isn't really necessary to visualize the Stoic gods, or any other entity, as being responsible for a problem or setback that is the occasion for me being tested. 

Simply thinking something like, "Here's a test of my composure," appears to be enough for me to get the benefit of the Stoic test, as it creates a bit of distance between the problem and my habitual reaction to it.

For example, today I went to our bank to deposit a check and get some cash. (Yeah, I'm old enough to still use cash on occasion, along with those archaic things called postage stamps.) When I walked in I was first in line for a teller. But the two people being served by tellers ended up taking a long time with their transaction.

Usually this irritates me. But this time I said to myself, "Stoic test," and vowed to remain calmer than usual. Which, I succeeded in doing.

Though I'm a big fan of mindfulness, a downside of mindfulness is that it can simply make me more mindful of a negative state of mind, like irritation or anger, without doing a whole lot to reduce that negativity, though being aware of a negative emotion is better than being carried away by it in an uncontrolled fashion.

Here's how Irvine describes the grading process for a Stoic test.

The gods who administer Stoic tests do not grade them. You must therefore grade them yourself, and in coming up with a grade, you should take two things into account. 

The first is how you conducted your search for a workaround for the setback. Before committing to a course of action, did you consider your options? In doing so, did you engage in lateral thinking -- did you think "outside the box"? And was the workaround that you finally chose optimal?

An optimal workaround, by the way, won't necessarily be a pleasant workaround. To be optimal, it need only be less unpleasant than the other possible workarounds. Along these lines, getting a foot amputated won't be pleasant, but if the foot is severely gangrenous, amputation will be preferable to the next-best option -- death.

The second but more significant factor in grading your performance will be your emotional response to the setback. If you remain calm and collected, you will be worthy of, say, a B. 

If your goal is to get an A or even an A+ on the exam, though, you will have to do more than remain calm; you will have to welcome the setback and even perk up a bit on its appearance. In this respect, you need to resemble a fireman who, after years of training, is finally called on to put out a fire. At last, a chance to show his stuff!

Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have

A few weeks ago I wrote a philosophical post for my HinesSight blog: Stoic guide to happiness: want the things you already have. Here's an excerpt from the talk by William B. Irvine that I transcribed.

The ancient Stoics came up with a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. The trick, they said, is to want the things you already have, to love the life you happen to be living. 

To better understand this trick, let’s turn our attention back to the gap theory of happiness. The Stoics agreed that the presence of a gap between what you have and what you want will make you unhappy. Their insight was to realize there’s a second way to close the gap.

You can also close it by wanting what you already have. Let me restate that. Instead of working to get the thing you don’t have, spend your efforts learning to want the things you already do have. 

The Stoics would argue that the person who embraces the life that he happens to be living, even though the life is quite basic, is vastly better off than the millionaire who, despite living in a mansion, is convinced that he would be lastingly happy if only he replaced his Ferrari with a newer model.

Or perhaps replaced his wife of several decades with some young model. This millionaire, by the way, will likely be envied by many people. They will imagine that if only they were living his life, they would at last be happy. All their problems would disappear, and no new problems would arise to replace them.

These people are as deluded as the millionaire is. The primary difference between them and the millionaire is that the millionaire is on a more expensive and extravagant version of the hedonic treadmill than they are.

The Stoics said that one way to want what you already have is to practice negative visualization, where you imagine losing something in your life that means a lot to you. Even brief periods of negative visualization can lead you to value more highly what you already have, rather than longing for something more and better.

After writing that post, I bought a book by Irvine, The Stoic Challenge, that I've written one blog post about. I'm enjoying it.

Today I read a couple of chapters about anchoring and framing. These are psychological concepts that pertain to the Stoic approach to happiness. Anchors are notions that sink into the subconscious mind where they affect subsequent speculations about the world.

An example cited in the book is a store that has two options for selling shirts.

Plan A is to price the shirts at $32 each. Plan B is to price the shirts at $40, then have frequent 20% off sales. The benefit of Plan B is that the $40 price gets anchored in the minds of customers. Then when the shirts go on sale, customers think they're getting a good deal if they pay $32 for one.

Framing is related to a Stoic adage, "What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about the things." Meaning, we have a choice in how to frame or look upon a situation. Irvine gives the example of a doctor telling you that you have the choice between two medical procedures.

One has a one-month survival rate of 90%. The other has a 10% mortality rate in the first month. Obviously both are equally risky, but most people find a choice framed in terms of survival more attractive than a choice framed in terms of death.

Though I've got about half of Irvine's book left to read, it seems pretty clear that negative visualization, anchoring, and framing all point to the view that, as noted above, what keeps us dissatisfied with life isn't so much what is objectively happening with us but how we subjectively look upon our situation.

As you might expect, given my strong atheist leaning, I feel that most religions, mystical paths, and supernatural forms of spirituality are harmful to lasting happiness -- even though they admittedly can produce short-term satisfaction by making grandiose promises about returning to God, enjoying heaven, basking in unending bliss, and such.

The problem with putting such lofty goals in the minds of believers is that the goals serve to raise expectations about what is possible to achieve, even though there's no evidence for God, heaven, or unending bliss.

Once we view life through the frame of "this world sucks but a better one awaits," we're akin to someone with a decent middle-class income who falls prey to a huckster who promises much greater riches by following their illusory recipe for wealth.

From being happy with what they have, they now look upon their life as seriously lacking. This is similar to Christian missionaries who tell previously content members of a so-called "primitive" tribe that they are filled with sin that has to be washed clean by believing in the sacrifice of Jesus. 

Suddenly their contentment is reframed as ignorance of their fallen nature that must be redeemed by embracing Christianity. This same game is played by gurus who proclaim that they've been sent to save souls, leaving aside the not-insignificant fact that evidence for soul is lacking, much less the need to save this nonexistent entity.

Tonglen seems like a good practice, if it is more than mental

Today I read a talk in Pema Chödrön's book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where she explained to her Buddhist retreat students what the practice of tonglen is all about -- something I'd never heard about before.

I found a web page where Chödrön describes tonglen in the same way as she did in her book. Check out "How to Practice Tonglen." Here's an excerpt.

Tonglen practice, also known as “taking and sending,” reverses our usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. In tonglen practice, we visualize taking in the pain of others with every in-breath and sending out whatever will benefit them on the out-breath. In the process, we become liberated from age- old patterns of selfishness. We begin to feel love for both ourselves and others; we begin to take care of ourselves and others.

Tonglen awakens our compassion and introduces us to a far bigger view of reality. It introduces us to the unlimited spaciousness of shunyata (emptiness). By doing the practice, we begin to connect with the open dimension of our being.

Tonglen can be done for those who are ill, those who are dying or have died, or those who are in pain of any kind. It can be done as a formal meditation practice or right on the spot at any time. If we are out walking and we see someone in pain, we can breathe in that person’s pain and send out relief to them.

This fits with another description of tonglen that I found. 

On the outbreath: soothing rays of light—like moonbeams—that fill the world with their benevolent healing power. On the inbreath: a smoky, pitch-like darkness. Inviting it in on the inbreath relieves the world of its negative presence. The darkness is transformed by your positive intention and the natural goodness of your heart.

There are many different versions of this practice, both traditional and modern. The simplest form is simply connecting motivation and breath while you meditate. You are essentially accepting the unpleasant and sharing the good.

As taught today, tonglen is often practiced in stages. After settling the mind in meditation, we choose an object of compassion: a person, animal, or group whose situation touches our hearts. We breathe in the smoky darkness of that specific distress, imagining that the object of our meditation is relieved of all difficulties, whatever they may be. We breathe out the soothing light of compassion; it touches the object of compassion, bringing comfort and peace. This is followed by a phase of expanding the visualization to others who experience similar distress. And expanding yet again until all suffering is alleviated and all goodness is shared.

The intentions here are admirable. However, even though I practice a form of loving-kindness meditation every day that similarly entails visualizing good things happening to both myself and other people, I have a problem with viewing tonglen as purely a form of visualization and imagination.

Both loving-kindness meditation and tonglen are pretty much worthless, in my decidedly personal opinion, unless the alleviation of suffering and the sharing of goodness are manifested in some physical fashion instead of just being mental.

I realize that many people believe in the reality of prayer. But prayer typically entails an appeal to God or some other supernatural power, which then supposedly may intervene in a situation described in the appeal, such as a person suffering from a serious illness.

OK, I don't believe in God, nor in the efficacy of prayer, but at least prayer usually is directed at altering something physical for the better. Tonglen doesn't appear to have that grounding. In her book, Chödrön says:

The essence of the practice is willingness to share pleasure and delight and the joy of life on the out-breath and willingness to feel your pain and that of others fully on the in-breath. That's the essence of it, and if you were never to receive any other instruction, that would be enough.

Like I said, this sounds fine to me, yet it doesn't seem to be enough. Maybe this is so obvious that it isn't stressed in tonglen practice, but if we don't actually act to relieve the pain of others and act to bring them pleasure, tonglen seems akin to a recipe for delicious food that never is actually made in the kitchen.

To offer an example from my own life, my wife and I, being in our mid-70s, have frequently wondered if we should continue to live in our house in rural south Salem, Oregon, that sits on ten non-easy-care acres.

I've been more willing to move into town than my wife is, even though I love where we are now about as much as she does. It's just clear to me that Laurel needs a lot of nature nearby, along with walking trails on bare earth rather than asphalt or concrete, more than I do.

I love Laurel. I want her to be happy. Currently, if we sold our house and moved into town, Laurel wouldn't be nearly as happy as she is now out here in the country. So I no longer bring up the question of moving, something I did in the past.

It isn't that I've become some sort of self-sacrificing saint. I simply feel better when I act in accord with what makes my wife happy. That isn't a sacrifice. It's a pleasure. Because I think there's a better moral adage than "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," the so-called Golden Rule. 

I want to do for Laurel what she wants done for her. Which is for us to stay in our current house for the foreseeable future. I don't see any point in visualizing or imagining Laurel being happy here. By not exerting any pressure on Laurel to move, I'm acting in a way that makes Laurel happier.

And that is the point of tonglen for me: using the mental as a springboard to physical action that makes life better for other people.

Stoic gods are useful even though they don't exist

I enjoy believing in Gods that don't exist. You get the benefit of a higher power but without the drawback of taking a fantasy to be real.

A few days ago I started reading a book about a modern approach to Stoicism, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient by William B. Irvine. 

Irvine begins his book by relating a tale of how, after several attempts to repair a plane's cargo door had failed, with an extended delay in taking off, a gate agent announced that the passengers would have to wait until morning because no plane would be available until then.

A groan went up from the passengers. He assured us that the airline would put us up at a nearly hotel, an assurance that was met with even more groans. I was, I must admit, among the groaners, but then I realized what was happening: the Stoic gods had contrived this event on my behalf, as a kind of challenge.

"Game on!" I said to no one in particular.

I did this because I knew from experience that by treating this setback as a challenge -- by assuming, more precisely, that the Stoic gods had administered the setback as a test of my resilience and resourcefulness -- I could simultaneously reduce the emotional cost of being set back and increase my chances of finding a workaround.

When I read this, I wondered what was up with the mention of Stoic gods. Did Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University, really believe in them? If so, I figured that my enjoyment of his book was going to take a marked downturn after reading the first two pages.

But, no, such wasn't the case, as I learned on the next page.

It is important to realize that Stoicism is not a religion: its primary concern is not with our afterlife but with our time spent on Earth. That said, I should add that Stoicism is compatible with many religions, including Christianity and Islam. But here another clarification is in order.

Above, I made reference to the "Stoic gods." I do not believe that these gods actually exist, as physical or even as "spiritual" beings. They are, for me, fictitious entities. 

By invoking them, I can transform what for many people would simply be an unfortunate setback into a kind of mind game. Doing this lets me respond to setbacks without becoming frustrated, angry, or despondent.

Those who dislike invoking imaginary gods as part of a psychological strategy may instead invoke an imaginary coach or teacher; the psychological effect will be equivalent.

And those who do believe in God may proceed on the assumption that the setback in question is part of God's plan for them -- or if they are Muslim, part of Allah's plan -- as many Christians and Muslims already do.

 

More interesting observations from "Seeing That Frees"

I'm continuing to enjoy the book by Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. (First post about it is here.)

It's clear that Burbea knows a lot about meditation, Buddhist variety, and is skilled at communicating his knowledge both to his students in person and to the world at large through his book. 

There's so much of interest in the six chapters (out of 31) that I've read so far, I find it difficult to decide what to share in my blog posts about the book. So I'll focus on some of what got special highlighting as I make my way through Seeing That Frees with pen and highlighter in hand.

In a chapter about "The Cultivation of Insight," I liked what Burbea had to say about the limitation of unobservable entities.

Third, however, it is important to stress that, as we are defining it here, only what is actually perceivable to a practitioner qualifies as an insight for that practitioner.

I may, for example, feel anxious when I check my bank balance and see that there is no money at all in my account. But refusing to believe the bank statement and simply choosing to believe instead that I have a million dollars in the account would not in itself constitute an insight here, even if it did have the effect of reducing my suffering.

More generally, any introduction of a belief not based on perception, or similarly, any introduction of notions of unobservable entities would also, strictly speaking, be excluded from this particular definition of insight.

Fourth, and related to this last point: Rather than being based on faith in the experience of another, or upon blind beliefs -- even 'Buddhist' beliefs -- about how things are, insight, as we are defining it, is based primarily on personal experience of what decreases dukkha [suffering].

When there is insight, the seeing melts dukkha, and that release of dukkha we can feel and know for ourselves.

Samadhi is a term that I don't often think about in my own meditation practice. Burbea is helping me to understand that while it sounds exotic, being in a foreign language, it's actually fairly simple. Samadhi is concentration, basically. With concentration comes pleasure, usually.

For me samadhi is a lot like flow -- absorption in doing something either mentally or physically to the exclusion of other possible doings. Here Burbea relates concentration to defabricating the stories our brain tells itself about what's being experienced.

This fits with how I felt driving my Subaru Crosstrek into town today along the six miles of twisty, hilly, two-lane road that connects our neighborhood with Salem, Oregon. When I was simply concentrating on how the car was moving under my control, there were no stories about driving in my mind. There was just driving. And that felt good.

It typically takes a good deal of samadhi practice and insight to reverse a misconception of what is actually happening in a state of 'concentration'. For at first it understandably seems that such an altered state of unification and well-being is arrived at by ignoring phenomena other than the chosen object, so that these other phenomena, both inner and outer, are repressed from the consciousness at that time.

It might seem too that, replacing them in their absence, with much 'huffing and puffing' and strenuous effort, an altered pleasant state is constructed.

Is that really what is happening though? A state of samadhi is indeed still a constructed, fabricated state. But keen investigation, reflection, and a pondering of the relationship it has with letting go suggest that it may be more accurate to understand samadhi as a spectrum of states that involve progressively less fabrication than a more 'ordinary' state of consciousness involves.

It may not be obvious for quite a while but any state of samadhi is to some degree a state of letting go, of reduced craving. And the deeper the samadhi, the deeper and more comprehensive the letting go that it involves.

As we shall come to see through the insight practices, less craving results in less fabricating. Therefore any state of samadhi is a state of less fabricating, less building of the perception and sense of the self and of the world. If we understand how to contemplate it, samadhi itself offers profound insights into fabrication and dependent arising.

Spaciousness is a powerful means of lessening suffering, pain, unease, discomfort. Here Burbea explains how that happens.

Whenever there is any grasping or aversion toward something, indeed whenever any hindrances are present, the mind is, to some degree or other, in a contracted state. It has, so to speak, been sucked in to some perception, some object of consciousness, has shrunk and tightened around it. Generally we experience this contraction in the mind as an unpleasant state, as dukkha. 

We can notice this contraction, this constriction of the mental space, in relation to both internal and external phenomena. It will be evident, for instance, with regard to some unpleasant sensation in the body, like tiredness, or a difficult emotion, such as fear. And we may also detect it in social situations, if a certain relationship is charged.

The clinging mind contracts around some experience, and then, because the mind space is shrunken, the object of that grasping or aversion takes up proportionately more space in the mind. It thus seems somehow larger, and also more solid -- its size and seeming solidity both corresponding to the degree of contraction in the mind.

With the object appearing then bigger and more solid, and the experience of contraction being painful to some degree, the mind without insight in that moment will usually react unskillfully.

It will unconsciously try to escape the situation by increasing the grasping or aversion, in a way that only keeps it stuck or even makes things worse. For unfortunately this further grasping keeps the mind space contracted, or contracts it even more. This makes the issue, the perception, still larger and more solid, setting up a vicious circle in which the mind is trapped.

About all this, for now, we simply want to point out that it can be very helpful, when the awareness is unwisely sucked in in this way, to pay attention deliberately to a sense of space. Noticing space opens up the perception, and can begin to dissolve the vicious circle. Even attention to external physical space can help us open and ease the constriction of the mind, and can create a sense of space around an internal experience such as bodily discomfort or a difficult emotion.

As we have stated before, space is not emptiness, and emptiness is not a space of any kind. Rather, our investigation here is simply into how the mind gives solidity to experience and fabricates dukkha through the very ways we relate to, see, and conceive of things.

We are gradually learning to untangle the tangle of suffering. And again, like all deliberate shifts in the way of looking, the more we do it, the more accessible it becomes. The more we practise inclining the mind to notice space, the easier it becomes to actually open up some space in the perception and experience some relief.

Slow deep breathing and smiling -- two ways to feel better fast

Recently I listened to a guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my Calm iPhone app where she led listeners through an interesting exercise that taught me something new about breathing.

First Levitt had me breathe for a minute, using my usual breathing. I recall that no counting was done with this first exercise. Then she asked listeners to breathe more slowly, and to count those breaths for a minute that she timed. I had six in and out breaths during that minute.

Then Levitt said to breathe slowly again, but to extend the duration of each in breath by inhaling more deeply when it seemed that no more air could be taken in, and also to extend the duration of each out breath by exhaling more deeply when it seemed that no more air could be expelled.

She timed that minute also. I had four in and out breaths during that minute.

Levitt then talked about how deep breathing of this sort activates a relaxation response in the brain. So she recommended using the extra-deep-breathing technique if someone is anxious about a doctor visit, presentation at work, or whatever.

I've been experimenting with this in my own life and it does seem to work, seemingly for two reasons.

One is that the body does respond to slow deep breathing by relaxing, since fast shallow breathing is associated with a stress response, as when you're worried about being attacked by a stranger on a dark deserted sidewalk.

The other reason is that slow deep breathing, where I inhale and exhale more air past the point where I usually think I've done a full inhalation and exhalation, requires me to concentrate on my breath -- which means my mind isn't full of thoughts about a situation that is making me anxious. 

This is different from merely following my breath, something I've been doing for a long time in my mindfulness and meditation practice. A BBC story (registration may be required), Why slowing your breathing helps you relax, talks about this difference.

Recent scientific research has shown that while quick, shallow and unfocused breathing may contribute to a host of problems, including anxiety, depression and high blood pressure, cultivating greater control over our lungs can bring many benefits to our mental and physical health. Intriguingly, scientists are finding that a particular frequency of breath – at around six exhalations a minute – can be especially restorative, triggering a “relaxation response” in the brain and body.

...Indeed, you may be forgiven for wondering whether breathwork is simply another name for mindfulness, given that many meditation courses already encourage participants to focus their attention on their inhalation and exhalation.

Mindfulness, however, tends to involve passive observation – “watching the breath” – whereas breathwork requires you to actively change the way you breathe. This includes ensuring that you breathe with your diaphragm (rather than the movement of your chest) so that you can fill your lungs with more air, while consciously slowing the pace of your breathing from your resting average.

According to practitioners, those slow, deep breaths set off a cascade of physiological responses that accelerate your descent into a more complete state of relaxation, compared to more passive mindfulness exercises.

“It acts as a speed ramp into the meditation practice, helping to calm the mind quicker so that you get more bang for your buck while meditating,” explains Richie Bostock, a breathwork coach based in London whose book, Exhale, will be published later this year. “In fact, I call some of the routines I teach ‘Meditation on Rocket Fuel’ because of the profound effect it has on calming the mind quickly and getting you to that place of no-thought.”

I just ordered Bostock's book, so will have more to say about this subject after I try the breathing exercises he recommends. Here's another article from Harvard Health Publishing to peruse, Relaxation techniques: Breath control helps quell errant stress response. 

This is a great example of how the mind and body are intimately related. We are physical beings having a physical experience, not the oft-quoted and misleading We are spiritual beings having a physical experience. That way leads to some serious pitfalls, including a dissociation between our mind and body.

Smiling is an even easier thing to do than control the breath. Research shows that smiling can trick your brain into feeling happier, something that seems true when I try it. Here's another story that makes the same point: Forcing a Smile May Improve Your Mood, Study Suggests.

How a physicist embraces both science and spirituality

I embrace science. I also embrace spirituality, so long as "spirit" isn't viewed as something supernatural, but as a word that points to a deep personal understanding of existence that is compatible with science.

So when I heard about physicist Alan Lightman's book, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, I knew that I wanted to read it. (I included an excerpt in this post.)

Now that I've finished the book, it met my expectations, though I didn't learn anything astoundingly new.

Lightman does a good job of explaining how we can feel a sense of belonging to a world that is far greater than our small self, which can even fade away to a near-nothing in a transcendent experience, without recourse to religious dogma or mystical mumbo-jumbo.

But I already believed that to be true. Which doesn't take away from the value of Lightman's book for me, because I enjoy hearing truths spoken in different ways.

Here's some excerpts from the book that will give you a feel for Lightman's perspective.

In the millions of experiments and probes of the physical world, modern scientists have not found any mysterious forces or phenomena that did not ultimately yield to a rational explanation.

Sometimes, we have had to revise our understanding and theories based on new observations and considerations, as happened in the twentieth century with relativity and quantum mechanics, but the revised theories have always been consistent with the law of the conservation of energy and, more generally, a material, rule-based understanding of nature.

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As I have said, I'm a materialist. Like almost all modern biologists, I believe that consciousness and all mental experiences are sensations brought about by the chemicals and electrical currents in the brain. But we may never be able to cross the first-person/third-person divide. The experience of consciousness, at least at its highest levels, is the first-person subjective par excellence. 

The analysis of three pounds of neurons sitting on the lab table, the probing of the brain with instruments, the measuring of its electrical quiverings, the writing of equations to describe it, even the mere talking about it as a thing are all third-person activities. 

We can't be inside the box and outside the box at the same time. Of course, in some sense we are always inside the box of our own minds, since we cannot experience the world except through our individual brains.

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Given that we cannot cross the first-person/third-person divide, that we cannot express in any objective way what it feels like to be a conscious being or thing, can we at least understand how a congregation of billions of material neurons might produce something as complex and qualitatively novel as consciousness? 

The answer is yes, and it comes from a study of what are called emergent phenomena. Emergence or emergentism is collective behavior of a complex system with many parts that is not apparent and often not predictable by understanding the individual parts.

...In particular, consciousness can emerge from the collective interaction of billions of neurons, following known laws of chemistry, physics, and biology, without the intervention of some additional ethereal or psychic force.

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The experiences described here, which express many of the features of spirituality as I have defined it -- feelings of connection to nature, the cosmos, and other people; the feeling of being part of something larger than one's self, the appreciation of beauty; the experience of awe -- are religious experiences, in that they are all mediated by an omniscient and purposeful Being and Creator we call God.

As such, the experiences may be considered to derive from God, or from the God-like soul in us, or from the pervasiveness of God in nature and the cosmos. For the unnamed clergyman and for Tagore and Muhammad and Moses, the existence and spiritual power of God are implicitly assumed.

I respect these beliefs and their divine attributions. My aim here is to show that these same spiritual feelings can arise completely from the forces of Darwinian natural selection and the capacities of a highly intelligent brain, without other agency. In other words, I am discussing here a nonreligious spirituality and its evolutionary origins, although the feelings of connection and awe may be quite similar to those of religious spirituality. 

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A detachment from one's Self plays an important role in various aspects of spirituality, especially the transcendent experience of being connected to something larger than ourselves. When we open ourselves up to a larger world, we are in some ways subjugating and dissolving our individual egos. For a few moments at least, we let go of Self.

Thus, there would seem to be an anticorrelation between the degree to which we focus on our individual selves and the degree to which we can connect to things larger than ourselves. More self, less connection to the larger world. 

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It is worth pausing here to acknowledge that the relative importance of one's self is partly shaped by one's society. Cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have long noticed substantial differences between Westerners and Easterners in their attitudes toward the individual versus the larger group.

Westerners (Americans, Europeans, Australians, etc.) celebrate the individual and the individual's freedom, independence, and autonomy, while Easterners (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.) prioritize the group over the individual and emphasize the interdependent relationships between members of the group.

The two psychological and cultural dichotomies are referred to as "individualism" versus "collectivism." One particularly interesting feature of this dichotomy: To study a phenomenon or analyze a problem, individualists break the thing down into its component parts. Collectivists experience phenomena holistically, and in terms of the relationships between the parts.

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I believe that the capacity for awe also includes an openness to the world. Openness, in turn, requires a certain humility. To be open to the world is to recognize that there are things in the world that we do not yet possess, things bigger than us, things that we do not yet understand (or perhaps may never understand).

...Returning to the Hindu concept of darshan, which literally means "viewing" in Sanskrit, its fuller meaning is the experience of beholding a deity or sacred object. 

For Penrose, mathematics is that sacred object. For Bai Juyi, it was the view from a mountaintop. For my early morning in Maine, it was the shining air. For my two-year-old daughter, it was the ocean. The experience of darshan is considered to be reciprocal. 

When we open ourselves to the world and pay homage to that which is larger than ourselves, we receive a blessing from the outer world. We get something back. We are ourselves enriched by the larger understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.

Mindfulness and meditation aren't about improving ourselves

I used to believe that meditation, and its close relative, mindfulness, were supposed to make me and my life better. 

Wiser. Calmer. More spiritual. Happier. And more besides.

In other words, I looked upon mindfulness and meditation as akin to exercise. I put in the work of training my mind and I benefit from that workout. Maybe not instantly, but over time I'd reap the rewards.

I can't say that I've totally discarded that perspective. However, it isn't as strong in me anymore. 

Instead, I've come around to the notion that the idea of gaining something from mindfulness and meditation is at odds with what these practices are all about: being in touch with here-and-now reality.

When part of me is resting contentedly on my meditation cushion (which happens to be attached to a chair) and part of me is expecting to become someone better than I am now, there's a disconnect.

It's difficult to embrace what is happening inside and outside of me now, while also anticipating that what I'm doing now will lead to future positive changes.

I recall that Buddhists speak of this sort of thing as having "gaining ideas." Meaning, an expectation that mindfulness and meditation will help the practitioner gain something.

Another way of putting it is being attached to the outcome of mindfulness and meditation, as contrasted with simply pursuing those activities without desiring particular changes.

Here's a few passages from Seth Gillihan's book, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that get at what I'm trying to describe.

My patient Jon had stopped meditating when he found that it didn't get rid of his anxiety. Many of us expect that meditation practice will get rid of the less desirable parts of our lives, such as stress, anxiety, and other difficult emotions.

Sometimes that happens, given the calming nature of mindfulness practice. But feeling more comfortable is not the purpose of openhearted presence -- and it is less likely to happen if we make it the goal.

Expecting certain outcomes from our mindfulness practice will get in the way of our experience. Expectations lead to evaluation -- Am I relaxing? Is my mind quieting? Am I having a mystical expericnce? -- which pulls us out of the present.

Instead, we can approach each moment of meditation as if it's the first time we've experienced it, without preconceptions or goals. 

Mindful awareness is about relationship. In my work with Jon, he practiced a new way of relating to his anxiety. When the anxious spells came, he opened to the experience with curiosity rather than resistance. 

Instead of telling himself, "I can't stand this!" and "I have to make it stop," he said, "Let me see what this is like. What's happening in my body? How does the anxiety shift over time?" Jon discovered not only that he suffered much less but also that the attacks came less often.

Mindfulness changes our relationship with our experience, not necessarily the experience itself. 

...As you invite mindful presence, you don't have to force anything or try to make it feel "spiritual." Keep it very ordinary and uncomplicated, and just notice what's happening. See what you're seeing. Hear what you're hearing. Take in colors and textures around you.

You can turn inward, too, seeing what emotions are present and watching what your mind is up to. This can all happen in real time as you go about your activities. You can try it with cooking, cleaning walking, bathing -- anything at all, including reading this book.

As you pay attention, open to anything that comes your way. Receive it. Proactively say yes to it all. Release the constant drive to improve your situation. Settle into it instead: "This is what's happening. This is my reality."

That doesn't mean you don't fix something that's wrong or tell someone no. Just stay open to all of the experience as it's happening, even the uncomfortable parts.

Spirit isn't supernatural. It's physical.

Looking back, one of the strangest things about the India-based religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is how the RSSB teachings taught that the mind wasn't to be trusted, supposedly being an agent of Kal, the negative power that rules the lower regions of creation.

Yet like all other religions, RSSB was thoroughly in the grip of mental concepts that had no foundation in any sort of discernible reality. 

Of course, I didn't realize that at the time, since I was in the grip of a mental concept called "blind faith" that led me to believe that what the RSSB gurus said was true, really was. So even though there was no demonstrable evidence of soul, God, Kal, divine light/sound, heaven, or any of the other entities RSSB claimed to exist, I trusted that with time all would be revealed.

That didn't happen. Not for me. And not for anybody else in RSSB that I knew. Which was a lot of people given how long I was a member of the organization.

So this taught me to be wary of any theology or philosophy that claims knowledge of a supernatural realm, because invariably the proof of that claim is mere words and concepts, not anything substantial. If I want empty promises, it's easier to listen to politicians rather than embrace a religion.

Yesterday I attended a 3-hour seminar that focused on the martial art aspect of Tai Chi. I wrote about it on my HinesSight blog: Why I enjoy Tai Chi as a martial art. 

Having spent about 12 years practicing the hard martial art style of karate, and now about 19 years practicing the soft martial art style of Tai Chi, with a bunch of years playing competitive tennis before that, like so many other people I enjoy the physicality of sports and physical activity. 

One reason is that physical activity can't be faked. You either can do something physical, or you can't. While naturally there's talking involved in learning a physical activity, a sermon can't be a substitute for it, whereas with religions words and concepts are their foundation.

Recently I wrote about Seth Gillihan's talks about Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. I liked what he had to say so much, I ordered his most recent book from Amazon. 

Here's some excerpts from the book that's called, unsurprisingly, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Simple Path to Healing, Hope, and Peace. Though Gillihan says he embraces Christianity along with secular Buddhism, his religious approach is pleasingly rooted in reality.

When I first heard the call of my inner self, I thought it was beckoning me to become "more spiritual," as if my ideal self were a disembodied spirit, floating through life unfettered by thoughts and untouched by feelings.

But idolizing our spiritual selves would mean abandoning our minds and bodies and becoming less of who we are. In truth, our spirits are not narrowly focused on "spiritual" things, to the exclusion of our physical and mental realities.

...Our spirit permeates all of our experience and is intimately connected to the rest of us. 

...Knowing what is true about ourselves does not need to be deep and mysterious. My wife reminded me of a truth about myself when she encouraged me to go swimming at Cape May. She knew I am happiest when I am swimming; that is one of my truths.

We know mental truth when we practice right ways of thinking that bring us happiness and peace. We can find that truth in our relationship with our thoughts as we see through the endless fictions our minds create that can make us miserable, such as that we don't deserve to be happy and that we aren't lovable. 

The cognitive part of CBT helps us to replace these false beliefs with ones that are faithful to reality. We find joy as our mind dwells in the truth.

We experience physical truth when we give our bodies what they need and consistently do the things that bring us alive. We can enact truth through eating nourishing foods, getting adequate rest, moving our bodies every day, spending time with our favorite people, being of service, and doing work that we enjoy.

...We find spiritual truth through being wholly present in our lives because our spirits are always in the here and now of our experience. My swim in the bay was an encounter with spiritual truth as I reconnected with myself and what I love.

As my example shows, mindful presence is not an esoteric experience that's available only to a select few; being in our lives is a habit that all of us can cultivate in each moment. 

Our mind, body, and spirit form an integrated whole, intersecting with and affecting one another. For example, our bodies affect our minds, as when we're well rested and it's easier to recognize our negative thinking.

Our bodies affect our spirits, too, as when we step out of compulsive activity and thereby enter into connection with our spirit. 

And our spirits affect our minds, as when we focus our awareness on the present and discover that in doing so, it's easier to recognize when our thoughts are telling us lies. 

...We are constantly thinking: even if we decide to stop thinking, our minds will keep doing it anyway. It's what they are good at. If they aren't telling us stories in words, they're crafting made-up scenes or pulling up images from our memory banks.

Our minds are actually so caught up in thinking that we don't realize we're thinking.

We assume that the nonstop stream in our heads is something real and meaningful, and we mistake thoughts for actual observations of something true. In subtle ways we probably don't notice, mental events in our brains are fashioning our lives.

...We often don't realize when our mind has shifted from reading us front-page news to reading the op-eds. If we don't recognize our thoughts for what they are and treat them accordingly, we'll live in a false reality of our mind's creation.

That's a great description of what religions offer: a false reality of our mind's creation.