Church of the Churchless

Here's some thoughts about thinking (and nonduality) from Joan Tollifson

I've become a big fan of Joan Tollifson. I can't get enough of her take on Zen, Buddhism in general, Advaita, nonduality, and a bunch of other subjects that she talks about in her writings and speaks about in her talks.

I sort of feel like a Grateful Dead groupie back in the days when people would travel around the country attending their performances wherever they played. Except, I don't need to go anywhere to get my Tollifson fix. 

Her books are delivered to me by Amazon. Her web site has a vast amount of material in the Outpourings section. And I've signed up to get regular posts from her emailed to me.

Below is the most recent post, which I like a lot. There's a great deal of wisdom here. Plus some excellent writing. Tollifson is deeply familiar with so many spiritual/philosophical teachings, it's a joy to read her sensitive, sophisticated views on some subject.

Like, thinking and nonduality. You'll see that she favorably mentions David Loy's book, Nonduality, in the post below. I enjoyed the book also. These are the blog posts I wrote about it.

Pink Panther and Alan Watts on nonduality
Cutting out the bullshit from nonduality
Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality
"Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject
Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is
Experience is all there is for us. Praise be to nonduality!

Here's Tollifson's post about thinking. Enjoy. I sure did, in part because I've been told many times by commenters on my blog posts, "Brian, you think too much." When I'd read that, I'd think (not surprisingly), "Um, didn't you have to think to write Brian, you think too much? And who gets to decide what too much is? Shouldn't that be up to me?"

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A few thoughts about thinking
by Joan Tollifson

Thinking is something the universe is doing in the form of human beings. Like everything else, it is an activity of the whole, inseparable from everything it apparently is not. Thinking has given humans great advantages and also significant disadvantages.

The bare activity itself—the pulsation of a thought—is amazingly ephemeral, impermanent, fleeting and without substance. A thought appears and instantly evaporates like an invisible and ungraspable little burst of invisible energy.  

But the content of thinking—the headlines it asserts, the stories it tells, the beliefs and ideas it promotes, the maps of reality it generates—these can seem very solid and real. They are sometimes functional and necessary, sometimes creative, sometimes relatively harmless, but very often, thinking—and believing what thought tells us—is the source of immense human suffering and confusion. The problematic type of thought (e.g., “I’m a hopeless failure” or “So-and-so is the devil and should be killed"), when believed, can cause enormous pain.

Because thoughts can be so powerful and so easily mistaken for objective reports on reality, being aware of them, being able to see them as thoughts, and being able to discern the difference between the pictures they paint and reality itself is a vital part of both spiritual awakening and good psychotherapy. It may sound obvious, but it can be very subtle, recognizing again and again that a map is never the territory it describes, that a concept is always an abstraction, and that “I’m a hopeless failure” is just a conditioned thought, not an objective report on reality. 

There are many relative truths that can be discovered through thinking, reasoning, logic and scientific exploration. These are wonderful human abilities. But what we might call the heart of things, the source of happiness or unconditional love cannot be found in this way. It is beyond the thinking mind, beyond reasoning and logic, beyond what science can discover. And because of this, there is a common misunderstanding in the spiritual world that the goal of meditation is to be thought-free, that awakening entails having a permanently and completely empty mind, devoid of all thinking, and that thinking is basically the enemy that must be vanquished.

I’ve never heard any teacher suggesting we should or could eliminate all thinking, and I’m certainly never suggesting that. That would be a fool’s errand. It may sound as if this is being suggested sometimes, usually when a sentence is taken out of context and/or misunderstood. But no one I know is suggesting this. Creative thinking and reasoning have done incredibly wonderful things, and we wouldn’t survive without functional thinking. Moreover, thinking is something that happens uncontrollably. There is no thinker authoring the thoughts. They bubble up automatically. Anyone who takes up meditation discovers this very quickly.

Because thoughts pop up and instantly dissolve, they can easily zip by so quickly that we don’t even see them. As a result, we are often completely unaware of habitual thought patterns. This is where meditation can be helpful. It allows us to slow down, be still, and do nothing else other than simply being, present and aware. And in this way, we begin to see more and more clearly what the mind is doing, and the more it is seen, the less believable it becomes and the more these habitual thoughts lose their grip and fall away.

I’ve often spoken about my first all-day silent meditation retreat at the San Francisco Zen Center, when it was suddenly seen that all my thoughts were about the future. I was sitting there imagining my next silent retreat, thinking about what to do on the break that was coming up and where I would park the car tomorrow when I went to work, and so on. I’d never noticed this before. Once it was seen, it was as if a light had been turned on in a previously darkened room.

From then on, whenever thoughts about the future happened, they would be noticed—sometimes instantly, sometimes after the attention had been occupied with them for quite a while. I began to see what was alluring about future fantasies, and also how it was a form of suffering. Gradually, over many years, this habitual pattern got weaker and weaker until it dissolved. Not that it never happens now, but it rarely happens, and never obsessively anymore.

Thought was powerless to remove this pattern. Having the thought, “I need to stop thinking about the future,” would only be another thought about the future—and about “me,” the imaginary thinker. Awareness was the transformative power.

The best teachings help us to discern the difference between the map and the territory in ever more subtle ways. They also recognize that mapping is something the territory is doing, and that language, imagination and thought are all vital and emergent activities of the universe, inseparable from the whole. These can all serve us beautifully, or they can get us into massive trouble, and it is profoundly liberating and helpful to discern what’s helpful and what isn’t, while also recognizing that, in the absolute sense, the apparently helpful and the apparently unhelpful are “not two” and can never actually be pulled apart.

A work of fiction, a poem, a beautiful painting, an evocative dance, a piece of sculpture, a great movie, beautiful music, a mathematical formula, a scientific theory— these certainly cannot and should not be dismissed as unreal or mere illusions. They are all quite real. And so is the spiritual dimension—boundless awareness, openness, presence, spirit.

Intelligent spirituality is operating on multiple levels, we might say—both conventional and absolute, sensory and imaginal, conceptual and actual—and these pairs can’t really be pulled apart. The boundary-lines are always themselves conceptual. Some teachings lean more one way, some more another—and certainly, in my writing, one paragraph, article or chapter may lean more one way, and another paragraph, article or chapter many lean more in another. Taking things out of context can be very misleading. We see this all the time in the political realm and in clickbait headlines.

Ultimately, ALL dividing lines between one thing and another are conceptual—they are like the lines on a map. Where exactly does the mountain become the valley? Where does heads turn into tails on a coin? Where does the body end and the environment begin? Where does inside become outside? Where is the boundary between awareness and content, or between the screen and the movie? We can’t say. We can’t deny difference and variation, but we can’t find actual separation. That recognition is what nonduality is all about.

In my experience, the most liberating forms of spirituality are those that pull the rug out from any place we want to land and from any impulse to plant a flag. Landing nowhere, freefalling, we can play freely in all realms, sticking to nothing and open to everything.

The Tao that can be spoken both is and isn’t the true Tao. Everything we say both is and isn’t the truth. Not one, not two. Or, as Dogen put it, leaping clear of the many and the one. Not fixating or getting stuck on one side of a conceptual divide.

A few words about nonduality

When people tell me they are into nonduality, I ask them what they mean, because the word has been used in so many different ways over the centuries. In recent years, nonduality has become a buzzword in certain subcultures, where it can refer to anything from Tony Parsons to Rupert Spira. There isn’t one definition upon which everyone agrees. Many people claim that their version is the One True Nonduality, but that, in my view, is dualistic nonsense.

If you want to explore the subject of nonduality in a comprehensive intellectual way, I highly recommend David Loy’s excellent book, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. David Loy is a Zen teacher and a professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, so he brings both the discernment of a trained philospher as well as the experiencial understanding of a long-time Buddhist practitioner to the table. The book compares and contrasts the Advaita notion of Self (Immutable Reality) with the Buddhist understanding of no self (impermanence, thorough-going flux, no-thing-ness), and it explores concepts such as time and space, substance, causality, freedom, and spiritual path from a nondual perspective, drawing not only on Advaita and Buddhism, but also on Taoism and Western philosophy.

Of course, nonduality is more than an intellectual philosophy. It is a living realization, a way of seeing life that brings forth a different way of being.

It seems to me that the common thread in all the different versions of nonduality is the sense of wholeness and the absence of separation. None of these different nondual perspectives are denying the appearance of diversity, differentiation, multiplicity, variety and polarity, but they are all seeing it as one inseparable whole that cannot be pulled apart. It is always a holistic perspective in which everything is included and nothing exists independently.

In Advaita, this wholeness or unicity is typically seen as the Self or the One Consciousness that underlies and is everything that appears—the ground of being. In Buddhism, it is more often understood as emptiness: impermanence, interdependence, groundlessness, and the absence of any persisting or separate self-nature in anything. Of course, within Buddhism there are many subdivisions, including the One Mind school that says, “All there is, is Mind.”

And nowadays we have expressions that don’t fit neatly into any of these pre-existing categories, or that draw from several of them—people such as Toni Packer, Adyashanti, Tony Parsons, Darryl Bailey, Peter Brown, John Astin, or myself. So there are many variations on the theme of nonduality, but in some way, all of them point to an indivisible unicity that is at once both seamless and infinitely varied.

I would also say that all the versions of nonduality that I’ve encountered point out the non-substantial nature of everything that appears. In Advaita, it is compared to a dream in which there seem to be mountains and people and events, but it’s all nothing other than the dreaming consciousness. It all vanishes upon waking up from sleep. Nothing that appeared to be there was really there in any substantial, observer-independent way. It was all a play of consciousness.

In Buddhism, it is more the understanding that no solid, discrete, independent, persisting, substantial things ever actually form, and yet, we can’t say this is nothing. But there is no-thing we can grasp that it is. The “it” is imaginary. There is only it-less-ness. As the great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna pointed out, no way that we try to conceptualize life holds up to careful scrutiny, and the true understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence, because impermanence is so thorough-going that no-thing ever actually forms to be impermanent.

Buddhism and Advaita are not the same, nor are Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons, and yet, they all point to a similar sense of wholeness, nonsubstantiality, and freedom from imaginary bondage. We can emphasize the differences, or we can see the commonality. I can appreciate both Buddhism and Advaita. I have enjoyed both Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons. At different times, I have found all of these expressions liberating. They might see each other as off-the-mark, but I don’t feel compelled to choose between any of them.

In my view, all the ways of conceptualizing, describing and mapping this living reality are in some way incomplete and inaccurate. This living reality can’t really be captured conceptually. The ultimate liberation, in my view, is in not landing anywhere, not concretizing any view (or non-view), not mistaking any map for The Truth.

Ultimately, we don’t know what this is or how it all works, and yet, here it is, clear and obvious—until we start thinking about it and trying to nail it down with words and concepts. Then suddenly, it seems very paradoxical and confusing.

And whatever this is, it keeps unfolding and revealing itself in ever-new ways. I feel less and less sure of anything I think, and this uncertainty only feels problematic when I think that it should be otherwise. What feels very real and undoubtable to me is the openness of Here-Now, aware presence, and this ungraspable present experiencing.

As I say on the current home page of my website:

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

Being awake as I mean it is simply an openness, a willingness to live without answers, to be here in all simplicity, to see through the stories and beliefs that create suffering and confusion or that provide false comfort, to not land in any fixed view.

Present experiencing is ever-changing while never departing from the immediacy of here-now. It is infinitely varied, yet cannot actually be divided up or pulled apart. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole.

We tend to think that we are an independent entity with free will—the thinker of our thoughts, the maker of our choices—living in a world outside of us. But in looking closely, no substantial boundary between inside and outside, and no thinker apart from the thinking can be found.

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 ever-fresh aliveness, this one bottomless moment, right here, right now, just as it is.

Love to all…

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. 

Experience is all there is for us. Praise be to nonduality!

Once again proving my adage that I don't need to buy nearly as many new books as I used to, now that I've realized that every time I re-read a book, it's as a new person, I'm back to taking another look at David Loy's Nonduality. 

(That's a newer edition; I have the 2010 version.)

It was just about a year ago that I wrote about the book in my aptly titled post, "Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject. In that post I shared links to three previous posts about the book, the first written in January 2015.

Because I've been writing recently about how nonduality is viewed by Shamil Chandaria in the context of Bayesian predictive processing by the brain, those thoughts are making the book feel fresh again.

I've re-read (or actually re-re-re read, given the different colors of my highlighting in the book) the first few chapters. That reminded me that Loy, who based the book on his doctoral thesis -- he's well qualified both intellectually and spiritually, since he's been a student of Zen for over twenty years and is a Zen teacher -- finds four aspects of nonduality.

The negation of dualistic thinking. The nonplurality of the world. The nondifference of subject and object. The nonduality of duality and nonduality.

His main focus is on the non-difference of subject and object, which also is what Chandaria focused on: the nature of human perception. It's a neuroscientific fact that we don't see the world as it is, but as we experience it. 

Meaning, our senses aren't objective transmitters of what's out there in the world, nor of what is in here in the body. For the brain is constantly predicting what will be perceived based on our prior experiences and what the senses are communicating to the brain.

Experience is all there is for us. If we don't experience something, it can't exist for us. So this easy to understand principle, which is unarguable, forms the foundation of nonduality. 

There are, of course, objects out there in the world that aren't us. We're not talking about idealism here, where mind or consciousness is the sole reality. All I'm pointing out is that nothing exists for us apart from our experience of it. 

Fortunately, we humans have very similar minds and senses. That allows me to approach a traffic light and be very confident that, absent an intoxicated or distracted driver, other cars are going to stop if their light is red and proceed if their light is green, with yellow being an indicator of an impending red light.

Thus even though each of us is necessarily limited to knowing only our own personal experience, the similarities in how we perceive and understand the world allow us to generally inhabit a shared "objective" world. I use quotation marks because there is no truly objective stance we can take to reality.

Nonetheless, here's how I put it last year in Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is. 

Each of us views things from an inescapable subjective perspective.

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

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

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

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

Nonduality doesn't alter those facts. However, it does allow us to bridge the gap between ourself and the world, since the perceiver, perception, and what is perceived sure appear to be nondual, a unity. They all fit together into a seamless whole, even when we don't consciously realize this. 

Science is another way of achieving a shared understanding of reality. For even though scientists are bound by their own inherent subjectivity of personal experience, science has rules and methods for assessing the validity of experience -- as when a scientist reports their observations of a seeming new fact about reality.

Assertions of that sort are put to an inter-subjective test.

A group of scientists looks at the report and critiques it, studying what has been claimed, looking for inadequate conclusions that don't fit the data. While every person inhabits their own experiential reality, it takes a village of scientists to decide whether an assertion about our shared reality holds up.

This is much like the legal system where facts and the law combine to serve as the criteria for a decision by a judge or jury. Facts are detailed observations or experiences. The law is more constant, a benchmark against which the facts of a case are held up to decide innocence or guilt.

Religion is a vastly less reliable guide to knowing the nature of reality since it is largely based on personal experience lacking the validation of others. If someone claims to have experienced God, there's not much that can be said to that person but "that's nice."

It's not like going to Paris and claiming to have experienced the Eiffel Tower. That's a much more credible claim, since the Eiffel Tower is known to exist. 

Nonduality of subject and object, of what's perceived and the perceiver, isn't a free pass to asserting that reality is whatever we experience it as. After all, as I noted before, nonduality doesn't say anything about  how the world really is.

A psychotic person who hallucinates visions and voices is having a nondual experience -- of their own mentally ill mind.

This gets us into the nonduality of duality of nonduality, where it must be realized that as appealing as nonduality may be for us, a genuine nonduality encompasses the duality of objects that exist, or fail to exist, independent of our experience of them.

Why I prefer Buddhism to Advaita Vedanta

On Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I noticed there was a lengthy (1 hr 37 m) discussion between Harris and Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York.

So for the past few days I'd listen to 10-15 minutes or so of the discussion every morning. Today I finished listening to the whole exchange as I was driving around in my car.

It was really interesting.

Both Harris and Sarvapriyananda are highly knowledgeable about both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Of course, Harris embraces Buddhism and Sarvapriyananda Vedanta, so each of them is more expert in their favored philosophy.

While Harris and Sarvapriyananda had a lot in common, some core differences couldn't be bridged.

Buddhism is all about emptiness, the lack of anything in existence standing in isolation from other entities, while Vedanta assumes that humans possess an eternal soul, Atman, that is essentially one with God, Brahman.

I thought that Harris had the better arguments in this regard. The notion of no-self is solidly compatible with modern neuroscience, while Atman and Brahman are religious abstractions. 

I can't recall any instance where Harris relied on a Buddhist scripture to make a point (he favors the Tibetan Buddhism sect of Dzogchen), while Sarvapriyananda frequently cited Hindu or Vedanta writings, speaking them in an Indian language, then translating into English, which he speaks very well.

Consciousness is key in Vedanta.

For Harris, consciousness probably arises from the matter of the brain, though he acknowledges that many mysteries remain about the nature of consciousness. By contrast, for Sarvapriyananda, human consciousness partakes of the universal consciousness of Brahman, God.

However, Sarvapriyananda never explained what the evidence is for this. Apparently it is just supposed to be taken on faith, even though he would repeatedly say that Advaita Vedanta doesn't require religious faith, just a willingness to experience the truths of Vedanta.

At one point Harris invited Sarvapriyananda to take five minutes or so to lead Harris and listeners to the discussion in a Vedanta exercise, or meditation, that would show the approach of Vedanta.

But Sarvapriyananda used that time, and more, to describe a logical approach to Vedanta, which disappointed me.

Often I listen to Harris' guided meditations on the Waking Up app. He uses a variety of simple exercises to help the listener understand that there is no thinker inside our head in addition to thoughts, no hearer inside our head in addition to hearing, and so on.

So I came away feeling that Buddhism is on a much solider foundation when it comes to the doctrine of no-self than Advaita Vedanta is when it comes to the doctrine of Atman, or soul. Still, I found Sarvapriyananda to be appealingly humble and open-minded.

He just buys into the truth of Vedanta more strongly than I see Harris buying into the truth of Buddhism, perhaps because Harris' secular variety of Buddhism is much less dogmatic than Sarvapriyananda's religious brand of Advaita Vedanta. 

I got the impression that Sarvapriyananda embraces Vedanta because it tells such a compelling story within the Hindu tradition. Indeed, Harris admitted that he finds the notion of Atman and Brahman to be more appealing than Buddhist emptiness and no-self.

However, Harris considers Buddhism to be closer to the truth. I agree.

Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is

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

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

Each of us views things from an inescapable subjective perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which gets me to the irritating part of nonduality. 

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

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

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

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

We've all had those kinds of experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, on the next page Loy writes provocatively:

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

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

Indian and Greek thought are both dualistic. Chinese thought isn't.

Oneness has a lot of appeal.

It's simple. Nothing is simpler than one. (Well, maybe nothing is simpler, but since there is no way to know what nothing is like, since it doesn't exist, who knows?)

Also, oneness has a lot in common with love.

Love brings us together, which is a big step toward being one. Duality, on the other hand (a good phrase to use when talking about duality), posits two things that are inherently different.

Like most people, I've had the idea that Eastern forms of spirituality are more into oneness that Western forms are. The cartoon above captures the notion from a Buddhist perspective. It's difficult to imagine a Christian or Jewish version of the joke.

The Greeks were the source of Western dualism. Here's an excerpt from a book that I'm enjoying a lot, Jeremy Lent's "The Patterning Instinct."

The eternal soul, Plato explains, knew all about the immutable world of Ideas before it was incarnated. At birth, when the soul is forced to leave the world of Ideas and become fused with a mortal body, it forgets most of its previous knowledge. Thus, the goal of philosophy, in purifying the soul from the body's pollution, is not to learn new truths but to rediscover the Truth that was already known to the soul prior to its incarnation.

...Here, in Plato's cosmology, is the beginning of the cascade of dualism that would structure the European tradition of thought about the nature of humanity and the universe all the way to the present. In this constellation of ideas that would become endemic throughout Western civilization, the human capacity for abstract thought is linked with the soul, which, in turn, is linked with truth, and truth with immortality. The body, as part of the changeable material world, is associated with sensory appetite, ignorance, and death.

Soul and body. Heaven and earth. Truth and illusion. Spirit and matter. Good and evil. Eternity and time.

These are the sorts of dualisms that have split the Western mind for thousands of years. ("Mind," by the way, has largely replaced "soul" since Descartes. But many, if not most, Westerners still believe that mind has an immaterial basis, as does consciousness.)

So Eastern forms of thought and spirituality attract people who are turned off by the rigid dualism of Western religions. In my case, I embraced Indian philosophy because I believed it was markedly more into oneness than Christianity and Judaism. 

Well, over the years I changed my mind.

The form of meditation I learned from an Indian guru was intensely dualistic. It was aimed at leaving behind awareness of the body and senses in order to experience a form of "soul travel" that led to knowledge of realms beyond the physical. 

You can't get much more dualistic than that. 

In these passages Lent explains how ancient India embraced a form of dualism that differed in some respects from that of the Greeks, but still was based on the same sorts of splits found in Christianity. After quoting from the Maitri Upanishad, he writes:

The realization of oneness in breath, mind, and the senses seems a long way from the Platonic notion of the separation of mind and body. In fact, an influential school of classical Indian thought is known as advaita, which literally means "not two" and is frequently translated as "nondualism." 

Does this mean, then, that the principles of Yoga transcend the dualistic mind-body split that India civilizations inherited from its PIE [Proto-Indo-European] forebears? Further investigation shows that this is not in fact the case.

First, we need to consider what the term advaita refers to.

Is it saying that body and mind are not two, that they are really just different aspects of one entity? Not really. Its core teaching is based on the foundational idea that atman equals Brahman, that the world of maya is illusory, and that although things seem separate from each other, if you keep peeling the onion and look to the inner reality, you will see that everything is ultimately part of Brahman.

Rather than resolving the mind-body split, advaita teaches that relinquishing the body and all other conditions of existence is necessary to realize the true identity of atman and Brahman. 

So if someone is looking for oneness, it won't be found in either Greek or Indian thought, which are both thoroughly dualistic.

Pleasingly -- because I'm attracted to Chinese thought, especially in the guise of Taoism (and Tai Chi, basically Taoism expressed as movement, which I've been practicing for 13 years), Lent is big on the Chinese way of looking upon the world, which he admires as being in tune with modern scientific thought and a naturalistic approach to oneness.

Here's how he concludes his chapter on "Dualism and Divinity in Ancient India."

The belief in the divinity of everything in the universe ultimately differentiates Indian thought from that of the Greeks. In Greek dualism, only humans possess the faculty of reason that enables them to achieve the lofty heights of divinity. For the Greeks, the ultimate Truth attained by reason is to be found above the world, separate from the world, in a dimension of eternal abstraction.

In the Indian cosmos, dualism took a different form: the source of meaning is both above material things and hidden deep within then, and is glimpsed by piercing through both the reasoning faculty and the senses.

While looking in different directions for the ultimate source of meaning, both traditions agree that it's not to be found in the tangible world. It is in this sense that both are dualistic.

In the next chapter, we will explore an alternative understanding of the universe. In the ancient civilization of China, untouched by the migrations of Indo-European tribespeople, an unbroken tradition evolved from shamanic roots into a cosmology that demonstrated, by its very structure, how the human quest for meaning can take an altogether different approach. 

And I'd add, an exceedingly appealing approach for those, like me, who are tired of philosophies and spiritualities that divide, rather than unite, our world.

Osho on how life is purposeless (a good thing!)

A few days ago somebody emailed me a document about how life is purposeless, since I'd recently blogged about "The joy of living in a meaningless world." They weren't sure who had written the piece, but thought it was Osho (previously known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh).

They were right. I found this out via a Scribd file, which I've copied in below. 

I like what Osho says. I agree with almost everything in the piece, which is an excerpt from a book he wrote, "Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi." Because it is about 3,000 words long, and some people may not want to read it all, I've boldfaced parts I particularly liked.

Yes, during his Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh days, things got pretty weird in Osho's world.

Since I was living here in Oregon back when the Bhagwan and his followers founded Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, I clearly remember all the Rolls Royces, scandals, and such that ended up giving Osho a bad reputation. Nonetheless, I've read one or two of his books, and they made quite a bit of sense to me.

As does the following, with a few exceptions.

Osho - Life is purposeless. And it is beautiful that it is purposeless

Question: Beloved Osho, If everything is simply happening, then can there be any ultimate purpose to it all, or is life just an accident? Can it be said that life is evolving towards some ultimate goal?

Osho: It is very difficult, particularly for the Western mind, to understand that life is purposeless. And it is beautiful that it is purposeless. If it is purposeful then the whole thing becomes absurd – then who will decide the purpose? Then some God has to be conceived who decides the purpose, and then human beings become just puppets; then no freedom is possible. And if there is some purpose then life becomes businesslike, it cannot be ecstatic.

The West has been thinking in terms of purpose, but the East has been thinking in terms of purposelessness. The East says life is not a business, it is a play. And a play has no purpose really, it is nonpurposeful. Or you can say play is its own purpose, to play is enough. Life is not reaching towards some goal, life itself is the goal. It is not evolving towards some ultimate; this very moment, here and now, life is ultimate.

Life as it is, is accepted in the East. It is not moving towards some end, because if there is some end who will decide the end and why? If God decides it, then you can ask the same question about God: ”What is the purpose of creating a world with purpose?” or, ”Why should he create a purposive world?” or even more deeply, ”What is the purpose of God’s existence?” Maybe life has a purpose and God decides the purpose, but then God’s existence has to be questioned – why he exists – and that way the question is simply pushed one step ahead.

Then God becomes purposeless, or you have to create another God to decide the purpose of this God. Then you will be in a regress ad infinitum, then there is no end to it. Somewhere deep down you will have to come to the conclusion that this phenomenon is purposeless; otherwise there is no end.

 

So why go from the world to the God? Why not say that life itself is purposeless? The whole game of logicians, theologians, is stupid in a way. They say, ”God created the world, because how could the world come into existence if there was no one who created it?” But the question can be asked, ”Who created the God?” – and then they fall on their own. They say, ”God is uncreated.”

If God can exist without being created, why can’t this life itself exist without being created? If you accept that something is possible without being created, then what is the trouble? Then why think about a God who created the world? The East says God is not the creator, God is the creation. Nobody has created it, it is there. It has been so always, it will be so always – sometimes manifest, sometimes unmanifest; sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. It goes on moving in a periodical rhythm, in a circle. But existence itself is uncreated and it has no goal.

Then think about it in other ways also. Firstly, if there is a goal why hasn’t it been achieved yet? The existence has been existing timelessly, millions and millions of light-years it has existed, and the goal has not been reached yet. When will it be reached? If so many millions and millions of light-years have passed and the goal is nowhere to be seen, when will it be reached? Secondly, if some day the goal is reached, what will happen to existence? Will it disappear? When the purpose is fulfilled, then what? Conceive of a moment somewhere in the future when the purpose is fulfilled: for what will existence exist then? Then it will be purposeless for it to exist.

The reality is this: that it is already always purposeless. There is no goal towards which the existence is moving. It is moving, but not towards any goal. It has a value, but the value is not in the end, the value is intrinsic.

 

You love someone. Have you asked the question, ”For what purpose does love exist?” The mind, a calculating mind, is bound to ask, ”Why love? What is the purpose?” If you can answer then one thing is certain – that you are not in love. If you can show the purpose then love is not there, it is a business, it is a bargain. But lovers will always say there is no purpose to it.

To be in love is the goal. The goal is not somewhere else; it is intrinsic, it is in the very phenomenon of love. The goal is already achieved. When you are happy have you asked, ”What is the purpose of being happy?” Can there be any purpose to being happy? When you are happy you never ask because the question is absurd.

 

Happiness is itself the goal, there is no purpose to it. Life is like love, life is like happiness. Life is existence – no goal. And once you can understand this your ways of living will change totally, because if there is no purpose in life itself there is no need to create a purpose for your individual life also – no need. Because of individual purposes you become tense, something has to be achieved.

Then an achieving mind is created which is always trying to achieve something or other. And whenever something is achieved again the mind asks, ”Now what? What is to be achieved now?” It cannot remain with itself, it has to go on achieving.

 

This achieving mind will never be blissful, it will always be tense. And whenever something is achieved the achieving mind will feel frustrated, because now new goals have to be invented. This is happening in America. Many of the goals of the past century have been achieved, so America is in a deep frustration.

All the goals of the founding fathers who created America and the American constitution are almost achieved. In America the society has become affluent for the first time in the whole history of mankind. Almost everybody is rich. The poor man in America is a rich man here in India. The goals have almost been achieved – now what to do? Society has become affluent: food is there, shelter is there, everybody has got a car, radio, refrigerator, tv – now what to do? A deep frustration is felt, some other goals are needed. And there seem to be no goals.

Instead of one car you can have two cars – a two-car garage has become the goal – or you can have two houses, but that will be achieved within ten years. Whatsoever the goal it can be achieved. Then the achieving mind feels frustrated. What to do now? It again needs a goal, and you have to invent a goal. So the whole of American business now depends on inventing goals. Give people goals – that’s what advertisements and the whole business of advertising is doing.

Create goals, seduce people: ”Now this is the goal! You must have this, otherwise life is purposeless!” They start running, because they have an achieving mind. But where does it lead? It leads into more and more neurosis.

 

Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace. But a nonachieving mind is possible only with the background of a cosmic purposelessness. If the whole existence is purposeless then there is no need for you to be purposeful. Then you can play, you can sing and dance, you can enjoy, you can love and live, and there is no need to create any goal. Here and now, this very moment, the ultimate is present.

If you are available the ultimate can enter you. But you are not available here; your mind is somewhere in the future, in some goal. Life has got no purpose and this is the beauty of it. If there was some purpose life would have been mean – just futile. It is not a business, it is a play. In India we have been calling it leela. Leela means a cosmic play... as if God is playing. Energy overflowing, not for some purpose, just enjoying itself; just a small child playing – for what purpose? Running after butterflies, collecting colored stones on the beach, dancing under the sun, running under the trees, collecting flowers – for what purpose?

Ask a child. He will look at you as if you are a fool. There is no need for purpose. Your mind has been corrupted.

 

Universities, colleges, education, society, have corrupted you. They have made it a conditioning deep down within you that unless something has a purpose it is useless – so everything must have a purpose. A child playing has no purpose. At the most, if the child could explain he would say, ”Because I feel good. Running, I feel more alive. Collecting flowers, I enjoy, it is ecstatic.” But there is no purpose. The very act in itself is beautiful, ecstatic. To be alive is enough, there is no need for any purpose.

Why ask for anything else? Can’t you be satisfied just by being alive? It is such a phenomenon. Just think of yourself being a stone. You could have been, because many are still stones. You must have been somewhere in the past, sometime, a stone. Think of yourself being a tree. You must have been somewhere a tree, a bird, an animal, an insect. And then think of yourself being a man – conscious, alert, the peak, the climax of all possibilities. And you are not content with it. You need a purpose, otherwise life is useless.

Your mind has been corrupted by economists, mathematicians, theologians. They have corrupted your mind, because they all talk about purpose. They say, ”Do something if something is achieved through it. Don’t do anything which leads nowhere.” But I tell you that the more you can enjoy things which are useless, the happier you will be. The more you can enjoy things which are purposeless, the more innocent and blissful you will be. When you don’t need any purpose you simply celebrate your being.

You feel gratitude just that you are, just that you breathe. It is such a blessing that you can breathe, that you are alert, conscious, alive, aflame. Is it not enough? Do you need something to achieve so that you can feel good, so that you can feel valued, so that you can feel life is justified? What more can you achieve than what you are? What more can be added to your life? What more can you add to it? Nothing can be added, and the effort will destroy you – the effort to add something.

But for many centuries all over the world they have been teaching every child to be purposive. ”Don’t waste your time! Don’t waste your life!” And what do they mean? They mean, ”Transform your life into a bank balance. When you die you must die rich. That is the purpose.”

 

Here in the East – particularly the mystics we are talking about, the Upanishads – they say, ”Live richly.” In the West they say, ”Die a rich man.” And these are totally different things. If you want to live richly you have to live here and now, not a single moment is to be lost. If you want to achieve something, you will die a rich man – but you will live a poor man, your life will be poor.

Look at rich people: their life is absolutely poor, because they are wasting it transforming it into bank balances, changing their life into money, into big houses, big cars. Their whole effort is that life has to be changed for some things. When they die you can count their things. Buddha became a beggar. He was born a king, he became a beggar. Why? Just to live richly... because he came to understand that there are two ways to live: one is to die richly, the other is to live richly.

And any man who has any understanding will choose to live richly, because dying a rich man doesn’t mean anything; you simply wasted yourself for nothing. But this is possible only if you can conceive that the whole existence is purposeless; it is a cosmic play, a continuous beautiful game, a beautiful hide-and-seek – not leading anywhere. Nowhere is the goal. If this is the background, then you need not be worried about individual purposes, evolution, progress. This word progress is the basic disease of the modern age. What is the need?

All that can be enjoyed is available, all that you need to be happy is here and now. But you create conditions and you say that unless these conditions are fulfilled you cannot be happy. You say, ”These conditions must be fulfilled first: this type of house, this type of clothes, this type of car, this type of wife, this type of husband. All these conditions have to be fulfilled first, then I can be happy.” As if by being happy you are going to oblige the whole universe. And who is going to fulfill your conditions? Who is worried?

But you will try for those conditions, and the effort is going to be so long that they can never be fulfilled really, because whenever something is fulfilled, by the time it is fulfilled the goal has shifted. One of my friends was contesting an election, a political election, so he came to me for blessing. I said, ”I will not give the blessing because I am not your enemy, I am a friend. I can only bless that you may not get elected, because that will be the first step towards madness.” But he wouldn’t listen to me. He was elected, he became a member. Next year he came again for my blessing and he said, ”Now I am trying to be a deputy minister.”

I asked him, ”You were saying that if you could become a member of parliament you would be very happy, but I don’t see that you are happy. You are more depressed and more sad than you ever were before.” He said, ”Now this is the only problem: I am worried. There is much competition. Only if I can become a deputy minister will everything be okay.” He became a deputy minister. When I was passing through the capital he came to see me again and he said, ”I think you were right, because now the problem is how to become the minister. And I think this is the goal. I am not going to change it. Once I become the minister it is finished.”

He has become the minister now, and he came to me a few days ago and he said, ”Just one blessing more. I must become chief minister.” And he is getting more and more worried, more and more puzzled, because more problems have to be faced, more competition, more ugly politics. And he is a good man, not a bad man. I told him, ”Unless you become the suprememost God you are not going to be satisfied.” But he cannot look back and cannot understand the logic of the mind, the logic of the achieving mind.

It can never be satisfied, the way it behaves creates more and more discontent. The more you have the more discontent you will feel, because more arenas become open for you in which to compete, to achieve. A poor man is more satisfied because he cannot think that he can achieve much. Once he starts achieving something he thinks more is possible. The more you achieve the more becomes possible, and it goes on and on forever. A meditator needs a nonachieving mind, but a nonachieving mind is possible only if you can be content with purposelessness. Just try to understand the whole cosmic play and be a part in it.

Don’t be serious, because a play can never be serious. And even if the play needs you to be serious, be playfully serious, don’t be really serious. Then this very moment becomes rich. Then this very moment you can move into the ultimate. The ultimate is not in the future, it is the present, hidden here and now. So don’t ask about purpose – there is none, and I say it is beautiful that there is none. If there was purpose then your God would be just a managing director or a big business man, an industrialist, or something like that.

Jesus says.... Somebody asked him, ”Who will be able to enter into the kingdom of your God?” Jesus said, ”Those who are like small children.” This is the secret. What is the meaning of being a small child? The meaning is that the child is never businesslike, he is always playful. If you can become playful you have become a child again, and only children can enter into the kingdom of God, nobody else, because children can play without asking where it is leading. They can make houses of sand without asking whether they are going to be permanent.

Can somebody live in them? Will they be able to resist the wind that is blowing? They know that within minutes they will disappear. But they are very serious when they are playing. They can even fight for their sandhouses or houses of cards. They are very serious when they are creating. They are enjoying. And they are not fools, they know that these houses are just cardhouses and everything is makebelieve. Why waste time in thinking in terms of business? Why not live more and more playfully, nonseriously, ecstatically?

Ecstasy is not something which you can achieve by some efforts, ecstasy is a way of living. Moment to moment you have to be ecstatic, simple things have to be enjoyed. And life gives millions of opportunities to enjoy. You will miss them if you are purposive.

 

If you are not purposive, every moment you will have so many opportunities to be ecstatic. A flower, a lonely flower in the garden... you can dance if you are nonpurposive. The first star in the evening... you can sing if you are nonpurposive. A beautiful face... you can see the divine in it if you are nonpurposive. All around the divine is happening, the ultimate is showering. But you will be able to see it only if you are nonpurposive and playful.

 

Source: from book "Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi" by Osho

Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality

As I said in a previous post, I've dug David Loy's book, "Nonduality," out of a forgotten book bag and have gotten back to reading it after a several-year break. 

A few days ago I read his chapter, The Mind-Space Analogy. Pretty damn brilliant. Of course, this book is based on Loy's philosophy doctoral dissertation, so I guess the brilliance isn't surprising.

Below I've shared Loy's analogy in his own words, albeit condensed. I've left out F and G of his analogy, which are another form of Mahayana Buddhism and Theism. 

As you'll see, what Loy has done is imagine that something akin to "pure consciousness" actually exists.

This is more than an individual consciousness; it is an all-pervasive Mind-space that bears considerable resemblance to how the Absolute is viewed in the Eastern philosophies of Hindu Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Forms of theism, of course, view the Absolute or God as an entity that is distinct from everything in existence. So the inclusive emptiness of Mind-space doesn't fit well with theism (though they can be crammed together with a bit of effort).

What I like most about Loy's analogy is how it points to this: a supposed experience of the Absolute can be interpreted in various ways. Meaning, this experience isn't revelatory of The Way Things Are, though religious true believers imagine that it is.

In my college days, for example, I had numerous psychedelic experiences that gave me a profoundly different view of the world. But I just looked upon these as impossible-to-describe experiences, not a glimpse of an objectively true alternative reality. 

Everybody, repeat, everybody, has ineffable personal experiences. In fact, it can be argued that each and every experience is ineffable, since it is ours alone.

What Loy has done is point out how the same experience of his hypothetical Mind-space can be interpreted in various contradictory ways that correspond to how differing Eastern philosophical/religious perspectives view reality. 

In short, it may indeed be possible for people to have a "non-dual" experience of the world, but this tells us little or nothing about what the world is like.

Here's a shortened version of Loy's Mind-Space analogy.

Comparing the Absolute to empty space is a metaphor that naturally suggests itself when we want to describe "something" which in itself has no characteristics. 

...Thus space seems to be an excellent analogy for "empty nonduality." The analogy breaks down -- that is, we are reminded it is only an analogy -- in that our usual understanding of space conceives of it as an objectively existing medium that things are "in" and as having neither life nor awareness, whereas sunyata for Mahayana, Brahman for Vedanta and the Tao for Taoism are the ground of everything including all consciousness.

Of course, this is nothing other than the two sides of our familiar duality, the commonsense but problematical bifurcation between object (in this case, "material" space) and subject.

But let us use our imagination to eliminate this duality, by supposing that space is conscious. Let us suppose that as a result of some experience I realize that "my" consciousness is not mine at all but is an aspect of space itself.

...this experience of Mind-space seems to reveal "The Way Things Really Are." But if "I," having had this experience, were to be asked what I had realized, how would I answer? The point of this chapter is that this "Mind-space experience" lends itself to very different and contradictory descriptions.

In the following section I imagine some of the responses that might occur during a conversation among people who have had this experience and who have drawn metaphysical conclusions from it.

Speaker A [Sankkya-Yoga]: "There are two very different substances, both of which are uncaused and eternal and omnipresent, although they do not seem to interfere with each other or even interact. One is immutable and attributeless consciousness (Mind-space), which, I now realize, is what my mind always has been. The other is more difficult to characterize. I suppose we can call it an 'energy-stuff' or perhaps a fine 'matter-stuff'... now I realize that immutable consciousness and the constantly changing energy-stuff are quite different from each other and always have been."

Speaker B [Advaita Vedanta]: "Speaker A is mistaken. Only one thing is real: this immutable, attributeless Mind-space, which is what I and everything else really are. The constantly changing forms that arise within and from this Mind-space are simply illusions which delude us about what really is: they have no substance or reality of their own, for they are only phenomena that represent nothing but merely manifest the Mind-space... There is only this Mind-space, which is birthless and deathless and has no characteristics of its own."

Speaker C [Early Buddhism]: "What the others have called 'Mind-space' cannot really be said to exist, because it has no characteristics at all. It is so 'empty' that it is literally nothing, and how can nothing be 'real'? What 'I' have realized is that there is no 'I' and never was. All that does exist are those constantly changing phenomena -- or rather the 'attribute-elements' of which things are composed and which are now experienced clearly... However, it doesn't matter anymore what attributes arise or pass away, now that the sense of 'I' has evaporated and there is the deep peace of emptiness in its place."

Speaker D [Mahayana Buddhism]: "I agree with speaker C that speakers A and B, by referring to mind-space, have made something out of nothing -- that is, they have hypostatized emptiness into a substance. Yet I must also agree with speaker B that phenomena are not real, for they too are empty... Except for speaker A, we all agree that these appearances [of phenomena] do not represent any material substratum, but speaker C still tries to make these attributes into little substances of their own... Phenomena are illusory only if we are deluded into taking them as self-existing: now that we have realized they are empty appearances, we should accept them for what they are and be able to play with them freely. The dance may have no meaning, but there is still the empty dance."

Speaker E [ Taoism]: "I agree with speaker D, but he does not go far enough. He too is still one-sided. We have realized that the world is nondual, but we should not be so infatuated with this new way of experiencing that we become prejudiced against the more usual dualistic mode... Subject-object duality and the plurality of phenomena are also aspects of the world, and we should not dualistically reject one mode in favor of the other. Let us accept that there are these two ways of experiencing, without prejudice against either. Our aim should be to understand fully the relation between these two modes in order to be able to experience both."

Loy summarizes these perspectives by their answers to two questions: 

Is Mind-space real?
Are Phenomena real?

Here's the answers.

A. Sankhya-Yoga: Yes, both Mind-space and Phenomena are real.
B. Advaita Vedanta: Yes, Mind-space is real. No, Phenomena are unreal.
C. Early Buddhism: No, Mind-space is unreal. Yes, Phenomena are real.
D. Mahayana Buddhism: No, both Mind-space and Phenomena are unreal.
E. Taoism: duality and nonduality are both "Real"

So take your pick.

A "mystical" experience of nonduality or cosmic oneness can be interpreted in various ways. We can accept the validity of the experience, yet be no closer to knowing the nature of absoute reality.

Folk theory of enlightenment: sophisticated B.S.

"I am nothing." "I am God, or all."

Somehow these seemingly contradictory hypotheses coexist within what the Shimmering Dead End blog calls the folk theory of enlightenment. Here's a diagram of the whole confusing thing.

(click to enlarge)

Pretty darn interesting. There's a slide show that explains this schema. 

From my quick perusual of his/her writings, The Shimmering Dead End guy/gal appears to believe in some sort of immediate experiential non-dual awareness (whatever that means), but considers that the conceptualizations underlying "I am nothing" and "I am God, or all" are, basically, bullshit. 

Popular bullshit, to be sure. I've bought and read lots of books in both spiritual genres -- nothing and everything. I used to think that realizing either possibility via some form of enlightenment was better than the mere something I feel myself to be now. 

In recent years, though, my current existence seems fine to me. (As if I had a choice in being anything other than what I am here and now.)

From the above-mentioned quick perusual of this blog, I get the impression that Mr./Ms. Shimmering Dead End feels pretty much the same way.

I say "pretty much," because enlightenment still seems to be his/her goal. But this isn't a transcendent, supernatural, or elevated type of enlightenment. Maybe more like giving up ideas about enlightenment, which enables the thing itself to shine forth in all of its non-ideational glory.

The post "Making the mountain an inner forest may ease your way" reminded me of someone who emailed me after my book about Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, was published. It is called Return to the One, so there's a lot of non-dual stuff in the book. 

The first message this person sent me was positive. The second message wasn't. He'd read a concluding chapter where I used a metaphor about ascending a mountain as a reflection of Plotinus' teachings. 

That really rubbed the guy the wrong way. He said that spirituality isn't about reaching a summit of consciousness. Rather, it is about embracing the center of what we already are. Back then, I resisted that notion. Now, it makes a lot more sense to me.

Here's an excerpt from the Shimmering Dead End post along that same line.

I’ve found there to be two main schools of thought which attempt to describe the realization of nondual, or primordial consciousness: the ‘glorious mountaintop’ school and the ‘chop wood, carry water’ school. These denote the metaphor systems employed to make the description. The first makes heavy use the attributes “up,” “higher,” “greater,” “perfected,” “pure,” “chaiste,” and “divine.”

...The ‘chop wood, carry water’ school is quite the opposite in terms of its use of superlatives and attributes. We merely see what has always been present, as the Rinpoche describes. When this moment occurs, there is a recognition of what has been ongoing in our awareness, albeit seemingly overlooked.

...The ‘glorious mountaintop’ is the defacto home of the folk theory of enlightenment. Most of the Vedic-based systems of thought are saturated with it, as well as their Western deriviates, the neo-Advaita schools. ‘Chop wood, carry water’ finds its purview in Zen, Ch’an, and Dzogchen Buddhism, as well as with just about every individual I have met personally who I regard to be a jnani, or knower of nondual consciousness.

I’d like to suggest that the main problem is simply that our embodied mindstake these metaphors too literally. Thus, to make enlightenment something that is higher, greater, more perfect and/or more pure, is to remove it from ourselves in the moment, resulting in the occluding effect of the folk theory of enlightenment.

I also liked another post, "The fantasy known as 'no ego'".

Referencing the map for a moment, we can see that the entire constellation of ideas I’m calling the folk theory of enlightenment find their center of gravity in the notion of “no ego.” There are millions of people around the world fervently and sincerely trying to destroy their own sense of themselves as a path to nondual enlightenment.

Our sense of ourselves is our social nav system. Nondual enlightenment does not affect the nav system, as it’s always shining within the nav system’s functional awareness. Every enlightened person on the planet has a nav system. We experience our nav system, our sense of self and place in the world, as our personality. 

Non-duality tweets by David Chapman

Hey, Twitter certainly can be philosophical. In 140 characters or less.

Here's a series of recent tweets from David Chapman that I enjoyed.

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

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since All is One, seeming differences are illusion. Illusion is bad, so Oneness is better than differences. [The duality of #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

In Oneness, all is equal. Equality is better than difference, so we who know Oneness are more equal than you. [Authoritarian #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since your self is an illusion, doing what you want is meaningless—there's no "you" to want it—so stop now. [Renunciation in #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since individuals are illusory, your individual desires and peculiarities should be ignored by the state. [Isn't #nonduality great?]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since All is One, everything is already perfect. You think otherwise because you are spiritually defective. [#Nonduality enjoys paradox.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

I have realized the Divine Oneness of #Nonduality, so I can teach you everything you need to know about Reality. Follow me! [On twitter.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

[In the mean time, here's the best thing I've read on what's wrong with Oneness: http://www.joeldiana.com/downloads/guru_papers/gp_oneness_chapter.pdf …]

 

Pink Panther and Alan Watts on nonduality

I'm reading a book about nonduality by David Loy that has a pleasingly appropriate title, "Nonduality." Loy is a Zen practitioner and a university professor. 

I like his style. He thinks. He analyzes. He studies the relationship between substance philosophies like Vedanta (Self is real) and flux philosophies like Buddhism (nothing is immutable).

Loy is helping me to realize that nonduality really isn't about oneness. It is about the rather obvious fact that this requires a that. And light requires dark. And self requires non-self. And life requires death. And so on and so on and so on.

Oneness is a bunch of crap. There is no such thing.

Rather, if there was, no one would know about it. Because if everything was one thing, there wouldn't be (1) a knower of that thing, and (2) that thing. There'd just be a blob of One, clueless about itself, since it couldn't be aware of itself, being all One'y.

So nonduality fanatics who make it into some sort of Oneness thing, while speaking from the perspective of their decidedly dualistic self -- they're irritating.

I've started reading nonduality books, then gotten nauseated by the bullshit being crapped out. Fodder for Amazon resale. Loy's book is different. He doesn't sound like the annoying nondualist in The Advaita Trap. (I could only watch a few minutes of the video; reminded me of the books I've hated.)

 

More and more, I think Alan Watts had, and still has, the best take on nonduality.

You can get a pretty damn good feel for his perspective in this video. Kudos to whoever had the genius inspiration to use a Pink Panther cartoon as a backdrop for his words. On You Tube the uploader says:

A while back, I was sitting in a waiting room listening to an Alan Watts lecture on my iPod. Bored, I glanced up at the TV screen fixed to the wall above me. It was showing the classic Pink Panther episode "The Pink Phink". At that moment, something amazing happened; Watts' words became perfectly juxtaposed with the visual. The storyline of the cartoon was flawlessly in sync with Watt's wisdom. 

So, here it is for your viewing pleasure: Pink Panther and his little friend teaching non-duality! 

 

 

The self: a trick your mind plays on not-you

Here's some good news, and some even better news, from the current special issue of New Scientist: "The Great Illusion of the Self."

You're being tricked by an expert! And who doesn't like amazing tricks? Even better, the trickster is your own mind! You're your own magician. 

Well, you would be if you existed. But almost certainly you don't. At least, not in any way close to how you feel that you do.

In 10 pages, several New Scientist stories -- "Who Are You?," What Are You?," "When Are You?," "Where Are You?," "Why Are You?" -- persuasively present evidence that an enduring detached self isn't who we are, even though this is how it seems to us.

Here's an excerpt from Jan Westerhoff's What Are You?

THERE appear to be few things more certain to us than the existence of our selves. We might be sceptical about the existence of the world around us, but how could we be in doubt about the existence of us? Isn't doubt made impossible by the fact that there is somebody who is doubting something? Who, if not us, would this somebody be?

While it seems irrefutable that we must exist in some sense, things get a lot more puzzling once we try to get a better grip of what having a self actually amounts to.

Three beliefs about the self are absolutely fundamental for our belief of who we are. First, we regard ourselves as unchanging and continuous. This is not to say that we remain forever the same, but that among all this change there is something that remains constant and that makes the "me" today the same person I was five years ago and will be five years in the future.

Second, we see our self as the unifier that brings it all together. The world presents itself to us as a cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, mental images, recollections and so forth. In the self, these are all integrated and an image of a single, unified world emerges.

Finally, the self is an agent. It is the thinker of our thoughts and the doer of our deeds. It is where the representation of the world, unified into one coherent whole, is used so we can act on this world.

All of these beliefs appear to be blindingly obvious and as certain as can be. But as we look at them more closely, they become less and less self-evident.

It would seem obvious that we exist continuously from our first moments in our mother's womb up to our death. Yet during the time that our self exists, it undergoes substantial changes in beliefs, abilities, desires and moods. The happy self of yesterday cannot be exactly the same as the grief-stricken self of today, for example. But we surely still have the same self today that we had yesterday.

There are two different models of the self we can use to explore this issue: a string of pearls and a rope. According to the first model, our self is something constant that has all the changing properties but remains itself unchanged. Like a thread running through every pearl on a string, our self runs through every single moment of our lives, providing a core and a unity for them. The difficulty with this view of the self is that it cannot be most of the things we usually think define us. Being happy or sad, being able to speak Chinese, preferring cherries to strawberries, even being conscious – all these are changeable states, the disappearance of which should not affect the self, as a disappearance of individual pearls should not affect the thread. But it then becomes unclear why such a minimal self should have the central status in our lives that we usually accord to it.

The second model is based on the fact that a rope holds together even though there is no single fibre running through the entire rope, just a sequence of overlapping shorter fibres. Similarly, our self might just be the continuity of overlapping mental events. While this view has a certain plausibility, it has problems of its own. We usually assume that when we think of something or make a decision, it is the whole of us doing it, not just some specific part. Yet, according to the rope view, our self is never completely present at any point, just like a rope's threads do not run its entire length.

It seems then as if we are left with the unattractive choice between a continuous self so far removed from everything constituting us that its absence would scarcely be noticeable, and a self that actually consists of components of our mental life, but contains no constant part we could identify with. The empirical evidence we have so far points towards the rope view, but it is by no means settled.

Here's the introduction to the special issue:

As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.

As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.

This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.

Not only neuroscientific thinkers. Philosophical and spiritual thinkers also. Psychologist Susan Blackmore does a good job of presenting this selfless perspective in her book, "Ten Zen Questions." I'm fine with it. Actually, more than fine.

I love the notion that "I" don't exist. Takes the pressure off me to know that I'm an illusion. Like Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Like salvation. Life after death. Hell or heaven.

Blackmore writes:

But what about me and my conscious experiences? Where do I fit into this integrated system of inputs, outputs and multiple parallel processing systems? 

The strange thing is that I feel as if I am in the middle of all this activity, experiencing what comes in through the senses, and deciding what to do in response, when in fact the brain seems to have no need of me.

There is no central place or process where I could be, and the brain seems capable of doing everything it does without any supervisor, decider or inner experiencer. 

...The temptation to fall into dualism is so strong that escaping from it, and from the popular idea that we have a spirit or soul, has been a rare insight in human history. This insight is not confined to modern science and philosophy, but can be found at the heart of Christian mysticism, Sufism, Advaita, Taoism, and Buddhism.

All these traditions claim that the apparent duality of the world is an illusion, and that underlying the illusion everything is one. 

Along with this often goes the idea that there is no separate self who acts, so that realizing nonduality also means giving up the sense of personal action or of being the "doer" of what happens. This is rather hard to accept, which is probably why such traditions are so much less popular than the great theistic religions, or those that promise heaven and hell to reward the actions of individual souls.

...There's some stupid bastard doing a U-turn in the middle of the road right in front of my bike. I am angry and want to shout "You idiot -- what do you think you're doing? You nearly knocked me off!" Can the sight of that idiotic man be me?

Yes. Of course.

If I stop, calm down, and search for the me who is looking at him I will find only him, and his car, and the road. If I search for the me who is angry with him I will find only the anger bubbling up. It's the same with everything I experience; there is not a separate me as well as the experience.

It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street; that I am, at least in this fleeting moment, that Muslim woman with her stupid veil, that annoying child with the ice cream, that crowd of giggling school girls. 

Yet somehow or other this way of looking makes it easier to be kind.

How far down the rabbit hole can an unbeliever go?

I know something about rabbit holes. I've been down quite a few -- of the psychedelic variety and otherwise. 

Graduating from high school in 1966, I headed to college in the San Francisco Bay area just at the time Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wrote "White Rabbit." I still get a chill up my spine (tiny LSD flashback?) when I watch a video of her singing it.

Speaking as a proud Flower Child babyboomer, Man, they don't make music like this anymore. Suffer through the brief ad at the start. Two and a half minutes of Jefferson Airplane are worth it.

 

This morning I got to thinking about how far down the rabbit hole it is possible to go while reading a terrific chapter in David E. Cooper's "The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery," a book I blogged about several days ago.

Cooper's philosophically dense, but always stimulating, book examines the extreme humanistic notion that man is the measure of all things. Extreme, because taken literally it posits that "there is no discurable way the world anyway is, independently of human perspective and interest."

Existentialism takes this idea and runs with it. Sometimes a long ways down the rabbit hole. 

If it is up to us to choose what life is all about, if existence precedes essence, if there is no solid objectively real foundation to the cosmos we can stand on, then seemingly we enter a whirlpool realm of absurdity, nausea, no exit's, angst, and a lot of strong coffee consumed while smoking filterless cigarettes in Paris coffee houses, talking about the meaningful meaninglessness of life.

And yet... Cooper says that it really isn't possible to live that far down the rabbit hole. At least, not without going certifiably insane.

Almost all humanists, along with non-monotheistic "faiths" like Advaita and Buddhism, embrace compensations that stop them from falling all the way down into the depths of nothing matters because there is nothing to lean on, not even Nothing.

Cooper argues for the near-necessity of compensations in various ways. Here's how he speaks about one way non-believers in an absolute objective reality, religious or scientific, compensate for the loss of being sure about the world "anyway is."

As inveterately teleological creatures, human beings need to view substantial stretches of their activity as having significance. (I use 'significance' as a portmanteau term for what we want such stretches to possess -- point, worth, meaning, importance, the distinction of mattering, and so on.)

Typically, at least, to assign significance to an activity is to display its appropriate connection with -- say its contribution to -- something beyond itself that then serves as a source of its significance: a wider project, perhaps, that provides measure for the activity.

This is why activity is typically regarded as devoid of significance when perceived as so limited and enclosed as to fail appropriately to connect up with anything beyond itself. 

...There is little doubt, surely, that a final source is sought, or simply assumed to reside, 'beyond the human' -- in , say, an independent, discursable order of facts. 

...The thesis of 'the human world', once 'deeply cultivated', turns out to be one with which human beings cannot live. If our need for answerability is to be satisfied, human life must indeed answer to something beyond itself.

l agree. I'm reminded of my first LSD trip, circa 1968.

A friend experienced in "tripping" took LSD along with me, to be my guide down the rabbit hole where reality As We Know It fades away. Soon, though, I'd convinced him that we had gone crazy.

Not just temporarily. Permanently.

After discussing what life for us was going to be like from now on (we remembered taking LSD, but couldn't fathom ever not being in our current state of consciousness), we reached a fairly satisfying conclusion:

Crazy is good. Yes, we had gone off the deep end. But, hey, it's nice paddling around in those weird waters.

This fits with Cooper's thesis. My friend and I had entered a LSD-created mental world where anything was possible; what we were experiencing was what there was; like Grace Slick sang, "logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead."

And yet... we couldn't handle the idea that we'd entered a completely topsy-turvy world. Our strong inclination was to talk things out and arrive at an understanding that we weren't in a genuine Nowhere Land, we had just entered a realm where things were going to be crazily dependably good. 

Cooper gives examples of how "Asian" traditions (not always literally Asian, but within that philosophical framework) compensate for the lack of absolutism found in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other "this is how things are" traditions.

For example:

If humanism is the thesis that there is no discurable way the world anyway is, independently of human perspective and interest, then Samkara was a humanist. For while he thinks there is an independent, absolute reality, brahman, this is not discursable. 

...The important point in the present context is that the doctrine of brahman is a good example of one that 'compensates' for the thesis of 'the human world'. Samkara's view is that that thesis would be unendurable without the further compensating doctrine. 

...In the Advaitin case, as we know, compensation comes in the shape of the doctrine of brahman. In appreciating that 'all that we can see...is not real in itself', the enlightened person also enjoys a sense of 'the reality behind everything'.

While this reality is strictly ineffable, he or she knows it to be, if only in extended senses of the terms, 'truth, consciousness and bliss (satchitananda). Life then has its point -- the effort to identify with this reality -- and the world is saved from being merely a dream that passes us by.

Bart Marshall talks non-duality absurdity

I can't remember how I came across an interview with Bart Marshall in non-duality magazine.

I'm glad that I did, though, because the questions and answers encapsulate why the supposed state of enlightened "non-duality" strikes me as being almost as absurd as traditional religions are.

Now, I'm sure Bart Marshall is a nice guy. I'd probably like him if I met him.

But reading about his purported enlightenment, realization of pure awareness, and identity with God made me think, "There's as much evidence for Christianity or any other religion being true as there is for non-duality being true."

Meaning, none. Zilch. Nada.

Yet Marshall is convinced that Realization (with a capital "R") happened to him on a plane ride.

Well, the short answer is that what I’d always believed I was, vanished, and what I have always truly been appeared as self-evident.  All questions disappeared, along with the so called “person” who had been asking them.  What remained was pure Awareness—God consciousness, if you will—and life as I had known it came to an end. 

Actually, there is no such thing as pure awareness. (See my blog post, "My main gripe with Buddhist meditation" for reasons why.) Modern neuroscience has shown that so long as we have, or are, a brain, neurological processes outside our awareness inescapably shape how we view the world.

So almost certainly Marshall is wrong about that. However, it's equally certain that he was right about one thing: the "person" he thought he was doesn't exist. Neuroscience also recognizes the absence of any enduring self, pretty much as Buddhism teaches.

Yet why would somebody claim to be enlightened because they're realized a scientific truth? Marshall claims to have realized what is true for everybody: the self doesn't exist. What we are is what the physical brain experiences.

To me, this is true non-duality -- not perceiving ourselves as different from all the other forms of materiality. 

Marshall, though, sees himself as now experiencing life quite differently than unenlightened beings. This strikes me as self-centered, not exactly what you'd expect from someone who says he has achieved enlightened non-dual consciousness. From the interview:
----------------------- 

"NDM: You already mentioned some of these below. Do you also have any of these other traditional jivan mukta [realized being] traits listed below by Ramesam Vermuri?

1.	Universal “Love” (Maitri)
2.	Equipoise.
3.	Tranquility.
4.	Sense of happiness

5.	Absence of sense of “self”
6.	Absence of ‘Doership’
7	High levels of Gamma activity in the brain
8.	State of Deep Sleep with Awareness (Yoganidra)

9.	Fearlessness and Detachment
10.	Always in the “Now”

Bart Marshall:  I think that’s a pretty good list of some of what comes with the package, although I have no idea what my gamma activity might be, and the state of deep sleep with awareness is not something I experience very often, although I am occasionally aware of that."
----------------------- 

So it sounds like Marshall, as a realized/enlightened being, must be a pretty special guy. He possesses universal love, is detachedly fearless, is always in the now, tranquil, happy, and so on. However, he goes on to say...

One thing I might say, though, is that this list makes it all sound very grand and elevated, and there is the implication that possessing all these wonderful qualities produces a problem-free life and permanent state of euphoria, when in actuality it lives very ordinary.  One doesn’t really go around being aware of any of this—I don’t “feel” fearless or tranquil or loving at the moment, for instance.  I just experience What Is and do what gets done. 

Hmmmm.

Both outwardly and inwardly Bart Marshall appears very ordinary. Yet he wants us to believe that he is enlightened, and goes around teaching other people about a realized non-dual state which is somehow both marvelously special, and also entirely ordinary.

Marshall says there is no such thing as partial enlightenment. It's all or nothing.

As for the idea that someone can actually be “halfway up the mountain,” I don’t buy it.  Enlightenment is an all-or-nothing thing.  One can be very wise in spiritual ways, and very ripe for it to happen, but until the trap door opens and you free fall into the Absolute, you’ve got nothing.  As I mentioned earlier, Rose had a great quote in this regard:  “You don’t know anything until you know Everything.”  

So Bart Marshall supposedly has attained to the Ultimate. He knows Everything. However, he also admits that he isn't aware of being any different than he was before his enlightenment, and there are no outward signs of his enlightenment, so far as I can tell from the interview.

My conclusion: there is no such thing as enlightenment. Just claims about enlightenment, many of which come from people who make a living teaching others how to become enlightened. Sounds absurd and self-serving to me.

But then, I'm not enlightened. 

"The Ultimate Twist" -- honest, creative, appealingly unconvincing

Suzanne Foxton, author of "The Ultimate Twist," is an occasional commenter on this blog. She has her own nonduality-oriented blog, Nothing Exists, Despite Appearances. (Tagline: "All there is, is this, exactly as it is")

That last sentiment sums up how I felt about her book after I finished reading it. I liked Suzanne's honesty and creativity. Yet my attitude toward nonduality was unchanged by her 116 well-written pages.

Knowing that she'd written a novella based on her own life, I was eager to learn about Suzanne's struggle with addiction and other problems that come with being human. However, I also was afraid that this would be one of those A Book About Me treatises which I find annoyingly self-centered.

My fear was misguided.

"The Ultimate Twist" doesn't have the feel of an autobiography thinly disguised as fiction. Rather, I was drawn into an engrossing story of a woman, Lucy, who is trying to defeat her inner demons, the therapist who guides her along a path of recovery, and her husband -- who tries to understand how nondual teachings reflect his wife's fresh outlook on life, yet keeps being put off by the blather he reads in All there is, is this, exactly as it is writings.

That's a nice touch, to have your main message undercut by a skeptical central character. In a short chapter also titled The Ultimate Twist, Lucy reads over her first attempt to describe how she now sees reality.

Awakening is so simple. Enlightenment, or whatever you want to label it, realization as some call it, is simply what you are, right now. It's no different than what is happening -- here, now. The thoughts that label whatever reality is for you, the thoughts that tell you that this isn't it, even they are it.

The feelings that seem to be discontent or frustration, they are it too. Those thoughts that tell you that it couldn't be so simple.. that it couldn't be any different than whatever it is you seem to have been experiencing all your life... they are what you are looking for.

The thoughts that say "How could this possibly be it? This is boring!" Well, the boring-ness is it too, as are the thoughts that label it "boring". Those thoughts are just what's coming up in what you are. What you are is here and now. What you are is everything.

What you are is not dependent on what your mind makes of it all. You will never be any closer to what you are than you already are. Those thoughts that it might be something different... those are it, too. Nothing is not it. Everything is what you are looking for. What looks is what you are looking for. Looking is what you are looking for. Here it is!

Well, I find sentiments like these almost equally balanced between infuriating and inspiring. So I resonated with Lucy's husband, Alistair, who was similarly repelled by and attracted to his wife's newfound insight that what is, is. Dude.

I wrestled with my "it is what it is" love-hate relationship in a recent blog post. My basic take on these five words is that if everything is fine just as it is, saying this is both deeply meaningful and utterly useless.

It's much like I felt after an Argentine Tango lesson a few weeks ago. Dancing with a woman I'd just met, I couldn't resist sharing some thoughts about the philosophy of leading and following in Tango.

But after I did that, I felt it would have been better if I'd simply shut up and danced. Doing is different from talking. Experiencing is different from analyzing.

I'm not saying that Suzanne shouldn't have written her book. There's a time to live life without comment, and there's a time to talk about life. My point is that I'm pleased with how my reading "The Ultimate Twist" left me feeling this isn't it, in much the same way as I'm pleased to realize that talking about dancing Tango isn't it either.

Not quite the same way, though.

Because Tango requires some conceptual knowledge before someone can dance it properly. You might be able to pick it up just by watching, but even then you'd need to recognize the nature of basic moves.

Nonduality, on the other hand, claims to be an all-encompassing approach to life. It isn't a skill, technique, approach, method, or whatever. Supposedly a nondual vision of reality leads to everything looking different. Or perhaps, just the same -- yet sharper, clearer, closer.

So I get confused when I read about nonduality. Suzanne's book left me less perplexed than usual, because she doesn't take this stuff as seriously as other "this is it" authors.

An interview with her in non-duality magazine does show, though, that Suzanne has a good grasp of philosophy. I just don't understand how the interviewer managed to ask so many questions, and raise so many issues, about a viewpoint which supposedly is amazingly simple.

Here's how the interview starts out. And arguably could have ended.

NDM: Suzanne, can you please tell me about your awakening, when this happened, how this happened exactly, why you believe this happened. What was going on in your life at the time?

Suzanne Foxton: Let me start by saying that the overwhelming quality of "my awakening" was the realisation that there is no such thing. That "I" couldn't  "awaken" because there was no me to awaken, and what I had taken myself for was a whimsical fabrication, albeit a fascinating one. Within that paradox lies enlightenment, or whatever we're calling it today.

I could be wrong (the truest thing I've ever said). But this is how I'm coming to see nonduality, Zen, Advaita, and all the other teachings which propose that what we're looking for is what is doing the seeing:

Such is the natural reaction of those who persisted in banging their heads against a spiritual wall for a long time, and then had the bright idea, "Stop!"

Thus there isn't anything special about a nondual outlook on life. It's basically irreligious common sense.

What's apparent, is. What's not apparent, isn't. However, to anyone who once had a strong belief in something marvelous that exists beyond the physical, and strived mightily to realize it, having that dream dashed can be such a profound experience, it gets called "enlightenment."

Several years ago I blogged about a previous Argentine Tango lesson. Carlos, the instructor, didn't like how I was leading. He wanted me to experience what it was like to be the follower (usually, a woman). So he led, and I followed.

Or rather, tried to follow. Mostly I tried to anticipate what move Carlos wanted me to do. When I failed, which was every few seconds, Carlos would stop and say "No! That isn't what I led!"

I got a little frustrated. Then I got a lot frustrated.

So much so, I said to myself, "Fuck it. I give up. Carlos can do whatever he wants without me." At which point, after a minute or thereabouts of my relaxed I don't care'ness, Carlos smiled and said, "Yes! That's it!"

I hadn't done anything. All that I'd done is learn how not to do anything. (For a while, at least.) This is a big part of what makes a good follower in dance -- letting the leader lead, fully.

Likewise, a big part, maybe almost the entirety, of what often is called "spirituality" involves letting life be as it is, not trying to guide unguidable events, not trying to control what is uncontrollable.

When I tried to follow Carlos, I failed. Trying is inimical to following, just as seeking is inimical to finding. So long as someone is looking for what isn't there, the presence of what is here isn't fully realized.

I enjoyed Suzanne Foxton's "The Ultimate Twist." However, I didn't get anything from it in a wow, I never knew that before! sense. Reading the book left me unchanged, so far as I can tell.

And that, I suspect, will please Suzanne. Like she writes on the next to last page of her book:

Perhaps if there is nowhere to go and no one to get there, every obstacle dissolves.

Vastness might be us, not a separate self

Somebody in my house picked up Suzanne Segal's book, "Collision With the Infinite, " this morning. Outwardly, it seemed to be me. But inwardly, it didn't feel that way.

Even though I've got a bunch of books in my meditation area that were ripe for reading, I was drawn to move into an adjoining bedroom and look over the contents of a couple of bookcases. My right hand followed my eyes after I spotted the book.

Holding it, I didn't have a sense either that I'd made a decision, or that a decision had made me. Something simply had happened.

A few seconds later I was thumbing through "Collision With the Infinite," reacquainting myself with Segal's description of how, while waiting for a bus, she experienced a sudden sense of emptiness -- that the self she'd considered herself to be didn't really exist.

Back in 2007 I wrote about the book in Consider a cosmos that is only consciousness. It was nice to make friends with Segal's thoughts again -- and my own highlightings of favorite passages.

She writes lucidly, honestly, and refreshingly non-dogmatically. I suppose she could be called a "non-dualist," but if this word is used in her book, it isn't often. "Vastness" is her preferred term for what she now feels connected with.

At the bus stop in Paris, the "me" was annihilated, and it has never reappeared in any form. With this annihilation, there occurred the realization that a "me" has never existed who is the doer behind what has appeared to be "my" life. In recent years, it has also become clear that not only is there no "me," there is also no "other."

The "no other-ness" is now so dominant that nothing else is perceived. Life is being lived out of the infinite substance of which it is made, and this substance -- which is what and who we all are -- is constantly aware of itself out of itself. What an extraordinary way to live!

The vastness never requires that something must go away for it to be the vastness. After all, where could anything go in this vastness? ... Nothing has to change, go away, or transform itself into something else for the vastness to be the vastness. The vastness is always who and what everything is.

Now, this outlook is pretty darn close to a bunch of philosophies. Advaita Vedanta. Buddhism. Taoism. Other forms of monism and non-dualism. However, Segal almost entirely writes from her own experience, not from concepts.

For a long time her feeling of emptiness was accompanied by fear. She went to quite a few therapists and spiritual types in an attempt to understand what was going on. A Zen practitioner gave her advice. Then she asked him, "Have you experienced what I'm talking about?"

He admits that he hasn't. She moves on, eventually coming to some conclusions on her own:

This raises questions about the value of performing spiritual practices, studying ancient texts or even living a "spiritual" life. Most practices imply the existence of a "me" who can do the practice and eventually accomplish a particular goal.

But if a practice is undertaken by such a "me" in order to attain the non-locatable vastness of no personal self, then a conundrum or paradox presents itself. A personal doer is presumed to exist who must do the practices properly in order to achieve the realization that there is no personal doer.

...Further, most spiritual practices presume that awakening is someplace else and must be reached or attained. But we are always the vastness -- always! It is the naturally occurring human state.

Where would the vastness go? Where could the infinite hide? What could we possibly need to do to become the vastness, when we already are it?

I liked Segal's contention that any supposedly "spiritual" practice requiring the giving up, elimination, stopping, or purification of something (mind, desires, thoughts, etc.) is misguided.

This fits with my own lengthy experience, thirty-plus years, of practicing a meditation system that emphasized the negativity of Mind -- which earns a capital "M" because it was considered to be not only what goes on inside the human cranium, but also a universal "negative power" that misleads the spiritual aspirant and keeps him/her from entering the realms of Soul.

You can't get much more dualistic than that, which helps explain why the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) teachings, a.k.a. Science of the Soul, frequently cited quotations from the Bible.

Just as Christianity posits a Devil or Satan who stands between us and God, so did RSSB claim that Kal or the Negative Power operates through the human mind, which therefore can't be trusted.

Of course, this teaching was communicated by gurus who had a human mind and used it to share their thoughts about spirituality with disciples who received those ideas through their own minds.

Which is a paradox. And points to a way out of these sorts of contradictions: Segal's hypothesis (for her, a certainty) that the individual self/soul/ego or whatever doesn't really exist, but only appears to.

She speaks of how crazy it would be for someone to decry all the seaweed in the ocean. Hey, oceans have seaweed! That's part of what makes them oceans, and not purified water.

Segal also talks of the cosmos as being akin to sand. A finger made of sand draws figures in the sand. It's all sand! Nothing else. To say "the finger, and the forms drawn by it, interferes with the oneness of Sandness" is misguided. There's only sand, no matter how it appears.

Is Segal right? I don't know. Is there such a thing as right and wrong when talking about the ultimate nature of the cosmos? I don't know that either. I simply resonate with what she says.

All ideas about accomplishing spiritual awakening are based on the assumption that there is a someone, a you, who can perform the practices and accomplish the goal. But this someone doesn't exist.

Take, for example, the popular spiritual notion that we need to "get out of the way so the infinite can just flow through us." It is predicated on a non-existent someone who can figure out how to surrender. We need to see that spiritual and psychological practices, every single one of them, are based on taking ideas about who we are to be the truth of who we are.

The idea that we are the doer behind our actions does not make us the doer, no matter how often we get hoodwinked into taking this idea to be truth.

Then there is the notion that we must stop the mind in order to be free. But who will stop the mind? Like everything else, the mind is just what it is. A mind that generates thoughts is not a problem; it is simply doing what minds do. The mind is made of the same vast emptiness as everything.

Whether the mind is active or quiet, this emptiness never changes. Nor does the infinite wait for the mind to do or stop doing something in order for the vastness to reveal itself to itself. If the mind should stop, it simply does so as part of the unfathomable mystery.

 

 

Great two sentence take on oneness

There's a lot to say about the pros and cons of a metaphysical belief in cosmic oneness, but it's hard to put it much better than the Duh Master does.

We're all connected, like one big organism.
So, no, I would not say that "I" still have "your" lawnmower.

"Awakening to the Dream" shows religious side of Advaita

I've got a love-hate relationship thing going with neo-advaita/non-dual teachings -- which is what Leo Hartong's book, "Awakening to the Dream," is all about.

(Note: I'm pretty sure "Awakening to the Dream" should go in the neo-advaita, rather than traditional advaita, literary category. Advaita-philes like to argue about the distinctions between the two -- see here and here -- which strikes me as sort of strange given their emphasis on oneness and non-duality.)

I'm not certain how I learned about this book. I think Amazon sucked me into buying it through one of those "readers who bought X also bought Y" lures. Anyway, as soon as it arrived I found myself reading it avidly.

Up to a point.

Then I started skimming it, because I'd reached the end of what I could like about "Awakening to the Dream" and started to focus on what I dislike about some forms of Advaita and Nondualism.

[Update: just ran across a great humorous post by Jeff Foster that beautifully captures the irritating nature of many nondual/advaita types. Read "The Advaita Trap" and laugh.]

Namely, their faith-based religious aspects, which are plainly evident in Hartong's book. His emphasis is on Pure Awareness, which I have some problems with. (See my post, Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness.)

Supposedly the essence of human consciousness is Pure Awareness, which is completely separate from the awareness of all the stuff that we're usually aware of. How anyone, including Hartong, could know this isn't talked about. It's just something to be taken on faith.

It [Awakeness] will shine when it shines, and it will shift the attention from the content of Awareness to Pure Awareness itself. This Pure Awareness is what you really are. When you think you're not it, this thought is part of the temporal content of Awareness and has no bearing on Awareness itself.

Just let yourself be. Give yourself permission to be up, down, pissed or delirious. Observe the process and don't get caught in the content. Know yourself as the limitless field of Pure Awareness in which the drama of life merely arises.

Well, why should I believe this is true?

The notion that worldly existence is maya, illusion, a dream, unreal, a reflection of higher realities, shadows cast by a divine sun -- this is a core tenet of Hinduism, Platonism, and other religions/philosophies which urge us to discount the reality of everyday experience.

Hartong, echoing various systems of Indian thought, says that the Self is all there is. This is the same as Pure Awareness, so far as I can understand. You know, Atman is Brahman; Pure Awareness is the Self; Self-Realization is God-Realization.

What irks me about all this "Self" talk is that this concept sounds exactly like "God." Something transcendent, mysterious, invisible, unknowable, yet to be taken as the Most Real Thing.

Now consider the possibility that the Self dreams up this manifestation in a similar way. Like the dreamer appearing in his own dream, we can say that the Creator appears in his manifestation while, at the same time, the manifestation appears in the Creator. Dreamlike, He manifests the whole cosmic drama out of Himself...The substance of this dreamed up 'reality' is Pure Awareness -- the dream that stuff is made of.

OK, I'll consider the possibility. Just as I'll consider the possibility that Jesus died for our sins, Allah revealed the truth to Mohammad in the Koran, and lots of other religious propositions.

But I won't believe or accept possibilities unless they make good sense, or have demonstrable evidence supporting them.

I starting reading "Awakening from the Dream" avidly because I resonate with several themes that Hartong focused on in his opening chapters: (1) there is no such thing as a "self" or "soul" residing within the human psyche, and (2) genuine enlightenment is realizing there's no such thing as enlightenment, because there's no individual self to be enlightened.

Maybe later I'll write a what I like post about this book, because there indeed is a lot to like in "Awakening from the Dream." At the moment, though, having finished the book this afternoon, I'm zeroed in on the discrepancy between Hartong's certainty about the Self and Pure Awareness with passages he wrote like these:

Whatever we say about it is as true or untrue as its opposite...Take for example a simple sentence like 'Pure Awareness is beyond all concepts.' Labeling Pure Awareness as being beyond concepts objectifies it as a new concept.

...No matter how we try, by talking or thinking about this we cannot escape the limitation of making it into a concept, and so it forever escapes each and every attempt to define it. It remains forever a paradoxical and intimate mystery, an ongoing open question, and a constant answer.

Absolutely.

I like these thoughts. The idea that we humans can comprehend the essence of the cosmos seems astonishingly anthropomorphic, grandiose, and unproven to me. Yet somehow Hartong manages to claim that the Self is eternal, since it will remain when time runs out and the manifested universe dissolves.

Sounds just like God. Something to be taken on faith. (Also, how does Hartong know time will run out and the universe will dissolve? This is a Hindu belief without any proof behind it.)

When I ordered "Awakening to the Dream" on Amazon, I noticed that 34 of the 35 reader reviews were 4 or 5 star, highly positive. Today I read the single 1-star review, which was quite interesting and well written.

Have a read. It's a better critique of the book and neo-advaita than I'm capable of. Plus, the guy (or gal) offers up a bunch of suggestions for spiritual/philosophical reading that he or she finds more credible than "Awakening to the Dream."

I'll copy in the 1-star reader review as an extension to this post.

If there's no "me," I don't have any problems

Following up on "My best guess about God" musings, I wanted to take another crack of getting down to the core of a whole lot of religiosity, spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy.

My inspiration is Wei Wu Wei's "Open Secret," which I finished today. Like many books with a Zen, Buddhist, Taoist, Advaita, or non-dual slant, I passed through many stages of literary emotion while reading it.

Interest. Irritation. Confusion. Agreement. Contentment. Bewilderment. To name a few.

What kept me turning the pages were the glimpses of something intriguingly simple that the author, a.k.a. Terence Gray, was trying to communicate. It isn't an original notion, not by any means, but Wei Wu Wei -- at times -- says it more clearly than most.

From page 143:

Bondage, and the consecutive suffering -- which is all suffering -- is entirely dependent on the idea of an objective I, that is "a me." But no such contradiction-in-terms has ever existed, exists, or could ever be.

...To be an object is just to be perceptible, which is to appear.
To appear to whom? To be perceptible to what?

Only I can perceive. What else could there be to perceive, which could perceive? And whatever I perceive must be my object.

My object is an objectivisation of what I am. What else could there be for it to be?

Therefore every object is myself. There can be no thing which is not myself. I am no thing but my objects, and my objects are nothing but I.

Another try at saying it, from page 88:

The perceiver in fact has arrived at a point in his investigation at which he is looking at what he is himself; he has reached a dead-end in his analysis and finds himself face to face with his own nature, but, instead of recognizing it as such and realizing that the void is what an eye sees when it looks at itself, he goes on trying to objectify what he does not see, what he can never see, by turning it into an objective concept, like the good and well-trained philosopher he usually is.

...But there is, has always been, an alternative, when the dead-end, the Ultima Thule of conceptualisation has been reached, and that is just to turn round and wake up to the truth. Having arrived at the gate they tried to prise it open, not realizing that they were already on the right side of it.

And how is this realized? By doing nothing. From page 135 and 139:

All practice must necessarily be futile, and why the exercise of volition must necessarily defeat its own ends.

It is vain for an object to seek the subject which it is -- for only the subject could seek, and it cannot find itself by seeking -- for the sought is necessarily elsewhere than that which seeks it, is in a different moment of time and in a different area of space from those of that which is seeking. 

...It is from the illusion of autonomy that a pseudoidentity awakens, and it is the condition that then obtains, a state of universality, which has been given the name "enlightenment," for an apparent identity has become aware of its universality, and has returned to full consciousness of the totality that it is.

Now, maybe this doesn't sound so clear to you. So I'll express my own understanding of what Wei Wu Wei is getting at in some (hopefully) simple words.

We try to know who we really are. Why?

Because we feel that if we knew, we'd be better off. Happier. More at peace with ourselves and the world. And religiously speaking, we'd be saved, enlightened, God-realized, whatever you want to call it.

We presume that there is a self, a soul, a psyche, a "me" -- something objectively real -- which is going to be known by us. So we search for it via meditation, prayer, contemplation, drugs, psychotherapy, walks on the beach, studying books, and many other sorts of ways.

But wait! Who is doing the searching?

Why, it must be...me. Who else could be doing it? Hmmmmm. This means that if I find myself, it won't be me, because I'm the subjectivity doing the looking, not the object that is found.

There's a spiritual/philosophical and a scientific/logical way of looking at this. Both end up in the same place: There's no "self" in myself. No "ego" in my egocentricity. No "soul" in my soulful searching.

Mystics, like Rumi, say that what we're looking for is so close, we don't recognize it. Here's how I expressed a Rumi story in my book about the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus: "Return to the One." 

Rumi, a Persian mystic, speaks of a sage who told a man how to unearth a buried treasure. Paraphrased, the story goes like this: "Stand here," the sage says, "and shoot an arrow in that direction. Where the arrow lands, there the treasure will be found." The man gets a bow and enthusiastically does as instructed, carefully watching the high arc of the arrow as it flies away.

After digging where it landed, he is dismayed at not finding any treasure. "I'll keep trying," he vows. More arrows are shot, and soon the ground is cratered with holes. But still no treasure. Exhausted, he goes back to the sage and complains that all his work has gone for naught.

"I didn't tell you to shoot with all your strength," the sage tells him. "Simply let the arrow drop from your bow." The treasure, it turns out, was right beneath the man's feet.

Similarly, Plotinus says that our spiritual wealth is so close we are unable to find it. What separates us from what we seek isn't physical distance but rather the mistaken notion that we are separated at all. For it is by running outside ourselves that we distance ourselves from the One. A spiritual seeker's first step, then, is to stop moving and realize his or her true self.

Which, according to Wei Wu Wei, doesn't exist. So there is nothing for the non-existent self to do. Only to be.

There is no need to read books, chant Sutras, recite Scriptures, perform any antics; there is nothing whatever to discuss, argue about, or explain. There is nothing whatever to teach or to be learned... No volitional action whatsoever is possible that could "liberate" from "bondage," since there is no entity to be bound or to be free.

And from a scientific perspective, here's how Thomas Metzinger starts off his book about modern neuroscience, "The Ego Tunnel."

In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self. But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are just about to shatter the myth of the self.

It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness -- that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object -- if we don't come to terms with with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond the world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has an answer in his book, "I Am a Strange Loop."

The strange loop making up an "I" is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter. Such a loop may exist "inside" an auditorium, but the fact that it is physically localized doesn't mean that one can pick it up and heft it, let alone measure such things as its temperature and thickness!

...And thus the current "I" -- the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions -- by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified "I"; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, year after year.

In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind.

Interesting. Good stuff. But we're back to some complexity. I'd better end with some simpler Wei Wu Wei.

In this process of personalizing "mind" and thinking of it as "I," we thereby make it, which is subject, into an object, whereas "I" in fact can never be such, for there is nothing objective in "I," which is essentially a direct expression of subjectivity.

This objectivising of pure subjectivity, calling it "me" or calling it "mind," is precisely what constitutes "bondage." It is this concept, termed the I-concept or ego or self, which is the supposed bondage from which we all suffer and from which we seek "liberation."

...There cannot be any such thing as bondage at all, but only the idea of such. There is no liberation, for there is no "thing" from which to be freed. If the whole conceptual structure is seen as what it is, it must necessarily collapse, and the bondage-enlightenment nonsense with it.

Along with religion. Spirituality. Mysticism. Self-development.

Bye-bye. All gone. Good riddance.

Focus on experiences or the experiencer? The big spiritual divide.

When we get down to the essence of religion, spirituality, and mysticism, it seems to me that the broad divide between various sorts of faiths can be boiled down to this question:

Is the focus on experiences, or the experiencer?

This isn't an either/or, a crisp choice between one or the other. Still, Zen and Advaita Vedanta are decidedly on the experiencer side. Meaning, what's more important is how the consciousness of a practitioner perceives reality, not what is perceived.

Pouring a cup of tea (or for me, sipping a mug of coffee) is as significant, or not, as soaring to the highest heaven and beholding the radiant face of... whatever.

Monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam are much more into experiences. Their theologies are pretty weak when it comes to explaining how our human subjectivity relates to so-called "objective" reality, which is a central concern of Buddhism.

Rather, the goal is to experience God's love, embrace Jesus after death, spend eternity with the angels in heaven.

I was inspired to ponder this subject after I started reading "Open Secret." The author is Wei Wu Wei, the pseudonym of Terence Gray. Between 1958 and 1974 this Taoism aficionado (who also was attracted to Zen and Advaita) wrote a series of books.

Previously I'd heard of Wei Wu Wei, a Taoist term meaning action that is non-action, but this is my first foray into his writings. I like his blend of logical Western philosophizing and indirect Eastern "pointing at the moon."

As several reader reviews of Open Secret on Amazon say, this book is best read slowly. The author frequently crams a lot of meaning into a few words.

Like many other "non-dual" writings, Wei Wu Wei's prose stimulates conflicting feelings in me. Sometimes I'm convinced that the guy is just talking gibberish. Then I'll come across a passage that strikes an intuitive just so chord, leading me to think, Ah, this indeed is what life is all about.

Wei Wu Wei/Terence Gray zeroes in on the nature of subjectivity and objectivity. Here we are, conscious. We're aware of all kinds of things. However, we can't make a "thing" out of our consciousness, since it isn't possible to step outside of our subjective awareness.

These are some quotes from a concluding chapter that I skipped ahead to and read this morning:

If you can't find it by looking -- don't look, if you can't find it by thinking, don't think! It is where there is no looking, and no thinking.

Not because it cannot be seen or thought, but because there is no "one" to look or to think!

If a phenomenon could be "enlightened" then "enlightenment" would be phenomenal, like inebriation or any other psycho-somatic condition. If it is not phenomenal -- and anything the word could mean metaphysically certainly is not -- then there is no "self" to experience it.

The sought is the seeker that is no thing, absence is the presence of no presence and no absence. What we are, apart from one another's objects, is the absence of all objects, whereby all objects appear to be!

In-seeing does not mean looking in one direction instead of in another, "in" instead of "out," from the same centre as is commonly supposed, but seeing from within instead of from without, seeing from the source, which is noumenon, not from manifestation, which is phenomenon. 

I am not an identity which understands something: understanding that there is no one to understand and nothing to be understood is understanding what I am!

Reading Wei Wu Wei, I was reminded of how my wife and I have friends who do a lot more traveling than we do.

They're off to Europe, a Caribbean cruise, hiking in New Zealand, exploring Bryce Canyon, and such while we usually hang around fairly close to home here in Oregon. Even though sometimes they'll urge us to take a trip that they've enjoyed, I never feel like they consider their experiences to be superior to our experiences.

After all, each of us is always experiencing something (assuming that dreamless sleep and other states of unconsciousness are experiences). So no one has an experience deficit; people simply have different experiences.

Each to his own. That's the general attitude in everyday life, even when someone tells me "You absolutely must try this new restaurant. It's marvelous!"

I know what they mean. They had a really good experience dining there, and they think I'd like the place also. But they aren't saying that my life will be worthless if I don't do what they did. It's just a suggestion for a new experience.

However, when it comes to religious, spiritual, or mystical experiences, often people who supposedly have had a special vision, insight, or whatever will speak as if anyone who hasn't shared that experience is missing out on something vitally important.

Well, maybe I was sipping my coffee instead. Or mowing the lawn. Or cooking spaghetti. I now tilt much toward the experiencer side of the divide I mentioned at the beginning of this post, than the experiences side.

What I do doesn't seem to be nearly as important as the quality of the doing -- using "quality" to mean something that I can't really describe, yet is real to me.

I'll let Alan Watts say it better than I can.

If I may put it in a way which is horribly cumbersome and inadequate, that fleeting glimpse is the perception that, suddenly, some very ordinary moment of your ordinary everyday life, lived by your very ordinary self, just as it is and just as you are -- that this immediate here-and-now is perfect and self-sufficient beyond any possibility of description.

You know that there is nothing to desire or seek for -- that no techniques, no spiritual apparatus of belief or discipline is necessary, no system of philosophy or religion. The goal is here. It is this present experience, just as it is.

...You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now -- otherwise you would not be here. Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

So become what you are.

What's wrong with change and concepts?

After I put up a post about Deepak Chopra's misunderstanding of quantum theory, Suzanne left a comment pointing me to Stanley Sobottka's website, "A Course in Consciousness."

Sobottka is an emeritus (retired) professor of physics. I enjoyed reading the short version of his course, a 75-slide Power Point presentation. I was curious to see whether his philosophical/spiritual take on quantum physics made more sense than Chopra's.

The jury inside my head is still out on that question. After I finished reading the slides, my impression was interesting, but not persuasive. Meaning, I didn't come across any grand insights that weren't already pretty familiar to me.

Sobottka is big into nondualism.

He regularly refers to sages like Ramana and Nisargadatta. Having read several books by these gurus, I wasn't surprised to find that parts of Sobottka's presentation produced the same question marks in my head as those books did.

Here's some examples.

Now, at first glance this slide elicited a "yes" from me. But on further reflection I agreed a lot more with the first two points than with the last two.

What is, is. It's difficult, if not impossible, to disagree with that.

If I stumble on the dance floor, or during my Tai Chi class, that's a fact. It's reality, what happened. But the next time I attempt the same move, I find nothing wrong in learning from my experience and changing what seemed to produce the stumble.

I don't feel separate from my "body sensation" when I try to change a bodily action. Nor do I feel separate from my thoughts when I decide to think about something different than what is currently in my mind.

Change happens. Change is part of life.

Heck, it's reasonable to say, change is life. A lifeless rock is much different from a living flower. Resisting change, including our natural desires and intentions, doesn't seem like a healthy or wise way to live.

This slide makes the same point. Again, I don't find that trying to change something -- whether inside or outside of me -- produces an increased sense of separation. As dishes pile up in our sink, there comes a point when I think, "I should put them in the dishwasher."

Doing so, I neither feel more or less separate from the world. I don't feel that something is wrong when dishes get dirty. That's what dishes are for: to put food on them, some of which sticks to the surface.

So I don't see how taking action to produce a change is a problem. This is the way of nature, including the laws of nature that Sobottka studied as a physicist.

Another part of the presentation that produced a "huh?" in my psyche concerned concepts. This slide makes some good points. We don't perceive reality as it is, but as our human perception makes it out to be.

The same holds true for dogs, cats, bats, goldfish, and every other conscious entity. We don't know what the cosmos is like from a detached "God's Eye" perspective. What would that perspective consist of? It'd just be another way of perceiving, not reality as it is absent perception.

Sobottka appears to accept an interpretation of quantum theory which posits that an act of observation leads to possibilities/probabilities becoming actualities. I guess this is what he means when he says "if there are no mental images, there are no objects."

This is questionable. I find it hard to believe that the 14 billion year old universe didn't exist until conscious beings with minds came along.

How is it that physicists and cosmologists have been able to trace the history of the universe so persuasively, including deep space images of galaxies that formed soon after the big bang, if there were no objects? (Since "mental images" weren't part of the cosmos until minds evolved.)

Along the same line, Sobottka says that objects are nothing but concepts. Well, I can sort of see what he is getting at. Physical reality, nature, doesn't come with labels attached.

Trees, stars, stones, water, grass, and what-not are defined and delimited by human cognition, even though ecologists, environmentalists, and systems theorists point out the interconnectedness of everything.

But to say that an object is nothing but a concept...hmmmmm. Maybe, maybe not. This seems to be a philosophical notion that could be debated endlessly, like so many other, well, concepts.

Yes, Sobottka uses lots of concepts in his "A Course of Consciousness." What else can he do? He is a human being with a mind/brain, who wants to communicate with other people.

What's wrong with that? What's wrong with concepts? Or, change?

Nondualism, as with most other mystical, religious, and spiritual teachings, sees big problems at the heart of life and living. We're screwed up, seeing things wrongly, enmeshed in illusion, deceived by the human psyche.

Well, as I so often say: maybe; maybe not. I now lean toward the latter. And in that regard, Sobottka agrees with me in the first part of the first slide I shared in this post. We feel things should be different from the way they are, but how could they be?

So there's the big contradiction I see in my admittedly brief foray into "A Course of Consciousness." It teaches that on the one hand, reality is what it is. On the other hand, we humans need to overcome our inability to comprehend reality as it really is. 

This presumes that some person knows what reality really is, that nondualism, or monotheism, or materialism, or idealism, or some other "ism" can capture the essence of the cosmos. Or at least point us toward our own experience of that essence.

Maybe. Maybe not. Again, I lean toward "not." And I also lean toward accepting human experience for what it is, not for what some sage, guru, or philosopher says it might be. 

Change happens. Concepts happen. What's wrong with that?

Deep dreamless sleep isn't my mystical goal

I've often wondered why the state of deep dreamless sleep is so appealing to some mystically-inclined people.

Since we're dead to the world -- both inner and outer -- seemingly the only difference between deep dreamless sleep and death is that we wake up from sleeping. I can understand wanting to experience a mystical super-consciousness, but why aspire to unconsciousness?

The Indian Upanishads probably are largely responsible for the high marks given to deep dreamless sleep. For example:

The third quarter is prājña, where one asleep neither desires anything nor beholds any dream: that is deep sleep. In this field of dreamless sleep, one becomes undivided, an undifferentiated mass of consciousness, consisting of bliss and feeding on bliss. His mouth is consciousness.

And a commentator on the Upanishads says about a high mystical state:

It is like the state of a deep dreamless sleep, like the feeling of intense bliss where neither the knower nor the known can be distinctly felt but where there is only the infinitude of blissful experience.

Well, this sure isn't my experience of deep dreamless sleep. Nor that of anyone I know. I'm conscious when awake, and I'm conscious when I dream (I often remember my dreams), but I'm completely unconscious and unaware during deep dreamless sleep.

So if this is what I'm supposed to aspire to, enlightenment-wise, no thanks. I'm just not attracted to existing in a condition where I don't know that I exist, or that anything exists. 

Yet the quotations above claim that deep dreamless sleep is super blissful. How can this be? Skepticism is warranted, because religions are fond of making dogmatic statements at odds with common sense, direct experience, and scientific knowledge.

That said, I'll be the first to admit that the nature of consciousness still is a mystery. How the brain works is becoming increasingly well understood, but the relation of all those neurons firing to our felt conscious experience basically is a big question mark.

When I have more time, I'd like to peruse a lengthy article on "Deep Sleep Awareness" that I found on the Rational Vedanta site. It discusses a debate in Vedanta about the meaning of deep dreamless sleep. Some quotes:

Sankara declares that the experience of the state of deep-sleep is a glimpse of the self's real nature, where there exists no 'I', no ego.

If there were not 'I', the same subject in pre-sleep, during sleep and post-sleep, the individual would not recognize the things after sleep that those are experienced earlier i.e., before sleep. Therefore the awareness of 'I' as particularized awareness exists even during the deep sleep, for self-luminous atman persists in deep sleep in the form of 'I'.

Again, I don't get this, or agree with it.

Sankara (or Shankara) is the leading Vedanta philosopher. But back in 800 C.E. modern neuroscience didn't exist. Plus, people slept then just like they do now: deep dreamless sleep isn't an experience, but the absence of experience.

To my mind, this shows how Eastern metaphysics can be as faith-based as Western monotheism.

Just because we wake up from a good night's sleep, which included periods of dreamlessness, and still have a sense of who we are -- how does this prove that a "self-luminous atman" (soul) persists in deep sleep?

The only thing it shows, which already is obvious to all of us, is that when we sleep our brain continues to function. Memories are retained. Our sense of self remains intact.

In the same fashion, last year I had a colonoscopy. The only thing I remember about the procedure is that I don't remember anything about it. I heard the doctor say, "I'll start the sedation." Then I woke up in the recovery area.

Just as with deep dreamless sleep, I was gone. And then I came back. I don't see what is mystical or spiritual about this. Neuroscientists have found that a brain signal persists even in deep dreamless sleep.

Neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have taken one of the first direct looks at one of the human brain's most fundamental "foundations": a brain signal that never switches off and may support many cognitive functions... This signal doesn't switch off even in dreamless sleep, possibly to help maintain basic structure and facilitate offline housekeeping activities.

It isn't at all surprising that brains preserve their structure and functionality after a period of sleep. If this didn't happen, every creature that sleeps would survive for one wakeful state.

Yet the Vedantic extolling of deep dreamless sleep continues into modern times. In his "The Transparency of Things," Rupert Spira writes:

Deep sleep is in fact simply the presence of Consciousness shining by itself. That is why it is so peaceful and enjoyable!

...Therefore, if Peace is identical to deep sleep and, as we have seen, deep sleep is the presence of Consciousness without objectivity, it follows that Peace is inherent in Consciousness, that Peace and Consciousness are one.

Wow.

Who knew that so many unfounded conclusions could be drawn from waking up from deep dreamless sleep? I guess my colonoscopy sedation also should qualify as an enlightenment experience.

Except, as noted above, I didn't experience anything while I was out. Nor does anyone experience anything in deep dreamless sleep, so far as we know (if they did, it wouldn't be "deep," or "dreamless").

Thus I don't see deep dreamless sleep as being a state I should aspire to, since I'm already highly competent at it. And if unconsciousness is divine, each of us is poised to become godlike when we die.

While I'm alive, I prefer consciousness to unconsciousness whenever possible.

(Ken Wilber, however, claims that somehow it is possible to remain conscious in deep dreamless sleep. This strikes me as an example of Wilber's propensity to make dogmatic statements that aren't backed up by evidence. There must be a way for neuroscientists to test whether someone in that brain state is aware of his or her surroundings. If Wilber, or anyone else, can prove that conscious awareness continues in deep dreamless sleep, that would be most interesting.)

Non-dualism is non-sensical, but I like it

Many things in life don't make sense, yet are enjoyable. Lost, the TV series, comes to mind.

After every episode my wife and I look at each other and say, "What the heck was that all about?" Most of the time we've got no idea what's going on. It's an entertaining ride on the Confusion Express, though.

I feel similarly about nondualism, as noted in a recent post. This is the "not two" (but also not one) mystical philosophy that underlies Vedanta, some forms of Buddhism, and various other faiths.

I'm enjoying a book I've started reading: "Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism" by Jay Michaelson. However, I don't agree with, or understand, a lot of it.

It's refreshing to have nondualism discussed from a Jewish perspective, rather than a Hindu, Buddhist, or New Age outlook. I like Michaelson's thoughtful, quasi-intellectual  style.

Having read about a third of the book, here's my favorite quote so far:

Rather, nonduality may be said to be the place where mysticism and atheism shake hands. The cosmology may be identical, as there are no puppet-masters pulling the strings of our reality. Yet the stage is now a cathedral.

This is an astute observation.

My take on nondualism is that it is the place many religious skeptics end up after they've dropped fundamentalist, faith-based, and ritualistic dogma. Yet they don't want to embrace a fully rational and scientific view of the universe that seemingly leaves little place for a mystical vision.

Indeed, Michaelson says in his introduction:

I like to think of it this way. First, if you have some belief in God, drop it. Let the atheists, or your own doubt, totally, utterly win: there is no one minding the store, just matter and energy combining and separating. There is nothing in this moment that cannot be explained by science and reason.

But then, take science seriously, and remember that there is no self either: consciousness is an illusion of the brain, after all. Believe the postmodernists, the Buddhists, the Darwinists, the cognitive materialists, and the Hasidim when they say that this sense of ego, while essential for our survival, causes us to mistake a pattern of phenomena for something that's actually there. Really, there is no soul, just a buzz of neurons. So: no God, no self. And then...what?

What's left, after the self is subtracted, is what nondualists mean by "God." Other names are fine as well. Empty phenomena, rolling on; the Divine Play; Indra's Net; the Dharma; causes and conditions; the substance of Nature, and its laws; the Shechinah and the Holy One; as you like it. YHVH, the primary Jewish name for God, basically means "Is."

OK. So what "Is" is, is what is. That's cool.

It's great to have a philosophy whose central adage can fit on a bumper sticker. ("Form is emptiness and emptiness is form" is a bit longer, but also pithy.)

Thus anything and everything is included in the nondual vision. Transcendence. Immanence. Emotions. Detachment. Silence. Speaking. Thoughts. No mind. Heaven. Hell. Sinning. Saintliness. Materiality. Spirituality.

This sounds wonderful, just as the above-mentioned cathedral seems more attractive than a plain old stage. But when everything on the stage is in the cathedral, the only difference between the two is...what?

What's difficult to understand about nondualism is what's the point of it? 

The answer, if there is one, might be: to realize that there's no one to get the point, or any point. The self which is doing the asking doesn't really exist, so existential questions are pointless. (Practical questions, though, like "who will win the Super Bowl?" aren't, especially if you have a bet on the game.)

At first, most of us imagine that we are essentially selves, and some of us believe that there is a God as well. Nonduality invites us to suppose nothing, believe nothing: that there is no God, but also that there is no self. When there is merely no God, we remain as we were. But when there is also no self, then what is left is the Ein Sof, the God beyond "God." Simply what is; simply this; and not-this as well, "surrounding as well as "filling" all that can be predicated.

And from that fullness, which is also utter emptiness, God reappears, and the self reappears as well -- only now as masks, perspectives, ways of seeing, modes of speech. Some masks are more real than others; some are merely imaginary. But that becomes a subject for a different conversation. In silence, all disappears. From silence, all is born.

Well, like I said, nondualism doesn't make sense. It's likable, though. When I finish Michaelson's book I'll let you know whether I've grown even fonder of nonduality.

Non-duality both appeals and repels (appropriately)

Here's my bottom line on non-dualism: it's either (1) the best take on ultimate reality that humans have ever come up with, or (2) a total crock of shit.

Of course, if (1) is the case then seemingly both (1) and (2) are true -- since either/or distinctions don't have much of a place in non-dualism.

I got to pondering this stuff after Amazon sucked me in this morning with one of their irritatingly accurate emails. (If there is a God, his name is Jeff Bezos).

Amazon apparently looks at the books I buy and then correlates them with other books favored by people with my reading habits. I was prepared to hit the "delete" button after glancing at the email, but I couldn't resist clicking on a couple of astute suggestions.

One of which was "Love's Quiet Revolution: The End of the Spiritual Search" by Scott Kiloby.

I'd never heard of the guy. I read some reader reviews of his book and came across a mention of how marvelous his You Tube videos were. So I took a look at a couple.

"Freedom from your own insights" starts off with these words:

So whatever it is you think enlightenment is, that's what it's not. And that's where you're stuck.

Well, that struck me as good news. I don't have much of an idea about what enlightenment is, so this must mean that I'm fairly free to find it.

Except, there doesn't seem to be anything to find.

At least nothing that can be described in any way. The next video I watched, "Your Spiritual Teacher is Full of Crap," started off with: Never trust a spiritual teacher who appears to believe in his own crap.

Hmmmm.

This sentiment appealed to my churchless non-soul. However, I couldn't help but wonder whether Scott Kiloby believed in his own advice about not trusting a spiritual teacher who believes in his own crap.

That's what I find irritating about non-dualism. Those who espouse it often sound a lot like anyone else who has a religious, philosophical, or metaphysical position to defend.

Yet the non-dual claim basically is that there's nothing to defend, and no one to do the defending. Differences are illusory (though not unreal).

I headed over to Kiloby's web site to see if that would help me better understand his point of view. On the home page I read:

Enlightenment is not reserved for gurus or available only after years of practice or seeking. It is your birthright. It is not a special state, experience, thought, or emotion that one has to find or maintain. The word “enlightenment” is merely a label pointing to the direct and immediate recognition of timeless awareness. This awareness holds the key to your real identity. It reveals that there is no separate self.  It reveals that all boundaries are illusory including the boundaries between people, religions, programs, paths, groups, and nations.

Sounds good.

In the site's "writings" section I was advised to read this piece before perusing anything else. It started off with Present awareness is our real identity. Nice and simple.

But it took 72 pages to eludicate this thought. And this is just one of many essays by Kiloby, along with several books that he's written. Browsing through the piece, I kept coming back to my love-hate relationship with non-dualism.

I love how it focuses on awareness of the here and now.
I hate how it makes awareness into something esoteric and complex.

Now, I realize that advocates of non-dualism would take exception to my hate statement. I guess they'd argue that it takes countless books, videos, workshops, web sites, seminars, and what-not to communicate the non-dual message that there is nothing to communicate.

OK, maybe. The Buddha, though, did fine by simply holding up a flower. 

If there's nothing to say about non-dualism, then why do non-dualists use so many words to say that nothing? Alternatively, if there is something to say, then why criticize spiritual teachers for believing that their sayings are more than "crap"?

I don't get it. But I have sent off some bucks to Amazon for Kiloby's book. So there is indeed a reason to talk about non-dualism, $16.99 worth of reasons.

Jed McKenna -- an illusion of enlightenment?

In "Spiritual Enlightenment," Jed McKenna tells us that he is enlightened. In fact, he says that a lot. Which got me to thinking, now that I'm a bit over halfway through the book (which was recommended to me by an old friend)...

Does enlightenment exist?
If so, what the heck is it"?
How would we know someone is enlightened?

Other questions come to mind also, because this is one of those intriguing/exasperating books that make me say "what a bunch of crap" on one page, and "right on, brother Jed" on the next.

Such as, does Jed McKenna exist as the sort of guy he puts himself out to be in the book?

Namely, someone who has achieved non-dual enlightenment, owns a big farm house somewhere in rural Iowa, and acts as a guide to all kinds of folks who come to this quasi-ashram to be disillusioned of all their fake religious, mystical, philosophical, and spiritual beliefs, and absorb the unexcelled wisdom of Jedism.

Since the Jedism blogger says this on his home page, I'm strongly inclined to accept the prevailing opinion that someone going by "Jed McKenna" has written a fictional book with non-fiction overtones.

Yes, we understand that “Jed Mckenna” is a fictional character or alter-ego, perhaps in the same way that “Don Juan” of the Carlos Castaneda books may have been, but that doesn’t diminish the impact that the ideas, images and intuitions have had on many people.

Now, just because Jed McKenna has made up stuff about his life, this doesn't mean that he has made up his enlightenment. However, the questions I asked above still remain.

Over and over, Jed talks about himself in the fashion below. It may sound tongue-in-cheek, but believe me, he wants us to believe him.

The difference between us isn't that I'm enlightened and you're not. The difference is that I know it and you don't. I possess selfless awareness and you don't... I basically believe that I know everything and nobody else knows anything... The greatest men and women who have ever lived are just children on a playground to me.

Jed's "trip" (as we used to say in the '60's) is demolishing everyone else's view of reality but his own.

He's got a way with words, and almost surely he's making up the conversations in his book anyway, so not surprisingly enlightened Jed comes out on top of every meaning-of-life dialogue in "Spiritual Enlightenment." (Spoiler alert: there isn't one -- a meaning of life.)

There's a lot of fawning praise of the book on Amazon. So I zipped right to the minority 1-star reviews. Quite a bit of thoughtful skepticism here. Such as:

Which brings up the interesting question, when he became enlightened, how did he know his other state-of-being was to be called "enlightenment". And not, for instance, "satori", "nirvana", "at-one-ness", "super-acidity", what have you?

The original words from which the word "enlightenment" was created: "nirvana" or "nibbana" and "satori" etc have been lost for thousands of years, so how did McKenna arrive at this state and said "Ah, this is the state of 'enlightenment'". How did he know it was not a state of permanent foobarisment?

In fact, he makes such strong and fine distinctions, that one wonders if there is a hidden school somewhere that maintains the old traditions: "That was spiritual awakening, not non-dualism, McKenna. Drop down and give me twenty! Now let's work on mystical one-ness for the next hour."

This reader review encapsulates the main problem I have with Jedism, or any "ism" that claims it's followers possess a clearer view of ultimate reality than the rest of us deluded fools.

We're expected to accept some guy's (rarely, gal's) claim of enlightenment without any evidence that he has achieved it -- or even often, as in Jed's case, that there is any way to describe a state of enlightenment.

"You'll know it when you become it," is Jed's oft-repeated message to his (fictional) acolytes. If someone asks "What is it?" or "How do you get it?" the basic answer is to seek what is truly true with great raging determination, a la Ramana's admonition to keep asking "Who am I?"

Here's some of the many contradictions in the book.

Spiritual teachers aren't to be trusted, and aren't really needed (Jed got enlightened on his own). But Jed clearly enjoys playing guru to his disciples, even though he'd deny that this was what was going on. 

Jed McKenna decries spiritual paths that exalt a guru and declare the teachings sacred, but he fills the first ten pages of his book with blurbs extolling him and what he's written (since, he's self-published several more titles about the truth of Jedism).

Everybody has to find truly true truth for himself or herself. However, there's only one acceptable outcome: non-dual enlightenment, whatever that is.

Along that line, it's tough to recognize the non-duality in Jed's enlightenment. In the book Jed acts like a normal, albeit deeply egotistical and self-centered, human being. He bikes, drives, skydives, shovels gravel, goes on walks, reads, watches TV, conducts interviews, and such.

Put him in a Mystic Lineup, and I don't see how a guy like Jed would reliably be chosen as the One Genuine Enlightened Being out of a bunch of other candidates.

Like I said, he talks the game better than most, but the question remains whether there's any meat/tofu under the bun of his verbiage.

Meaning, Jed, along with most other spiritual, mystic, and religious faiths, considers that it's possible to illuminate the darkness of primordial mystery. This, I guess, is "enlightenment" -- seeing what IT is all about -- even if IT can't be described to anyone else.

Jed loves to use a quasi-Platonic analogy.

Everybody but him is watching the movie of life, not realizing that it is just a dramatic production, not reality. Jed, though, has seen through the screen, projection mechanism, and all that. He knows that everybody is just playing a role, like actors in a movie.

This assumes that everyone has a self, or consciousness, that is non-role'd in some fashion -- a really real identity, better termed a non-self, that is the touchstone of truth. The diamond of reality compared to which everything else is costume jewelery.

Well, maybe.

But I doubt that Jed is the real deal. Or, that anyone is. I lean toward leaving mystery mysterious rather than trying to explain it away with a magic word: "enlightenment."

There's a lot to like in Spiritual Enlightenment. I resonate with Jed's talk of black holes. I just question whether there is really any light at the end of the black hole tunnel. For me, truth is admitting "yes, blackness" when the big questions of life and existence remain unanswered.

Jed, however, believes it is possible to fly right through cosmic mystery and come out the other side.

Here's the most directly I am able to say this: The one and only truth of a person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else, everything else, is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole.

...All fear is ultimately fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of the hole is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole, and anything that's not about getting to and through the hole is just more rubbish and debris.

Well, this assumes that it is possible to step through ourselves, or everyday reality, and reach somewhere else. Since the cosmos supposedly is non-dual, according to Jedism, I don't understand all this talk about rubbish and debris being so undesirable compared to the black hole.

Here's another way at looking at things: the Hubble Deep Field in 3-D. I like the idea of no end to the cosmos. Or of seeking the truth of it.

Rules of the non-duality club

I think this guy has nailed non-duality, in a Fight Club sense. Sure seems like he's been following the non-dual comment conversations on this blog. See if you agree.

Self, no-self...what's the difference?

Maybe I have a "self." Maybe I don't.

There doesn't seem to be any way to tell. Which makes me wonder, who the heck cares, if there's no evident difference between self and no-self?

I've enjoyed the comment conversation between Manjit and me on this blog's "Losing your self is so egotistical" post. We've been going at it discussing whether there's a self to lose.

Something related to my brain and laptop-typing fingers -- sure seems like a self -- keeps arguing that unless we're one with the cosmos, there's a separate sense of identity.

Manjit prefers to see this as a non-issue. Since there's no such thing as a self, there's no way to lose it.

Well, if that's the case, why have I been able to read big thick books by Ramana, Nisargadatta, and a bunch of others about how to go about realizing the truth of non-duality?

I mean, this sure doesn't seem to be the same thing as not being able to lose my unicorn, since I don't have one.

People don't travel to India and spend years meditating in a dark closet trying to come to the realization that they don't have a unicorn and shouldn't be worrying about what happens to it.

Yet there's a huge spiritual industry associated with losing the self. Or, as some put it, becoming aware that there never was a self to lose.

Gurus... books... seminars... retreats... web sites... what's the point of it all?

Here's how I've come to see this self vs. no-self question: if there's no way to tell the difference between someone who considers they have (or are) a self and someone who doesn't, we're in the realm of words, not reality.

I want to see a Who Has a Self? reality show. Put a bunch of people together. Film them interacting and doing everyday stuff. Viewers vote on who has a self and who doesn't.

If the public thinks someone is full of themselves, they get booted off Selfless Island.

Of course, we have to wonder whether the vote would be just a subjective opinion or an accurate reflection of reality. Are some people -- perfect gurus, realized souls, enlightened beings -- truly selfless, having seen through the illusion of duality?

And the big question: If so, how would anyone know? 

"Anyone" includes themselves. Because usually non-dual teachings say there's no obvious sign of having attained a selfless state.

No capacity to perform miracles. No freedom from normal human frailties. No extra-sensory perceptions. No knowledge unavailable to self-filled humans.

Often this issues comes up in books about, or by, some supposed guru or spiritual master. Why does he or she still get angry, irritated, depressed, or forgetful? Why does he or she not show any unique qualities that scream out, not leaving any doubt, Realized Being Here! ?

I've heard many first person stories similar to this one: a guru who is considered to be God in human form angrily throws a book manuscript at the would-be author. This is viewed as an act of grace, a "tough love" lesson.

Yet a neutral observer would say, "Gee, that bearded guy in the turban sure acted angry for no reason."

So I'm still looking for evidence that there's a difference between selfless and selfed people (including the non-dualists who straddle the self-no self divide).

Sure, there are wonderful devoted Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and others who serve the world in a seemingly selfless fashion. But there also are plenty of ordinary people with the same compassionate, centered, caring characteristics.

Sam Harris makes some good points in "A Contemplative Science." The brain just does what it does. There's no evidence of an immaterial "ghost in the machine," or self.

If we flow with experience, understanding that there's no hard and fast distinction between us and the cosmos, inside and outside, self and non-self, things seem to go more smoothly.

But this is a far cry from the religious claims of those who elevate the elimination of ego (or the realization that such doesn't exist) to sacred status. I'll end with this Harris quote:

Needless to say, any truths uncovered about the human mind through meditation cannot be "Buddhist". And if meditation ever becomes widely adopted as a tool of science, it will be quickly stripped of its Buddhist roots. There are, after all, very good reasons we don't talk about "Christian physics" or "Muslim algebra".

Physics and algebra are genuine domains of human inquiry, and as such, they transcend the cultural conditions out of which they arose. Today, anyone emphasizing the religious roots of these intellectual disciplines would stand convicted of not understanding them at all.

In the same way, if we ever develop a scientific account of the contemplative path, speaking of "Buddhist" meditation will be synonymous with a failure to assimilate the changes that will have occurred in our understanding of the human mind.

Start with mystery closest to home

I've been enjoying recent Church of the Churchless comment conversations, here, here, and here (plus a few other post places).

In this regard, I want to mention that I keep on telling TypePad, which hosts this blog, that they need to improve their comment features. It bugs me that only the ten most recent comments are shown on the left sidebar, and that it isn't possible for visitors to search through previous comments (I can, but others can't).

TypePad assures me that they'll get around to this. Someday. Guess I need to have faith.

Which brings me to a thought that's been stimulated by what others have been saying in their comments – and usually is front and center in my own questioning mind: What can we know for sure?

Really, not much. Even science recognizes this, because every scientific theory is provisional. Meaning, it can be falsified if new evidence comes along.

With religion, spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy, the knowing is even less certain. Here beliefs rather than observations predominate. And beliefs, being mental, always can be refuted by someone with a different mentality.

"Jesus died for our sins so that we may be born again and reside with our Father in Heaven."
"Prove it."
"It's a matter of faith."
"No, it's a matter of bullshit."

So it goes in the arena of belief. Nobody can be declared a winner, except by those who refuse to recognize the other contestants.

God remains a mystery. We don't know whether God exists. So obviously we also don't know how God might exist. Yet every religion and spiritual path believes that it has the answer, ignoring the evident fact of mystery.

As many commenters keep saying, either directly or indirectly, it makes sense to start from the other direction: with another mystery much closer to home. So close, it's right before our eyes. In fact, it is our eyes – plus every other sensory organ.

Because it's awareness, or consciousness. This is just as much a mystery as God is.

Science has no idea (though notions abound) as to how consciousness arises or what it is, really. Much is known about brain functions related to mental events, but the hard problem of consciousness — what is awareness? — shows no sign of being resolved.

Why not start here, if you're a spiritual seeker? Why speculate about far off divinities or heavens when you've got an equally peachy-keen gigantic mystery right here?

I'm aware. You're aware. That's so freaking amazing (and also the most natural thing in the world) that there's no need to look beyond awareness if we're wanting to grasp What It Is All About.

This morning I picked up one of my favorite books, "Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi." The first chapter starts off by talking about the mystery of awareness.

The essence of Sri Raman's teachings is conveyed in his frequent assertions that there is a single immanent reality, directly experienced by everyone, which is simultaneously the source, the substance, and the real nature of everything that exists.

He gave it a number of different names, each one signifying a different aspect of the same indivisible reality. The following classification includes all of his most common synonyms and explains the implications of the various terms used.

1. The Self. This is the term that he used the most frequently. He defined it by saying that the real Self or real "I" is, contrary to perceptible experience, not an experience of individuality but a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness. It is not to be confused with the individual self which he said was essentially non-existent, being a fabrication of the mind which obscures the true experience of the real Self.

He maintained that the real Self is always present and always experienced but he emphasized that one is only consciously aware of it as it really is when the self-limiting tendencies of the mind have ceased. Permanent and continuous Self-awareness is known as Self-realization.

Now, there's quite a bit in "Be As You Are" that, in my opinion, edges into esoteric Indian mysticism and beliefs that need to be taken on faith.

But it's impossible to argue with the fact that each of us is aware. And this is a mystery that holds the key to every other mystery – because consciousness is a prerequisite for being conscious of anything.

For a long time I've had an itch to write a book called "My Best Guess About God." Because that's all I have: speculations on the subject. There'd be one line in the book, though, that would be incontestable.

And cribbed from Descartes. Who echoes a multitude of other philosophers, mystics, and sages across the ages.

"I'm not sure about anything except that I am aware…of not being sure about anything."

Each of us has to start from somewhere. Awareness. Whether we ever can move from this place is exceedingly unlikely. In fact, impossible.

So religious dogmas that skip over this evident fact are worthless. They ignore the mystery (many would say, divinity) of our own self and would have us believe in artificial human conceptions rather than the most natural thing in existence.

Consciousness of existence.

I am, therefore I am

The older I get, the more I feel like embracing seriously simple approaches to spirituality.

That way, if I become senile, when someone asks me what I believe a ready answer is more likely to spring from my receding lips and failing psyche.

This helps explain why I'm enjoying Stanley Sobottka's Course in Consciousness so much. I've been lugging my laptop into my meditation lair each morning, reading some of his downloaded book-length manuscript before I meditate.

I'm about halfway through. The basic message is exceedingly simple, though it takes over 200 pages to express it.

Consciousness is all there is. That's the essence of Advaita, Vedanta, Buddhism, and some Western philosophies also.

Though countless books have been written about this notion, if you're asked to explain this world view whatever you say or don't say, that's it – already present in your questioner's consciousness, because he or she is conscious.

Over and over Sobottka reminds the reader that everything he's written is a concept, not reality. As is, in his opinion, time and space itself, plus the laws of nature.

What gives his position more intellectual credence is his status as an Emeritus Professor of Physics. Being someone who swings both ways with science and spirituality, I like how he starts off his Course in Consciousness with a solid overview of quantum physics, then heads into the airier philosophic reaches of nonduality.

Much of what Sobottka sets forth is virtually indisputable. Such as, knowledge of reality always comes through consciousness.

Well, yeah. How else could it come? If it's impossible to be conscious of something, what reality does it possess for us? Imagining a unicorn would be a lot more real, because that bit of fantasy would be present in an individual consciousness – which makes it something rather than nothing.

Just not a shared something, a part of supposedly objective reality that we can agree on. I say "supposedly," because Sobottka isn't big on objectivity given his consciousness is everything leaning.

More accurately, he sees subjectivity and objectivity as the same thing – consciousness. So the divisions we usually make between inner and outer, subjective and objective, spirituality and science, and so on, don't really exist for him.

From this perspective Descartes was right when he said, "I think, therefore I am." But he could also have said, "I don't think, therefore I am." More simply, "I am, therefore I am." Or "I am."

Or…anything at all. Like, "1, 2, 3, A, B, C." Whatever.

Whenever I read about nonduality or advaita, I tend to think "This is either the biggest bunch of crap ever, or the truest thing that can be said."

There's no in between, really. Once you say consciousness is all there is, you're committed 100%. Totally right or totally wrong. (Though if you're right, there's no right or wrong.)

Sobottka does a nice job of using quantum physics to support nondual notions. For example, he points out that those who posit some sort of transcendental mystic realm where quantum reality resides don't understand that the quantum wave function is deterministic and requires time and space to function.

So New Age notions about quantum phenomena being metaphysical don't mesh with scientific fact. They also don't mesh with nonduality or oneness, since dividing reality into "physical" and "metaphysical" is decidedly dual.

I also like how Sobottka demolishes the "we create our own reality" fiction. This often is heard from people who know just enough about quantum physics to make misleading philosophical conclusions about it.

He says that while consciousness does play a central role in the collapse of the wave function, which determines what quantum phenomena come into being and which remain potentialities, it must be a universal consciousness that does this – not an individual consciousness.

Again, this points to nonduality. We believe we're unique and separate from others, but it could well be that each manifestation of consciousness actually is an expression of the whole.

One reality. One consciousness. One thing going on.

Simple.

Many would be tempted to say "too simple." However, that "too" leads to "two." Which could be the way things are. But I've got an affection for one.

Quantum and non-dual consciousness

Ah, intellectual and inspirational bliss.

A free, downloadable, thoughtful, well-written "Course in Consciousness" that moves smoothly from down to earth quantum theory to soaring spirituality.

This is my cup of reading tea. I've only been able to quickly browse through the 242 pages of Stanley Sobottka's writing, but I can tell that there's a lot to like here.

Sobottka is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, so obviously he knows his scientific stuff.

His deep knowledge of, and appreciation for, Buddhist/Advaita teachings is more surprising – though he isn't the only physicist to wade into some deep philosophical waters (Amit Goswami and Shimon Malin are some others).

Check out Sobottka's short "Dialogue in Consciousness" for an overview of his approach. I resonate with almost everything he says, though I can't help repeating my mantra, "What do I know?"

I learned about the Course in Consciousness from a post on the Church of the Churchless forum. It quoted a paragraph on page 184:

Particularly destructive among the self-deluded spiritual teachers are those who teach that only they and their personal power can bring freedom, or that they are the ones best suited for the task. They would merely strengthen the chains of our bondage. No genuine teacher will imply that we need anything or anyone, since we are already free and complete. A teacher's function is to convey this to the student, and to help him or her to see that. A teacher is at best an invaluable resource to the student, and at worst, a "false prophet", the deluded purporting to teach the deluded, the blind trying to lead the blind.

Amen to that.

This passage from page 101 also appealed to me:

In summary, the following is what physics (plus some simple logic) tells us: There are no objects. There is only a series of observations. There is no observer. There is only nonlocal universal consciousness. As we shall see later, these statements are the essence of both Advaita and Buddhism. (In Advaita, nonlocal universal consciousness is called pure Awareness. In Mahayana Buddhism, it is called primordial consciousness, or buddha-nature.) It is remarkable that physics, which is the science of external, objective reality, can tell us so much about subjective reality, and also can be in such agreement with our most profound nondualistic teachings.

I'm a big fan of science. I also am attracted to the nondual teachings that constitute much of Sobottka's course.

It seems crazy that to know reality, we'd have to ignore half of it: objectivity or subjectivity. Consciousness seemingly links the outer and the inner, science and spirit, physics and mysticism – because if we're not conscious of something, it doesn't exist for us.

Here's Sobottka's Chapter 26: "Very short summary"

The following concepts, like all concepts, cannot describe Reality, but, unlike most concepts, they point to Reality.

1. The premise: Consciousness is all there is. Another word for Consciousness is the impersonal, yet intimate, I.

2. The conclusions:

I am not an object or entity.
Objects and entities are never real.
Whatever is supposed to happen will happen. Whatever is not supposed to happen will not happen. There is no doer, so there is no choice.
The entire manifestation is an expression of Love.

3. The practice: Don't believe this—look and see it for yourself!

This interview with Sobottka also encapsulates his outlook.

[Technical note: Sobottka's web site has links to some interesting PowerPoint presentations. If you don't have PowerPoint, you can view them with a free PowerPoint viewer.]

Surrendering to nothing outside myself

Sometimes I surprise myself. Reading along in a nicely non-dualistic advaitaish book I didn't expect to find myself moved by a passage about surrender.

If you surrender, doesn't it have to be to someone or something outside of yourself? That doesn't sound very non-dual. Usually religions preach the virtue of surrendering either to God or His earthly representative – a prophet, guru, messiah.

I don't like the idea of surrender under those terms. Throwing myself at the mercy of an imaginary being called "God" makes as much sense as pleading to the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus to take care of me.

And surrendering to another human being – that's got too much of a master/slave thing going on.

But there's another way of looking at surrender: to reality. Which, since I seem to be just about as real (or unreal) as anything else, includes me. Here's how Ramana Maharshi puts it in excerpts from his writings quoted in "One."

Complete surrender is another name for jnana or liberation. Offer yourself up unconditionally to the power that is your own source.

It is enough that one surrenders oneself. Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one's being. Do not delude yourself by imagining such a source to be some God outside you. Your source is within yourself. Give yourself up to it.

I've read several books about Ramana's teachings. What can be confusing about is the way he bounces back and forth between speaking of the Self as the non-dual essence of everything, and talking about God in a seemingly theistic manner.

However, just as with Ibn 'Arabi, I've learned to mentally translate Ramana's "He's" and "Him's" into "That's." Ramana recognized that some people are drawn to a conception of a personal divinity, so he gave them what they wanted.

What I want, though, isn't surrender to another person – even if it supposedly is the Big Man Upstairs. Reality will do just fine, thank you.

And that's what I feel I get from Ramana, once I burrow beneath the apparent monotheism of his words and hit a deeper vein of non-duality.

Complete surrender does require that you have no desire of your own, that God's desire alone is your desire and that you have no desire of your own.

Banish even the thought "I am a fit instrument for Him" and remain still.

Abidance in one's real state is ceasing to exist as a slave [of God]; it is remaining even without the thought "I am a slave" rising; it is egoless mauna [silence], utterly still, having no mental movements. The unlimited consciousness that shines in this state is the [true] consciousness.

Surrender to Him and abide by His will whether he appears or vanishes; await His pleasure. If you ask Him to do as you please, it is not surrender but command to Him. You cannot have Him obey you and yet think that you have surrendered.

He knows what is best and when and how to do it. Leave everything to Him. His is the burden; you have no longer any cares. All your cares are His. Such is surrender. This is bhakti.

Or, enquire to whom these questions arise. Dive deep in the Heart and remain as the Self. One of these two ways is open to the aspirant.

Two ways? Maybe. However, I suspect they're the same way.

Worship at your own doorstep

This morning, before meditating, I read some inspiring words from Vivekananda about strength. Our strength. Not God’s. Not a guru’s. Not anyone else’s.

I decided to ask Google to tell me more about “Vivekananda” and “strength.” In the results I found myself. Thank you, Google. That’s exactly what I need to know.

Or rather, remind myself of. These distant gods, these elevated theologies, these remote sages—increasingly they seem like comic book characters to me. Two dimensional, artificial, unnatural, fantastical.

I may not have the answers to the big questions of life. I may be ignorant of what, if anything, lies beyond the physical. I may be clueless about how one even begins to unravel the mysteries of consciousness, life, death, and existence.

But there’s one big plus to me: I know that I am. Right here, right now, sitting on a chair, typing on my laptop, glancing out a window at a typically gray and rainy January Oregon day, I’m something real.

Now, what that “something” truly is, that’s a question for another day. Or moment. Or lifetime. However, there’s always an immediate answer to my what’s it all about? It’s whatever I’m aware of here and now.

Logically (and also intuitively) that’s always going to be the answer. It’ll shape shift along with every other changeable bit of the cosmos. Which, if the Buddhists have it right, is all the bits.

What I like about Vivekananda is what I like about myself when I’m not avoiding being who I am. He turns us around toward the person we see when we look in a mirror. He urges, “Worship that. Be that. Act boldly as that.”

My knowledge of Tango is as limited as my knowledge of ultimate reality. Still, I’ve learned this much: when the leader leads, he does so decisively; when the follower follows, she does so decisively.

No maybe’s. No perhaps’. No possibly’s. Either take a step, or don’t. If you do, do it. All the way. 100%. Full throttle. Pedal to the metal. That’s the ideal, at least.

Who can live up to it? Only a few, whether on the dance floor or in the meditation chamber. Still, whether we’re leading or following, yang’ing or yin’ing, pursuing or surrendering, the more strength and confidence we bring to whatever we’re doing, the better off we’ll be.

Religion is a strength sapper. Especially when your belief is in a personal god who is separate from creation. Vivekananda says:

There are, no doubt, great and wonderful things in the religions of the dualists. Wonderful is the idea of the Personal God apart from nature, whom we worship and love. Sometimes this idea is very soothing.

But, says Vedanta, that feeling is something like the effect that comes from an opiate; it is not natural. It brings weakness in the long run, and what this world wants today more than it ever did before is strength. It is weakness, says Vedanta, that is the cause of all misery in this world.

Weakness is the one cause of suffering. We become miserable because we are weak. We lie, steal, kill, and die because we are weak…We are miserable through delusion. Give up the delusion and the whole thing vanishes. It is plain and simple indeed.

What is so plain and simple?

I know it is Truth alone that gives strength. I know that Truth alone gives life, and nothing but approaching Reality will make us strong, and that none will reach Truth until he is strong. Any system, therefore, which weakens the mind, which makes one superstitious, makes one mope, makes one desire all sorts of wild impossibilities, mysteries, and superstitions, I do not like, because its effect is dangerous.

…When we have nobody to grope towards, no Devil to lay our blame upon, no Personal God to carry our burdens, when we alone are responsible, then we shall rise to our highest and best…Cry to all the gods in the universe. I cried for years, and in the end I received help. But the help came from within myself; and I had to undo what I had done by mistake.

…The idea that the goal is far off, far beyond nature, attracting us all towards it, has to be changed; the goal has to brought nearer and nearer, without degrading or debasing it. The God of heaven becomes the God in nature, and the God in nature becomes the God who is nature, and the God who is nature becomes the God within this temple of the body, and the God dwelling in the temple of the body at last becomes the temple itself, becomes the soul and man—and there Vedanta reaches the last words it can teach.

…The idea of freedom that you perceived was correct, but you projected it outside yourself, and that was your mistake. Bring it nearer and nearer, until you find that it was all the time within you, it was the Self of your own self.

Gangaji, Eli, and Neo-Advaita hypocrisy

Ah, nothing like a guru-student sexual affair to spice up a churchless blog. Through my friend Randy’s “Gangaji’s Pinprick” and “More on Gangaji and Eli Jaxon-Bear” posts I’ve learned about some Neo-Advaitan hypocritical failure to practice what you preach.

Understand: the hypocrisy is what bothers me about spiritual teacher Eli, who is married to fellow spiritual teacher Gangaji, having a three-year affair with a much younger female student. Affairs happen. Usually they should remain a private matter.

Some of the commenters to an Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings story about Jaxon-Bear’s affair wondered why this was newsworthy.

Well, I agree with a Ron who said, “When you have an Ashland-based group that has some national prominence, and that is a spiritual organization whose leader gets caught with his pants down, so to speak, that's news.”

(Another commenter called Ashland “ten square miles of land surrounded by reality.” Neale Donald Walsch of “Conversations with God” fame, the subject of my previous post, also lives in Ashland. Along with other gurus. I love this quirky southern Oregon town, noted for its Shakespeare festival, which is about three and a half hours down I-5 from where I live.)

Coincidentally, if there is such a thing, yesterday I had coffee with my philosophical friend Patricia. She’d brought along the most recent issue of “What is Enlightenment?” It featured a critical article about Neo-Advaita that I found interesting: “Who’s Transforming Anyway?”

The author, Tom Huston, describes his youthful descent into the craziness of this New Agey teaching that we’re all already enlightened; we just don’t know it. Concerning Andrew Cohen and the editors of “What is Enlightenment?” Huston says:

No matter how effective a mystical teaching Advaita might have been in India’s ancient past, its newborn Western child, Neo-Advaita, seemed to be missing something significant. Isolated from its Eastern religious and historical context and taught as a quick-fix, no-frills contemporary path to spiritual enlightenment, they noticed its tendency to ignore traditional values like ethics and the cultivation of personal integrity.

Gangaji is one of the Neo-Advaita teachers mocked in Jessica Roemischer’s related previously-published piece, where Stacey Heartspring encounters the post-modern craze of Neo-Advaita. Here’s a typical Neo-Advaita bit of blather from Gangaji:

There is nothing that keeps you from the realization of your inherent, permanent, present freedom except your imagination that somebody or something is keeping you from that.

Neale Donald Walsch, who by and large echoes Gangaji’s and Eli’s outlook, says pretty much the same thing:

It’s not really a question of stepping into an experience so much as it is allowing it to flow through us more fully and more completely. It is quite possible for anyone to do that without any sort of training, without any particular sort of discipline, without any study, but with just a willingness to have the experience. And the first step is to allow the possibility that it could occur, because of course if you don’t think it could occur, then it cannot.

Well, fine. I haven’t realized my “inherent, permanent, present freedom.” But it’s possible that Gangaji and her hubby Eli have.

She’s written a book that promises to reveal how we all can “directly experience the perfect radiance of who you really are.” And at this very moment spiritual seekers are enjoying the “rare gift of being with Eli in an advanced setting for ten days.” So we have to assume that Gangaji practices what she preaches about desperation:

Find who is feeling desperate. The feeling of desperation only continues because you assume that you are, in fact, something that the feeling is hooked on to.

Hmmmm. I wonder why Gangaji and Eli had to go through a three month separation to resolve their differences if neither of them is a “something” that can be hooked by negative feelings, and if, as fellow Neo-Advaitist Tony Parsons says, “all concepts of good or bad, original sin, karma or debt of any kind are products of an unawakened mind.”

Eli and Gangaji, who somehow spoke as one voice in this interview, say:

Each of us needs to experience the ignorance, to find the place of fundamentalist certainty, fear, aggression, and animal territoriality, and to discover what is deeper. What is deeper is the next stage in the evolution of the human. It is the transcendental realization that you are not limited to human animal-ness. I do not mean merely to understand this, or to believe this, or to hope this is so, but to directly realize it for oneself. This requires the willingness to turn one’s back on personal identity as a male or female human animal.

Yet a student of theirs says that Eli is a “sexual predator who abused his power in the most egregious way.” Sounds pretty animalistic to me.

I’ve got no problem with men or women acting like animals. That’s a big part of what makes sex enjoyable. What ruffles my avian feathers is when a religious or spiritual figure pretends to be something that he or she is not, or says one thing and does another.

Another proponent of Neo-Advaita, Francis Lucille, says that “the only sin is to take yourself for a sinner.” I don’t agree with that point of view, but it is admirably simple and clear.

If it is true, though, then there wouldn’t have been a need for the Gangaji Foundation to issue an apologetic letter to their community of followers.
[Update: This letter has been removed by the Foundation. However, emails from the Foundation relating to the scandal still can be found at another web site.]

What was initially seen as a matter between adults is now recognized to be a betrayal of the teacher/student relationship and an abuse of power. A trust with the larger community also has been broken. This is an important revelation as real harm is being experienced by the student and is being fully acknowledged. The repercussions of this betrayal are reverberating in ways that were never imagined, but are very painful.

Tom Huston describes how he awakened from the relativistic nightmare of Neo-Advaita that, for a time, passed for spiritual truth in his excessively nihilistic eyes. There’s a valuable lesson for all of us here: fundamentalism doesn’t only come in the guise of traditional religion.

Tell it like it is, Tom:

Night after night, day after day, I’d storm Zen Buddhist forums, atheist forums, Christian forums, and even Natalie Portman fan discussion forums with my proselytizing passion for the Neo-Advaita way. “You morons think you’re real? Try this,” I’d say, as I dished out the intoxicating truth that renders human beings and their concerns into utter irrelevancy.

…“If all is One, then nothing is wrong,” said the notorious murderer Charles Manson. And while I didn’t actually kill anybody as I spread my love of Neo-Advaita far and wide, I probably did as much damage as one can with words alone, subverting all beliefs, trouncing all opinions, actively denying all values, hopes, and dreams—and loving every second of it, as I savored my absolute power over all relativity.

Yesterday Patricia and I talked about the big difference between thinking that you’re an enlightened spiritual person and actually being such. Passionate Neo-Advaita advocates, like all true believers, are prone to confusing the two. Thinking so doesn’t make it so.

If you claim to have turned your back on being a human animal, having a lengthy sexual affair with one of your students is just a touch contradictory (to put it mildly). Still, it’s always possible to take heart from a saying that my friend Hans is fond of repeating:

No one’s life ever is completely wasted. He can always serve as a horrible example for others.

Spirituality in one word

“Wow!” “Camat!” That’s all of spirituality in one word, for both words mean the same thing. “Wow!” is English; “Camat!” is Sanskrit. Both point to wonder, the touchstone of spirit.

I learned about camat from Luther Askeland. Recently I’ve been re-reading Luther’s book, “Ways in Mystery.” His thoughts stimulated some of my own: “Mystery is omnipresent” and “Dismantling the golem project.”

So it was a treat to get an email message from Luther on Monday. We’ve corresponded by snail mail a few times, but I didn’t know that this Minnesota philosopher and woodworker had a cyberspace presence.

Probably because of Luther’s classic writing style, and my assumption that he still lives in Welch, Minnesota, I’d always pictured him writing letters by hand under candlelight (probably after bringing the cows in).

Yet wonder of wonders, Luther has not only has email but also a website, where you can see an appropriately mysterious photo of him in his rural element and download a booklength essay: "When the Word-Animal Discovers Signlessness: A Reflection on the Possibility of the Mystical."

Here’s some of what Luther had to say. I’m thankful for being exposed to a new word, “camatkara.” I read on this web site that camatkara means consciousness without obstacles, the consciousness of a subject “who is finessed in the vibration of a marvelous enjoyment.” Sounds good.

Hello Brian. The last few days our paths have crossed, probably both in cyberspace and in mystery. I wanted to check back to your website and read through 5-6 of your recent blogs, and so I discovered of course that you have also been looking at some of my stuff lately.

We certainly seem to be in the same place--edgeless mystery!

When you say that "Wow!" and similar words are the best possible form of spiritual utterance, I'm reminded of a Sanskrit word I've frequently thought about lately: “camatkara.” It's an important term in Kashmir Shaivism, a monistic Shaivism with some basic similarities with the Vedanta.

“Camat” just by itself is an exclamation of surprise, astonishment, or wonder, just like "Wow!". “Kara” has the basic meaning of making or doing. So the basic sense of camatkara could be translated as "saying 'Wow!" or maybe as "the Wow!-word" or even the "Wow! experience."

The word is often translated as meaning astonishment, amazement, etc. And this word is frequently used in Kashmir Shaivism to point to the supreme spiritual experience or realization.

You wrote recently about the oddness of everything. Lately I've been thinking back about my fairly long path (I'm now 63) and trying to discern its main threads. And one of the most important of them is just the strong sense of that oddness.

For it has long seemed to me that the basic thing spiritually "wrong" with us isn't sin, but our extraordinary dullness. Unaware of mystery, we usually act as if all this ("the world," "This") is perfectly normal, "just what you would expect," when in fact it's infinitely abnormal, the "strangest thing," or as you write, full of oddness.

On a lighter note, I feel much more on top of things, having learned how to create a "religion of one." As soon as I sign off, I plan to look at my driver's license and get started. Thanks! and all the best to you in all your endeavors.
--Luther

Ramana: Simplicity

Ockham’s razor is a rule in science and philosophy that the simplest explanation is the best. Extending this principle to religion and spirituality, Ramana, a twentieth-century Indian mystic, shines.

Only recently did I began reading Ramana seriously. I wish I had done so earlier. I’d always thought that the Vedanta teachings which form the core of Ramana’s message were intellectual and complex. They can be, if a complex intellectual tries to communicate Vedanta.

But when the teachings are described by Ramana in the lively question and answer format of “Talks with Ramana Maharshi,” the highest form of Vedanta is revealed as marvelously simple and practical. This is Advaita, literally “not two.”

What could be simpler than one?

Advaita finds unity at the core of the cosmos. So does science. Or, at least this is what science expects to find. The quest of physicists is for the theory of everything that is the root explanation of the universe, not for the theories of everything.

Ramana’s teachings thus have an appealing scientific flavor. This is in contrast to most other spiritual paths and every religion, which expect you to believe in things that defy rational explanation or direct experience. Why? Because any faith founded on dualism necessarily posits a gap between the believer and what is believed.

If I believe in God, there obviously are two entities involved here: “I” and “God.” Given this situation, confirming my belief gets complex. Somehow I have to narrow the divide between me and divinity so what now is just a subjective idea or emotion for me becomes an undeniable objective fact.

So spiritual systems generally proscribe dogmas and theologies that amount to marching orders. Do this, don’t do that; follow this course, not that one. If the believer follows directions and treads the spiritual path in the correct manner, then the promise is that he or she someday will arrive at God’s doorstep (taking “God” to mean ultimate reality, not necessarily a personal being).

The more steps you’re asked to take, the more potential missteps there are. This is why I’m much attracted to Ramana’s simplicity. He says that all of Vedanta can be summed up in two Biblical passages: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) and “Be still, and know that I am God!” (Psalms 46:10).

Vivekananda: Strength

In my “Five Books to Support the Churchless” post, I said I’d share what I like most about the teachings of Vivekananda, Ramana, Eckhart, Plotinus, and the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Each points toward the same spiritual goal, unity with the ultimate reality of God. Yet I find that each emphasizes a different quality needed to become one with the One.

For Vivekananda the quality is strength. In his presentation of the ancient, yet still new, Vedanta philosophy he continually urges us to realize that there is nothing to fear. Only in duality can fear exist. I am only afraid of things that are not me, whether they be immaterial or physical. An attacker who tries to steal my wallet isn’t me. A cancer that upsets my body’s health isn’t me. An obsessive thought that won’t leave my mind isn’t me.

Or so I believe. Maybe, says Vivekananda, all these things really are me. For if the cosmos truly is one, not many, then there is no “other” to fear. This is the highest teaching of Vedanta, unqualified monism.

A dualistic religious perspective that sees God as separate both from nature and the human soul has to grapple with the problem of evil. “How,” Vivekananda asks, “is it possible that under the rule of a just and merciful God, the repository of an infinite number of good qualities, there can be so many evils in this word?”

The Hindus, he answers, never put the blame on God or on a separate Satan. Instead, they hold the eminently scientific view that effects spring from causes in a never-ending chain. Vivekananda says, “Therefore no other person is needed to shape the destiny of mankind but man himself….’We reap what we sow.’”

So here is one source of strength, the fact that each of us creates our own destiny. If we don’t like the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we can do something about it. Fresh causes will led to fresh effects. It isn’t necessary to passively wait for God to save us from our suffering, for our own actions have created both our joys and our despairs. What we have created, we can change.

But Vedanta goes farther than this dualistic idea that the entity known as “me” can cause effects in “not-me” that will then alter my condition (for example, if I am nice to people they will be nicer to me, thereby making me happier).

Vivekananda says, “The real Vedanta philosophy begins with those known as qualified non-dualists. They make the statement that the effect is never different from the cause; the effect is but the cause reproduced in another form. If the universe is the effect and God the cause, it must be God Himself; it cannot be anything but that.”

This means that the universe is the body of God, just as the flesh and bones writing or reading these words is the body of me or you. As the soul is considered to be immanent in the human body, so is God immanent in the body of the entire universe. Bodies come and go, whether they be individual forms or entire universes (the Big Bang may culminate in a Big Crunch), while souls and God remain unchanged forever.

So this qualified non-dualist philosophy encourages even greater strength in you and me. At heart we are not weak, isolated, limited beings who are born, live for a brief spell, and then die. We have the capacity to realize our oneness with the All—God. Vivekananda says, “There is not a particle, not an atom in the universe, where He is not. Again, souls are all limited; they are not omnipresent. When their powers become expanded and they become perfect, there is no more birth and death for them; they live with God for ever.”

Yet Vedanta urges that even this exalted conception of the soul be expanded. This is non-dualistic Vedanta or Advaita, “not two.” Namely, one. According to Vivekananda this is where human thought finds its highest expression. “It is too abstruse, too elevated,” he says, “to be the religion of the masses…It is difficult for even the most intelligent man or woman in any country to understand Advaita—we have made ourselves so weak; we have made ourselves so low.”

According to Advaita the truth is that there aren’t many souls in the universe. There is only a single soul: the Self. From one perspective this is God, Brahman. From another perspective it is an individual soul, Atman. Regardless, there is no difference between God and the soul, Brahman and Atman. All is One.

Vivekananda says, “The whole of this universe is one Unity, one Existence—physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually. We are looking upon this one Existence in different ways and creating all these images upon it.”

Who then should we worship? A God far off in the heavens? No. A savior sent by God to redeem us? No. A natural world separate from ourselves? No. A book, icon, holy relic, place of pilgrimage, or other sacred object? No. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the only entity worthy of our worship is wonderfully close at hand:

Our own Self.

I’ll let Vivekanada explain this bold assertion in his own words. As you read them, feel the strength within you. I love how he reminds us that we have been beaten down for so long by religions that weaken us, we have lost touch with the power of the soul that is our birthright. And also our deathright. That power can’t be taken away from us, even though most of us have voluntarily surrendered it.

Take it back. Become spiritually independent. Let the energy of the cosmos flow through you, for it is you.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Atman,” a talk delivered by Vivekananda in Brooklyn, February 2, 1896]