Writing digest

 [I am experimenting with a daily writing digest. Here is today's entry.]

I grew up, saw the tree of life. It was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yet there is no good and there is no evil. And there is no God. But humans know evil and they know good. However so do other animals. Other animals just don’t mind being naked. There are animals who know shame. For example, dogs. If dogs can feel shame, so can other animals, they may simply not be able to express it to humans, nor would they want to.

So I grew up and I saw the world was something other than what was promised. I am still looking for the one that was promised. It’s not there. Suffering exists, and people die. So where can I find meaning? My mind wants to busy itself with antidotes. Death is the big problem. Therefore there must be a big answer. But there is no big answer. There are small answers. Being kind to each other, for example. 

And there is paying attention. Okay now I am getting drawn into an analysis of how to be. That is not what I need right now, nor do I believe it is strictly necessary. I caught myself, pausing, staring out the window, and searching for nuggets of significance to set down on the page. And then my thoughts grew turgid. They grow turgid now. I must be important and I must relay that which is important.

So continuing my brief life story, I grew up, then I became middle aged. At some point I will die. Right now I have too much gut fat, and I am listening to Pink Floyd’s album Animals. I am listening to the 2018 remaster which does have a lot of instruments that can be heard clearly compared to the original. I’ve been listening to this album non-stop for months. I don’t know what gives it such a satisfying strong hook. But I really love it. So anyway, continuing this story, I am listening to spacey guitar effects and a funky bass. Also, “ha ha, charade you are!” in harmony. What a beautiful song. It embodies angst, dissatisfaction, but also resolution. It is great.

Religious experience and hallucinations

I grew up in a house with a bible-thumping dad. He was also literally crazy, schizophrenic. He thought Jesus was talking directly to him. He thought that the CIA had his entire life bugged and that the surveillance footage was being broadcast to every American household. Whenever he visited somewhere new, he would scroll through the cable channels, hoping to catch a glimpse of himself. The fact that he couldn't was used as further evidence that it was happening. Needless to say life was trying at times. His strange logical jumps had me supplying rationalizations, missing bits of logic to get from A to B, but to him, I think it was just obvious that lack of evidence was actually evidence.

I considered myself devoutly religious, spurred by the ethos of my church, I preached to some students in 9th grade lunch. I mainly found religious girls attractive, and when I say religious, I mean Christian. Like probably even on the fundie side. I decided to read the bible all the way through, and after hearing about all the things that are unclean in Leviticus, I said, nope, that's not the inspired word of the lord. I continued thinking of myself as Christian for a while, but in the end I became an atheist.

I drank too much though, went to AA, and they said "you need religion." I said, "well, will Buddhism do?" They looked at each other uneasily and said, "we'll let it pass for now, but one day, boy, Jesus gonna knock you upside the head." Various others worried I might burn in hell. They were drunkards.

I began Buddhism on the philopsophical side, got drawn into the spiritual and magical. My dad was schizophrenic, so maybe it's not surprising that I can come up with my own sanctioned hallucinations, grade A approved by the rest of the sangha. I fit in. I felt special. Meditation helped me out. But my guru raped a woman. Supposedly he was divine. That didn't sit right. I tried a different guru, but in the end, my conclusion is that magic is all bunk. We humans are programmed to think this way, at least some of us are, and it is remarkable how easy it is to fall into it.

I was once falling asleep, subject to an increasing litany of doubts, when my guru appeared in my dream, knocked loudly on the outside glass, and I shot up in bed, startled. My doubts all dissipated immediately. Now I look back and think, wow, my mind was really intent on a certain path. It had set me on the path earlier, when I had a vision, or really more of a somatic experience. Before I met my guru, on my way to his talk, I prayed that he have happiness and its causes. Immediately I felt a surge of euphoric energy in my heart, the phrase "returned as wisdom blessings, the light is reabsorbed" rang through my head, and the energy shot up through the top ofvmy head. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. It was my own road to damascus story. Some aspect of my own mind set me on a path, and attempted to keep me there. Weird, right? 

Other apparent miracles are literally the appearance of rainbows in the sky on auspicious occasions. Let's just say that this is less than convincing. Rainbows are a natural phenomenon. I expect we see them more when we want to see them, because then we are paying more attention. Also, on days when a group is cremating a lama, everyone is outside, people are there for hours at a time. It's not so unexpected that rainbows appear somewhere in that window. 

So now, I see that a lot of the supernatural, well all of it, is completely bunk. Just my mind plugging into a collective mythology, cocreated my humans over millenia. It's a little sad because just praying to an entity is kind of easy. And if they have the power to bless you, wow,  you've got it made in the shade! Actually looking at my own life and deliberately acting in ways that I choose, that's hard. Also, people die. They die forever. Every one of them. That's not an easy biscuit to swallow either. 

So to recap, I was raised by a schizophrenic, fundy father. Then I became an atheist. Then a committed Buddhist. Then an atheist again. Where to from here? Hopefully a path with further clarity of thought and purpose.

Analyzing my religious beliefs

I’ve been thinking a lot about religious beliefs recently, and one of the first questions that arises is what distinguishes religion from philosophy? I would say religion has a supernatural or supernormal aspect. It is something involving entities or intelligences that are more powerful than us, which we can supplicate through ritual and prayer, and who have the power to intervene on our behalf. The Christian God certainly has this property. The so-called pagan Gods of the old Roman empire had this property. The Buddhist system which I spent a large part of my life in also has this property. Philosophy, on the other hand, is more of a rational method of inquiry and an attempt to understand the world. Probably there is a philosophical component to other religions. There is certainly one in Buddhism. The teachings of the Madhyamaka school and the Buddha’s original emphasis on anatman (no-self) are examples of this. The nice thing about the philosophical components is that they are subject to analysis and introspective exploration. The religious components are more problematic. While claiming a great degree of objectivity, asserting things like monks walking through walls or floating through the air, modern instantiations of religion turn out to be entirely subjective when analyzed with a critical lens, especially if I limit myself to what I can personally verify.

In more detail, for the religious components of Buddhism, I set myself the following test. Have I personally witnessed or experienced anything which had a definite or probable supernatural origin which, crucially, would be convincing to someone else not already predisposed to believe it? I have had multiple powerful experiences as a Buddhist, one even comparable to Saul’s vision on the road to Damascus, but looking at all of them, they have each been subjective and potentially explainable as a product of my own mind. I have not witnessed people floating, people putting thumbprints in rocks, evidence of foreknowledge, or anything along these lines. All of my religious experiences were entirely subjective, usually some type of interior vision with a somatic component like the feeling of energy moving in the body. Many of these experiences were deeply meaningful, but none stepped outside what you might consider the conventional laws of physics, and none of them would convince another person outside the system. So I must conclude that, no, despite the power of these experiences, none of them are truly evidence of the religious component of Buddhism. I think a good theory is that religious visions are a simply part of human psychology.  

So I find myself in the same place that many people have found themselves, trying to separate out the useful kernel of Buddhist teachings into a more secularized form. That is essentially the modern mindfulness movement. I guess I am late to the party. My initial thought when composing this text, was that having lived and experienced the religious side, I am coming to a more informed decision about things. That is, I wanted to say that my skepticism was somehow more genuine than the skepticism of those who had a priori doubt about the veracity of Buddhist religious beliefs. However, upon further reflection, I think I am just reproducing the standard hostility toward atheists and skeptics. Something along the lines of “I am a skeptic for deeply considered reasons. Those others are doing it due to their own character flaws.” This is of course deeply unfair and self aggrandizing. So let me say instead that skepticism of the supernatural is not a personal failing but a rational and normal state.

I heard the following sentiment attributed to William James. It is important to disbelieve things which are false, but it is also important to believe things that are true. For me, the Buddhist philosophical teachings and many of the meditative practices still hold a lot of value. Despite the fact that the Madhyamaka teachings don’t seem to make a lot of sense on first hearing, and many people have a strong antagonistic reaction toward them, I think they have something profound to say about our world. The various forms of meditation serve as a vehicle of exploration of our internal landscape and a method of sharpening our focus. So even though I have come to the conclusion that the religious aspects of Buddhism are not objectively true, I still feel that there is a lot here which is good and useful both as a framework for understanding reality, and as transformative practices for training the mind.