Fragile Wisdom

Many spiritual belief systems are largely based on the premise that one can become wiser by doing certain practices, accumulating life experience, praying, being more open to God, more compassionate, or whatever it may be. Wisdom will allow us to better understand, accept, and perhaps even change, reality; it will give us inner peace and make us better persons. It is the highest goal we can aspire to. It is also a secure investment: all the time and effort you put into gaining wisdom will pay off in some way or another.

I myself implicitly operate on that premise. It's not that I've consciously set out to accumulate wisdom, as if it were some sort of commodity, but if I'm engaged in an existential/spiritual search it's in the hope, albeit flickering, that it is going to lead me somewhere. I might be going round in circles a lot of the time, but the hope of finding answers, or whatever there is to be found, is still there.

We tend to think of wisdom as a spiritual quality, meaning something beyond the physical and the psychological, something transcendent that cannot be taken away from us. But it can. All it takes is for something to go wrong in our brains. Some time ago I attended a meditation group in which a woman told us about a good friend of hers, very committed to her Buddhist practice, who had recently had a psychotic breakdown and, believing that everyone was out to get her, had gone missing. What happened to her wisdom? Was it still there in some way? Was she perhaps going about her psychotic breakdown in a more enlightened way as a result of her meditation practice? Was the whole episode perhaps part of a bigger plan that would eventually benefit her?

A few days ago I watched a clip on the internet where Ram Dass was interviewed about his then recently published book on aging and dying, Still Here. The interviewer said that, having read the book, he could see that the stroke Ram Dass had suffered some years earlier, which nearly killed him and left him with some degree of expressive aphasia and limited mobility, hadn't dimished his soul. That made me quite uncomfortable. What did he exactly mean by "soul"? Would he have said the same had Ram Dass's brain haemorrhage affected his cognitive function to the point that he couldn't speak or write, or remember who he was or what "God" meant? I'm not critizising the interviewer — if his use of the word "soul" made me uncomfortable its becase it reflects my own thinking, or at least one of it's contradictory aspects.

I don't know whether we have anything we could call soul in other than a metaphorical sense, or whether our spiritual search can take us any further that what our brains will allow. It is painful to realise how fragile our existence is, and that's a realisation that can inspire us to turn to spirituality, to seek wisdom and compassion as the means to transcend the contingency of the world. But it is even more painful to realise that wisdom and compassion themselves are as fragile and contingent as the wounded world they seek to redeem. Still, I don't resign myself to believing that that is the last word on the matter. I sincerely hope there's something I'm missing, something I'm not yet wise enough to appreciate.

Neo-Advaita

I've recently discovered The Urban Guru Cafe, a podcast dedicated to what is often called Neo-Advaita, and, in my usual compulsive style, I've listened to all the available episodes. Advaita, Neo or otherwise, preaches (and actually means) non-duality, meaning there's no separation between, well, anything and anything. Jargon and lines of argument may vary, but basically these people will say that striving for enlightenment is a waste of time because you already are what you seek; that past and future are illusions, and, therefore, the idea of spiritual journey is an illusion too; that there is nothing to gain from meditation or any other spiritual practices, because there is no I or you in the first place to gain anything from anything; that gurus are playing a game that keeps people trapped in the illusion that they need to do something to get enlightened, or that there is such a thing as enlightenment, or even a person to get enlightened; that undivided presence, consciousness, or simply that is all there is, and there's nothing outside of it or indeed different from it; and that experiences, things, people, mind, self, concepts, time, etc. are all appearances without any real substance.

The people interviewed in this podcast all seem very sure of themselves and speak as if what they were saying was blindingly obvious and they couldn't understand why the rest of the world would choose to remain trapped in the belief that they exist as real entities in a real world. They write books and give talks (often called satsangs), charging an entry fee (often called donation) if there are people who are willing to pay, in which they announce the end of the spiritual search. They will insist that you're not going to gain anything from any gurus, books, practices, etc., because, as I said, there isn't even a you to gain anything. How they justify their writing illusory books, full of illusory concepts, that illusory people will read and buy giving them illusory money, or going on an illusory tour of illusory satsangs, scheduled at specific times in the illusory future, in which they will go on and on about how pointless the spiritual search is, is something that escapes me.

What's really interesting is how devoid of meaning their arguments can be. You'll often hear them say, for example, that you are not a person, that the self is just a concept without any real substance. And I ask, is "person" not, by definition, precisely what we are? In other words, the word "person" was essentially "invented" to refer to that which we are, whatever that may be. So what these guys are in effect saying is that a person is not a person. Cool. And then, what does "a concept without any real substance" mean? What does a "real substance" look like? "Precisely," they would reply. But then, what does it mean to say that something doesn't have any real substance when there is no such thing as a real substance? Another one of their core beliefs is that what we call reality, including ourselves, other people, concepts, things, time, matter, etc. is just an appearance, an illusion, a dream. And again I ask, if everything is an illusion, what does "illusion" mean? Illusion only means something by comparison: we say that some things are an illusion only by contrast to the the rest of the things, which are not an illusion. Similarly, if we say that nothing is ultimately real, we are just rendering the quality of realness meaningless. It only makes sense to say that something isn't real by comparison to the rest of the things, which are real.

Imagine we all got enlightened, or saw things "as they truly are" — call it whatever is non-dualisticly acceptable. Imagine we all realised that reality is an illusion and began to refer to it as such. Would we not end up inventing a new term to discriminate between the illusion formerly known as reality and the illusion that we've called illusion all along? And if we all finally realised that the self doesn't exist, that there is no you or me, and dropped personal pronouns and referred to ourselves as, for example, empty experiencing, would we not end up devising some way of discriminating between this empty experiencing over here that writes a blog and that empty experiencing over there that reads it?

What I find most troubling about these neo-Advaita people is that they appear to be absolutely convinced of what they're preaching. They're all radically awakened, or whatever other synonym of the — for most of them taboo — word "enlightened" they use to describe themselves, and they consequently have to readily produce a confident answer to every question thrown at them. They'll never say, "Hmm... I don't really know. What do you think?" They'll just make something up, or pick one of their stock responses that's only tangentially related to the question. And then, after all this pontificating, they'll categorically reject the idea that they are any kind of gurus or spiritual teachers. But all things considered, that's hardly surprising given that they reject the idea that they are persons at all.

Why do I then bother listening to them at all? you might rightly ask. Well, I generally enjoy philosophical and spiritual gibberish, even if I don't agree with it. As long as they don't abuse words like energy, vibration and quantum too often, and don't expect me to believe in elaborate fairy tales, it's all good to keep my restless mind entertained. And, to be fair, I do find the Advaita ideas interesting, it's just that I can't stand the complete absence of self-doubt these people display. If you're so open-minded that you're prepared to believe that everything is an illusion, it wouldn't do you any harm to also be open to the possibility that you've got hold of the wrong end of the philosophical stick. And, of course, this doesn't just apply to Neo-Advaita.

The cosmic nebula that you once were

"Most of the atoms that make up the Earth and its inhabitants were present in their current form in the nebula that collapsed out of a molecular cloud to form the Solar System," says Wikipedia. Each of the atoms that make up your body has been around on this planet for 4.5 billion years, and who knows how long for as part of the primordial molecular cloud that would eventually become the Solar System. Each of those atoms that are now part of you, or perhaps I should simply say are you, has its own history, alternating quiet periods with extremely hectic ones. Just think of the food you've assimilated from your last meal. Those proteins that are now part of your triceps were only a few days ago part of the hind legs of some cow in Argentina. That last bit of fat incorporated into your belly was months ago part of an olive growing on an olive tree in Greece. Some of the water molecules that are now inside your cells were a few weeks ago floating in the atmosphere above the Atlantic ocean, before it precipitated and rained into the reservoir that supplies water to the region where you live.

Those are just the first obvious and coarse steps in the genealogy of your body. I shouldn't even call it genealogy, because it's not that the atoms in you body descend from the atoms that made up the plants, animals and other stuff that you have made your own: they are the exact same atoms, give or take a few electrons. So then, if you go just a few days back in time tracing the location of all the atoms that are at this moment part of you body, you'll find little chunks of your future self scattered around the globe. Go back further and little chunks will become clouds of atoms, ever thinner and thinner, more and more scattered. Keep going back and you'll get to a point where most of your present body spreads over most of the surface of the Earth. Go back 5 billion years and you'll be scattered across light-hours of mostly empty space.

You can now fast forward and contemplate how the chosen atoms of that nebula first become a massive lump of molten rock, then earth and atmosphere, then bacteria, insect, plant, river, bird, urine, shit, pig, bean, milk, raindrop, breath, cow, saliva, tomato, spinach leaf, and, finally, it all converges into you. Can you visualise that infinite backwards ramification of yourself into empty space and the forward converging of a nebula of atoms into your present body? Does it not feel like an absolute miracle? If that isn't enough complexity to blow your mind, consider not only the past history of the atoms currently in your body, but their future as well. Where will all the atoms that make up your body be in billions of years? Consider that if you go 10 billion years further back in time all the atoms in the nebula converge on the single point from which the universe exploded into existence, if that is indeed what happened, although they wouldn't be atoms at that stage. Consider the past and future not just of the particles currently in your body, but of every particle that has ever been a part of it. Consider also all the ususpecting atoms scattered around the planet that will one day become a part of you.

If you look at it from a deterministic perspective, you could almost say that those privileged atoms in the cosmic nebula were predetermined to one day become part of a conscious being who would be wondering where they were 5 billion years ago. Even if I try to stick to chance and physical laws to account for this process, it is almost impossible for me not to find meaning and purpose in it. You could say that meaning and purpose, if they weren't there in the first place, emerge from an ocean of chance and blind determinism, which is even more mysterious. Whichever way I look at it I end up with the same sense of awe. I, somehow reluctantly, admit that you could call that worship, but — ssh — don't tell anyone I said that.

Mysticism 1 - Nihilism 1

I don't long to believe in God as much as I used to. Now I would settle for plain and simple mysticism. You know, feelings of oneness with the universe and all those other transcendental experiences I'm hardly ever fortunate enough to get a taste of. The reason for that is that God, as we usually understand it, is a belief that can be either true or false. He either exists or he doesn't, and it seems cheeky, if not dishonest, to simple decide that he does. By contrast, mysticism, again as we usually understand it, is all about experiencing. You can experience yourself as one with the universe, or you can feel a sense of peace and harmony, awe and joy, and those experiences are neither true nor false, they just are. And yet it seems that one cannot just feel a sense of harmony with the universe or some such thing and not probe a bit into it, not question it, at least occasionally. That's what sane people do if they're to remain sane, and that is what I do. My scepticism will often lead me to dismiss those experiences as nice but irrelevant, meaningless, empty. This, however, rather than a logical conclusion, seems to be the product of some sort of emotional reasoning. If I'm feeling pessimistic, jaded, unhappy, etc., the mystical thoughts that might cross my mind will probably seem pathetic, unconvincing and self-deluding. I will tell myself that mystical experiences are just the product of the firing and misfiring of neurons in that lump of meat inside our skulls called brain; nothing we should take too seriously. That's one of my favourite lines of argument to get all depressed and nihilistic. What's interesting, though, is that the pessimistic mental states that lead me to dismiss anything that sounds mystical as self-delusional are also the product of the workings of the same three pounds of meat. This makes me smirk with delight. It feels like cheating, but it isn't.

Mysticism and nihilism are equally illogical, or more precisely, equally alogical. Reality is what it is; intrinsically neither good nor bad, neither mystical nor depressing. It is us who decide what to make of it. I'm not saying that any ideas, being the product of our humble little brains, are equally valid. There are objective truths, like the laws of physics. Denying that, and some do, is plain silly and incoherent. But whether existence is sheer beauty and bliss or a meaningless nightmare is up for any given three pounds of meat in a skull to decide.

The past

In my last post I wrote about how the universe is constantly writing stories and histories — of people, countries, worlds — only to destroy them later leaving no trace of their former existence. I often feel the need to believe that that's not quite how things work, that the past must still exist in some way and will always exist. The idea that my childhood memories — places, people, etc. — only exist in my brain and will vanish when I die can be a difficult one to come to terms with. I sometimes like to watch clips from eighties' Spanish TV on YouTube: the news some random day some random year, the test card they showed with background music at the end of the evening until the first programme began the following morning , ads, anything. As you might expect it makes me terribly nostalgic, and something in me thinks that I should have the right to be able to go back and re-experience those things first hand. But it won't stop there. I want to be able to visit my parents village as it was in the forties and fifties, when they were kids, to watch them run around and play. I also claim my right to be able to visit early 20th century Bombay and 17th century Istambul, to meet Jesus and the Buddha (just out of curiosity), to have a coffee with my great-grandfather. But I digress.

It's not just the extinction of my own memories, the fact that my past is forever past, that concerns me, but also everyone else's memories and past, all the things that have happened on this planet. The past must still be real in some way. I just find it almost impossible to believe that the past is gone forever and will be forgotten completely.

By the time the universe is 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years old, the black holes themselves will disintegrate into stray particles, which will bind loosely to form individual "atoms" larger than the size of today's universe. Eventually, even these will decay, leaving a featureless, infinitely large void. And that will be that—unless, of course, whatever inconceivable event that launched the original Big Bang should recur, and the ultimate free lunch is served once more.

(from TIME.com)

And then whatever has happened in the past, the innumerable people, lives, experiences, stories, memories, etc. will have disappeared completely. There will not even be any clue that any of those things have ever occurred. Whatever happens in the universe, the end result is the same: absolute nothingness. Can that be true? Let me try a desperate attempt to prove otherwise. Read on.

Mozart died on 5 December 1791. As far as we know that's a true statement. Would it make any sense to say that it is false — just because — or that it is neither true nor false? Obviously not. If it's true, it's true. And will it make sense to say either of those two things when the human race has disappeared from the universe? Obviously not. Whatever happens to the human race, "Mozart died on 5 December 1791" will always be a true statement. Does anything change when then universe "dies"? Will our statement stop being true? Obviously not. Now take all possible true statements about the past, down to the minutests details, to the position of each atom at every moment. All those statements constitute all of the past, and each one of them is true, and it wouldn't make sense to say otherwise. It wouldn't make sense now, and it wouldn't make any sense in 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. So, even if the past is gone in some way, there is another way in which it will always exist, because if it didn't exist in any way, it would be perfectly logical to say that "Mozart died on 5 December 1791" is neither true nor false, when it clearly isn't. If the past didn't exist in any way, at the end of the universe all the true statements about the past of the universe would cease to be true and become neither true nor false. I hope you'll agree with me that that cannot happen. Some might argue that after the death of the universe, "Mozart died on 5 December 1791," along with all other possible statements about the past, will just be something whose truth or falsehood cannot be known. But my point is that, even so, the statement will be either true or false. In conclusion, if we accept that the truth about the past exists, then the past, all of it, will always exist in at least some way, the way that makes true statments about it true.

I don't blame you if you don't find this argument very compelling — neither do I. There is something awkward about it. But then there's something awkward about all philosophy. It's just another argument in my collection of philosophical reasons for puzzlement and hope.

Stories

Your life, the people that come in and out of it, the emotions that seem to take up all the space around you, that are as real and pervasive as the biting cold in this wintry night, the jobs you go through, the ups and downs with your girlfriends and boyfriends, all the letters and phone conversations, all the lies and truths, struggles, achievements, love and hate, the photographs you take, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, your personality, the sound of your voice. Your life, your story, enormous and infinitely intricate as it is, is but one among billions on this planet. And this planet is probably just one among billions of planets that are home to sentient beings who also have their own unique, endlessly beautiful, painful, joyful and complex stories. Both their stories and ours are written only to be forgotten shortly after death puts and end to them. Your children might remember you, you might even be one of the few that have done something great for which millions of people remember them after they die, but there will come a day when our precious planet is annihilated along with all the life it harbours. And then nobody will remember Gandhi, Beethoven, Picasso, Jesus, Genghis Khan, Queen Victoria or Kermit the Frog, let alone your life or mine. Any trace of anything that ever happened on planet Earth will be pulverised and the universe will carry on as if human history had never occurred.

How many other intelligent and conscious life forms might have existed in the universe that had a history like that of the human race, complete with civilisations, empires, technological and moral progress, art, and, most importantly, billions of little people that asked themselves what the hell was this joke called life supposed to mean? Just us? A handful of them? Billions? I'm inclined to believe the latter, but any answer seems equally puzzling to me. If indeed there are, have been and will be billions of civilisations comparable in richness to the human race, what sort of a universe is this that incessantly invents these magnificent histories/stories, a million at a time, only to mercilessly destroy them later? It conjures up the image of an extremely talented and infinitely prolific writer that threw his books in the fire just as he'd finished writing the last page. Why would he do that? Why bother writing the story in the first place? You could say that the universe, unlike an actual writer, is not aware that it is writing a story, or trillions of them, or that the stories are just writing themselves, or that it is us who choose to see things as stories. That's all very reasonable, but still, is it not striking that the most magnificent of all writers is not even aware that it is creating stories all the time, or that it is not aware at all, or that it is simply sprouting conscious life that then worships it or, like me, asks it what it's playing at, creating and destroying all these precious stories? What's the point of all that? Could there possibly not be a point? Really?

On aliens and consciousness

It is probably safe to assume that ten thousand years ago, when humans hadn't yet developed any writing systems and, presumably, weren't too philosophically sophisticated, concepts such as consciousness or mind hadn't even occurred to them. Imagine that at that time in human (pre-) history a group a highly evolved, ultra-intelligent, science-loving alien researchers had visited the Earth and studied all there was to study about humans. They cracked our genome and understood how it worked, not roughly as we do now, but exactly, as a computer programmer knows how a program works. They did the same with brain function, to the extent that they could create accurate computer simulations of the activity of the brain. The aliens quickly learned the languages spoken by the human communities they were studying and enjoyed socialising with them and learning about their culture.

You get the picture, right? And now let's get to the point. The striking thing about this story is that when our extraterrestrial friends went back to their distant planet thinking that their understanding of humans was complete, they had missed something of the utmost importance: consciousness. The aliens hadn't realised that some of the brain activity of those endearing creatures generated subjective experience or, to use a more unequivocal term, qualia. This wasn't due to a careless mistake; nobody skipped the consciousness item in the checklist. There simply wasn't such an item. These aliens didn't have subjective experience themselves and had never heard about anything remotely similar. Why would they look for it? Moreover, there was nothing in the behaviour of humans that pointed to it, nothing unaccounted for. They already had a full and satisfactory explanation of all the phenomena they could observe in humans. And yet, consciousness not only exists, but is the most astonishing thing we have. Isn't it remarkable that these incredibly developed and knowledgeable aliens didn't have any reason to suspect its existence?

Let's now fast-forward several thousand years to the present time. The aliens decide to come back to our planet and find out how we're getting on. They're happy about our technological progress and are delighted that human culture has grown so varied and rich; that'll give them something to keep themselves entertained for a while. They devour all the information they can lay their hands on: all of Wikipedia, entire libraries, etc. They find some of our beliefs amusing, but they don't have any difficulty explaining them. They understand why people believe in gods and demons. They understand what we mean when we talk about beauty and morality. But there's an idea they're having a hard time with, which is, of course, consciousness. Not only do they struggle to explain why we believe in it; they don't even know what we mean by it! They talk to some philosophers that specialise in the field of consciousness and that only makes things worse. They have a coffee with David Chalmers, a philosophical hero of mine, who, failing miserably in trying to make them understand what consciousness means, concludes that these aliens must be philosophical zombies, i.e. they do not have subjective experience. The aliens then go on to meet with Daniel Dennet, Paul Churchland and Susan Blackmore, who are thrilled to talk to this enlightened beings who believe, as they do, that consciousness must be some kind of illusion, but their attempts to explain to the aliens what consciousness is are a complete failure.

The aliens, dejected, conclude that consciousness must be a bug in the software run by the human brain, although a unique one. They had previously explained superstition and religion as bugs, but at least they could understand what the concepts involved in them (luck, god, fate, morality, heaven, soul, etc.) meant for humans. In the case of consciousness, however, they cannot even begin to understand the meaning of that which is an illusion, and nobody can explain it to them. The funny thing is that even people who, like Dan Dennet, believe that consciousness is an illusion and that the very concept of qualia doesn't make sense, know perfectly well what qualia are, yet they can't make our aliens understand it because they (qualia) don't exist. That is some serious bug.

I, as you might have gathered, think that the existence of qualia is perfectly obvious, and that the only reason why some people are committed to the view that they must be an illusion (albeit one which nobody has a clue how to explain) is their having faith in a materialistic world view. But what I actually wanted to say in this post is not that consciousness exists; I'm taking that for granted. What fascinates me is the possibility that, in the same way these fictitious super-evolved aliens didn't detect consciousness when they first came to visit us, and couldn't understand it when they found out about it several thousands later, there be other kinds of stuff (for lack of a better word) in reality which, being as real and meaningful as consciousness, we are fundamentally unable to detect, let alone comprehend. We perhaps observe some of the effects that kind of stuff had on the kinds of stuff that we do know about, in the same way that the aliens eventually knew about consciousness only because humans told them about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying wacky New Age beliefs; I'm just saying that it is plausible that there is much more to reality than what we are able to know. What that might be I don't know — you figure that one out yourself — but I would hope it would somehow make the universe a better place, just as consciousness does.

Appendix

Two alternative outcomes of the research programme conducted by the aliens:

1. On their first visit to planet Earth they notice that some of the neural activity in the brain of humans doesn't quite conform to physical laws and they hypothesise the existence of some hitherto unknown kind of "stuff" which they can only infer by its effects on the workings of the human brain. Seeking to gain some insight into the problem, they try discussing it with the most intelligent humans they could find, but to no avail, as the latter, being completely incapable of grasping the concept of "physical laws", can't even begin to understand what the aliens are talking about. In their second visit they learn about consciousness and, although not being able to understand what it means, they recognise that it probably is what's causing the abnormalities they'd observed in the neural activity of the brain.

2. The aliens are conscious, understand consciousness, and have the means to detect it, as they indeed do on their first visit. On their second visit they congratulate David Chalmers for being of the right track and reveal to him what consciousness is and how it works. Chalmers, clever as he is, can't get to grips with some of the fundamental concepts the aliens use in order to explain consciousness, so he officially declares the cognitive closure of the human mind on the hard problem of consciousness, sets off for India and becomes a famous mystic poet.