And yet, it moves

Something that I’ve been struggling with for a while is the idea that consciousness is just a physical function. Like farting, but different. This is the logical conclusion of the ideas in “Reincarnation, a critical examination” a book I read on anticant’s recommendation.  It’s a book I found to be cogent, coherent and all too probable.

For the sake of amicable discourse let us accept that I couldn’t find a logical flaw in the book’s argument that consciousness is a function of the brain and that there is no evidence for any part of us surviving after death. You are of course as entitled to your own views about the immortality of the soul as I am; I am not going to try to persuade you of anything one way or the other and I’d appreciate it if you’d show me the same courtesy in return.

I’ve been struggling with the idea that I’m just a by-product of my own existence ever since I read the book, and today I could finally articulate it :

Consciousness - our sense of self - isn’t an entity in its own right, it’s an effect, a result, it is ends rather than means. In fact, it’s less than that: it’s a side-effect, a by-product. As the DNA store puts it: DNA is life, the rest is just translation.

It is lurchingly disorientating to realise that consciousness is  incidental. Dawkins of course is explicit that evolution is about survival on the level of individual patterns of genes not on the level of entire genomes, still less on the level of consciousness or any other abstract idea. I’ve been able to accept that we are Bede’s bird, flying though the firelit hall out of darkness and back into darkness, but I find it hard to hold on to the idea that the bird itself is, as I said, a side-effect.  I’ve been like a dog trying to catch its own tail for weeks.  I find it almost as hard to understand this idea (and not just the words it’s expressed with), as I’d find it to see the back of my own head without a mirror.

This is an idea as subversive, maybe even more subversive, than the heliocentric solar system, and it’s an idea of the same kind.

Oh well.

Brief candles

I am feeling giddy at the moment.

I commented in a previous post that “The only school of “alternative” thought which I have not yet found to be intellectually undermined is the Buddhist approach to re-incarnation” and Anticant obligingly provided me with an antidote. I’ve been reading “Reincarnation: A Critical Examination” by Paul Edwards on and off since it arrived.

I’ve always thought a Hereafter was at least possible, and for a lot of my adult life I’ve considered it to be probable. There’s internal coherence to the Hindu and Buddhist world views, but they fall down when you test some of their underlying assumptions using nasty practical empirical science. (The one world-view that has never made any sense to me whatsoever is paradise, judgement day, heaven and hell). So during my adult life, my position on life after death veered from the conclusion that reincarnation made absolute sense to dragging it along like a comfort blankie while I got on with my real life. I think I even put Buddhist down on the 2001 census. I certainly wasn’t going to put Jedi.

I like Buddhism. I like its practicality. The techniques it teaches, such as meditation, produce real quantifiable changes in the people who practice them. I like the idea of the soul taking several lifetimes to explore different things. I like the idea of karma, that every action has a consequence and that you cannot escape the consequences of your acts. (This is very different from the judgement / punishment view of Christianity, where there is an external deity keeping score. Karma as consequences is more mechanistic and simpler, like a law of nature rather than the whim of a petulant despot). I look around me and I can see karma working on a small scale, and I was comforted by the idea that it worked across lifetimes too. I like the idea that I chose my own parents, that I might get a second chance with lost loves, that I might yet be a mother, that I can catch up next time with what I don’t do this time. I’ll miss Buddhism, but oddly enough I am more interested in it now, not less.

Buddhism, or a Buddhisty theory of reincarnation, provided answers to the questions that I asked, and the aforementioned comfort blankie of course.

Edwards argues simply and fairly clearly that:

1. there is no credible evidence for reincarnation and even the best cases evaporate into delusion, wishful thinking or fraud under close examination
2. the mind requires the brain to exist, and consciousness does not survive the death of the brain

Edwards also deals with things like Near Death Experiences, (feelings of warmth, love and total understanding, culturally specific spiritual figure at the end of a tunnel of light, etc); Astral Travel (which he debunks as bunk); remembered past lives, (which never produce information not available in this one), and so on.

Ultimately, of course, it comes down to a matter of belief, but religion is essentially a ritualised version of “here be dragons” and as science maps out more and more of the unknown, the remaining dragons are left balancing on smaller and smaller islands. Edwards argues that the dragon of reincarnation no longer has a foot to stand on. Being an Oriental Dragon, it has no wings and cannot fly. Or that’s my metaphor, and I’m sticking to it.

I am trying to absorb various truths. When I die, I’ll go out like a candle. There are no second chances, if I don’t do it this time then I won’t get to do it at all. The people who I know who’ve died have stopped. And the big one: life really is a bitch and then you really do die.

As well as the truths, I now have all sorts of other questions swirling in my mind. How can morality have merit if it is merely a human artefact? What practical meaning remains to the word “spirituality”? What merit is left in Buddhism if you take out reincarnation? Does this mean the Dalai Lama isn’t cool any more?

Oddly there is one question I am pretty clear on which is why are there no pre-20th century cultures which are entirely irreligious?

It seems clear to me:

1. that religions provided creation myths and an explanation for why stuff happened and
2. that religious belief provides just enough of an advantage to individuals and societies in times of crisis for there to have been a very slight selective advantage in a strong religious faith.

Dawkins is such an evangelist for atheism that I rather like the idea of religion providing an evolutionary benefit. It seems highly likely to me that dogs have gods.

At the moment I veer between two contradictory feelings. Sometimes I am shocked by how dramatically the stakes have been raised: as the the saying goes, “there ain’t no justice, just us”. We cannot rely on any external checks and balances to iron out the world’s problems. If we don’t sort it out here and now, then it won’t be sorted out, and that’s not all right. And then I veer towards nihilism: in the long run we are all dead and nothing is remembered. How can justice matter if the victims can neither know nor care?

It is this spinning around which is making me giddy.

---

Edwards’ book, incidentally, is irritating in a number of ways. It is printed on very odd paper and the whole thing turns into two parallel tubes when you are reading it. It is appallingly badly proof-read, which is unforgivable in a second edition. He promises to discuss various subjects such as childhood prodigies and extremes of talent, but doesn’t, and he fails to discuss Out of Body experiences at all, refering the reader in toto to Susan Blackmore. It is however also fun, witty and sarcastic. I just wish it had been better edited. Or edited at all, really.

The devil and the deep blue sea

We were discussing religion over a curry, as one does. The one I discuss religion with (and have curries with, for that matter) expressed the view that religion is incompatible with science. He is reading Dawkins at the moment. NLPer that I am, I started challenging the generalisations: “All religions?” “Entirely incompatible in every way?”

What bugs me about evangelical atheists, and I’ve drunk wine and broken bread with a few in my time (secularly of course) is that they assume that all religions are based on The Book and slag them off accordingly. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all monotheisms and in that direction - if you ask me - madness lies. The problem with monotheisms is the dualities they set up: Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Heaven and Hell, Sheep and Goats, God and the Devil. Someone once said to Abraham Lincoln “I am so glad that God is on our side” to which he replied “I don’t set my sights that high, Ma’am. All I hope is that we are on God’s side”. Bush and Blair and Bin Laden all know god is on their side, and so they have far more in common than they have differences. I’ll stop wandering off in that direction now, before get so enraged I forget to breathe.

I know very little about Hinduism which seems polytheistic (though the one I was having curry with knows a bit about it). I know barely more about Buddhism and Taoism, which are atheistic. Isn’t that a thought to conjure with? An atheistic religion. A religion without a god. Roll it around your mind’s tongue. Taste it, savour it, find out what you think.

If you strip god out of religion you are left with a whole load of other stuff which (because it is my post and I can do what I like with it) I am going to put broadly into four categories:

Societal

Ceremonial / Rites of Passage / Social glue / Social contribution / Ritual

Explanations

Creation myth / Higher purpose / Why bad things happen / Why are we here

The supernatural

Spiritual practice / The shamanic / Good luck charms

Social control

Ethical precepts / Moral guidance / Greater cause

The one that interested me the most, as we were discussing it over our curry, was the Shamanic. This is all mixed up with ritual, energy, altered states of being, sexual power and the power of the personality. In the 60s and 70s Rock stars were our shamans; in the 80s there was even a band which took the name. I’m not sure who our shamans are now, but I am pretty sure that the popularity of fantasy films appeals to our need for the shamanic. Looking at that list of nouns again - ritual / energy / altered states / power - maybe terrorists view themselves as shamans. I dunno. Which reminds me. The obvious thing that that is missing off that list is Sacrifice, which is common to so many religions. I’m not sure where it fits though.

It is interesting to see what is happening now to those areas of human life.

The societal stuff (ceremony, rights of passage, social contribution) is pretty hollow without religion. Don’t get me wrong, it is all much better done with integrity by atheists than with hypocrisy by those who claim to be religious, but I am not sure how well atheists do it. I’d rate the ceremonial of a Russian Orthodox Eucharist over the Oscars any day of the week. Mind you, I prefer my schools, hospitals, orphanages and childrens’ homes to be run by the state, so maybe I am arguing myself out of that one after all.

Structures and explanations. This is the scary one. This is the one that gets Dawkins’ blood boiling. “Where is the evidence?” the atheists cry. And they are right of course. There is no evidence that the world is the result of Egyptian gods masturbating or of great cows licking the ice, and plenty that it isn’t. Sane Christians yield this ground gracefully admitting that the world is not flat and does in fact go round the sun. Insane ones promote something which is neither intelligent nor design and call it science. (Breathe, Aphra, remember to breathe). Unfortunately these follies lead evangelical atheists to throw the baby of spiritual practice out with the bathwater of creationism. Or something like that.

The supernatural. This one is trickier than it looks. It’s a mixture of stuff which has quite clearly demonstrable effects such as meditation, and other stuff which is just wishful thinking. Add in the human need to seek patterns, mix it with the human inability to estimate odds, and sprinkle with the human responsiveness to spontaneous hypnotic suggestion, and you end up with all sorts of nonsense like numerology, astrology, Bach flower remedies and (goddess help us all) spiritual channelling. Scientists can now see the parts of the brain which fire off when someone is having a spiritual experience. The question is, of course, whether the brain is responding to an external stimulus analogous to its response to sounds, or whether the sparks are flying at random or for some electro-magnetic or chemical reason. The fact that stuff like meditation works doesn’t make it spiritual any more than the fact that the world exists proves that it was hatched out of a giant egg.

Social control. This is the one where religion leaves the biggest gap behind it. Ethical precepts just aren’t the same if they aren’t backed up with violent weather, rugged mountain scenery, Charlton Heston and the threat of everlasting damnation. (This is the place where I point out that I rather like the idea of terrorists achieving martyrdom and waking in Paradise to find that their sherbet will be delivered by 70 Ann Widdicombes). We’ve lost our moral compass and don’t appear to be able to adopt irreligious ethics in the way the Greeks did. They took pantheistic shamanism to blood-thirsty extremes, but came over all rational and philosophical when considering ethics. The Norse gods couldn’t be bothered with all that Good and Evil stuff either so far as I can make out. Monotheism makes me spit.

I rather like the idea of a Schroedinger Deity; a god comprising the sum of an increasingly complex and sophisticated life force, evolving in power and sophistication in the way that the chemical richness of our world is based on elements which evolved from hydrogen and that all living things have evolved from random amino-acids losing their randomness and forming RNA. This would be a god who may or may not exist, whose existence will only become apparent at the end of the universe at which point in time (and space) it will turn out has existed all along. Or not, as the case may be.

Sorry to whitter on for so long. It was a good curry. Thank you for asking.

Fireworks and funerals

I want to be a firework when I grow up.

More accurately, I want to be a firework when I die.

Spiritually, I prefer the idea of burial, of gently turning back to the earth from whence I came, and all that. But I am damned if I am going to be dug up again to make room for a housing estate, or to have my thigh-bone measured by archaeologists, or grave-robbers, as I prefer to call them. So when the time comes I wish to be cremated. But that’s rather dull. I want my ashes to be packed into fireworks; great big jolly purple ones like alliums, ones that go ”whhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” or, better, ones that go “BANG! - whhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” and hang around in the air for five or ten seconds in a slowly expanding sphere.

People can, and presumably do, do the most extraordinary things with their relatives remains, from turning them into diamonds, to burying them in coffins painted to look like parcels and labled “return to sender”.

But, me, I want my ashes scattered, and scattered in a jolly, noisy and cheerful way.

Mulled wine, anyone?

Good god, bad god

The devil may have all the best tunes, but god certainly has all the best choral music. I was listening to a Byrd Magnificat on the way in to work last week and started thinking about the good things about religions.

So: choral music, from plainsong to gospel taking a diversion through Buddhist and Hindu chanting, is definitely one of the best things about religion.

Also the concept of stewardship. This is a Christian one really, the idea that we are answerable to a deity for how we look after and manage their creation. Unfortunately some interpretations of this concept assume that we have been given the rights to own the world rather than the duty to act as its caretakers. No creator worth believing in would just hand over a jewel like this planet of ours for us to to destroy in the way we are.

Reciprocity. Christianity is keen on reciprocity. Luke 6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. This is is an exhortation to pay attention to karma really, isn’t it? However, Christianity does not seem to be as hot on cause and effect as Buddhism and Taoism are, with the Great Big Escape Clause In The Sky offering to let you off the hook: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:15.

Meditation. Stilling the mind. One of the things I really like about eastern religions and philosophies is just how damn practical they are. They give clear instructions. Breathe in-two-three, breathe out-two-three-four-five-six. Look at the candle. In-two-three. And guess what? Their instructions work.

Parables. All the great religions have wonderful parables, metaphors and fables. Love ‘em.

Architecture. Hard to beat a good medieval Cathedral in the impressive architecture stakes. Modern bridges do it, but not much else. Robes. Most good religions have impressive robes. Padded embroidery. Gold thread. I’m rather fond of the Orthodox tradition of long beard, square hat and fancy copes myself, though a mitre is very satisfactory in its own way and the red and orange robes of Buddhists are rather jolly. And ceremonial, there is something very calming about slow and measured movements which have been repeated for centuries and a good procession is always a pleasure to watch. And then there’s the smell of incense and the walking around with a censor so the smell of it gets everywhere. Ach, let’s face it: I’m a ritual-bunny.

But I think that’s about it. Good things about religions: choral singing, the concepts of reciprocity and cause and effect, instructions on how to meditate, a rag-bag of stories and metaphors, some neat buildings and robes and some soothing ceremonial. Mind you, any half decent military service should be able to deliver the goods in terms of costume and ceremony but they have a bad habit of doing it all to the sound of marching bands.

It’s not a long list, really, is it? And you are more than bright enough to know what I’d put on a list of things that are bad about religions. Me, I’m going to listen to that Byrd Magnificat

Chillin’

Bloglily’s recent post in praise of sloth has made me re-examine what happened to me the day I bought my new phone. I’d got the day of an event wrong, and ended up with some completely unscheduled time.

Now for the scary bit: I had a much nicer time than I have had for ages on the free days when I plan my activities.

What….?

Why………?

What am I doing to myself?

My ‘to do list’ is looking pretty good at the moment: I did my two most pressing ‘must do’s yesterday and, other than standard chores, the rest is ‘would like to do’s.

But are they? Would I really like to do them, or would I prefer to do something entirely random instead? Perhaps I should make myself a gamer’s dice with some entirely pleasant and slothy activities on it, and throw it at least once a fortnight, or once a week, or every couple of days.

What would be good to have on it?

• Sit in bed, reading fiction and eating soft fruit
• Amble round the shops in the market town looking at tat and not buying it
• Take a walk through the valley
• Download a concert from Radio 3 and listen to it while knitting
• Go out and photograph things

… I find it rather sad that I can only think of five slothful and spirit-renewing things to do.

Note to self: Must do less.

 

 

Why Walkmans and iPods frighten me

We all know that people are afraid of the dark, but aren’t we afraid of silence too?

Silence is almost impossible to find. It is a truism that we can hear things “all the time” - Right now, I can hear my forearms move on the table, the fan spinning in my PC, the keyboard tapping as I type, a fly buzzing around the sink, a blackbird(?) singing outside my window (I don’t know my birdsongs as well as I know my birds), a cock some distance off, and someone hammering in fenceposts.

However, all of these apart from the blackbird are human sounds in one way or another. If my neighbour did not keep hens, there wouldn’t be cocks to crow. If I was more interested in washing up and less interested in blogging then flies would not be as fascinated by my kitchen.

343 meters per second

It is hard to find places where you cannot hear the sounds of people. Noise carries, particularly on a still day. The whine of a bike accelerating, changing gear and accelerating again carries a couple of miles. You can hear the grey sound of a car’s tyres on a metalled road three miles off. Aeroplanes growl in the skies twenty miles or so away. Those are the big ones. But in more rural areas you can’t move for the sounds of sheep, tractors, trains and picnickers.

The three most silent places I can remember are the Australian desert, Swedish pine woods and - in a raucous third place - some sparsely populated moors, or maybe they were dales.

The way your ears behave becomes qualitatively different when you are alone in a remote place away from moving water. Sounds become more three dimensional. One can hear progressively quieter things, and one’s aural horizon expands, enabling one to extend mentally into progressively larger spaces. I have been told that if you are in a desert for long enough you can hear a snake rustling across the sand a quarter of a mile away.

As an aside, I would be curious to experience a migraine in a place that silent. One of the symptoms of migraine is what is called sonophobia, but what actually happens is that you lose your ability to filter out some sounds and focus on others. As a result every noise appears amplified and crystal clear. It is the audio equivalent of the autistic person’s compulsion to catalogue everything they see. It would be interesting to experience that inability to filter sounds in a still and silent place. The next time I have both a migraine and a driver I’ll ask them to take me up onto the moors.

In still and silent places, and I have experienced only three, you engage with sounds in an almost tangible way. A sound can become a whole-body experience. You let sounds come to you, and then you start to seek them out. You try to understand and interpret what is going on.

You listen.

And in the silence, you can think.

So maybe that is what frightens us.

If we are somewhere that silent there is a tendency to babble. We find silence to be oppressive. We whisper in empty churches. Oddly, we don’t whisper in cathedrals so much, but these are often noisy places with their plethora of tourists. (We of course aren’t tourists, we are visiting). Out of doors there is not the social pressure to be quiet, so we walk, crunching sticks under our feet, our clothes rustling around our bodies, and we call out quiet here, isn’t it to each other at a quite unnecessary volume and ensure that it is nothing of the sort.

We are making ourselves progressively more insensitive to noise. We deafen ourselves - physically and measurably deafen ourselves - from an early age. We turn up the television far louder than it needs to be for us to hear it. We sit in pubs where the music is so noisy we have to shout into our neighbour’s ear in order to be heard. And then we clamp iPods to our ears to rub out the noise around us. And every single one of these noises desensitises us to noise both physically and mentally.

How many pieces of music do you hear a day? It appears that we hear, on average, an hour and a quarter of non-chosen music each day, and two and three quarters of an hour of chosen music.

We tell ourselves we use noise to blot out noise. Surely we use noise to blot out silence.

As I said at the beginning. Walkmans and iPods frighten me, and I think this is because they are the anaesthetic a whole generation is using to rub out the noise around them. But these devices replace noise with noise, leaving, in the middle of it all, no place to think, and no place to sit and to do nothing but be.

In the midst of life we are in death

We were called into a meeting room the other day - the whole team - at no notice. Solemn faces all round and the manager saying “there’s no easy way to say this, but for those of you who knew him….”

One of the young men had been found dead at the foot of his staircase the day before. He’d not turned up for work on Monday, HR had called his father, and it was his father who found him. He was 29.

I’d only exchanged a few words with him - he seemed like a nice lad and he was well-liked by those who worked with him.

What I found disturbing was the need for friends and colleagues to speculate: it seems his relationship had ended recently and there has been a lot of speculation that he committed suicide.

We all need an explanation, a justification, for young death. We look for an answer to the question “why?” We live in a state of secular denial, and so that answer has to be physical or psychological.

However, I’m shocked by how many people cannot accept the idea of an accident or natural causes. My family background, which includes medics and clergymen, means I know that there is no special age before which people do not die.

Shit does happen. Ulcers and appendixes burst. So do blood vessels in the head. People slip on stair-cases, fall through windows, electrocute themselves, choke on food, knock themselves out in the shower and drown.

This lack of acceptance of the brutal unfairness of fate is behind the desperate need of the Diana conspiracy theorists to believe that her mortality was a human betrayal, not a slip of the steering wheel. The idea that the universe could be that random, unfair and cruel is frightening. It could be you.

It is difficult to know what to hope for - to hope that he died of an accident is to hope that his life was stolen from him. To hope that he died of his own volition is to hope that he was so lost, lonely and desperate that he could not see how much the future can hold when you are 29.

Either way, my heart went out to his father, and I am glad that the person who has my spare key is not a member of my family.

Lost for words

I’ve set myself the task of writing something here every day - or every weekday at least. The challenge of course - as with most things on the internet - is content. I have to find something interesting to say every day, and something interesting to other people. Because, of course, whatever I say must be interesting, challenging, witty, incisive and intelligent. And, ego and vanity aside, whatever I say should be worth other peoples’ time to read.

Some years ago I went on a Buddhist retreat over Christmas. I’d still recommend it as a good way to spend Christmas or New Year. I was one of the few people I knew that year who lost weight. On retreat we meditated and prepared food and walked and slept and listened to stories about the Buddha and cleaned the retreat centre and were generally simple and spiritual and vegan.

By far the most interesting part of it, for me, was the 36 hours we spent in silence. Eating in communal silence is simple enough. You tend to take more care of people: you check to see if they need the salt or the pepper and if you are stuck at the wrong end of the table from the egg-free salad dressing, you just touch your neighbour gently on her arm to attract her attention and point. Sharing chores becomes calm and companionable when you communicate softy with touch and with sign language. It’s all very pleasant.

The really interesting thing, however, is what happens when you don’t have to socialise; when you don’t have to babble about what you are doing, or ask friendly questions, or empathise with a tale of woe, or listen to someone else’s anecdotes. You don’t have to scrabble around to fill those social silences. The space that you are in becomes physically companianable, and mentally or emotionally stress-free.

Of course, the silence can have side-effects. All the stuff you’ve been drowning out, not saying, denying, suddenly has a space to come out in. You may break down in tears because you are not clamping down on whatever it is that wants to cry out.

But the most interesting thing is that words suddenly have value. You don’t squander them on social-oil and small-talk. The odd thing about those 36 hours of silence, was how much more gentle and honest the silent signals were, when the noise of words did not get in the way.

The mindfulness of cats

The cats fascinate me, particularly in the summer.

They step delicately out of doors and enter whole-heartedly - whole-bodiedly - into the outside world. You can see them react to every sound, savour every smell, watch for every movement and every change of light. They seem greedy for physical sensations. When they are outdoors it is as if they are swimming: every sense is fully immersed.

They are fully in the moment - practising the mindfulness of being outdoors. They sun themselves; they luxuriate as they twist and turn, rubbing their shoulders in the dust; they drink in the flavour of the breeze. They watch, and listen, and kill things.