Questions that point to the transcendent

Why is there a universe when there could just as well be nothing?

Why the physical laws of the universe are those which they are? Why are they such that life can develop?

Why does consciousness, that most incredible yet most useless (from a materialistic conception of reality) of miracles, exist?

Why are we capable of experiencing such emotional richness and depth as we do?

Why do we have a need for art, which, again, is a hundred percent useless?

Why do we have any existential needs?

Why do we ask all these questions?

I don't know about you, but these questions make me "suspicious", they bring my attention right into the transcendent. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying they are proof of God's existence or anything like that. That would be only too easy. But then it's also too easy to say that feelings, art, existential concerns and consciousness are simply a product of natural selection or that it's silly to wonder why the universe exists or why the physical laws are these and not any others. These questions are legitimate, they are big, and they haven't been answered. Why would anyone chose to brush them aside? In most cases probably out of faith in scientific materialism. (I looked "scientific materialism" up in Wikipedia, as you do, and it says that "[t]he term is usually only used by critics of the scientific discipline, such as the proponents of intelligent design". Just for the record, I think the intelligent design guys are a bunch of fruitcakes, and I don't criticise "the scientific discipline", but the believe some people hold that science can provide all the answers or that that which cannot be studied through science is not real.)

As I was saying, these questions point to the transcendent. By that I mean that when I consider, for instance, the existence of the universe (as opposed to its conceivable non-existence) I can only shut up and contemplate. I don't have an answer for the question of why the universe exists; I don't even think there is one! But that only increases my sense of awe, for the question won't go away: it is as real and relevant as it can be, and yet it has no answer! I dwell on the question, contemplating the unthinkable enormity and complexity of the universe, and that brings about a sense of wonder and mystery, a heightened awareness of myself and the world. It opens up a peaceful yet excited inner space where not having an answer doesn't feel like a problem. What do I do with all that? Enjoy it, to begin with. And then I don't know; I'm still trying to figure it out. Why does this happen? Why does this in principle philosophical question send shivers down my spine? Is is because it gives me hope in the existence of God as I used to believe in it in my post-Catholic exaltation (which I won't conceal I think would be great)? Perhaps, but that's not what it feels like. It's more like being hurled into the transcendent, the numinous, the you know what I'm talking about, that knowing something without knowing exactly what is it that you know. You follow me?

Another one of my favourite questions for pondering and making my mind go into "wow!" mode (another term for contemplation) is consciousness. Its very existence is regarded by intelligent people as the most enigmatic question facing science and philosophy. No one has yet produced a theory that provides any substantial insight into the nature of consciousness. It is not only unexplained, but, from the materialist point of view assumed by science, unnecessary: it is not thought to play any causal role in the physical universe (a position with which I disagree, but I'll leave that for another post). Unexplained, perhaps unexplainable, unnecessary, and yet it is the most fundamental fact about our existence, our most treasured possession. What ... is ... going ... on?

Next in the list are art and beauty. You could argue that creativity has evolved because it is biologically adaptive, and that art is just creativity gone mad and self-conscious combined with the need for recognition, which can also be adaptive. That sounds pretty reasonable. But what about appreciation of art and natural beauty? What's adaptive about a song making you shiver or some landscape making you forget to breathe? Is that just a useless by-product of biological evolution, "a misfiring of Darwinian behaviour"? (Francis Collins ironically paraphrasing Richard Dawkins in a debate on Science and Religion) Well, maybe it is, but excuse me if I find the idea a bit far-fetched.

Apart from having some contemplative fun, there are other things I can do about these questions: investigate, speculate, despair, debate, meditate, swing back and forth between scepticism and mysticism, go to India (where one feels either closer to the truth or more deluded than anywhere else), have some chilli pickles in an attempt to get some inspiration, write on this blog, ... At any rate what I cannot do is ignore them for very long. What do you do about them?

Why I meditate. Why I don't meditate.

These are some of the reasons why Wes Nisker meditates:

I meditate because life is too short, and sitting slows it down.

I meditate because I've discovered that my mind is a great toy, and fun to play with.

I meditate because I am growing old and want to become more comfortable with emptiness.

I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahmavihara, the divine abode of awe, and then I’ll go down in history as a great spiritual adept.

(complete poem; talk where you can listen to him reading it)

As good as any other, I suppose. Meditation is a confusing subject indeed. The recommended techniques as well as the alleged aim of the practice vary enormously across schools. For instance, I've come across several forms of mindfulness of breathing (pay attention to your body as you breath, pay attention to your nostrils, count the number of breaths up to ten and start again, breath deeply and slowly with your belly, don't try to control your breathing at all, any combination of the above) or vipassana (pay attention to any bodily sensations that spontaneously arise, systematically scan your body in a particular order, acknowledge your thoughts as they crop up, pay attention to your feelings, pay attention to your breathing except when something crops up). There are many more variations of these techniques, as well as altogether different kinds of meditation like mettā bhāvanā (practice of loving kindness), recitation of mantras or walking meditation. When it comes to the aims of the practice the variability is also considerable: calming the mind, realising the true nature of reality (the one and only!), communion with God, transcending the phenomenal self, developing compassion, just sitting (yeah, right), etc.

Summarising, meditation is a technique where you sit in some position or other, lie down, walk, or even jump (you don't want to miss these demo clips of Osho's Dynamic Meditation, ooh!), pay attention to your breathing, your body, your feelings, your thoughts, God, or the candle in front of you, or recite a mantra, or visualise some object, or just sit, with the purpose of calming the mind, developing mindfulness, realising the absence of self, developing compassion, or "[awakening] the sky-like nature of mind, and [introducing] practitioners to that which they really are: unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death" (Wikipedia's entry on meditation). I mean, wow!

In the following lines I'll be referring mainly to vipassana meditation (the most important in Buddhist practice according to many) in any of its usual forms (as taught, for instance, by S.N. Goenka or Joseph Goldstein). Vipassana basically involves observing the mind (and/or bodily sensations) as a means of realising the three characteristics of reality: anicca (impermanence) (pronounced anitcha), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness) and anatta (lack of an inherent essence or self). The idea is that you sit on your cushion, spend an hour or so observing your mind (or some eleven hours a day if you are on a retreat), day in day out, and just by doing that you will realise that everything is impermanent and that you don't have a self, and that'll liberate you from suffering. That's great, innit? I have some objections to make, though.

Firstly, how many people have actually attained liberation through the realisation of anicca, dukkha and anatta? OK, it's a gradual process, but so gradual that it can take several lifetimes! Not very good value for money. Secondly, how many people have realised anicca, dukkha and anatta though meditation without having been told that's what they had to realise? Spending as many hours a day as you can, for as many years as you can, sitting immobile on a cushion with your eyes closed, observing your mind, trying to resist the temptation to scratch your nose, fighting the natural tendency of your brain to think of something interesting, with the sole purpose of "realising" what someone else has told you are the great truths that lead to liberation looks worryingly like brainwashing. (Uproar! Outrage!)

The problem is, you see, that if you were told that what you are going to realise through the practice of observing your mind is the divine nature of the self, the immutability of the sacred ground of being (I just made that up), or anything else, that is surely what you would realise (although it might take you several lifetimes of committed practice and study, of course).

It is true that meditation can have dramatic experiential effects, particularly in retreats of some length and intensity. But let's think of it critically: ten days of seclusion and silence, not being allowed to read, write, have eye contact, sleep an extra hour, skip a meditation session, spending some eleven hours a day sitting on a cushion (every joint in your body hurts), with your eyes closed, observing your mind, not even being allowed to consciously daydream (not that anyone would find you out, of course). In such extreme circumstances of sensory, social and mental deprivation, regardless of whether you are doing vipassana or reciting Hail Marys, your mind is bound to explode, implode, turn inside out and upside down. Intense emotions will unexpectedly arise and overwhelm you, you'll become paranoid, fall in love with the guy meditating next to you, you'll experience unusual sensations while meditating (am I levitating?), you'll become hypersensitive to sensory stimuli, you will get a great sense of achievement when you make it to the end of the ten days, and you will interpret all this chaos according to whatever preconceptions you have about what you're doing. You could believe that you're experiencing intimate communion with Jesus, or that you've had a breakthrough in your realisation of anatta, or that your chakras have opened and rebalanced. Meditation done in this fashion is the most anti-scientific method of enquiry you could think of.

That is why I don't meditate.

On the other hand, observing the mind is a fascinating thing to do; meditation is a systematic way of doing so. I sit and meditate every now and then (with occasional stretches of regular almost daily practice). Some years ago I tried to do classic vipassana, but I eventually got bored and my practice gradually turned into a more active exploration of mental activity. Instead of just watching phenomena come and go, I would try stuff, e.g. paying attention to my brain (crazy idea, I know, but you should try it) or to the blackness inside, listening to the silence, feeling the space around my body, observing how I fall asleep, observing what it feels like to want to scratch and itch while repressing the urge to do it (it often makes me smile), observing what it feels like to observe. I'm not sure whether I have achieved any great insights through my idiosyncratic practice of meditation, but I'm definitely developing an ever more detailed knowledge of mental phenomena, which I consider very valuable in itself and provides me with material for my musings on the nature of consciousness and other geeky subjects, and I'm having fun as I go along. You couldn't ask for more.

You know what the downside is, though? That I am on my own. I can't belong to any group that practises a given kind of meditation and upholds a particular doctrine, because my curiosity and inventiveness would be frowned upon, as it often has been in the past. I can't share my experiences with my dharma buddies. Mine is a solitary search, and that is something I resent. Perhaps one day ...

What does spirituality mean anyway?

Or, at any rate, what do I mean by it? Today (maybe not tomorrow) I'd say spirituality is my endeavour to, firstly, work out what existence is all about, and secondly, find a way of coming to terms with whatever conclusions I reach. You pop into this world, have a more or less unfulfilling life, grow old and die. Now, how do you construe that in such a way that it doesn't feel like the cruelest of practical jokes? How do you relate to existence so that you can not just tolerate it, but believe it is just as it should be?

There are several ways to go about it. The easiest one is to surrender your troublesome ability to think for yourself by signing up to some major organised religion with a clearly set out dogma, scriptural canon and hierarchical organisation of authority. Then you needn't worry any more. Have a doubt? Ask your priest / imam / guru / rabbi / teacher. He'll tell you all about the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, your mission on earth, the afterlife and what have you. Does hell exist? Can we reincarnate as plants? Is non-penetrative sex an abomination in the eyes of God? Don't worry, someone will know, or if they don't, they'll look it up in some book, written by someone who really knows.

Another strategy is to admit defeat when it comes to finding the answers to the big metaphysical questions, investing one's effort in cultivating acceptance of reality. Some forms of Buddhism fit this model. Even though Buddhist teachings are philosophically very dense, it is often said (typically with some rhetorical intent) that the Buddha readily dismissed metaphysical concerns as irrelevant; he was offering a path for the cessation of suffering, nothing more, nothing less. It must be noted that only some metaphysical issues are deemed irrelevant. For instance, the question of the existence of God is apparently a sheer waste of time, whereas the realms of existence (gods, hungry ghosts, etc.) and reincarnation, to give only a couple of examples, are taken for granted. Go figure. In any case, in (at least some forms of) Buddhism philosophical enquiry is explicitly discouraged. What matters is the development of the qualities of the mind that lead to the cessation of suffering.

Those that, rejecting traditional religion and not being inclined to embark upon a thorough philosophical enquiry, have the need to believe in something, might find inspiration in New Age spirituality. If Conversations with God, The Celestine Prophecy, or What the Bleep Do We Know? not only didn't make you cringe, but you actually enjoyed them, you are a New Ager. You'll probably also believe things like these: sincronicities have a purpose; we are one with the Universe, evolving towards higher levels of cosmic consciousness; all spiritual traditions are ultimately saying the same thing; the Dalai Lama is a great fellow; quantum physics provide scientific support for, I don't know, Reiki, or something; people in India lead very simple lives and are all very happy; alternative medicine is the way forward. I must confess that I find the New Age conception of the world very appealing indeed, the only problem being it is wrong in almost every respect it can be wrong. However, if you take the outrageous pseudoscientific beliefs and the philosophical naivety out of the equation you are left with nothing less than faith. Faith in life, love, the universe. That I also find appealing, and it can't be wrong because it doesn't involve claims that can be right or wrong. It's a feeling, a stance; the kind of warm, trusting feeling you get when you read The Alchemist (again, if it doen't make you squirm). Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of faith (I suppose I have it in a flickering kind of way), but there's a bunch of neurons in my brain that demand more intellectual rigour than that.

My approach to spirituality at this moment revolves around science-informed (or at least science-compatible) philophical enquiry. Some of the traditional subjects of hard sciences, such as the evolution of life or the laws of the physical universe, are of the utmost significance for a reality-based spiritual search. Other spiritually-relevant issues like the nature of consciousness, near-death experiences, paranormal phenomena, the nature of freedom, out-of-body experiences, altered mental states, etc., although not typically regarded as objects of science, have been subjected to empirical scrutiny, often yielding crucial results. For instance, just imagine how misguided our speculations on the nature of the mind would be had we not discovered how inextricably linked it is to brain activity. I need to bear all these hard facts in mind to make sure that my existential ruminations are part of a quest for truth, not a process of self-deception, of which I've seen too much and have been a victim myself.

I used to think that the spiritual / existential search was about finding meaning. I have now reached a stage where I have to consider the absence of intrinsic meaning in the universe as a likely possibility. There might not be a purpose to our lives or to the universe. Maybe you die and that's that. Maybe there isn't a God or any other kind of superior being that that has a benevolent plan for us all. Maybe there isn't any kind of true meaning to be found in existence. Maybe it's all shit. Maybe the whole universe is ultimately going to pot. Once I've been forced to seriously consider that possibility, my only hope of "salvation" is creating meaning. How? Bit by bit.

Anatta, science fiction and thought experiments

One of the basic tenets of Buddhism are "the three marks of existence": dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence) and anatta (absence of self). They are supposed to be the essential characteristics of all phenomena, which sounds a bit odd (of all phenomena?), and leads me to suspect that something's got lost in translation. Apart from that, why these three things go together and why it is precisely those three characteristics that deserve the honour of being called "the three marks of existence" I honestly do not know. It has always seemed somewhat arbitrary to me, but, hey, it's religion, what do you expect? In any case, the first two couldn't be more straightforward: yeah, sure, human existence is pretty unsatisfactory at some level, and everything is in constant flux. It's the "absence of self" that makes you go "Hang on a second! Absence of self? What self? My self? What are you talking about!?" It's also called egolessness, non-self, impersonality, ... So, yes, they really are saying that there is no self. But ... but ... I mean ... How can anyone say that? And what does it mean exactly?

Some teachers / traditions seem to mean it in the most radical sense: what you call yourself is nothing, you are nothing more that an unstable pattern of matter and energy. That is supposed to be a liberating realisation, but to me it rather feels like a kick in the stomach. Once, on a S.N. Goenka Vipassana retreat in Dharamsala, that brutal interpretation of anatta came at the worst time, when my grandma had passed away only a few days ago. Was this toad of a man telling me that my grandma was nothing more that an unstable pattern of blah blah blah? I then found myself thinking of friends, parents, girlfriends, other deceased grandparents, and weeping like a child. "Unstable configurations of matter and energy? Well, how about you are an unstable configuration of matter and energy speaking a load of rubbish!?" In case you're wondering, yes, I did quit the course.

Other teachers / traditions would say that anatta refers to the absence of a soul or some unchanging essence beneath our flowing sense of self. Of course we have a self; it's only that it has no fixed substance. Gil Fronsdal even says (I'm not sure how orthodox an interpretation that is) that the Buddha never taught that there is no self, but only that that (anything: your personality, your consciousness, ...) is not the self, thus leaving the question open as to whether there actually is something that can be rightfully called the self.

In any case, if there is any truth to anatta, I've always been put off by the simplistic way in which it is usually presented. It goes something like this: "No matter how hard you look for it, you're not going to find this thing called the self. Come on; show it to me. Where is your self? If you can't pin it down you'll have to accept that it is an illusion." Through that kind of reasoning you would eventually deny the existence of anything beyond concrete physical objects. For instance, where is that thing you call "history"? Come on; show it to me. No, no; that's a book of history, but it's not history itself, is it? Is history a book, or even the whole British Library? So where is it then? If you can't show it to me you'll have to face the fact that history doesn't exist. Where is syntax? Where is a logarithm? Where is probability? Where is energy?

I wouldn't be able to produce a neat idea of what the self is off the cuff. It does seem awfully complicated, and very much an open-ended question. I would personally start with my own sense of self, which to me is as good a proof of its existence as there can be. If I have a sense of green, green exists. It would be silly to argue that green is an illusion because it doesn't have an actual physical existence (in physical terms green is only a wavelength). My idea / sensation / perception / sense of green is enough for green to be an unquestionable reality. The same applies to the self. Our sense of self is so deep rooted that we can't even think of ourselves as other than, well, our selves! Doesn't that grant the self some kind of ontological status? Whether the philosophical beliefs that revolve around our sense of self are valid is another matter. In any event, would it not be more interesting to enquire into the nature of this mysterious feeling of being a self rather than doing away with the whole problem by decreeing it illusory?

Isn't all this kind of obvious? Why then have I never come across any Buddhist teacher who explained anatta beyond the simplistic "if you can't find it, it doesn't exist"? I mean, if you expect me to believe that there is no self (an idea which is often regarded as the most important realisation resulting from the practice of meditation) you'll have to present arguments that are a bit more compelling than that. Funnily enough, certain science fiction-inspired thought experiment that caught my attention a while ago provided me with such arguments.

The idea is attributed to British philosopher Derek Parfit and it goes like this (this is a third-hand account, so never mind the details): Imagine we had developed the technology for teleportation. You walk into a teleportation chamber, you press a button, your body is disintegrated and then reintegrated back in some other teleportation chamber on Mars. Neat, isn't it? But now imagine that the teleportation system has some failure during the process (Windows crashes) and as a result you reintegrate simultaneously on Mars and on Earth. Both you's are perfectly conscious and they both have the feeling of being you (they have your body, your memories, etc.). Now, which is the real you? Both? Neither? Is it an impossible situation? Do we have some kind of soul that cannot be duplicated and therefore one of the two you's would be something like a zombie? I believe that both you's would be you, which is shocking, but there's nothing too problematic about it. We'd have to broaden our understanding of the self so as to allow for self duplication, but I personally think that's almost something to celebrate!

The real trouble begins when we add the following twist to the story (and as far as I've aware this is not Parfit's idea anymore, but mine). After the duplication accident the you that is still on Earth is informed about the unexpected outcome of the teleportation process and he thinks that's a real pain in the arse. "How can we sort this out?" he asks to the teleportation assistant. "Well, it's very simple. You are already on Mars. The only problem is that you're on Earth as well. The quickest way to solve that is for you to kill yourself. Any conventional method will do. We would dispose of your corpse free of charge. Alternatively you can go home, spend a nice weekend (we would provide some gift vouchers as compensation), and come back to us once the system has been repaired in order to be disintegrated hassle-free." What the hell do you do then?

I don't have a problem with the idea of being disintegrated and subsequently reintegrated. My conception of selfhood is not threatened in any way by that. If, however, the me-before-disintegration and the me-after-reintegration overlap in time, even if it's for a few seconds, the alarm bells go off. What difference does it make? In both cases (succession or overlapping of the two me's) the original me is disintegrated, killed, call it what you wish. Would it not be better to disintegrate the original me after the new one has been successfully reintegrated, so that I'm sure that I'm not going to disappear in the process because of any accidents? Apparently not. What if there was an overlap but neither me knew about it until the disintegration was completed? Would that make a difference?

The point is not to find the correct answers (they may not exist) but simply to have our understanding of the self "exposed" as inadequate. It doesn't seem very logical for the overlapping to make such a big difference or to be so threatening. That suggests that my intuitive understanding of the self is flawed or at least incomplete in some fundamental way. Is the absence of ego the answer to this puzzle? It doesn't really feel like a solution to the problem (the bafflement is still there after anatta has been considered), and it does feel like throwing the baby out with the bath-water, for egolessness doesn't even attempt to answer the crucial question: what is the self?

Summarising, anatta isn't very convincing as a solution to the felt problem posed by the thought experiment we're looking at, but the latter provides a striking and effective argument to challenge our understanding of the self, which is as much as anatta could aspire to. Other challenges coming up soon.

Introduction: Sceptical? Spirituality?

So, it seems that the time has come for me to stop procrastinating and get down to it: my "sceptical spirituality" blog. The title seems rather self-explanatory to me, but I know it isn't, so I will explain what it’s all about. Since I've had anything close to an adult mental capacity I've always had two very strong and seemingly contradictory instincts within me: spirituality and rationality. I like to think that they've been passed down to me respectively by my mum (a devout Catholic) and my dad (an atheist, I suppose, though I've never heard him define himself in that way).

As far as spirituality is concerned I've tried a bit of everything. I began by being something of a fundamentalist Catholic. A religious mum and grandma, a dad to whom family dynamics compelled to keep quiet in religious matters, a strictly religious school (there weren't any places left in the more moderate one just down the road, I was told), a self-perpetuating shyness, and an unwavering fear of damnation all did a good job of turning me into a good Catholic boy. Apart from these external circumstances, I did have a real (natural?) interest in religion, philosophy, psychology and all that deep stuff.

For many years fear of hell alone was what that fuelled my piety. At around fifteen or sixteen I began to read the Bible and some Christian literature on my own initiative, and then it dawned on me that there was more to religion than the all-important "purity" (i.e. not doing or thinking anything remotely sexual) and observance of Sabbath. (Any trespasses on these two areas were "mortal sins", which means they send you straight to hell if you don't repent and confess, so you'd better not mess around.) I moved on towards an ever more liberal understanding of Christianity. Then the inevitable crises of faith came into the picture, punctuating my spiritual search ever since. When fear of damnation ceased to be the driving force behind my religiosity several other motivations took over its function: inertia, dissatisfaction with the material and pragmatic side of reality, curiosity, need for the truth, fear of death. I then discovered Eastern spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism, and got as far (!) as considering myself a half-Buddhist for some time.

Running parallel to my spiritual longing I've always had a sceptical outlook on things. In my school years that scepticism completely bypassed my Christian faith. I was one of those believers that are so sure of their truths that regard them as self-evident, and will passionately argue anything with anyone, sometimes being right (about the conclusions, if not so much about the arguments) and more often just speaking a lot of embarrassing guff. What a little Catholic Taliban I was. But still I believed in reason, in science. I was almost as scientific-minded as youth and religious indoctrination permitted. I must confess that when fanaticism eased off a bit I remained for many years open to the possible existence of pretty far out stuff, but that was the best I could do at that time, when Wikipedia didn't exist. What made me a ‘true sceptic’ is that I never settled down for almost-completely-convincing truths. If there was room for doubting, I would sooner or later doubt. Inevitably, all the religions, traditions, call it what you like, that I have got to know have ended up disappointing me.

At this moment I find it hard to believe in, or even be inspired by, anything spiritual, but at the same time I badly need faith and inspiration. My hope is that I'll be able to cultivate (or stumble upon, that would do just as well) some kind of understanding of existence (myself, the world, the meaning of life, and all the rest of it) that is spiritually satisfying while standing the test of science and rationality. As I see it, science is but a very refined, powerful and intellectually honest method to aid us in the search for truth; it is a safeguard against some of our intellectual shortcomings: one of its aims is to ensure that we don't fool ourselves. Abandoning science would amount to giving up on the truth. It might not look pretty, but if we are serious about spirituality (which, as I understand it, means, among things, pursuing the truth) we must always take science into consideration. On the other hand, one should examine very carefully the philosophical claims, allegedly supported by scientific evidence, made by some materialist particularly in the subject of philosophy of mind.

During the last year I've been writing an MA dissertation (counselling) that has given me the perfect excuse to spend hours on end on the Internet feeding both my spiritual and sceptical selves. I've been particularly interested in Eastern spiritual traditions (as interpreted by Western minds), philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and the sceptical and secular humanist movement. I've read and listened to more stuff than I can possibly have digested. And that's where this blog steps in: it is meant to be a way of sharing my sceptical-spiritual search, of obliging me to think things through and give my insights some intelligible form. There comes a point when lying on the sofa listening to hours on end of podcasts doesn't really make you grow that much. I need to do something with all the information I'm force-feeding my brain. And if I manage to write something that some people find interesting, well, that’d be cool too.