The Samatha Jhanas

Again, my apologies for the formatting. Go to the link at the bottom if interested.

Via Shaman Sun:

Steps leading to jhana/dhyana
There are 9 steps in concentration training leading to shamatha (pali samatha) as explained in Alan Wallace's "The Attention Revolution." What follows is a brief overivew of this map with 9 steps, 6 powers, and 4 types of engagements featured in Wallace's handbook, with additional notes on terminology from different sources (such as "Mahayanasutralankara" and "Shravakabhumi" by Maitreyanatha/Asanga,"Bhavanakrama" by Kamalashila etc.).

	Step	What is achieved	Power by which that is achieved	What problem persists	Attentional imbalances	Type of mental engagement	Quality of the experience	Involuntary thoughts
1	Directed attention	One is able to direct the attention to the chosen object	Learning the instructions (skt. shruti)	No attentional continuity on the object	Coarse excitation	Focused	Movement	Flow of involuntary thought like a cascading waterfall
2	Continuous att.	Attentional continuity to a chosen object up to a minute	Thinking about the practice (skt. asaya)	Most of the time attention is not on the object	Coarse excitation	Focused	Movement	Flow of involuntary thought like a cascading waterfall
3	Resurgent att.	Swift recovery of distracted attention, mostly on the object	Mindfulness (skt. smrti)	One still forgets the object entirely for brief periods	Coarse excitation	Interrupted	Movement	Flow of involuntary thought like a cascading waterfall
4	Close att.	One no longer completely forgets the chosen object	Mindfulness, which is now strong	Some degree of complacency concerning samadhi	Coarse laxity and medium excitation	Interrupted	Achievement	Involuntary thoughts like a river quickly flowing through a gorge
5	Tamed att.	One takes satisfaction in samadhi	Introspection (skt. samprajanya)	Some resistance to samadhi	Medium laxity and medium excitation	Interrupted	Achievement	Involuntary thoughts like a river quickly flowing through a gorge
6	Pacified att.	No resistance to training the attention	Introspection	Desire, depression, lethargy, and drowsiness	Medium laxity and subtle excitation	Interrupted	Achievement	Involuntary thoughts like a river slowly flowing through a valley
7	Fully pacified att.	Pacification of attachment, melancholy, and lethargy	Enthusiasm (skt. virya)	Subtle imbalances of attention, swiftly rectified	Subtle laxity and excitation	Interrupted	Familiarity	Involuntary thoughts like a river slowly flowing through a valley
8	Single-pointed att.	Samadhi is long, sustained without any excitation or laxity	Mindfulness, introspection, enthusiasm	It still takes effort to ward off excitation and laxity	Latent impulses for subtle excitation and laxity	Uninterrupted	Stillness	Conceptually discursive mind is calm like an ocean with no waves
9	Attentional balance	Flawless samadhi is long, sustained effortlessly	Familiarity (skt. paricaya)	Attentional imbalances may recur infuture	Causes of those imbalances are still latent	Effortless	Perfection	Conceptually discursive mind is still like a great mountain

* Coarse excitation: attention completely disengages from the medit. object. Medium exc: involuntary thoughts occupy the center of attention, while the medit. object is displaced to periphery. Subtle exc: Medit. object remains at center of attention, but involuntary thoughts emerge at periphery of attention.
* Coarse laxity: Attention mostly disengages from medit. object due to insufficient vividness. Medium lax: Object appears, but not with much vividness. Subtle lax: Object appears vividly, but attention is slightly slack.

More here at Dharma Overground.

Anxiety and Procrastination

My apologies for the formatting. Not sure what's going on.

A great article I picked up from Integral Options Cafe.

Meditation has helped me greatly with this, personally. I have always
been a terrible procrastinator, and have relied on various things to
veg-out. The anxiety that comes up when I want to get something
done is the same across the board, felt when I see something I want
to eat, say, or when I have to deal with someone I don't want to talk
to, or approach someone when I'm afraid to. With observation, it
disappears (though this takes practice, and the observation often
must be fairly constant.) This in itself is a large part of my practice.
When I feel anxious, I watch the sensation, and later try and figure
out what about the situation was making me feel anxious so I can
uproot it.

Don't Delay

Understanding procrastination and how to achieve our goals.

by Timothy A. Pychyl

Giving in to feel good: Why self-regulation fails

Focusing on regulating mood can lead to self-control failure in other areas.

We give in to feel good. Give in to what? Food, shopping, drinking, smoking, gambling, and, you guessed it, procrastination. The problem is that focusing on regulating our moods and feelings can lead to self-control failure in other areas.

"Giving in to feel good" is the first part of the title of an important paper written by Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky (complete reference below). Anyone interested in knowing more about issues of the self and self-regulation should search out resources, and there are plenty, written by Dianne Tice or Roy Baumeister, or their students. I have quoted Roy's work before, and I will again given his prolific prominence as a psychologist.

Procrastinators will tell you that the task they're facing (avoiding) is difficult, and it creates bad feelings like anxiety or general emotional distress. Putting off the task at hand is an effective way of regulating this mood. Avoid the task, avoid the bad mood. This is what Tice and Bratslavsky refer to as "giving in to feel good." We give in to the impulse to walk away in order to feel good right now. Learning theorists would even add that we have now reinforced this behavior as the decrease in anxiety is rewarding.

Of course, this short-term strategy has long-term costs. The last-minute efforts that become necessary when we put off the task usually mean a sub-standard job overall (although not always, and this is a classic reward to the procrastinator and very memorable). More importantly, as Tice and Bratslavsky explain, "the final and overall level of negative affect is likely to be even greater than if the person has worked on the task all along" (p. 152). We actually feel worse later!

In fact, earlier research conducted by Tice & Baumeister across two academic terms demonstrated that procrastination caught up to students in the second term. Whereas in the first term, the non-procrastinators were more stressed, by second term the costs of procrastination became obvious for the procrastinators in terms of course performance, stress and illness.

The message of their research is clear. Putting off a task to control immediate mood results in problems later. They demonstrate this across a number of domains as I noted earlier, including eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, shopping and procrastination. When we give primacy to addressing our emotional distress, we usually do so at the cost of self-regulatory failure. They summarize this key idea with,

"People will engage in behaviors that may be self-destructive (gambling, excessive shopping, overeating, smoking, procrastinating) if the behaviors make them feel better in the short term. Thus, emotion regulation may have a special place in the field of self-control, because emotion regulation takes precedence over other self-control behaviors and even undermines other self-control efforts" (p. 154).

The message to each of us should be clear as well. If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we'll undermine ourselves in the long run.

I've been teaching my 3-year-old daughter this. A typical "lesson" goes something like this.

Me: "Sweetie, it's time to pick up your toys before we go."
[Mood now visibly changing.]
L: "I don't feel like it. I don't want to."
Me: "Sweetie, according to Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky it's not the best strategy to focus on your feelings now, it's . . . sweetie?? Where are you?"

Ok, so it is about delay of gratification, and we do (should) learn this early in life. But, the evidence seems to show that we all can (and do) act like 3-year-olds at times.

In fact, we may spend a lifetime acting like a 3-year-old, and rationalizing it to ourselves the whole time. I don't feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.

No you don't.

In fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors. Progress on that task will improve your mood.

For example, new research where introverts are instructed to act extraverted shows that the introverts who act extraverted also feel happier (an affective advantage of extraverts). We'll talk about this more in the near future.

For now, the message is, don't give in to feeling good, get going instead - don't delay!

Reference

Tice, D.M., & Bratslavsky, E. (2000). Giving in to feel good: The place of emotion regulation in the context of general self-control. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 149-159.

Creativity, a baby's world, and happiness.

Occasionally I get behind in my blog reading, and sometimes this creates fortunate coincidences. Like, now.

First, an article in Scientific American about how babies see the world. (both SciAm and the Shambala Sun articles are off Integral Options Cafe.)

"As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. We even know something about how the brain does this: connections from the prefrontal part of the brain both enhance our perception of the attended event and inhibit our perception of other events. And there is a chemical basis for this, too. When we pay attention to an event certain brain chemicals called cholinergic transmitters make a small part of the brain more flexible and “plastic”, better at learning, and simultaneously other inhibitory transmitters actually make irrelevant parts of the brain less flexible.

If you look at baby’s attention you see a related but very different picture. Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more generally “plastic”, more flexible and better at learning than adult brains. Young brains are bathed in the cholinergic transmitters that enhance attention in adults, but the inhibitory transmitters that damp consciousness down haven’t yet come on line. If you put all that together it suggests that babies consciousness is more like a lantern than a spotlight – that it illumines the entire world around them.

Finally, you can think about what adult experience is like when we put ourselves in the same position as babies. When we travel for instance, we are suddenly surrounded by an unexpected new world and, instead of just focusing on the important things, we take in lots of information at once. That actually makes us more vividly conscious of our surroundings, not less. I think that for babies, every day is like first love in Paris."

Also, on play and pretending:

"...they seem to use their imagination the way that creative scientists do. One of the big new ideas about how babies learn is that they use what computer scientists call “Bayesian inference”. That means that you imagine lots of different possibilities and test how likely each possibility is.

When we have a theory of the world, we can not only say what the world is like now, we can also explore what would happen if the world was different. We can ask what would happen, for instance, if there was a rocket that traveled close to the speed of light. In fact, the ability to imagine these possibilities is one of the biggest advantages of understanding how the world works. Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. Its actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention."

In a second article from Scientific American, researchers look at a way to increase creativity, and find that making something psychologically distant from oneself (anything not happening here, now, and to oneself is psychologically distant) increases creativity around the problem, which makes sense. How playful would you feel if you were trapped in a room slowly filling up with water? You'd probably be freaking out.

It also accords with the candle study, explained in the video below from TED talks:

Basically, people have to figure a simple task out. There are two groups, one given money if they complete it quickly and one not given any money. Classically, you'd expect the group given money as a reward to do better, but they do worse. See, the task they have to do involves some creativity. Giving people money apparently takes away some of their playfulness. (The talk is actually on motivation and the twenty-first century work place. I might talk about it in a later post, it's good.)

One more from TED: something I've put up before:

Finally, an article from the Shambhala Sun on happiness.

Now we can get to the point. It seems to me that the mode of consciousness described in the first article is not unique to babies, we're just educated out of it, at least when we're facing concrete and tangible problems, but we have access to it at anytime, and can certainly train to enhance it (the guys on "Who's Line is it Anyway"come to mind). Of course, the restricted, focused consciousness is just as important, we'd never become adult without it, but we're losing something when we ignore it, something that (as the first video explains) is increasingly needed in our world, and which might be linked to happiness. Or perhaps over-reliance on the focused method of consciousness, the "get-the-loot" consciousness, as the article puts it, causes us to ignore those million little things that are uplifting in the day.

Indeed, though the article in the SS doesn't present it in this light, we need both of these kinds of consciousness to be successful, and in meditation are training both: a simultaneous rigid focus on an open and innocent ("virgin", the article says,) state-of-mind. This could be why both the first and the last article are concerned with paying attention. Children are paying attention to everything, and if you're unhappy, maybe you're just not paying attention.

But children are not enlightened, nor are they all-in-all more conscious than adults (well, healthy adults.) The combination of the two is something attained through growth. As the SS article says, the "get-the-loot" mindset is always looking for something exterior, an experience or thing, while happiness comes from the inside. Babies don't have this, they aren't differentiated from their environment yet.

Remove the pillars of your belief in this world and look around a little bit, at least every once in a while, I guess is the take-home message.

Meditative visuals when tired. Lucid dreaming?

Recently when I have been tired I have noticed a fascinating phenomenon- I am not usually a visual person, that is, it is sometimes difficult for me to maintain mental images in my head. However, I have been meditating quite a lot recently, and when I have been tired, especially if I am not going to sleep but just resting my eyes, I have been paying attention to the shapes and colors playing behind my eyelids. The greater my focus, and greater my relaxation, (I am often meditating casually as I rest) the more real they appear, like the images that can guide you into dreams directly from waking, something I have frequently experienced since the time I was young. I have either been waking up to jot it down or falling asleep, but my goal is to be able to enter lucid dreams from this state, which I'm pretty sure is possible even though I have been as yet unable to control them.

On "Enlightenment Therapy" in the Times.

As soon as I saw the title, Enlightenment Therapy, I knew I was going to blog about it, I just didn't realize it'd take a few days to digest, or that it would be so personal. After all, it's about the marriage of Freud and the Buddha; what integral blogger could resist?

Reading the article, though, there were a few things that hit home, and I put it down to think it over. Again, this is a fairly personal post, just a warning.

There are two main characters in the story, The zen master/ patient, and the zen student/ therapist. Their names are Lou Nordstrom and Jeffrey Rubin, respectively.

The first hint that this might be a challenging piece for me was '“The agonizing absence of internal unity made me suicidal,”' I've never been suicidal, but boy do I know some about the agonizing absence of internal unity. I always feel torn. Only rarely do I get a glimpse of something I'm finding other people take for granted. I have a sense of self, of course, of being a separate being (I am human,) but rarely do I ever know just exactly what it is I want. It turns out that Mr. Nordstrom and I share quite a few personality traits, and the further I read the more I became worried that I was falling into the same trap that Nordstrom had.

'He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity.' Unfortunately, I have not spelled out yet my working theory of mind, so bits and pieces will have to be explained as I come to them. In any case, I do the same thing. The drama in one's mind is created by oneself,* and so while I was never physically abandoned by my parents, I have always been terrified of abandonment, rejection, separation, call it what you will. The solution? Effacing myself, preemptively abandoning, rejecting, separating. Afraid that the world would reject the "real" me, I just don't speak up, giving no opportunity for what I want so badly, to be accepted, valued, heard. Again, psychological drama.

'“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me,” he told me last fall. “I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed...I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real...I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life.' Again, check, and check.

'...that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. I want to be seen for what a strange fellow I am. As a young guy I got off on the sense of being different. There was some arrogance and elitism in it. The positive spin of the surreal nature of my childhood was that there must have been some special destiny for me. To give up tenure, to become a monk, I embraced an aggrandized narrative.' While some of the words I'd use are different, the feeling, again, is the same, "embracing an aggrandized narrative." There's the desire to be noticed and accepted as being different, because special.

“Re-entry is difficult,” Nordstrom admitted. “I feel I’m going to be blindsided — that I’m being set up. The record suggests that’s what tends to happen to me.” [That is, entering life emotionally is just begging to be hurt.]

“Do you hear your language?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what tends to happen to me.”

“What do you hear — that I sound like a victim?”

“There’s no agency in there — to see that is to open to the possibility of feeling less the victim in your life.” [Perhaps why I'm overly drawn to the opposite archetype, like James Bond. The ultimate anti-victim. There's more than this though, there's also the fear of agency, the fear of my own ability to do things.]

“I know this intellectually. I’ve had this sense of being a victim, a marked man for a long time — marked for bad things and marked for great things.” [I have never felt marked for bad things, though I certainly have always felt marked for great things. Reading this, though, makes me realize that yes, actually, I have always felt fated to meet some wretched tragic end. In my fears, by bloody violent murder at the hands of a random stranger, or by plane crash, mostly. Of course, the one must have its reciprocal. Silly me not to have connected them.]

“I wonder if that isn’t a compensatory fantasy which hides a deeper pain. It’s not that ‘I was horrifically abandoned, unconscionably neglected,’ it’s ‘I have a special destiny.’ ”[This is harder for me because, again, I was never abandoned, I just feel that way. I suppose it's the same narrative, though: I have been overlooked and ignored, but everyone will see in the end how big of a mistake that was when I turn out to be the best Baseball Player / Doctor / Author / Musician / Artist / etc. etc. (fill in fantasy of the year. Some, of course, are fairly outdated.)]

“Yes,” Nordstrom said. “As a boy I consciously constructed this idea that I’m in a situation that makes no sense whatsoever. The only meaning I can glean from it is that there may be some kind of completely different life in store for me. There will be a compensation. I am owed.” [So, for this life to make sense, there has to be a surprise ending. The narrative itself assumes the legitimacy of the ego's drama. They are epiphenomenal, sides of the same coin, or cube. 'I was hurt, but if I bear this hurt, endure it, in the end I'll get my reward.' Notice the words "consciously constructed." Without the original slieght, though, the narrative makes no sense, and one's life has been wasted. The older and older one gets, the more rests on this false narrative. Quite a lot in here, one of these days I'll get that theory of the mind up.]

“What comes to mind with ‘owed’?”

“I’m entitled. That feeling got me through high school. It’s why I excelled at sports and studies.”
[Opposite for me. It's what caused me to coast through on abilities without any work, because I didn't have to. I'm me, after all, and in the end, oh you'll see.]
“It also killed you.”

The thought hung in the air.

“Why do you think I say that?” the psychoanalyst said.

“Because it’s true?”

“No, because it’s led to a passive detached relation to your own life. It’s robbed you of your human birthright. It’s like you are waiting for Godot. It keeps you in a virtual life. Do you get that? Do you feel that emotion?” [This is where the similarity really battered me. Just around the bend is the miracle that's going to change my life. It's something I'll stumble on, not work for. I've always been this way (until recently, more later.) There's always something hidden up the road, past a bend, that is, it's never something I'm concerned with at the moment, of course, that's going to super-duper change my life.]

'“I don’t know why I constantly deprive or deny myself positive experiences,” Nordstrom said after a while. “There is a perverse self-destructiveness. It’s like the theme from the movie ‘The Pawnbroker’: if my life is in good shape, then my history makes no sense. . . . When I broke my hip the first time, before I fell, I thought, Don’t move, turn on a light, then I thought, Screw it, and I fell.”' Again, the narrative (history in Nordstrom's words) has to be true, because if it's not, one's life makes no sense. If one's life is miserable, the narrative, and the ego it reinforces, makes perfect sense.

'“Stay with that ‘screw it’ voice: are you saying nothing that happens to you that’s good is going to make a difference?”

“There is something I know that I really want that I’m never really going to get. It may be mother. It may be mother.”

“Maybe your pessimistic stance is a defense against that shattering realization. Maybe you see your life as a Faustian bargain: I will not have hope demolish the hope that one day what I want will come.”

“My least favorite word in the English language is ‘hope.’ ”

“And in the meantime you’re knee-deep in it!”'

The ego is a mesh of paradox, that's why it survives so well. Tackle it one way, well, it wasn't ever like that anyway. Nordstrom rejects hope of ever getting what he really wants, because to get it would negate the hope that is that final reward. Hating hope is the surest sign of how dependant you are on it.

Reading this article threw me out of whack, to say the least. Was I fooling myself? Was I only trying to do in a more aggressive and radical way exactly what I was trying to cure myself of? Sitting on this a few days, I've reaffirmed what I've been doing, though this article was certainly a wakeup call. Perhaps because I was born later, perhaps because my childhood was not traumatic, but I'm not running away from life into meditation. Far from it. The further I've gotten along in my self-directed course of growth, the richer and fuller my life has become, the more I've taken responsibility for my life and its direction, the more active I've been able to be to pursue and complete real, practical goals, and the happier and more emotionally engaged I've been. I have not been doing what Nordstrom did, quite the non-opposite. Rather than throw myself into meditation as a solution, or rely only on analytical accounts of the mind, I've been practicing meditation to give me more energy and insight into the ego so that as I heal it I can return more mindfully to meditation, and so on and so forth.

Of course, the basic structure of my ego remains, and I haven't fully reconciled its contradictions in health. I'm thankful that this article revealed this to me, and I'm thankful to you as well, whoever is reading. Even if nobody, getting all of this onto (electronic) paper is extremely helpful. It's real.

'Rubin was convinced that “the marriage of Buddha and Freud” would benefit both disciplines. “When you combine the best of Buddhism and psychoanalysis,” he told me one day last winter, “you get a full-spectrum view of human nature focused on both health and spiritual potential as well as on the psychological forces we struggle with and the obstacles we unconsciously put in our way.”'

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*That is, while you can always draw external correlations to prove your fears, a different person would draw different correlations from the same external conditions. Beaten by a mother, one child develops to fear abandonment, another to fear loss of control, and both point back to the same event.

The Silent Gap

An important part of Integral Theory, in short:

Reality is unified (A-dual,) mind creates duality. This can be experienced, and is the gateway to all esoteric knowledge.

A good introduction to this as a meditation here. The music is a little iffy, and the guy also kind of funny, but if you do what he says, you ought to figure out what's being talked about.

While most people identify with the voice in their head, they don't realize a) there are usually at least two competing voices, especially about anything important and b) you are not these voices, but the observer of them. The more and more familiar with the stance of the observer, the more and more you identify with it and disidentify with the voices in your head, the more rich and full your life will be, and the easier it will be to see just how insane and unreal the mind is on a day to day basis.

Peter Fenner, Radiant Mind

Peter Fenner gives about as good, simple and natural an explanation to the space of consciousness as just about anyone I've come across.

A short dialogue, here.

God and Science, and Daniel Dennett

***10-9 See an update to the below (concerning visualizing Dennett's theory) here.

I am using as a jumping off point for this post this interview of Daniel Dennett in the Magazine "Search."

From the article:

"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."

Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself. This summary is unfairly short, as Dennett says, so for those of you interested in reading more, you can go here, a site at Tufts University with many articles by Dennett that make this point more clearly and more in depth.

I think that Dennett is 100% right here, and yet I think he makes the same mistake that everyone else makes when talking about religion (which, while the quote above doesn't directly deal with, the article does,) confusing religion with the existence of "God." In the non-dual view of being the idea of a separate "God" that is above and beyond the world, transcendent to it, is seen as laughably impossible in the face of the fact that separation is a conception, an appearance. This, substituting "God" for "consciousness" and "the events of the universe" for "the activities of the neural system" could well give a post-post-modern conception of God. This, I think, is an idea that is emerging, and I do not think it conflicts with anything that Dennett says in this article, or the scientific materialists, though they would all dislike the word "God."

When he says that everything is open to the investigations of science, he is perfectly right, and when he calls "Darwinism a 'universal acid,' cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought," he is also right. But, I still claim that he is wrong in rejecting religion. The spirituality (a word I dislike) of the future does not reject science, nor its findings. The spirituality of the future does not rely on dogma or myth or literal interpretations.

"Consciousness has arisen from the unwilled, unordained algorithmic processes of natural selection," or, in other words, not from the hand of God. Again, there's nothing to disagree with here, it is the historicity of the dogmatic and literalist claim that God is a real "thing," like a toaster, that necessitates the high board of science. God does not perform magic, and any God worth believing in would not need to.

When God is viewed or understood as simply "being," the metaphors of religion make a lot more sense, even ones as clearly literalist as "God created the world." Well, yeah, the world is here, so, being created it. Of course, the wording of this favors the mythology of God, that some giant man like thing created the world in the way you or I would draw a picture. Created here could be understood better as "the flood created a problem for getting through the center of the city." It's not like the flood meant to do this. It's impersonal.

Is God impersonal? Yes. And no. You're a person, aren't you? So God is personal. But the totality of everything, this is impersonal.

The irony is that, in attacking the idea of a separate unitary self-center of consciousness, Dennett is affirming something that the world's esoteric religions have said since the time of the Buddha, and perhaps earlier in Vedanta: "you," do not exist. What you think you are is only a thought, and the reality is much simpler than that.

When Dennett says that there is no truth that religion can claim as its own without science, he is both right and wrong. In the exoteric sense, he is right. Science has domain over everything in the material world. But in the esoteric sense, science has nothing to do to prove or disprove being. It can do neither, being is self-evident. But what it is, what we are, is so obvious that we miss it constantly. As Einstein said, the fish will be the last one to discover water. In the way I think Dennett is using the term, as in "objectifiable exterior phenomenon," I think he is incorrect. No matter what science gets to about the happenings inside one's brain, you cannot experience what someone else experiences. Even if you could "see" what someone else were seeing, or "feel," it, it would be different, because "you" are doing it, with all the different history and the different system for experience you have. Experience is not falsifiable, nor is it provable. This is precisely beyond the realm of science, and something which religion has always dealt with, in both exoteric (mythological) and esoteric (contemplative) strains.

The problem is that anything "non-scientific" gets lumped in with "mythology," or, to put it slightly differently, any attempt at describing interiorality is seen as necessarily involving supernaturalism. There may be no "privleged center" in consciousness, something, again, esoteric branches of religion would be familiar with, but that doesn't discount subjectivism itself. The objectivist description of the world, perfectly legitimate at that, is not an explanation, and cannot exist without subjectivity. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? What's in a mirror when no one's looking?

This is not to say that reality needs intelligent aware and conscious beings, far from it, it is just to say that without subjectivity, there is no objectivity. Obviously this uses the word slightly differently than the conscious subjectivity we're used to , but it's none the less valid.

The direct experience of being without an object, the experience pointed at by the esoteric traditions, is shrugged off by science as being equivalent to boogeymen.

There is this fundamental problem between duality and what Dennett argues, that there is no Cartesian duality, and yet I would say that they are only two metaphors for looking at the same thing, like the heads and tails of a coin are actually still both only parts of the coin. There is an interiority in consciousness. But this does not make it dual, since it is entirely inseperable from the exterior occurances of consciousness. They do not arise separately, and they are not independent.

In a Vedantic sense of enquiry (or, for that matter, Cartesian,) the only thing that cannot be doubted, that can actually be proved and believed, because self-evident, is being itself, or, in the human mind, awareness of being. What was before the big bang? Whatever it was was the only thing real, the only thing unchanging, the only thing not subject to the laws of impermanence. What was it? Nothing. Nothingness. This is simultaneously everything, it is all that is real. And, the world is this as well. In the Hindu formulation, the world is illusory, Brahma alone is real, the world is Brahma. The argument between Cartesian duality and materialism is missing the point. Against the Cartesians, there is nothing special and separate, no "privliged center." There are not two things. But, against the materialists, that nothingness is not different from existence, is existence itself, and is the consciousness, the open space within which all else happens, and, it is not material.

There is a new world view emerging, one that believes as strictly as Dennett does in the rigorousness of science, and yet makes room equally for the interior experience of consciousness, the subjectivity that is impossible to describe or prove or disprove, except in the first-person perspective, where it is self-evident. I am. I have no proof that you have an interior, but at the very least, I am, or, rather, am-ness.

This worldview, as Dennett says, must pass through the tests of Darwinism, and science. The Religions of the future cannot be ones that believe in the things science shows are impossible. Oddly enough, believers of one mythological system find others absolutely ridiculous, and yet this does not shake their faith in their own ridiculous stories in the least bit. Lao Zi was not 900 years old when he was born. Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth. There is no Garden of Eden, especially not one that looks exactly like a 17th century English manor's garden.

The myths are beautiful, but they are not true. They are stories, rife with meaning, and are as such not exactly fiction, but they are not true.

The worry about science is not really that it can explain God, but that it can explain God away, and it has explained away quite a few things that believers in former times thought of as being sacrosanct, that is, they thought of as providing a pillar for belief of God, but it can never explain away being itself, which is the ground for all of the mythological religions, and the contemplative. The myths arose because there is no rational explanation for any of this, and again, science is really describing things more than explaining them, at least at the deepest levels. But there's no need for words in the contemplative experience. There's no room for them. Whatever form religion takes in the future, to be legitimate, will be centered on the contemplative.

This, it should be noted, is a far cry from what is called "new-aged spirituality" (a term from which my prickling disgust for the word "spirituality" likely comes.) New-aged "spirituality" is a reversion to beliefs in magic, more or less.

Another article, by Sandra Blakeslee, in the magazine "Science and Spirit," on the neurological basis for spiritual experience, highlights what I have been talking about.

There is still an over-reliance on the external viewpoint, and the point of view (I believe mistaken) that these external and objective interactions cause the experiences rather than correlate with them, but it is an improvement on several things. The structures of one's internal consciousness certainly impact your spiritual experience, so, where a Muslim will see Mohammed, a Christian may see Christ, even though what is happening to them is, at its base, and neurologically speaking, the same.

Of course, the science which crows so loudly (and correctly) as it trumpets, say, the fossil record, also trumpets when it sees neurological signs of meditative activity, as if the experiences undergone can be explained away by science. Yes, breakdowns happen, and this is what the meditative traditions have always asserted. The fact that there's a biological basis for this should have been obvious except for those that thought the literal hand of god reached down from his (likely rather large) throne in the sky and touched one's forehead with a golden finger. Of course, I am downplaying that this viewpoint may be prevalent, but still, the main idea is that the scientific proof of different and abnormal brain states during these activities certainly does not reduce them to being no more than "fireworks in the brain." But, it is not that the biological activity creates this, it is that the release of the constraints and constrictions of one's mind unveils this ever-present experience of reality. It is the same as the Buddhist tradition has always maintained; you're not reaching enlightenment, you're getting rid of everything else. Or, if your mind is a room, you don't need to add furniture to get what you want, you need to throw it all out of the room. Or, as Meister Eckhart wrote, "If you empty yourself, God has no choice but to fill you."

And, of course, there is no "God," as such.