Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a remarkable thing. It transforms the past, even the mundane, and makes it mysteriously perfect, beautiful and, dare I say, even sacred. And, of course, painful. Like much of what we consider an essential part of humanness (art, consciousness, etc), nostalgia is as awesome as it is absolutely pointless, which makes it all the more awesome. This paradoxical nature is not exclusive to human attributes and activities; it arguably extends to the very existence of the universe: pointless, but awesome. If you've read some of my previous posts you'll know that I relish this sort of paradoxes. I like to think of them as provisional truths, as stepping stones. They're true as far as they go, but they only go so far.

But I digress. Going back to nostalgia, one cannot fail to notice another paradoxical aspect of it, which is that the past that now seems wonderful, didn't feel so wonderful when it was the present. Much the same occurs with places. When I think of Varanasi my heart yearns to return to what it remembers as an ancient and magical city where the divine was almost palpable. However, my mind knows that the last time I was there I got fed up with it very quickly, to the point that I decided to shorten my stay in India by a couple of months. There are plenty of reasons why one would be fed up with a place like Varanasi. At the time what frustrated me the most was the fact that all the fellow travellers I met were into far-out New Age stuff, conspiracy theories, or some other kind of nonsense. I couldn't seem to meet anyone from whom I didn't have to conceal my beliefs — or, mostly, lack thereof — if I was to have a friendly conversation with them. You would think that after three prior trips to India I would have had the wit to adjust my expectations, but that is what nostalgia does to you. It makes you forget, idealise, romanticise. And even now as I write this, I can't think of many things more enticing than a trip back to India.

The lesson we might extract from this is that, contrary to what our heart would have us believe, there is nothing special about the past and all those places we now miss. Whenever we are beset by nostalgia we can remind ourselves that when the past was present it didn't feel special; if it feels special now it's only because we are idealising it. This sobering thought can sometimes come as a breath of fresh air for people of a romantic temperament like myself. In my case, however, my longing tends to be more geographical than temporal: I miss places more than I miss the past. Seemingly random images of places that, for some reason or other, are dear to me, unexpectedly crop up in my mind with such frequency that I don't give it much attention any more, but, as soon as I do, the unbidden memories become more and more vivid, something inside my chest turns breathing into an activity that requires a conscious effort, and then all I want is to be somewhere else, thousands of miles away. When that happens I often allow myself to drift into nostalgia, as there usually is something beautiful and poetic about it, but when it simply hurts and there is nothing positive about it, I might choose to "dispel the illusion" — or at least try — reminding myself that when I was in those places that I now miss, I often dreamed of being exactly where I am now.

That's one way of looking at it: nostalgia as a kind of cognitive distortion. But there is a much more interesting side to it. Nostalgia has the power to instil beauty and emotional depth into anything it touches, typically, as I've already said, the past or places we've been to, but also experiences we've never had, times when we weren't born yet, and places unknown to us. We would normally call that "longing", but it feels so similar to nostalgia that arguably the difference is merely conceptual, not experiential. Nostalgia is, by definition, about experiences we've actually had, while longing is about experiences we haven't had. Now, can you imagine a kind of emotion, akin to nostalgia and longing, were the object is not experiences that we've had or haven't had, but the experiences we are having right now? In other words, is there any way we instil that mysterious beauty and depth to the here are now? I think we can. How? Read on.

I said above that one way to deflate a bubble of nostalgia is to remind oneself that when the past was present there was nothing great about it, so there is nothing to miss. But we can flip that around and, instead of arguing against the specialness of the past, accept that it is indeed special, and then remind ourselves that the present will one day be the past, and that we will then miss it in the same way that we now miss what from our standpoint is the past. In all likelihood the world in the year 2010 will in 2060 look to us as charming as the world in the year 1970 looks to us now. Think of all those daily things we take for granted or positively dislike: high-street shops, the carpet in your doctor's waiting room, the design of cars and buses, the current state of technology in laptops, mobile phones and various other gadgets, commercial pop music, chavs, petrol stations, buildings from the eighties, video games, the economic downturn. All those things will appear incredibly charming in a hundred years' time. Imagine you could travel back in time to 1969, 1936, or any other time you chose, and just walk around the streets. How would that make you feel? How would you perceive things? Think of the shops, the way people dressed, the cars, the news on the radio, the music people listened to, how they spoke, the latest fashion at the time. I'm sure your mind would be filled with intensely vivid perceptions of all those little things that everyone else took for granted, and that you would bubble over with feelings of excitement, appreciation and affection.

I would like to suggest that we can look at our present world through the same lens, reminding ourselves that a lot of the ordinary objects that we now use will one day be collectibles, that contemporary Ikea furniture will be sold in antique shops, that Eastenders will be the subject of PhD theses, that in a few decades' time there will be a self-conscious revival of the fashion we now take for granted, that the cars that spoil the otherwise perfect photograph of an ancient monument will appear suitably ancient and picturesque to our grandchildren. Hopefully that will transfigure our here and now, if only for a fleeting few minutes, in the same way that nostalgia transfigures the past, only in a more joyous way, for the present is here for us to revel in. This will not change your life — if it does, please, let me know! — but it's an interesting experiment nevertheless.

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 it is becase it reflects my own thinking, or at least one of its many 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 most of 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, which has an uncanny resemblance to a feeling of worship. But — ssh — don't tell anyone I said that.

Mysticism, Nihilism

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 delusional. I'll 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 whatsoever, 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 creating 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 now 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 TV clips from the seventies and eighties on YouTube: the news some random day of 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. You might think that I'm certifiable for saying this, but I also want to claim my right 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 it 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 indeviduals, lives, experiences, stories, memories, etc. will have disappeared completely. There will not even be any clue to suggest 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.

Mozart died on 5th 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 5th December 1791" will always be a true statement. And 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 that is clearly nonsense. 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, and it's little solace. 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 so real and pervasive, 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, infinitely intricate, 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 go through their own unique, endlessly beautiful, painful, joyful and complex stories. Both their stories and ours are written only to be forgotten shortly after death writes their final chapter. 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 that has arisen on it. 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 storytellers 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, were not 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, super-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 currently do, 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 there is. 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, demons and homeopathy. 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 and Pat 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 means 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. In the case of consciousness, however, they cannot even begin to understand the meaning of that alleged 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.

As you might have gathered, I 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 blog 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 thousand years later, there be other kinds of stuff (for lack of a better word) 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" with their prehistoric minds, 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 on 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, a kind of Australian Rumi.

Ana

Ana was my friend Bea's cousin and one of her best friends. A twenty-four-year-old bright and beautiful girl. An only child. A blood clot in her brain sent her into a coma, and then, refusing to respond to drugs and being inaccessible through surgical means, killed her just a few hours ago. I'd never met her, but Bea had told me countless stories about her. She loved her with all her heart, of which she is now left to pick up the pieces and glue them back together. I'd also seen many pictures of her; one of them, a photobooth shot of the two of them together, smiling innocently, always displayed in Bea's purse. She was very keen that we should meet — we would like each other and get along. We never had the chance. Well, we did eventually, yesterday, but all I could meet was her dead body behind a window.

When I learnt that she'd died, after my share of pillow punching I opened my bedroom window and leaned out looking at the few stars that were visible in the urban sky. I tried saying "God". Awkward. Fairy tale. Still, the question came to my lips, "God, should I be grateful?" I tried it in Spanish too: "Dios, ¿debería estar agradecido?" Even though I doubt the existence of the addressee, the question was genuine: if this is what things are like, if best friends die when you need them, if parents can lose their only child, if a young girl can one day be busy thinking about her studies, friends, plans for the future, boyfriends, and be in an irreversible coma the next day, should I still be grateful for life?

I spent some time in the funeral parlour looking at her, mentally repeating her name, recalling all those endearing things Bea had told me about her and how pretty she looked in the photographs I'd seen, wondering what kind of friendship we could have had if we'd been given the chance. That was the most sacred thing I could think of doing, and the situation called for something sacred. Even though her parents are not believers, there was a crucifix standing at the head of the coffin. Would I be able to remember the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary? Would it be comforting to recite them? Yes, I was able to remember them. No, it wasn't comforting. I can try to suspend my disbelief for a while, I can look for solace in a heavenly father and a virgin mother. I'm not, however, willing to call myself or anyone else a sinner and beg for mercy. If God exists I'm sure he wouldn't want me to do that.

This evening I drove Bea and a cousin of hers to the crematorium, which, for some reason, was in a small town some forty miles away. It was closed when we got there an hour before the scheduled time. It was dark, it had rained, it was in the middle of nowhere, and we had to drive several miles to find a place where we could have a coffee to kill some time and keep ourselves warm. That gives you an idea of the mood before what we expected would be some kind of ceremony. We then got back to the crematorium and, after being introduced to her parents and Bea's mum, I realised that I was going to be one of the only six people that would be with Ana in her last moments of bodily existence. I felt slightly inadequate and hoped her parents wouldn't mind me being there. We were ushered from the hall into a small room with two benches that were just about big enough for the six of us. Through a window — again, glass between the dead and the living — we saw two men open the coffin so that we could have a last glimpse of Ana. It was then literally a matter of seconds before the coffin was inside the oven and the curtains were drawn inviting us to leave. No prayers, no speeches. Not a single word. The whole process since we got to the crematorium didn't take more than three minutes. It isn't difficult to see why Bea felt cheated. Both Bea and Ana deserved better than that. I'm not sure what, but anything would've been better. The whole thing was so dreary. Dreary as death I suppose.

I didn't mention it to Bea and her cousin, but as we drove back home in silence I couldn't help but comparing Ana's sterile farewell to the cremations in the burning ghats by the Ganges in Varanasi — wood, fire, smoke, crowds of people, ashes, water, boats, garlands, floating oil lamps — and of burials in small villages in Spain — a small procession, hymns, old women dressed in black, the village priest, people chatting outside the cemetery, flowers, prayers, incense, quiet weeping. Not being a Hindu or a Christian, I'd much rather mourn someone's departure in any those ways. Anyway, does it matter?

...

I'm still constantly thinking of Ana, that friend I never met, and I dare to hope that she knows.

The present moment

This is what best-selling author Eckhart Tolle has to say about the "present moment", starting with the more ordinary claims and building up to full-blown mysticism:

Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do.

The Power of Now, page 20

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

ibid, page 35

The present moment holds the key to liberation.

ibid, page 23

As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggledissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of
quality, care, and love — even the most simple action.

ibid, page 68

When you dissolve psychological time through intense present-moment awareness, you become conscious of the Unmanifested both directly and indirectly.

ibid, pages 133-4

And it's not just Eckhart Tolle. "Being in the present moment" is held by most spiritual schools and teachers as one of the most important principles of spiritual development. And I just don't get it. Well, I do and I don't.

First of all, what do they mean when they say "being in the present moment"? I mean, how could I live in any other moment? I lived in the past, but that was the present moment when it happened, and and will hopefully live in the future for yet a few more decades, but I'll have to wait for the future to become present for me to actually live in it. Whatever you do, you do it in the present moment. Are these spiritual teachers asking me to do what I, by virtue of existing in this universe and being subject to its physical laws, cannot help doing anyway? They might well be; that would be more sensible than hundreds of other things spiritual teachers have asked people to do. But what else could they mean by "being in the present moment"?

We are told to bring our awareness to the present moment, but when they tell us how to do that we realise that, generally speaking, what they are asking us to do is to pay attention to mental phenomena as they arise in the present moment. Once again, how could we possibly bring our attention to mental phenomena that arise in the past or the future? If we can pay attention to them, it is because they are happening, and things can only be happening now. So it seems that what they want us to do is simply pay attention to mental phenomena, to whatever arises in our consciousness. But what else could we pay attention to? Doesn't everything we focus our attention on present itself to us as a content of consciousness? I cannot focus my attention on the book lying on my desk in itself, only on my perception of it. They seem to be asking us to just pay attention, but one cannot just pay attention. We have to decide what to pay attention to. Sounds? Physical sensations? Emotions? The song stuck in your head? The feeling of wanting to scratch your thigh? Random thoughts? Mantras? Sexual fantasies? The unexpected memories of a trip you went on many years ago? The next post you're going to write on your blog? The geometry of the room? When spiritual teachers ask us to stay in the present moment, at least when they are talking about meditation, usually what they are really asking us to do is to, of all the mental phenomena we could pay attention to, stick to those which don't have any clear relation to the past or the future. If you pay attention to the itch in your nose, you're on the fast track to liberation. You can also pay attention to feelings and thoughts, but the moment they are about something that happened in the past of in the future — which is to say, the moment they are connected with things that are important in one's life, which always involve past and/or future — they cease to be an appropriate object of meditation. They distract us from the glorious, eternal, all-encompassing, non-dual present moment, in which there's only room for non-conceptual, spontaneous, impermanent, immediately felt, i.e. meaningless, events, like the transcendent itch in your nose.

After this cynical outburst I must admit that I can see the logic in restricting our attentional efforts while meditating to simple events like physical sensations, though not because they are more in the present moment — and therefore more valuable than any other contents of consciousness — but because it's easier that way. What I see much more nonsensical problematic is the extrapolation of the anti-past and future philosophy to life in general. The usual rhetoric goes something like this:

The past is already gone, gone for good, so there's no point in clinging to it. The future is not here yet, and you don't even know whether it will ever come — every moment could be you last. Past and future are illusory. There's no point in fretting about them. Only the present exists, and you should give your full attention to it. Live in the here and now, and you'll live creative and spontaneously. The present moment is perfect in itself, it doesn't need the past or the future to be completely fulfilling.

That is all very well, and I acknowledge that that way of thinking can be helpful sometimes. There are people whose concern about the future (being afraid of it, making plans, etc.) or about the past (missing it, brooding over it) can prevent them from ejoying life. They could do with some here-and-now awareness. The problem comes when living in the here and now is regarded as the single most important principle of spiritual life, the key to enlightenment, as it often is. I've had people literally gape at me in absolute disbelief when I dared to question that present moment awareness was all one needed in order to lead an authentic and fulfulling life. It is considered by many to be the most evident of self-evident truths, and I honestly don't get it.

We exist in time. Any particular moment of our precious human existence only makes sense if we see it as stemming from the past and projecting into the future. Spiritual teachers will encourage you to stay in the present moment by paying full attention to whatever you are doing: walking, eating, thinking, etc., but any of those things only make sense in time. For instance, walking down the stairs is what connects being upstairs — the past — with being downstairs — the future. If, to take another example, you are breathing consciously, you have to be aware, at least implicitly, of what moment of the inhale-pause-exhale-pause cycle you're at. If you inhale for too long, you explode; if you pause for too long, you go blue in the face. The very act of meditation has a beginning and an end in time, which you or somebody else must keep track of, and it is something you do because you've decided it and learnt how to do it — past — and because you expect to obtain some sort of benefit from it — future — although some would say that you don't, that you do it just because, but even they know that that's not true.

Going to a retreat with a beginning and an end date and scheduled meditation sessions; reading a book on enlightenment that lasts for however many pages, in the accurately timed slot between underground stations A and B, on weekdays only; commiting to a lifelong (or even many-lives-long, according to some) spiritual path. It seems paradoxical, to say the least, that one might do all these necessarily time-bound things in order to learn how to forget about past and future and focus solely on the present moment. Fortunately, our brains, evolved over millions of years to enable us to deal with the real world, will keep bringing us back to our goal and future-oriented mundane concerns, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that the future is some kind of distracting illusion.

And you know what? Despite all I've said so far, I actually think that being as fully as you can in the here and now, unconcerned with past or future, even completely losing all sense of time, can be a liberating, inspiring, mystical, comforting, or simply enjoyable thing to experience from time to time, even daily if you're really into it. But turning that into an absolute, into the highest spiritual good, the key to liberation? I'm sorry, I must be very thick, but I don't get it.

I'm back. Or am I?

It's been seven months since my last post. I'm not quite sure why all of a sudden I didn't feel like writing any more. Was it because of my meagre readership? Did I run out of things to say? A bit of both, I suppose, but there is a more personally meaningful reason. In the last months there have been quite a few topics I thought I could write about, but always thought, "Why keep writing about this stuff?" Perhaps "sceptical spirituality" is not something I identify with so much any more. It feels somehow wrong to describe myself as a sceptic. I'm just reasonable. I'm sceptical only in relation to unreasonable beliefs, but I'm not sceptical as a person. (That's an awkward way of expressing it, but you get my point.)

A few weeks ago I met a girl that claimed to be a medium. She also believed that everything was vibration, and that the table across which she kept casually brushing against me was made up of consciousness. You could say I was sceptical about her beliefs — which is a polite way of saying I thought it was all a load of BS — but that's not because "I am a sceptic", but because she's a nutcase. You see what I mean? I don't want to define myself around the fact that other people believe in strange things. It is them who are gullible, not me who is "a sceptic".

And then comes the "spirituality" bit of "sceptical spirituality". Do I still believe in spirituality? Does it mean anything real at all? As I see it, once you discard unfounded assumptions, appeals to authority, revealed truths, wishful thinking, false centainties, fairy-tale cosmologies and all the whacky stuff, spirituality is reduced to becomes existentialism. (Provisional definition of existentialism: You, the world, life, death, meaning, absurdity, hope, despair. Now deal with that.)

Despite what I've just said, I'm still attracted to spirituality and religion, even if I don't believe a word of it; and I'm very much inspired by the sceptical / secular humanist movement. So perhaps "Scepticual Spirituality" should remain the name of this blog after all. A different matter is whether I will write any more posts. We will see.

This mess is here to stay

There are times — which, for some reason, tend to occur when I'm lying in bed and it's dark, particularly between 5 and 9 in the afternoon — when the possibility of ceasing to exist — i.e. dying and there not being an afterlife — comes to my mind in a particularly vivid and persistent manner, not surprisingly making me rather gloomy and distressed. I call it a "possibility" partly because I don't want to give up hope, and partly because, even from a strictly scientific viewpoint, nobody can be sure that death is the end. The other "possibility", however, seems less and less plausible.

I'm not one of those lucky people that say they don't care that they won't exist any more after they die. "Once you've died you won't be there to be depressed about it, so what's there to worry about?" As if not suffering was all there is to it. The problem is precisely "not being there"! How could I ever be okay with that? It somehow seems that we're expected to be "mature" and have come to terms with it, but I can't help but think of death — if it really is the end — as the greatest unjustice, the cruelest joke.

The other day I was on my lunch break at work, looking forward to a quiet twenty minutes eating my meal and browsing through some of the free newspapers that were lying around. In fact I had decided to take my lunch break earlier than usual so that I could be on my own. Less than five minutes into the break I was sharing my table with a group of five of six people that I know only vaguely with whom I was supposed to have some sort of interaction. That was bad in itself, but then one of them took centre stage when he began recounting ready-made anecdotes selected from the last edition of the Darwin Awards, which are given to people that die for their own misjudgement or incompetence in a stupid and supposedly comical way. "They died when they fell off the roof of a house after having made love on top of it. Hehehe! And then this other woman had her head crushed by a lift when she was peering through the shaft. Hahaha!" I wasn't in a position to speak my mind, but I was positively despising this guy and the moron that answered back with equally tasteful and witty jokes. I don't want to become a self-righteous prig — I must confess that I smiled when I read some of things in the Wikipedia entry on the Darwin Awards — but, I'm sorry, death is not funny. At least not the real death of a real person.

The kind of angst I was talking about resembles the feeling I get with some nightmares. "How the hell did I get into this mess? Something isn't quite right here." Sometimes that strange unease resolves into the realisation that I was only dreaming, whether or not I then wake up. And then I get a feeling that says, "Phew! That was too absurd to be true. Thank God for real life, so realiable and so normal." But there are other times when that feeling is stickier and lingers on even after I've woken up. Knowing as I do that it is harmless, temporary and probably meaningless, it is an interesting thing to experience and observe. By contrast, the I-don't-want-to-die angst is all too meaningful, and it really is no fun. It'll go away — and come back at some point —, of course it will, but not because I realise the mess I was in was only a dream. This mess is here to stay.

Conversations with God

(18/06/09 Note: I've sometimes felt uncomfortable remembering the spiteful tone of this post, but for honesty's sake I've decided to leave it as it is. It would be great to be all-loving and compassionate — or would it? — but I'm not. So, ladies and gentemen, this is me, pissed off.)

A few years ago I bought Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsh, read the first few chapters and didn't find it particularly inspiring, so, as I often do, I literally shelved it. Some weeks ago I decided to give it another go — it is often regarded as a modern spiritual classic after all — but this time in audio-book format. I listened to the whole book and also to books two and three. My verdict? An outrageous pile of crap.

If you're not familiar with it, the book is written, as it name implies, as a conversation between the author and God. That is one of the first problems I have with it: the guy really thinks he was taking dictation from God. That in itself would be enough to chuck the book in the bin, but audio-books demand so little effort on the part of the listener that I carried on anyway. It really isn't worth going into in much detail, but let me just present some of the most pathetic highlights of the book.

On page 44 of the first book God says that believing in him produces "unlimited potential". After some discussion the author mentions "the question of the feeble, the infirm, the handicapped, those who are limited", to which God retorts:

Do you think they are limited, as you put it, not of their choice? Do you imagine that a human soul encounters life challenges -- whatever they may be -- by accident? Is this your imagining?

ibid, page 45

You think that is outrageous? You haven't heard anything yet. (The author's words are in red.)

All illness is created first in the mind.

How can that be? What of conditions contracted from another? Colds -- or, for that matter, AIDS?

Nothing occurs in your life — nothing — which is not first a thought. Thoughts are like magnets, drawing effects to you. The thought may not always be obvious, and thus clearly causative, as in, "I'm going to contract a terrible disease." The thought may be (and usually is) far more subtle that that. ("I am not worthy to live.") ("My life is always a mess.") ("I am a loser.") ("God is going to punish me.") ("I am sick and tired of my life!") [The repetitive use of parentheses is in the original.]

ibid, page 188

So now you know. People suffering from AIDS were infected because they thought they weren't worthy to live. Can you stomach some more of this crap?

And if you've ever taken alcohol into your body, you have very little will to live.

I drink very moderately.

The body was not meant to intake alcohol. It impairs the mind.

[...]

But even some medicines contain alcohol!

I have no control over what you call medicine. I'll stay with my statement.

ibid, pages 191-192

Driking implies having very little will to live. Thinking that you're tired of life is the sort of thing that makes you get AIDS. I suppose beer must, therefore, cause AIDS.

Your life work is a statement of Who You Are. If it is not, then why are you doing it?

Do you imagine that you have to?

You don't have to do anything.

[...]

If "woman who works at job [sic] she hates in order to meet responsibilities as she sees them" is Who You Are, then love, love, love your job, for it totally supports your Self image, your Self concept.

[...]

No one does anything he doesnt't want to do.

ibid, page 186

OK, you tell that to the millions of families for whom scavenging their local rubbish dump constitutes their only means of subsistence. What planet does this moron come from? But it can always get worse:

Hitler did nothing wrong. Hitler simply did what he did. [...] The mistakes Hitler made did no harm or damage to those whose deaths he caused. Those souls were released from their earthly bondage, like butterflies emerging from a cocoon.

Conversation with God, Book Two, page 42

Hitler was created by you. He arose out of your Collective Consciousness. [...] The consciousness of separation, segregation, superiority — of "we" versus "they," of "us" and "them" — is what creates the Hitler Experience.

ibid, page 55

Not to put too fine a point on it, what a fucking prick.

Less outrageous highlights include the revelation that "the US Constitution was God inspired. The same balance of powers should be built in to the new world constitution" (ibid, somewhere between pages 204 and 208) and the unqualified endorsement of psychics and healers of any kind.

Why is this kind of crap even published? How does it become a bestseller? This idiot really makes me angry. If I don't mend my ways I'm going to bring some fatal disease upon myself, and then, in a bout of insanity, I'll go and choke him for suggesting that it's all been the consequence of my having negative thoughts, but that won't be wrong anyway, because I will only have liberated him from his earthly bondage.

The hard facts

Spirituality can be regarded, among other things, as a quest for truth. Even in the case of, say, a Roman Catholic that happens to have reached the same conclusions on any matter of importance -- from abortion to homosexuality -- as the Vatican, we can still make out a desire to find the truth. Our RC friends are only working under the inexplicable assumption that what the Church says has to be right, and then think "backwards" to explain why. They got the method wrong, but still what they seek is the truth.

Not every truth (or every piece of nonsense) is relevant from a spiritual perspective. For instance, I have yet to understand why the integrity of the Virgin Mary's hymen before, after and during birth was ever considered of theological significance. Incidentally, it was in order to have that most relevant of truths explained to me by a teacher at school that, at the age of thirteen, I learned about the existence of such a thing as the hymen. It now strikes me as kind of kinky that that poor old sod of a teacher (an Opus Dei numerary, i.e. celibate and tormented) should be concerning himself with the intimate anatomy of no less than the virginal mother of God.

It seems bizarre that so many believers would hold such fairy-tale dogmas dear and attach so much significance to them, and then disregard what science has to say about life, us, the mind, the universe. It is true that some of the most significant aspects of our existence fall beyond the reach of science, but, if truth is what you're after, it makes sense to at least begin with science, which will provide you with the "hardest" facts available. Regardless of what would be desirable, comforting, beautiful, or coherent with any one religion, science will push ahead uncovering the truest truth that we have so far been able to discover.

If I care about science it's not because it makes me feel all good and spiritual, "look at the universe, isn't it amazing" kind of thing. If anything it makes me feel depressed and existential. The hard facts can be hard indeed. It makes me depressed to dwell on the very real possibility that we owe our existence only the combination of blind chance and natural selection. It makes me depressed to realise how utterly insignificant we are in relation to the spatiotemporal scale of the universe. 13.7±0.2 billion years old, at least 93 billion light years across, at least 70 sextillion (7×10^22) stars in the observable universe. In a way that shouldn't mean anything, and it often doesn't, but when it catches you on a gloomy day, believe me, it isn't an uplifting thought.

It also makes me depressed to think of myself as matter, to realise how fragile our bodies are. Nature, that most idealised of concepts, makes no distinction between us and, say, Mycobacterium leprae. We are both living organisms, evolved by mutation and natural selection, that do what we are "programmed" to do. From this point of view health isn't any more "natural" than disease, normal cell reproduction isn't more natural than cancer. Nature doesn't care. The universe doesn't care. It sprouts galaxies, stars and planets, and some of those planets sprout intelligent, conscious, self-aware beings, some of which sprout existential thoughts like these. But the universe doesn't care. Again, not very uplifting.

This is one of the many "spiritual moods" I can be in. Scientificly-inspired nihilism. Some people like it. The other day I heard Susan Blackmore, a renowned sceptic and zen practitioner, in an interview say that she takes comfort in reminding herself that existence is pointless, or something to that effect. Good for her, I thought, but what do the rest of us do? Feel stupid because pointlessness seems a ghastly possibility to us? I was going to say that it'd be nice if she gave us an insight into how pointlessness, meaninglessness, or whatever her actual words were, can be liberating in any way, but then I thought that, whatever the answer, I've probably heard it a million times already, and it hasn't worked for me.

My position is not to believe in whatever appears to give meaning to existence. Of course not. I want to be honest with myself. I'm interested in the truth. If the truth is that the universe is meaningless, just a set of physical laws and heaps of matter and energy, I want to face that reality, not delude myself. I am open to that possibility at least as much as I am open to the contrary. I just don't think I'll ever find it reassuring. By the way, did you know that mildly depressive people have been shown to be more realistic in their self-appraisals than the rest of the people? Corollary: the truth will make you miserable.

The transcendental shag

Although most dictionaries haven't caught up with it yet, the distinction between religion and spirituality is commonplace nowadays. What's the difference exactly? Most of us would agree that obeying the commandments of the Church (attend Mass on Sundays, go to confession once a year, keep the days of fasting and abstinence, etc.) and the Ten Commandments (the fundamental one being "Sex: don't even think about it"), especially for fear of damnation, is religion according to this popular dichotomy. But what is spirituality then? Hmm ... uh ... Meditation retreats? Yoga? Mantras in Sanskrit? Rumi's poetry? The Dalai Lama?

Why are these things spiritual? Perhaps because they help people achieve inner peace? Not everything works for everyone, of course. Some people absolutely hate meditation, or find the whole Eastern spirituality thing kind of cultish and creepy. Perhaps what works for some such person is writing poems, or gazing at the stars through their telescope. Is that spirituality? If they regard it as such, I would say it is. Apart from inner peace there are other things one might hope to achieve through a spiritual "practice", for example the feeling of "being alive", which can be experienced as a profound existential need. But perhaps observing one's mind or looking at the sky are not the most effective means to bring about that much sought-after state of mind. Perhaps what would really make you feel alive would be something as ostensibly worldly as having a fling or taking LSD or ecstasy in the appropriate set and setting.

Let's be honest. Conventional spirituality is all very well, but what can make you feel more fulfilled, expansive, grateful, and at peace with yourself and the world than spending the night with that person you've been fancying for some time, and then flirted with for some more time? On your way home the next morning, if you still fancy him or her (let's be honest about that too), you bask in a feeling of inner warmth and utter contentment, the world smiles at you and you smile at it, everything is perfect as it is, you radiate peace and kindness. And that is only what you get after the actual experience! Admittedly, it wears off. So what? The effects of meditation also wear off, to the extent that you are encouraged to practice it every day! Meditation has the advantage of always being available, and of not requiring that you go through the hassle of dealing with people, but it won't ever, not in your wildest dreams, give you a state of mind comparable to what I'm describing. If you disagree, perhaps what you need is to get laid please consider why so many well-known spiritual teachers haven't missed the chance to get in their students' knickers when the opportunity presented itself. Of course, the trouble is that, whilst sharing intimacy, affection and sex with someone you fancy is a life-enhancing experience, sexual abuse makes you a psychopath.

Hallucinogens are another way of generating powerful spiritual experiences. That's why they are also known as entheogens: "that which generates God (or godly inspiration) within a person" (Wikipedia, naturally). By contrast to sexual experiences, hallucinogens are readily available at very low prices. If you are seeking spiritual inspiration through meditation retreats or other such means but you haven't tried LSD, you are wasting your time you really are missing out on something big, as big as your mind can hold. Descriptions of mystical experiences achieved through a lifetime of asceticism are indistinguishable from the description of experiences commonly, cheaply, and easily induced by entheogens. With drugs you also get to see dragons, which is always a bonus.

Even if you don't have a full-blown mystical experience, drugs can be great fun, and maybe that's just what you need, existentially if you like -- which is like saying spiritually, isn't it? If you feel the need to calm your mind, to dwell in empty consciousness, or something of the sort, go and meditate. But perhaps you're becoming anxious about that steadily encroaching sense of ennui, and the last thing you need is to calm your mind. Perhaps what you need is to shake up your life before you become a vegetable, to saturate your mind with new experiences. In that case, well, go for it! It would be very spiritually unwise to sit and meditate when what you really need is to go out and get drunk, or whatever it might be.

A combination of, on the one hand, conventional spirituality, and, on the other hand, drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll, works well for many people. A stereotypical backpacker in India, for instance, might chill out smoking charas for a few weeks, then go on an intensive meditation retreat, then go to some full-moon party where she meets some Aussie guy, then travel with the Aussie guy for a couple of weeks until she gets bored of him, then go somewhere else and take some yoga lessons, and so forth. It seems a bit weird to label both the meditation retreat and the full-moon party as spirituality. It might make more sense if, instead of saying that something is or is not spirituality, we talk about a spiritually-informed or spiritually-aware life. What I mean by that is a life in which one listens to their deepest longings and asks the unanswerable questions. If your going to bed with someone is, for example, imbued with a desire for true communion (don't laugh! I'm serious!) and your whole being is shaken by the experience, I would call that a spiritually-informed, er, shag. And If you take an ecstasy tablet with respect (if you see what I mean) and looking forward to a celebration of live, I would call that a spiritually-informed high.

(Am I being outrageous?)

Atheism is fashionable

Atheism has become fashionable. A number of books have been published lately whose aim is to rationally tear religion to pieces and put forward atheism as the only intelligent and honest alternative. Atheism certainly has much to commend it, so I set out to read some of those books and see what they had to offer. I started with Sam Harris's The End of Faith, and now I'm halfway through The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (1 million copies!). I have been halfway through it for about a month already, and that's because, just as it happened with The End of Faith, Dawkins' book leaves me cold.

Once it is established that religion has been the cause of millions of deaths throughout the history of mankind, that creationism is stupid, that dogma is an intellectual suicide, once you realise that God's existence doesn't solve the mysteries of the physical universe while good old science does, once all the well-constructed arguments for atheism have been laid out and I perhaps have agreed with many of them, atheism still seems unconvincing. It's not that religions as a whole is much more convincing, but there are shades of grey, aren't there?

That is one of the weaknesses of these atheist books: that they consider religion as a whole, not doing any justice to the actual diversity of religious experience. It reminds me of those people for whom environmentalists, pro-Palestinians, weed lovers, Basque separatists, anti-arms campaigners and Amnesty International are all one and the same: communists. "These communists." What communists? "Religion." What religion?

In their seeming unwillingness to distinguish between the innumerable varieties of religious experience Harris and Dawkins show a complete lack of empathy towards that very experience. I don't think religion is ultimately about dogma, brainwashing, Islamic terrorists, sexual repression and laughable cosmologies. I think it's about men needing to find meaning to their lives, full stop. On top of that, layers of nonsense have solidified down the centuries and across different cultures, but that doesn't invalidate the primordial need for meaning, but, if anything, shows us how inherent it is to human nature. Science is the perfect antidote for much of the nonsense involved in much of religion, but cannot possibly be an answer to my deepest existential concerns. If you set out to convince people that religion is stupid, you should, if not tell them what to do with those existential questions, at least acknowledge their legitimacy and show that you understand what it feels like to be tormented by them. If you think that knowledge of the structure of the atom and the theory of natural selection will soothe my angst, you don't understand the first thing about religion.

(a week later)

Having now also read Cristopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (extremely interesting book, by the way) and the comment cheekily posted by my friend Álvaro before I'd finished writing this post, my point remains the same. I admit that religion is usually perverse (thirteen years in a Catholic school gave me some first-hand experience I'd rather have not had), but does that mean it is inherently perverse? Going back to politics, how many millions have been killed in the name of political ideologies? How many millions have been indoctrinated or had their most basic freedoms taken away from them? And yet nobody with their feet on the ground suggests discarding politics altogether. In response to some totalitarian ideology, many turn to another totalitarian ideology, like those that, as a reaction to America's global abuse of power, align themselves with all things anti-American: communism worldwide, poor Arab nations, anarchy, you know, the whole lot. Others, more sensibly, reject wickedness (what a lovely word) in politics wherever it occurs, be it right-wing wickedness, left-wing wickedness, Western, Eastern, rich or poor. And then some are apolitical (to the extent that is possible), which is fine by me. But, again, all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of political ideologies don't seem to lead anyone to the conclusion that we should reject politics as a whole. Why do they when it comes to religion?

I know, I know, you can only take this comparison so far. I know politics is an aspect of social reality whether you like it or not. But let me continue with the argument. Despite overwhelming evidence seeming to point to the contrary, politics is not intrinsically about mass murder, nor about manipulating history, nor about bank accounts in Switzerland. It is about ... er ... I don't want to dig myself into a hole here ... it's about something else, something which is good, or neither good nor bad. Likewise, religion, unless you chose to define it thus, is not intrinsically about child abuse, bride burning, foreskin removal, sexual repression, revealed truths, however many virgins at one's disposal in paradise and bloodthirsty gods performing miracles when they are in an interventionist mood. It's about something else, which is good, or neither good nor bad. For me it's about a human being looking at existence, the universe, life, death, and then asking "What is this all about? What am I supposed to do now? Why? How? Who? What?", and setting out to find the answers.

So then religion is not a concept describing a clear-cut reality. You have to decide what you mean by it. Talking of which, there's something that irritates me about Dawkins:

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason

(The God Delusion, page 19)

He concedes that what he calls "Einsteinian religion" is intellectually sound -- "In this sense I too am religious" (ibid) -- but then he disallows the use of the term "religion" to describe that sort of experience on the grounds that it is confusing. What he's saying then is that religion, by definition, is nonsense, and if there is some religion that isn't, we mustn't call it religion because, as previously stated, religion is nonsense. I mean, please ...

My modest dream

A few days ago, rambling around the Internet, I came across this idyllic Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of the reputedly hippie village of Órgiva, in the mountains of Granada, southern Spain. Apart from its remoteness and the beautiful scenery that surrounds it, what enamoured me to this place were the little huts, equipped with "just the bare essentials: bed, meditation seat, altar, shelf, running water, gas stove to heat up meals or tea, wood burning stove, shower and simple toilet", that they rent at an extremely affordable rate to those wishing to do a meditation retreat. [Update 29/10/07: They are actually quite expensive. They've changed their website now, but when I first saw it it made you think that the stated price was per week, when in fact it is per day!] Another thing that I liked was the fact that you can just go on your own, for as long as you like, not as part of a scheduled retreat. You are are not required to attend group celebrations or whatever Buddhist stuff they do. As long as you respect others you're free to live your spirituality as you wish. At least that's what I've understood.

I dream of a place that would be just like that but non-denominational. I mean really non-denominational. A place where there would be no norm from with to deviate, where non-belief, idiosyncratic spirituality and doubt would be not just tolerated, but welcomed wholeheartedly; where I (for this is all about me) could speak my mind and heart out without expecting some enlightened being to save me from my spiritual ignorance. A place where one could find solitude as well as company, where there would perhaps be some group meditations which one would be invited to attend. (Why is it that discipline is so often a essential part of retreats? Is it really a good thing for my spiritual life to be treated like a child at school or a prison inmate only with more obligations?). In this ideal place there would always be someone to talk to, perhaps some kind of resident spiritual counsellor, who wouldn't be delivering wisdom to the ignorant, but providing a warm, accepting and sympathetic ear. There wouldn't be teachers, gurus, hierarchies, truths. Only people, with their yearnings, faith, lack thereof, angst, insights, beliefs, fears, worldviews and feelings. And all of that would be respected and listened to.

I'm not asking for much, am I? Does anyone know of any such place? If not, why don't we create it (apart from not having a penny and not even knowing where to begin)? If you are filthy rich and don't know what to do with your money, why not sponsor my project? We'll look for a nice plot of land in some mountainous area, and we'll build the first humanistic monastery! It would become a sanctuary for those that, while feeling the need to incorporate spirituality into their lives, cannot follow any religions or spiritual teachers any more, only their hearts. Anyone interested? No?

Free will

If the problem with consciousness is how it arises from the physical world, the problem with free will is whether it is even compatible with the laws of physical world. And if the problem with consciousness is what its nature is, the problem with free will is what do we even mean by it. We all take free will for granted: we assume that we are in control of our actions and that we are morally responsible for them. But then the usual assumption of philosophers and scientist is that the physical world is deterministic. That means that for any given state of the universe, if we knew the value of every variable necessary to describe it, or, as Laplace puts it, "all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed", as well as the actual laws of the physical universe, if we fed that into an infinitely large and powerful computer it would be able to calculate with absolute precision every subsequent state of the universe to the tiniest detail. Not only would that hypothetical computer be able to accurately predict the position of such and such galaxies in a millions years, but also the exact movement of the finger of X. pulling the trigger of the gun that will shoot Y., the nerve impulses that will make Z. whisper words of comfort to his friend A. It will predict every crime, every act of love and generosity, every word, every feeling, every effort, every defeat.

Needless to say, that computer cannot possibly be built, but the point is not whether the future is knowable by any intellegence, natural or artificial, but that it is predetermined--already written, as it were. Now, that is not a fact, only an assumption. There is no way we will ever be able to know with certainty whether physical laws alone determine the future. It is assumption, however that most scientists and philosophers take as self-evident reality. Let's join them for a while in their assumption and imagine that we lived in a deterministic universe. Would that imply that we don't actually have free will? Before attempting to provide an answer (which, incidentally, I won't) let's flesh out the problem.

Most of us understand free will as the ability to decide which course of action to take, particularly when faced with situations in which there are conflicting motivations within oneself. That would typically be between self-interest and morality, or between a long term higher good and an immediate lower good. In these situations we feel like we have a choice. Even when the urge to choose the selfish or unwise option is very intense (you are trying to give up smoking but find it impossible to resist the temptation to have another fag) we still feel we have a choice. That is why we call it an urge or temptation, because we have the choice to resist it; otherwise we would call it a reflex. We can always choose whether to fight our base instincts or surrender to them, whether to put in a bit more effort or give up. Even when we surrender, we still have the impression that we could have done otherwise.

That is what we intuitively understand free will to be. However, from a physicalist/determinist perspective what's going on in those situations is not at all a battle of will power (a battle of what power?), but nerve impulses travelling across the brain in strict accordance to the laws of physics; matter and energy mechanistically proceeding along their predetermined course. Cause, effect, cause, effect. Neat, mathematical, inescapable. Whatever you do, fight the battle or give up, it was meant to be, and you couldn't physically have done otherwise, even if you had the impression that you could. Now, this is tricky. Imagine that you do something nasty to somebody, hurt your partner's feelings, behave like an idiot, whatever:

"Why did you do that?"
"It was predetermined, just like everything else. I couldn't have done otherwise."
"Yes, you could!"
"You don't understand. I was physically predetermined to do it!"
"You could have chosen no to do it, and then that would be what was predetermined."
"That's a logical phallacy."
"I don't think so. And even if it was and you were really predetermined to do it, you still have behaved like an arsehole and the least you could do now is apologise."
"No I can't. I'm predetermined not to. Can't you see?"
"You frigging idiot! If you just apologise now then that'll be pretedermined too! Whatever you do you'll always be able to say it was predetermined, so why not do the predetermined right thing instead of behaving like a predetermined cretin?"
"You're being so unfair and judgemental. I would like to apologise, but I can't. All the things I have said to you really were predetermined, as is what I'm saying now. I can't possibly stop the laws of physics determining my thoughts and my actions."
"Okay then, you be a predetermined cretin."

Tricky indeed. It sounds reasonable to say "If everything is predetermined there's nothing I can do to change the course of events, so I may just as well stop striving to achieve what is predetermined anyway," whereas it sounds incoherent to say "Knowing that the future is predetermined I will try my hardest to achieve what is already predetermined." One doesn't strive to achieve what is predetermined; that's ridiculous. One strives precisely to have an impact on what would otherwise be the course of things. And you can indeed change the course of things if you try, but the trying and the change are predetermined as well. You are predeterminedly predetermining the future. Does that sound convincing?

We could also say that there is no contradiction between determinism and free will, or that determinism, even if it is true in some sense, is irrelevant to our lives. How can this be? The reason why determinism sounds so depressing is because it seems to divest us of our free will, but that is just one way of looking at it. For free will to exist we should be free to choose, not the physical laws. But what are we? What is the deciding agent in us? Not our toes or our lungs, are they? It is our mind, our personality, our feelings, our thinking. That is what decides, whether or not we believe in determinism. But then thinking is a function performed by the brain, which is physical and abides by the physical laws. It doesn't make sense to say that we are helpless against the neural and, more fundamentally, physical processes that take place in our brains, because we are those processes. (Or are we?)

Nonetheless, if a robot one day said she is depressed because she is powerless against the predeterminedness of the decisions made by her circuitry, we wouldn't tell her she's being stupid and look for the bug in her software that is causing such misperception--not me anyway. On the contrary, we would sympathise with that longing for true freedom, whatever that is, and acknowledge the emerging existential and moral dimension of that computer. Perhaps the moment one feels free or longs for freedom, something new arises, and our existence takes on a new dimension. It seems that to reduce that dimension to the physical is at least misrepresenting it.

So what if the world was not deterministic and we were really, truly, existentially, morally free? Where would our choices come from if not from the physical activity of the brain? We've already discussed that counsciousness can't be convincingly reduced to the physical (convincingly meaning "in a way way that convinces me", of course), and that since we think and talk about consciousness it does influence the physical world. In other words, there is something non-physical, the laws of which we know nothing about, that has an impact in the (allegedly) otherwise physically explainable universe. If consciousness, something that is obviously not physical, and obviously has an impact on the physical realm, exists, then a non-deterministic view of the universe seems plausible. Perhaps free will is not an illusion, in the same way that consciousness, despite being such a philosophical inconvenience, is not an illusion.

But then an interesting problem arises. Imagine that Ralph encounters a situation in which he must make a decision of ethical significance. He, for example, has the chance to steal some money that would buy him a very nice 10mm lens for his camera. After some inner struggle he opted for the unethical course of action, he grabs the money and leaves the scene whistling a tune. Let's now play God: let's grab the remote control of the universe, go back in time to the moment just before Ralph's temptation, and hit "play". What would he do this time? If we repeat the experiment several times and Ralph always walks away with the money in his pocket, it would seem that he was predetermined to do it--he couldn't have chosen otherwise. But what if he sometimes nicked the money and sometimes didn't? Would that proof the existence of free will or that of chaos? I don't know about you, but if I look at it like this I almost find determinism more reassuring than the alternative (indeterminism, undeterminism, antideterminism?). It seems to me, however, that there's something fishy about this thought experiment. It sounds way too simplistic. And the moment we are playing God in this manner, replaying poor Ralph's predicament over and over again, free will kind of goes down the toilet anyway.

So what do I believe about free will then? This might sound like a cop-out, but the answer that I find more intellectually honest and more spiritually meaningful is that the truth about free will (as well as other existential issues) probably lies beyond what our logical minds will ever be able understand or verify. There are reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic, to believe in one thing or the other, but I think that if you believe in a theory that exaplains free will away you are clinging to illusory certainties.