Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

If consciousness is immaterial, why does ultrasound boost mindfulness?

I realize that those who believe that consciousness is immaterial are pretty much immune to the evidence that it is a physical phenomenon.  That evidence is ubiquitous, as I've pointed out many times in blog posts. Anesthesia makes us unconscious. So does being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Caffeine makes consciousness more alert. MDMA ("Ecstasy") makes consciousness feel more loving.  The October 2024 issue of Scientific American has a short article that presents more evidence for the physical nature of consciousness. Being a daily meditator for most of my life -- I started meditating in 1969 --…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Reality

Nondual awareness could be closest to the scientific worldview

In my previous post, We're all having an "out of brain experience," I said there was more to say about a lengthy chapter in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind.  Here's that saying. More accurately, here's what Metzinger says, because his ideas are so subtle and often expressed in philosophical language, I figure that it's best if I use his own words here, rather than trying to restate them in my own language. Don't be surprised if some, or much, of what Metzinger says in these excerpts isn't crystal clear. It isn't always clear to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

We’re all having an “out of brain experience”

At long last, I'm reaching the home stretch of reading Thomas Metzinger's meaty/tofuy book, all 500 pages of it, The Elephant and the Blind, about the experience of pure consciousness that's based on more than five hundred experiential reports from meditators. There are 35 chapters. I've just got two left to read. I thought about skipping some, but after finishing the "Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality" chapter this morning, I'm glad that my rather obsessive reading style -- usually I read every page in a book, unless I'm really not enjoying it -- paid off in this instance.  Because Metzinger makes…
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Posted inConsciousness God

Douglas Harding sees God where most people see consciousness

It's a familiar feeling. I'm enjoying a book about spirituality, because the author makes sense to me and doesn't go overboard on religious mumbo-jumbo.  Then... I reach a chapter where I fill the margins with question marks, because what's being said doesn't make sense to me and sounds like religious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the previous part, but it makes me wonder how the author could shift so suddenly into religiosity.  That's what happened to me today with Douglas Harding's Face to No Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. I wrote about my initial reading of it in…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

I rediscover Douglas Harding’s “headless” rediscovery of the obvious

Douglas Harding's classic book, On Having No Head, has the subtitle of Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. Well, as I said in a 2018 post, "'On Having No Head' has a few simple truths," I'd bought the book quite a few years prior, given it away because I wasn't overly impressed with it back then, then bought a revised edition after I heard Sam Harris talk about it on his Waking Up app. The past few days I've been re-re-reading the book that I re-bought and re-read six years ago. That's a lot of "re's" for a book…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

“Theory contamination” is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions. A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Pure consciousness isn’t an experience. It’s the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate. I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes: Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

If you’re trying to control your mind, who is the “you” doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that.  For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality?  In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself."  This…
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Posted inConsciousness Free will Neuroscience

Our mental experience isn’t always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences.  You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing. It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

You can’t know your “true self,” but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments. All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.) Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth. I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light. Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling you know isn’t the same as knowing

One of the benefits of reading a book about pure awareness by a philosopher, instead of someone who identifies with a religion or spiritual practice, is that you get a more realistic perspective. A good example is that Thomas Metzinger, the author of The Elephant and the Blind, speaks in an early chapter about the difference between a feeling of knowing and actual knowing. This should be obvious to anyone, which really is everyone, who has confidently believed that something was true until they learned that it wasn't.  Metzinger calls this the E-fallacy. His glossary defines it this way: A…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Taoism/Tai Chi

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself.  So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words. A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Nobody is watching the movie of your life, or mine, or anybody’s

Every morning I try to read one of the short chapters in Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness -- Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports. I particularly enjoy passages that intuitively appeal to me, yet rationally challenge my ability to comprehend exactly what Metzinger is saying. Below I'll share an example from the "Nonidentification" chapter.  First, though, this introductory mention in the chapter of the traditional movie theatre metaphor. One classic metaphor for this process [of de-identification], found in many places in the popular literature on meditation, is the image of being…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The Elephant and the Blind — a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived.  I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab. Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Why “being at the eye center” isn’t possible

In my preceding post, "Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations," I shared quotations from one of her books that clearly demonstrated why it makes no sense for a person at one of her talks to claim that they were able to concentrate their mind at a vantage point that enabled them to be aware of the world from a detached distance that they considered to be positive for them. Just a bit of clear thinking illustrates why this couldn't actually be the case. Meaning, this person wasn't really concentrating their mind at a certain point in their…
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Posted inConsciousness

Consciousness is mysterious, but it’s almost certainly not supernatural

Consciousness seemingly should be easy to understand. After all, every living human with a normally functioning brain experiences consciousness from the inside, so to speak. Meaning, everything we know, including what we know about ourselves, has to be consciously experienced or it doesn't exist for us.  That includes the entire universe, with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing on average about a hundred billion stars. If there was no consciousness in the universe, all that would be a big bunch of nothing. Assuming it could even be called "nothing," given that it's impossible for conscious beings like us to…
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Posted inConsciousness

To be real, consciousness must cause something. Sorry, supernatural believers.

People throw around strange conceptions about consciousness. On this blog, and elsewhere. Most of the strangeness comes from those religiously and supernaturally inclined, who put forward notions of consciousness that bear no resemblance to reality. I'm familiar with this sort of w00-woo, because I used to engage in it myself. I've finished reading neuroscientist Christof Koch's latest book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.  Not surprisingly, he frequently views consciousness through the lens of integrated information theory, a theory that Koch has embraced and contributed to. Here's passages from a concluding chapter…
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Posted inConsciousness Religions Science

“Facts and the law” applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law."  Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election…
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Posted inConsciousness

The mystery of consciousness actually isn’t so mysterious

The history of science shows us that many inexplicable phenomena, which often were considered to have supernatural causes (Thor makes thunder!) actually have natural causes.  I strongly suspect that the same will prove to be true of consciousness. While most scientists view consciousness to be a product of the brain, some, especially those with a philosophical bent, have a dualistic perspective where mind and body are separate entities. This, of course, was how Descartes saw things way back in the 1600s, believing that the mind was nonphysical. Most religions share that opinion, though soul sometimes is substituted for mind, or…
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