“Religions are in the death business: preparing people for death, pretending to send them off after they’ve died, making believe they know what happens afterward, and explaining to the dead person’s relatives where they think their loved one might be now. Without death most religions don’t have a whole lot to live for.”
— Sit Down and Shut Up (Brad Warner)
I don’t have a lot of bad habits these days. Don’t smoke or do drugs, drink (beer) in moderation… but when the idea for this post occurred to me, I was thinking of good habits. Things I do with some consistency without having to give them a lot of thought. Consistency being the operative word. If you don’t count brushing my teeth, I really only have one good habit: meditation.
There are almost as many forms of mediation as there are meditators. For me it’s the time I spend each day practicing paying attention. (I’ll skip the long riff on how continuously lost we are in thought we all are.)
2024 will be the 10th consecutive year of tracking my daily meditation. I think I was practicing for five years or so before I began logging my time on the cushion on November 30, 2014. I ran up a string of 371 days before missing a day (pneumonia). I managed 271 consecutive days before missing again (out of town attending the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation.) I have not missed a day since. 2,101 consecutive days (5.7 years). Total days since I started logging my sessions, 3,317 days.
I usually sit for 30 minutes. If it’s almost bedtime I might do a 15 minute session and every once in while I set for 45 minutes or an hour. In terms of perceived time, the longer sessions do not seem much longer. But 30 minutes is the sweet spot for me. My one good habit.
After 20 years of reading about free will, I have to agree with those who insist it doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion, but probably necessary. Robert Sapolsky has written a book titled “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” this excerpt describes an experience I’m having with increasing frequency.
“You may have had the uncanny experience of talking about an upcoming camping trip with a friend, only to find yourself served with ads for tents on social media later. Your phone didn’t record your conversation, even if that’s what it feels like. It’s just that the collective record of your likes, clicks, searches and shares paints such a detailed picture of your preferences and decision-making patterns that algorithms can predict — often with unsettling accuracy — what you are going to do.”
Sapolsky references a short story by Ted Chiang (What’s Expected of Us) in which the narrator describes a new technology that convinces users their choices are predetermined, a discovery that saps them of their will to live.
“It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter,” the narrator warns, “even though you know that they don’t.”
From a review in the Los Angeles Times. (Apple News) Below are some of my favorite bits.
“Most Americans have negative perceptions of atheists, and antiatheist prejudice is more prevalent than antipathy toward Muslims (which comes in second place), African Americans, LGBQT individuals, Jews, or Mormons.”
“We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to this moment.”
“While change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed by the world around us.”
“Much has been made of the hospitality, conservatism (as in strictly conserving cultural norms), and violence of the traditional culture of honor of the American South. The pattern of violence tells a ton: murders in the South, which typically has the highest rates in the country, are not about stickups gone wrong in a city; they’re about murdering someone who has seriously tarnished your honor (by conspicuously bad-mouthing you, failing to repay a debt, coming on to your significant other…), particularly if living in a rural area.”
“You can’t successfully believe something different from what you believe.”
“Why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before it.” They why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before that,” forever, isn’t absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. […] In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. […] All that came before, with its varying flavors of uncontrollable luck, is what came to constitute you. This is how you became you.”
“By age three, your average high-socioeconomic status kid has heard about thirty million more words at home than a poor kid.”
“‘Free will’ is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will. […] We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons.”
“We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control — our biology, our environment, their interactions. […]Try as we might, we can’t will ourselves to have more willpower.”
“We don’t change our minds. Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, are *changed* by circumstances around us.”
“What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.”
“Depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.”
“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
— From a lecture titled The Concept of the Collective Unconscious delivered by Carl Jung on October 19, 1936, to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
Wikipedia: “Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments.”
Based on years of meditation and lots of reading on the subject of consciousness, I actually get this.
There are a lot of articles on stacking stones. Why some people stack them… and at least as many on why you should not.
Because stone stacks are built using unaltered stones, they require your full attention on the task of the present moment to find the perfect connection of the stone’s centre of gravity to its foundation to balance the next layer. The process is meditative; it heightens present moment awareness/mindfulness. Even the simple act of choosing the stones heightens mindfulness!
I have no interest in balancing stones (the fad that seems to piss off conservationists everywhere). I just like making a little pile. I do find the process meditative.
“Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.” — Georges Braque (1882–1963)
If a person were to read my ~6,000 blog posts, spanning 20 years, he/she would know me better than anyone who has ever met me. That person does not exist and I suspect never will.
Perhaps one day an AI (“I prefer the term ‘artificial person‘”) will read them and want to discuss what I wrote/shared.
I won’t be around but perhaps this future AP will be able to create a synthetic version of me, using everything I’ve shared (YouTube, etc) and we’ll have a nice chat.
(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”
We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.
Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.
In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.
In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.
“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi
Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.
When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.
The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”
The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.
“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki
Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading