Checking in

Hello everyone, just updating people on how I’m doing. I’m starting to get into the groove of the day here, cooking in the morning and then spending most of the afternoon doing cycles of reading and meditation. It’s nice so far, and the weather is just warming up. My fire starting skills are not the best, so I’m usually a little colder than I’d like to be, but otherwise things are comfortable.

A woman about my age came a few days ago and I think she’s really struggling. I’m trying to help her get comfortable but I don’t know if she’ll end up staying. She’s very New Age-y, talking about spirit walking and auras and all that. I hope she stays, but it might be better if she comes back when she’s more grounded. I’ll keep trying to support her, but I hope I don’t let it sidetrack my own practice.

I have to go now. I miss you guys a lot. I’ll check in again soon.

 

All that is, it is without Self;

when one sees this with wisdom,

one becomes weary of clinging.

This is the Path to Purity.

Dhammapada 273

First day

Hey guys, I’ve arrived in Thunder Bay and have kinda settled in. There was a screw up with my plane flight when transferring from Toronto to here and that’s always frustrating, but luckily I arrived in one piece last night around 11:30.

Canada is nice. People say “eh” a lot, which I think is funny. The Ajahn, Punnadhammo Bhikkhu, seems to be very wise and I look forward to hearing more from him as time goes on. For the moment, I’m mostly just learning from the previous steward, Karl, and he’s very nice as well. It looks like there are two other people here but they are not speaking at the moment so I haven’t met them.

My hut is very nice and runs on a wood stove, which is a cool little touch. I love the snow. It’s great to see animal tracks and stuff in the morning. There’s a little creek nearby that is just starting to thaw and gurgles a bit.

All in all, things are well. I’ll post next week probably if I get to the internet.

Thanks for reading.

A fool who knows of his foolishness

is wise at least to that extent.

But a fool who thinks himself wise

is the one who is truly foolish.

Dhammapada 63

Headed Out (or oot)

Next week, on the 25th, I’ll be headed out to Arrow River Forest Hermitage up north in Ontario for some time. I don’t know how long I’ll be there, but I may go straight to another monastery afterwards. It’s hard to tell.

Tell me if you want to hang out in the meantime – I’d like to see people before I go. Maybe we’ll have one last bad movie night.

When I return, an anagarika position at Wat Atammayatarama in Woodinville, near Seattle, is probably going to be available. I hope to end up there for the foreseeable future. I can’t explain how excited I am right now – but I keep coming back to this:

There is the case, Moggallana, where a monk has heard, “All that exists is unworthy of attachment.” Having heard that all things are unworthy of attachment, he fully knows all things. Fully knowing all things, he fully comprehends all things. Fully comprehending all things, then whatever feeling he experiences — pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain — he remains focused on inconstancy, focused on dispassion, focused on cessation, focused on relinquishing with regard to that feeling. As he remains focused on inconstancy, focused on dispassion, focused on cessation, focused on relinquishing with regard to that feeling, he is unsustained by anything in the world. Unsustained, he is not agitated. Unagitated, he is unbound right within. He discerns: “Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.”

Even this joy is inconsistent, a barrier to perfect peace, empty, unworthy of attachment. In times like this, when clinging and grasping seem like good ideas, I have to keep repeating the pure teaching of the Blessed One: sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya – all that exists is unworthy of attachment.

I’ll be pretty quiet in the next week before I leave, but please do let me know if you’d like to get dinner or just spend time together. I’m not ashamed of the unwholesome amount of affection I have for so many of the people in my life.

In the meantime, I’m listening to Modest Mouse. It’s probably toolish to say how much this song means to me, but I don’t even care anymore; perhaps that’s a good sign.

I’m walking away to another plan.
I’m gonna find another place, maybe one I can stand.

From the Alagaddupama Sutta

“Therefore, monks, whatever isn’t yours – let go of it! Letting it go is the way to happiness. And what is it that is not yours?

“The body is not yours. Let go of it! Letting it go is the way to happiness.

“Feeling is not yours. Let go of it! Letting it go is the way to happiness.

“Perception is not yours. Let go of it! Letting it go is the way to happiness.

“Thoughts are not yours. Let go of them! Letting them go is the way to happiness.

“Consciousness is not yours. Let go of it! Letting it go is the way to happiness.”

…

“What do you think, monks – if people were to carry away the grass, sticks, branches and leaves in this grove and destroy them according to their own desires, would you think, ‘These people are destroying us!’”

“No, Lord.” “And why not?”

“Because, Lord, that garbage is neither us nor ours!”

…

“So, too, monks, let go of whatever isn’t yours! Letting it go is the way to happiness.

“And what is it that is not yours? The body is not yours! Feeling is not yours! Perception is not yours! Thoughts are not yours! Consciousness is not yours!”

“Let go of it! Oh monks, letting it go is the way to happiness.”

Not me, not mine – not much of anything at all.

A quick thought

I’m comfortable saying, “There is no God” in the same way I’m comfortable saying, “Someone didn’t step on a landmine last night in my kitchen” – not only is there no positive evidence for either, but the evidence that should be there is not.

The lack of pulverized linoleum, broken windows, and charred body parts, all things that a reasonable person would assume follow directly from a dalliance with such a device, is itself enough evidence for me that Jody Williams need not worry. I refuse to be “agnostic” about explosions in my kitchen, and in a world that not only lacks one shred of evidence for God, but more tellingly, lacks the evidence that one would have to agree God’s existence would manifest, I don’t need to be agnostic about God either.

Some thoughts on science, Buddhism, and the mind

Meditation the last few days has not been going well. My fat little legs keep falling asleep and compelling me to move and drastically increasing my grumps. No matter how I sit, I can’t seem to keep them from dropping out after about ten minutes; I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that attachment to the body causes suffering.

I’ve been spending the time I should be meditating watching more debates online, which probably just makes my mind even more unstable. But I can’t keep away, especially not with a premise as delicious as Sam Harris vs. Deepak Chopra on the menu. The eminent Mr. Chopra never disappoints one looking for absolutely fucking bizarre statements like, “Consciousness is a dynamic flow of potential existences superimposed by a God-mover” or (I shit you not), “In the absence of a conscious entity, the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.” I felt so bad for Sam; how do you even argue against that?

On the whole, the debate went well and covered the normal scientific claims about God, the mind, and science, most of which Sam Harris and his partner Michael Shermer elucidated and defended very well. Especially interesting to me was the discussion on consciousness, thanks in no part to Deepak’s bizarre outbursts regarding “quantum nonlocality” as a base for experience. – but with his inanity as a sounding board, the two skeptics were able to make a lot of really fascinating points about the limits of knowledge in regards to what consciousness really is; Sam in particular should be lauded for his brave (but nervous) admittance that “…we simply don’t know how consciousness forms in the brain, or if it is from the brain at all, and we may never know.” I was reminded of an XKCD comic from a few weeks ago:

Debugger (http://xkcd.com/1163/)

The fact that consciousness, the very thing through which the entire world is revealed, remains a fundamental mystery in its origins and operations is a fascinating concept. For a long time, we’ve been fighting to understand and quantify it, whether through neuroscience, biology, psychology, or even spirituality. But, just like the stick figures above, we always keep arriving at a brick wall – the ultimate realities of consciousness, of our brains and our minds, are always studied through our senses, and no amount of scientific rigor or philosophical examination can remove the inherent subjectivity of experience. To use a sentence as complex as the problem itself, it’s maddening to know that you don’t know how you know you know things.

But as I’ve spent more time exploring the Buddhist path, the search for fundamental reality apart from experience has begun to feel a bit like the search for a reflection apart from the mirror. I’ve begun to doubt, as I progress (however slowly) down the path, that it’s wise or even possible to know anything about this world except in terms of sense experience; whereas the modern Western approach seems to regard the exterior world as a true and constant reality accessed through an unreliable and emergent consciousness, I tend nowadays to believe that our consciousness is the true and constant reality through which we access an unreliable and emergent world.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can disregard that which we do experience and usher in some kind of epistemological anarchism of relativistic and baseless assumptions, but it does mean that we must come to terms with the fact that even the most concrete scientific, philosophical, and social constructions we have are, at best, an imperfect patchwork of concepts and categories placed over a never-ending stream of pure sense data. When we’re honest with ourselves and admit our fundamental inability to truly know something apart from our experience of it, we become healthy skeptics, capable of admitting the pragmatic benefits that these frameworks bring while still realizing their inherent shortcomings and assumptions. A consciousness-first, experiential relationship with the external world can bring us a much-needed distance from the universals that too often bind both the materialistic and the spiritual into restrictive and dogmatic ways of thinking.

That doesn’t mean we have to rid ourselves of these shorthand expressions; it’s a lot easier to refer to a sunset as a sunset rather than a bundle of sense impressions, or to just compliment a friend’s cooking rather than declare the ability of the meal’s qualia to be conceptually ordered as “delicious.” But there is a real danger when the framework of concepts we use to describe the world suddenly becomes the ultimate nature of the world itself – when we mistake, as the old Zen koan goes, the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself. And as much as I love science, I tend to think that perhaps we’ve already made this mistake any time we talk about “explaining consciousness.”

This isn’t to say that research into the brain is bad or counter-productive, because it isn’t. I just worry that, as we learn more about what makes that three-pound computer inside us tick, we’ll be more and more likely to reduce the fundamental element of consciousness to the conceptual; we’ll turn the light by which we see the world into a product of that world, a fundamental category error and leap of faith that undermines everything we really know about the nature of the world.

I love science, and I hope that we continue to explore the brain, both to improve the lives of those who suffer from neurological disorders and move towards an increasingly simple means of predicting phenomena. But I sincerely hope that with this new knowledge, we don’t indulge in the arrogance assumption that, through an unwarranted shift from the instrumental to the universal, we can subvert the most Properly Basic knowledge we have. Simplifying consciousness down to its materialistic constituent parts in the brain may very well be a great way to make pragmatic advances in the treatment of disease and the development of consistent biological theory – but it is neither a helpful nor accurate summation of the real, ultimate nature of this world.

Five common arguments for God and why they fail

Oh man. Thanks to a giant Youtube playlist of Christopher Hitchens debates, I’ve just come off a twenty-hour atheism binge. I watched about twelve different sparring matches between good ol’ Hitch and different Christian superstars like William Lane Craig and Dinesh D’Souza before I had to pack it up and go to bed, Chris’ waxy face raging me to sleep. The lineup of theist foes rotated a few times, but the general setup was the same. Almost all of the debates were predicated on solely discussing one topic, mainly “Is belief in God rational?” and everyone was instructed to stay away from specific issues like Old Testament morality or the utilitarian benefit of Christianity – although of course those two topics were essentially all Christopher Hitchens ended up discussing because Christopher Hitchens says fuck your rules.

Actually, his willful disregard for both the concrete arguments of his opponent and the most basic standards of hair combing helped me realize something I’ve secretly believed for a long time: The atheist’s favorite belligerent was not really that great at debating people. He was witty, and eminently quotable, but he rarely challenged with sustained argumentation, favoring clever ad hominems over airtight logic. And that’s okay; after all, he was a journalist and political agitator before he became the overexposed bastion of New Atheism, and his training was far more aimed towards the development of catchy soundbites and simplified but clever strikes against old and worn-out dogmas. Also ad hominems are okay to use against Dinesh D’Souza because that man is a batshit crazy British colonialist from 1824 born into the body of an East Indian Macaulay Culkin.

But when Hitchens went up against Craig (and his absolutely baffling monotone howl seriously calm down Bill), I couldn’t help but wish that someone would actually confront the shoddy arguments this “noted Christian apologist” was making. Besides repeatedly saying that Hitchens had not offered “even one good argument for why God does not exist,” as if that is a meaningful statement instead of just childish bullshit, Craig based his entire case on four ridiculous “proofs”: The Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Argument from Morality, and the Argument from Experience. Now, outside his Talbot School of Theology, all four of these arguments garner from philosophers about as much interest as, well, a degree from his Talbot School of Theology, but for people who are intent on believing, they offer clever if philosophically bankrupt defenses that the intellectually dishonest or desperate are happy to use on the less discerning. Seek and ye shall find, eh?

So without further ado, here’s a quick rundown of his four “proofs” and explanations of why they are at best inconclusive and at worst downright meaningless:

…

The Cosmological Argument – Everything that begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause.

This first argument, Lane’s favorite, falls into the “meaningless” category because it says nothing. The statement, “God must exist because you need something uncreated to create something” is, at its core, a tautology; it can be simplified into the self-evident, “Nothing can be uncreated except the uncreated.” This, of course, does not demonstrate why, if God can be uncreated, the universe could not contain the property as well, nor does it explain exactly why the “cause” of the universe could not have been natural. The Cosmological Argument leaves untouched essentially every theory modern science has suggested regarding the origins of the universe, as both a stable singularity disturbed by quantum fluctuations or a cyclical universe model both demonstrate either a non-theistic cause or a level of “uncreatedness” equal to that of God’s. If the second claim is true, then current science provides at least a plausible explanation of what “caused” it (hint: it wasn’t God) – and if the second claim is false, which it very well might be, the argument is meaningless.

The Teleological Argument – The Universe’s “fine tuning” suggests that it was designed by an intelligent being to support life.

Of all these arguments, I have the most contempt, both intellectually and emotionally, for this one. We’ll start on an intellectual level and consider the absurd selection bias inherent in this argument. Of course the universe we exist in is going to be fine-tuned for life – if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t exist to make that judgment! There are, in all likelihood, innumerable universes out there that do not allow for any kind of life and there are no beings alive to notice it. Even if this is the only universe or life-bearing planet in existence (a very unlikely conjecture), the fact that we can exist in it demonstrates nothing except the obvious conclusion that our development was molded to the world we found ourselves evolving in. The world appears “fine-tuned” to us because we tuned ourselves to it; only a baffling amount of arrogance convinces us to reverse the obvious cause and effect.

For a great demonstration of this, look at the sidewalks downtown after it rains. There are going to be, between large stretches of flat ground, puddles that form in the random potholes and ditches, and each one will be filled to its brim. Does that mean that those holes were created to be filled with rain water, or that the “perfect fit” between the amount of rainwater and the size of the puddle demonstrates superintending?

The emotional side of this argument is less ridiculous and more upsetting. By claiming that this planet is somehow the best that God could throw together, you are essentially required to admit that every possible evil in the nature of this world was known and approved by God himself as part of his “design”. Rather than a defect of our evolution, the diseases that daily bring millions of human beings untold suffering and pain must be side effects of His imperfect or malicious workmanship. Instead of our planet’s geological history, earthquakes and tsunamis that bring untold destruction are actually to be blamed on a Supreme Being who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how to design a world where the Earth doesn’t occasionally shake entire cities to pieces. Worms that dig into the eyes of children in the Congo, each parasite lovingly crafted in the Lord’s workshop. Cancers that eat innocent people alive from the inside, carefully placed into each human’s DNA by a divine hand. A loving, just God who invents the synapses that plunge us into addiction and abuse, a kind and gentle Lamb who has killed over 99% of the species he supposedly created since time began. If the Teleological Argument demonstrates anything, it is that the only God capable of creating this world would be one either disinterested or downright cruel. More likely, an honest and intelligent exploration of our world and its nuances would demonstrate an obvious lack of a designer. William Lane Craig’s intellectually dishonest Teleological Argument doesn’t hold up to either scientific scrutiny or moral reasoning.

The Argument from Morality – Without God, objective moral values cannot exist; objective moral values exist; therefore, God exists.

I find it painfully ironic that Mr. Craig can argue for the impossibility of atheistic objective morality while simultaneously defending the myriad of genocidal, racist, misogynistic, and bitterly cruel actions either directly performed or unequivocally commanded by the God that he worships. I simply refuse to believe that the determiner of right and wrong is a slaver and a tyrant like Jehovah, and I don’t think anyone with their head on straight would criticize me for that. So while his claims about “objective moral goods” are dismissible solely for the reason that his God is scarcely above a capricious and immature child when it comes to any sort of ethical behavior, the argument actually falls flat even if you entertain its basic absurdity.

First, this argument fails to justify its first point; many other logical (and, might I add, far more “moral”) systems have been developed that rely on concepts such as self-ownership or utilitarian calculus. While the debate is still very much open regarding the efficacy of these systems, to base a logical argument on the assumption that God is the only possible moral ground is stunningly ignorant unless one is capable of refuting the core arguments made by naturalist moral realists like Bentham and Mills. It is telling, of course, that those who use objective morality as a proof for God seem to be uninterested in doing so.

William Lane Craig has an even greater hurtle hidden in the second condition of this argument, as the objective nature of morality is not self-evident by any stretch of the imagination. From psychologically-oriented expressivists to evolutionarily-minded biological nonrealists, the ability to craft and enforce a strong moral code through an examination of our evolutionary history or our social interaction is clearly demonstrable. Again, the jury is still out, and probably will be forever, on whether or not these systems reflect reality; what is important is that Mr. Craig has seemingly barreled past any sort of refutation of these points in order to arrive at his foregone conclusion that objective morality even exists. Nowhere has he attempted to tackle the Is-Ought problem, nor has he answered what is perhaps the most glaring issue facing theists today, mainly, why are those who reject moral systems aligned with God no less “moral” in their behavior? The ability of atheists to act in morally sound ways without the counsel or guidance of theistic schema shows undeniably that God is not necessary for ethics to have a firm and reasonable grounding. Of all the arguments put out to support Christian theism, this one may be the shakiest one of them all.

The Argument from Experience – I know God exists because I have experienced Him.

I mean, come on, is there anything I need to say about this? William Lane Craig, raised in a Christian family in a Christian nation, just happens to have direct experience of the Christian God? What a shock! The fact that human beings can have intense spiritual experiences, and that those experiences are easy to see through the lens of your culture, should surprise no one. Call me when Dinesh D’Souza has visions of the Phoenician Goddess of sex and war, or when a Yoruba man suddenly has an outbreak of Krishna Consciousness. Until then, this argument is meaningless and there is no need to waste any more time on it.

…

I would encourage anyone, theist or not, to examine these arguments and see if they really hold to up scrutiny; in addition, anyone who feels I have made incorrect statements or indulged in any logical fallacies is free to correct me. I would encourage anyone who does believe in God to point out where I have gone wrong or suggest other evidential approaches that I might not have encountered.