Church of the Churchless

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

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

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

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

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

First Shukman describes koans in this fashion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This... This... This 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is this...

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

Thank you for being open to trying this.

I like how Henry Shukman views love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shukman writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why general relativity leads me to prefer Zen'ish meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Vox article: How meditation deconstructs your mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breathing exercises can calm a frazzled mind

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

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

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

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

Take a deep breath.

Now exhale and notice how you feel.

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

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

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

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

More recent research has found evidence supporting this ancient insight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He describes what mindfulness is.

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

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

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

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

I like how Taft points out misconceptions about mindfulness meditation. 

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

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

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

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

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

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.

A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside.

I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into Stage Six, where is where I left off. 

I liked the book before, and I'm liking it now. The author, John Yates, who also goes by Culadasa, is deeply versed in what meditation is all about, and has a knack for describing meditation in a manner that is clear, creative, and compelling. 

In my 2018 post, I noted how the book's discussion of attention and awareness makes a lot of sense. Both are necessary in both everyday life and meditation. (RSSB refers to the India-based religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.)

In my reading this morning I was struck by the wisdom of clearly distinguishing attention from awareness. A Glossary in the back of the book defines these terms.

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli. Attention is one of two forms of conscious awareness. Peripheral awareness is the second: we pay attention to some things, while simultaneously being aware of, but not attending to, others. 

Awareness: As used in this book, awareness always has the same meaning as peripheral awareness. It never means attention, nor does it refer to covert or non-conscious awareness. 

Any meditation approach that doesn't combine the benefits of attention and awareness is like a bird trying to fly with one wing. Both are needed. When we drive a car, we can't focus all of our attention on staying in our lane and keeping a safe distance from the car ahead of us. 

We've got to have peripheral awareness also. What if a car unexpectedly runs a stop light at an intersection? What if a child chasing a ball runs into the road? There are so many things we need to be aware of, other than what our primary focus is.

This is why mantra meditation, where a word or words is repeated (usually soundlessly) as a focus of attention, is very limited. Repeating a mantra was emphasized by the RSSB teachings that I followed for so many years. And not only during the time of meditation, but as much as possible throughout the rest of the day.

I eventually realized that this had some major drawbacks.

I found that when I put too much attention on the mantra, I distanced myself from the reality of what was around me. Like, the person I was talking with, or nature, if I was out on a walk. I also observed that many RSSB devotees acted a lot like robots, lacking spontaneity, naturalness, social awareness. 

They were so focused on keeping their attention from scattering out into the world, they were clueless about what was happening in the world -- the exact opposite of mindfulness, which requires a wise balancing of attention and awareness. There's a time to be focused on one thing, and there's a time to be aware of the entirety of what surrounds us.

Since recently I've been reading and writing about a couple of books aimed at making the reader better able to manifest their goals, with each book emphasizing the importance of positivity in our affirmations, visualizations, and such, I was struck by how The Mind Illuminated echoes that advice in a chapter I re-read today. 

Here Yates is discussing the process of (1) forgetting the meditation goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose, (2) engaging in some mind-wandering, and (3) waking up again to the goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose.

Awakening to the present is an important opportunity to understand and appreciate how your mind works. You've just had a minor epiphany, an "aha!" moment of realizing there's a disconnect between what you're doing (thinking about something else) and what you intended to do (watch the breath).

But this wasn't something you did. Nor can you voluntarily make it happen. The process that discovered this disconnect isn't under your conscious control. It happens unconsciously, but when the "findings" become conscious, you have an "aha!" moment of introspective awareness.

The way to overcome mind-wandering is by training this unconscious process to make the discovery and bring it into consciousness sooner and more often. Yet, how do you train something that happens unconsciously?

Simply take a moment to enjoy and appreciate "waking up" from mind-wandering. Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them. 

Conscious intention and affirmation powerfully influence our unconscious processes. By valuing this moment, you're training the mind through positive reinforcement to wake you up more quickly in the future.

Also, avoid becoming annoyed or self-critical about mind-wandering. It doesn't matter that your mind wandered. What's important is that you realized it. To become annoyed or self-critical in the "aha!" moment will slow down your progress.

You can't scold the mind into changing, especially when dealing with entrenched mental patterns like forgetting and mind-wandering. It's like telling your unconscious you don't want to have the mind-wandering interrupted. If negative emotions do arise, simply notice them and let them come, let them be, and let them go. 

It's like training a pet. Consistent, immediate positive reinforcement of behaviors we want will be far more effective than punishing behaviors we don't. 

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.