Posted inBuddhism

Spirituality comes in two flavors: “That” and “This”

As noted before, what I both like and dislike about Rob Burbea's book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, is how marvelously detailed and deep Burbea dives into his subject.  In no way is this a popular Buddhist book, using "popular" to mean a book aimed at people who want to know more about Buddhism but aren't into the farthest reaches of classic Buddhist writings and practices. It's more like a manual for attaining both a full conceptual knowledge and intuitive experience of what Burbea considers the core of Buddhism: emptiness, along with the closely…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

Concepts can’t be avoided and are different from thoughts

I've continued to make my way through Rob Burbea's excellent book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. As noted before, Burbea goes into considerable detail about his subject, sometimes more than I'm capable of appreciating -- since I'm a fan of Buddhism but don't consider myself a Buddhist. Then I come across some passages that truly do resonate with me. Here's a sampling.  This discussion of concepts impressed me because it fits so well with the modern neuroscientific theory of predictive processing by the brain. Basically this says that the brain is constantly making…
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Posted inReligions Science

Detection of gravitational wave “orchestra” shows power of science

Since I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, I get frequent notifications of new stories on my iPhone. Some interest me. Some don't. This morning it was a pleasure to be sent a story about how scientists were able to discover a background hum of gravitational waves, building on the first detection of these waves in 2015. I've made a PDF file of the story, "The Cosmos is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find." It's well worth a read, having been written by a science reporter with a Ph.D. in particle physics. I'll share a few…
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Posted inBuddhism

Buddhism, pain and pleasure are not the same

I'm personifying Buddhism in the title of this blog post. But really I'm talking about how Rob Burbea viewed the Buddhist approach to dualities in his book, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. As noted in recent posts about the book, I like the way Burbea explains his subject, though sometimes he can be too Buddhist-geeky for my less-committed-to-Buddhism taste. However, today my yellow highlighter kept making question marks in the margin as I read two chapters about "The Dependent Arising of Dualities" and "The Fading of Perception." I found much to like in the chapters, but…
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Posted inAwareness Buddhism

Spaciousness of awareness is a nice thought, but not reality

Buddhism, like all "ism's", can be irritating. But that's the case with everything in life, really. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. I resonate with Buddhist teachings. However, as I make my way through Rob Burbea's in-depth examination of the Buddhist notions of emptiness, dependent arising, suffering, and such, some chapters in Seeing That Frees are too Buddhist-geeky for my taste. Burbea, like some practitioners who are really into Buddhist teachings, strikes me as being akin to a car enthusiast who wants to fine-tune every aspect of a vehicle's operation. So his book goes into…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

My weird dream points to the fluid boundaries of self

Most of us believe that our self -- leaving aside what that word truly means -- is something solid and real. But there's plenty of evidence all around us that calls this assumption into question. Which is an understatement. Because that evidence actually demolishes the notion of an enduring unchanging self. So those who claim that notions about awareness, consciousness, or soul point to a self that is a fixed North Star in a constellation of change have a lot of explaining to do. For mental illness can markedly change the contours of a person's self. So can dementia, where…
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Posted inBuddhism

It’s best to respond to most problems, not react to them

It's a fitting day to be writing about reactivity, given that at the moment the fate of five people in a submersible craft that was on its way to view the wreck of the Titanic, some two and a half miles down in the ocean, is unaccounted for. Meaning, the craft hasn't been located after it lost communication with the mother ship about an hour and a half into its descent. By this time, it's estimated that if the five people are still alive, they're about to run out of air. That's a truly horrendous situation. It'd be extremely easy…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

More interesting observations from “Seeing That Frees”

I'm continuing to enjoy the book by Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. (First post about it is here.) It's clear that Burbea knows a lot about meditation, Buddhist variety, and is skilled at communicating his knowledge both to his students in person and to the world at large through his book.  There's so much of interest in the six chapters (out of 31) that I've read so far, I find it difficult to decide what to share in my blog posts about the book. So I'll focus on some of what got special highlighting…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

“Seeing That Frees” — a great book about Buddhist emptiness

Shamil Chandaria's talk on the Bayesian Brain and Meditation that I wrote about recently is a gift that keeps on giving. For on one of his slides there was a small image of a book by Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. I recall that Chandaria mentioned it briefly, but he certainly didn't dwell on the book. I figured, correctly as it turns out, that the book was in line with the ideas about the brain that Chandaria was talking about, so I decided to order a copy from Amazon. It took a while to…
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Posted inGay rights Morality

The beauty of “We don’t not care” rather than “We don’t care”

Sometimes a television program can get a moral point across in a few minutes of entertainment that is more clear and convincing than a lengthy ethical treatise. That happened to me last night when my wife and I were watching an episode of season 3 of Ted Lasso on AppleTV+. Before I share a clip of that scene, a bit of background.  Colin, one of the soccer (football, to most of the world) players on the professional team Lasso is coaching, inadvertently revealed that he was gay, homosexual, to the team captain, Isaac, when Isaac saw some photos on Colin's…
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Posted inReality Vedanta/Advaita

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

Once again proving my adage that I don't need to buy nearly as many new books as I used to, now that I've realized that every time I re-read a book, it's as a new person, I'm back to taking another look at David Loy's Nonduality.  (That's a newer edition; I have the 2010 version.) It was just about a year ago that I wrote about the book in my aptly titled post, "Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject. In that post I shared links to three previous posts about the book, the first written in January…
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Posted inAwareness Neuroscience

Phenomenology can deconstruct religious dogma

While I said in my last post that I'd be moving on from the subject of predictive processing, I'm only going to go halfway there. Because I want to explore something that stood out for me in one of the slides I shared in that post from a talk by Shamil Chandaria about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." This is how I described the blue box with various terms for Non-Dual Awareness and its associated orange'ish note in my previous blog post. Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, is one of the spiritual notions (in the blue box) that Chandaria says…
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Posted inNeuroscience

A summary of Shamil Chandaria’s “The Bayesian Brain and Meditation”

Don't worry, Church of the Churchless visitors who aren't as interested as I am in the hot new neuroscience theory of predictive processing by the brain, which is why I've been writing about Andy Clark's book The Experience Machine recently. I'll be on to other topics soon. But not quite yet, since I want to share some of what I learned by watching Shamil Chandaria's talk on YouTube about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." I heard Chandaria and Sam Harris engage in a fascinating conversation on Harris' Waking Up app.  That led me to watch Chandaria's talk, since he's knowledgeable…
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Posted inNeuroscience

How to hack your brain with predictive processing tips

Well, I've finished the book I've been writing about recently, Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. I enjoyed it a lot. In this post I'll share some tips from the final chapters about how we can use the theory of predictive processing to improve how we experience life. This is a leading theory of modern neuroscience, with references to it popping up in many places. For example, here's how a review of The Experience Machine in a recent issue of New Scientist starts out. On a building site, there is a scream of pain.…
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Posted inComments Neuroscience

For those following the comment game, Spence Tepper lost

For those who have been following the interesting exchange of views about consciousness and the brain in comments on a recent blog post, I'm pleased to present the final score on a debate about whether there's evidence that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. Commenter Spence Tepper ended up without scoring a debate point due to his religious dogmatism. Commenters Appreciative Reader and myself scored numerous debate points because we used facts and logic. Tepper never actually played the debate game, choosing to ignore calls to produce evidence for his assertion. Bottom line: you can't win a game…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Here’s a brief overview of how the brain works by Anil Seth

I realize that some people don't resonate with Andy Clark's writing style as much as I do. So for those who find the excerpts I've been sharing from Clark's book, The Experience Machine, to be unduly confusing, here's a blog post I wrote in 2021 about the views of a neuroscientist, Anil Seth, with views similar to Clark's. Everybody's brain is producing a kind of hallucination
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it’s dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note. I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from. It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious…
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Posted inNeuroscience

How the brain makes predictions come true

Before discussing the subject that's the title of this post - how the brain makes predictions come true -- I'll shoehorn in a related personal story about my check ordering saga. Recently Columbia Bank, which my wife and I use for a checking account, was bought by Umpqua Bank. For many years I've ordered checks for our Columbia Bank account when the supply ran low. Last month was the first time I'd ordered checks with Umpqua Bank on them. Balancing our checkbook about a week ago, I noticed that we'd been charged on May 17 for the cost of mailing…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Here’s a fresh way of looking upon attention

I'm continuing to read and enjoy Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. It's one of the best books about modern neuroscience that I've ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of them. My first post about the book laid a foundation for these subsequent posts, as I get deeper into The Experience Machine. This is a one sentence summary of the Big Idea discussed in the book -- which makes a heck of a lot of sense. Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain,…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Our brains don’t see reality as it is, but as it’s predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences. Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to…
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