Church of the Churchless

Beyond awe, beyond mystery, there's ultimate not-knowing

There's many levels lying on the other side of ordinary knowing. I've been pondering this after writing the recent post, What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I hasten to point out that while I'd love to lay claim to such a marvelous title, it belongs to David Wolpert, who wrote an engrossing monograph about the limits of not only human knowledge, but the knowledge of any other species.

Wolpert lays out the foundation of his complex and subtle arguments in a single paragraph.

This question does not concern limitations on what we can know about what it is that we can never know. Many things can be conceived by us humans even if they can never be known by us. The set of what it is that we cannot even conceive of is a (strictly smaller) subset of what it is that we cannot know. The issue I am concerned with is what we can ever perceive concerning that smaller set, the set of all that we cannot conceive of.

As quoted in the first post about Wolpert's paper, he aptly observes:

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

I think it is not only likely, but a near-certainty, that without exception, every human who has ever lived has been handicapped in knowing the nature of reality by the seemingly inescapable fact that there is much about the cosmos we can't even conceive of, must less know.

To be blunt about that "without exception," I include Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Lao Tau, Guru Nanak, and each and every mystic, saint, yogi, or whatever who has walked the earth. No one, repeat no one, is capable of knowing anything about what we can't even imagine.

Religion and mysticism embrace awe and mystery. So do I, as an atheist. But awe is what we feel when we are in the presence of something known, yet beyond our comprehension, like the vastness of the universe.

And mystery likewise requires a dividing line between what is known about something, and what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge. Darkness isn't nothing. It can be conceived, as when we peer into an unlit room and say "I can't see what's there."

We don't know what's there. However, we can imagine something being there, even if it is nothing.

Obviously it's much more difficult to envision even the slightest sign of something beyond our capacity to conceive of. I'd say it's impossible, but Wolpert has been thinking about this stuff for many years, and he sees some possibilities for humans to conceive of what is now beyond our conception.

God, of course, is either fully or largely within the realm of human conception. Which is one reason why I firmly believe that God is a creation of humans. I used to resonate with the Via Negativa, negative way, where whatever could be said about God, isn't. 

(In contrast to the Via Positiva, where believers love to describe God's love, wisdom, power, goodness, and such.)

But even the Via Negativa requires the concept of "God." It's just a way of saying that whatever can be said about God, the reality is beyond those sayings. What would we be left with, though, if the very concept of God were beyond the ability of humans to imagine?

Well, it would be akin to how our dog looks upon politics or quantum mechanics. Less than nothing, since "nothing" implies the potential presence of something, and our dog just has no capacity to conceive of much that we humans take for granted.

Yet as every dog owner knows, canines inhabit a sensory world of scent and sound and sight that is impossible for we humans to conceive of in anything more than a crude sense.

Probably each of us has a favorite way of trying to grasp in even the slightest fashion the elusive concept of what is so far beyond our conception, it can't even be imagined. Mine is the classic "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Or as I prefer to put it, "There is something rather than nothing," because I don't see any possibility of answering the "why?"

When my mind tries to conceive of this primal fact, There is something rather than nothing, I'm thrown into a realm of no beginning, no end, no creator, no creation. Just the stark reality of existence that to my human mind, must always have existed.

But that's a very human conception. It fills me with awe. It fills me with mystery.

However, I strongly suspect that if an alien being arrived on earth who, against all odds, did possess the capacity to know the nature of There is something rather than nothing, neither me nor anyone else would be able to conceive anything about that knowledge.

It would be as distant from us as the Theory of Relativity is from our dog's understanding of reality. I find this exciting. Also, humbling. Because it means that no matter how much anyone believes they know about the cosmos, what they're utterly incapable of knowing is what they cannot even imagine.

We don't know, so live now

Yeah, it's a cliche, dating all the way from 1971. "Be here now." (I have a well-worn 1972 edition of the book.)

The book, though, actually doesn't talk a whole lot about the simple act of embracing the present moment as much as possible. Rather, it's filled with a bunch of Eastern mysticism/yoga philosophizing that I used to find appealing, but don't anymore.

What I do agree with is that now is a treasure that shouldn't be frittered away by paying undue attention to the past and future.

Sure, we have to be aware of what's happened in the past and what might happen in the future. That's a big part of being human. Memories and anticipations are part of our present-moment awareness. Meaning, everything we experience is now -- because we can't exist in the past or future, only now.

I need a reminder of this. So frequently I say to myself, "Don't know. Live now." 

Why do I add don't know? Wouldn't live now be sufficient to keep me centered in the present? Perhaps. I just find it helpful to keep in mind that what I think might happen, which is the foundation of both my disagreeable worries and pleasant hopes, is often (or usually) markedly different from what does happen.

Right now Oregon is under a snow state of emergency issued by Governor Kate Brown. The National Weather Service is forecasting between three and eight inches during today and tomorrow in the Willamette Valley, where I live.

This is a pretty big deal for holiday travelers, since snowfall will be much greater at higher elevations where passes in the Coast Range and Cascade mountains are. It's also worrisome for my wife and me who live in a rural area with a steep driveway and roads that aren't plowed.

Also, last February the Willamette Valley suffered through a devastating ice storm. Our electricity was out for twelve days. That wasn't fun, to put it mildly.

So it's understandable that when some significant snowfall was forecast in the next few days, and maybe into next week, I started getting PTSD-like anxiety about our electricity going off again, with all of the hassles that entails.

However, i'm finding that reminding myself, "Don't know. Live now," is helping to keep that anxiety at a manageable level.

After all, the National Weather Service is saying that because the approaching front isn't a solid mass of precipitation, but unstable air made up of a bunch of cells, snow amounts can vary considerably from place to place, even if those places are close to each other.

In short, what's going to happen the next few days is uncertain -- which is how life often is. Or even, usually is. 

Back in February my wife and I were watching TV when the electricity went out at about this time of night. We just finished watching several episodes of Ted Lasso before we took a TV break to do some other things, like me finishing this blog post.

It's quite unlikely that our electricity will go out tonight, since it hasn't even started snowing at our house yet. Thus I might as well live now, enjoying our evening, rather than worrying about what could happen electricity-wise. 

I've done everything possible to prepare for snow and cold weather. Vent covers are in. My AWD Subaru with its winter tires is parked at the top of our driveway. I bought some extra groceries last week. So why not relax into don't know?

Don't know is a marvelous thing to keep in mind. Most of us dislike not knowing. We prefer to believe that we have a good idea of what will happen, because that relieves our anxiety about the unknown. But actually I feel better when I embrace don't know rather than push it away.

In 2017 I wrote a blog post about this, "Wu chi" and "don't know" go nicely together.

It's funny (I mean, interesting) when you read a book and only one sentence sticks with you. I figure that if I remember it after many years, that sentence must have a significant meaning for me.

A meaningful sentence I recall from one of Huston Smith's books came from a Zen practitioner: "I have a new koan: I could be wrong." 

Beautiful! 

I'm wrong all the time. So I can totally identify with this sentiment. 

Lately I've been enjoying using a similar idea as a sort of mantra when I'm going to sleep at night and find that my mind is overly filled with thoughts of what be coming next in the world of politics, my own life, and other aspects of reality I care about.

Don't know. 

It feels really honest and refreshing to silently repeat those words inside my head. Don't know replaces the guesses, predictions, suppositions, hopes, anticipations, and such that otherwise would be rambling around my psyche.

Now, I'm not saying that looking into the future is bad. We human beings have a marvelous ability to create visions of what might be that are far beyond what other animals are capable of.

It's often useful to fashion scenarios of what Time may bring us after the present moment. However, predictions of what will happen beyond a few minutes, or even less, often are widely off the mark.

That's why don't know appeals to me so much.

Those two words remind me to remain open to anything and everything, really. No matter how confident I am that this or that will occur, the universe typically doesn't operate precisely (or even generally) in accord with my view of what will be.

Naturally don't know applies to grand cosmic anticipations as well as small mundane ones. 

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, typically have a clear sense of what will happen after they die. Heaven, God, afterlife, soul travel, reincarnation -- whatever it is, something predictable awaits.

But actually, they don't know. No one knows. Which is to say, as the above-mentioned Zen practitioner said: We all could be wrong. And likely are, when it comes to supernatural suppositions. 

 

Sam Harris shows my meditation is on the right spiritual track

There's many forms of meditation. They all have strengths and weaknesses, pluses and minuses. But only a few forms of meditation lead to an increased knowledge of reality, since most are based on unfounded religious dogma.

I'm confident that the meditation I've been practicing for about fifteen years -- after I wisely gave up a religiously-based form of meditation -- has me on the right spiritual track.

I explained why in "Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self." Here's how that 2014 post starts out.

Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."

I'm about a third of the way through. Which is far enough to have discovered the central theme. Harris writes:

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion -- and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

...Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self -- not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body behind the eyes, inside the head.

The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will.

And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished. 

...Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents.

Wow. 

Now, I realize that some people would say "Yeah, makes sense, no big surprise" to the above scientifically- and experientially-persuasive truths.

But I spent decades as a devotee of a mystical philosophy that, like many others, taught that we humans have, or are, an eternal soul. The soul supposedly could return to God through meditation at the "eye center" -- that place behind the eyes and inside the head Harris, a neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, says doesn't house a self or soul.

So it sure seems like those who claim that this world is an illusion, with soul-realms being true reality, are the ones who have gotten it wrong. 

There is no enduring soul or self to be liberated. As Harris says in his book, genuine spirituality is realizing this. Thus a belief in the existence of soul leads one farther away from the truth, not closer. This is basic Buddhism, yet even many Buddhists still harbor fantasies of living on after death as... something or other.

Other posts I wrote about my first reading of Harris' "Waking Up" are here, here, and here. I re-read the book in 2016 and wrote another post about it. I had some quibbles about how Harris views consciousness, but upon a closer reading of certain sections I was able to better grasp his viewpoint.

The past few days I've been reading "Waking Up" a third time. I switch highlighter colors with every reading. By now some pages are almost completely highlighted.

This book is my favorite in the spiritual but not religious genre. Harris is famously down on religion, yet decidedly up on understanding the nature of ourselves through Buddhist Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation that's aimed at dissolving the illusion that we are, or have, a self/soul.

Harris writes:

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

Although many Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary  human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind.

Buddha means "swakened one" -- and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self. 

Compare this with the Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition.

...Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in the religious and philosophical literature of the West.

Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.

Beautiful. 

What I love about this approach to spirituality is that it's solidly founded in modern neuroscience, which also says that our sense of being a "self" is almost certainly an illusion, so meditation needs to be aimed at realizing what we are not by paying close attention to what we actually are.

Namely, thoughts without a thinker; perceptions without a perceiver; emotions without an emoter; and so on.

Sam Harris writes:

The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self -- that there is no rider on the horse -- seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.

How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn't. What doesn't survive scrutiny cannot be real.

Harris uses this visual illusion as an analogy.

There appears to be a white box in the center of the figure. But, Harris says, "when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled."

Try blanking out all but one of the black figures with your hand. That makes it easier to see that what appears to be a white square actually is an absence, not a presence. 

Just like the self, or soul. It appears to be there, but this is an illusion. Look for it, and it's nowhere to be found. If that feeling of nowhere'ness persists, congratulations. You're enlightened! Or, awake.

Here's the problem with living: we're going to die

This isn't exactly breaking news, but I'll say it anyway. Each of us is going to die. 


Those seven words are undeniably scary. Life isn't always pleasant. Yet the gulf between having a difficult life and no life at all is more than immense. It's immeasurable. There's no way to compare being alive and being dead, or existence and non-existence.

The worst day anyone can have is on a different dimension than not existing at all.

Understand: I'm not saying that life is always worth living. Suicide and death with dignity testify to the fact that sometimes people prefer to check out of life early, rather than waiting for the involuntary eviction notice.

There are many reasons most people on Earth embrace some form of religiosity. However, a central reason has to be the reassurance almost every religion provides that when the last breath is taken, that doesn't mark the end of their life, but rather the beginning of a new form of existence.

I don't believe this is true.

There's no convincing evidence of life after death. Nor is there convincing evidence that human consciousness can exist without a functioning brain. Comas, anesthesia, being hit on the head with a baseball bat -- there's abundant evidence that consciousness is a product of the brain, though how this happens still isn't fully understood.

Still, each of has to come to grips with the reality of death whether we're an ardent atheist, committed religious believer, or somewhere in-between. 

Leaving aside the option of not thinking about death until it stares us in the face (which can be a good way to live, for those capable of doing this), it seems to me that there's two basic approaches to preparing for the inevitability of our eventual demise.

One is to try to expand our self. The other is to try to shrink our self. 

Almost all religions take the first approach: expanding the self. For example, some religions say that after death there is either bodily resurrection (Christianity) or reincarnation (Hinduism). Mystical aspects of religion proclaim that the soul can merge with God, taking on divine attributes. 

Aside from the fact that self-expansion, or consciousness-expansion, likely isn't possible in any sense that extends beyond the bounds of a single physical life, there's other reasons to shy away from this approach.

It encourages grandiosity.

I see this all the time in comments religious believers leave on my blog posts, notably those who are devotees of an Indian form of spirituality known as Sant Mat, or the Path of the Saints. They're fond of claiming that this is the highest form of religion, supposedly leading as it does to knowledge of an ultimate divine reality.

Of course, just about every religion makes this same claim.

Since there is no evidence of one religion being superior to another, almost certainly because they all are "fake news" (to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump), it seems ridiculous for a member of any faith to say that their way is the only way -- sort of like people arguing about which unicorn color is the most attractive, given that unicorns don't exist except in one's imagination.

So I prefer the other approach to dealing with life and our eventual death: shrinking the self. 

After all, us humans already are pretty damn insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Aside from having a lot of company here on Earth -- the human population is about 7.6 billion -- we are on a planet circling one of about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of at least 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

And we're very lucky to live 100 years, which is an infinitesimal blip in the 13.7 billion year old universe we inhabit. 

Thus it doesn't take much for us to shrink down to almost nothing, either figuratively or literally (the whole "ashes to ashes' thing). But our egos enjoy pretending that we're way more important than we really are, which goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of religions.

God so loves us, he sent his only son to die for our sins. The soul is destined to return home to its heavenly father. Humans are the pinnacle of creation. 

The myths of religion are innumerable. I much prefer reality:

Each of us is nothing special. We're connected to all other living things through the secular "miracle" of evolution. We live for a while, then we die. Humility is not only a virtue, it's the way things are in a world that is much grander and longer-lived than us.

Of all the world's religions, in my opinion Buddhism and Taoism are the best at offering ways to help us shrink our sense of self. One reason is that neither posits an enduring Self, or Soul. Rather, they teach that life is ever-changing, as are we. Our existence is intimately connected with that of everything else on Earth. We're humble parts of the whole.

He who stands on tiptoe is not steady.
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.
According to followers of the Tao, 
    "These are extra food and unnecessary luggage."
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them.
    -- Tao Te Ching

As a concrete example of the difference between grandiose and humble approaches to spirituality, I spend exactly zero time and effort on religious web sites or blogs trying to push my atheist point of view. Sure, I enjoy sharing churchless/atheist ideas here on my own blog, but I don't go out of my way to convince others that they should adopt my perspective.

But ever since I started this blog in 2004, religious believers -- mostly of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas/Sant Mat variety -- have commented in droves on my blog posts. The way I see it, this shows that they're not very confident in their belief system, since when someone presents arguments against what they believe, they take this as a battle cry to fight against.

Thus I'm pleased to be a humble churchless blogger rather than a grandiose believer in religious dogma. It's much more relaxing that way, since my only commitment is to the truth as best I can understand it. Truth doesn't require any attempt to boost it up, since it stands tall on its own.

Regarding death, my bet is that what will happen to me is exactly the same thing that happens to every other person: we die and are gone forever. The way I see it, the more I can reduce my sense of ego and specialness, the easier it will be to let go when the moment of dying comes.

Until then, I'll enjoy life.

Sure, religious believers typically derive comfort from a fantasy that death won't be the end for them. But the price they pay for their belief strikes me as too high -- feeling like they are the special beloveds of God or some other higher power, which leads to a sense of separation from everybody else who won't enjoy such a marvelous afterlife.

I'd rather feel like I'm simply part of the dead-and-gone-forever crowd. If somehow I discover that I'm living on after I die, that'll be great news. I'm not counting on it, though.

"Wu chi" and "don't know" go nicely together

It's funny (I mean, interesting) when you read a book and only one sentence sticks with you. I figure that if I remember it after many years, that sentence must have a significant meaning for me.

A meaningful sentence I recall from one of Huston Smith's books came from a Zen practitioner: "I have a new koan: I could be wrong." 

Beautiful! 

I'm wrong all the time. So I can totally identify with this sentiment. 

Lately I've been enjoying using a similar idea as a sort of mantra when I'm going to sleep at night and find that my mind is overly filled with thoughts of what be coming next in the world of politics, my own life, and other aspects of reality I care about.

Don't know. 

It feels really honest and refreshing to silently repeat those words inside my head. Don't know replaces the guesses, predictions, suppositions, hopes, anticipations, and such that otherwise would be rambling around my psyche.

Now, I'm not saying that looking into the future is bad. We human beings have a marvelous ability to create visions of what might be that are far beyond what other animals are capable of.

It's often useful to fashion scenarios of what Time may bring us after the present moment. However, predictions of what will happen beyond a few minutes, or even less, often are widely off the mark.

That's why don't know appeals to me so much.

Those two words remind me to remain open to anything and everything, really. No matter how confident I am that this or that will occur, the universe typically doesn't operate precisely (or even generally) in accord with my view of what will be.

Naturally don't know applies to grand cosmic anticipations as well as small mundane ones. 

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, typically have a clear sense of what will happen after they die. Heaven, God, afterlife, soul travel, reincarnation -- whatever it is, something predictable awaits.

But actually, they don't know. No one knows. Which is to say, as the above-mentioned Zen practitioner said: We all could be wrong. And likely are, when it comes to supernatural suppositions. 

A related idea is wu chi, a Taoist term for the emptiness from which fullness flows. In Tai Chi, which I've practiced for about 13 years, wu chi is the poised, balanced ready position that precedes movement. I talked about this in the above-linked post:

I first heard the term, wu chi, used by my martial arts instructor. Warren said that he had told his own Tai Chi teacher that, after several decades of training, he had finally realized that there is only one move in Tai Chi. “Oh, very interesting,” the teacher said. “What is it?” “Whatever flows from wu chi [the empty state of rest in Tai Chi].” “Ah, I think you’re on to something,” said Warren’s teacher.

The idea is that when one is in a state of wu chi, it's easy to move in any direction.

This is a subtlety of Tai Chi that I'm beginning to appreciate more deeply. Even when one move directly follows another, there's a balance point, a pivot point -- the moment when one move is essentially finished and the next move hasn't quite begun.

That point is akin to don't know. In an actual fight, you wouldn't know what your opponent is going to do. So you should be ready to respond flexibly to... whatever.

Hence, the beauty of wu chi. 

Everyday life isn't a battle, but it shares the quality of unpredictability. It makes sense to be ready for anything. Or at least, many things that we don't expect will happen, yet certainly could.

Is this a coherent philosophy of life? I'd say so. It's just different from what we usually think of as providing a philosophical foundation for ourselves. Here's how I put it in my wu chi post: 

There’s nothing quite like wu chi in Western philosophy or religion. By and large we in the West adore positivity. We want to be filled, not emptied. We want to acquire, not divest. We want to become more, not less. We want to be raised up, not driven down.

Even when we claim to aspire to a state of lowly humility and egolessness, the envisioned end result is to be elevated: saved, enlightened, God-realized. I’m not saying that people of the East are less prone to ego, but at least philosophies such as Taoism and Zen—when unencumbered by religious trappings—present to spiritual aspirants a goal of inner emptiness.

For several years I wrote quite often about wu chi and wu under a blog category, Wu Project. Feel feel to browse through the posts. Or, not to.

In Buddhism, ultimate truth is an absence, not a presence

Yeah, I'm on an emptiness roll, Buddhism style. Three blog posts in a row on this fascinating subject (see here and here for #1 and #2).

Having finished Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness," I ordered a roughly similar Newland book, "Appearance & Reality." Both books are giving me new insights into what Buddhism is all about. 

There's very little religious supernaturalism in them, a big reason why they appeal to me. I'm fine with philosophical Buddhism, which by and large is compatible with modern scientific understandings of reality.

Once we get into rebirth, omniscience, and additional other-worldly stuff, though, I part company with Buddhism.

Newland makes a few references to "liberation from cyclic existence" and other religious'y aspects of Buddhism, but I just put a question mark in the page margin when I come across such mentions and move on.

To his core theme, emptiness. 

The normal meaning of that word is an absence. Same applies in Buddhism.

What we need to do to become enlightened as to the nature of reality is give up the notion that anything (including us) exists permanently, fixedly, unchangingly, independently.

Yes, we are real. A chair is real. Dogs are real. Everything in everyday existence is real. There isn't any reality beyond the conventional world, no hidden realms of existence in some far-off heaven or spiritual realm.

Our problem isn't that we aren't in touch with ultimate reality.

Our problem is that we fail to see it as it is -- empty of inherent existence. Actually, everything is interconnected, interdependent, interwoven. But we wrongly consider that things (including the human self) possess their own inherent nature.

In the book I'm reading now, Newland writes:

The Great Vehicle tenet systems teach that the subtle and profound emptiness realized on the bodhisattva path is an ultimate truth. This ultimate truth is a negative phenomenon -- the mere absence of a certain type of self (i.e., a certain kind of existence) in phenomena.

The various Great Vehicle systems disagree about the kind of existence that emptiness negates. The Mind Only system, for example, says that emptiness is the absence of a difference of entity between an object and the mind apprehending it, while the Middle Way Consequence system says that emptiness is the absence of inherent existence.

Still, however they define it, Great Vehicle tenet systems agree that the subtle emptiness is (1) an ultimate truth, and (2) a quality present in all phenomena. That is, everything that exists (including emptiness itself) is devoid of whatever type of existence emptiness negates.

Back in my mystical meditation days -- which lasted over thirty years -- I was super-fond of the term ultimate reality. But then I viewed ultimate reality, or ultimate truth, as something positive that could be known. 

So it's been a refreshing eye-opener to get exposed to a fuller and clearer explanation of how Buddhism views emptiness as ultimate truth. I really like the idea that what separates us from ultimate truth is the presence of a false notion: inherent existence.

Which Newland defines as "the existence of something by the power of its own intrinsic or essential character."

This is how soul, God, and other supernatural entities are viewed by most religions. And how everyday existence is viewed by almost everybody in the world. Meaning, we see things -- like a table and chairs -- as possessing inherent existence rather than being brought into being by dependent arising. 

Which Newland defines as:

The core teaching that "in dependence upon this, that arises," which is the heart of the Dharma. Since there is nothing that exists in and of itself, all existents are dependent arisings.

Reality, then, is "synonym for emptiness, the ultimate truth." And Newland says emptiness is...

The sheer nonexistence of intrinsic nature. For example, the table's emptiness is the table's lack of existence by way of an intrinsic nature.

For me, the beauty of this Buddhist philosophy is that it negates the search for a True Self.

In the Indian philosophy I previously embraced, but have now discarded, there was the notion of coverings of mind and matter that obscured the primal soul-consciousness of who we really are. Supposedly these coverings could be removed through spiritual practice, meditation, and God's/Guru's grace.

Mahayana Buddhism seems much closer to the truth. Here's a few more Newland definitions.

self -- sometimes refers to the person -- that is, to something that does conventionally exist. However, often refers to a reified nature that does not exist at all but is wrongly superimposed on persons and other things.

selflessness -- the nonexistence of a reified nature that ignorance wrongly superimposes on persons and other things. In Prasangika Madhyamaka, the nonexistence of intrinsic nature in a person or other existing things.

Beautiful!

Suffering, distress, unhappiness, and ignorance arise from adding an "extra" on to things that exist: unchangingness, permanence, independence. We worry about not knowing our True Self when, actually, the truth is that we don't have a self.

Nothing does. 

Including emptiness, because emptiness isn't something that exists; it is the absence of inherent existence.

So what we need to be fulfilled isn't something; it is giving up a belief in "things," understanding that, as Newland puts it, "there is nothing that is truly or ultimately existent."

 

Who do you want to be? Someone, Anyone, or Nobody?

The existential alternatives in the title of this post were named by brain researcher Susan Greenfield. I came across a mention of them in Julian Baggini's intriguing book, "The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean to be You?"

Here's how Baggini describes the alternatives, based on an interview he did with Greenfield at the 2009 Bristol Festival of Ideas. After sharing these excerpts from his book, I'll add some observations of my own.

Where Greenfield gets a little more speculative is when she imagines the variations in types of selves which might emerge if different types of connections become dominant. She bases this speculation on what I think is a quite useful way of simplifying three forms of subjective experience.

The first she calls the 'Someone' scenario, which is the normal case of 'you being different from someone else'. This is how we almost all, almost always, feel ourselves to be. 'In brain terms, the Someone scenario could be reflected in the forging of idiosyncratic connections, and associations that are unique to your particular experiences, and also leave you open to modification by those.'

Although we tend to think of ourselves as Someones, we are on occcasion also 'Anyones', the second of her scenarios. 'Sometimes in our everyday life, we're all parts of a team, it's where we subsume our own interests, our own individuality, we sacrifice what we personally want to do in favour of the group.' Instead of 'living out an individual life story', Anyone lives out a collective life story.

Although this is benign in moderation, Anyones are malign when they are created by ideologies in which 'you are so constrained in what you do, what you think, what you eat, how you live out your life, what your agenda is, that really you're subsuming your life into the collective life story of that particular ideology... You're living out life as a component, you're just a small part in the very big picture, to the extent that in extreme scenarios, as we know tragically happens at the moment, the individual can be disposed of or can dispose of themselves in the service of the greater narrative.'

The neural basis of this could be that there are 'connections that are so strong that they are more resistant to modification by subsequent experience'.

We also sometimes live life under the third scenario, as Nobodies. 'Human beings have stalked this planet for 100,000 years, [and] we have from time to time indulged in wine, women and song; or drugs and sex and rock and roll, the modern equivalent.

There are moments in most of our lives when we want to "let ourselves go", "blow our minds". The very word "ecstasy" in Greek means to stand outside of yourself. These are moments when we abrogate our sense of self, when we are no longer self-conscious, we're just conscious.' This is what psychologists call depersonalization.

Dancing is one of Greenfield's favourite examples. 'The whole point of dancing is that you let yourself go. You're having a sensational time, that is to say you're putting a premium once again on the senses, as you would as a small child, you're back in the booming buzzing confusion.'

What's interesting about the feeling of being Nobody is that it can be wonderful and dreadful. For instance, most people who take marijuana report depersonalization effects, sometimes quite strongly, and find them pleasant.

But as Roy J. Matthew points out, in clinical psychology 'depersonalization is associated with such unpleasant states of mind as fatigue, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, anxiety, depression, temporal lobe migraine, temporal lobe epilepsy and so on.' Depersonalization disorder is a recognised, distressing condition.

Well, I think Greenfield doesn't emphasize the positive side of Nobody enough. She worries about how video games and other forms of computer technology could suck people into a Nobody Scenario of excessive passive sensation and insufficient active cogitation. 

But her favorite example of Nobody'ness, dancing, certainly doesn't seem dreadful. Not does the general notion of "flow," that pleasant feeling when you're so immersed in an activity, you and the activity come to be almost one. 

I might be garbling what Greenfield is getting at. However, to me the words "I," "You," and "Us" seem to closely relate to her Someone, Anyone, and Nobody respectively. 

Yes, most people identify with "I." We view ourselves as individual entities, selves or souls or whatever. Our nature appears to be distinct from the world. Our subjectivity looks upon the rest of reality as an object. 

Many religions, cults, mystic practices, and spiritual paths offer up a "You" alternative, the Anyone scenario Greenfield describes. In another article about her three ways of being, the dark side of Anyone is laid out.

In the "Anyone" scenario people subsume their individuality to a mass collective mindset, typically revolving a David and Goliath story. The Nazis believed there was a Jewish world-wide conspiracy while Al Qaeda thinks the same about the US. Group members generally all behave the same and lack individuality. On the other hand they are generally emotionally fulfilled, content within the group but angry and contemptuous of outsiders.

Thus the "I" of the individual is subsumed into the "You" of a belief system, which may be embodied in an charismatic leader or guru. The devotees offer their all to the collective, doing whatever is asked of them.

I no longer find this appealing, having experienced both the delights and downsides of belonging to an India-based, guru-centered spiritual organization for many years. After all, what's the point in trying to give up one's "I" just to have it replaced by another "I" -- the personal characteristics demanded by a belief system, religious leader, or such?

One self-centered way of being in the world, "Someone," simply is replaced by another, "Anyone." "I" becomes "You" -- a different someone.

So I'll take Nobody. Or Us.

This strikes me as being both the most scientific and most pleasant way of being. After all, the world is known to be seamlessly interconnected. Neuroscience tells us there is no enduring self or soul inside (or outside) our cranium. 

We are all changeable, malleable beings, albeit with an enduring sense of psychological continuity. We are the world, and the world is us. 

My wife and I have enjoyed learning ballroom dancing over quite a few years. As Greenfield notes, dancing is a good example of the Nobody/Us manner of experiencing. When in the flow, there just seems to be me, my partner, our movement, and the music.

Yes, there are distinctions between us, but blurry ones. She, and I, and our moves, and the music... we are all together. It feels good to be Nobody. Because at that moment Nobody seems like Everybody.

Best explanation of Schrödinger's cat I've ever seen

Schrödinger's cat is a perplexing animal that seemingly is both alive and dead before an observation is made of it.

This thought experiment was intended to show how the weirdness of quantum mechanics could be applied to everyday objects.

It's always bothered me that a human, or some other observer, was needed to make the twin potentiality of "dead" and "alive" become a single actuality. Why couldn't the cat observe itself?

In Amanda Gefter's book, "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn," she has the best explanation of the Schrödinger's cat paradox I've ever come across. The implications of this are huge -- a subject I'll leave for another blog post.

I've finished the book, which has a central theme of observer-dependent reality, as I blogged about here and here. 

These passages from near the end of the book carry on in that vein. Great writing, Ms. Gefter.

If an elephant could measure itself, collapsing its own wavefunction, then it needn't exist relative to anything outside itself -- in other words, it would simply, inherently exist. It wouldn't be observer-dependent. It would just be. 

In an act of self-affirmation or quite possibly suicide, Schrödinger's cat would collapse its own wavefunction before anyone opened the box. But quantum mechanics -- through the uncertainty relations, complementarity, EPR -- has already proven that if we assume that elephants inherently exist in some objective, observer-independent way, we get the wrong answers. 

By relativizing everything, [Carlo] Rovelli had rejected any kind of ontological distinction between observer and observed, leveling the playing field to a quantum monism where every perspective is a possible reference frame, none of them any better than the next.

That did away with the seeming paradox that an observer can't be a subject and object simultaneously, and yet somehow the observer is a subject and object simultaneously. I am the subject relative to me. I am an object relative to my father. 

There's no God's-eye view from which both would appear true at the same time. But again, that hinged on the impossibility of self-measurement. If I could measure myself, I'd be both subject and object and quantum physics would fall apart. The prohibition on self-measurement upheld Wittgenstein's intuition that "the subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."

Rovelli had shown that quantum mechanics seems bat-shit crazy as long as we assume the existence of a single reality shared by multiple observers. Give up that notion and all the quantum weirdness begins to make perfect, non-spooky sense. We can dissolve the problem of the second observer by embracing the cosmic solipsisms that physics demands.

It's not the brand of solipsism that Everett or Wigner momentarily considered, in which there is just one absolute observer. The solipsism that radical observer-dependence implies is itself observer-dependent -- as Rovelli emphasized, observer in one frame is observed in another.

...Boolean logic was just the ordinary logic we usually assume holds true, with its basic rules, like if p is true then not-p is false, or if p implies q and p is true then q is true. There was also the crucial law of the excluded middle: a proposition, p, is either true or false; there's no third option. Non-Boolean logic -- quantum logic -- openly defies the law of the excluded middle. A proposition p can be true and false, depending on who you ask. 

But I now saw that logic becomes non-Boolean only when you compare the perspectives of two or more observers. According to any one observer, p is either true or false. We only violate the law of the excluded middle when we try to view p from more than one reference frame at the same time.

Classical logic tells us that the particle passed through one slit or the other. Non-Boolean logic offers a third option: it went through both. But the point is, there's no observer who can see it go through both. That would require an impossible God's-eye view, akin to seeing inside and outside a black hole's horizon.

No observer sees both elephants. Look at the slits and you'll see that it only goes through one. The phrase "both elephants" is totally misleading. Statements such as "The photon travels two paths simultaneously" are wrong. They assume there's some singular reality, a way things "actually are." There isn't. Nature has shown us otherwise.

...We never see simultaneously-alive-and-dead cats because superpositions represent a multiplicity of points of view, and, by definition, a given observer has only one.

...If, however, reality is radically observer-dependent -- if, that is, the universe is nothing, then we need interference to literally cancel out the diagreements between our perspectives. Interference -- the physical manifestation of non-Boolean logic -- exists because nothing is real. Or because reality is nothing. With this "many frames" interpretation of quantum mechanics, that bat-shit experiment was actually starting to make sense.

...But non-Boolean logic, I now knew, was a fictitious logic, the logic that crops up when you cut across horizons, when you try to describe reality from multiple points of view simultaneously. Quantum logic is non-Boolean because reality is radically observer-dependent. Because there's no way things "really are." There was my "really" and my father's "really," but never both.

How beautiful it is to do nothing and rest afterwards

This morning I rode my bike around a Camp Sherman, Oregon loop. Cabin to store to bike path to Lake Creek Lodge to trail-through-woods to gravel road to cabin.

Along the way, which involved considerable pedaling, I came across a sign which led me to stop and do almost nothing -- except stand, pull my iPhone out, and snap a photo.

This seems to be a Spanish proverb. Totally believable. Isn't the siesta a significant part of the Spanish lifestyle?

(If not, don't tell me; I'm a habitual napper who enjoys feeling like I've got some Spanish heritage that impels me at siesta time.)

Given my admiration of the proverb, it wouldn't be fitting to spend too much energy talking about it in a blog post. I'll simply observe that doing nothing is a centerpiece of many spiritual traditions.

Buddhism and Taoism, for sure. Along with the contemplative side of numerous others.

I summoned up enough energy to Google "spirituality doing nothing." Then I took a quick look at some of the search results. Here's some links to explore. Unless you prefer doing nothing.

doing nothing, just being

The Joy of Nada -- Doing Nothing for Lent

All Nothing, All the Time

Do you know how to relax? Why you should make time to do nothing.

The idler has realized the illusion of control

'Doing nothing' a place of surprising activity

Update: damn, I'm so nothing, so humble, so ego-less, I forgot to search my own blog via Google. Discovered that I've written a lot about nothing. Some would say, yeah, everything you write is a bunch of nothing.

Doing Nothing. Sounds like my sort of anti-religion.

Doing nothing is the best meditation. 

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become.

Doing nothing, do everything. Taoism is cool!

"Nothing" is my spiritual resolution for the New Year

Mysticism is all about doing...nothing

And if you'd rather just press a "play button" and watch a God is Nothing video, feel free:

 

Meaning of life: one damn thing after another

Beginning at age 13, when I wrote my first philosophically-minded poem, until today, age 64, I've been searching for the meaning of life.

I've delved into psychedelics (LSD and mescaline); pondered existentialism (Sartre, Camus, etc.); for over 35 years meditated hours a day under the guidance of an Indian mystic; done the marital arts and Tai Chi thing; read countless philosophical, religious, mystical, scientific, and spiritual books; explored Argentine Tango and ballroom dancing; walked at night under Oregon stars (and rain) looking into the vastness of the universe -- just as I did at 13; written books about physics & mysticism, karma & vegetarianism, and a Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus; married a psychotherapist who knows a lot about human nature.

So, yeah, I'm well qualified to speak about the ever-fascinating subject: The Meaning of Life. Today, tonight, right now, I'm going to reveal the answer. (Well, I already did, in the title of the post.)

It's... one damn thing after another. 

Here's two guesses about your snap reaction to this revelation. (1) That is so fucking obvious! (2) That is so fucking ridiculous! Be assured: I agree with both points of view. And with any other opinion you might hold about my five-word summation of what life is all about.

That's the beauty of it!

One damn thing after another encompasses every possible criticism of my philosophical proclamation, as well as every possible praise. Also, anything else that can be expressed about anything, including silence. 

So even though there is a lot to be said about what I've just said, I'm going to resist the temptation to elaborate in much more explanatory detail. For now, at least. Because I want to assure my well-deserved place in the Pseudo-Philosophical Platitudinous Hall of Fame (I have lots of company), stay tuned for additional posts about the underlying brilliance of one damn thing after another.  

For I have managed to encapsulate the essence of cosmology, quantum physics, Buddhism, evolution, You Tube, Facebook, athletics, art, dance, and so much more (no, screw false humility!) really everything in what can be aptly termed an all-encompassing Theory of Everything.

One damn thing after another.

Philosophical Nobel Prize, please!

I sense some skepticism arising in cyberspace, even before I've pushed the "publish" button on this post. Well, test out my foundational Law of Nature, both human and otherwise. Observe your life, along with that of other sentient beings.

Throw in non-sentient beings too. Plus inanimate objects.

Let me know if you find any which are not subject to the inescapable law of the cosmos: one damn thing after another. (Note: I will admit that "damn" is not an absolutely essential descriptive part of my five-word philosophical masterpiece; however, I think it adds a lot of emotional weight, so am reluctant to discard it.)

I am confident in the objective validity of my statement. Its subjective attractiveness may be less easy to appreciate. However, if you keep on pondering Life is just one damn thing after another, I believe you will find yourself loving that sentiment as much as I do.

Takes the pressure off.

Allows you to stop searching for anything more than the next damn thing, which doesn't have to be searched for, because it will come to you all by itself. Stops anxiety, judgmentalism, egocentricity, and holier-than-thou'ness in its tracks (or... allows your train of thought to proceed with them worry-free). 

Now, I purposely avoided Googling "one damn thing after another" until I reached this point of my post. I didn't want my stupendously original thoughts about this phrase to be blemished by any extraneous influences -- such as the fact that other people had said the same thing before me.

Yes, some have. Such as:

Elbert Hubbard. "Life is just one damn thing after another." The guy was an American writer, publisher, artist, businessman, anarchist, and libertarian socialist philosopher. Way to go, dude! Proud to be in your company.

Frank Arntzenius. A philosopher specializing in the philosophy of physics who wrote a paper with this title.

John Masefield. An author who, bless him, wrote a book titled "ODTAA." One Damn Thing After Another. Amazon tells me other writers have used the same title. 

Proves my point. Life is just one damn thing after another. Which includes people saying, in different ways, "life is just one damn thing after another."

Great free will question: What do we want to be free from?

Having given up a belief in resurrection, physical immortality, eternal soul, or living on through my works, I've settled on another approach for dealing with my eventual demise:

Not being me. 

Now, some will say, "That's Buddhism 101." Sort of true. Anatta, not-self, is indeed a core Buddhist concept. But I'm lazy.

Buddhists, including those of the Zen variety, go through a heck of a lot of effort to realize that the entity striving to become enlightened doesn't exist. My feeling is, why not simply begin and end with the nothing-much-of-anything that I am? 

Done. Finis. Enlightenment trophy, please.

There's no me who is living, so there's no me who is going to die. Or, to become immortal. So the whole problem of What Happens to Me after Death is irrelevant, since there is no me (or you, of course) before death.

Neuroscience is a great way of overcoming the illusion of me-ness. We humans certainly feel we're in charge of ourselves, which implies there are selves we can be in charge of.

However, neuroscientific evidence strongly points to no "ghost in the machine," as Gilbert Ryle famously put it.

Meaning, each of us is deterministically connected with the world, including other people. This doesn't mean we are machines. Just that we're not free-floating, freely-willing soul "ghosts" separate from the physical body.

In his book Who's in Charge? (subtitle: free will and the science of the brain), neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga asks an excellent question. "What do we want to be free from?"

Again, we feel like we have free will. It seems like I can freely choose what I'm going to write in the next moment. It seems like you can freely choose to continue reading this post, or to head off to another corner of cyberspace. 

Questioning the reality of free will is threatening to most people.

Something bothers us about the notion (which almost certainly happens to be reality) that goings-on in the brain are determined by processes outside our conscious control, and that mind/brain are different aspects of the same physical entity, both governed by the laws of nature.

Yet Gazzinaga says, persuasively:

What does it mean to really talk about free will? "Ah, well, we want to be free to make our own decisions." Yes, but what do we want to be free from?

We don't want to be free from our experience of life, we need that for our decisions. We don't want to be free from our temperament because that also guides our decisions. We actually don't want to be free from causation, we use that for predictions.

A receiver trying to catch a football does not want to be free from all the automatic adjustments his body is making to maintain his speed and trajectory as he dodges tackles. We don't want to be free from our successfully evolved decision-making device.

What do we want to be free from?

How about... nothing.

The nothing-separate that is "me" doesn't want to be free of all that I'm connected with. Not that I have a choice in the matter. Life depends on others: energy, food, water, shelter, love, friendships, giving, taking, relating.

Yet mind-body dualists in general, and religious believers specifically, view this world as constraining us, enslaving us, restricting us. This is how the notion of a hideous problem with all existence arises, the subject of a previous post.

Religions want us to believe that something or someone is keeping us from an ideal state of divine freedom. "The Devil made me do it." 

Or if not the Devil...

Original sin
Karma
Maya/illusion
A fall from heaven
Un-enlightenment

Since we're supposedly trapped, we need someone to save us. A...

Savior
Prophet
Guru
Master
Spiritual guide

But then we come back to Gazzinaga's question: What do we want to be free of? 

I haven't finished his book, so I can't confidently relate his answer. However, some reviewers have given me a peek into the final chapters, as have clues in what I've read so far. 

Gazzinaga doesn't think we're looking upon "free will" in the correct fashion. The way we're looking at this issue is preventing us from understanding what reality really is. It's sort of like understanding that the Earth is round, not flat.

Everyday personal experience isn't going to do us much, if any, good. We can walk to the ends of the Earth. It still will look flat to our eyes. Not long ago, people were afraid they'd fall off the edge of the flat Earth if they went too far. 

No amount of introspection (looking within) or extrospection (looking without) will lead to genuine understanding if we're looking in the wrong way with a limited perspective.

The scientific method -- in this case, the methods of neuroscience -- are able to correct individual misunderstandings through careful experiments and explanations. Reading Gazzaniga's book, along with others, I can realize how faulty my feelings about free will are. I can see through the illusions of everyday life, where I believe that a single entity, mysteriously named Me, is controlling what I do with my body/brain.

I seek to be free of... what? For most of my life I never seriously considered that question. I just assumed that something was holding me back from being all that I could be.

With age, and hopefully a bit more wisdom, I've come to understand that the whole notion of a Search for Freedom/Liberation was off the mark. I never was enslaved. Religions want us to believe that we are because they're in the business of selling Get Out of Jail permission slips.

Religions are excellent at marketing. They help create a demand for an illusory product aimed at solving a non-existent problem. Unfettered free will isn't possible, nor is it desirable. Neither is separating mind from body, or soul from materiality.

The key is understanding that the me each of us wants to be free doesn't exist.

This is the illusion that humans daily entertain: we are the masters of our domain, aware of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

In fact, the illusion that we’ve got a unified operation inside our heads, running the show, is so thorough-going that  “even the most strident determinists and fatalists at the personal psychological level do not actually believe they are pawns in the brain’s chess game.”

So it’s not that Gazzaniga denies the unseen forces that influence all of our actions and moods and impulses. Instead, he challenges the concept of free will as we know it.

“In traditional philosophy, free will is the belief that human behavior is an expression of personal choice that is not determined by physical forces, fate or God,” he reminds us.

In this view, implicitly, it’s possible to subtract away these external factors—"physical forces, fate and God"—and be left with an essential self, a free-wheeling agent.

But, Gazzaniga argues, neuroscience has dispelled the myth of such a self, of such a “you.” The brain, composed of all kinds of decentralized circuits that work in tandem, has no central command center.

“There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU.”

“Prior to the startling advances of neuroscience, explanations of mechanisms were unknown. Today they are. Today we know we are evolved entities that work like a Swiss clock.”

It’s no longer useful to ponder the question of free will as such because neuroscience has changed the very meaning of the question. Accordingly, the mind develops ideas and beliefs that then influence the brain, which in turn influences the mind. It’s a constant back and forth. It’s dynamic.

Zhuangzi's (Chuang Tzu's) delicious weightlessness

I like the idea of floating free, weightless, able to move here, there, in any direction, with little or no effort, unbound.

Even better... for this not to be an idea, but experience.

Which helps explain, as I blogged about before, why Daoism/Taoism resonates with me.

There's a freedom, a playfulness, a whatever in Daoist philosophy that mirrors the difference between relaxed Tai Chi and the hard-edged traditional Shotokan karate I spent nine years training in before I switched to what can be called Daoism-in-motion.

Daoism is difficult to put a conceptual finger on. I've been reading and re-reading various translations of the Daode Jing since my college days, many moons and suns ago.

What the Daode Jing means, and even whether it was written by somebody we know as Laozi/Lao Tzu, are open questions. Both for me and scholars.

Chad Hansen is a professor of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. In his book, "A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought," Hansen says that to grasp Daoism, it isn't enough to study Laozi. Zhuangzi/Chuang Tzu is the ancient Chinese man with a more mature grasp of what we have come to call Daoism.

(Hansen starts his Zhuangzi chapter with a quote from Angus Graham: "Chuang Tzu never knew he was a 'Taoist.'" True. Just as Christ never knew he was a Christian, and Buddha never knew he was a Buddhist.)

The motto of this churchless blog is preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. Zhuangzi, explains Hansen, has a wonderful image of what supports the marvelous variety of philosophies of life, religious beliefs, spiritual predelictions, life goals, and such which we humans pursue.

Absolutism is a no-no for Zhuangzi.

Let us talk, he [Zhuangzi] says, about talking about something, and about not talking about anything. Zhuangzi invites us to consider an Ur-perspective, a view from nowhere. That is the perspective from which shi [this] and bi [other] do not contrast and complement each other. 

He calls it the hinge of daos (dao-shu). This is a hypothetical, unbiased, purely nonpurposive perspective that is prior to any system of language. Each pattern of prescriptive shiing [right'ing] and feiing [wrong'ing] starts from the center of a circle of infinite possibilities. 

The view from the axis of daos [ways] is not where nothing can be said. It is rather the point from which anything can be said with equal warrant. Once we say something, we step off the axis onto a particular dao/path. From the axis, we can go out at any angle.

...Zhuangzi's metaperspective does not lead to nonperspectival knowledge of things. It is not a window on the thing in itself, but on the bewildering range of possibilities. It leads us to a conception of the limits of knowing.

...The skeptic can say nothing about reality because we cannot prove it. THe mystic can say nothing in principle about incommensurable reality. They thus say the same no-thing. One smiles more and has an awestruck look in his eyes. The other furrows his brow a lot.

I'm with the smiling Daoists. 

There's way too much seriousness in the world, much of it produced by religious fundamentalists who believe they, and only they, know what is right and wrong, good and bad, God's will and the Devil's tempting.

Following the passage above, Hansen nicely illustrates the pleasure of a Daoist outlook on life.

A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose).

Nietzche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abysss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness.

Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of the cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. 

Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness -- free flight -- not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!"

Beautiful.

That "Whee!" reminded me of something. Dimly. A blog post I'd written... where I said Whee... about???... probably Daoism. The Great God Google quickly confirmed my intuition.

Ah, I love to quote myself.

We do our best to understand what can be understood. But some things can't be understood. Especially things that aren't a thing, as noted above.

We could follow Wittgenstein's advice: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." That isn't much fun, though. We're social, communicative creatures. So we use our imagination to detour around the roadblock of what can't be spoken of, because it can't be understood.

Whee! We're still driving on the understanding road!

As fast as we want. Even going offroad... then onroad... wherever. No problem. After all, it's an imaginary road, and we're not getting anywhere in really real reality. Just our imaginary reality.

Taoists do a lot of laughing. At themselves. At the world. At the Tao. They don't take themselves very seriously. This came through in Qiguang's entertaining talk.

Near the end of his presentation he told a story, showing an illustration from his book that he'd drawn himself in a Taoist style: people small, nature large.

A Chinese man is driving a cart pulled by a horse. There's a jug of wine sitting behind his seat. No luggage. No other belongings. Just a large jug of wine. What else does he need?

A boy is walking in back of the cart. He's carrying a hoe. Qiguang said that the man hired the boy to follow him. When the man dies and falls off the cart (too much wine?) the boy's job is to bury him where he lies with the hoe.

Confucianism, Qiguang said, has rules about how a person is supposed to be buried. The Taoist attitude is, whatever. So the man is flaunting Confucian rigidity and pretentiousness.

If we feel like imagining what reality is like, no problem. Whatever. We just shouldn't take our imagining very seriously, or expect other people to share in it.

Religious myths can be entertaining. Fun. Comforting. Inspiring. If we don't feel like remaining silent regarding what can't be spoken about, why not imagine away?

Knowing what we're doing. With a smile on our face.

Weightlessly. Realizing that there isn't a single Dao/Tao, that Dao isn't like a God who insists on One Virtuous Way of doing things. There are many ways, many paths, many daos.

Ours is ours; other people have their own.

Except ours and own aren't really the right words, since ways arise from the presence of everything, not just us. How could we follow a path through a forest if there weren't any trees?

Getting down to absolute nothing

Fans of nothingness (I'm one, and enjoy the company of Nothing'arians, but it's difficult to organize a fan club around nothing) should enjoy this letter in a recent issue of New Scientist. 

It's in response to a special issue on the nature of nothingness that I blogged about last month.

From Dave Howells
I found your articles on nothing interesting but dismaying (13 November, p. 40). Strictly speaking, none of them was about nothing. They surveyed the mathematical zero, empty sets, electronics, the quantum vacuum, and the noble gases.

Nothing, I believe, is when we are unconscious. Say I have an operation under general anaesthetic. I count down from 10, reach seven, and then wake up to discover that I am in a different place. What happened in between?

For my conscious awareness, absolutely nothing -- no time, no space, no matter, no emptiness, no experience whatsover.
Swansea, UK 

True. But Dave couldn't "know" about this nothing until he became something again. So it's tough to put your finger on nothing absent a something to poke at it with.

[Note: I'm trying out the LinkWithin feature that appears below. Supposedly it does better at recommending related posts as it learns about a blog. Currently the recommendations seem more than a little random. But, hey, surprises are good.]

Nothing is the heart of reality

There's something fascinating about nothing.

Yes, that's a paradox. Necessarily so, because "nothing" is an abstraction, an impossibility. If nothing actually existed, it wouldn't be nothing. And even if somehow there could be nothing, no one would know about it.

A recent issue of New Scientist largely was devoted to exploring the nature of nothingness. In one page, physicist Brian Greene summarized the main themes in "Nothingness: why nothing matters." 

SHAKESPEARE had it right, even in ways he couldn't have imagined. For centuries, scientists have indeed been making much ado about nothing - and with good reason. Nothing, or rather what we've long taken to be nothing, may be the key to understanding everything from why particles have mass to the expansion of the universe. As explored in this special issue of New Scientist(see "The nature of nothingness"), nothing is a rich and subtle subject whose biography is far from finished.

Every article in the special issue had some passages that made me think, "Wow, nothing really is something."

For example, Richard Webb's description of how zero eventually became a core concept in mathematics included these insights: 

Greek thought was wedded to the idea that numbers expressed geometrical shapes; and what shape would correspond to something that wasn't there? It could only be the total absence of something, the void -- a concept that the dominant cosmology of the time had banished.

...Eastern philosophy, rooted in ideas of eternal cycles of creation and destruction, had no such qualms.

...Brahmagupta was the first person we see treating numbers as purely abstract quantities separate from any physical or geometrical reality.

...The result was a continuous number line stretching as far as you could see in both directions, showing both positive and negative numbers. Sitting in the middle of this line, a distinct point along it at the threshold between the positive and negative worlds, was sunya, the nothingness. Indian mathematics had dared to look into the void -- and a new number had emerged.

In the next article, mathematician Ian Stewart taught me a lot more about set theory than I'd known before (of course, starting at zero, essentially, I could only go up).

Already I've managed to work this empty paper bag explanation of how set theory defines numbers into a conversation. Try doing that yourself. You're virtually guaranteed to stop the conversation in its tracks because nobody will know what you're talking about, including yourself. Fun!

Zero is a number, the basis of our entire number system. So it ought to count the members of a set. Which set? Well, it has to be a set with no members... the empty set. It is unique, because all empty sets have exactly the same members: none... We can define the number 0 as the empty set.

What about the number 1? Intuitively, we need a set with exactly one member. Something unique. Well, the empty set is unique. So we define 1 to be the set whose only member is the empty set... This is not the same as the empty set, because it has one member, whereas the empty set has none. Agreed, that member happens to be the empty set, but there is one of it.

Think of a set as a paper bag containing its members. The empty set is an empty paper bag. The set whose only member is the empty set is a paper bag containing an empty paper bag. Which is different: it's got a bag in it.

The key step is to define the number 2. We need a uniquely defined set with two members. So why not use the only two sets we've mentioned so far: [0, the empty paper bag set, and 1, the paper bag containing the empty paper bag set]

You can probably guess what 3 is. A paper bag containing 0, 1, and 2. So every number is based on nothing, an "empty paper bag." Mathematics, which so accurately describes reality through the laws of physics, is founded on nothing. So says a sidebar in the article.

The empty set has no members, as an empty paper bag contains nothing. It can be used to define numbers uniquely by forming other sets from the empty set.

Likewise, a New Scientist video at the top of this page shows how there is no such thing as "nothing." Take all of the particles out of a box, or the universe. There still will be energy in (or as) this supposedly empty space. 

In "The Physics of Nothing; The Philosophy of Everything," Ethan Siegel lays out in words and pictures how the cosmos evolved from nothing. No God required. No creator required. 

By the time we arrive at today, we've obtained the Universe we currently exist in. We started from literally nothing; from empty spacetime containing solely the energy of the quantum vacuum, and have arrived at our Universe today, with its billions of galaxies, stars, and all that ever was or will be here on Earth.

So if we feel a need to worship something, that should be nothing. (A Google search of "nothingness" on my two blogs shows that I've done a lot of wordful worshipping of this elusive non-entity. Such as here, here, here, and here.)

Alan Watts praises nothingness in this You Tube video that is included at the end of Siegel's post. Have a look and listen.

 

How "Nothing" is the key to a meaningful life

I've never watched an episode of Seinfeld, but the theme of the show -- "nothing" -- appeals to me. In one way or another, this is what attracted me to my Wu Project, which is still bubbling along in its nothing-much fashion.

Here's the thing, though: "nothing" still is something, when this notion is viewed as something special, something to be attained, something waiting around a meaning-of-life corner.

Zen folks have a lot to say, via words or silently, on this subject.

But I don't think there's any unique understanding of "nothing" here either, since Zen (and Buddhism in general) still sees it as something that needs effort, even of the effortless variety, to grok.

Recently I came to one of my Big Dog Walk Insights shortly after setting off with the family pet on our usual two-mile loop.

With nothing to do but take one step after another, leash in hand, my dog walk time leads me to be more aware than I usually am of what passes through my mind when my brain doesn't need to do any cognitively complex stuff.

Observing thoughts arising of this or that, sometimes I feel like I should shut them up through a mantra, or mindfulness of the external sights and sounds that surround me. Hearing myself talk to the dog, as pet owners often do, sometimes I feel like I should commune with her wordlessly, which is how members of her species interact.

Starting once again to engage in this habitual self-referential, self-questioning drama, suddenly a starkly simple intuition popped into my psyche:

It doesn't matter. Do whatever you want. Think or don't think. Talk or don't talk. Whatever. It's all the same.

Naturally, I then pondered this intuition as dog and man walked on.

My primary sensation was lightness. I felt like a weight had been lifted from my meaning-of-life shoulders. The need to conform with some standard, even as non-religious'y as "thou shalt be mindful," had faded away. I was left with a pleasing feeling that whatever came along, inside or outside of my head, was just fine.

Now, I realize that what I'm talking about might sound to you like one of those unfunny stories where the teller of the tale, seeing a quizzical look on the face of his listener, says "I guess you had to be there."

Of course. Agreed.

Heck, I was there, since I was the one who had this Big Dog Walk Insight, and I still have some difficulty in appreciating the aha! of that nothing-to-do moment. What I've written admittedly seems worthy of a "so what?" given its obviousness.

Life is what it is. There's got to be a bumper sticker with that platitude. Is this worth a second's thought, much less a blog post?

Well sure. After all, that was the essence of my Big Insight.

There are no rules (which is on a t-shirt I have, not a bumper sticker). Most people, certainly including me for most of my life, are addicted to searching for the right way to live -- as if this was a thing, an object, a Platonic form, that exists as some sort of objective reality somewhere or other outside of our current awareness/ understanding/ state of enlightenment.

This leads us to feel that something is missing from our lives. We assume that there is an optimum way of being, and we're only firing on a few meaning-of-life cylinders. We want a tune-up!

So we turn to religions, self-improvement programs, counselors, psychotherapists, spiritual advisors, holy books, gurus, etc. etc. etc. We figure that however we're acting now, however we're feeling now, however we're thinking now -- there must be better alternatives. Thus we keep on keeping on, running in the hamster cage of "must improve!" without ever getting to the promised land.

If this is what we feel like doing, great. But there may come a time when another possibility presents itself: Nothing. Which, more accurately, is the absence of possibilities, because it is the presence of what is here and now.

What I've just said may sound like gibberish to you. It might not make any sense at all. OK, that's what it is. For you. Nothing more to do; you've got it.

We all may be living selflessly

Usually we consider that being "selfless" means acting altruistically. This casts the word in a moral sense, which is how most religions see it. We're supposed to put God and others before ourselves.

But there's a scientific side to selflessness that I'm finding increasingly intriguing: the notion that nobody has a self, so we're all selfless -- including the greediest, most egotistical, and me-centered among us.

Recently I wrote about a book where noted thinkers talk about what they believe, but cannot prove. I quoted psychologist Susan Blackmore:

It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it." With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.

...When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises—will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds—but this too I cannot prove.

Free will is closely connected with having (or being) a self that is unchanging. Where, though, is the evidence for a self, soul, or whatever which stands apart from all of the ever-altering processes in the brain and nervous system?

There isn't any.

So I agree with Blackmore that recognizing or realizing the absence of a self is something that may not ever be able to be proven, yet is perhaps an absolutely real experiential phenomenon.

In another book by Blackmore, "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction," she delves more into this fascinating scientific and philosophical subject.

Blackmore shows one of those familiar optical "illusions" (not quite the right word) where a drawing of a three-dimensional box looks at first glance like it is facing one way. However, if you stare at it for a while, the box will suddenly look like it is facing another way.

Nothing has changed, except the brain's interpretation of the drawing. In my experience, the jump from one appearance to another can't be forced.

It seems to happen on its own. Even when I know there is another way of perceiving the box, because I've seen it before, I can't will my brain to shift into another way of seeing. It just happens, which is how Buddhism and other like-minded spiritual traditions say enlightenment occurs.

If Blackmore is correct about us being selfless, and neuroscience points to the fact that she is, then enlightenment may be nothing more than seeing through the illusion of "I" created by the brain/mind for evolutionary reasons we may never be able to fully grasp.

This morning my wife either did, or didn't, take some medication that she's supposed to swallow twice a day. She'd opened the refrigerator where it is kept, rummaged around in the contents, and then, a few minutes later, couldn't remember whether she'd taken the pill.

Whether she did, or didn't, some fairly complex brain-body activities were going on. These are akin to an example Blackmore talks about in her "Consciousness" book: driving along in a car and finding yourself at your destination without much, if any, memory of having driven there.

The driving just happened automatically, while the driver's attention was occupied elsewhere. Thinking about other stuff, listening to music, a host of possibilities.

This shows that consciousness, and conscious actions, can occur just fine without a "self" being aware of them. I can't tell you how many times I've driven halfway to town (about ten minutes from our house) and suddenly thought, "Geez, did I turn off the burner after I cooked the vegiburger?"

I can't recall rotating the switch. But having gotten older and wiser, after turning around several times and always finding the burner off, I've learned that I do many things correctly during a typical day without being aware that I'm doing them.

Where am "I" at these moments? Somebody is taking the medication, driving along, or turning the burner off. However, this likely isn't an enduring "self" -- just a collection of brain processes.

Blackmore says:

It seems we have some tough choices in thinking about our own precious self. We can hang on to the way it feels and assume that a persisting self or soul or spirit exists, even though it cannot be found and leads to deep philosophical troubles.

We can equate it with some kind of brain process and shelve the problem of why this brain process should have conscious experiences at all, or we can reject any persistihg entity that corresponds to our feeling of being a self.

I think that intellectually we have to take this last path. The trouble is that it is very hard to accept in one's personal life. It means taking a radically different view of every experience. It means accepting that there is no one who is having these experiences.

It means accepting that every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and not the same "me" who seemed to exist a moment before, or last week, or last year. This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice.

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.

 

 

"God" is the absence of "me"

I don't believe in God, not as this word is commonly understood. I don't see any sign of a personal divinity who created and oversees the universe, nor any indication of an omniscient and omnipresent universal consciousness.

Here's the newest news about proof of God's existence: there isn't any.

Isn't it more than a little strange that precisely zero progress has been made in the thousands of years of recorded human history toward conclusively resolving The Big Question: "Is there a God?"

Yet I'm akin to Mike, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, who has commented, "I'm a diehard atheist desperately in search of God."

Nicely said.

Similarly, Andrew Newberg, one of the authors of "How God Changes Your Brain," says in the book:

I like to think of God as a metaphor for each person's search for ultimate meaning and truth. Financial and relationship stability may be a major goal for most people, but I believe that within each of us there is a primal drive to reach for something higher.

We want to understand why we're here and what our purpose should be. We want to understand where we came from, and where we will eventually go. And we want to understand what reality actually is. With that understanding, we are then compelled to act in a more intuitively rational way.

Here's some reality to consider: not only is there no sign of a God up in the heavens, there is no sign of a soul down here on Earth. David Weisman says...

There is a common idea: because the mind seems unified, it really is. Many go only a bit further and call that unified mind a “soul.” This step, from self to soul, is an ancient assumption which now forms a bedrock in many religions: a basis for life after death, for religious morality, and a little god within us, a support for a bigger God outside us.

For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind.

Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake.  Often, the way things feel has nothing to do with how they are.

I'd prefer that I had, or was, a soul, because I prefer the idea of existing after I die to the prospect of fading away into nothingness. However, reality is notorious for not caring about my preferences -- or anyone's preferences.

Here's some good news, though.

Not in the Christian "good news" sense of a religious fantasy, but rather findings founded in some solid science that cast a different light on the whole God-Soul-Salvation thing.

Since neuroscience isn't finding evidence of a unified mind capable of remaining unchanged through transformations of the physical brain (death being a big change), it seems increasingly clear that "Me" doesn't really exist.

At least not in the way we think it does. Researchers are finding that our sense of self seems to be created through the idling processes of the brain's "default mode."

As neuroscientists study the idle brain, some believe they are exploring a central mystery in human psychology: where and how our concept of "self" is created, maintained, altered and renewed.

...research on the default mode network and mind-wandering has helped focus neuroscientists' attention to our rich inner world and raises the prospect that our sense of self, our existence as a separate being, can be observed, measured and discussed with rigor.

...That's in sharp contrast to the pattern struck by the brain when hard at work: In this mode, introspection is suppressed while we attend to pressing business — we "lose ourselves" in work. As we do so, scientists see the default mode network go quiet and other networks come alive.

So basically the Me inside my head (as well as yours, naturally) fades away when I'm focused on something, like writing this blog post. Which fits with my experience.

I only feel like I'm writing when I'm not. Meaning, when I'm searching for what to say, I'm in more of a default mode mind-wandering state. I'm aware of a Me that is trying to get my brain and fingers to type out something coherent on my laptop's screen.

However, when I'm in the flow and focus of writing, the words just come -- just as when someone is in the flow of dancing, the steps just come. "Things go better without Me" is a truism for most activities.

Religions seek union with God. But almost certainly there's no God; at least, not the sort theologies proclaim: a divine being or entity separate from physical existence.

We can, though, experience union with a different "God." Reality. Which is here and now. All that is required is the absence of Me. And this isn't tough to do, since we do it much of the time.

In fact, it could be argued: all of the time, because there is no evidence of a Me separate and distinct from the universe.

Our sense of self appears to be an appearance, a conjuring trick cleverly performed by the marvelously complex human brain. Remembering the past and anticipating the future, our brain fashions an "I'ness" out of neurological flashes of chemical/electrical energy.

If I never was, then I shall never cease to be. Which brings the Me that I'm not pretty damn close to being God. My absence is an Almighty Creator, since it brings the unity we can call "God" into existence.

The Indian sage Nisargadatta seemed to say pretty much the same thing, rather poetically:

What is religion? A cloud in the sky. I live in the sky, not in the clouds, which are so many words held together. Remove the verbiage and what remains? Truth remains.

Boundless Existence -- meaningless backdrop to a meaningful life

As I said in my previous post about Milton Munitz' marvelous book, "Does Life Have a Meaning," the notion of boundless existence sends a chill up my churchless spine.

This isn't really a "notion," though. Munitz makes clear that the awareness of That -- That existence exists -- can never be anything more than exactly That: simple awareness, without any cognitive content of What boundless existence is.

At best, all we can have is an awareness of Boundless Existence. But this awareness is not an exercise in understanding, of making possible a kind of intelligibility. Nor is it a case of our finding some value in our awareness of Boundless Existence because of the presence and activation of certain properties or powers it possesses.

The only contribution to the resultant experience of awareness is made from our human side. It is the combination of this absence of all normal conditions and sources of meaningfulness (such as we find in the case of our interactions with existents) that distinguishes our experience of Boundless Existence from all other human experiences.

When we find meaning in life, it always is the result of our interacting in some fashion with someone or something else.

A beautiful sunset leads us to feel the wonder of nature. Gazing at our baby's peaceful sleeping face causes us to marvel at the continuity of life and the love that binds. Kneeling before the altar to take communion, a religious believer is reminded of the sacrifice that Jesus supposedly made to absolve humanity's sins.

In his book, Munitz answers the question of his title with a strong "yes." Life does have a meaning. Lots of meanings, though. Not one, since each and every person finds meaningfulness in different ways.

So how does an awareness of Boundless Existence, which I seem to feel in much the same way Munitz describes, contribute to a meaningful life if the only thing we can say about Boundless Existence is nothing?

Since it is devoid of all properties, Boundless Existence is another way of interpreting and sanctioning the use of the concept of "Nothing." Yet how can the admission of such Nothing into our lives perform a crucial and important role? How should we make room for it in our manifold interactions with various Somethings?

...How can our awareness of it be the source for achieving meaning, if (as we have argued earlier) meanings are to be found only in the interactions of human existents with other existents?

Well, how does a blank canvas contribute to the creation of a painting? How does an open mind contribute to the acquisition of knowledge? How does a clear blue sky contribute to the perception of a jet streaking across the horizon?

These are backdrops. In a sense they are inseparable from the focus of our attention -- a painting needs a canvas to exist, as a bird needs the sky to fly in -- and in another sense they are separable. Similarly, says Munitz:

The relation between Boundless Existence and the existent observable universe is not one of Creation of the latter by the former. Boundless Existence is not a creator, not a person, not an infinite mind, not a being possessed of the attributes, qualities, or properties of power, wisdom, or goodness, nor indeed of any other.

It does not stand to the existent observable universe and its contents in the relation of one entity (being, object, substance) to another. It is not "separated" from the world in the way in which we think of the relation between a craftsman and the work he produces.

...in one respect we can (with proper qualifications) affirm that Boundless Existence is a "property" of the existent observable universe, whereas in another respect it is not a property at all.

Boundless Existence simply is what it is. Which is, nothing that we can know, understand, experience, feel, comprehend, or cognize. It's akin to looking into emptiness and saying, "There's nothing there."

Exactly.

Yet that nothing also is everything. Existence is the background to essence, philosophically speaking. Also, realistically speaking -- if existence didn't exist, there would be no place for anything to be what it is.

So an awareness of Boundless Existence leads us to this conclusion: the meanings in our lives come from us. There's no ground floor to the cosmos that everything rests on, other than the Nothing of Boundless Existence.

Meaninglessness thus is the backdrop to a meaningful life.

Hunger and satiety, boredom and excitement, routinized performance and genuine creativity, restricted and shared experience, evil and good, welcome accidents and disastrous ones -- these and many other parameters for mapping the course of interactive meanings are everywhere germane, applicable, and reapplicable to the lives of individuals.

But they play no role whatsoever insofar as we think of our lives under the aspect of Boundless Existence. Boundless Existence has no powers of its own, no cares or concerns, no standards, no goals, no plans, no order of operation -- not even a blind, purely causal one.

...When we take this perspective, what can we say? We cannot point to any wider scheme in terms of which the enormous variety of human experiences takes on a role, fills a place, or contributes to our understanding of how or why they are what they are.

We must remain silent; there is nothing to say that would give our lives meaning in the cosmic sense because, in living in a world that has this dimension of Boundless Existence, our lives, too, are surrounded by and immersed in meaninglessness.

The only sources of genuine, redeeming positive meaningfulness of our lives are on the level of interactive meanings -- as human existents living in a universe that is itself an existent, and by interacting with other existents, but whose Existence, in general or in part, is without meaning, without intelligibility or value.

Right here, right now, you are the source of meaning in the universe. Only you. Meaning doesn't come from anywhere else.

No God. No guru. No holy book. No philosophical treatise. No manifestation of nature. Your interactions with the world are the fountainhead of meaning. Flow on, freely and happily.

The beauty of boundless existence

"Existence" is one of my favorite things to ponder, mostly because existence (the boundless variety) is imponderable. It's just what it is: Isness, Thatness, whatever you want to call primal That -- which isn't a What.

A few months after I started this blog, I wrote "Existence exists. Amazing!" And said in that post:

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For me, existence pure and simple is absolutely real, though I’ve never seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted it. I have no idea what it is, this essence of everything that can’t be a thing itself and certainly isn’t nothing either. I feel it much more than I think it. Not emotionally, but like sensing an invisible presence in a dark room that you know you’ll never be able to put your finger on.

Nothing has changed about my relation to the almost-Nothing that I talked about above. Except, I'm less inclined to agree with my "certainly isn't nothing" conjecture about existence pure and simple.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it is and it isn't. Impossible to know.

That's the existential beauty of boundless existence, a term used by Milton Munitz in one of my favorite books, "Does Life Have a Meaning?" This morning I was drawn to pull it from my bookcase, the first time I'd visited this paean to boundless existence since I wrote a post about it back in 2007. 

I enjoyed flipping through the short (114 pages) book and reading passages I'd highlighted the first time through. This paragraph in the Summing Up section not surprisingly sums up Munitz' central theme nicely.

Boundless Existence consists in the fact that the universe Exists. It marks the ontological locus of the impenetrability by any humanly devised scheme of conceptual bounds to go beyond the awareness of this basic fact. It blocks all attempts to explain how or why the universe Exists. 

...Awareness of Boundless Existence as a fundamental feature of Reality is tantamount to denying the possibility of making the Existence of the universe intelligible by appealing to any conceptual scheme -- whether philosophic, religious, or scientific. Any such scheme, whether purportedly descriptive, explanatory, or valuational is, from the vantage point of the world picture here advocated, altogether lacking in convincingness or plausibility.

Milton Munitz explored life deeply: scientifically, philosophically, and most importantly, experientially.

Though he talked with Einstein, wrote books about the philosophical ramifications of cosmology, and had a distinguished academic career, the sense I get from him through his last book -- "Does Life Have a Meaning?" -- is that of a guy who I would have loved to have a coffeehouse chat with over a couple of lattes, because he felt much the same as I do about existence.

He just had the smarts to describe those feelings much more clearly and intelligently than I'm capable of doing. Munitz wrote:

To become aware of Boundless Existence calls for entering a different mode of experience. It is not reached by a leap of faith. Nor does it consist in a type of access that affords a special source of knowledge. It is simply a wholly unique mode of awareness that reveals a different level of Reality from that which comes from observation and the use of concepts of any sort.

The correct use of the term "Boundless Existence" lacks all reference to what is observable, conceptually interpretable or capable of serving as subject for propositions that can be judged as true or false. It is that of which no scientifically warranted, factual knowledge at all can be obtained.

Boundless Existence is unobservable, unintelligible, unknowable -- beyond all space, time, or any other conceptual distinctions -- hence not subject to changing horizons either of an observational or conceptual sort.

In the June 2010 issue of Scientific American I came across a paragraph in an article, "Extra Dimensions," that Munitz would have liked.

The discovery [of extra dimensions] would transform not only physics but also its allied disciplines. Extra dimensions might explain mysteries such as cosmic acceleration and might even be a prelude to reworking the entire notion of dimensionality -- adding to a growing sense that space and time emerge from physical principles that play out in a spaceless, timeless realm.

Cool. And close.

Yet Munitz' Boundless Existence isn't a "realm." It isn't anything, because it isn't a thing. Yet this "it" that isn't an it, but That, is beautiful -- because without That, there wouldn't be any beauty, or anything else.

Awareness of Boundless Existence is approached with silence. But noisy words are necessary to communicate this. I tried in "Meaningful meaningless meditation."

Doing nothing is the best meditation

The title above is my theory, at least, as discussed in my marvelously cogent, persuasive, and uplifting post "Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become."

Well, let's make that cogent, persuasive, and uplifting to me. Who is the person I'm most concerned with making sense to.

That said, I'm always interested in learning the specifics of how other people approach meditation or some other form of spiritual practice. "Specifics," as noted in that previous writing, is the watchword.

More and more, I'm into specifics when it comes to spirituality. I've spent a lifetime floating in the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical heavens. Now, show me the meat! (or, tofu)

I still enjoy airy-fairy speculation. Heck, what would this blog be without it? Both the posts and comments would be exceedingly brief, that's for sure.

But whenever I get a new spiritual, religious, or philosophical book these days, I thumb through it right off the bat, looking for details. Especially if it deals at all with meditation.

What does the author say we (or even just he/she) should do in an attempt to understand what It Is All About?

Don't give me elevated abstractions. I want down to earth instructions. Absent that, a writing is just a bunch of speculative blah, blah, blah.

Entertaining. But not scientifically or practically persuasive.

So I figured that I should take an I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours approach. (Heck, I recall that working with a neighborhood girl when I was a preschooler, and we were both interested in figuring out the differences between males and females.)

Actually, there isn't much to add to how I described my morning meditation about two and a half years ago. I'm still into doing as little as possible, since this seems to make my meditating as unproductive as possible.

Which is my goal. (Oops... guess I haven't left behind my Protestant ethic entirely.)

The rest of my waking moments, pretty much, I'm trying to do something. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Maybe trying isn't the right word, because much of the time the doing just seems to happen on its own.

Regardless, movement -- voluntary or not -- pervades my day (and night) outside of meditation. Thus if I want to bring something new, fresh, and unexpected into my psyche during my morning meditation time, that would be...

Nothing.

Naturally there's plenty of mystical philosophizing supporting this simple notion to be found in writings from Rumi, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Ramana, Chuang Tzu, and many other sages.

But I prefer to leave philosophy aside when I'm unbusily engaged in nothing, which I like to call my Wu Project.

Wu, wu, wu. This Chinese word also is a sound, as all words are. I use it as a meditation mantra. I like how "wu" sounds just like "woo," as in "woo-woo," which I consider religions and metaphysical belief systems to be.

Meditation, though, isn't fantastical -- not when it is stripped of blind faith and dogmatism. The brain is real. The mind is real. What goes on in the mind/brain is real.

I don't believe that pure awareness, consciousness without any content, is possible. However, each of us certainly can become more aware of what's present in our psyche. And we have some control over the thoughts, emotions, and what not that appear in our stream of consciousness.

I enjoy settling down into what I call a "base" mental state. Eyes closed, earplugs in, I sit in my quiet, dark meditation area. I repeat my wu mantra. I don't expect anything spiritual, mystical, or magical to happen.

I simply am out to experience what it is like for me to experience as little as possible. This feels like a foundation that the rest of my much more active day is built on. Meditation seems to help me become more aware of this calm base that I can return to, more or less, when my mind gets excessively frazzled and overactive.

Today I read another chapter, "Equanimity," in Buddha's Brain, a book about neuroscience and contemplative practice. These passages resonated with my approach to meditation:

As your mind grows steadier, pay particular attention to the neutral feeling tone. Stimuli that evoke a pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone stir up more brain activity than neutral tones do, because there is more to think about and respond to. Since your brain doesn't naturally stay engaged with neutral stimuli, you must make a conscious effort to sustain attention to them.

...When you are equanimous, you don't grasp after enjoyable experiences or push against disagreeable ones. Rather, you have a kind of space around experiences -- a buffer between you and their feeling tones. This state of being is not based on standard prefrontal control of emotions, in which there is inhibition and direction of limbic activity.

Instead, with equanimity, the limbic system can fire however it "wants." The primary point of equanimity is not to reduce or channel that activation, but simply not to respond to it. This is very unusual behavior for the brain, which is designed by evolution to respond to limbic signals, particularly to pulses of pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones.

...The space of awareness allows every content of mind to be or not to be, to come and to go. Thoughts are just thoughts, sounds are just sounds, situations are just situations, and people are just being themselves.

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.

New year's enlightenment resolution: nothing

I used to make New Year's resolutions. Now, my attitude is, "what's the point?" If I want to make a change in my life, I will, no matter what part of the year it is. Doesn't have to be January 1.

When I was a religious true believer, I'd often vow to meditate more assiduously, be a better person (details left necessarily vague), or otherwise try harder to close the gap between a conception of my ideal self and who I felt myself to be.

Master Woof thinks this is a stupid thing to do. So do I.

If Master Woof was more substantial than a cartoon character in an entertaining Zen book, "The Upside Down Circle," I'd be worried that he'd hit me with his stick if I backslid into trying to work my way into a state of enlightenment.

(dialogue, since the words are small: "Master Woof, I've been lazy. I want to restart my search for enlightenment." "Why come to me?" "Well, you're a Zen master." "So?" "So tell me, where do I go for enlightenment?" "Nowhere!" "Nowhere?" "Wherever YOU go, enlightenment will be hidden.")

Master Woof isn't big on dogs (people too, I assume) who are searching for what is already present.

Donald Gilbert, the book's Zen Master author and artist, offers up pithy commentaries on the cartoons. Such as...

"One of the biggest problems of so-called 'practices' is that the practice itself becomes a habit. The belief sets in that there is a practicer, someone who is on his way -- a traveler who is going where he is already."

"Woof is saying that the secret of life is revealed when we are living in harmony with the changes and motions of life -- when we are not struggling to change what is."

And the commentary that accompanies the cartoon above...

"In simple terms, enlightenment indicates the absence of the illusion of self and other.

The 'YOU' Master Woof speaks of is an object. This of course implies a subject. Subject and object is the illusion that obscures enlightenment.

Hence Master Woof's statement points out that wherever 'YOU' go, enlightenment will be hidden. He indicates that there must be a wholeness, not the persistence of a dichotomy.

Well, I don't know if there such a thing as enlightenment.

But if there is, it makes sense (assuming enlightenment would make sense) that it entails some sort of resolution of our usual view that objectivity and subjectivity are opposed to each other.

Last night on New Year's Eve, wild party'ers that we are, my wife and I sat around with a few other people at a friend's house, sipped wine, and talked -- often about some pretty deep subjects -- until midnight rolled around.

Several of the conversationalists were heavy into art: music, painting, photography. Two guys had taught art courses at the high school and college levels.

Much of the discussion, which got rather heated at times, centered around whether the value of an artistic expression can be assessed objectively, or if beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

Listening to the opposing arguments, both made sense to me.

Yes, it does seem that what appeals to one person may turn off another. So how is it possible to say that a painting of dogs playing poker is "better" than the Mona Lisa if good art is what someone likes?

On the other hand, I could appreciate the other viewpoint: that some art touches something deep in us, makes us resonate with a different meaning-vibration, is able to elicit fresh appreciations of what life and living are all about.

The conversation ball kept bouncing back and forth between these walls of subjectivity and objectivity.

And I kept having intuitions of some middle ground, but couldn't find a way to put it into words. I still can't, though maybe Master Woof could. Eventually I made an attempt.

I told the "good art is subjective" and "good art is objective" advocates that I agreed with both of them, since their viewpoints flowed from a single source: the human mind.

Art begins and ends in a person's consciousness.

The artist has a subjective notion to create something. Then, he or she uses some medium (images, sounds, movements, words, whatever) to convey that notion objectively. Someone else views the objective form and appreciates it subjectively.

It's impossible to divide the subjective from the objective. These are two different ways of perceiving the same piece of art, I said. (Or tried to say; I'm not sure how I came across last night.)

I suggested that if an artist has the skill to authentically convey what is intuitively and creatively evident to him or her from inside to outside, maybe this is what we'd call good art.

We feel the artist's vision. We're offered a peek inside another person's psyche through what has been created. The more honestly and authentically the subjective (inside) and objective (outside) are related, the more a piece of art moves us.

I tried to make some sense. I semi-succeeded. That's the way of conversation, as of art, as of everything.

For most of us, most of the time, there's a tension between what we mean and what is heard, between what we intend and what is done, between what we perceive and what we understand.

And sometimes there's no tension. We just are. As what we do and know is. 

According to Zen Master Gilbert it isn't possible to find ourselves, because we are ourselves. Sounds good. I'm ready to do less spiritual searching in the New Year. (Unk is the bloodhound who keeps getting whacked by Master Woof when he looks for what is right of front of him.)

Therefore Unk has to awaken from the notion of being Unk. The truth of Unk is not 'thingly.' There is nothing to be found (no thingly thing) nor anyone to find it. The unfindable is what Unk is, and his unfindable is the found. So no matter how assiduously Unk looks within, he can never see the seer.

"God" isn't the best name for God

God. Just three letters in this word. But they sure pack a punch.

Countless people have died in the name of "God." Countless good works have been performed. Countless arguments have ensued over what this word signifies.

Dahlia Lithwick dives into this fascinating linguistic tangle in a Newsweek article, "Jesus vs. Allah -- the fight over God's secular title."

Pop quiz: which of the following names represents a non-sectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?

If you answered "none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered "Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered "Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee.

Hamilton ruled that prayer in the Indiana House of Representatives shouldn't use Christ's name because it favored a particular religion instead of being nonsectarian.

(For those, like me, who get confused about the difference between secular and sectarian: "secular" means worldly rather spiritual, "sectarian" means relating to a sect. So nonsectarian refers to a generalized religiosity, while secular is non-religious.)

It's hard to see how anyone could disagree with Hamilton's point: that "Jesus" is less universal than "God" or "Allah."

But Hamilton's ruling got him into a lot of trouble with fundamentalist Christians, even though he pointed out that the Arabic word "Allah" is used for "God" in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures.

I face sort of a similar problem frequently on this blog. How do I refer to whatever (if anything) lies at the heart of the mystery of existence? "God" often sounds just fine to me.

However, the meaning I have in mind when I use this word is fairly close to how Spinoza and Einstein saw "God" -- as the sum total of the laws of nature, not a personal being who intervenes in the world from time to time.

Given this confusion between the various ways "God" can be used, the "One" is a word that has pluses to it. My favorite Greek philosopher, Plotinus, favored it. Along with "the Good." In his Enneads, he wrote:

But if the One -- name and reality expressed -- was to be taken positively it would be less clear than if we did not give it a name at all... Therefore, when you have said "The Good" do not add anything to it in your mind, for if you add anything, you will make it deficient by whatever you have added.

Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic, had much the same attitude. He preferred "Godhead" to "God," being a word that points to universality rather particularity.

God has many names in Scripture. But I say that if someone perceives something in God and gives it a name, then that is not God. God is above names and nature. We read of a good man who turned to God in his prayer and wished to give him a name. Then a brother said to him, "Be silent! You are dishonoring God!" There is no name we can devise for God.

For sure, since It seems that nothing is a lot closer to "God" than something.

Existence...what is it? Can't be something that exists within existence. Can't be the creator of stuff that exists. Existence is the root, existent things the branches.

That's why I like "the One" as a description of ultimacy. "Emptiness" is a pretty good word also, notwithstanding its Buddhist connotations. Also, "Wu." These terms are not only nonsectarian, they're also arguably secular. So, about as universal as you can get.

Know yourself first, God second (if at all)

Often it's said, "God is mystery." People love mysteries. They're interesting, intriguing, and, well, mysterious.

So religious believers, rather strangely, somehow combine an acceptance of well-defined dogmas, teachings, commandments, and such with an embrace of a Great Unknown.

Mysticism, to which I'm considerably more attracted than religion, dumps the "acceptance" stuff and jumps right into the "embrace."

Mystics say, I want mystery (that's why they're called mystics).

So does science. The known is appealing to scientists. But it's the unknown that really gets their truth-seeking juices flowing. 

The central thing that differentiates my churched self from my churchless self is this: now I've realized that the first, and maybe only, cosmic mystery I want to solve is who I am, not who or what God is.

Such was a point I made in my previous post about Robert K.C. Forman's fascinating book, "Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness." 

The book's index only has one reference to God.

And this is a negative one, since Forman speaks about how a beginning monk, when asked why he is doing such and such, will give an answer that refers to certain objects or goals: samadhi, God-Consciousness, or whatever. In other words, an intention.

Intentions or desires are interesting. But they're not really mysterious. The big mystery is what underlies intentions. And everything else that appears in a person's consciousness. 

Consciousness thus is the here-and-now, right in front of me, closer than the end of my nose, analogy to God -- in that consciousness is the seeming source of what is in our minds, just as God is considered to be the creator of what is in the universe.

But our consciousness is directly accessible to us. God isn't. So it makes sense to mystics (and me) to focus on figuring out the Mystery of Me first and the Mystery of God later.

If at all.

"If at all," because it might turn out that our clear and present consciousness is the primal mystery, not a murky and distant God. (Some traditions equate the two, of course, as in atman is brahman.)

Forman has had a profound mystical experience himself. He's also an academic, so he is able to analyze the experience and place it within the context of mystic philosophies and practices.

His basic thesis is this:

The evidence provided by mystics leads us to distinguish between two concepts that are generally not distinguished: intentional consciousness and awareness per se...In the pure consciousness event, we argued, mystics experience their own awareness to be without content.

...Awareness itself functions and remembers itself differently than it remembers content. It does not know or remember itself through any kind of intentional structure, but rather, we said, just unintentionally knows and holds itself together through time.

Thus we can distinguish two distinct epistemological structures: knowing intentionally, which [William] James divided into knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowledge-about, and the nonintentional form of self-knowing, which I call "knowledge-by-identity."

Knowledge by identity is an epistemological structure that any and every conscious being must have, a knowing what it is to have a consciousness simply by virtue of being conscious.

In other words (and I'd be the first to agree that Forman uses some fairly abstruse words), we know consciousness by being aware.

As Popeye said, "I am what I am." (Or rather, "I yam what I yam.")

Knowledge by identity.

What's beautiful about this thesis, which makes a lot of both experiential and intellectual sense to me, is how it points toward a non-metaphysical oneness.

Forman observes that while being an American is profoundly different from being Japanese, the awareness per se of an American likely is the same as the awareness per se of a Japanese. Or any other human being.

Often it is said that we don't know what it is like to look through another person's eyes. Meaning, what it is like to be them, rather than our own self.

Jean-Paul Sartre speaks a lot about this -- how we are a subject to ourselves and an object to others.

Existentialists like him tend to find this a bit (or a lot) depressing, since it seems to establish an unbridgeable gulf between our subjective sense of self and the appearance of others as objects within our consciousness.

But this notion of awareness points toward a commonality between every person on Earth, and maybe even between all sentient beings of any sort.

Take away what each of us is conscious of, and perhaps what is left is... awareness pure and simple.

Watching my dog stare at a chipmunk hole at this moment, I can't help but feel that if I subtracted all the contents of my human consciousness from my awareness, and if she could subtract all the contents of her canine consciousness from her awareness, we'd be pretty much the same.

Maybe exactly the same. Awareness. Consciousness aware of being conscious.

One. Which is pretty darn close to what God often is considered to be.

Existentialism and churchlessness: great fit

I've been rediscovering existentialist philosophy lately, since I'm re-reading Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" after a long absence from the pages I densely highlighted decades ago.

Sartre was an atheist. Atheist existentialism isn't the only form of this philosophy, but non-belief in God is much more compatible with an existentialist perspective than believing is.

It's tough to encapsulate Sartre's outlook on life. He's a marvelously rich and complex thinker.

I love getting into his head via what he wrote in "Being and Nothingness." Sartre often writes in a dense intellectual style, but (thankfully) he frequently throws in nuggets of simplicity that inspire my churchless psyche.

A few paragraphs below are a few examples from my fresh highlighting in the book. The passages are pretty easy to understand, especially if you keep in mind the existentialist adage: existence precedes essence. 

Which means, for Sartre there is no God, Platonic form, noumenon, soul, real self, or ultimate reality hidden behind the contents of human consciousness. What you see is what there is, basically.

Here's the quotes:

The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. 

Consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being and not as being known...The existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself.

Whatever being is, it will allow this formulation: "Being is that and outside of that, nothing."

We must be careful never to posit nothingness as an original abyss from which being arose...This means that being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it.

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not...Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.

Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it: it is freedom. 

Thus the condition on which human reality can deny all or part of the world is that human reality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its present from all its past.

It is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom...Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being.

I apprehend my freedom as being the possible destroyer in the present and in the future of what I am.

It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable.

Values are sown on my path as thousands of little real demands, like the signs which order us to keep off the grass.

In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.

Everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world succeeded in realizing only a missing God.

Man pursues being blindly by hiding from himself the free project which is this pursuit...Objects are mute demands, and he is nothing in himself but the passive obedience to those demands.

If consuming these Sartre snippets makes you hungry for more, but your reading diet doesn't include the 800 pages of "Being and Nothingness" (paperback translation by Hazel Barnes), I found these short overviews by Austin Cline to be well written and accurate:

Existence Precedes Essence
Atheism & Existentialism
What is Existentialism?
What Isn't Existentialism?
Abandonment: Condemned to Be Free

I also enjoyed Jayne Forish's take on Sartre's existence precedes essence tenet. She stresses that with freedom comes responsibility.

In conclusion, existence precedes essence in the sense that at birth man is a being for whom nothing is predestined. Through man's own individual life-quest, he discovers and chooses the meaning of his own life. Man creates his existence through living, plain and simple.

Living involves the freedom to make choices as well as the acknowledgement of responsibility for the choices one makes. With no a priori meaning in the universe, man is free to choose his essence as well as define the essence of the world which surrounds him.

Man at first exists without purpose, but then he defines himself in the world through his actions and shapes the meaning of his existence by those actions. One's identity cannot be constructed by any outside force; no one else can choose the essence of another.

Therefore, identities are constructed solely by the individual's freedom of consciousness. Values are formed similarly, for no universal concept of morality exists prior to birth. Only through action and choice do values form, for "value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose."

When a human being first enters existence, he immediately begins to live and to choose the shape of his essence and, consequently, his values and identity.

Sartre speaks to the churchless

I read some passages from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" to my wife recently. Her reaction: "How the heck can you make sense of that?"

Reasonable question. Sartre can be dense.

But I love how he rambles along in his French existentialist intellectual writing style for a while, then throws in a simple clear gem that makes me go Wow! Right on, Jean-Paul.

For example, how he ends these thoughts.

Anguish in fact is the recognition of a possibility as my possibility; that is, it is constituted when consciousness sees itself cut off from its essence by nothingness or separated from the future by its very freedom. This means that a nihilating nothing removes from me all excuse and that at the same time what I project as my future being is always nihilated and reduced to the rank of simple possibility because the future which I am remains out of my reach.

But we ought to remark that in these various instances we have to do with a temporal form where I await myself in the future, where I "make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month." Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there.

"Being and Nothingness" is 811 pages long as I noted in a previous post. However, just the two paragraphs above show why Sartre is a patron saint (god, he would have hated that appellation) for the churchless.

He says, correctly in my opinion, that we choose ourselves. This is scary. Also, exhilarating, as I wrote about on my other blog in "Sartre, scootering, and sensuality." 

If someone believes in a religion, that belief is his or hers. Not any one else's.

Believing is an action, not a state. It has to be continually reaffirmed, though often (or usually) we don't consciously realize how free we are to hold onto or discard a belief.

That's why Sartre speaks wonderfully about anguish being the fear that I won't find myself at the apppointment I've made with myself for some time in the future. ("Anguish," to my understanding, isn't so much anxiety as the realization of our freedom to choose.)

Someone believes in Jesus, or a guru, or whatever, for a long time. Then, she doesn't.

When the person was a true believer, she envisioned the appointment with herself that Sartre spoke of: a continued believing that carries on into the future (in the same way as a newly married couple imagines growing old together, not getting divorced some years down the line.)

But nothing comes between our present and our future. For Sartre, this "nothing" doesn't imply unbroken continuity, as when we say "Nothing is blocking the road between here and town."

No, nothing is nothingness. Freedom.

The gap between our subjectivity and things as they are in themselves, or being as it is in itself. The following quote is denser than the preceding one, but it offers a flavor of Sartre's view of nothingness.

But the nothingness which arises in the heart of consciousness is not. It is made-to-be. Belief, for example, is not the contiguity of one being with another being; it is its own presence to itself, it's own decompression of being.

...Thus the for-itself [individual consciousness] must be its own nothingness. The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist at a distance from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty distance which being carries in its being is Nothingness.

In this blog post I can't do a good job of explaining what Sartre means here. Here's a short and fairly simple attempt, though.

Things just are. A table is what it is. A table.

It's full of itself. All it is is what it is, a table. This is what Sartre calls Being-in-itself, which doesn't know that it is, because something unconscious isn't anything but itself. Meaning, it isn't aware that it exists. It just exists.

Humans, however, are Being-for-itself. We are conscious, including being conscious of our consciousness. This produces a distance from everything in existence, including ourselves.

Yes, there is a pre-reflexive consciousness that simply is. There has to be, because the nothing that separates Being-for-itself from itself isn't being. It is nothingness. Only being is. The rest is nothingness.

People talk about being one with God, one with the guru, one with Jesus, one with something. For Sartre (and also for me), that's impossible.

Oneness, in the sense of identity or no difference, is death for humans. If you and I aren't two, we're non-existent. I recall an Eastern sage, Ramakrishna, saying "I don't want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar."

Becoming sugar, or ashes, or God, or anything else, is to be non-existent. Unconscious. Dead. Who wants that?

This is what human life is: separateness, choice, freedom, anguish, joy, searching, finding, not-finding. If we were merely being, we would be a stone, a tree, a star, a table.

We are conscious. We are aware of existing. We know that we are free to choose. This is our joy. And also our anguish. Sartre says:

In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.

God's goodness is absolutely nothing

For the past few days I've been enamored with my "What's good about God?" question. It keeps running through my mind, particularly the answer:

Nothing.

In the comments to that post I clarified a point that might have confused some people. I didn't mean that people aren't affected -- both positively and negatively -- by a belief in God.

But this is much different from being influenced by God directly. For that to happen, (1) God would have to be real, and (2) God would have to act upon human beings in some demonstrable fashion.

I responded to a comment with...

My question is: what good is God, if God doesn't make any difference in people's lives? Yes, people have beliefs about God that make them act in different ways.

Some of these ways are positive -- an alcoholic stops drinking after surrendering to God -- while others are negative, a terrorist kills in the name of God.

But in neither case can it be proved that an actual reality called "God" is at work. It is the person's brain/mind at work, creating thoughts that become beliefs. Do you see the difference?

There's no evidence that God makes any difference in people's lives. Believing in God does. In the same way, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy have effects in the world (kids make money from their teeth, for example), but these entities exist only as concepts, as thoughts.

I find this tremendously liberating. For some reason, in all of my sixty years I'd never thought about God in this fashion until the thought "What good is God?" popped up unbidden while I was meditating.

Think about it.

In all of human history, which encompasses so much striving to understand the cosmos and what role a god or gods might play in it, there is exactly zero demonstrable evidence that any person has known God or been touched by Him, Her, or It.

Zero. None. Nada.

Yet reality is real. We experience it each and every moment while we're alive. There just is no sign of God anywhere. As I noted in my previous post, there's no way to tell the difference between a godded person and a non-godded person.

Which means...we're free! We can live life without the anxiety that so many people carry around (I know, because I used to be such a person): "I should be working harder at coming closer to God."

That's impossible. Nobody has ever done it.

At least, there's no proof that anyone, alive or dead, has embraced divinity and been changed by the contact in a fashion that isn't part of normal human experience. So as I said in another comment to my post:

Actually, it's liberating to see things more clearly in this fashion. What it means is that if God exists, a relationship with Him/Her/It is going to be super-duper intimate. No one will ever know about it -- not directly. There never will be any proof of it -- not directly.

This is pretty much what "deep" mystics always have said: God is the ultimate mystery (that's why they're called mystics). When we try to make God into something that can be shown to our friends, like a magic trick, that isn't God.

This is it. Right here and now. All there is. All we need. All we'll ever have.

Grab it. Reality isn't ever going to be any closer than it is at this moment.

What you want to do, do it now. What you want to know, know it now. What you want to be, be it now. What you want to have, have it now.

I'm speaking philosophically, of course. Or "spiritually," if you like (though that word has come to mean less and less to me).

LIfe's meaning, the grand purpose of it all, is never going to be revealed in a great gush of Godly grace. Don't expect that you're ever going to become anything other than the ordinary human being you are now.

Because there's no solid evidence that this has happened to anyone in all of human history. And none of us really believes that we're so special, we'll be the first God-being to ever exist.

Life will keep on unfolding until we die. New things will keep happening to us. We will keep changing until change comes to an end.

That's all good. And inevitable. Which is why I call it "good."

Yet God is nowhere in all of this. So stop believing that He/She/It is. There's nothing good, nor anything bad, that God can do for you or to you. Wake up and smell the reality coffee.

God either is nothing, non-existent, or nothing that affects humans in any sort of extraordinary way. In either case, God is nothing.

If you disagree, take up the challenge in my previous post. 

Let's imagine a game show: "Who Has Been Made Better by God?"

A dozen people sit in chairs on stage. The contestant -- let's say it's you -- has to figure out which of the individuals, if any, has an intimate relationship with God, and which are godless.

How would you tell? What questions would you ask?

Given the opportunity to conduct background research on these people, what evidence could you gather that would allow you to say, "Person X is better because of God"?

None. If gathering such evidence were possible, it would have been done by now.

Let's modify the New Hampshire motto. Live free. Then die.

Gazing over the edge of reality

Yesterday I got a request emailed to me:

I was wondering if you could perhaps write one of your essays about "impermanence" or "nothingness" to stimulate some more positive and philosophical responses and discussions.

Glad to oblige.

When I read this I thought of Anaïs Nin, who wrote erotic and pornographic narratives in the 1940s for a dollar a page. The difference between her and me is that I pay for the privilege of writing on this blog. And my musings aren't nearly as stimulating.

Anyway, since I was thirteen I've loved to ponder nothingness. What we don't know, the vast darkness between the scattered stars of knowledge, exerts a powerful pull.

Last night I was in bed reading The New Yorker before going to sleep. Coming across this cartoon, I knew it had to be part of the next day's blog post.

A guy sits in his chair on the edge of a cliff. His wife (I assume) says, "If you want a positive outlook, you're going to have to turn your chair around, Walter."

No Walter, don't do it! Stay where you are!

That void you're staring into is where it's at. (Don't pin me down as to what "it's" and "at" mean -- they're part of the void, so who knows?)

So much of everyday life is devoted to stepping back from the edge of existence. Religions encourage this, even though lots of people mistakenly consider that religiosity involves jumping into the unknown.

Not true.

If someone claims to know what happens after we die, don't believe them. If they're alive and able to engage in claiming, they're not dead. So they've got no experience of what they're talking about.

Death is the deepest and most mysterious void each of us is going to dive into one day. Religious dogmas, like the guy's wife, do their best to turn us around from it.

They promise salvation, resurrection, reincarnation, soul travels, heaven -- all sorts of afterlife goodies to make us forget the empty plate that will stare us in the face at our last breath.

I used to eagerly imbibe those promises that this life is but a foretaste of eternity yet to come. But now I'm a lot like Walter: I enjoy looking into the void. I don't have much of a desire to fill it with imaginings anymore.

Death is real. Keeping this in mind doesn't feel negative to me; if I turned my chair around I don't see how that would produce a positive outlook.

Because the older I get, and the more churchless I become, the greater is my wonder, appreciation, and sense of awe that I'm anything at all.

So far as I know, I was Nothing before I was born and I'll be Nothing after I'm dead (nothing conscious or aware, at least). Yet here I am, in between a huge freaking mass of nothingness, Something!

It hardly matters what I am, or what I'm doing, or how I feel about my being and doings. Whenever I want to, and also sometimes unbidden, I'm struck by a feeling that this moment, right here and right now, never will come again.

Thus, it is infinitely precious. I've traded a promise of infinite life for the reality of experiencing this moment as infinity.

Which wouldn't be possible if I'd continued to step back from the edge of death's cliff and believed that I had plenty of time to experience life, because I wasn't going to die when my body did.

This is hard to put into words. If I wasn't me, I'd have trouble understanding what I'm saying. I don't expect you to. What I feel directly can't be transported through verbiage into someone else's psyche.

All I'm doing is pointing to something that seems not at all unique to me, because I've read many descriptions of similar sentiments in mystic, philosophical, and spiritual writings (Taoism and Zen being my current favorites).

This. Now. 

It's astounding. Incomparable. Priceless. Fleeting. Never to be had again.

Don't look away from it. The seeing draws you to the edge of existence, where loose pebbles of so many kinds (head-on car crash, runaway cancer, sudden heart attack) could cast us into the void.

For now, we're in the easy chair of bodily existence. Staring at every moment at what won't be visible when our moments here on Earth end.

What a gift. There's no need to believe in a Giver to whom we extend our appreciation. Saying Yes! to each instant is thanks enough: to nothing.

Resting in the stillpoint of mystery

So many religious beliefs.
So many philosophical systems.
So many gurus with divergent truths.
So many notions of what life is all about.
So many guides pointing in different directions.

And so few people willing to say, "I don't know."

Ignorance isn't bliss. But neither is illusory knowledge.

I'm much attracted to those who have done their best to sort through the world's collection of answers to life's biggest questions and have the guts to say it like it is:

All come up short.

Virtually everyone ends up choosing sides in the massive Game of Meaning, where countless teams vie to collect the greatest number of people willing to pledge allegiance to a particular set of conceptions.

In his "Ways in Mystery," Luther Askeland clearly describes the confusing situation.

A single good book has an aura of plausibility. Does a collection of several thousand books arguing persuasively for several thousand competing and conflicting points of view have the same aura of plausibility?

Do we get a sense of reasonableness if we stand back and attempt to contemplate the totality of all the competing, conflicting mass of human self-knowledge which, not to speak of either past or future, is being offered today in biology, neurology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, linguistics, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy?

This totality, in fact, is the antithesis of the plausible and rational. It cannot offer us a verbal, conceptual sense of who we are and what we are doing because it offers us hundreds of thousands of rival versions, only a few of which we can actually begin to digest.

This dizzying, seemingly limitless number of increasingly complex, increasingly variegated, mutually competing accounts of our human reality stands in a curiously inverse supporting relationship to the negative way, for it is a self-destructing positive way, one that has reached such a degree of bizarre fecundity and self-contradiction that it cancels itself out as a way for the intellect to discover and reveal who we are.

Ah, I can visualize true believers in a mystic path saying to themselves, "What's been said doesn't apply to me, because my way is beyond the intellect."

If asked for proof of this, they will point to books describing in copious verbiage their supposedly wordless way; to sayings of a spiritual leader who teaches that reality can't be spoken about; to guideposts -- commandments, practices, approaches -- demarcating a supposedly formless path.

Thus we see that no one ever leaves the jungle of competing concepts. They merely cling onto a particular vine for support, ignoring the fact that myriads of other people are equally attached to their own belief structures.

Askeland offers examples of the variety of ideas that we grab onto.

We are flesh; no, we are spirit. We should live for this world; we should live for the next. Let us do our duty; let us enjoy life as much as we can. You are responsible first of all to yourself, to your family, to your clan, to your community, to the nation; do not limit yourself and discriminate, but recognize that your real responsibility is to humanity as a whole, or perhaps to something still greater. Our condition is one of decline, of steady progress of awaiting or seeking to create some drastic change. There must be some purpose, but what purpose could there possibly be? It is imperative to at least try to do something; let us not do, but be. Somewhere, sometime things will be better for us. We are in a tragedy, a comedy. As things are now, so they will always be.

I don't think (nor does Askeland) that we can avoid being attracted to certain conceptions of what It Is All About.

However, wisdom seems to lie in recognizing the arbitrariness of our choices.

There's no universally compelling reason to choose Christianity over Buddhism, existentialism over empiricism, church-going over solitary meditation, or anything else over anything else.

Which, to my mind, indicates that nature -- reality minus human conception -- stands apart from all of the multitudinous ways humans try to make sense of mystery.

So if people are tired of wandering in the jungle of competing concepts, it's understandable why they would clutch onto this one or that one and say to themselves, "Now I've found a place to stand."

There's another option, though, the psychological equivalent of nature's Lagrangian point. This is a place in space where a small object remains in a fixed position relative to two larger gravitationally attractive objects (like the Sun and Earth).

Their gravitational fields balance out at the Lagrangian point, in the same fashion as competing philosophical/spiritual/religious conceptions cancel out to equal "who knows?"

It takes effort to break away from long-held dogmas, just as the power of a rocket is needed to lift a satellite out of the Earth's gravitational field.

But once we realize the relativity of all conceptions about the ultimate meaning of the cosmos, perhaps it is possible to settle into a peaceful Lagrangian state -- resting in the stillpoint of mystery.

Trapped in the goal of having no goal

One of my pet peeves is how often I hear, "Brian, you think too much!" Almost always I'm told this by a true believer (generally in Sant Mat, my previous faith) who is using his or her mind to express that thought.

So obviously that person isn't opposed to thinking, because they're doing it when they tell me "You think too much." What they really are saying is that they don't like what I'm thinking.

Which, when expressed in a Church of the Churchless blog post, often has to do with the futility of religious believing. Those beliefs, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sant Mat'ish, or whatever, are thoughts.

Thus actually I spend a good part of my blogging life urging people, "Don't think so much!"

About what can't be thought, at least -- a category that includes concepts involving God, existence, being, consciousness, oneness, and other notions pointing at the ultimate.

By "ultimate," I mean something that can't be divided up. Rock bottom reality, if you like. It isn't possible to stand outside of it and point toward it with a meaningful thought.

If you do, your pointing is in the wrong direction.

You can't think about your thinking, because what you're doing is your thinking.
You can't be conscious of consciousness, since you can't be aware outside of consciousness.
You can't exist separate from existence, given that existing and existence are one.

This is simple stuff. Mysticism 101.

And believe me, I'm well acquainted with that course of study. I've dived deep into the teachings of Rumi, Eckhart, Plotinus, Kabir, St. John of the Cross, Ramana, Zen masters, and many others.

They all say, in one fashion or another, that whatever ultimate reality is, there's no way to it. No path. No technique. No method.

How could there be? It's ultimate reality. It's what is. It's what we and everything else in existence are.

"Closer than your jugular vein." "Right beneath your feet." "The light with which you're searching is what you seek." "Chop wood, carry water."

There's lots of ways to express how close at hand -- so close, there's no place to go -- ultimate reality is. Yet somehow we keep missing it.

Because we're looking for it. And it can't be seen.

Alan Watts expresses this nicely in his "Become What You Are." He speaks of Tao. But he might as well say "God," "Final Truth," "Meaning of Life" or any other synonym for the way things really are.

There is no way, no method, no technique which you or I can use to come into accord with the Tao, the Way of Nature, because every how, every method implies a goal. And we cannot make the Tao a goal any more than we can aim an arrow at itself.

If we once get into the tangled state of the arrow which is trying to shoot itself, the self trying to change itself, we can't do anything to stop it. So long as we think or feel that perhaps we can stop it, that there is some way, violent or subtle, difficult or easy, to make ourselves unselfish, the contradiction will continue or get worse.

...We cannot find release until we have known the real extremity of our situation, and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile -- since the very seeking thrusts them away.

...Of course, this doesn't mean that a Taoist comes to the table without expecting dinner, or gets on a bus to go nowhere special. I am talking of results in the moral and spiritual sphere -- such things as goodness, peace of mind, sanity, happiness, personality, courage, and so forth.

...The goal in question was some sort of image, some mental picture, some vague feeling, of an ideal, of a state in accord with the Tao, of harmony with the Way of Nature. But it was precisely in relation to such notions and ideals that Lao Tzu said: "Get rid of knowledge; eject wisdom, and the people will be benefited a hundredfold."

He was talking about supposed knowledge of what the ideal way of life is. As I said at the beginning, there is simply no way of knowing what the Tao is. If we cannot possibly define the Tao, we certainly cannot define what it is to be in harmony with the Tao. We have simply no idea of what the goal ought to be.

If then, we act, or refrain from action, with a result in mind -- that result is not the Tao.

...Now this is an immensely important discovery. For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is -- a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is a rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism.

But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched up. It is trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. It is working purposefully, as it must, but to no purpose.

It is looking for results in terms of itself. It wants to get results from the process of looking for results. This is a hopelessly and wildly fouled-up feedback mechanism. There is, however, just this one possibility.

It can realize the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it. And this realization of "I can do nothing" is precisely mui.

One has mysteriously succeeded in doing nothing.

And, everything.

Profitable spiritual investing

As the world financial crisis deepens, conversations tend to turn toward money rather than other subjects. Last night I was with a group of people who discussed the ins and outs (not to mention the ups and downs) of investing in tough times like these.

I didn't have a whole lot to say.

Briefly I held forth on the Buddha-like nature of index fund investing, where you don't try to beat the market through some clever scheme but rather rest content with rising and falling in concert with the overall financial tide.

I told my friends, "If the world and national economy go to hell, so will our investments. If things improve, so will our portfolio. It's a humble way to invest, since you're happy to be average."

This is pretty much the same way I feel about my spiritual investing strategy now.

For many years I thought I could beat the system. That is, find a way to salvation, God-realization, enlightenment, or whatever, that would lead to a better result than others would enjoy who weren't privy to the inside knowledge I possessed.

I've written about my shift from "active" to "passive" spiritual investing in previous posts:
"Running so fast to become motionless"
"Spiritual diversification, a sound investment strategy"
"Spiritual investing takes nothing"

In the last post, I said…

Here's some further thoughts about spiritual investing, a subject that I've enjoyed pondering since writing my post of a week ago. I advised that, just as it makes great financial sense to invest in index funds that mirror an entire market, a person's spiritual endeavors should be similarly widely diversified.

However, there's a difference between worldly and other-worldly markets that I neglected to address sufficiently before. When you buy a monetary index fund such as the Total U.S. Stock Market, you end up owning a piece of every single company stock in the United States. Thus diversification is accomplished in a manner that is easy to understand: own a little bit of everything.

But to invest one's soul in the Total Cosmic Spirit Market means taking an exactly opposite approach: owning nothing. You diversify widely into the One by not clinging to any part of the Many—anything that can be demarcated by name or form.

…So I'm convinced that spirituality is, purely and simply, the embrace of Nothing. Nothing, that is, of the world of illusion. Which means everything of the world of reality.

It's a damn good deal: Nothing for Everything. The only trick, and it's damn difficult to figure it out, is how to acquire that spiritual investment capital, Nothing. Seemingly you should be able to find it anywhere just by letting everything else go. Sounds easy enough.

But I've been looking for Nothing inside my head during more than thirty years of daily meditation. I always end up with something. The search continues. I'll keep you posted.

Well, I've done just that on this blog for the three and a half years since I wrote those words. Here's an up to the second update: no change. Nothing still hasn't made an appearance.

I am, though, starting to suspect why. The Nothing that I equated with God (since ultimate reality isn't like anything we know now) probably is much more of a nothing than I suspected. Or could begin to imagine.

So much of a nothing, there's no trace of it. Which leads to a question: "Is there any difference between non-existent and unknowable?"

Mystics and theologians often speak of God as unspeakable. They urge us to think of God as being beyond thought. Rather than seek a divine light, embracing darkness is recommended – the via negativa.

I'm no longer so big on embracing Nothing. I still love the notion of emptiness, of becoming a receptive vessel that can be filled with truth, happiness, knowledge, and other good stuff (including money).

However, the notion that there's a Nothing on the other side of Everything – Christians would call this "God," Taoists "Wu Chi" – maybe this is just a meaningless concept lacking any foundation in reality. People who want to make money don't ask, "What is the ineffable source of wealth?"

They just invest. Not in nothing, but in something. Hoping to get more of it: something.

This morning I read some intriguing passages in Fung Yu-Lan's "A Short History of Chinese Philosophy." I got a different impression of nothingness. Suddenly it seemed a lot more nothing'ish. So much so, there was nothing to it.

The Tao is "Nothing"

The Hsiang-Kuo interpretation made several most important revisions in the original Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. The first is that the Tao is really wu, i.e., "nothing" or "nothingness." Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu also had maintained that the Tao is Wu, but by Wu they meant having no name. That is, according to them, the Tao is not a thing; hence it is unnamable.

But according to the Hsiang-Kuo interpretation, the Tao is really literally nothing. "The Tao is everywhere, but everywhere it is nothing."

…Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu denied the existence of a personal Creator by substituting in His place an impersonal Tao, which is that by which all things come to be. Hsiang-Kuo went a step further by insisting that the Tao is really nothing.

According to them, the statement of the earlier Taoists that all things come into being from the Tao simply means that all things come to be by themselves.

…Likewise, the statement of the earlier Taoists that all things come into being from Being, and Being comes into being from Non-being, simply means that Being comes into being by itself.

Makes sense, in a wonderfully simple recursive fashion. The ultimate questions of life basically are answered (or ignored) by "Things are what they are; the universe is what it is."

That's real spiritual index investing.

Meaning of the universe may be meaninglessness

If a movie ever is made of my life, this coffee house moment has to be in it. In an intuitive flash, I got a glimpse into what the universe is all about.

Nothing. None of the above. No answer. Nobody home. No way to know.

A bunch of negatives. But the feeling I had was wonderfully positive.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. While it did, though, I felt lighter, more joyful, the weight of a gigantic question mark having been lifted off of my inquiring psyche.

Reading the first few pages of a book, "The Way of Wonder," preceded my mini satori.

I'm not sure which lines led me to stop sipping my Starbucks skinny venti vanilla latte, look up from the book, and gaze upon Salem's Court Street with fresh eyes. It could have been these words:

Life is an unknowable, inexplicable miracle; there is no solution, and … there is not supposed to be a solution. It is all an unsolvable mystery, and is unreachably far beyond the mind's ken. And that includes the self, like it or not.

…'Wonder', then, is the moment when answerless questions of the universe become not only fully obvious, but electrifying; it is the point where the individual is released from the limiting possibility that life is knowable, and the mind is cut free from the cognitive fetters which enclose it.

Those are words. Not the wordless aha! that washed over me.

For a while I simply looked at the street scene with a lot more wonder, and a lot fewer question marks in my mind, than when I walked into the Starbucks.

I knew that there weren't any answers. I knew that ultimate reality always would remain the ultimate mystery. I knew that I'd die not knowing what It Was All About.

And that was OK. In fact, better than OK: perfect. I thought, "The meaning of life is that we can't know what it is; questioning is the only answer we'll ever get."

Later, on page 157, I found that Haas explained what I was feeling in another fashion:

There is a point in life when all theories, ideas, proofs, and arguments fall irrevocably impotent, and the individual, determinedly bent hard upon comprehending his or her life in the implausible cosmos, will suddenly sense that none of what has been told to them about life is true; that Life, in fact, is not about understanding, but about living, and that the more we try to understand … the less we live.

For there is no wisdom in trying to understand what is not understandable. And there is less wisdom in imagining that one understands what one does not understand. And there is less reason still in retreating from the realization that we absolutely 'do not know,' and shrinking back into a secure, limited lie, instead of accepting the confounding Enigma, and thus embracing life's majesty completely, because of the very fact that it is well beyond our limited comprehension.

This is Life. Ours is the choice whether to obscure it with words, or worship it with wonder.

Real and false faith

"Faith" is one of those words that people use a lot, but sloppily. That is, the meaning is assumed rather than being clearly defined.

So I enjoyed reading a message ("why argue faith?") over on the Church of the Churchless Google Groups discussion forum, which is rarely used – except by spammers. Jptxs (probably not a real name) has some interesting things to say about faith.

So you can take the definition of faith and now use some substitution
and come up with this:

Faith is an opinion or conviction not based on proof.

If that is true, then one can't really disprove a matter of faith,
either.  Right?  If there was no proof in the first place, how can one
offer any argument or proof that would sway someone who actually had
real faith in something.  

… All this brings me to my question: why does anyone bother to argue any
issue to which they claim to have faith?  If you truly have faith in
something, isn't it beyond reproach?  You may have lots of little
beliefs that have built up around your faith you may argue about, but
why argue about the core articles of faith?

Bonus points question: if someone is willing to argue about something
they claim to have faith in, is that a sign that it's really only a
belief that they will drop with proof?

Good questions. It seems to me that what people usually call "faith" really is more akin to a belief founded on shaky evidence.

They have faith that Jesus saves because the Bible tells them so. They have faith that a guru is God because they sense divinity in his presence. They have faith that keeping kosher is correct because their culture supports the dietary laws.

In each case, the faithful can provide reasons – albeit flimsy – that a theological position is founded in reality rather than fantasy. Thus their faith actually is a semi-logical conclusion, not a blind leap.

So, hey, if you want to embrace faith, why not go all the way? Open yourself to the unknown, a.k.a. God, without a whit of proof, none at all, nada, nothing, about what, if anything, lies over the horizon of Mystery.

I've plowed this philosophical ground in a number of posts, including "God wants to be forsaken." However, Alan Watts says it much better (not surprisingly). Here's some quotes from one of my favorite books, "The Wisdom of Insecurity."

We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use it here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be.

The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.

Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

…To discover the ultimate Reality of life – the Absolute, the eternal, God – you must cease to try to grasp it in the form of idols. These idols are not just crude images, such as the mental picture of God as an old gentleman on a golden throne.

They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind and heart to reality.

…What religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

…If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

Really empty your spiritual cup

The "empty your cup" story is a favorite in spiritual circles. Most commonly, it's told from a Zen perspective.

A university professor went to visit a famous Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about Zen. The master poured the visitor's cup to the brim, and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. "It's overfull! No more will go in!" the professor blurted. "You are like this cup," the master replied, "How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup."

I'm attracted to emptiness. And, cups.

Every morning, before I meditate, I fill an empty cup with coffee – following the adage, Meditation and strong coffee combine to produce a feeling that all is right with the world (of course, so does the coffee alone).

But here's the thing. I know what's going to fill my cup: coffee. Similarly, the Zen master knew what he wanted to fill the professor with: Zen.

To me, this isn't genuine spiritual or mystical emptiness. You're emptying your mind with an expectation of what's going to fill the void. Lurking behind the screen of nothing is a substantial something.

You aren't really empty, because you're expected to be filled with a specific experience, knowing, emotion, understanding, vision, intuition, or whatever.

Eventually this came to be one of the problems I had with Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas. There was a lot of talk of the meditative practice being based on emptying the mind of thoughts and concepts so the purity of soul consciousness could shine forth.

But actually the practice, surat shabd yoga, presumed a whole lot that was supposed to be kept in mind during meditation.

Do this; don't do that. Follow this sort of sound or light; shun other inner experiences. Imagine the presence of the guru; don't attend to visions of other beings. Anticipate that you'll rise to specific realms of mystic reality; don't allow yourself to head in different directions.

If you know for sure what the nature of ultimate reality, or higher consciousness, is like, then I suppose it makes sense to order that up from the vast menu board of spiritual/mystical options. "A grande surat shabd yoga enlightenment, please. Hold the maya."

However, I've come to this conclusion (open to change, as are all my conclusions): given that an experience of ultimate reality likely is going to be much different from any possible conception of it, it's best to remain as open as possible to the manner in which this truth (assuming it exists) might make an appearance.

So one of my goals in meditation is to empty my consciousness of preconceptions. Sure, that goal is something rather than nothing. But it points me in the direction of emptiness, rather than taking me farther away.

I used to feel that there was a path leading to Truth (with a capital "T"), and I was on it. Now, I see the countless religions, meditative practices, forms of spirituality, mystical belief systems, and such as akin to spokes of a wheel emanating from a central empty hub.

That's a Taoist notion. Emptiness isn't revered for what will fill it, but as itself. From the Tao Te Ching:

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is,
we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

Religious practice is focused on being filled with something.

True faith, though, is to empty your cup and leave it at that. (Here's another way someone said much the same thing.)

Lowering our spiritual center of gravity

I was walking along the Metolius river in central Oregon, semi-lost in thought. Which isn't unusual for me. Like most people, I spend a lot of my day focused on what's going on inside my head.

That's as far from earth level as my six foot bodily consciousness can rise.

Since I've been reading "Tajiquan Theory" in the morning before I meditate, some Taoist lessons came to mind.

Breathe. Focus on your abdominal center, the lower dan tian. Simply be aware. Without thought.

I've heard this in each of the Tai Chi classes that I've been taking for three and a half years. "Rise from above. Sink from below."

Where does that leave you? Centered. Often we carry a lot of tension in our upper arms and shoulders. Letting it go, relaxing the elbows, softening the knees, we settle into a comfortable wu chi stance, rooted.

As in the Tai Chi dojo, so on the riverside trail.

Attention to a few breaths, feeling my abdomen expand on the inhale, contract on the exhale, and my psyche was several feet lower, seemingly. I wasn't teetering along inside wobbly mental confines any longer. Nature and me were much more intimately connected.

That's how I've been feeling ever since I entered my churchless phase: more attuned to the world that exists outside of conceptual thought.

Or at least, on the far edges of it – since I'm not sure that it's possible to completely separate sensation from cognition. The human brain isn't wired in such a dualistic fashion.

It's strange that I hear so frequently, "Brian, you think too much." This advice (or criticism) usually comes from true believers who question my leaving a religious fold. They view themselves as having gone beyond thought into pure spiritual experience.

Yeah, right. I don't see it this way at all. And I feel like I know whereof I speak, because I've been there and done that – the true believing thing.

Belief involves thought. So does faith. Each adds on something to direct experience that isn't naturally there. A complex conceptual superstructure is constructed on top of simple sensation, leaving the psyche top-weighted.

Christians believe in the presence of Jesus. But there's no Jesus actually there in prayer or a church service. Without all the dogma and theology of Christianity, Jesus wouldn't exist. He's only evident when the thought of a believer is active.

Same with guru worship in Eastern faiths, something I know a lot about. The elevation devotees feel in the presence of the guru comes from believing in his (or, rarely, her) divinity. No belief, no elevation.

It's all in the head, another example of top-weighted experiencing. This was the point of my "Did I see God in first class?" post. The ahhhhh from being a few feet away from a purported God-man erupted only from those who believed in him.

By contrast, when I walk along the Metolius there's no believing involved in recognizing the river's beauty. My thoughts keep me from fully experiencing what's really there, rather than being essential ingredients of the experience – as is the case with Jesus or guru worship.

There's nothing wrong with thinking. But when it's the foundation of religious or spiritual faith, we're out of balance, way up there in our own head, not grounded in natural reality.

I'll end with some Alan Watts.

The first element of Chinese Taoist yoga is to stop talking to yourself. Don't explain the world…So one has to get to the nameless state, the nonthinking state, which is called in Chinese wu nien. Wu means "not" and nien means "the heart-mind."

…Now, you will find, if you try, that it is a very difficult thing indeed to stop thinking. "Stopping thinking" doesn't mean to stop using your eyes and your ears and your hands and all your senses. It means that when you see a dog, you don't say "dog" to yourself; you just see what is there. The Buddhists call this the state of suchness.

…When in ancient texts of mysticism you read that it is necessary to go beyond the senses, that necessity can very easily be misunderstood. The texts are not saying that it is the senses – the eyes, the ears, and so on – that falsify.

It is our conceptions of what the eyes and the ears bring to us that cause the falsification…The splendor of a river is that it is the meaning and has none, and there is about it a quality of meaninglessness, of having no meaning and yet being meaning to all nature.

Feeling alive, undeadened by religion

Some more Maui meditations...following up on "Big waves, small waves: no difference?"

I enjoyed the comments on this post. I agree: splitting reality up into awareness and what we're aware of – how is this not another duality that the consciousness is all philosophy tries to get away from?

Reading further this morning into Peter Dziuban's book by the same name, my consciousness made clearer by Kona coffee, I'm struck by how Awareness (with a capital "A") can be made into an abstract divinity with pretty much the same characteristics as God.

I've never been aware of Pure Awareness, unsullied by anything I'm aware of. And I strongly suspect that neither Dziuban nor anyone else ever has either.

Yet somehow I'm supposed to consider this the really real reality, even though it is nowhere apparent. I'm supposed to view what my senses tell me as akin to images on a movie screen: passing, ephemeral, lacking unchanging being.

But where is this Being that Dziuban (and Plato, among many others) talk about? How can it be separated from my here and now awareness, which contains many beings, me included, naturally?

Methinks too much can be made of what most probably either is (1) so absolutely simple, we aren't recognizing it as such or (2) so absolutely different, we aren't looking in the right place.

Whatever.

I'm not interested in trading away the aliveness of the present moment for deadening promises that later, someday, tomorrow, after death, eventually, I'll be aware of something other than what I'm conscious of now.

Laurel and I went on a Pacific Whale Foundation sunset dinner cruise yesterday. It sure seemed real. But the whole time I was only aware of what my senses, thoughts, and emotions conveyed to me – not Awareness itself.

Which was good, because if I'd been in a state of Pure Awareness I would have missed the whales and dolphins that appeared next to the boat (against the odds, according to my experienced captain, given that only a couple of whales are still hanging around Maui).

I'm not denying the possibility that consciousness is separate from the body that each of us is (or at least, seems to be) at the moment.

But every time Dzuiban approaches the central question about consciousness that I raised earlier, it gets skirted. Here's an excerpt from a chapter I read today:

A question that may arise based on all of the preceding might go like the following:

"If the mind is not inside a body or brain, then why does the mind's activity stop when the body is anesthetized? How could anesthesia affect the mind if the mind is not there? And if the mind isn't in the brain, then why don't the mind and body function just as well when the brain is damaged or removed?"

Great questions. No good answer. This one leaves a lot to be desired.

So if it appears the state of a "body" is altered via chemical anesthesia or surgery, naturally the state of the "mind" will appear altered too, for it is all the same, one "stuff." It is not because a mind is inside a body…This book is not denying that such things seem to occur.

Well, as I said before I'm not big on relying on quotation marks to define reality. If I seem to be unaware when I'm anesthetized, a literary device – making it into "mind"—doesn't change the situation for me. Or anyone else.

Feeling alive. Isn't this what life should be about? When I'm catching a wave on my boogie board, soaring down a zipline, or watching a whale surface nearby, I'm absorbed in the moment.

I'm not anticipating the future or remembering the past. For me, this is where the feeling of increased aliveness comes from: being here and now, fully.

Positing some state of Being separate and distinct from what's present, this is the province of religion – whether it be a monotheistic creed or a philosophic exaltation of "consciousness is all."

Way back in the '60s I grooved over Be Here Now. I haven't moved much, if anywhere, since. How could I?

When I’m unconscious, why aren’t I enlightened?

My second straight post with a question mark in the title. I still don't know if awareness can be aware of nothing, so I'll extend my ignorance by talking about what happens when we're unaware of everything.

Like, under anesthesia. Or after being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Or in deep dreamless sleep.This latter state is particularly praised by Advaitist sages such as Ramana.

I like Ramana a lot. But whenever he extols dreamless sleep as being akin to a realized consciousness, I'll pause in my reading and think: Gosh, I'm not sure I want to be enlightened if it means I'm unaware of everything.

What's the difference between being (1) dead and gone and (2) alive and unconscious? Not much.

That's why lots of people have signed living wills that allow life support to be withdrawn if they're in an irreversible persistent vegetative state.

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm reading "Consciousness is All" while here on Maui. A good book, creatively and intelligently written, very much in the Advaita tradition – but without the Indian cultural trappings (which appeals to me).

Today I made my way through the "Consciousness is not the 'human mind'" chapter. In arguing that consciousness isn't tied to the body, Peter Dziuban said:

This point can be illustrated by this typical human assumption: "Consciousness has to be inside the body. Why? Well, suppose my body had surgery, and was given heavy anesthesia. Or suppose my body got knocked out. In each case I would be 'unconscious' or 'unaware.' When any of those things happen to my body, Consciousness stops functioning – at least temporarily – so Consciousness must be inside the body."

First, a literary quibble. I understand the purpose of the quotation marks around 'unconscious' and 'unaware.' But they don't change the fact that when I got my tonsils out as a kid and had an ether-soaked cloth put over my nose, I really was unconscious and unaware for quite a while.

Similarly, you could say that when I take my last breath I'll be "dead." Well, it's sort of nice to see those not really quotation marks again. However, they're not going to change the reality of the situation.

Which, for the anesthesia and knocked out examples, Dziuban sees differently from me.

In such cases something seems to cease functioning, of course. But it is not Consciousness, the Infinite that stops. It is the so-called human, sensing "mind," or that which is finite, that stops. They're not the same.

…In other words, it would be everything one appears to be conscious of that gets disrupted, not Consciousness Itself. It would be everything observable that gets knocked out. Consciousness Itself never is observable to begin with – because it's infinite! So the fact that everything observable seems to have gone doesn't mean Consciousness itself has gone.

Though I'm attracted to Advaitist and non-dual approaches, this is where they and me start to part company: when I'm asked to have what sounds like blind faith in infinite Consciousness. How is this different from blind faith in God?

I mean, I'm unconscious. I'm unaware. Yet supposedly Consciousness and Awareness (the capital letters signifying their universality) proceed on their merry way.

They're still there. They just can't be observed. Well, if consciousness is all, as the title of the book says, why isn't it more noticeable rather than less when the obscuring physical body and mind are removed from play?

In other words, why doesn't being knocked out with a baseball bat lead to enlightenment? Now that the senses aren't working and thoughts have stopped being produced by the mind, shouldn't the purity of Awareness shine much more clearly?

Conceptually (and I know: concepts are a no-no in nonduality) this is a big problem for Consciousness is Everything folks. As for those who believe that immaterial soul consciousness is the true Self.

Again, why isn't the soul's intrinsic awareness evident when the normal functioning of brain/mind is interrupted? What happens is just the opposite. We become much less conscious and aware when the body isn't functioning as usual.

On this note I'll end with a pointer to an interesting post by Manjit on the Church of the Churchless message board, who also tilts strongly toward non-duality, but has some reservations about it. An excerpt:

Midway through a 4 week mini meditational home retreat, checking my emails and reading the posts on the main blog, I thought I'd add my personal understandings of the value of 'spiritual practice'.

Spiritual practice specifically in relation to the absolutist, pure non-dual and so-called 'neo-advatist' etc, views or positions. A View that is promoted by so many, including myself on occassion, on the ChurchoftheChurchless blog. More specifically, the complete and total dismissal of any kind of  'spiritual practice' whatsoever, with a kind of implied belief that by simply adopting that View, it will in and of itself resolve all the various factors which lead to the primal suffering/existential angst/incompleteness etc, which caused one to 'seek' or search for spiritual peace or God or whatever.

Having myself often expressed myself with this 'View' too, it may seem strange or contradictory when I say that sometimes this View comes across as rather hollow or shallow sounding? Even stranger, from my perspective, and I have considered it deeply, it is entirely integral!

In the end, what the @#$%&! do I know? Or any of us knows? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing.

Today I enjoyed Mark Morford's column about the Earth singing its own music, along with the entire cosmos.

Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.

Yeah, for sure.

Each of us gets a lot less time than the Earth to ring (maybe). Regardless, when our tone comes to an end, at least we can also say, "well that was interesting."

Can awareness be aware of nothing?

My wife and I are in Maui. We've overcome a lot of struggles to get here, as documented in "From snow to sunshine with snafus."

For example, our first class upgrades didn't get us much of a vegetarian meal on Hawaiian Airlines. The Buddha was right: life is suffering.

I like to keep things simple on Maui. Today we sat in some shade on the beach until the mid-day sun drove us into the ocean -- Laurel to snorkel, me to swim back and forth across Napili Bay.

When to lie on the sand; when to go in the water. Of such Big Questions a vacation should be made of.

It's also another good time to work on my Wu. Which involves a query of more cosmic proportions than our beach dilemma. Namely, can awareness be aware of nothing?

Intuitively, I doubt it. But as I so often say on this blog, what do I know?

My Wu Project, or anybody's, necessarily hits a major roadblock if the answer is "No." Seeking the root of whatever lies at the bottom (or top, or middle) Of It All, one is left with something within consciousness – a duality of (1) something and (2) consciousness of that thing.

I brought with me a new book, "Consciousness is All." I figured, correctly, that it'd blend nicely with the mellow buzz of my cup of Kona coffee in the morning, and more generally, with the whole laid back Maui vibe.

The author, Peter Dziuban, has an engaging style. I'm much attracted to what seems to be a complete lack of quotations in his 296 pages. He just says what he thinks, with no corroboration from holy books, gurus, saints, or seers.

After reading just a few chapters I can tell that a central thought regards the reality of pure awareness.

Awareness truly is. For this to be clear, start with pure Awareness, pure Consciousness only – entirely distinct from the body and everything else you seem to be aware of. One who is alert sees that pure Awareness, all by Itself, alone, never changes or goes away.

Hmmm. I don't know about that, though maybe I'm not alert enough to see it. Sure, for every moment of my 59+ years I've been aware (which Dziuban says is synonymous with being conscious).

I've also been aware of something for each of those moments – except when I was unconscious. Then I wasn't aware of anything, including awareness.

I like the notion of pure awareness, of pure consciousness. It just sounds so…pure. And simple. But I can't imagine what it would be like.

Neither, says my skeptical soul, do many (if not all) of the people who talk about it. Again, though, I could be wrong. It just seems to me that pure awareness is like pure existence: a concept.

How empty can awareness or existence be, and still be something that we can be aware of or know as existent? I find it difficult to imagine being aware only of awareness, or of existing solely as existence.

For one thing, it's deeply creepy. Like being dead, yet not quite. Totally alone. A nothing knowing only its nothingness.

But, hey, I'm just 21 pages into Dziuban's book. Maybe things will clear up with more Kona coffee-aided reading. And perhaps the beauty of Maui is what's making me wonder…

Can there be awareness without stuff to be aware of?

Can there be existence without stuff that exists?

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become

More and more, I'm into specifics when it comes to spirituality. I've spent a lifetime floating in the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical heavens. Now, show me the meat! (or, tofu)

I still enjoy airy-fairy speculation. Heck, what would this blog be without it? Both the posts and comments would be exceedingly brief, that's for sure.

But whenever I get a new spiritual, religious, or philosophical book these days, I thumb through it right off the bat, looking for details. Especially if it deals at all with meditation.

What does the author say we (or even just he/she) should do in an attempt to understand what It Is All About?

Don't give me elevated abstractions. I want down to earth instructions. Absent that, a writing is just a bunch of speculative blah, blah, blah.

Entertaining. But not scientifically or practically persuasive.

So since I don't want to be a pot calling the kettle black, here's what I generally do when I sit down for my morning meditation – fortified with a strong cup of coffee, which caffeinatedly elevates my mood even if the mediation session doesn't.

I have a saying that I repeat, and contemplate, before meditating.

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become

I say this to myself as an encapsulation of my current spiritual outlook. It also serves to get me in a groove that, hopefully, I'll stay in for as much of the meditation period as possible.

Nowhere to go… Here I am, stock still on my cushion. No place else I need to be for the next 30 minutes or so. This is It.

Nothing to do… No mental place I need to arrive at either. I don't need to think, feel, imagine, perceive, or do anything else inside my head.

No one to become… Even more, no transformation of my basic being needs to happen from on high, or down below. Like Popeye, I am what I am (or, I yam what I yam).

This centers me in three dimensions of space, time, and being – exactly where I am. I realize that every movement from this center, on what spiritual traditions call a "path," is going to take me farther away from really real reality, not closer.

That's my theory, at least.

However, it's founded on a whole lot of book learning and life experience. I just choose to ignore all of that learning-experience in favor of the no, no, no at the center of my Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become.

I then use a simple sort of mantra meditation to stay close to the center during my meditation.

Lately I've been favoring Wu because it means nothing/negation in Chinese. And I hear "wu chi" a lot in my Tai Chi classes (this is the motionless ready stance that begins and ends each form; from wu chi the tai chi begins).

Something…wu…out of nothing…the empty center. Endlessly fascinating. A sound in my head, uttered by me, where before and after there is silence.

So, yes, I do something. Not nothing. But as little as possible, which is a heck of a lot less than I'm going to do the rest of the day, after I stop meditating.

I enjoy beginning the day with this period of mostly passive yin that contrasts with my mostly active yang the rest of my waking hours.

It's the core of my spirituality, really. Yet it's nothing that I can describe beyond how I've already described it. For there's nothing much to it.

Even less than I think, for sure.

Googling "nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become" before I wrote this post, I came across a book whose title is two-thirds of my meditation saying.

Well, no one has a copyright on nothing. Though lots of people have said quite a bit about it. Like...

There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.

However, it helps to understand that fire burns,
and when it rains, the earth gets wet.
Japanese Zen scroll

As for me, when I meditate my saying is as minimal as I can make it. Wu, wu, wu.

Absolute unitary being – nothing that’s really something

AUB. An acronym for the highest reality humans can perceive. Or, more accurately, not perceive – because Absolute Unitary Being isn't anything you can be aware of, because it is awareness without any content other than itself.

This isn't just another wild-eyed, New Age, mystic-religious, or psychedelic inspired bunch of far out fantasizing.

Rather, the notion is founded on some solid science. In the book "The Mystical Mind" that I've been blogging about recently (here, here, and here), physician researchers Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg show how the brain produces experiences that often are termed mystical.

In their opinion, the most mystic experience of all is that of Absolute Unitary Being.

AUB is a state of pure awareness without the perception of discrete reality, without the sense of the passage of time, without the sense of the extension of space, and without the self-other dichotomy. In short, it is pure awareness or awareness without content.

As such, it's the common denominator of every deep form of spirituality or religion, the glue that binds together otherwise disparate philosophies, theologies, and ways of looking at the cosmos.

AUB is analogous to the clear sky across which clouds of all kinds of shapes and sizes move, leading people to look up and say, "That one resembles Mickey Mouse, that one a dog, and there's some large breasts!"

Clearly, in AUB there can be no distinction between what is experienced by different individuals, even from totally different cultures. There may be significant differences in how these experiences are described and interpreted, particularly since they are usually related in terms of the specific cultural and societal milieu from which the experiencer comes.

We maintain, however, that the actual experience of AUB in itself is necessarily the same for any individual who experiences it. This is necessary from a neurophysiological as well as a philosophical perspective. It is necessarily experienced as an infinite, unified, and totally undifferentiated state.

The basic reason for this is that the brain normally does its best to locate the body to which it's connected in time and space. Evolutionarily speaking, this makes great sense. If you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, it's important to know exactly where you and the threat are in relation to each other.

But when sensory inputs are shut down, as in closed-eyed quiet meditation (or a sensory deprivation chamber), the brain may do some strange stuff. This is the result of deafferentation, which occurs when incoming information into a brain structure is cut off.

The deafferented neurons, d'Aquili and Newberg say, then begin to function according to their own "internal logic." Here's what happens with the orientation association area.

If this structure is totally deafferented so that it receives no input from the outside world, then it cannot form a sense of space and time abstracted from sensory input. It is still trying, however, to generate an orientation in time and space. It is still working by its internal logic.

It continues to attempt to generate a sense of space and time even without input from the external world to work on. The result is a sense of no space and no time, or conversely it might be described as infinite space and infinite time.

No matter how it is defined, it is the same sensation. The world's mystical literature is replete with experiences of no space and no time or infinite space and infinite time. Therefore, it appears that total or near-total deafferentation of the orientation association area may be involved in the generation of such mystical states.

Note the may. That's how scientists talk. Cautiously, unwilling to bind themselves to a view of the world that makes sense, but hasn't yet been experimentally confirmed to such a degree that it can be termed a valid theory.

However, d'Aquili and Newberg note that functional brain scans of experienced meditators (such as Tibetan Buddhist monks) show the changes that their model of the "mystical brain" predicts.

So, what can we make of all this? To me, it supports my churchless predilections. Because as noted above, AUB is considered to be the highest of mystical states in most traditions (some elevate a "non-dual" consciousness that includes awareness of the physical world to be more elevated than AUB).

A big reason for this is that those who have had an experience of Absolute Unitary Being generally say that it felt a lot more real than everyday reality. They come back changed, as is often the case with those who have a near-death experience.

d'Aquili and Newberg conclude that notwithstanding thousands of years of human pondering about what is real and what isn't, the phenomenological sense of This is real is the best measure of absolute reality. In this article, the authors make their case.

Clearly, baseline reality has some significant claim to being ultimate reality. However, AUB is so compelling that it is very difficult indeed to write off the assertion of its reality. Actually, for individuals having experienced AUB, it seems virtually impossible to negate that experience.

This being the case, it is a foolish reductionism indeed which states that, because unitary consciousness can be understood in terms of neuropsychological processes, it is therefore derivative from baseline reality. Indeed the reverse argument could be made just as well.

Neuropsychology can give no answer as to which state is more real, baseline reality or hyperlucid unitary consciousness often experienced as God. We may be reduced to saying that each is real in its own way and for its own adaptive ends.

It's interesting that people interviewed by d'Aquili and Newberg who have had an AUB experience describe it as neither subjective nor objective. That is, it wasn't a subjective local consciousness, and it wasn't consciousness of objective external reality.

It was something else. Itself. Pure awareness. Thus it's tempting to call it the "ground of being," or some such foundational term.

Well, whatever it is, it sure isn't religious. There's no ritualistic, theological, or personalized content in an experience of Absolute Unitary Being.

No Jesus. No Buddha. No guru. No God. No Allah. No anything that points to a particular religion or spiritual path.

However, some AUB'ers experience it as being suffused with positive affect that leads them to personalize it as "God." Others, such as Buddhists, experience it as suffused with neutral affect and describe it as nonpersonal or void consciousness.

This is one of my few quibbles with d'Aquili and Newberg. Seemingly in an effort to meld personal and impersonal AUB experiences into a single overarching framework, they equate them as reflecting "anterior" and "posterior" natures of God.

Whatever that means. I don't get how an experience of absolute unitary being can be divided into two, or how using the word "God" adds to their scientific explanation of AUB.

But this is a minor quibble. On the whole I've found the notion of absolute unitary being -- the product of specific brain states – to be a marvelous support for a truly scientific spirituality.

One that doesn't seek for ultimate reality "out there" in some mysterious hidden realm known only by revelation, divine grace, or secret mystical techniques, but rather within the brain that each of us possesses right here and right now.

Here's how "The Mystical Mind" ends.

Since the approach presented in this book is firmly based on the neurosciences, on neuroevolutionary theory, and on strict phenomenological analysis, we hope that it will carry a compelling plausibility, indeed probability, to twenty-first century readers steeped in a scientific culture and demanding proof.

Thus, the mystical mind has led us down a new and fascinating path toward the understanding of human beings and their relationship to religion, spirituality, and God. As we stated in our dedication, we certainly believe that neurotheology can help open us to a greater sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the tremendous and spellbinding mystery – and to the awareness that we, who are brought together in a love of truth, are the mystical minds seeking that mystery.

Ibn ‘Arabi on the impossibility of becoming nothing

I've read the Koran (in translation, naturally). It didn't resonate with me. Really tough to get through – but Muslims say that a lot, maybe everything, is lost in translation.

Somewhat strangely though, I went through a phase where I couldn't stop reading Rumi. He was a Sufi, the mystical side of Islam. My bookshelves are full of Rumi titles, including Nicholson's three volume translation of the Masnavi.

I rarely pick up a Sufi book any more. There's too much monotheism left over from Sufism's Islamic roots to appeal to me, now that I'm in a Taoist/Buddhist phase.

All this Rumi talk of "His ruby lips" and "kiss of the Beloved" …ugh.

But I just read an excerpt from Ibn 'Arabi's "Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom" that gave me a fresh outlook on Sufism and mystical Islam. It's included in One: Essential Writings on Nonduality, edited by Jerry Katz.

I liked these passages because the notion of becoming nothing is appealing only insofar as it is a metaphor, not reality.

During my deeply devoted Radha Soami Satsang Beas days, when I'd hear disciples say "The guru is everything, I am nothing," I liked the humble sentiment. But it never made sense to me.

After all, if someone is in love with the guru and wants to be just like him, and the guru is everything, then shouldn't that person want to be everything also, rather than nothing? Plus, if you're nothing, how can you love? Or be devoted? Or be anything?

Religions often preach the virtue of extinguishing individuality, ego, willfulness. Yet as Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) says below, this presumes that there is something to extinguish.

If reality is truly one at its foundation – a hypothesis that makes a lot of sense to me, both scientifically and spiritually – what's up with all this talk of nothingness and somethingness?

Here's how Ibn 'Arabi puts it, presenting Islam in a refreshing non-dualistic fashion.

You cannot know your Lord by making yourself nothing. Many a wise man claims that in order to know one's Lord one must denude oneself of the signs of one's existence, efface one's identity, finally rid oneself of one's self.

This is a mistake. How could a thing that does not exist try to get rid of its existence? For none of matter exists. How could a thing that is not, become nothing? A thing can only become nothing after it has been something.

Therefore, if you know yourself without being, not trying to become nothing, you will know your Lord. If you think that to know Allah depends on you ridding yourself of yourself, then you are guilty of attributing partners to Him – the only unforgivable sin – because you are claiming that there is another existence besides Him, the All-Existent: that there is a you and a He.

Our Master, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), said:

He who knows himself knows His Lord

He did not say:

He who eliminates himself knows his Lord!

…That which exists and is visible is He. There is nothing but He, so how could nothing cease to be?

…Therefore, do not think anymore that you need to become nothing, that you need to annihilate yourself in Him. If you thought so, then you would be His veil, while a veil over Allah is other than He. How could you be a veil that hides Him? What hides Him is His being the One Alone.

Well, I still don't like the "He's" and "Lord's" in reference to Allah. But these are just ways of speaking. I mentally translate them into "It" and "Reality," which seems to be the sense Ibn 'Arabi is intending.

There's only One Thing Going On. It's all around us, and indeed is us.

No need for religion when there's nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become.

Taoism wants us to be holey, not holy

I've been attracted to Taoism for a long time. Even before I knew anything about it. Early in my teen years (maybe a bit before) I visited San Francisco's Chinatown.

I came back with a bunch of cheap art, bought from my allowance. I was enthralled with the images of misty mountains drawn with a few brushstrokes, usually including a tiny solitary figure walking along a path.

Who knows where that early instinctive attraction to Taoism came from? I sure don't. My mother had no inclination toward Eastern philosophy or art. I wasn't exposed to such in any other fashion, so far as I can remember. But I had those scrolls and prints up in my bedroom for quite a few years.

They seemed entirely natural to me. As does Taoist philosophy now, along with Tai Chi, the current stage of my martial arts evolution.

I've been reading and hugely enjoying a new book in my Taoism collection. "Daoism Explained" by Hans-Georg Moeller is brilliant. It looks at Taoism/Daoism in a fresh light. Familiar Taoist stories and images are becoming new for me again, thanks to Moeller's insightful take on classic writings.

He translates the eleventh chapter of the Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching).

Thirty spokes are united in one hub.
It is in its [space of] emptiness,
Where the usefulness of the cart is.

The hub, says Moeller, is at the center; it is empty; it is still; and it is single, being a center. This is the Tao. Yet it isn't only the empty hub. The Tao is the spokes also. It is the process (not a substance) that makes the world go 'round.

So Taoists try to reflect the emptiness of the hub. They seek to be holey, rather than holy. An artificial morality is anathema to them. In ancient China it was the moralistic Confucians who came in for Taoist scorn. Today fundamentalists of other persuasions make the same mistake:

Failing to see that prevention is better than cure, that emptying oneself of notions about right and wrong produces a natural ethical sense. Moeller:

If people learn to follow the Way (dao) and the "own course" (ziran), then morality will not be required because everything will be just naturally fine. From a Daoist point of view, morality is the virtue of latecomers…Instead of focusing on the Dao and trying to naturally follow it in the first place, the Confucians seem to attempt to "help" the Dao once they have already failed to correspond to it.

It's easy to miss the Tao. That's why Taoism is so simple to follow. You want to miss the Tao. The entire difficulty comes from making the Tao into something that can be spotted, understood, perceived, sensed, worshipped, contemplated, meditated upon.

In Chinese Tao is wu (emptiness, non-presence) rather than you (fullness, presence). If you believe you've got it, you don't.

If something "is there" or if somebody "has something," there is fullness; and if nothing is there or if somebody "has nothing," then there is emptiness. In this sense you designates a place or spot where there is something while wu designates a place or spot where there is nothing. In the image of the wheel, the spokes are obviously in the place of you – in the space where there is something (the turning spokes cover all the space around the hub), whereas the hub is in the space of wu.

Religions adore presence. They make God or ultimate reality into something transcendent that exists Out There, a Platonic form of divineness that we fallen humans must struggle to reach.

Religious humility, egolessness, surrender – this is a means to attain a glorious end. True believers see themselves as being on a spiritual roller-coaster. "If I can just go down far enough, I'll then be able to rise up."

Back in the days when I looked at the mystic-religious path of Sant Mat (Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch) through uncritical devotional eyes, I failed to recognize this. I didn't see that my efforts to prostrate myself before the guru, and thence before God, sprang from a elevational goal.

Even when my eyes were downcast, focusing on the humble descent of the spiritual roller coaster, I was keeping a look out for the anticipated swoop upwards. Wheeeeee! Sach Khand! God-realization! Paradise!

Now, I don't know where I'm heading. Up. Down. Sideways. Nowhere. Somewhere. I'm clueless.

Which, more and more, feels natural to me. Because after some forty-five years of investigating the meaning of life (including my teenage Taoist phase, which was followed by a lot of listening to Bob Dylan, so that period should count) here's a big part of what I've learned:

The sum total of agreed-upon human knowledge about what lies beyond the physical is precisely zero.

There's a virtually endless supply of religious dogma, countless volumes of philosophical speculation, large crowds of supposed spiritual gurus, endless stories of the miraculous. But when you add them all together and discard the unproven, unlikely, and unbelievable, what's left is a big pile of nothing.

And that exactly equals what Taoism says should be found by anyone seeking the hub of the cosmos, the pivot point around which everything in existence swirls.

Everything that exists, in its entirety, exists by itself, and at the center of this entirety of presence is "nothing" – or more precisely, nonpresence (wu). This is the "Dao of heaven" (tian dao).

Beautiful. Taoism finds emptiness at the core of reality. This empty Tao is holey, not holy. It can't be worshipped, revered, prayed to, or otherwise made an object of veneration, because it isn't separate from the potential venerator.

When I try to lay hold of my own innermost essence, I can't do that either. The core of my being is as squirmy, slippery, and shadowy as the Tao is. And as the God that religions and mystic faiths claim to know, but can never provide proof of.

There's a story in the Zhuangzi about fish drifting along free and easy. A couple of sages discuss this seeming happiness of fish, wondering whether it is possible to know what makes a fish happy if you're not one yourself. I liked Moeller's commentary.

If one "rambles" free and easy, one has no friction whatsoever with one's surroundings and so is part of a seamless, easygoing process…When Zhuangzi claimed to know about the happiness of fish, he did not claim to be able to feel the exact same feeling. He was just saying: I feel perfect by rambling around, and the fish feel perfect by rambling around.

At the center, wu. Nothing.

Rambling around wu. Perfect.

Sheer absence of soul reveals its nature

Ah, sheer poetry. About the soul. Featured on the front page of The Oregonian Living section yesterday, of all things. I've poeticized a quote from Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds 3 exhibit that I wrote about recently.

In the exhibition
the pure absence of the soul
actually
underlines the soul

The longer I am
an anatomist,
the closer I am
to the soul

just
because of
its sheer
absence

I was surprised by the tone of the story, headlined "Exhibit or exhibitionism?" The reporter, Nancy Haught, must have gone out of her way to find people who were offended by this display of plastinated human bodies (plus a camel).

All of the people who donated their bodies did so voluntarily. Yet the story had numerous quotes along the lines of this ridiculous observation from a Unitarian minister (I'd expect a Unitarian to be a lot more open-minded).

People volunteer for all sorts of things. People volunteer to be prostitutes. People volunteer for genital mutilation, to kill themselves. That doesn't mean society should cooperate with their wishes.

My take is that underlying this sort of how could they?! reaction to the exhibit is the commonly held assumption among religious types that the soul, if not itself physical, still is closely linked to the body.

Why else would so much valuable real estate be taken up by graves? This is a great income producer for casket makers and embalmers, but theologically is absurd.

When the body is dead, it's a goner. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Finito.

If there's anything of us that survives death, it sure isn't material. There's no evidence of anyone being resurrected, notwithstanding the blind faith of Christian true believers (and members of other religions with similar supernatural dogmas).

So if you want to hang on to a belief in something spiritual – call it "soul" – that lives on after we die, any sort of physical evidence of it belies the belief.

When it comes to the soul, nothing trumps something.

That's why I liked von Hagens' statement so much. It's deeply profound, though I doubt most Oregonian readers appreciated it sufficiently, being a bump in the road on their dash through the Living section to the comics.

Spiritual emptiness: it's a good thing. The very best.

I don't know if the soul exists. But if it does, I'm pretty sure it won't be found in any familiar place. Like, the body. Or thoughts. Or feelings. Or perceptions.

It'll be hanging out where the really wild things roam.

Nothingness. Which, if you believe physicists and mystics, is a close kin to Everything.

Wu t-shirt leads to philosophical conversations

Usually I just wear my Wu t-shirt to Tai Chi class or the athletic club. Yesterday was pretty grey in central Oregon, so I decided to brighten it up with my yellow Wu attire.

Good decision. After a pleasant walk along the Metolius river, where this photo was taken, I had a couple of pleasant philosophical discussions stimulated by a "What does that mean?"

When I started my Wu Project some fifteen months ago, I knew that what I needed most of all, and first of all, was a Wu t-shirt. What's a project without a t-shirt?

I'm pretty sure that what I've got on my chest doesn't say Kick me or This dumb shit thinks this means Wu. The Wikipedia entry for "Mu/Wu" now shows the character in cursive script, but the small non-cursive icon looks like my t-shirt. Still, whenever someone Chinese walks by while I'm wearing it I prepare myself for hilarious laughter.

The cursive version is cool. Check out this animation that shows the calligraphy stroke order. Beautiful.

Like Wu. And conversations about Wu. My first was in the charming Camp Sherman store. One of the owners pointed at my chest and said, "Explain."

As if I could. But anyone who wears anything but a plain t-shirt should be willing to answer questions about the message they're broadcasting to the world.

"It's Chinese," I replied. "It means Wu. That's a negative—negation, nothingness. But it doesn't have, well, the negative sense we Westerners put on nothing. It's more like the universal that remains when everything particular is negated."

"Infinity," the owner said. "Exactly," I told her. Though exactly isn't exactly a word that fits with Wu, she seemed to hit the word-nail right on the head.

Anyway, it beat talking about the weather. Conversations like the one we had, even brief ones, are so much more satisfying than the usual "How's it going? … Fine" variety. It'd be nice if everybody had a t-shirt that succinctly expressed their philosophy of life (and they were amenable to talking about it).

My other t-shirt inspired conversation came near the end of the Metolius river trail, where you approach the headwaters and are stopped by a fence on private land.

The family pet and I had been following a woman and her yellow lab. Serena and I were faster walkers than they were. We caught up with them near the turning point. She was in her 70s. Her dog, about the same in dog years. The woman had the look of an elderly flower child.

Flowing smock. Brightly colored hearing aids, not disguised at all but prominently displayed in her ears like jewelry. Our dogs sniffed each other. Then she did the human equivalent.

She asked "What's that?" I started to go through my usual explanation, but she politely cut me off. "Yes, Wu. Like Wu-wei." Once again I said, "Exactly."

It turned out that she was a massage therapist who did Qigong. I told her that I practiced Tai Chi and had some experience with Qigong. I demonstrated the "wu chi" (readiness) posture and showed how "tai chi" makes an appearance as soon as Wu differentiates into one thing or another—yin or yang.

Listening to myself talk, I liked what I heard. Not because I was saying it. Because it made sense, in spite of the speaker's Wu ignorance.

"There's got to be something beyond everything that we can ever know or understand," I said. "Out there on the other side of beyond, that's Wu." She smiled.

She and her husband had just moved to Camp Sherman, a quirky community of 200 or so full-time residents. She'll fit right in. Folks around here resonate with Wu as the Metolius River wordlessly speaks it.

Me finding myself. And Van Morrison.

It happened again today. Searching for the meaning of existence via the Great God Google, I looked into the mirror of cyberspace and saw my own truth looking back at me.

Not surprisingly, I agreed with myself. Which, naturally, raises the question: "If what I'm searching for is what I already know, what the hell am I doing Googling?"

I'd been thinking about Tai Chi. Which got me thinking about Wu Chi. Which reminded me of a web site that had a reference to using "Wu" as a mantra – the sound of wind whistling through tree tops. Whoooooooo. Whoooooooo.

Which stimulated me to fire up Google and see if I could find the web site again. Which led to a page of results with only one item of real interest.

One of my Wu Project posts. So I ended up finding what I really was looking for: someone who fully agreed with me. Which, not surprisingly, turned out to be me.

Why don't I trust myself when it comes to the deep questions of life, those no one else can answer for me? I'm more than willing to follow the advice of someone who is expert in an area I'm ignorant about—like plumbing or car repair.

But each of us is our own authority when it comes to What's it all about? Even if we submit to someone else, that act of submission is under our control (I must give credit to a sex article in a women's magazine I recently thumbed through in a waiting room for that bit of insight).

So I'm telling myself to stand taller. As should you, if, like me, you find yourself looking for outside encouragement platform shoes for reassurance that your view of the cosmos is at least a smidgeon above ground level.

I'm never going to find anyone else who totally agrees with me about what it's all about. Or not about. My best shot at a boon philosophical companion is myself. And only then, if I don't get in the way of establishing a trust bond between myself and me.

None the less, I enjoy all of the others on the Road That Isn't Quite Where I Want To Go But is Darn Interesting Nonetheless.

Including the visitors to this here Church of the Churchless.

In a comment today Edward said:

Now drop what you're doing, find the song "Tupelo Honey" by Van Morrison and listen to it like it was your first birthday card. There will be a part of you, big or small, loud or quiet, that says, "Yes, this is true." Not a formal truth, not a provable theorem - just blood warmingly true.

Good advice. You can watch here. Or below. And read the lyrics here. Yes, that's truly true truth. It's got to be. I just said it was.

Soul is superfluous

Usually spirituality is associated with "soulfulness," whatever the heck that means. I used to believe that I knew something about soul. Now, I don't.

Perhaps because soul is superfluous—it's an notion that is so much a part of most cultures, we take it for granted that a human being consists of something above and beyond the physical.

Before leaving for Maui I bought Nicholas Fearn's "The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions" at a Powell's Books outlet (one of the world's great bookstores; don't miss the main store if you visit Portland, Oregon).

Interestingly, the first chapter I read on "The Problem of the Self" echoed Douglas Hofstadter's conclusions in "I Am a Strange Loop," which I'd just finished (and have been blogging about).

In searching for a self we look for something over and above our attributes, but we do not usually think this way about ordinary objects. For example, I believe that my favourite armchair persists through time without imagining it to have a chair-soul or a chair-ego that possesses its traits.

It has characteristics such as being three feet high at the seat, padded with foam and covered with green cloth, but there is no chair over and above these characteristics.

If we took away the foam and the seat and the cloth and so on, we would not be left with a naked chair, as if objects were ghostly coat hangers upon which traits are hung. Yet this is precisely what we often imagine to be true in the case of persons.

Well, who knows? Maybe it is true. But since soul is, by most definitions, distinct from materiality and mentality, there's no way to perceive it or cognize it.

Like Fearn says, soul is considered to be something ethereal—pure consciousness perhaps—that (or who) somehow manages to serve as the core of our being even though it's essentially nothing.

The more we wish to gain immortality by divesting ourselves of earthly trappings such as physicality, memories and the like, the more we reduce ourselves to nothing at all – and, to quote the American children's author Norton Juster, doing nothing is hardly worth the effort.

Along the same lines, Hofstadter persuasively argues that the "I" of each of us starts out as a blank slate. He finds no evidence that a soul enters the body at birth, or conception, or somewhere in between, and thereafter serves as the "coat hanger" on which the attributes I consider to be Me are hung.

The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain – no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or a whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there.

…This "I", this unreal but unutterably stubborn marble in the mind, this "Epi" phenomenon, simply takes over, anointing itself as Reality Number One, and from there on it won't go away, no matter what words are spoken.

It turns out, then, that soulfulness is eminently unspiritual. For when we believe that some part of us—no, even more, the essence of us—is eternally distinct from everyone and everything else we encounter in the world (sticks and stones may break my bones, but my soul is immutable), a sense of separateness is inevitable.

Soul is considered to be separate from body. The realm of soul is considered to be separate from the physical universe. Awareness of soul is considered to be separate from material and mental perceptions.

The writings of British philosopher Derek Parfit are discussed at some length in Hofstadter's book. Parfit also pops up in Fearn's first chapter. Hmmmmm. Parfit sightings in two consecutive reads, after a lifetime of never having heard of him.

Here's how that initial chapter ends:

The personal identity debate shows just what happens when we dispense with the soul. For Parfit, the consequences are liberating. He writes that when he thought his existence a fact distinct from his physical and psychological continuity, he seemed 'imprisoned' in himself. 'My life seemed like a glass tunnel, though which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there as darkness.' However:

'When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.'

Another response might be to dwell on how the fleeting status of human existence has been accentuated. Not only are human beings continually coming into being and passing away, but they are even doing this on countless occasions within a single lifetime. We are, it seems, a flicker within a flicker.

If I’m not an “I,” what am I?

My admiration for Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop," the subject of my previous post, is evidenced by the fact that I just carted the 410 pages to Maui—adding the weight of this hardcover book to my 50 pound suitcase limit, every ounce of which I'm going to need on our return trip after our usual rampaging through Lahaina t-shirt shops.

But I wanted to ponder my strange loopiness some more while on vacation. At the moment I'm listening to Napili Bay waves, rather than Oregon rain, but the same "I" seemingly is doing the listening though its body has traveled far today.

Or so I've always thought.

Hofstadter calls this the "caged bird" metaphor. The cage is the body, or cranium, and the bird is the soul. There's one bird to one cage. And if you're spiritually inclined, supposedly the bird can be freed from the cage.

Satori! Enlightenment! Salvation!

But this presumes that the bird is real. There's an "I" separate and distinct from the physical matter that comprises the brain and the rest of the body. What if there isn't? What if instead of a caged bird, we're actually…

Even Hofstadter has trouble finishing the sentence.

It is not easy to find a strong, vivid metaphor to put up against the caged-bird metaphor. I have entertained quite a few possibilities, involving such diverse entities as bees, tornadoes, flowers, stars, and embassies. The image of a swarm of bees or of a nebula clearly conveys the idea of diffuseness, but there is no clear counterpart to the cage (or rather, to the head or brain or cranium). (A hive is not what I mean, because a flying swarm is not at all inside its hive).

The basic problem is that when you go looking for the "I," it's impossible to pin down. That's what leads Hofstadter to say that the "I" is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Sounds a lot like Buddhism and quite a few other maya-embracing philosophies. The difference, though, is that Hofstadter apparently doesn't offer a way out of the illusion (I've got a few more chapters to read). He strikes me as a Buddhist who doesn't believe in enlightenment, just the emptiness of individuality.

Hofstadter's favorite image concerning the sense of "I" comes from his experience of squeezing his hand around a pack of about a hundred envelopes that were in a box. When he did this, he felt a marble in the midst of them. Strange.

He tried to shake the marble out from the envelopes. No luck. Then he went through them one by one and found that each envelope was empty. Even stranger. Upon closer inspection, he realized that at the vertex of each envelope's flap there was a triple layer of paper and a thin layer of glue.

This area couldn't be compressed as much as the rest of the envelope. So when a hundred of them were aligned precisely and pressed together, voila, a marble. Or rather, an epiphenomenon that felt uncannily like a marble.

An epiphenomenon…is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unexpected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

Just like the "I." According to Hofstadter my sense that I'm indisputably me (which for you, obviously, is that you're you—not me) arises from countless experiences from birth until now. Each of us is way more than a hundred experience-envelopes stacked up together.

That me-bump we feel in the center of us, it's as real as the marble.

The problem is that in a sense, an "I" is something created out of nothing. And since making something out of nothing is never possible, the alleged something turns out to be an illusion, in the end, but a very powerful one, like the marble among the envelopes.

However, the "I" is an illusion far more entrenched and recalcitrant than the marble illusion, because in the case of "I," there is no simple revelatory act corresponding to turning the box upside down and shaking it, then peering in between the envelopes and finding nothing solid and spherical in there.

We don't have access to the inner workings of our brains. And so the only perspective we have on our "I"-ness comes from the counterpart to squeezing all the envelopes at once, and that perspective says it's real!

I love it. And I hate it.

For me, pondering Hofstadter's book has been like getting on the best ride in the Existential Theme Park. It started off with some exciting ups and downs, which I enjoyed. But then I hit the part where you feel like everything has been pulled out from under you.

Whoa, momma! Stop the ride! No, wait, I want more! Changed my mind again, stop the freaking ride, NOW!

On the whole, I like the feeling of free-falling. Except when I don't. "I"s are like that—fickle. More on this later, after the jet lag wears off and the warm water wears on.

You’re a strange loop (and that’s OK)

Via Douglas Hofstadter, I've got some soul-shaking news to pass on to you. You're a strange loop.

So am I. As is he. We all are. And it's not a bad thing, once you get used to the strangeness and loopiness of our rarely recognized condition.

I'm most of the way through Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." His new book is an elaboration of themes creatively discussed in "Gödel, Escher, Bach," which I read a long time ago—with difficulty.

Hofstadter has come a long way, both personally and professionally (he's a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University). His wife died suddenly from a brain tumor in 1993. He writes of his love for her, and how he has struggled to relate his understanding of how the mind works with how Carol lives on in his consciousness.

Which, at heart, is a "strange loop." What this means takes a bunch of chapters to explain, some quite dense.

I thought I knew what Gödel's theorem was all about, non-mathematically at least, but it's a lot more involved than my thinking thought. However, the fact that I can think about my thoughts about what Gödel and Hofstadter think about thinking shows that I'm at least in the ballpark of a Gödelian frame of mind.

A plain loop is easy to grasp. It's akin to a thermostat that senses the temperature and turns the furnace on or off to keep the house comfortable. This isn't a strange loop because the thermostat isn't self-aware. There's awareness of the temperature, but not any awareness that the thermostat is aware.

Humans, by contrast, are hugely strange—the strangest loops in existence, so far as we know. We are masters of abstraction and symbols. We observe (generally) friendly furry animals of an astounding variety of shapes and sizes, summing them up as "dogs."

Our ability to conceptualize allows us to jump back and forth between levels of abstraction. Hofstadter observes that we can dream about ourselves dreaming about dreaming. More profoundly, he says, Gödel found that "one of the domains that mathematics can model is the doing of mathematics itself."

This talk about abstractions can easily sound, well, abstract. But when the core message of "I Am a Strange Loop" hits home, as it did to me today, it's anything but abstract. Some of the feel of what I felt is hinted at in Hofstadter's description of a strange loop.

What I mean by "strange loop" is—here goes a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the first stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle.

That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, where one had started out.

Hofstadter illustrates this by M.C. Escher's lithograph Drawing Hands. But the thoughts that I'm thinking as I write this post about how we think, or the thoughts that you're thinking as you read what I've written, are equally good illustrations. Just shyer. He writes:

Fortunately, there do exist strange loops that are not illusions. I say "fortunately" because the thesis of this book is that we ourselves—not our bodies, but our selves—are strange loops, and so if all strange loops were illusions, then we would all be illusions, and that would be a great shame. So it's fortunate that some strange loops do exist in the real world.

On the other hand, it is not a piece of cake to exhibit one for all to see. Strange loops are shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the light of day.

Here we are, you and I. Except when you say "you and I," I'm the "you" instead of the "I" that holds when I say it. Already that's darn strange. Because it's impossible to point to any sort of "I," whether it is in you or me.

Hofstadter goes so far as to say what he says below. I'll leave his saying alone for now. The hour is late, and while strange loops avoid the light of day, they also avoid the dark of night.

In this strange loop's mind, at least. There will be more to say another day, if the strange loop that is me wants to head that way.

That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that "I"'s do exist—and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people's minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus "I."

…My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the "I" as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the "I" as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Honoring the mystery that is me (and you)

In 1977 I spent two weeks in India with a guru, Charan Singh. At that time visitors could spend up to three months at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab, soaking up the mystico-spiritual vibes gratis.

Flying off from the Amritsar airport to return home, via Delhi, I remember looking out of my window seat at the majestic Himalaya mountains, saying to myself, "I don't want my thoughts to be mine anymore, but yours."

I was a devoted disciple back then. I still am. What's changed is the meaning I give to yours. Thirty years ago it meant the guru; today it points to mystery.

This, actually, is entirely in accord with Charan Singh's teaching, for he said, "May your love of the form culminate in the love of the formless." It's a natural progression. Really, an inevitable one.

For what we know, no matter how much, is so much less than what there is.

Here each of us is, one of six billion people on an insignificant planet circling an average star that comprises just one of two hundred billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion or so galaxies in a universe that extends far beyond what can be observed, and could well be just one of countless universes in a cosmos that has no end.

And yet many (if not most) think they've got it all figured out, because the Bible, Koran, Torah, Adi Granth, Vedas, or whatever, tells them so.

They don't know what life is, what consciousness is, what matter/energy is, or what anything is at the root of its really real reality, not to mention what any possible metaphysical existence may consist of. Worse, they don't know that they don't know—or at least aren't willing to admit it to themselves.

I am. Now. That's why the sentiment of my Amritsar airport takeoff moment is still with me. I've just extended yours to encompass the mystery of what I, and you, and everything else in existence is.

Of which I'm clueless. Happily so.

I no longer feel that I have to fly halfway around the world to honor a sacred impulse. The mystery that is me provides worshipful opportunities aplenty.

In my previous three posts I've been equating meaninglessness with mystery. Makes sense, doesn't it? If I knew the Meaning of It All, there wouldn't be any mystery to the cosmos. And there's a lot. So, how to honor meaninglessness?

By not being meaningful. Usually this is considered to be undesirable. I say something to a companion and am told, "I have no idea what you mean." Communication failure! I try again, hoping to make sense this time.

However, if I'm facing in the direction of ultimate Mystery, my communication with what is uncommunicable should be as non-sensical as possible.

I may be speaking with myself. Or, not. Who knows? It's a Mystery. Either way, meaninglessness tunes me in, to some degree, with what lies beyond the meaning of the little I'm aware of now.

My meditation periods used to be deeply meaningful. Now my goal is different. I still enjoy mantra meditation—repeating a word (or words) to still my thought-stream. The mantra used to have a meaning for me. Mystery, though, deserves to be honored with meaninglessness.

D.T. Suzuki speaks of Buddhist mantra meditation as using a name ("Namu Amida Butsu") whose meaning consists in having no meaning. Essentially, the mantra becomes a koan.

Meditation, or "coming into the presence of the Buddha," thus gave way to the constant reiteration of the phrase as not always or necessarily referring to any definite objective reality, but merely as a name somehow beyond comprehension, or rather as a symbol standing for something indescribable, unpredictable, altogether transcending the intellect, and therefore suggesting a meaning beyond meaning.

In other words, meaninglessness.

Wu, Wu, Wu. Woo-woo. Wuuuuuuuuuuu. Whew!