Consciousness & happiness

I Like It...but Is It Meditation?

2008-11-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

An Appreciation of Everyday Mindfulness

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. --Abraham Joshua Heshel

My life is full of meditation: I gassho before I eat. I turn the shower on ‘cold’ before I get out. I visually check the state of the tide in our bay every morning, en route to our local coffee shop. I do the New York Times crossword over my coffee. My pal Mike and I play pool at our neighborhood bar Monday nights. I take my kayak out on Humboldt Bay several times a week. I usually check the stars (or, more likely, the overcast) from the darkness of our hot tub before going to bed. These are my rituals.

Meditation? What’s all that got to do with meditation? Well, it depends how you define it. Strictly speaking, and in the soto Zen tradition that is my practice, meditation is sitting quietly on a zafu, eyes half-open, paying close attention to my breathing. It starts with a bell ringing and ends with a bell ringing. Kinhin--walking meditation--is an extension of shikintaza, “just sitting.”

But that’s what I think of as “formal” meditation, thirty minutes or so a day. Then there are the myriad openings for informal meditation, like what I mentioned above. Pool? Crosswords? Tides? Oh sure, and much more. The daily--hourly, even---opportunities for mindfulness, to stop and pay attention, to take a breath of gratitude, to appreciate the Ultimate Fact of Life: I’m here!

***

For the first 1500 years of its existence, Buddhism was mostly confined to monasteries, with strict rules, timetables and hierarchies. In contrast, Zen in America today finds the majority of its followers in the lay world, where most of us “zennies” have families, jobs and homes. Our zendos are places to visit, perhaps daily, but more likely once or twice a week, refuges, perhaps, from the “real world” of money, responsibility and regular folks who don’t know the doan from the dharma.

Along with the “layification” of Zen has come a sharp distinction, for most of us, between meditation and the rest of life. While the monks of old lived and breathed, day in day out, year in year out, in an atmosphere of stillness and contemplation—their entire lives were one unbroken meditation!--we modern zennies stop what we’re doing when we sit, and restart our everyday lives when the bell signals that time’s up. The result of this is a dichotomy: either I’m meditating (on my zafu, often in the zendo, sometimes at home); or I’m not meditating (the rest of the time).

What’s lost in this either/or distinction is the idea that meditation is what I choose to make it. Sure, I can define meditation rather narrowly, i.e. the time spent on my cushion. But if I do so, I’m elevating sitting over everyday awareness, and thus diluting the possibilities for all those other quotidian opportunities for mindfulness.

***

So what is meditation, if it’s not zazen? It’s easy to think of it in terms of the zazen process: solitary (even when you’re elbow-to-elbow with fellow sangha members), quiet, physically upright, mentally focused (in most forms), precisely timed, free of outside stimulation. That’s usually how meditation is defined, in terms of how it looks and what we do for those 30 or 40 minutes.

Another way to look at it is in terms of what it offers. I recognize that this is anathema to many meditators--for years, on being asked why I meditated, I’d say something like, “I don’t know, I just do it.” (Attainment? Oh please!) The fact remains that, consciously or unconsciously, I do things for a reason. I wasn’t born a blank slate, I came with a standard-equipment brain that constantly make decisions based on the available information. At some level, whether I’m aware of it or not, I meditate because of some perceived benefit.

I suspect it’s the same for everyone--I’ve asked fellow meditators the same question, and they all give me some reason, from “Helping me get through the day,” to “Taking me to the root of things,” to “seeing the big picture of life.”

My list is something like this:
* a sense of gratitude (Hey, I’m alive!)
* self-awareness (I’m aware that I’m aware, amazing)
* humility (Don’t take myself too seriously)
* intimation of mortality (This breath is one breath less…so don’t squander!)
* playfulness (My mind sure knows how to have fun)
* creativity (I’ve got to remember that great idea for later)
* adventure (Wonder what’s coming next?)

All these gifts usually appear to me at some time or other during zazen. But the rest of life offers so many opportunities for welcoming exactly the same gifts, so long as I’m willing to notice and accept them. It just (just!) takes the slightest mental nudge--effortless really--to transform the usually unnoticed happenings of my life into rich servings of observed experience. It helps to think of them as rituals.

Take pool. I’m a mediocre--make that bad--pool player, but I’m also lucky. Sometimes, when I’m in the flow, I’m like Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie, effortlessly potting one ball after another. At those times, I’m never more alive, never more aware of the sweetness of this life, gratitude balanced by poignancy: one day this will end. And the humility (oh! the humility) of watching the cue ball roll unerringly towards the corner pocket. It’s meditation writ large, it’s fulfilling and engaging and just plain fun.

Same with solitary kayaking, cold-showering, struggling with the crossword, gazing up at night--with all of my rituals, in fact: appreciating the enormity of it all compared to this meager body and mind, the refuge of my breath, the shock of finding myself here, the gratitude for being a player in life…all available for the noticing.

***

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with zazen--in fact, I credit zazen with helping me to pay attention to non-zazen events. It’s that when I put so much stock in formal meditation, I forget that it’s only one way of helping me see the magic that is me and that surrounds me. Redefining meditation simply as “the opportunity to notice” opens up a world of possibilities.

That is, seeing zazen as simply one more activity--no more or less meaningful as solving a cryptic clue or watching a pelican dive-bomb for his lunch or sinking the eightball--helps level the playing field between “sitting” and “the rest of life.”

And guess which of these I spend more time in?

Does the moon call upon the gnat to move the mountain to the sea?

2008-11-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

--and other zenny answers for your friends.

You’ve been practicing for awhile now, and some of your friends are starting to be concerned. Have you been co-opted by a cult? Are you about to fly off to Nepal with a one-way ticket? Have you changed your will to leave everything to the local Zen center? Have you (gulp) changed?

They may start asking you questions—just what is it that you’ve gotten yourself into? How do you know you aren’t being brainwashed? What does Zen teach, anyway? Rather than try to answer them directly, you’ll sound much cooler and wiser if you respond to their well-meaning questions with one of these tried-and-true all-purpose no-answer answers. It also saves you the bother of actually thinking.

1: Your question comes from the relative world, but now I inhabit the realm of the absolute.

2. Does the moon call upon the gnat to move the mountain to the sea?

3. As the Buddha said to Ananda, a flower is not a flower, a tree is not a tree.

4. Is the finger that points to the moon, the moon?

5. The Buddha’s teachings have lasted for near 3000 years, they have been verified by time.

6. Only when you have practiced as long as I have will you understand.

7. Your question tells me you are still asleep. Come back when you are awake.

8. Words are inadequate to answer your question

9. He who knows does not say, he who says does not know. So I will remain silent.

10. You already know the answer to your question.

Black Cat of Desire

2008-11-07T10:19:00.000-08:00

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.
--attributed (like so much else) to Confucius

Do you ever get confused about the official Buddhist take on “desire”? I sure do. As I understand it, if my desire to end desire is sincere enough, then I just might end up with not desiring anything, in which case the whole exercise would be moot, because now I’ll have gotten what I don’t want…

Second-guessing the Buddha on the topic of “desire” might seem pretty brazen, if not for two mitigating circumstances. The first was his insistence that we were lights unto ourselves, and not to take his word for anything. The second is that he came up with the Four Noble Truths a couple of thousand years or so before the birth of the modern science of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to explain much of our behavior now in terms of the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve problems way back then, in the environments of our ancestors.

Prince Siddhartha’s suite of Noble Truths was his response to the undeniable fact of human suffering. We suffer, he said, because we live in a state of desire…but we can eliminate that state by following the eightfold path. What he may only have dimly grasped is that our brains are hard-wired to desire. It was desire that got our ancestors through the bad times of drought and famine, and now we’re stuck with it in our genes. Because of our genetic mandate to be dissatisfied with what we’ve got, we humans are both blessed and cursed with insatiable desire, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. Seeking an end to desire is like looking for that non-existent black cat in the dark room.

The blessing, of course, is that we probably wouldn’t be here to discuss it if our ancestors hadn’t lived in a more or less chronic state of dissatisfaction. That’s what worked, back when our forefathers and mothers were struggling to survive on the African savannah a million or so years ago. Any incipient trait for contentment with the status quo would have usually led to one's genetic line being abruptly severed, as Ms. or Mr. All-blissed-out got eaten by a passing sabertooth tiger. The ones who survived and reproduced--that is, our ancestors--were the ones who spent their days worrying about where the next meal was coming from, whether the water hole was about to dry up, what was needed for the tribe to survive. Anxiety and desire were successful traits for survival back then--and today we’re born, not as blank slates, but with brains genetically programmed to worry and want.

So desire for more was an undiluted blessing back when life was really tough, whereas nowadays, when most of us have at least the basics of food, clothing and shelter taken care of, the constant curse of craving for more, newer and better can dull us to the bounty of the present moment. Instead of dancing around gratefully in what physician-poet Lewis Thomas called “a contented dazzlement of surprise,” I’m more likely to find myself noticing what’s wrong with my life, and what I imagine I need to make myself happy.

So is meditation the answer? After all, that’s why many of us were attracted to the practice in the first place, in the hopes of silencing the chronic voice of dissatisfaction in our lives. Isn’t meditation supposed to be the antidote to our hunger for something else, the answer to our craving for more?

This is where cracks in the logic of the Noble Truths become apparent, as the spotlight falls upon the paradox of desiring an end to desire. It seems to me any effort I put into my meditation practice is doomed to failure. Effort only serves to reinforce my discontent with what I’ve got--in fact, it’s my effort that’s the problem! My experience as a meditator is that trying to achieve a less grasping, calmer, happier, more compassionate, more aware state is just about the worst possible approach to practice. As Buddhist teacher Bon Ryun puts it, “Trying to make yourself have a clear mind is like trying to make muddy water clear by stirring it.”

Not only is the notion of “desiring an end to desire” pretty nutty, but it takes me right out of an appreciation of this: this moment, this life, the way it actually is. Perfect equanimity is impossible—my genes have seen to that—but I can at least acknowledge the fact, and make the best of it by surrendering to the reality, accepting what is (including my resistance to it!).

“Surrender” and “acceptance” are pretty tricky concepts. They make it sound like there’s something to be done, some goal to be achieved--which is my problem in the first place. In fact, it’s more like surrendering to the realization that there’s nothing to be done (not even surrender!), and making the best of the situation.
Making the best of it, for me, takes the form of noticing, what Jiddu Krishnamurti labeled “passive awareness,” open to undifferentiated everything and nothing. That’s what meditation is for me: it’s still active, in the sense that I deliberately set it up, by stopping my usual daily activity in order to sit or walk quietly. But in practice it’s passive, meaning I’m open to the adventure of whatever pops up (not unlike my iPod set to “shuffle”).
So…does it work? [Spoiler alert!] Somehow, against the all the odds of logic, this “sit down and shut up” approach does pan out for me, in the sense that I've stopped beating myself up with debilitating self-criticism for not achieving my spiritual goals (whatever that might mean!). And itworks in the deep sense that I seem to have accepted that my desire for desireless will be forever unrequited and my hope for change will never change.

Now you’ll have to excuse me while I look for a certain black cat. Answers to “mu.”

Play's the Thing: The Lighter Side of Meditation

2008-11-06T16:45:00.001-08:00

In 1978, I sat a nine-day silent vipassana retreat with the then-89-year-old Cambodian Thervadan Buddhist monk, Bhante Dharmawara--who went on to live another 20 years. One day deep into the retreat, we were standing on the grass outside the dining hall awaiting the bell that would tell us our afternoon snack was ready. Bhante was sitting on a plastic chair when suddenly one leg sank into the soft ground, propelling him backwards into a rosebush. He lay there with his orange robe akimbo and legs in the air, looking undignified to say the least. As we all rushed to help him, horrified that he might be hurt, he burst out laughing. Thirty years later, I can still see him flat on his back, giggling, a modern incarnation of Budai-Hotei, the Laughing Buddha.

I’m not sure most people would immediately think of laughter in relation to Buddhism. Starting with the first Noble Truth, much of the philosophy of Buddhism is concerned with the inevitability of suffering (dukkha) and what we can do about it. Given Buddhism’s overt preoccupation with suffering, it seems to me that we sometimes forget about dukkha’s opposite, sukha, usually translated as “happiness” or “bliss” (or perhaps, “chuckling while lying on your back in a rose bush”).
***

Newcomers to our practice, on the (rare!) occasions that they return after their first session, have often told me they’re intimidated by the formality and solemnity of our practice. Those black zafus and zabutons and robes, the bowing and deference, the general air of earnestness and correctness, all promote a general sense of gravity. I know what they mean, since I’ve certainly been guilty of taking the practice very seriously, which really means taking myself very seriously.

Two years ago, I had tea with an old friend, now a Zen monk. We were discussing our experiences of Zen practice, and found ourselves in disagreement over whether there were any rewards. “After all these years of playing around with meditation,” I said, “I’m not sure there’s anything to actually get out of it.”

He looked surprised, and frowned: “Maybe if you had taken it more seriously, instead of playing around, you might not feel that way now.” We agreed to disagree, although I realize now that part of our disagreement was semantic—while I take my commitment to the groups I help lead seriously, I take the practice itself lightly--especially when it comes to talking about future rewards, which I believe are nebulous at best. As they say in the investing field, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

The way I see it, Prince Siddartha, before he was designated the Buddha--the Awakened One--didn’t go back to his five self-denying friends and say in a grave voice, “Greetings, oh monks, I have something very serious to impart to you that I’m calling the Middle Way...” No, I think he ran to them chortling: “Hey guys, guess what! It’s not what we thought! It’s not about being ascetics! It’s not about being anything! We don’t have to do a damn thing, it’s all right here!”

I know, I wasn’t there at Sarnath. Maybe the Big Guy was more of a dour John Calvin type than an exuberant Mahalia Jackson…but to me, it makes sense that he’d have offered a joyful, playful message to his fellow ascetics—after all, they already knew how to be serious. I’m guessing that they resonated right away to what he had to say because it was fun, because he was fun.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years or so. To paraphrase Sophie Tucker (among others), “I’ve been playful and I’ve been serious: playful is better.” It’s not either/or, of course, but I find now that approaching meditation with a generally playful attitude simply feels better. We all know how to play--it came naturally to us when we were kids. Grief, sorrow, loneliness, anger and the other “darker” emotions still come up for me, of course. But approaching meditation with a light heart means that when they do come up, they don’t have the same grip on me as they did when I approached it with more earnestness.
***

Perhaps I can best explain my present point of view by trying to put into words the sort of experiences I typically have during meditation:

OK, here I am sitting on my zafu, trying to concentrate (I can’t type that phrase without smiling), pretending that it matters exactly how I hold my fingers, how I breathe, even how I think (“I think I should be thinking something else”), putting effort into my sit, going along with the notion that equanimity is some quality that can be achieved (--as if!), that sitting is cumulative and that my thousands of hours on the mat actually count for something.

…And then, seeing how I’m clinging to all that, affecting an attitude of, This, now, is all there is…

...And then I take that to mean something…

…And on and on, until the sheer silliness of all my thoughts and ideas and beliefs floods in. I realize that this sloppy trillion-neuron-brain can never make sense of itself and that illusion is my natural condition. This self will never consent to its non-existence (duh!).My desire to be free of desire is unquenchable and my hope for change will never change. My own liberation is accepting my incarceration. OK, got it! That’s how it is! So now all I’ve got to do is…

…and the bell rings. Oh god, it’s so stupid! I’m so stupid! It’s hard not to laugh out loud. After all that, how can I possibly take any of it seriously?!

My soul

2008-08-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

Seems like the English language is designed to keep us in the comfortable cocoon of dualism, the idea that a person is essentially an immaterial soul that "possesses" a body and a mind. So "my leg," "my thoughts," "these eyes of mine," and so forth. We can even happily talk about "my soul" and "my essence" with hardly a qualm about, just whose soul/essence we might be talking about. Note that we differentiate between animate and inanimate parts-"The dog bit my (or your, or his, or the horse's) leg, but not, usually, "The dog bit the table leg."

It's gets even squirlier when talking about so-called out of body experiences. "During the procedure, I saw my body on the operating table."

Shuffling Mind

2008-08-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

I'm fond, too fond, of saying, "I don't have a mind, I just mind." My problem with "mind" as a noun is the implication of incorporeality—in Descartes version of dualism, we consist of material bodies and non-physical minds. How does one affect the other? Via the pineal gland, chosen by Descartes because it is the one organ in the brain that isn't duplicated, where somehow the non-physical influences the physical in some weird way. These days, almost all scientists and philosophers are solidly materialistic, so to speak, and discount the existence of a metaphysical mind or soul. What you see, or can measure, is what you get, no more, no less.

So much for logic. In real life, I know, and I'm sure you do, what "mind" means. I probably use the word a dozen times a day: "I've made up my mind." "My mind wandered all over the place during meditation." "Great minds think alike."

"Whose mind is like the wind on a sea of wheat…" wrote Louis McNeice in his poignant Autumn Journal, of his almost departed girlfriend.

So after one particularly rambunctious period of meditation, I was able to note that the best way I could describe the workings of my mind was top compare it to Apple's ipod: put it on "shuffle" and the machine randomly picks songs to play from its entire library of music. The metaphor works particularly well when the song that pops up is at first unfamiliar (you can store a LOT of music in eight gigabytes of memory!). Music starts, I think, "Do I know this?" and a moment later there's a click—oh yes, of course, that's Queen's "Spread Your Wings," haven't heard it for years.

Just like memories. "Where did that come from?" I think, as a flash of 16-year-old-me inviting Jenny Hay out for a date, calling her "Jennifer" in my awkwardness. (She declined.) Next moment there I am slogging up Mount Shasta…and then my knee hurts…and I notice my breath count 135...136...clanking along in the background.

As I tell the guys in the jail, "It's always an adventure," before I ring the bell and we begin our meditation shuffle.

The Myth of the Experienced Meditator

2008-07-22T06:39:00.001-07:00

[Published in Tricycle, Spring 2008]

...I tell [Kyodo Roshi] I want to take my practice to a deeper level. “Deeper level?” He laughs again. “What you mean ‘deeper’? Zen practice only one level. No deep, understand?”

Lawrence Shainberg, Ambivalent Zen

I am, unfortunately, an experienced meditator. From the time I stumbled into an introduction to Transcendental Meditation in Vancouver, Canada, in 1970, through multiple eras (including my present 15-year old Soto Zen practice), I’ve sat and stared at many walls (and mandalas and candles, and the inside of my eyelids), reveled in sundry “bells and whistles” mental experiences, got bored, decided I was going crazy, became enlightened (no, really!), and now I’m ready to share everything I’ve learnt. It won’t take long. In fact I can sum it up in one word: nothing.

Not that ‘nothing’ is to be sniffed at. For years—decades!—I thought there was something to learn, and that all those thousands of hours on the mat were cumulative, that the more I sat, the more aware and compassionate and wonderful I would become. In a world where the attainment of goals is seen as a virtue, thirty-eight years of realizing nothing didn’t come easily or lightly.

By definition (mine!), if I did think I knew something about meditation, that wouldn’t be meditation. Sort of like God—if you can describe God to me, that ain't God. If, as I believe, meditation is simply awareness, then any past knowledge I have about it is not only useless, but slops over into my immediate experience. Knowing is antithetical to openness, and it’s the adventure of not knowing that’s the genius of meditation. Not for nothing (so to speak) are two of the most popular contemporary books on Buddhism called Beginner’s Mind (Shunryu Suzuki) and Only Don’t Know (Seung Sahn). I have this fantasy that next time I open my copies of these books, I'll find only blank pages.

So what is meditation about? I’ve heard many claims for the practice over the years, that it’s about: gratitude; emptiness; deepened, (or if you prefer) heightened, awareness; compassion; spaciousness; the discovery/realization/dissolving of one’s true self (your choice); attaining liberation; self-realization; being present in the moment; opening to the wonder of it all; finding inner peace; encountering one’s Buddha nature; becoming one with everything; cutting through delusion; (fill in the blank___________).

It seems to me, though, that meditation isn’t about anything: meditation is meditation. Any attempt to define it in terms of something else simply confuses the issue, making it vulnerable to being treated like any other self-improvement system. Lord knows, these days we are offered enough ways to be better people, get closer to God, find ourselves and enhance our circumstances. We’re swamped with therapies, self-help books and techniques—what the British philosopher called “the thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques”—which treat our lives as projects to be tweaked and fixed. Isn’t meditation (if it’s anything at all) a relief from all this? Isn’t it the opposite of repairing and adjusting and striving and perpetually wanting things to be different?

For me, meditation is the haven away from the ubiquitous world of self-improvement. It's not just that there's no such thing as ‘bad’ meditation, but there's no such thing as ‘good’ meditation either. It is what it is. So when I hear words like “effort” and “discipline” and phrases like “deepening one’s practice” and “advancing along the spiritual path” spoken in the same breath as meditation, I wince. Just sitting (“shinkantaza”)—doing and wanting nothing, breath coming and going unbidden, eyes seeing, ears hearing—in this effortless state, thoughts flurry like falling leaves

So can a so-called experienced meditator offer anything to someone new to the practice? Probably not. If what we’re really talking about is awareness, how can we help someone notice what’s going on? This is what's going on: no more, no less. Unlike a subject like, say, carpentry, where we learn from the experience of those who have gone before us, meditation is defined by spontaneity, by not knowing. As the roshi says, “practice only one level.” Perhaps the best we can do is to reassure newcomers that each of us starts over with every sit and every breath.

Trust me. I'm an experienced meditator.

As If I'd Never Left

2008-07-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

Some facts just resonate and resonate, can’t get enough of them....

* We consist of two parts, soma and genome. Soma arrives and leaves regularly, genome just keeps on. My genome represents unbroken chain that started over three billion years ago, essentially immortal. So when I claim to be mortal, that’s only half the story.

* The universe is the most efficient simulation of itself. Similarly, a random number is the most efficient way of expressing itself. Lovely, profound, satisfying.

* Search for meaning in life is pointless, the universe is what it is, no more and no less. Nothing to do or achieve. Such a relief.

* We’re not designed for happiness, we’re designed for survival and reproduction. Happiness, when we experience it, is an epiphenomenon. Again, a relief.

* So much “artificial” unhappiness is created by unrealistic expectations of happiness. As Geneen Roth pointed out, despite spending at least half our lifes in discomfort, we keep thinking happiness is our normal condition.

* Just to rub it in: happiness, happenstance and haphazard have the same (Greek) root. Happiness isn’t something to be figured out, it’s an unexpected gift of the gods.

* To sit still and become aware of the stuff of mind: chaos made (more or less) visible. Mind minding. Breath breathing. (Ears earring?) Gratitude for life, gratitude for awareness of life...

Meditation 101: Less is More

2007-08-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

My instructions for first-time meditators are becoming more and more minimalist. These days, it’s something like, “Sit quietly and notice what’s going on.” It used to take longer—when I was the meditation instructor at Kannon Do sangha in Mountain View, I would spend 30-40 minutes telling newbies how to sit, how to breathe, how to bow--not to mention how to enter and leave the zendo, how to ask a question, and (talk about setting them up!) what to expect.

Part of my ‘quickie’ approach these days is dictated by logistics. At the jail where Pete, Michael and I take turns with the men’s meditation program, we are almost always with folks who have never meditated before, and we have limited time. I want to give them a taste right now of the essence of meditation. And when I’m leading our Eureka Wednesday evening group, new folks always seem to walk in as I’m about to ring the bell, so it’s a quick, “Welcome…shoes off, please…chair or cushion?…so OK, why don’t you just sit and notice what’s going on for the next 30 minutes…thank you.”

That’s it? What about eyes open? 45-degree head tilt? Cosmic mudra, thumbs just barely touching? Spine as straight as the proverbial tower of gold coins? Tongue on roof of mouth? Breath awareness? Counting? Attention on the hara? Letting thoughts through without stopping for a chat? All this is fine to experiment with once someone’s made the decision to practice, but for first-timers? I like giving them a big field to play in by following my core belief about meditation, that there’s no way to do it wrong…

...as opposed to just about everything else in my life! There’s often this underlying editorial commentary, on the lines of, “Hey, good job, Barry…uh-oh, you really screwed up there…man, you’re doing well…oh god, the day’s gone and I’ve done nothing!” While meditation, on the other hand, comes and goes, the antidote to goal-oriented existence: I meditate because I meditate, and for the most part, I don’t try to improve it or tinker with it. It is what it is.

My concern with detailed meditation instructions is that by their very nature, instructions imply there are good ways and bad ways to do it. They say, this is what you should be doing, this is right, this is wrong. Instructions set up goals, just like in ‘real’ life.

I wonder if this is why so many people try meditation once—and quit, feeling they’ve somehow failed? At Kannon Do, we estimated that out of five or six people who came the first time to the instruction session (followed by a sit) we saw just one of those folks again. For the vast majority, that one time was enough. How many times have I heard something like, “Yeah, I tried meditation once, but it didn’t work for me…I just couldn’t do it right…my mind wouldn’t calm down…”?

If a newcomer does have questions or concerns, I encourage them to try it first and to ask the questions after. My belief is that someone sitting for the first time learns more about meditation in 30 real-time minutes than any experienced meditator can explain to them in that same amount of time.

Because meditation isn’t a set of instructions: it’s an adventure.

Gratitude List

2007-08-13T12:27:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like a gratitude list to move on, get with the program, leave the blues behind…Here's mine for today:

1. Writing. Thanks, Sumerians, Phoenicians, Chaucer…
2. Internet. Thanks, Tim Berners-Lee
3. Really, really bad movies (to help appreciate the good ones). Thanks, Danny "Sunshine" Boyle.
4. NYT crossword. Thanks, Wil Shortz.
5. Sad, funny music. Thanks, Leonard Cohen.
6. Sunshine. Thanks, carbon resonance (and Fred Hoyle for explicating).
7. Being here. Thanks, 100% non-childless ancestors.
8. Prescription lenses. Thanks, Salvino D'Armate.
9. Vaio laptop. Thanks, Akio Morita.
10. Bicycles. Thanks, John Starley, John Dunlop, many more.

What am I pretending not to know?

2007-07-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

Seems to me the US is going to hell in a hand basket, and much of the world with it. Yet to many of us, it’s so obvious what’s wrong: acquisitiveness and materialism, lack of critical thinking, environmental negligence, ignorance of other cultures and values. In Dark Ages America, Maurice Berman compares our fate with that of the Roman Empire, nibbled away from the inside with delusions of grandeur. He lists four characteristics of our common fate, that of Rome and Washington:

1. The triumph of religion over reason
“A writ of infallibility…guides the inner life of the White House.” (Ron Suskind). And not just the White House--59% of Americans belief in the literal truth of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelations

2. The breakdown of education and critical thinking
11% of young adults can’t find the U.S. on a world map…12% of Americans have passports.

3. Legalization of torture
Alberto Gonzales, the same man who wrote the legal briefs justifying torture, now heads the Justice Department. (George Orwell would have understood!)

4. Marginalization of the U.S. on the world stage
For instance, the World Health Organization rates the health care system of U.S. 37th in the world; meanwhile, our annual trade deficit is half a trillion dollars (offset by foreign loans to the tune of $4 billion a day in 2003)

I suspect readers of my modest blog don’t need to be told any of this. So what’s meditation got to do with any of it?

There is, as I see it, only way to move beyond simplistic, polarized and lock-step thinking: to stop. That is, to literally stop and notice what’s going on. Most of us have all the information we need to figure out that there’s something totally weird going on. We know (don’t we?) that forming our opinions solely from Fox News and right-wing talk radio is the opposite of critical thinking...we know (don’t we?) that our own culture is one of many, and that the fact about 16% of U.S. citizens have passports may make us a tad chauvinistic...we know (don’t we?) that 9/11 wasn’t just the evil guys attacking the good guys...we know (don’t we?) that Iraq is about oil and U.S. hegemony?

The information is out there, and most of us have at least some sense that not questioning authority is going over the cliff with the rest of the trusting herd. Well, maybe we do, but sometimes it takes courage and honesty to allow our skepticism to surface. And more: it takes stopping and allowing dissenting thoughts, awkward thoughts, to percolate from our unconscious.

Many years ago I partook in a training where a banner above the door of the training room “grew” day by day. The question on the banner was, “What are you pretending not to know?”

Answer, then and now: so much. But at the deepest level, the answer is always the same: I’m pretending not to know how deluded I may be...I go through life pretending I'm right.

Is meditation--the act of stopping and noticing what’s going on--the antidote to delusion? It sure helps! I'm not saying that G. W. Bush is going to sit quietly staring at a wall for half an hour and realize that maybe he God isn't on his side. But for those of us whose minds may not be quite so set in concrete, the simple act of stopping and noticing can be a major step to acknowledging that something, indeed, is wrong.

And best of all, sometimes comes the greatest and most important awareness of all: I may be deluded.

Happiness: the way out

2007-05-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

So happiness, again. Take a look at the origin of the word...

Happenstance, haphazard, hapless, luck, the blessing of the gods. That’s what the Greeks thought way back when, before neurology, before we started thinking about free will. Ties right in with Julian Jaynes notion that prior to say 1000 B.C., humans weren’t self-conscious, they heard voices in their heads (one hemisphere informing the other) which they interpreted as the gods telling them what to do. If you were lucky, and the gods weren’t jacking you around, you got good advice, resulting in happiness. Nothing to do with any effort you put in. Your happiness was out of your hands.

These days, it seems to me that we’re pretty well addicted to the notions that (1) happiness is our birthright and (2) claiming that birthright is entirely up to the individual. I say this by simply noting what sells--most of the non-fiction bestsellers are self-help how-to-be-happy books. (“Non-fiction” is, of course, a relative term!)

So which way lies happiness, the gods or ourselves?
***
There are so many reasons why almost all our efforts to be happy fail.

1. The very yearning for happiness brings unhappiness, for it reminds us that we’re dissatisfied with what we’ve got.

2. Even if we set up our lives by optimising our actions to bring future happiness, it ain’t gonna happen. We’re different people in the future, and what we thought would bring them happiness may not work anymore.

3. Happiness is self-limiting. The very awareness of being happy leads to a variety of messages, all of which take the edge off it. For example, “Yeah I’m happy, but I think I should be happier;” “The first time I did this, I was a lot happier than I am now;” “I’m happy now, but for how long?”; “I wish I’d done this sooner;” and on and on. I don’t think it possible to be aware of happiness and stay neutral to it, without commentary and judgement.

All this can be explained by evolutionary theory (see Skip the Car). In a nutshell, unhappiness and dissatisfaction promoted survival and reproduction. A gene that emphasized satisfaction wouldn’t get very far down the evolutionary path.

So if being dissatisfied with the status quo is built into our genes, what’s to be done?

The only way out I see is to do stuff for no other reason than novelty, that is, doing things for which we can’t really figure out the outcome.

It’s called “adventure.”

Death, according to George Wald (1970)

2007-05-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

"It’s rather odd that we regard mass suicide on the part of lemmings as an aberration, as a kind of psychopathic behavior; whereas our way of dealing with the same problem [too little food] is considered normal. Where the lemmings go off to die, we go off to kill; for it’s equally true for the human migrants that there is no other place for them. Every place is occupied. Have you ever heard of people migrating to a place fit to live where there were no people before? There are always people. If the migration ends in a colonization, that’s through conquest. It is strange that we look on that as normal and proper, whereas the lemmings seem to be doing something aberrant; for biologically there is much to be said for the way lemmings go about it.

"On the one hand, the way the lemmings do it, there is a minimum of dying. As soon as enough lemmings have left the center of population, there is enough food for those that remain, so the migration automatically stops. Second, there is no destruction. The lemmings’ home territory is just as good as it ever was. Third, and whenever I say this I shudder, since I can’t jump over my shadow, but a selection process is at work. It’s the hungriest lemmings that go off to die; the ones that are doing better stay home. Whereas in the human way of doing things, we pick the flower of our manhood to go off to kill and die. The lemmings are exercising better biology."

Not talking about God

2007-03-31T11:48:00.000-07:00

Feynman described himself as a 'non-believer.' ...When I asked him what he meant, he said, "You describe it; I don't believe in it." Feynman was not saying he didn't believe there was a god; he was saying that any god that you can describe is too limiting for him to believe in.
Colleague of the late Richard Feynman

I don't know how to talk about God(s)/god(s)/G-d. We're dealing, presumably, with the ineffable, that which is incapable of being expressed. I guess I’m like Feynman: you tell me what you mean by God and this isn't God to me. This isn't saying I don't believe in God, just that I haven't a clue what we're talking about.

According to scholar-writer Karen Armstrong, “Some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God.”

So am I an atheist? Don't know! I need to know what a theist believes in first. In our Western culture, that’s usually one god, I understand (unless you insist that Christianity is polytheistic—unlike Judaism and Islam—if you grant Jesus’ separate divinity). This is one of those awkward situations where a word is defined by what it’s not, like vacation and chastity and, for that matter, death. In this case, theists set the rules, so to say you’re an atheist is normally to say you don’t believe in a (or the) Christian God. As self-proclaimed atheist Richard Dawkins puts it, “Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.”

Believing in God isn't like believing in fairies, or bigfoot. As it happens, I don't believe in fairies, but I'd know one if I saw one, dancing around a circle in the moonlight, pixiedust in her hair. Bigfoot, same thing, sans pixiedust. But God? How would I know God if God suddenly appeared or spoke to me? Just because a burning bush announces itself as God doesn't make it so. I need to redefine here, open it up a bit.

I resonate with a 2006 Salon interview in which Michael Shermer says, “It doesn't matter to me if you call it God or the cosmos. We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.”

I’m not sure we all are, but let’s go along with this and rephrase the God question as, Do I experience awe and wonder? then, You betcha! I suppose the best I can do with the idea of God is to grant it—the concept—shock value: some new, unexpected feeling or awareness or gratitude. So to try to list such experiences is a bit of a paradox (—there went the shock!). But here goes anyway, to give a flavor:

· Louisa and I pause in silence for a few seconds before eating—and often for me it's, “Good grief, here I am still! I’m alive! How did that happen?!”

· Water cradles my body as I float on my back in a mountain lake: just this.

· Consciousness is the experience of experiencing. Oh!

· I put on my glasses and see leaves on a tree 200 feet away. Individual leaves! What would Caesar or Charlemagne have given for corrective lenses?

· The firing of neurons creates awareness—how about that? This experience—-all of it!—-is a physical process.

· And colors aren’t ‘out there’ in the world, just wavelengths. Red isn’t so much a color as a psychological state of my brain.

· I navigate to the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant naked-eye object by far. Photons self-destructing on my retina began their journey when Lucy walked in Africa.

· My tiny GPS unit hearkens to three or four satellites some 12,000 miles distant. I walk five paces, it knows!

· Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor, start of the final movement. Shivers. Ineffable.

· My best pal and I are talking a mile a minute. We stop, seeing only eyes, forgetting our separate selves.

· Where do words come from? Where do they go?

· Time. Haven’t a clue. Really!

· And what about the “bad” stuff? Unexpected news of cancer? The death of a friend? Part and parcel of the fabric. Can't have one without the other. For me, a work in progress...

OK, then, do I believe in God? Oh yes. Many.

Introduction and Postscript

2006-11-25T09:58:00.000-08:00

If you’re not happy here and now, you never will be.

Taisen Deshimaru

I do love Joe Bob Briggs (joebobbriggs.com). Joe Bob reviews B movies, drive-in movies, cheap movies, bad movies, the sort of movies you probably wouldn't want your kids to see. Movies with titles like American Nightmare. His reviews always conclude with a tally of the important stuff—here’s how his review of A.N. ends:

Four breasts. Eight dead bodies. One burial alive. Corpse- beating. Grave-stabbing. Slicing. Dicing. Filleting. Multiple stab wounds. Outdoor rave bikini-dancing. Drug-induced wife-stabbing. Gratuitous shower scene. Voodoo Fu. S&M Fu…Three stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

Well, I probably won’t. Not because I don't trust Joe Bob. (Who’ya gonna believe? Joe Bob or the Netflix reviewer—read amateur—who says of the same movie, “This movie is a celluloid nightmare. Pure torture.”)

I read Joe Bob because he’s entertaining. He can write. Long ago, he penned a column in which he ruminated about writing. This is my recollection of what he said:

People come up to me and say, "Hey, Joe Bob, you're a writer, right? Got any tips for writing?” and he says, "Sure. Write every day.” And they say, "Yeah, OK. The thing is, I've got a terrific idea for a novel and I'm just trying to lick it into shape…” "Great,” he says. "Write every day.” "You don't understand,” they say. "This is a really fantastic idea. It could easily go from a bestseller to a screenplay and a major motion picture.” "Wonderful!” he says. “Write every day...”

I tell you this because I’m sometimes asked about writing. And because I write most days, not every day, I fall back on my Joe Bob story. I don't even know if it's true.

I write a lot. Mostly in coffee shops, mostly early morning, mostly in Eureka (Humboldt Bay, way up the California coast). At 6 a.m., I’m often Hasbeans’ first customer of the day, a buck for a good cuppa joe, table by the window. Right now it’s dark out, can’t see the bay. Ella sings Mister Paginini. Joanna’s making fresh coffee, Christine’s in back baking scones. Lights of a fishing boat heading out the bay. Police cruiser checking out something or someone down on Second Street. Nothing and everything.

I don’t know what consciousness is, but I write about it. I do know about travel, and write about that, too. The best advice I ever heard was, Don’t listen to my advice. Something like that, I forget.

I live in a culture where there’s this emphasis on improving our inner lives, fixing and tweaking and generally reminding ourselves that we’re not quite good enough the way we are. I'm 64 already, I'm tired of fixing myself. I could be 94 and still not be OK. I’m never going to be OK.

This is as good as it gets.

That's it. You can skip the rest.

Thursdays at the Jail

2006-11-25T09:43:00.000-08:00

Thursday nights four of us 'zennys' take turn facilitating meditation at our local county jail. Room 322 is rather a sad little space, cinder block walls, plastic chairs, heavy metal tables. When I arrive, I push the tables back to the wall and arrange a dozen chairs in a rough circle, making sure my seat is closest to the door.

Not for safety reasons--in six years, I've never felt unsafe, barring the one time a big guy asked if I ever did felt unsafe. That did elicit a little spinal tingle. I sit close to the door so I can reach the light switch easily and get back to my chair in the gloom. We can't achieve darkness in our little space, but it's the closest the inmates ever get to it in all their time inside.

Soon after seven, in their orange jumpsuits, they trickle in, one dorm at a time, until we agree that no one else is coming. I usually begin: This isn't a meditation class, (despite that it's billed that way on the sign-up sheets). That's because I have nothing to teach you and you have nothing to learn. The beauty of meditation is that you just do it, you sit quietly noticing what's going on. That's it. OK if I turn the lights out?

In the semi-darkness, I ring my little Tibetan chimes three times. "Listen as the last chime dies away," I say. "Follow it down." I give them a chance to appreciate the gloom, allow them to shuffle and readjust in their seats, perhaps they're wondering what they're doing here. "I'd like you to check out your body, starting from your feet and working your way up to the top of your head. Notice any areas of stress and imagine breathing the tension out when you exhale." Much deep breathing.

"Notice how you're sitting. Notice what it feels like to be you, right now. Notice how you're breathing. Notice where you're aware of your breathing." I imagine they're doing as I am, becoming aware of my body, slightly amazed at this whole wondrous mechanism.

The mood of the room changes from week to week. Sometimes I sense much tension, other times a deep acceptance. It's a stressful, noisy, overly bright environment the guys are in, 24/7. "This is it," I say, "your life, my life. Right now. This is what's happening."
***
After 15 minutes of this, we check in. "How's it going?" "Man, I feel peaceful." "I'm more tense than when we started." "I really tried to calm down, but my mind's going crazy." "I fell asleep." I'm always out of my depth, and say so. "All I'm here for is to create a safe, quiet environment. Sorry I can't do more," I tell them. "That's OK, bro."

We end with 20 full minutes of silence--a major stretch for many of them, who have never sat still for more than two minutes at a time in their lives. To stop and notice--that's new, sometimes scary, sometimes exciting
.
One evening, there seemed to be a lot of tension in the room. Towards the end of the 20 minutes, I heard myself breaking the silence. "Whatever you're feeling, however you're sitting, whatever you're thinking, you're doing it right."

A few minutes later I rang my chime for the last time, switched the light on, and thanked them. As we were putting the chairs and tables back, a young man approached me. I noticed his eyes were watering. "I just wanted you to know that in 25 years, that's the first time anyone told me I was doing it right," he said.

I hope he still is.

The Turtle Problem

2006-11-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

Galapagos, 1985

Quite possibly the greatest book ever written on the subject of turtle stacking.

Lisa Simpson on Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Suess

You’ve probably heard the story about the astronomer from the U.S. who was visiting India, giving talks around the country on the state of the science as seen through western eyes. At the close of one of his lectures on the cosmos, an old lady stood up and said, “Actually, the earth is supported on the back of a giant turtle.” The astronomer was taken aback, but stepping up to the plate, said, “I understand, madam, but can you tell me what the turtle is standing on?” to which the lady said, “Another turtle, of course.” Taking a deep breath, he said, “Well yes, but…” “It’s no good, sonny,” she interrupted. “It’s turtles all the way down!”

The story has been repeated so often by, or with references to, so many famous people—Bertrand Russell, Linus Pauling, Carl Sagan, Justice Antonin Scalia, Stephen Hawking— that it’s acquired a life of its own. The Turtle Problem is now routinely used as shorthand for the philosophical notion of ‘infinite regression’. I’ve seen it cited in reference to such issues as ‘the policing problem’ (who polices the police…and who them…) and (so-called) Intelligent Design (if the world is so complicated that it took God to create it, who created God…and etc.).

The Turtle Problem can, I think, also be applied to consciousness. I’ll be meditating, thinking, “Hmm, I’m sitting here, staring at a wall, feeling pretty good.” Then comes, “Who is having this thought?” (a standard technique in some forms of meditation). Followed, instantly it seems, by, “Who’s having the thought, Who’s having this thought??” And before you can say infinite regress, my mind’s off and running down mirrored corridors, bouncing the question back and forward (as I imagine) between the twin hemispheres of my brain.

Suppose we allow that when we notice we’re thinking, we’re having a ‘meta-thought’, and that this meta-thought is somehow more ‘real’ than the original thought. So the next thought--the one about the meta-thought, i.e. the ‘meta-meta-thought’--is presumably even closer to reality At what point do we get to reality itself?

And what the heck am I talking about? What is reality? Can we ever experience the world (including ourselves in it) as it really is? As the memsaab would have said, “It’s no good, it’s turtles all the way down!”

Make Me One with Everything

2006-10-30T06:27:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I'm meditating, I'll have an experience of
spaciousness, when it seems that Barry is no more, there's
just everything else, the entire universe, a vastness of
oneness, absent this particular being. Sometimes there's a
light—white light, blue light, filling up my entire being.
Sometimes there's absolutely nothing, no sensation, no
thought, no body, zero. Sometimes it seems as though I've
broken through to an entirely new and unexpected realm of
consciousness, where there is no ‘I’, no difference between
the seer and the seen.

I believe it’s all mindgames. Of course it all mindgames.
Whatever it is that is experiencing (and something is, by
definition, else there would be no awareness) is
intrinsically no different from that which is being
experienced.

Titling a book (as Mark Epstein did), Thoughts Without a
Thinker, plays into the folk-wisdom idea that it is possible
to experience in the absence of a thinker or a self, that is,
nonduality. But what use is a thought if it isn't perceived?
What is an unperceived thought? Is such a thing possible?

I don't think so. While it may indeed seem (to me!) that
I’m having thoughts without ‘me’ being present, the
question, “What, then, is perceiving this absence of a
perceiver?” leads to absurdity. To perceive or to know or to
be aware is to come from the position of the perceiver, the
knower, the one who is aware, however seductive the
experience.

So I have these far-out experiences, and there's this feeling
that comes, expressed in words by something like, “Wow!
How cool is that?!” with the inevitable undercurrent of,
“How cool am I?” (Even writing this, how cool am I to see
through all the promises and teachings? And cooler yet to
acknowledge it...sigh.)

***

If you’ve gotten this far with me, you know how much I
admire Sue Blackmore, the British writer, teacher and
interviewer on all things to do with consciousness. Our
paths diverge over this crucial issue of no-self, or non-
duality. In the very last chapter of her Consciousness: An
Introduction, after a crisp and engaging overview on the
science of consciousness, she goes woo-woo on us. After
decades of both studying consciousness from the outside
and, as it were, experiencing it from the inside--that is,
meditating--she wonders if the problem of consciousness
might be solved by knowledgeable people who have no-
self experiences.

She writes, “Might the psychologists, philosophers and
neuroscientists working on the problem of consciousness
see non-duality directly for themselves? ...This way the
direct experience of nonduality might be integrated into a
neuroscience that that only knows, intellectually, that
dualism must be false.”

My contention is that there can be no ‘direct experience’ or
‘nonduality’ or ‘thoughts absent a thinker.’ And that all the
teachers and teachings and hours spent meditating and
drugs and spirituality and austerities and practices bring us
no closer (but no farther away) from ourselves.

***

Here's what I believe: No thoughts are better, none are
worse, none are more or less spiritual or aware. The
thoughts of someone who is meditating for the first time--
his or her very first minute--are essentially no different
from those of the devotee who has spent thousands of
hours on the cushion. Thoughts about thoughts are still
thoughts. Awareness of an absence of thoughts, or of self,
when perceived, is a thought. Perception is dualism.

All thoughts are the same.

Everything else is bullpaddies.

The Search

2006-10-14T19:28:00.000-07:00

You have invested everything in one basket, self-
realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that
there is no self to discover, no self to realize. And you say
to yourself, “What the hell have I been doing all my life.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (no relation to Jiddu K.)

Years ago, soon after Louisa and I stumbled into each
other, literally (we were at a sensory-awareness workshop,
aka touchy-feely group, getting to know each other by
touch alone, since our eyes were closed), she interviewed
me. The idea was to create a tape recording to send to her
family members, to introduce her new beau to them.

“Who are you?” she asked me (this was the 70’s, when
such questions were just coming into vogue). “A seeker,” I
responded, very seriously. Well, in retrospect, pompously.
Probably trying to impress her sibs.

At some level, I was a seeker, though. My journals and
letter of that era rumble with wanting—enlightenment,
self-awareness, peace, silence, contentment—even as I
paid lip service to, for instance, Ram Dass plea to “Be Here
Now.” I tried, I really tried, to be here and now, somehow
seduced into believing this was the key to happiness: once
I reached the here-and-now state, all craving for something
else would be over, I’d have arrived.

I never did.

Sure, I had some wonderful ‘bells and
whistles’ experiences, each one simultaneously a gold star
for how far I’d come, and a reminder for how far I had yet
to go. I’m not sure when it finally dawned on me (although
I must have read and heard it dozens of times) that doing
something to be present was, as Buddhist Bon Ryun puts it,
akin to trying to make muddy water clear by stirring it.

Writer-philospher Steven Harrison’s first book was,
“Doing Nothing.” The title says it all. For Harrison, it’s the
very act of doing something—searching, meditating,
studying—with the goal of achieving some better state of
mind—that keeps us from appreciating just this. This
unimproved, unchanged, messy, klutzy, needy, screwed-up
self/no-self (whatever!). It’s the search that’s the problem:
“There is no technique, philosophy, instruction or religion
that will help us experience silence. Everything that we
acquire is in the way because the inquirer is in the way.”

Here’s how Lawrence Shainberg puts it in Ambivalent Zen
(for his reference to Zen, you can subsititute almost any
‘spiritual’ practice): “Everything we do in Zen is based on
the belief that we can free ourselves of desire. Isn't that the
greatest desire of all?...Is any desire more virulent than the
dream of no desire at all?”

Not that any of this is likely to make a scrap of difference.
We’re designed, from our brains on down, to want more.
It’s in our genes, we’re stuck with desire. Fame, fortune,
contentment, sex, understanding, enlightenment, no-self,
the state of desireless: we’re built to want one or more.

We’re supposed to desire! That’s the hand we were dealt
with at birth.

Teachers

2006-08-30T21:35:00.000-07:00

I daily honor my teachers by ignoring them. Steven Harrison

There surely are things we can learn about from teachers--global warming, calculus, cholesterol, skiing, music appreciation--but when we're talking consciousness (Harrison's speciality), how can anyone help you how to notice what's going on? This is what's going on. No more, no less.

I spent years trying to attain certain states of consciousness that I'd heard about, always wanting more, until it finally dawned on me: I'm never going to be closer to whatever it means to be alive than now. As Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said, We cannot put off living until we are ready…Life is fired at us point-blank.

The problem, as I see it, is that most teachers respond to their students desire to be yet closer yet with at least something--they're teachers, right? Hence such wooly wisdom as this, from a book by a well-known meditation teacher:

It is easy to get caught in the notion that there is a goal, a state, a special place to reach in spiritual life.

Sure is. But then in the very next paragraph, we hear:

When we enter the gateless gate, we come to the end of seeking...Finally, we enter the gate of the eternal present and discover that we are not going anywhere.

So is there a goal or isn't there? If we haven't entered the gate of the eternal present (a special place?), I guess we're not quite there yet. Sigh.

***

There's a story about an intense young seeker from California who, after many weeks of traveling, tracked down U.G. Krishamurti (no relation to Jiddu, the better-known Krishnamurti) outside Bangalore. He finally got to meet the irascable non-guru guru, and asked, "Sir, what is your message?"
UG responded, "It is quite simple: You are not going to get anything here, there is nothing to be given. You are wasting your time. I have nothing to give, you have nothing to take. Pack up and go!"

Another time he said, "Anything I do to help would be adding to your misery."

***

Most Thursdays when I'm in town, I visit our local jail to lead what's billed as a Meditation Class. The first thing I always says is, "I've nothing to teach you, and you have nothing to learn."

Sometimes I'll tell them the story of the traveler:

A traveler came to the bank of a wide river and wondered how to cross. Spotting a yogi in deep meditation on the far side, he called out, "Hey you! How do I get to the other side?" The yogi slowly opened his eyes, looked about him and saw the traveler.

"You're on the other side!" he replied.

Nowhere to get to. Nothing to do. We're already there.

***

The Buddha's last words are supposed to have been, "Be a light unto yourselves." What could be clearer? Yet two of the three "treasures" of Buddhism--Buddha and Dharma (wisdom-teachings)--invite us to look outside ourselves for assistance and advice. We--students of Buddhism (!)--engage with teachers regularly in dokusan (formal interview), trusting the teacher to act as a guide in our quest along the path of life. Despite the heart sutra, that bottom-line zen sutra, insisting that there is "no path, no attainment."

Yet we do--that is, I know I do, and (since you're reading this) I suspect you do--look outside ourselves for a helping hand. And for every seeker, there's a seekee, a teacher, someone who's only too willing to respond to our most profound questions. Ask me--anything--and I'll step right up to the plate.

· What's life about? Living.
· How can I be happy? Give up trying to be happy.
· How can I stop smoking? You can't if you're asking me.
· What should I invest in? Index funds.
· What happens after death? You're already dead if you're worrying about that.
· Does God exist? Many.
· What is enlightenment? What isn't?

See? It's easy. The problem is that (to paraphrase Sartre) the role of the student in Buddhism is simply to be neurotic in order to affirm the teacher's authority.

Please ignore the above.

Who is the teacher?

Real simple

2006-08-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Look it's real simple. We all know this, but here it is again.

Right now is all there is (and even that's a bit iffy)...

The past is frozen:

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Rubáiyát: Khayyám/Fitzgerald

The future ain't here, never will be:

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

Daniel Gilbert: Stumbling on Happiness

THIS

BREATH

57 POVs

2006-08-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

1. Life is up and life is down, there's no way to be consistently happy.

2. Any effort I put into being happy will almost certainly result in unhappiness.

3. I'm designed to be much more concerned with what isn't than what is.

4. Genes don't care about my happiness, they care about survival and reproduction. I'm playing with a stacked deck.

5. If my suffering is caused by desire, greater suffering is caused by my desire to end it. Most suffering results from my belief there's a way out of my suffering.

6. On balance, things won't get better.

7. I am ultimately alone in life. My experience of loneliness is natural.

8. 'Now' cannot be experienced. Knowledge about 'now' can be, but then it isn't 'now' anymore. 'Now' is a concept.

9. Guilt is my way of avoiding doing something I think I should be doing.

10. When I can't make myself the way I think I should be, I want the world to be the way I think it should be.

11. There's no such thing as 'self-deception' by definition. If I think I'm telling the truth, then I'm telling the truth. I lie best when I lie to myself.

12. Evolution saw to it that I'm more likely to be anxious than content.

13. A few good things happening to me can make me happier. A few bad things can kill me. So I focus on the bad things, hence the dictum: losing hurts twice as much as winning feels good.

14. On my deathbed, I'm more likely to be thinking, "I wish I hadn't taken it all so seriously," than, "I wish I'd been a better person," or, "I wish I'd achieved more."

15. There's nowhere to go, nothing to do. This is as good as it gets.

16. My culture generally supports the notion of life as a self-improvement project, where my "self" can be tweaked and fixed to edify my inner experience.

17. I think in thoughts. Not in words or pictures. Not linearly.

18. My mind is usually involved in escape, where I define what I want by what I don't want.

19. All my experience is processed, evaluated and filtered prior to awareness.

20. Life is a fluke. My life is a statistical near-impossibility.

21. I constantly (almost) forget I'm alive.

22. Awareness of my happiness dampens the feeling of happiness.

23. I don't know what I seek, in fact I am convinced there is nothing to be found. I I am, however, addicted to the search.

24. There was never a time when I wasn't aware, from my point of view. I won't be aware that I'm dead. To all intents and purposes, I'm eternal!

25. Life isn't fair.

26. Compassion and the question "Why?" (did you do that/say that) are antithetical.

27. The more choices I have, the more I worry I'm making the wrong one.

28. The common promise of all religions is, "success."

29. Man with many keys, many worries...the more I have, the more I worry.

30. When good things consistently happen, I raise the bar on happiness. When bad things consistently happen, a cup of coffee can bring ecstasy.

31. Ice cream test: the better it is, the sooner I feel blue.

32. Therapy offers new and richer ways to be unhappy.

33. The best way to give is willingly, cheerfully, abundantly, joyfully.

34. The best way to receive is willingly, cheerfully, abundantly, joyfully.

35. However bad things are, I'm aware and alive (or I wouldn't know how bad things were). This is better than the alternative.

36. The notion that the present is simply part of a continuum from past to future is baloney.

37. I cannot be convinced that I don't have a "self," since there would then be nothing to be convinced.

38. Humans may well be the only self-aware life in the galaxy.

39. It is wise to doubt that which I would most believe.

40. Self, mind, time, God are all undefinable metaphors.

41. The kindest words in the world are, "Tell me."

42. The best way to colonize Mars is with one-way trips (as the Americas were colonized by Europeans). Life is a one-way trip, anyway.

43. Trying to achieve a clear mind is like trying to clear muddy water by stirring.

44. I am only conscious of what I am conscious of. I have no idea what "unconscious" could mean.

45. Everything is subjective. There's no truth independent of brain.

46. It's better to be the first to apologize. That way, I get to make my antagonist wrong.

47. Human bodies evolved in a climate of physical activity. We're not designed to sit at desks.

48. I'm likely to favor anything I've spent time or money on (the "allegiance effect").

49. Typologies involving bimodal distribution (e.g. Myers-Briggs) are suspect, since behavior (and most everything in nature) can be plotted on a normal (Bell) curve.

50. Resentment is usually a sign of unset limits.

51. It's all neurons! Memories, feelings, desires, fears...

52. The universe doesn't care.

53. I am capable of both enmity and amity. My nature results from my distant forebears living in cooperative tribes, which in turn were competitive with other tribes. That's built in to the architecture of my brain.

54. I can never be sure I am not deluded.

55. My genes don't "care" about my happiness. All they "want" is to get to the next generation.

56. How much I drink (whether it's water or milkshakes) doesn't affect how much I eat, since (until recently) all calories came from food.

57. My opinions are as useless as anybody else's.

And around we go

2006-08-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

Every so often--usually when we're out in the country somewhere--I find myself staring at the moon, trying to viscerally experience my place in space. Nothing more humbling, nothing like it to bring me fact-to-face with the fact of the wonder of simply being.

We move--walking, driving, flying--across the surface of our sweet, unlikely planet, never more than 8,000 miles from anyone else. Everyone and everything man-made (excepting a few tons of space probes and clutter) lie within an 8,000 mile sphere, centered on me. Or you. All the ongoing wars, all the babies now being born and people dying, all the fish in the sea and books on library shelves and saints and terrorists--all lie within our small spheres.

And we're all in this together, moving through space, taking a year to whiz 300 million miles around the sun--nearly a million miles a day. Let's leave off the sun's galactic motion for now: I want to focus for a minute on earth's wide orbit, imagining (per Copernicus) our star to be a fixture. Our annual road trip is an elongated circle--an ellipse--around our parent body. How can we have any awareness of this at all? This table, this chair, this me, are as fixed as anything I can imagine. How can I experience the fact of whirling around the sun?

What I do is catch the moon at last quarter, that is, when just half of it appears in the morning sky. (I might have to wait two or three weeks for this to occur, depending on where we're at with the moon's phase. Exactness doesn't matter, a few days either way will do--for 2006, the best dates are August 23, September 21, October 20, November 18, December 18.)

OK, so here I am, outside on a clear morning: I check out the position of the sun and the half-circle of moon. Now I imagine I'm hanging on to the end of a rope attached to the sun, I'm swinging around on the end of it, in the direction of the moon: hanging for dear life onto a 92 million mile long rope, heading towards the moon. At 40,000 mph. Hang on tight!

That's it. At last quarter moon, the earth is heading (more or less) in the direction of the moon as it goes around the sun. In six hours, I'll be where the moon now is: that's how fast I am (and you are) going, and that's the direction we're all traveling.

Do try this for yourself. For me, the exercise evokes a profound realization, a "getting it", that takes me out of my tiny consciousness into the realms of something much bigger, a vastness of space and motion.

The Catch-22 of self-acceptance

2006-08-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

If I accept myself as I am, I will never improve, I'll be stuck with being uptight, judgmental, depressed the rest of my life. I need fixing, not accepting.

The quote is from my pal TC, with whom I've been having a dialog about self-acceptance. I regard the whole idea of self-acceptance as a chimera, on two grounds:

1. Self-acceptance isn't all it's cracked up to be in the conventional wisdom of our New Age. Given that the term means something (it's a bit hard to pin down), we just not wired to be self-accepting. Our internal critical dialog teaches us to learn from our mistakes--that's the burden an evolving conscious being has to put up with.

If we (i.e. the human species) didn't learn, we'd die out pretty fast. The world's a tough, complicated place, where it's impossible to avoid every pitfall and false step. When we screw up, our self-correcting mechanism reminds us of it, so we we'll learn and do better the next time. Sometimes that mechanism comes as a gentle nurturing voice, sometimes as a harsh criticism--either way, we get the opportunity to learn from the experience. The alternative (self-acceptance--"You did just fine, don't worry about it") would have us making the same mistake over and over.

2. If I accept myself as I am... is one of those contradictory phrases that pop up repeatedly in self-improvement literature, like, Just realize you're perfect the way you are!

You see the problem, right? This is the way I am, this screwed-up, not-self-accepting, not-realizing-I'm-perfect being. Any system, religion or teaching that starts off their "how to be ok" speil with, All you have to do is... or Only... or Just... is telling us we're not ok as we are.

Maybe we're not, and you know what? That's never going to change, the architecture of our brains takes care of that.

And maybe that's ok.

Wondering what she was on

2006-08-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this, you may well be a fan of Richard Linklater's Waking Life--not just a film about lucid dreaming, but a dream of a movie--filmed as live action, then kinda-sorta traced by a team of animators working on Macintosh computers. The result is not quite real but much more so than regular animation.

This afternoon I saw Linklater's adaption of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, also rotoscoped, a wild ride into the future of mind-altering drugs (written 30 years ago when Dick was in the throes of his own drug mania). Do see it, it's a fabulous movie. Now I need to see it again to try to catch up on some of the double-double plot twists. Again, rotoscoping was perfect for this crazy half-real, half-hallucination tale.

So the lights go on and I see that besides me, the only folks left in the theater is a couple about my age. He's explaining the rotoscoping technique to her, how it's made as an actual (digital) movie before being animated. Long pause, then she says, "I didn't realize it was animated."

Jim's question

2006-07-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Last night, Jim asked (brilliantly I thought), "What's the best question I can ask to start a discussion about consciousness?" I replied, of course, that he had just asked the best question. My answer fell short--here's my best effort:

Start off the conversation by trying to define consciousness. It's a bit like pulling yourself by your bootstraps, but here goes.

Philosopher Ned Block makes a useful delineation between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Access consciousness is the availability of the brain's resources to respond, analyze, react, speak, make decisions. The sort of stuff, in other words, that we assume a smart computer will be able to do in a decade or so, what has been called (see my post What's the problem, anyway?) "the easy problem."

Phenomenal consciousness, or phenomenality, is the hard problem, given flesh by the question, What is it like to be me? Thomas Nagel posed this question some years ago: What is it like to be a bat? Not a bat with a human brain asking itself that question--that's not a bat. And if you were an actual bat, you wouldn't be you, asking the question. Nagel concluded the problem was insoluble.

But we can ask What is it like to be this cup in front of me, that a few minutes ago held coffee? Well, I guess it's like…nothing. We can, I think, agree that it's like nothing to be a cup. Or a wall. Or a tree. Or a bacterium. Or a fish…

Uh oh. This is where it gets squirly. Is it like something to be a fish? A dog? A bonobo? A baby? You?

OK, let's assume that it's like something to be you, just as it's like something to be me--there's a certain quality of barryness here, now. That's what I mean by consciousness. That ineffable feeling that it's like something to be you.

So let's take another look at that teletransporter (my post, Natural-born dualists). You're standing in this booth about to press the button that will analyze you--every last nuance of your physical structure, down to orbiting electrons and a zillion microcurrents of charge in every cell of your body--and send the information across town or across the world where you'll be reconstructed, every last detail complete and in place. Would you push the button? Would I?

Well, it's all well and good, I think, for my material self to shift effortlessly, just like in Star Trek. (Apparently Gene Roddenberry dreamt up the transporter to save the cost of portraying a huge spaceship landing on alien worlds--cheaper by far to film just the crew arriving!) But what about my barryness? What happens to that?

Answer 1: (Monism) Don't worry, be happy! My barryness, my consciousness, my sense of self, is part of the package. Reassemble my physical body and you've got everything, including consciousness.

Answer 2: (Dualism) Don't push the button! Consciousness is something extra, non-physical. It may stay behind while the rest of me goes!

What do you think? (And do you have any choice in that???)

'nuff to get the conversation going?

Too involved with remodeling to post anything

2006-07-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

Except this:

The meaning of "secure a building" in different branches of the military:

If you told Navy personnel to "secure a building," they would turn off the lights and lock the doors.

Army personnel would occupy the building so no one could enter.

Marines would assault the building, capture it, and defend it with suppressive fire and close combat.

Air Force personnel would take out a three-year lease with an option to buy.

Remodeling effort at http://gtoadventure.blogspot.com/

Fat enough for you?

2006-07-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

...if you drink a beverage--whether it's a soft drink or juice or beer--you don't compensate by eating less food later.
Barry Popkin: Nutrition Action Healthletter, June 2006

I'm a great fan of evolutionary psychology, which (to oversimplify) says that most of our psychological traits were genetically advantageous (promoting survival to reproductive age followed by reproduction itself) way, way back when. Or to over-oversimplify, we're atomic-age bodies with stone-age brains.

So, for instance, dividing the world up into "us" and "them" (we're the good guys, they're suspect) might have made total sense when our ancestors lived in tribes and vied with neighboring tribes for limited resources. Cooperation with the rest of "us" and aggression towards "them" helped our genes on their long journey from then to now. Today we call it (destructive) nationalism; back then it was (constructive) tribalism.

Or, on another tack, it's long been suspected that our passion for sugar, starch and fat (think double-thick chocolate milkshake) is inherent--we crave that stuff because it wasn't so plentiful a million years ago, and what little our great-great...grand-mothers and -fathers got of it was good for survival, good for reproduction.

Another (mostly overlooked) way our genetic legacy leads to poor health is the way humans evolved to respond to liquid and solid intake, that is, separately. Until very recently, human liquid intake consisted soley of water (and breast milk as infants). If drinking a lot of water had alleviated hunger, our ancestors would have starved to death. So our brains evolved two separate systems, to ensure we both drink enough and eat enough. How much we drink doesn't affect how much we eat, because all our calories used to come from food.

So nowadays, when we chug, say, a couple of cokes, it has no effect on our hunger. Our brains are still on automatic, "telling us" to eat whatever we would have anyway, if we hadn't drunk the cokes. So now we end up toting an extra 300 calories that convert into extra pounds.

In 1977-78, Americans (age 2+) got about 3% of daily calories from soft drinks.
In 1999-2000, we got about 7%.

100 years ago, that percentage was zero. Go figure!

Ocean motion

2006-06-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

(email to Louisa)

Nearly but not quite halfway thru the year: you're reading this tomorrow in Guanajuato, at 7,000 feet elevation in the Sierra Madre. The ocean here doesn't roar, it's more like a continuous stage whisper, over there, in the misty dawnlight, a hundred feet from the open door of our van. I just drove over here, Samoa, found the little parking spot where we walked a couple of weeks ago after playing on that weird and wonderful concrete loading ramp on our bikes, remember? Steep up, steep down, don't fall down the hole in the middle. Good Earth tea tastes, well, earthy. Our van, our home. An hour ago, 4 am, I needed to get out of our alley home, out of Eureka. The ocean called--not the bay, quiet and serene, but the Pacific, this honest sheen of whirring water reaching to Japan. Now I'm sitting in "your' spot, on the bench seat, door wide open, waves right there, right here. A clear line cuts across the open door: white water above--grey sand below. Water meets land meets air.

Dancing images, wayward thoughts, fractal feelings contrast with the surety of the water. There's nothing ambiguous about the ocean, nor about the lone gull heading south down the shoreline. Completely incapable of being captured as a "scene." It's constantly in motion, the opposite of a still life, dead life. This is more like real life, then I remember that a still life--I think of Van Gogh's sunflowers--is a swirl of atoms in motion (the long-gone original or the ever-volatile oils). Nothing is still, no thing. Not even in death. When I'm dead, before I'm burnt, I'll be an active corpse, a zillion natural processes changing what is--we call it decay, but it's a living decay, no less vital than this breathing, typing-on-my-laptop not-yet-corpse. And later, even my ashes and smoke will be aswhirl with atomic motion. There is no "still" in still life, or anything else.

Notice what is, I instruct my meditators, pretending that there's an is to be noticed. There isn't. No here and now. No moment to be in. Me, when I meditate, I'm as active and alive as all get-up. As Joan (solid as a rock, 40 minutes at a time) famously said when I inquired about her meditation, "I'm designing my next home!" I count breaths, with all the peacefulness of a garbage truck.

We could do this anytime: drive over here, before the sun returns from her nighttime gallivanting somewhere down there, underfoot. Park, open to this big stage of ocean. Cuddle or walk or sip coffee. Consider the sand, admire the breakers, breathe the tang of salt, regard our good luck. Mother, mother ocean, I have heard you call... --a woman sang Buffett last Saturday evening at Hasbeans, lips full and expressive, hands celebrating the full range of her guitar strings. Loud, daring, full-on.

All I really worry about is squandering.

Dreamin' our lives away?

2006-06-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

We do not perceive the world directly, as it truly is; we actively construct it. We construct ourselves, too. Our ordinary waking self is as artificial, invented, and illusory as the ethereal double selves we hallucinate in dreams and out-of-body experiences.
John Horgan: Rational Mysticism

The secret [why recollections seem so real] is that real-time experience is just as indirect!
Marvin Minsky: Brains, Vats, Hats website

Horgan and Minsky, each in their own way, say what most people I've talked to about this suspect: what passes for our "real world experience"--what William James called our "rational waking consciousness"--is a fable. We no more experience the real world than an actor in a play lives a real life. There's no color "out there" (a light wave has no intrinsic color--that all happens after it's hit our retina); there's no "sound" in a sound wave--just pressure differences in the air around us.

[To drive this home: Take a good look at the last music CD you burned (non-label side)--there's a boundary between the burned part (closest to the hole) and the unburned part. That inner ring, a little less shiny than the outer, is music--is that weird or what? Up to 74 minutes of Jimmy Buffett embedded on a little silver disk.]

It's not that we really do confuse dreams with waking life, as the Taoist master Chuang Tzu is reputed to have done ("Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?"--which is anthropomorphism taken to the silly stage)--most of us, most of the time, and lucid dreams perhaps being the exception, know damn well when we're awake. Rather that we give too much credence to our waking experience.

Here are a couple of fine resources to challenge the notion that what we think we see is what we see:

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_adelson_check_shadow/index.html

http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/pullapart.asp

(Check 'em out--amazement guaranteed!)

I struggled to express the oddness of the boundary between sleeping and waking in this piece, written a few years ago in Mexico:

I love waking not knowing where I am, who I am. Allowing the pieces of this life to fall gently into place, unhurried. The daily process of reinventing self. I suppose it's accurate, but I really have no way of knowing for sure that who I was last night and who I am this morning are one and the same, or whether the process of waking involves some arcane bootstrapping, where I create myself, my self, a whole new persona. But somehow the one that emerges seems to be recognizable to the other life form that mind accords the label "Louisa" in this place labelled "apartment." Yet again, there is no paradox.

Sound waves come first, photons later. I'm prone, on a moderately yielding surface, which must be "mattress." Dogs bark. Words and phrases come unbidden, the senselessness of my dream fragmenting, waking consciousness bringing order, syntax, vocabulary. I'm uncurious where I am. I want not to know. For long drawn out seconds, or whatever time units my waking-dreaming self employs, I'm in the void, savoring the not knowing.

I'm in Guanajuato. That's it. The womb-consciousness flickers and is gone, I'm here, in a place with a name. I have a history. Barry in Guanajuato. Limbo yielding ruefully to knowledge. I do a sound check. Yep, dogs. Birds. Distant traffic. And bells, always--here in Mexico--church bells.

[Which square is darker--A or B?]

Gassho

2006-06-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

gassho

A position used for greeting, with the palms together and fingers pointing upwards in prayer position; used in the Zen tradition, but also common in many cultures in the East. It expresses greeting, request, thankfulness, reverence and prayer.

Before eating, Louisa and I bow--for me, it's an opportunity to notice I'm alive--literally. I was 30 before I noticed that. I guess I was on "automatic" before then.

Before and after our weekly 'business meetings' we bow to remind ourselves that we're a team, especially in case we get into items we disagree upon.

On trails in Nepal, it was namaste to strangers: I don't know you, but my spirit acknowledges yours.

If I'm particularly grateful to someone (who may have no connection to Buddhism), a gassho is a way of expressing my sincerity. Ditto if I need to apologize for something.

Coming into the zendo, it's a 'memo to self' that I'm part of a long lineage of meditators, to whom I give thanks.

Before and after meditation, a gassho says thank you to me (bowing in to my cushion) and to the group (bowing out) for our communal presence.

In formal group discussions, it can take the place of a talking stick, keeping a semblance of formality to what might otherwise be 'just' chatting. At the end of the discussion, it's a way of saying, OK, we can talk 'regularly' now.

When Louisa and I need to connect after some awkwardness or upset, it's a way of cutting through our BS.

***

I've been gasshoing for years, so that now my body knows to bow before "I" do. I already have my palms together before thinking about it. Is this where the gesture for prayer came from? Buddhism preceded Christianity by several centuries (not to mention Hinduism...and whatever preceded that!)--maybe the act of putting palms together is deep-rooted in some collective cultural memory?

Oxymoron of the day

2006-06-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

"Rival U.S. Labs in Arms Race to Build Safer Nuclear Bomb"
CNN headline

Sisters

2006-06-06T02:12:00.000-07:00

63

2006-06-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm at the age when the answers seem useless, incomplete or suspect.

The questions, however, interest and entertain more and more.

Avoiding

2006-06-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Back from four weeks cycling in Croatia and Montenegro: a magic May. With this...

So long as I see my life as a process, as a practice to be honed or a path to be followed, I'm avoiding: trading the reality of "as it is" for some better "as it will be."

The future is forever inaccessible. This is all I've got to work with, good or bad, happy or sad. This is all there is, including my belief that there must be more, and my belief that such thinking is futile.

Thought as language?

2006-04-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

We're in northwest Morocco cycling north from Asileh to Tangiers on the shortest day of the year, hoping to get a ferry back to Spain this afternoon. We had stopped earlier to admire a vast flock of geese way overhead, a couple of hundred or more, as they honked their way west. They looked like they knew where they were going, in their sure V-formation, not a doubter among them.

Heading up the next long rise, I noticed the incessant chatter of thought, what Toni Packer calls "the whole Niagara of consciousness": my separate selves, arguing and complaining among themselves. My awareness is filled with contradictory voices guiding, teasing, stewing, judging. Sometimes muffled, sometimes screaming at me.

Anyone who tries to pin down the concept of "self" immediately comes up against the obvious fact that none of us has just one self. We have selves. Not the multiple-personality "Sibyl" type selves who take over completely, but the committee of noisy, irritating cries and whispers that second guess, criticize and frown. Oh sure, sometimes they offer a muted compliment (Alright Barry! Nice catch! Wonder if you can do it again?) but mostly they're parental, rational and cautious (Shouldn't you do the dishes before Louisa comes home?).

On each side of the road, fields lush from the December rains stretch to the horizon. My girl is two hundred yards up ahead, looking fit and healthy, her legs pedaling happily in a sweet rhythm that matches my own--nothing beats a bike on an empty road in a far-off land, I think, before reverting to Philosophy 101.

Back in the early 1970's, psychologist Eric Berne narrowed our internal dialog down to a handy cast of just three: Parent, Adult and Child. The game was called Transactional Analysis, and the object was to let the adult-self see when it was being subverted by one's child-self or parent-self.

B-adult: Good morning sweetheart. What time is it?
L-adult: Hi dear. About seven.
B-parent: Oh shit, it's so late. Couldn't you have woken me earlier? You know I hate to sleep later than six.
L-child: I'm sorry, I was so involved in my writing, I didn't notice the time.
B-child: I just want you to be more aware of me in the morning.
L-parent: If you asked me nicely instead of complaining, you might get what you want…

Three selves are certainly better than the ten or twenty that inhabit my skull (and yours too I trust--I'd hate to think I was alone in this menagerie). Three is a nice manageable number, and one of them--Adult--is a no-nonsense, what-you-see-is-what-you-get character--my sort of guy, so Berne was only talking about two "problem" characters, only two selves to actually worry about.

I'm too absorbed in my thoughts to notice the 18-wheeler until it's right on my tail, and jeezus here comes a pick-up just ahead! Body takes over and I'm swerving onto the gravel shoulder, barely avoiding a spill. Nice catch, Barry. This road just isn't wide enough for the three of us. I watch, relieved, as Louisa pulls over calmly, giving the truck all the road it can use. I love seeing her taking such good care of herself.

But that's absurd! As the truck disappears over the hill ahead, something shifts in my brain, a spark jumps, hitherto unconnected synapses shake hands, a flash of understanding shocks me. Here I'd been absorbed with seeing these selves as debating among themselves, each with a well reasoned argument. As I start up the rise, the thought comes: thought doesn't come in sentences and words. Thought isn't language!

What thought? That thought, that sense of a thought, that interpreted, grammatically-correct, filtered, politically-correct version of something that happened in my brain that day in 2000.

***

Any attempts to put thoughts into words are dead on arrival.

Oh sure, we come up with something, we always do, we all do. If someone asks, What are you thinking? we can always come up with something in words. But before speech, I don't have the words all lined up in skull, it's more like, I speak to know what I'm thinking. (Well okay, some words sometimes appear, like when I'm playing around with a sentence before typing it out, or when the words of a song roll around inside my head, but inevitably there's a whole lot more going on.)

The actual words I utter in response to, What are you thinking? or Who am I? are a thin broth compared with the thick gruel of images, feelings, moods, tendencies, sentiments, fancies and just plain old stuff that swirl around, making up what I laughably call my "awareness."

It's easy to overlook the fact that our mental life seems more like a convention of whirling dervishes (Julian James' "world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind") than a well-parsed, grammatically-correct keynote address. The classic example of "thoughts made visible" is Mollie Bloom's soliloquy at the close of James Joyce's Ulysses. I've seen it offered as a sterling example of "stream of consciousness" writing. But of course, it's nothing of the kind. Sure, this is what the indomitable Molly, had she been asked what she was thinking, might have said. But that hardly makes her recorded monologue any more a true record of her thoughts than you or me saying, I'm afraid of dying encompasses the vast pollock-canvas of drips and splatters and rivulets of emotion accompanying that shorthand phrase.

(For a careful author like Joyce--who was known to have spent a whole day trying to come up with a single "right" word--the monolog is multiply-removed, the work of a literary craftsman.)

English novelist David Lodge writes: One of the modernist arguments for removing the intrusive authorial voice (wise, omniscient, reliable, reassuring) from the novel was that it was false to our experience that life is in fact fragmented, chaotic, incomprehensible, absurd...[Virginia Woolf] called for a kind of fiction that would 'record the atoms of experience as they fall upon the mind, in the order in which they fall, that would trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.'

Woolf may have called for that kind of fiction, but her best attempt, the 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, is a valiant attempt, no more, to portray the inner life of English-upper-crust-party-hostess-going-slightly-batty Clarissa Dalloway. Rather than those atoms of experience falling on the mind, readers are treated to fully-formed, perfectly framed words, sentences and paragraphs: we learn something of Mrs. Dalloway's thought process, surely, but we are hardly privy to her consciousness.

How could we be, when we can barely offer a listener--or reader--the barest glimpse of our own inner lives? In fact, skip the "put into words" problem. Isn't it deeper than that? Do any of us, really, have more than the merest glimpse of what's actually happening "inside"? And isn't even the richest conversation a bare skeleton compared with what's going on between two of us as we try to communicate?

We were on the three-o'clock ferry to Algerciras, right next to the Rock of Gibraltar.

(For more on the thought as language metaphor, check out my No. 1 desert-island book, Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh.)

Breakfast on Patmos

2006-04-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

Six months in on our 20-month wandering Odyssey a few years back, Louisa (Boo) and I found ourselves on the Greek island of Patmos, best known as where the Book of Revelations was written.

We're in a noisy Sunday-morning cafe on the Greek island of Patmos in the Dodacanese, between Naxos and the coast of Turkey. It's all men in here, mostly my own age. They don't talk, rather they argue, voicing their opinions loudly, passionately. This ain't the atmosphere of my favorite Palo Alto caff, the Bakery. The TV is on, of course, as it's been on in Mexico for the three months we were there, as it was on the ferry coming here from Athens, as it's always on, not too loud this time, just a low rumble in the background, talking heads, quick images.

Our table is littered with breakfast, the filter of my coffee with its dark grounds spent, my scratched glasses, an almond cake patiently waiting for me, empty ashtray, boo's frappé glass with its lime-green straw, our three-pound laptop in front of me, screen bright and alert for my input.

Outside waits our pink (yep, pink) motor scooter we rented yesterday. We wanted bikes, but they only had one, so we spent the day whizzing all over the island feeling slightly wicked that we weren't using our leg muscles. We visited the black thousand-year-old fortified monastery on top of Chora hill, still with about 20 black-robed Orthodox monks in residence, and books going back to the 8th century in the treasury. A little below, we checked out the cave--now a chapel--where crazy John the apostle imagined that the last days were revealed to him in all their Speilbergian Sturm und Drang. Maybe things were different here in 95 AD, but all we could see yesterday were gentle fields reaching out to the sea beyond. Each to his own.

Just before I pulled the laptop out, Boo said, "I feel like I've been carrying around this aura of dissatisfaction for years now." And I thought of Thoreau's line, about how most of us live lives of quiet desperation. What this year is all about...(how often have I started a sentence with that phrase since we left home last November?)...is about embracing all that obvious, don't- keep-reminding-me stuff about suffering being caused by desire.

Desire for things to be different, to be some other way: for our room here to have a view of the sea; for our property manager in California to be less flaky; for the muse of writing to descend on my shoulders and for me to produce reams of deathless prose without effort; for our shares to do fabulously well, so we never have any worries about money (When we're worth this much, we'll never worry again!); for strangers to embrace us to their hearts, invite us to their homes, take us under their wing, see us as much, much more than the tourists that we are; for Boo and I to never have another fight, to be wells of compassion and understanding for ourselves and each other. For things, in other words, to be other than what they are.

Rattle of cups, smell of cigarettes, buzz of a moped going past the open door. Life--it's all here, in front of my nose. Everything else I'm dragging around in my head, where I carry all my expectations, hopes, comparisons, dissatisfactions around in a box labeled, The way I wish things had been. Fettered to my past. Stuck in the future: this is how I want things to be. This is what I want to achieve this year. This is how I want people to think of me.

"But what about plans?" we ask ourselves. Make plans but hold them lightly, is the Buddhist response. Humans are, I'm convinced, born with plan-making systems enmeshed in our brains. Without plans, our ancestors would never have made it through a season's drought on the savanna, nor could they have hunted in groups, nor taken care of their children. For better or for worse, we're plan-makers, just as we're tool makers and language users. In California, it was getting to be for worse. Living my life in the future.

Now we have this idea for a book, about how and why a middle-aged couple get bored in Silicon Valley, rent out their home and head off, not quite knowing why or where to. In the book they have this catharsis: it all becomes clear, they have great waves of understanding that will astonish and enlighten their readers. The depth of the writing is only exceeded by the incisive insights offered, about life, marriage, travel, transcendence, relationships, self-fulfillment, consciousness and other cultures. In this inspirational and poignant book--both an adventure around the globe and inside their heads--our intrepid wanderers of earth, sea and sky display infinite compassion, humor and awareness. Each a latter-day Odysseus, they surmount every challenge with wit and courage, yet in the end it is their own modest sense of the wonder of themselves that enfolds the reader and brings the book to its vivid and totally unexpected conclusion. It is (of course) a best-seller in 20 languages, and the authors are feted around the world.

Of course.

There goes the present (where? where?)

2006-04-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

Our metaphor-prone minds see the past as behind us, the future ahead, and the present where we stand. That's true for most of us. The Aramaya people of the Argentine Andes use a more logically consistent picture, where the past is in front (where they can view it) and the future behind (hidden and unknown).

It's all blatant metaphor, of course. The road behind (or in front, if you're an Aramaya) is just a reasonably well orchestrated skein of convoluted gray matter, a trillion neurons on the surface of our individual occipital lobes, happily (I trust) giving the illusion of a "real" past. We can get some clue to the shadowy nature of what has happened or what we imagine will happen when we notice how similar are thoughts of past and thoughts of future (I missed this obviousness for years). For instance, if you’ve recently driven home from the office, visualize a part of your drive, perhaps through a particular intersection. Now imagine how that part of your trip will look tomorrow as you head home--not much difference, is there?

And of course, the past doesn't remain just the past, we can't just remember what actually happened: we embellish, we play what-if games (coulda--shoulda--woulda). The past, let's face it, is mushy. Just like the future.

And, for me anyway, most of what goes on--most of the time--mushy what masquerades as the present. I think of it as the conceptualized present: my experience from half a second ago, processed and filtered by my memory, judgment, shame, guilt, hope, anticipation, desire. The Sufis talk about experiencing everything through veils. George Gurdjieff put it in terms of being asleep to what’s actually going on. The instant the shape in the sky becomes a bird becomes a red-tailed hawk becomes an image of beauty, my pure experience (whatever that is) has given way to conceptualized experience.

I confuse this sort of low-key, edited awareness with reality.

The Hindis call reality tat tvam asi, just this, no more. There's literally nothing to say about it, because once I do, I'm conceptualizing, and there goes experiencing. Sometimes it seems like I'm sitting in a movie theater, lost in the plot. “The End” goes up, the lights come on, and suddenly the reality of the seat, people getting up, the inside of the theater, seem so much more intense than the movie, however gripping. No question, one is pretend, the other is real.

Waking up from a dream has the same this is real, that was a dream obviousness. Despite the Confucian Huang Chu’s astonishing comment that he can’t be sure whether he’s a man dreaming he’s a butterfly or butterfly dreaming he's a man. If the latter, that would have been one smart butterfly.

Sand

2006-04-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, on a freezing December evening, we dined in Patzcuaro, Mexico with an intrepid couple from Quebec who were cycling around the Pacific--a "Ring of Fire" multi-year adventure. (Check out Janick and Pierre here.)

A year earlier they cycled clear across north Africa. Libya, they said, was the toughest. Day after day they saw the same thing--unrelenting desert--stretching off for miles on either side of the road. One day they encountered a lone Swiss backpacker walking down the otherwise empty road. They discussed their different modes of transport, and he said, "I used to cycle, but I found I missed a lot, so now I walk." They said they looked out over the monotonous vista and tried not to smile.

Goats

2006-04-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

Louisa and I spent 20 months (1999-2001) wandering between Mexico, Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Ireland and Morocco. About six months in, on the Greek island of Paros, I wrote this:

Lying on rough concrete, a weatherbeaten boat dock. As we stared into the clear water, we talked sporadically about our plans, our uncertain future, of being overwhelmed by choices. The curse of freedom! Wavelets slopped against our perch and in my imagination, during one of the long pauses between our ragged words, I heard a distant tinkling of bells: echoes from the past, my humor enthralled by the tall tales I'd been reading of Mycenian navigators and Dorian settlers who ventured on these shores when the world was young.

My mind was now in overdrive. The bells seemed so real. Those stories, this air, must be affecting me...or not. Something was moving in the periphery of my vision. I looked harder. It seemed that the entire scrubby hillside on one side of the bay was in motion, a flood of shapes, brown and grey, black and white. Goats. Hundreds of them. Jingling down to the shore, each sporting a bell slung below its shaggy neck. Clanging and clanking they came, an army of tintinnabulation, nimbly trotting down the same stones we had trodden, awkwardly, an hour earlier. They passed behind us, hurrying along the beach, rank upon rank, hooves clattering, bells ringing, a old goatherd in the rear cantering along to keep up with the unstoppable horde, his work delegated to four mutt dogs who watched warily for dawdlers.

Just as quicky as they had appeared, they were gone, up the opposite hillside, no muss no fuss, obviously a well-travelled route for this mottled flock. I envied their certainty: they knew where they were going and how to get there. We stumble along, destination unknown.

Peak experience: open to scientific scrutiny?

2006-04-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

The following is from a recent exchange with a friend who is in the "enlightenment" business. I wrote:

There's no doubt in my mind there is a 'peak' experience that thousands or millions of people have had. You can't--I mean any responsible investigator--ignore the consistency of the subjective reports: non-duality, that is, a feeling of unity with the everything and everyone; conviction that their experience was not a hallucination, that something really happened that transcended all other experience or knowledge; ineffability, that is, they can't put it into words. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao.

Now we can either say (1) science has no role to play here, that it's beyond our comprehension now and forever. Or (2) we can say, this is fascinating! How is it possible for people from all faiths and ages, to have this consistent experience?

(1) says that it's something metaphysical, like god, which gives rise to "enlightenment" phenomena (in which case it's beyond rational investigation, end of discussion). (2) says there might be something in the architecture of our brains which does it. This is the one I'm interested in looking at.

So for instance, one hypothesis is that our unconscious mind (which seems to be vast compared to the fraction of brain activity of which we're aware) has some sort of integration module which takes all the unconscious brain activity, integrates it and feeds it up to our consciousness-- giving us the illusion we're this unified whole self, rather than the ragged, somewhat chaotic and huge mess of bits and pieces of neurons and synapses comprising dozens or hundreds of different brain parts. Sometimes, through grace or introspection or psychedelics or just plain dumb luck, we break through, below the level of language, and have this direct experience, past words and reasoning. (I wish I didn't have to use metaphors like "break through" and "below the level of..." and "past"--that's for a future post.)

OK, that's one idea, which has the great advantage over a faith-based explanation that it's open to empirical investigation--change brain chemistry consistently and see if you get consistent results.

Incidentally, if it's correct, it implies that enlightenment probably doesn't represent Bedrock Truth (this is slightly supported by the accounts of "levels" of enlightenment). Maybe experiences beyond this would expose us to a zillion competing brain messages, totally incomprehensible, and perhaps meaning that further investigation would have to take place in mental hospitals.

The little man in the frig

2006-04-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

...we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Julian Jaynes

I recall a song from childhood about the little man in the frig who turned the light on whenever someone opened the door. Or did he? Maybe he left it on when the door was closed. Maybe there was no little man! How can we know?

Similarly (this metaphor was first used, to my knowledge, by Susan Blackmore), when you ask the question, Am I conscious now? the answer is always yes. What about when you aren't introspecting? Are you conscious then? How can you know?

We can't. But because, whenever we check, we are conscious, we're stuck with the illusion that we're conscious all the time. Hence the notion of "stream of consciousness" (coined by William James), the idea that our waking lives are imbued with continuous awareness.

Not to mention the little man in my brain.

Moroccan Dawn (Asileh 2000)

2006-04-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

I don't always know when I'm right, but I sure know when I'm wrong.

Quarter Flash

Something's happening.

Is this really me? Oh yes, now I remember.

Waking. In stages, one level at time, rising out of the well of dream-mired sleep. She is already up, writing in the next room, her day's work half done. This one, this me, doesn't yet open his eyes, my eyes, wanting to savor the slow arrival of wakeful consciousness. No rush. Fat with time: Laurie Lee's lovely phrase comes from nowhere.

Body is all. I begin to check it out, already imagining myself focusing on each sinew...but my mind's problem-solving bureaucracy intrudes before I get to first base: What's a sinew?

Go away, I pout, just let me be with the feeling, the awareness of having a body in the first place, why do you always have to intrude?

I'm part of your body, my mind responds. And it's started, before I've even opened my eyes, the daily, second-by-second internal dialog, self versus self.

The metal grillwork on the window above my bed interrupts my mental bickering. Eyes must have opened. Effortlessly, I'm counting the wrought iron components, their tapestry of spirals and tangents presenting my ever willing sponge of a mind with a curious geometric puzzle. 26 of this shape, 14 of that. Asymmetry. I fret for a moment, imagining a different pattern, where each side is a mirror image of the other. Then I'm off again, debating the overrated virtues of symmetry.

Have the birds been calling all this time? Why only now, as I'm getting bored with geometry, do I hear them? Descriptive words come, intruding into sensation: chattering, twittering, chirping. I decide I don't like labeling the sounds. And off I go again, remembering something I read by a naturalist who commented, ruefully, that when a robin becomes a Turdus migratorius, the knowledge gained has to be weighed against the innocence lost. I think of Earle, who knows and loves birds, in their innocence and their complexity. I remember how, as he and I would lope side-by-side along our favorite trails on Sunday mornings, how he would suddenly stop dead in his tracks. I'd overshoot and come back to him, momentarily irritated at losing the rhythm of my stride. Goshawk, he’d whisper to me in a voice filled with awe, pointing, and I'd see a tiny black shape far overhead. I once wrote him from Ireland: About fifty black winged things just shot by the window. They're birds, right?

I pad to the bathroom where my pee falls loudly into the bowl, the start of my morning ritual: pee; wash hands, face, back of neck in my cold water wake-up sacrament; brush teeth; say hello. Good morning Barry, I say to the frown in the mirror. Jesus, I'm old already.

Louisa is in the room behind me. I ignore her, well aware of her desire for privacy. Alonetime, we now call it, an awkward portmanteau of a word. Playdate, I think, mind running on. Oh, I'm back in bed. How did that happen?

I check the time. Six-ten. I must have turned the light on. Where's my book? I'm reading, once again, Joan Tollifson's Bare-Bones Meditation, one of the three paperback books I allow myself when we’re cycle-touring. Reading doesn't do the process justice. I'm breathing, chewing, devouring it. I'm allowing, questioning, considering it. She writes, The most important book to read is yourself. If you read that book, you will have read all the others. I put the book down. Why am I reading it? Why am I stuffing my overfull mind with concepts about concept-free living?

I can't stop, the book is back in my hands. Writing is an offering, she tells me. To share, to clarify, to play. Yeah, right on, remembering the year of planning, researching, writing for my last book. The hardest thing I've ever done, I sometimes say. Was it really that hard?

Hard? I breath deeply, suddenly aware of my penis, rising to greet the new day. Where did that come from? Spontaneous sexuality streams through me, warming, exciting my entire self. Still reading, I hold my penis, gently stroking the glans through my foreskin. Then I wonder what it would be like to be circumcised, and irritation and anger arise at the thought of that dreadful quasi-medical, quasi-religious ritual. My foreskin is home to half of the hundred thousand nerve endings in my penis. Do I get double, the pleasure, double the fun a circumcised guy does?

The soft sensuality I'd been enjoying drains out of me. I'm back into concepts, arguments, fears.

Relax, I tell myself. Just watch. Notice.

Who is this unbidden little dictator who waits in the wings, quick to proffer these pseudo-zen platitudes? You relax, I offer back. I'll do what I want to do.

We spar discordantly, my observer-self, my observer-of-the-observer self, regressing infinitely. Meanwhile, also unbidden, dawn kindles the whitewashed wall opposite into a luminous sheet of white stucco. I'm glad we sleep with the window open.

500 rupees (Sri Lanka 2002)

2006-04-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

At 6 a.m., I'm standing on the sidewalk waiting for the "2nd and 1st Class" ticket window of Columbo Fort railway station to open. Already the street is bustling with people and 'tuk-tuks', Sri Lanka's noisy-but-efficient three-wheeler taxis. I landed two hours ago and now I'm feeling disoriented after 26 hours of flying in four legs from northern California.

*****

The window opens and I ask the bespectacled clerk for a ticket in the observation coach on the 7 a.m. train to Kandy, the old hill-country capital.
"Window seat?" I ask hopefully.
"No window. Only one seat left, aisle."
"OK, great, thank you."
"230 rupees," he says.
I hand him a 500 rupee note, the smallest I have, my dollars newly changed at the airport. He examines it carefully, squinting as he holds it up to the light, before handing it back.
"No change."
No change?I'm thinking, this is a railway ticket office, I've handed him what's basically a $5 note for a $2.50 ticket, and he can't make change! Then I remember, this has happened to me so often in third world countries, I'm surprised I'm still surprised.

*****

"Need change?"
"Er, yes," I reply, warily, to the scruffy, unshaven young man, maybe 20 years old, who has appeared at my side. I'm still holding the 500 rupee note and watch myself do exactly nothing as he grabs it out of my hand.
"You wait!" he commands and sprints off around the corner.
I come to. What on earth am I doing? I've just been taken for five bucks. Not even taken, I've given it away! What an introduction to this country! I start beating myself up, me, the seasoned traveler, who just watched a stranger help himself to my money. And suddenly I start laughing out loud, enjoying noticing my own stupidity. This is traveling, I tell myself, I'm jetlagged, this is a cheap lesson. From now on, I promise myself, I'll be really careful.

*****

I'm still chuckling, letting myself off the familiar hook of self-criticism, when my new buddy comes running back and carefully counts five 100 rupee notes into my hand.
"You didn't think I would come," he accuses me, tactfully not waiting for my reply, but adding, "You must be more careful with your money!"
I'm still laughing as I put a 100 rupee tip into his shirt pocket--not just for his honesty, but for reminding me that traveling in a country like Sri Lanka isn't predictable, but rather a string of encounters and incidents not easily categorized into 'good' and 'bad' like I do at home.

*****

And as it turns out, the observation coach is almost empty, a gay French couple and a local businessman the only other occupants as we wind up the long green hills to Kandy on the Intercity Express at an average speed of 25 mph.
Ten thousand miles from home and all is well with my world.

I love cemeteries!

2006-03-31T18:33:00.000-08:00

Life...preferable after all to total nonexistence, the state of being eternally unborn, of never had opportunity to contemplate the exquisite joys and sorrows of life, brief as it is.

C.L. Sulzberger

Talking to our mailgal today (this isn't quite as sexist as it sounds--as a grandmother, she appreciates it). After five years on our route, she's heading across town to start another route next week. We'll miss her.

"Hey," I said, "your new route will take you past the cemetery."
"Yeah, that's right."
"Cool, anytime you're blue, you can look over the fence and think, Hehe, I'm alive and you're not!"
Her chortles filled our alley.

(You had to be there.)

Natural-born dualists

2006-03-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

Humans are born dualists, with a propensity to believe in life after death, according to Is God an Accident? by Paul Bloom in last December's Atlantic.

Dualists, for the purpose of this post, believe that our minds/souls are separate from our bodies/brains. Are you a dualist? Try this thought experiment: they've perfected teletransporters, just like in Star Trek. You walk into a booth in your home city, press a button and your body is scanned down to the last bit of information before disappearing and reappearing, complete in every detail, in a similar booth on the other side of the world.

A dualist hesitates about pushing the button: Sure, my body and brain will emerge intact and unchanged. But what about me? My essence-soul-consciousness? What will happen to that?

A non-dualist, having been convinced that nothing of him/herself is left behind, pushes the button: Everything there is of me is material. There's nothing else to be transported, so what's the problem?

Back to the article. Bloom makes a pretty good case that children are innate dualists. In one experiment, most children believed that a storybook mouse, after being eaten by an alligator, would continue to have feelings and desires. Later on in life, most of us skate over the dualism issues as in, for instance:

* Shrek 2, when an ogre and a donkey are transformed into a human and steed, respectively;
*Star Trek, the episode where a villain occupies Captain Kirk's body to take control of the Enterprise;
* Tale of a Body Thief, in which Anne Rice has a vampire and human swap bodies for a day.

It's not that we totally buy these body-switching plots, rather that most of us don't find them completely loony. Every time I use such innocuous phrases as my brain or I really let myself down, I'm reinforcing my natural dualist instinct.

Once you've accepted dualism, it's a short step to believing that "we" survive as souls--destined for heaven, hell, another body--something rather than nothing.

The following month (January), Atlantic published a slew of responses to the article, including my favorite: It's much easier than all this, said the letter writer (I'm paraphrasing). Way back when, a few humans started burying their dead to prepare them for a possible afterlife--which was so much more sanitary than leaving disease-ridden corpses around. And here we all are, mostly descended from the hygienic afterlife-believing folks who flourished at the expense of their moldy cousins.

Nice!

What's the problem, anyway?

2006-03-29T09:57:00.000-08:00

The problem of consciousness is the ancient mind-body problem, what--100 years ago--was called the fathomless abyss, brought up to date by modern neuroscience. Simply stated:

How does subjective experience arise from the objective activity of neurons in the brain?

Subjective experience = What's it like being me, right now?
Objective activity = something physical and measurable, e.g. change in electrical potential in the brain

This is what David Chalmers called The Hard Problem.

It's a scientific mystery, where...

Mystery = a problem that we haven't a clue how to approach.

The mystery of consciousness is unique in science.

Camino de Santiago

2006-03-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

Speaking of meditation, I've got to add that the best "retreat" I ever went on was walking 540 miles in 30 days across northern Spain in 2001: the Camino de Santiago. After the first two or three days of resistance (we're walking how far???), I got into the rhythm of the pilgrimage. For hours on end, all I was aware of was my footstep, the next rock on the road, the clump of grass by my side. A month-long walking meditation.

We arrived 27 days after we started at the traditional end of the Camino, the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela (below).

Where Louisa (whose 50th birthday we were celebrating) decided that real pilgrims continued on to the coast at Finisterre, another three days walk.

More photos here.

What's meditation about?

2006-03-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

...I tell [Kyodo Roshi] I want to "take my practice to a deeper level." 'Deeper level'?" He laughs again. "What you mean 'deeper'? Zen practice only one level. No deep, understand?"

Lawrence Shainberg Ambivalent Zen

I've heard many claims for meditation over the years. That it's about: gratitude; deepened and/or heightened awareness (!); compassion; emptiness; spaciousness; discovering one's true self and/or spirit; dissolving the self; being present in the moment; opening to the wonder of it all; finding peace; encountering our Buddha nature; seeing the connectedness of everything; letting go; (fill in the blank___________).

It seems to me, though, that meditation isn't about anything. Meditation is meditation, and any attempt to define it in terms of something else simply confuses the issue and makes it vulnerable to being treated like any other system, technique or process to enhance our lives. Lord knows, these days we have enough ways to be better people, get closer to God, find ourselves and enhance our circumstances. We're swamped with therapies, self-help books and spiritual techniques which treat our lives as projects to be tweaked and fixed in order to improve our inner experience.

Isn't meditation (if it's anything at all) a relief from all this? Isn't it the opposite of repairing and adjusting and striving and perpetually wanting things to be different from what they actually are? For me, it's the haven away from the ubiquitous world of self-improvement. So that when I hear words like 'effort' and 'discipline' and 'deepening one's practice' spoken in the same breath as 'meditation,' I wince a little.

Because there are such amazing rewards for doing absolutely nothing: unbidden, breath comes and goes, eyes see, ears hear, thoughts flurry like leaves in fall--that to set out to experience anything else (even an end to desire!)--feels like a rejection of this life lived in this moment, a slap in the face for mere existence.

How can life be so beautiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?

Umberto Eco Foucault's Pendulum

Decision-making

2006-03-21T06:29:00.000-08:00

I think a lot of what we do isn't reasoned out and we can't necessarily go backwards from where we are and figure out why we're here (if that makes sense).

I think it makes lots of sense. (The quote is from an exchange that Louisa had recently with a member of her online writing group--thanks Lorri!) I think we make decisions willy-nilly and later, if necessary, go back to try to justify them (so we don't look totally stupid!).

This resonates with what I was saying in my essay "Why Meditate?", that I'm not aware of actually making a decision to, say, attend a retreat--one moment I'm confused, next moment the decision's made. The actual moment of decision is lost in the thicket of mind.

Reading that line from Louisa's writing buddy brought up a memory: years ago, when I was part of a Zen group in the San Francisco bay area, we had what we called a "How are we doing?" meeting. At one point, a member said, "All of us came to this group because we were in pain over something or other, all of us were hurting." I remember being ticked off with this comment, thinking, "Hey, that may be why you came, but don't speak for me!"

Truth was, I didn't know why I had come originally. That is, I could present a bunch of reasons: curiosity, hurting (!), desire for like-minding people in my life, loneliness…but to say, "This is why I did X" is giving myself far too much awareness and understanding of what are really hidden, unconscious processes.

Is this a problem? Only insofar as I feel cleaner and happier somehow, when I can look in the mirror and say, "I haven't a clue what got me to this point in my life!"

Which I fancy is what Paris thought when he woke up in Troy after his famous decision (see above) and saw Helen lying next to him.

I'd rather have a bottle in front o' me...

2006-03-20T11:47:00.000-08:00

angie b (hi Angie!) writes:

The no-self teaching, as I understand it, is about no fixed, permanent self. Even Buddha said "I." Our delusion is not that we exist, but that we won't/don't want to change, or die, or have the world change around us. Our suffering comes from our supreme effort to protect and maintain what's ephemeral and temporary...

Suzuki Roshi (right), the Japanese Zen priest who found such a fertile ground for Soto Zen in the San Francisco of the late '50s, was once asked to summarize millenia of Buddhist teaching. Echoing Heraclitus, he simply said, "Everything changes."

Does this necessarily mean that we resist inevitable change? Yes and no. If I'm in pain, if I'm hungry, if the kid at the next table won't stop crying, then I crave change! If things are going well, sure I resist. That's the nature of the beast.

I suggest that pain is inevitable in life--it's nature's way of keeping us on our toes. We worry about, say, where the next meal is coming from because if we didn't--if we lived in a chronic state of bliss or apathy--we'd die. These genes that we're born with were refined and honed by the anxiety and pain of our ancestors--the very feelings which led to their survival and reproduction.

Where humans seem to differ from animals, though, is in our intense desire to avoid pain. Walk into a bookstore, turn on the TV, glance at the newspaper ads--so much of the stuff of our world is about doing something about pain and anxiety. Anything! Therapy, drugs, meditation, Hawaii, gambling, booze…whatever it takes to avoid pain.

Does it work? Short of a lobotomy or a lifetime on Prozac? Does anything work? We're still messed up after a hundred years of therapy (to paraphase James Hillman's book title). How can it be otherwise? The enemy is us! We're supposed to have pain, we're designed that way.

Don't you feel better already???

Free will and/or self

2006-03-16T07:18:00.000-08:00

I keep returning to free will because I see it as a sort of back-door approach to consciousness and self, and much more accessible. That is, "self" is such a woolly concept--it's a metaphor for...what? Mind? (Which is a metaphor for...self?)

Whereas free will, that's something on which most of us can agree is a real issue. For instance, if we don't have conscious free will, where does that leave our justice system? ("Sure I shot him, but I didn't have a choice!")

Put it this way: someone proves beyond all doubt that you don't actually have a 'self'--it's an illusion, you're deluded, and now you (!) see the light. And say, "So what? I still hurt when I read about the Middle East. I still feel pain when I cut myself. I still feel good when I laugh." Nothing changes.

Now imagine someone proves to you that you're an automaton without conscious freedom of action: you have no free will. How does that feel? For me, this is something I can actually imagine (I was going to say 'grok'--do young people know that term?).

This is a very personal issue--I had a profound awareness many years ago that when I spoke, in response to a question, an internal tape recorder created my answer, unbidden by "me"--the words just came out, automatically. That incident (June 12, 1974) changed my life.

So while I think self and free will are two sides of the same coin, free will is more accessible, the issue that most of us can at least talk about and have some idea of what we mean.

What must happen has already happened

2006-03-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

That's from Ted Hughes' stirring translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, as spoken by Cassandra (painting by Evelyn de Morgan). Cassandra, the Trojan princess--that's Troy burning in the background--both blessed and cursed by Apollo: blessed with the gift of prophecy; cursed because no one believed her.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that the issue of free will has been a source of passionate interest at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, and the Oresteia (written about 460 BC) is perhaps the prime example. So many deaths and so much justification, appealing to fate, duty, the gods.

Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter, or the Greek fleet wouldn't have got the right wind to sail to Troy. Clytemnestra had to kill her husband Agamemnon to avenge her daughter's murder. Orestes was ordered by Apollo to kill his mom Clytemnestra--she'd murdered his dad, after all, what else could a guy do? And the Furies were bound by fate to torture him near to death for murdering his mother--this was their role.

[Finally Apollo and the Furies present Orestes' case to the people's court in Athens, where the best justice was to be had (Aeschylus was presenting his plays in Athens, and what better way to win the playwright-of-the-year award?). It was a hung jury, so Athena intevened, on Orestes side.]

The question that Aeschylus keeps throwing at his audience--then and now--is this: Could any of the protagonists have done otherwise? Could Agamemnon have said, "Y'know, my daughter's life is more important than sailing off to Troy to get my brother's wife back!" Could Clytemnestra have done otherwise? What about Orestes--"Hey Apollo, mom killed dad because dad killed my sister. I'm not going to do your bidding!"

In other words, did they have free will? Or were they fated to follow Cassandra's gloomy dictum, What must happen has already happened?

Speaking of your computer...

2006-03-15T07:47:00.000-08:00

"Freespirit" comments on my "How did you decide…" post:

But doesn't this line of thinking also call into question the very existence of the actual self that I am experiencing at this moment?

I certainly hope so! I've spent more hours (we're talking 1,000's!) looking for "myself" during meditation and dyad exercises, working with Ramana Maharshi's question "Who am I?" Thus far, nobody home. The insight that goes by such mystical names as 'enlightenment' and 'satori' is often conceptualized by the word 'emptiness'--the conviction that there is no self.

Freespirit continues:
If there is no self inside me, no conscious will making decisions, then what am I but a bunch of particles of matter that just happened (or, of course, didn't just happen, happened because of certain circumstances) to be collected in this spot. And if that's true, what differentiates this bunch of particles from the air surrounding what I call my arm, or the object I call a computer?

Well, for one thing, the ability to ask that question! I'm a materialist--I do believe that it's all about particles of matter (read: atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulphur) being assembled in such a way to create alive, self-aware beings. This is the gist of what John McCrone was saying (my previous post "Where I start from"). As far as what differentiates you from a computer--this is the "Mr. Data" question--if you build a computer that seems to be conscious, and says it's conscious, is it conscious?

One approach to this question is to suppose that neurosurgery has advanced to the state where individual neurons can be replaced with artificial ones--imagine neurosurgeons of the future physically replacing, one by one, the damaged neurons of an Alzheimer's patient, say. After the surgery, the patient says they're feeling great, they're fixed!

Can you do this indefinitely? Can you replace all of someone's neurons with artificial ones and still have a self-aware being? I would say, "Well of course!" Especially if the being with the now-synthetic brain insists that they're self-aware, and are, in fact, the same person they were before the operation!

The illusion of free will

2006-03-11T10:52:00.000-08:00

1. Any conscious action starts off with an unconscious cause X.

[I'll leave for now (and may never return to!) just what that cause is except to offer: (a) a pre-existing condition = determinism; or (b) a random (quantum?) event = roll of dice; or (c) something else really spooky, e.g. the "brains in vats" option.]

2a. X leads to action Z. (I lift my arm.) This is the actual causal path.

2b. X also results in a thought Y, "I'm going to raise my arm."

The experience of conscious will is when the thought Y and the action Z coincide, so we assume Y resulted in Z--the apparent causal path. ("I decided to raise my arm and it raised, so I must have free will!")

"The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of that act."

My summary from Daniel Wegner (2002) The Illusion of Conscious Will

William James on free will

2006-03-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

"...the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumberable ages ago."

and Samuel Johnson:
"All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it."

How did you decide...

2006-03-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

...to read that title?

"Free will" and "self" are intimately connected. If there's no core "me"--myself--inside me (you just can't talk about this stuff without getting hopelessly entangled in language problems), who's there to make decisions? Who is it who actually engages in free will? Take away self and you take away free will. Accept we have no free will and there goes the whole point of having a self in the first place.

From the ancient Greeks to David Hume and John Dewey and William James, the issue has usually been framed as a clash between free will and determinism: either we're free agents, making free decisions, or it's all determined in advance (map the universe down to the smallest detail, and there's no choice about what happens next...the eight ball has no choice but to drop into the corner pocket if the cue ball hits it just thus).

However, I'm not sure if the free will-determinism debate can really add anything to our understanding of consciousness. They seem to be to be incommensurable--free will is a feeling; determinism is a process. Setting apples up against oranges.

Whether or not our actions and thoughts are determined from one nanosecond to the next doesn't seem much to matter. They probably are--that's pretty much what a scientific, materialist view of the world seems to tell us--but so what? Would certain knowledge that we're going through our lives like robots make any difference to how we feel, what we do? The staunchest determinist would still run out of a burning theater and feel anxious if a cop pulled them over. That's how we're built.

What is useful, it seems to me, is to try to pin down a bit what we could possibly mean by "free will". Lift your arm now.
___________________________________
Did you do it? Did you remain still? How did you decide what to do? Any appeal to your "inner self" making the decision founders, as ever, on how it decided--on it's inner self, perhaps? Did it depend on your predisposition, your morning's coffee intake, whether you were breast-fed, your environment? All of which are pre-existing conditions. Where's the room for freewill?

"Well, I thought about it, and then I decided not to, it seemed silly!" OK. How did these thoughts and that decision come about? If not from something already existing (the determinist point of view), perhaps some random quantum mechanical happenings deep in your brain? But if free will means anything at all, surely it has to be transparent, conscious? Hidden randomness doesn't sound much like free will.

So where does this leave us?

I'm an admirer of Sue Blackmore, now a freelance writer and lecturer on consciousness (isn't it great someone can make a living with this stuff?!). Her approach, after dismissing free will, is to, for instance, sit down in a restaurant, look at the menu and think, "I wonder what I'm going to order?" After practicing this for many years, she claims to have lost her sense of having free will. (But not yet, for more than a few moments, her sense of self.)

How did you decide to read down to here?

The Secret (Life, the Universe...)

2006-03-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

We were in the desert last week, in our van, and I woke Louisa deep one night to tell her my dream. I had been nominated to be one of the Guardians, that tiny group of people who were entrusted with The Secret of Life and the Universe, to keep The Secret safe, and to pass it on from one generation to the next--sort of Davinci Code set-up (not that I've read it).

So it was time for our arcane group to meet--I think it happens every forty years--in a desert castle under the mountains (think St. Catherine's monastery). There were maybe 100 of us, in our black monks' cowls, hooded, our faces hidden from each other. The wind was blowing against the shuttered windows, and the candles--the only source of illumination--were guttering and sputtering. We all stood expectantly facing the front of huge hall.

An ancient, wizened master appeared, holding in his hands a long wooden box, which he proceeded to unlock. Seven locks, I counted. He withdrew a huge double scroll, like a Torah, and placed it on the lectern where he unrolled it. I could see his rheumy eyes slowly read whatever was written there, then he looked up, about to impart The Secret to us all. We all waited, anxious, expectant. Finally, he spoke.

"We're fucked!"

He rolled the scroll up, put it back in the box, locked the seven locks, and departed. We all turned and walked silently to the door, we Guardians of the Secret.

Joshua Tree

2006-03-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

We got back late yesterday from Joshua Tree National Park. High desert country. Lovely. Cold (I insist on sleeping with the door of our old VW camper van open--one night, Louisa said, "It's really cold!" "Nah," I said. Macho-man. In the morning, I was scraping an eighth of an inch hard ice off the windscreen...)

Later I wrote...

What is freewill, anyway? We were talking about it last nite, trying to come to some sort of agreement, one of those "I know what it is until someone asks me about it" deals (I think St. Augustine said that about time). It became clearer this morning after we'd walked up to Ryan Peak. I was scrambling down the gulley that would bring me back to the road below--while good ol' Boo went back down the 1.5 mile trail, down 1200 vertical feet more or less, to get the van.

I was in awe of my body, turning this way and that, finding the best route through the sagebrush or chaparral (whatever my generic term is for scratchy prickly dry underbrush in the desert). I'd find myself thinking, "Wonder how I'm going to get past this patch of nastiness?" and before you know it, I'm halfway through, confidently swinging past these thorns on the left and this rock on the right. Perfect example of body and brain happily--eagerly (like they're showing off)--wending their way, navigating, plotting, strategizing, weighing options, making decisions on the fly, just wonderful, while me, I--whatever passes for this "along for the ride" awareness--I'm tickled pink that somehow all this computing power and bodily articulation allows me to play along.

In fact I--conscious me--is worse than useless. As soon as I think about where I'm going, I make a misstep, like playing table-tennis. You think about what you're doing and you're dead in the water. "I" am allowed to get a ride along with all this wonderful, savvy, instantaneous navigation-and-motivation system. How cool is that?

And how much of life is like that? Just doing, without a conscious thought in the world. No self-consciousness, no sense of making decisions, watching the whole incredible play unfold.

Joshua Tree photos, first folder at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/barryevans9/my_photos

Why meditate? (Why not?)

2006-03-06T09:46:00.000-08:00

Article I recently wrote for our sangha newsletter. Third contribution at
http://www.arcatazengroup.org/voices/voices1_2006

The real mystery...

2006-02-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

...isn't anything special or exotic or enlightened. It's this. This ordinary reality, this regular consciousness, this.

Sheer mystery.

Amazing.

Skip the car!

2006-02-22T10:56:00.000-08:00

"If you think you'd be happier with a new car, skip the car and just be happier."

Easy for Joan Tollifson to say. For me, happiness is too elusive a target to "just be." Note the Declaration doesn't say that our inalienable right is to be happy, just to pursue it.

Good thing too. Like the end of the rainbow (pot o' gold or not), happiness recedes as I chase it. I don't usually quote Jiddu Krishnamurti (his personal morality just being too out of whack with his teaching), but I find his observation, "To have a cause for joy is no longer joy" to be accurate. I'm happy until I notice I'm happy. And then?

And then one of several things happen:
* Damn, this ice cream tastes good. Too bad it's going to be over soon.
* We spent so much on getting here, shouldn't I be feeling happier than I am?
* This feels so good. Wish I'd done it before.
* What a sunset! Almost as good as yesterday's!
* and etc.

We are not built for chronic happiness. Why not? Because, to a first approximation, our brains evolved during the Pleistocene epoch. Here's the scenario, one million BC:

Ug wakes up, walks out of the cave filled with joy--what a day! Goes down to the clearing and sits, zoned out his skull with utter contentment. Life just couldn't be better. Bliss! And gets eaten by the passing sabertooth.

Bug, meanwhile, and the rest of the tribe, are worried about where they should hunt so the whole tribe (less Ug) can eat. And with the waterhole drying up, where's the nearest water source? Anxiety is the order of the day. But they do survive, and reproduce, and we're the result. We're not designed to be content--we've got Bug's anxiety-prone genes. We worry and we're unhappy because our genes tell us to be, because that's what allowed our stone-age ancestors to survive and reproduce.

All of which is a great relief. What, me worry? Of course! I'm supposed to!

"We spend at least half our lives in either physical or emotional discomfort, yet we persist in believing that happiness is our natural, normal condition and that when were not happy, we're not normal." --Geneen Roth

My. Self.

2006-02-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

A reviewer (David Voron) summed up the thrust of Thomas Metzinger's "Being No One" thus:

"You cannot be convinced that your 'self' is a fiction, because in doing so you would have to dissolve the very self that is being convinced."

Which is about as succinct an explanation as any I've heard, of why it's so hard to abandon my notion of 'myself'. It takes just a moment of introspection to agree with what 99.9% of consciousness researchers say, that my sense of acting from a center, from an essential 'me', is a fictional metaphor. (Does my 'inner me' have a yet deeper essence? ...ad infinitum) The delusion is so complete that even with thousands of hours of meditating under my belt, a zillion discussions, books read, websites surfed--that my sense of 'barryness' survives unscathed. There's a feeling of being 'me' that no arguments to the contrary can dispel. That's the way my brain's built.

(Researcher Sue Blackmore says that the cleverest 'memes'--ideas which spread through the culture--are those that persuade us that our 'selves' really exist "…because giving us the illusion of 'self' helps them to survive and spread.")

Metaphor or not, 'myself' endures, barely touched by logic.

Ducks and dualism

2006-02-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

My original post about zombies "Elan vital and consciousness" begged the question, Is consciousness something "extra"? I asked you to imagine a human who was indistinguishable from someone like you, but who had no inner life, that is, no consciousness: this is the philosopher's zombie. I then supposed that whatever extra it was that you (the real you) possesses, this quality of consciousness--this turns out, in the fullness of scientific investigation, to be inevitable given the structure of the human body and brain. Just as life is inevitable--there's no extra spark of life--there's no extra attribute of "consciousness."

Meaning that the philosopher's zombie is an impossibility. A human built like you or me is conscious, by definition. (If it walks and quacks like a duck…)

This is one "solution" (make it go away!) to what's been called the Hard Problem of Consciousness, which can be easily stated: How can physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience? Or how can brain-stuff be mind-stuff? You can add a verb in there--"…generate mind stuff" or "…be correlated with mind stuff" but then you start getting squirly, implying that brains and minds are two different things and consist of two different kinds of stuff--physical stuff and thinking (non-material) stuff. This is Descartes' "substance dualism."

I don't want to spend a lot of time defending this kind of dualism, what the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle scoffed at as "the ghost in the machine" idea. Just to say that seems to be the insurmountable problem of interaction--how something non-material (thoughts) can affect, or be affected by, something material (brain). "Thoughts affecting brains" implies either that either thoughts are some kind of matter or energy (in which case they're non-material) or else you have to fall back on the old stand-by: magic!

So for now I'll stick with the word "mind" being more like a verb, a metaphor for happenings in my brain. Marvin Minsky said it succinctly: "Minds are simply what brains do."

Doing it right

2006-02-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

Our zen group offers a meditation class on Thursday evenings at the local jail. (I usually start by saying, it's odd for it to be called a class, since there's nothing to teach, nothing to learn.)

One evening there was more tension in the room than usual--during the discussion between "sits," several of the guys had expressed anxiety. So towards the end, I broke the silence by saying, "However you're sitting, whatever you're thinking or feeling, you're doing it right."

As we were leaving a few minutes later, one inmate came over to me, tears in his eyes. "I just wanted you to know that in 25 years, that's the first time anyone's told me I'm doing it right."

Where I start from

2006-02-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

"If the question is 'what is consciousness?', the first step is to say it is a brain phenomenon. Only brains are known to do it. This closes off a lot of the more spooky possibilities."

John McCrone

New skill

2006-02-19T06:43:00.000-08:00

I'm so proud of myself, whatever that is. I just figured out how to do accented characters after all these years of using a computer! (needed for "élan vital")

á = Alt + 0225
é = Alt + 0233
í = Alt + 0237
ó = Alt + 0243
ú = Alt + 0250
ñ = Alt + 0241
ü = Alt + 0252

¡ = Alt + 0161
¿ Alt + 0191

A new skill + fresh coffee courtesy Boo (who is working on her next business column) + Venus like a searchlite high in the dawn sky + a new blog + relaxing over our Guanajuato house now that Tom's on board = a happy guy

Elan vital and consciousness

2006-02-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

Gotta start somewhere.

How about this. Two hundred years ago, it was obvious, self-evident, that something left a body at death, a vital spark, the "élan vital". This belief is called "vitalism."

Nowadays, we understand that life happens--it can't help it!--as a result of complex and interrelated biological functions, which stop functioning when something dies. Science did away with the need for a spirit, or soul, or something extra in additional to the physical organism. Not to say there isn't an extra ingredient--just that it's unnecessary to explain life.

...the recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make élan vital about as interesting as Superman's dread kryptonite. (Dan Dennett)

Maybe consciousness will turn out to be like this. There's this thought experiment involving zombies. Not Haitian undead B-movie zombies, but rather philosophers' zombies. These are folks just like you and me, completely undistinguishable from us, except they don't have a sensation of consciousness, they have no "inner life." Sure, they talk about their feelings, sensations, loves, memories and all that. The thought experiment is that there's absolutely no difference between "you" and "zombie-you" discernable from the outside. But that inside it's blank.

I'll look later at how it's possible to divide consciousness-philosophers into two camps, those who think such beings are (in theory--remember this is a thought experiment!) possible, and those who don't. For now, pretend they are possible.

Then it would seem that "you"--good old regular, reading-this-blog you--has something extra that "zombie-you" doesn't have. Call it "consciousness."

So the question is, might this property "consciousness" turn out to be like the old élan vital? That is, in a few years, or a few hundreds of years, we'll convince ourselves that consciousness is inevitable when you have a complex organism with a trillion-neuron brain, like us? Nothing extra: you get a fancy body and brain, you're conscious. Nothing more to explain.

Great, that's the first one down! How am I doing?