— A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
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Chapter 1: Spirituality
Everything we want to accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope. I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed—but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently.
Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
The Search For Happiness
I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else—not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness—one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice.
Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd.
The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it.
Religion, East And West
Religion is a term like sports: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“ free solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it.
Any view of consciousness and the cosmos that is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not surprising, therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists have given voice to some of the same insights and intuitions. This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than religion.
We can easily forget how suddenly the world had shrunk and the cosmos expanded as the nineteenth century came to a close.
Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them in the West.
Mindfulness
But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.
Dopamine
There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.
The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be perfectly good objects of mindfulness.
Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time. My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.
Chapter 2: The Mystery Of Consciousness
To say that consciousness may only seem to exist, from the inside, is to admit its existence in full—for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness. Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—and all my memories are false, and all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other sentient being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
gossamer
Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence actually means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Perhaps consciousness presents an impasse of this sort. 18
Why can I pass my hand through liquid water and not through rock? Because the molecules of water are not bound so tightly as to resist my motion. Notice that this explanation of fluidity is perfectly reductive: Fluidity really is “nothing but” the free motion of molecules.
Might a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains. Nothing about human behavior or language or culture demonstrates that it is mediated by consciousness, apart from the fact that we simply know that it is—a truth that someone can appreciate in himself directly and in others by analogy.
The Mind Divided
To ask the left hemisphere what it is like to not know what the right hemisphere is thinking is rather like asking a normal subject what it is like to not know what another person is thinking: He simply does not know what the other person is thinking (or even, perhaps, that he or she exists).
Consider what this says about the dogma—widely held under Christianity and Islam—that a person’s salvation depends upon her believing the right doctrine about God. If a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere accepts the divinity of Jesus, but the right doesn’t, are we to imagine that she now harbors two immortal souls, one destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity in hellfire?
Structure And Function
However, the most important implications are for our view of consciousness: It is divisible—and, therefore, more fundamental than any apparent self.
Generally, we do not retain enough of a purchase on reality to even notice that anything out of the ordinary has happened. The most astonishing quality of dreams is surely our lack of astonishment when they arise.
Are Our Minds Already Split?
The non-speaking hemisphere has known the true state of affairs from a very tender age. It has known this because beginning at age two or three it heard speech emanating from the common body that, as language development on the left proceeded, became too complex grammatically and syntactically for it to believe it was generating;
Conscious And Unconscious Processing In The Brain
And emotionally charged terms are more easily recognized than neutral ones (sex can be presented more briefly than car), which further demonstrates that the meanings of words must be gleaned prior to consciousness.
Consciousness Is What Matters
I have never come across a coherent notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable that did not depend upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures. It is not always easy to nail down what we mean by “good” and “bad”—and their definitions may remain perpetually open to revision—but such judgments seem to require, in every instance, that some difference register at the level of experience.
The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place.
Chapter 3: The Riddle Of The Self
The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn’t make sense—being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness like a boat on the water. But the stream of consciousness can divide and follow both tributaries simultaneously. Should these tributaries converge again, the final current would inherit the “memories” of each.
Lost In Thought
From the moment my wife and I grabbed buckets and salad bowls to catch the falling water, we were responding to the ineluctable tug of physical reality. But my suffering was entirely the product of my thoughts. Whatever the needs of the moment, I had a choice: I could do what was required calmly, patiently, and attentively, or do it in a state of panic.
This is a remarkable fact about the human mind. We are capable of astonishing feats of understanding and creativity. We can endure almost any torment. But it is not within our power to simply stop talking to ourselves, whatever the stakes.
From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It’s a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.
No more control when awake tho
if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.
?
The Challenge Of Studying The Self
9 It has long been known that vision trumps proprioception (the awareness of the position of one’s body) when it comes to locating parts of one’s body in space, but the “body swapping illusion” suggests that visual perception may fully determine the coordinates of the self.
One of the most important things we do with our minds is attribute mental states to other people, a faculty that has been variously described as “theory of mind,” “mentalizing,” “mindsight,” “mind reading,” and the “intentional stance.”
The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran seems to have been thinking along these lines when he wrote, “It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like ‘self conscious’ when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.”
This very likely explains why most of us find movies and television so compelling. The moment we turn our eyes to the screen, we are in a social situation that our hominid genes could not have foreseen: We can view the actions of others, along with the minutiae of their facial expressions—even to the point of making eye contact with them—without the slightest risk of being observed ourselves. Movies and television magically transform the primordial context of face-to-face encounters, in which human beings have always been subjected to harrowing social lessons, allowing us, for the first time, to devote ourselves wholly to the act of observing other people.
Chapter 4: Meditation
A review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders. Unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with increased subjective well-being. 13 Training in compassion meditation increases empathy, as measured by the ability to accurately judge the emotions of others, 14 as well as positive affect in the presence of suffering. 15 The practice of mindfulness has been shown to have similar pro-social effects.
Gradual Versus Sudden Realization
The other traditional response to the paradox of spiritual seeking is to fully acknowledge it and concede that all efforts are doomed, because the urge to attain self-transcendence or any other mystical experience is a symptom of the very disease we want to cure.
The ego, if sought, will automatically vanish.
Over the next thirty seconds, we watched this woman’s enlightenment completely unravel. It became clear that she had been merely thinking about how expansive her experience of consciousness had become—how it was perfectly free of thought, immaculate, just like space—without noticing that she was thinking incessantly. She had been telling herself the story of her enlightenment—and she had been getting away with it because she happened to be an extraordinarily happy person for whom everything was going very well for the time being.
Dzogchen: Taking The Goal As The Path
That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful.
Having No Head
On Having No Head.
Chapter 5: Gurus, Death, Drugs, And Other Puzzles
The Spiritual Uses Of Pharmacology
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value. Drugs are another means toward this end.
The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time.
I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable.
Physicalism, by contrast, could easily be falsified. If science ever established the existence of ghosts or reincarnation or any other phenomenon that placed the human mind (in whole or in part) outside the brain, physicalism would be dead. The fact that dualists can never say what might count as evidence against their views makes this ancient philosophical position very difficult to distinguish from religious faith.
And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed.
My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell—as a metaphor if not an actual destination—seem perfectly apt. If nothing else, these excruciating experiences can become a source of compassion. I think it may be impossible to imagine what it is like to suffer from mental illness without having briefly touched its shores. At both ends of the continuum, time dilates in ways that cannot be described—apart from merely observing that these experiences can seem eternal. I have spent hours, both good and bad, in which any understanding that I had ingested a drug was lost, and all memories of my past along with it. Immersion in the present moment to this degree is synonymous with the feeling that one has always been and will always be in precisely this condition.
I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they weren’t, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to have been left permanently ajar. Thereafter, whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some excruciating detour on the path to sublimity. Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it.
For the next several hours my mind became a perfect instrument of self-torture. All that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words. An encounter like that takes something out of you.
I view most psychedelic experiences as potentially misleading. Psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature of consciousness. They merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
Conclusion
What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same.
changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met.