Imagination. We tend to think of this as something special, an activity we engage in when, say, we're trying to do something creative like paint a picture, write a novel, or compose a song. Or as what the brain does when it dreams -- which seemingly is markedly different from the clear perception of reality in our waking state. But Evan Thompson's book, "Waking, Dreaming, Being," has given me a different perspective on imagination. From both a Buddhist and neuroscientific perspective, he sees imagination as permeating every form of consciousness. Here's a passage from his Imagining: Are we real? chapter.…
Ooh! I bet the title of this blog post will irk spiritual types who believe that enlightenment is some sort of mystical transformation of consciousness requiring lots of meditation and/or other practices to achieve. I certainly would have felt that way myself prior to my enlightenment about enlightenment. But as noted in this recent post, I've come to the understanding that spiritual realization (if this term really means anything) involves seeing through the illusion of a soul/self that is separate and distinct from the body and brain. In short, there is no self. No soul. No person sitting inside our…
Having written a well-received book called "Return to the One," I've obviously thought a lot about oneness. My views have changed considerably since I wrote the book. I used to believe that the goal of a spiritual or self-realized life was to merge the soul's immaterial consciousness with universal consciousness, which often is termed God or The One. Now, I've got another view of oneness. A simpler one. A more easily achieved one. A considerably more scientific one. What I am, what we all are, what everything in the universe is -- its the stuff of physics. Julian Baggini puts…
My journey from churched to churchlessness pretty much can be summed up in this fashion: I used to believe that I had (or was) a distinct, unified, immaterial soul or self. Now, I rejoice in the understanding that there's no non-physical "pearl" of Me; I'm a collection of material stuff just like everything else in the universe is. Julian Baggini says this in his terrific book, The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean to Be You? A cart is not an illusion just because it has no existence other than by the correct arrangement of its parts. The only thing that…
Ah, I love it when I see one of my thoughts reflected in someone else's brain. This helps me keep in mind that we humans are wonderfully alike, as well as wonderfully different.
I write a regular Strange Up Salem column in our town's alternative paper, Salem Weekly. (Feel free to give this effort to lift the blah-curse on my home town a Facebook like.)
With marijuana legalization on the ballot in Oregon, in the most recent issue my theme was "A Strange Reason to Legalize Marijuana." Here's how I started off the piece:
Here’s a news flash from the front page of modern neuroscience: “You don’t exist.” At least, not in the way most people believe they do.
We feel as if we look out upon the world as a detached ethereal consciousness floating behind our eyes, inside our head. We feel as if we’re a weightless self or soul inhabiting a body.
These feelings are wrong. The sense of self is an illusion. You, me, and everyone else are billions of neurons woven together via trillions of electrochemical connections.
Marvelously, the brain tells itself stories about how it is other than it is.
The brain tricks us into believing something is real, when it is not, provided that such trickery gives it a survival advantage.
Absolutely!
If I believe that I am a separate unique self, precious beyond compare, I'm going to fight harder to defend myself when attacked. Physically or psychologically, doesn't matter. Nobody messes with valuable Me.
Likewise, the short video convincingly argues that many (or most?) near-death experiences are the brain's way of telling itself, "Dude, life is really worth living. Fight to stay alive!"
The Lane's have a strong connection with India, so some of the examples are from that sub-continent. I liked how one woman devoted to her guru didn't see a vision of him when she nearly died, but rather was wowed by a Holy Chapati.
It reminded her that she had cooking duties to attend to back on Earth.
Have a look.
I'll share my entire Strange Up Salem column as a continuation to this post.
I like how physicist Lawrence Krauss speaks about "more likely" and "less likely" in a short video than "true" and "false." Our knowledge about reality is on a fuzzy continuum, not a sharp dividing line. Rarely, if ever, can we say that this is absolutely 100% true, and that is absolutely 100% false. Still, I don't totally understand Krauss' statement that "Science doesn't prove anything... science can only prove things to be wrong, not right... the Earth isn't flat, we can go around it, so that's wrong." This might have to do with one popular view of the scientific method,…
After buying the new book by noted biologist Edward O. Wilson, "The Meaning of Human Existence" (can't pass up a book with this title, so long as it isn't written by someone religious), I couldn't resist jumping this morning to the Free Will chapter. The excerpts below, in bold, are some of the clearest writing about how the brain/mind works I've ever come across. And I've read a lot of books about modern neuroscience. I've taken the liberty of commenting, in italics, on Wilson's words. Conscious mental life is built entirely from confabulation. Ooh, I love that word, confabulation: "to…
I enjoy Zen. But I have no desire to actually practice Zen. Not formally. Too much work. Too much discipline. Too much bowing before a master who, you eventually realize, doesn't deserve veneration. I prefer the idea of being my own Zen teacher. That way, I can do as much Zen-stuff as I want, in the way I want to, when and how I want. Which includes giving myself koans to solve. This is my new one: If I'm not the one inside my head, then who is? l really like this koan. I'm SO happy I thought of it.…
Recently I've been blogging about Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up," whose central thesis is that our sense of being a Self or Soul separate and distinct from the brain/body is an illusion. Harris doesn't talk much, if at all, about how this sense came to be. It must have been an evolutionary advantage to early humans. Perhaps it is an add-on, so to speak, to our species' extraordinary ability to be not only aware, but self-aware. Aware of our awareness in a way that other animals aren't, the brain seems to look upon itself as if from the outside, fostering a…
There's a lot of stuff written and said about non-duality. I've both partaken of it and spewed out my own in various blog posts. For example, see here, here, here, and here. After reading a bunch of neuroscience books, Sam Harris' "Waking Up," and several books by Moller De La Rouviere, the simple truth of non-duality is finally sinking into my non-dual mind. Which, like yours, also has been, is now, and forever will be non-dual. Meaning, undivided into an observer and what is observed. Or awareness and objects of awareness. Or consciousness and contents of consciousness. In short, there…
Amazing video. What's even more amazing is that this galactic map is based on only 8,000 nearby galaxies. There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Awe. Mystery. Vastness. Who needs religion? Embrace science.
Thanks to an email from a regular reader of this here Church of the Churchless, I learned about an interesting article in Mother Jones, "Study: Science and Religion Really Are Enemies After All." Are science and religion doomed to eternal "warfare," or can they just get along? Philosophers, theologians, scientists, and atheists debate this subject endlessly (and often, angrily). We hear a lot less from economists on the matter, however. But in a recent paper, Princeton economist Roland Bénabou and two colleagues unveiled a surprising finding that would at least appear to bolster the "conflict" camp: Both across countries and also…
Today I watched a video called "There was no first human." I found it here. It makes a lot of sense. Also a lot of nonsense. By "nonsense," I don't mean that this explanation of evolution isn't true. Because it is. The thought experiment described in the video came from Richard Dawkins, someone who knows what he is talking about when it comes to the origins of life on Earth. Here he describes the thought experiment in words. The nonsense reference flows out of the difficulty I have understanding how there can be completely different species along an evolutionary branch…
"Ah, it's all becoming clear to me... so clear... I'm on the verge of grasping The Meaning of It All!" (Mentally insert the sound of cackling laughter, and a vision of a crazed man rubbing his hands together with glee). This is how I've been feeling lately. After fifty years of so of searching for the big "T" Truth through science, spirituality, mysticism, psychedelic drugs, philosophy, dog walks in nature, prayer, pleading, meditation, pondering, athletics, caffeine, and more, it's dawning on me that two words pretty much sum up both the Question and the Answer. Subjective. Objective. This blog post…
Today I came to an interesting chapter, Mind and consciousness, in "The Systems View of Life," a book I blogged about a few days ago. One of the main conclusions is an unsurprising one: mind is the brain in action, not something transcendent. Let us now summarize the recent advances in cognitive science discussed in this chapter. The main achievement, in our view, has been the gradual but consistent healing of the Cartesian split between mind and matter. In the 1970's, a few cognitive scientists recognized that mind and consciousness are not "things" but cognitive processes, and they took the…
For about a week I've been reading two books during my morning pre-meditation time. To most people they'd seem incompatible. Or at least, pointers in divergent directions of reality. But I happily read some of each, using a highlighter and pen (thanks for blank back pages, publishers) to note what I like, and sometimes don't like, about "The Way of Wonder" and "The Systems View of LIfe." Here's a blog post that includes links to other posts I've written about Haas' books; I haven't finished The Systems View of Life, which is a fascinating, but quite technical, undergraduate textbook that…
Whenever I read a book about Buddhism or mindfulness, I've got my highlighter poised to make a skeptical marginal question mark when (usually not if) I come across mention of perceiving reality "as it is." This is an absurd pre-scientific notion, as I've discussed here and here. With so many interesting ideas to choose from, I'll take the easy way out in this post and share some of what I read this morning about how humans attribute what actually is within to without -- the world outside our craniums. Frequently I take issue with those who claim it is possible to know reality "as…
I'm an avid consumer of physics books aimed at the general public. "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn" and "The Island of Knowledge" are my most recent reads. What comes through loud and clear in both books is how freaking far out modern physics and cosmology have become. Believe me, this isn't the sort of science I remember from high school, where the teacher had a model of an atom that looked like a miniature solar system. That way of looking at the atomic realm was recognized to be wrong even back then, of course. Quantum mechanics demolished the old way of…
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…
The final episode of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" ended with host Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, cogently describing how science is able to comprehend mysteries of the universe that other ways of knowing reality are unable to fathom. Like religion. Consider how Tyson's Five Simple Rules are almost diametrically opposed to the faith-based belief systems espoused by religions the world over. They ask us to revere authority, not question theological dogma, have unshakable faith, remain within a single chosen religion, and accept that some saint, prophet, or other godly person was able to perfectly know divine truth. Whereas this, according…
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