Consciousness a Feature of the Universe

I try, on the anniversary of my discovery of America, to reassess my understanding of reality. Last year I saw it as an ever changing energy field where what “we experience as the Earth, our own body, atoms and so on do not in fact have fixed boundaries or any intrinsic nature”.

What, though, is experience? It’s the product of consciousness, but what is consciousness?

We might say anything is conscious that grows, adapts to its environment and can communicate. Trees are goal-seeking and communicate with each other, though, and it’s a stretch to declare them conscious.

A more stringent definition includes subjective properties of experience, qualia, that occur inside our minds. That excludes trees, but what about animals? We don’t really know which animals, if any, have qualia. Explaining how and why we have qualia is the famously hard problem of consciousness. Why and how is our existence something we experience?

What in fact is this thing we call mind where qualia arise? Dictionaries tell us mind is “The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.”

But the mind also thwarts consciousness. It shows us things that do not exist. My mind did that, for instance, high above the Kathmandu Valley, showing me first a man in black, then a bear and then another menacing man, not one of whom was there.

All that’s puzzling enough but is mind a product of our brain or is its substrate outside our body? Each of us arises from the universal energy field that does not have boundaries. Could mind be an aspect of that energy field and also be without boundaries? Could consciousness be a feature of the universe, like gravity?

And if mind is a product of our brain, is its scope localized there? Do its inputs come only from the body of which the brain is part? Dreams sometimes seem to incorporate real events we could not be aware of via our traditional methods of perception: taste, sight, touch, smell, and sound.

Also, do actions our mind initiates occur only via physical links in our body? And are its operations even constrained by time? The CIA published a summary of a great deal of research indicating that we can both initiate action remotely and see events before they occur.

Most of us have at least some experience of knowing what someone is thinking before they speak or when they are out of contact. Species that flock communicate with each other so rapidly that shared thought seems the only explanation. And there’s so much more — some dogs, for example, know when their human master is about to have an epileptic fit.

There is a range of phenomena related to consciousness that don’t fit with the view that our mind is localized to our body:

Remote viewing — the ability to know something that is happening at a distance without the use of the physical senses
Remote influencing — the apparent ability to alter physical manifestation in an intended direction without a chain of physically causal events
Precognitive dreams — a person dreams about events that happen in the future
Survival hypothesis — consciousness continues after physical death

We call those phenomena anomalous because they should not exist if matter is the way we experience it, made up of continuously existent, indivisible atoms located within an absolute space and time. If matter is that way we could, if we knew all the equations governing the spatial positions of fundamental particles as a function of time along with the initial conditions, know everything about reality including all that happened in the past and that will occur in the future.

Those phenomena are not incongruous, however, with our understanding of quantum physics. Particles appear and disappear and we can know only the probability of their occurrence, space is not fixed and time is not absolute. What we categorize as anomalous phenomena are inconsistent with the world we experience but not with the underlying reality.

What that suggests is, phenomena we consider anomalous but which have often been observed could be real aspects of consciousness.

Increasingly over the past year I’ve been puzzling over the Buddhist teaching that names the energy field I wrote about last year dharmakaya and the forms we experience nirmanakaya. There are three kayas; dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. I’ve been trying to see the nature of sambhogakaya.

My teacher explained sambhogakaya this way, that it manifests as five divine wisdoms:

All encompassing space that projects consciousness and is the source of compassion
Mirror-like wisdom, the purified form of “form”
Equality wisdom, bias toward none
Discernment wisdom, perception, and
Action wisdom, the purified form of “concept”

I’ve been thinking especially about the first wisdom, all encompassing space that projects consciousness and is the source of compassion. My Buddhist practice is increasing my compassion, my urge to act kindly. It just happens. I also grow more aware of how self-absorbed I still am.

What’s happening is, I’m slowly shedding mental habits that obscure reality. Our mind matches fragments of what we perceive against its gallery of pictures, stories and concepts, then we act on what it in fact made up. That’s how above Kathmandu I saw creatures instead of what was there.

But why would fabricating less of what I experience result in compassion growing stronger? Compassion must be an attribute of consciousness. As I grow more conscious the natural result is I act more kindly.

When we can’t quite define a word it can be helpful to consider its opposite. The dictionary tells us that opposites of conscious include unaware and unresponsive. A related word is alive so another opposite of conscious is dead. The deepest opposite of consciousness, however, is dreaming.

When we are dreaming our mind is not in touch, or very little in touch, with its environment. Our fully conscious mind processes its environment accurately, however, providing us with a pure perception in response to which we are naturally happy and kind.

Consciousness was missing from my model of existence last year. I hope to have fewer questions about it next year.

Oct 9 2017

Collective Unawareness

It is quiet this morning. No howl of fast accelerating cars and trucks propelling their drivers to work.

Today we celebrate the accidental discovery of this land whose inhabitants we slaughtered and which we call our homeland.

It is not our true nature to do such things, to brutalize others. We just have the habit of behaving that way.

So let’s change! Let’s become who we truly are. Let’s become more and more the good people we have often been.

We are now spending a trillion dollars a year on things we think of as defending ourselves.

We have for sixteen years been in a “war on terror” that can by definition never be won and which motivates terrorism against us.

We are at war in seven countries, none of which has declared war against us.

We are spending vast sums preventing people whose countries we help destroy from coming here. We sing: “This land is our land…” We say: “This is the land of the free” while giving up our freedoms.

This would be a particularly good day, since we will not be distracted by work, to take a deep breath, relax, and consider who we really are.

We are a people who desire happiness and often act generously but who have some very bad habits.

We entertain ourselves with spectacles of violence, we fear violence against ourselves, we think that fear justifies our own violence, and we imagine magical solutions.

Our leader told us he would build a huge and beautiful wall to keep immigrants out. He said Mexico would foot the bill and too many of us pretended to believe him.

Our leader now tells the world we may utterly destroy North Korea. We already did that to Iraq and Libya, just not yet with “fire and fury the world has never seen”. I won’t go on with the litany.

What I’m saying is, we really are not bad people. We are good people with bad habits.

So please, let’s spend some time today noticing our selfish, fearful violent habits and start to shed the collective unawareness that makes it possible for us to do terrible things.

Let’s resolve to become the kind and happy people we really are. Let’s do it!

Sep 26 2017

Innocence, Habits and Donald Duck

We recently remembered 9/11/2001. We do not, however, remember 9/1/1973 when General Pinochet overthrew Chile’s popularly elected government with our very active support.

Why do we remember only when we were the victims, not when we were the perpetrators?

Ariel Dorfman reflects on that in A Tale of Two Donalds and his conclusion, “We really don’t have to leave this world as it was when we were born”, got me thinking.

Some preamble: Why did we help to overthrow Chile’s government? Because the Chilean people had for three years been working to build socialism via the ballot box and our leaders were afraid they might succeed, inspiring the same thing to happen here.

The focus of Dorfman’s book was Donald Duck because: “If there was a single company that embodied the overarching influence of the U.S. — not just in Chile but in so many other lands then known as the Third World — it was the Walt Disney Corporation.”

What was symbolized by Disney’s Donald Duck world? “a belief in an essential American innocence, in the utter exceptionality, the ethical singularity and manifest destiny of the United States … the inability of the country Walt was exporting in such a pristine state… to recognize its own history”.

What history did we not recognize? What, as Dorfman puts it, was our sin? “[our] violence (the enslavement of blacks, the extermination of natives, the massacres of striking workers, the persecution and deportation of aliens and rebels, all those imperial and military adventures, invasions, and annexations in foreign lands, and a never-ending complicity with dictatorships and autocracy globally)”.

Why is Dorfman writing now about what happened almost half a century ago? Because, he says: “We are clearly in a moment when a yearning to regress to the supposedly uncomplicated, spotless, and innocent America of those Disney cartoons, the sort of America that Walt once imagined as eternal, fills Trump and so many of his followers with an inchoate nostalgia.”

Now here’s what struck me. The innocence Disney conveyed is real. At the same time, the violence, selfishness and greed that Dorfman points to are also real. How can both be true?

It’s because, in the Buddhist understanding of existence, our intrinsic nature is good; we behave badly only out of habit.

What happens is, our mistaken acts accumulate into conceptual and emotional habits, then our behavior is governed by the things we always think and feelings we always have, not the unique circumstances in each moment.

Buddhists call all that programming karma. We call the habits we share our culture.

By observing people who have studied, reflected and done Buddhist practices for long enough, we can see they are not on auto-pilot. They are naturally kind. The Buddhist understanding of our nature is confirmed by observation.

Buddhism is not the only way to overcome bad habits, of course, and Buddhist leaders in Myanmar are currently exterminating their Muslim Rohingya population. We first need the right motivation, then whatever way works to train ourselves out of selfishness, greed and violence.

One of our greatest warriors was especially clear about making the right choice. Three months into his first term President Eisenhower gave this speech:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Why did we not heed Ike’s words, or his warning eight years later about our emerging military-industrial complex?

And why did our current leaders just vote for another vast increase in military spending while trying to pay for it and a further tax cut for the wealthy by cutting medical care for tens of millions of other Americans?

Because, despite our intrinsic goodness, we keep choosing not to acknowledge the habits we inherited — our sense that we were entitled to exterminate Native Americans and enslave people of color, the greed, fear and violence that govern so much of what we do. We keep reinforcing those habits.

We could, as Buddhist and other teachers explain, shed our selfishness, violence and greed. We would just have to recognize our programming then work diligently and long to get free of those habits.

Castigating others feeds our own self-righteousness, so let’s stop doing that. Let’s each of us just work at freeing ourselves.

And let’s stop electing leaders who subvert other governments. In 1973 we worked to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government. Twenty years earlier, we’d done it in Iran. Thirty years later we did it in Iraq, then Libya. We’re trying it now in Syria and helping Saudi Arabia do it to Yemen.

Let’s elect leaders who will inspire us to act as the good people we are. But before that can happen we’ll have to work sincerely to overcome our amnesia and purge our programming.

Sep 3 2017

A Stroke of Insight

Here’s a very powerful TED Talk by neuro-scientist Jill Taylor about her experience having a stroke and what it revealed to her about our two consciousnesses. Her conclusion, “which [consciousness] do you choose, and when” is not very satisfactory so I’ve added my thoughts below.

My stroke of insight

We are raised to use our linear conceptual brain because we’d be unable to navigate life without it. Just think for example, about Jill’s struggle to dial the phone. But we also have moments of delight, and if we have an activity like painting, we also spend some time in our other consciousness, the one she describes as energy meeting energy, with no boundaries.

Jill suggests the world would be happier if we spent more time in our joyful consciousness. Meditation practice helps us recognize that we have such a consciousness, something we forget during everyday, moment to moment living. The amazing joyfulness she experienced in that consciousness is what many devotees of spiritual practice hope to achieve. Many Western Buddhists think nirvana must be like that.

What I have slowly come to understand through my reading, reflection and practice was made clear by what she says about the structure of our brain. Happiness and the good behavior resulting naturally from it come when we inhabit both consciousnesses simultaneously

It’s not that we could be happy some of the time by switching out of our conceptual consciousness into the other one and continue being stressed the rest of the time when we’re living in conceptual consciousness. There’s nothing wrong with linear, conceptual consciousness. In fact it’s essential as I said before. The problem is conceptual habits, emotional habits, any kind of habits.

Happiness comes from simultaneous experience of both our consciousness that reveals the world we are in at each moment and of our logical, linear, conceptual consciousness which enables us to navigate that world.

The Tibetan Buddhist practice I do is one of thousands of ways to train oneself to live more of the time in that way. It aims to disrupt fixed concepts, the ones that make us think situations are what we expect, not what they actually are. Our ability to conceptualize is an enormous blessing. Autopilot with the radar shut off is a curse.

A friend who has practiced as I do for many, many years put is this way: “Dharma is malware for conceptual thought”. He is referring to Tibetan Buddhist practices that disrupt our everyday imagination of how things are. They linger in our mind and resurface unexpectedly.

I mention this because living in both our consciousnesses is actually very difficult. We’re greatly over-habituated to living in a world that appears as it does because we conceive it to be that way without noticing the reality.

May 6 2017

Words and Reality

Language is the decisive difference between us and other chimpanzees with whom we share 98% of our genes. We can articulate and review our thoughts. We can listen to and reflect on what others say. This enormously amplifies our ability to learn.

But we ought to be much more wary of words. They only point to things. Too often we confuse the name we give a thing with what it points toward. I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, something an empathetic friend helped me see. She responded to my post about recognizing that I don’t exist: “What you have written about your life is intriguing […] and a little heartbreaking”. What I saw is a new level of how blessed I’ve been.

My life has never, since I started work, anyway, felt “a little heartbreaking” to me. I’ve encountered a mix of circumstances, some quite difficult, but I was blessed to accept them and take action, not suffer.

My aim in my no-self post was to show a series of paths I took that were misguided. My experience along that route to nowhere was a sense of adventure, though. It was like being on a long trek through different lands.

So I’ve been reflecting on why I was blessed to feel that way. Two powerful forces were at work. I’ve mentioned the one known as Florence, my mother who felt there was no challenge she could not surmount. I’ll say a little more about her, then some about the force in my father, Leonard, that I had to oppose.

Florence grew up in a Catholic orphanage. She loved children, trained as a nanny and worked first for a wealthy English couple then in Italy for a marquess. She loved Italy and would have stayed longer but the marquess had to replace her when he was sent on a diplomatic posting to Hitler’s Berlin.

She never said much about that time but it was evidently happy. She explored with enthusiasm and one of her very few possessions, a picture of a chalet in the mountains on my bedroom wall, likely sparked my own Himalayan treks.

Leonard’s mother died before he was a year old and his father, Whalley, was jailed for refusing to fight in WW1, so he was raised by his beloved grandmother until he was eight. When Whalley remarried, the three of them joined one of his younger brothers in Akron, Ohio. Whalley, who hated the cold, was happy when he was offered the chance to operate a citrus farm in extreme SW Texas. He knew nothing about farming and not a single citrus tree was there but he loved it. So did Leonard but his step-mother Edith hated the heat even more than Whalley hated the cold, so after a few years they returned to Ohio.

When Whalley was unable to get a job in the Great Depression, he and Edith returned to England. Leonard stayed to graduate from High School and the friend with the farm offered to fund his college education but Whalley sent him a ticket back to England where, not knowing British history, he did not qualify for the Civil Service as Whalley hoped. That was when he began giving film shows for the Peace Pledge Union.

The lesson Leonard drew from all these upheavals was, the best he could do was endure. His happy memories of the farm in Texas and of High School predisposed me to be happy in America but they compounded his yearning for stability. He was apprehensive about new upheavals anyone with power over him might create.

What my friend’s comment about “heartrending” showed me is, I always understood more than I recognized about acceptance and suffering.

Now a more dramatic example of the power of words. The Zen master who was my first Buddhist teacher told us one morning: “If you really want to end suffering, stop creating it”.

Hearing that in a receptive moment, I got a glimpse of what acceptance means and that I had been blessed to practice it much of the time even though I hadn’t understood the word before. I’ve mostly done as my mother did and my father did not, recognized negative circumstances, not felt sorry for myself and taken action for change.

Here’s a second set of thoughts provoked by a response to my post. Richard wrote: “The intersection of physics and psychology gets pretty strange doesn’t it? I’ve done a lot of thinking about the implications of quantum physics, and our worldview. Mostly, it’s been a bunch of circular waffling. The only thing I’m fairly certain of is that our model of reality is flawed, probably because of some version of the “you can’t see the true reality from within the system” problem.”

I circled, too, until I saw that although I have no self, I do exist. We can discern the structure of reality from within the system even though we can’t quite see how it operates.

We manifest from an ever changing force field, as does everything we perceive, so from that perspective, we don’t “really” exist. But our actions change the force field, so in fact we do exist. How to think about that?

Nothing that is perceptible to us sentient beings can be found in the force field, yet every sentient being is a point of consciousness with the capacity to act. That means we exist in more than one way, only one of which, the form that takes action, is a form in the way we imagine.

Consciousness is the great puzzle to brain scientists. Is it a product of the brain, or somehow separate? I sense it’s separate but what has made all the difference for me is recognizing that we exist in a form that, because it has no intrinsic nature and is utterly imperceptible to our senses, to our way of thinking does not exist.

The reality of sentient beings takes threefold or twofold form in Buddhist metaphysics. The form that acts is the nirmanakaya, the conscious form is the sambhogakaya, and the imperceptible one is the dharmakaya. The first two are also thought of as one, the rupakaya, to highlight that the form with no properties is the ultimate level of reality.

There’s a vast mass of logic about why and how reality is multi-fold but it remains in the end a mystery to our intellect.

What we can be certain about is that matter manifests from energy. We can start by thinking of matter as congealed energy and energy as liberated matter, but when we use quantum physics to examine what’s going on we see that you and I, for example, exist in both forms simultaneously.

Or perhaps we exist in three forms, the three kayas, which we could rename Tom, Dick and Harry if that feels less foreign, or Romeo and Juliet if we’re thinking about the two forms. It’s only what the words point toward that matters.

I’ve noticed some changes since I began getting glimpses of what all these words are pointing toward, that what seem to be separate beings are not separate, that we are all manifestations from one ocean whose currents flow without boundaries, that we are all eddies in a maelstrom of pure energy.

The less separate I feel, the less indifferent I become. My impulses are more kind, I’m more prone to compassion than anger, and I’m less grasping.

The energy flows that manifest as Martin are changing because I’m watching them, and the longer I watch, the more sensitive I become to the eddies that manifest as other beings.

Yes, the way this multi-fold reality works is a mystery but now I know how to proceed, acting that way is deeply happy-making.

Apr 20 2017

Happy Birthday in Every Moment

My body was already sixty years old when I began to see with some clarity that I don’t exist as I’d always imagined. I’ll try to explain what I experienced.

What I noticed first is there had been at different times a different person in my body. I’ve given them Nordic patronymics. Leon Leonardsson came first.

Leon came to life in England during WW2 in an isolated farm-worker’s cottage with no utilities. He was the only child of Leonard and Florence Sidwell, a happy kid fascinated by farm machinery. Because his parents had no friends, Leon’s social skills were weak but he was highly intelligent. Florence made him study every day and he got the best results of all students in the exam that determined which school he would go to when he was eleven.

Leonard’s work since WW2 driving an excavator to maintain waterways paid very little but Florence found him a better paying job at this time selling insurance door to door. They were now able to buy a house with a tiny garden in the neighboring town. But Leonard hated his new job and that he now had so little room to grow vegetables. And Leon had nowhere to play and nobody to play with. As Leonard’s passivity evolved into depression, Leon fell prey to the same disease.

Leon’s new school, a bus-ride away in the county town, was an undistinguished private establishment founded in 1608 that had been recast as a State school ten years before Leon arrived. Life continued there almost as if the British Empire remained triumphant. Leon studied and remained top of his class but he was disoriented in this new world. Told after a couple of years to take the exam for a scholarship to Eton College, he passed but then read about life there and, horrified by the prospect of the even more foreign culture of the aristocracy, he failed the oral interview.

During that first year or two as Leon floundered in his new environment, a less passive new person, Sid Leonsson, began taking over. He told himself he was justifiably alienated from an antiquated culture, started building the personality of an intellectual and began reading philosophy. He labeled himself an existentialist.

The secondary school curriculum in England in those days channeled students into either the sciences or the arts but Sid insisted on continuing to study both Physics and English literature. Then, impatient with a curriculum that still felt too narrow, he drifted ever further from both subjects, roaming far afield into theories about the human condition.

He was delivered a great shock by “Three Faces of Eve”, a psychologist’s account of a patient whose body hosted three entirely different people vying for control. What if he was not the only one in his body? His current identity felt inauthentic. Maybe other personalities would spring forth, and none would be authentic? A friend whose psychologist father specialized in schizophrenia introduced him to much unsettling literature on this topic.

Sid was also deeply moved by Wilfred Owen and other WW1 poets who expressed the horror and insanity of war. His grandfather, Whalley Sidwell, had faced execution for treason by refusing to join that war and was jailed for two and a half years. Whalley’s five younger brothers also refused . One explained: “What if I kill a German boy then I meet his mother and she asks me why I did that?”

Whalley was a powerful presence. His son, Leonard, drove a van with a film projector all over England during the 1930s for the Peace Pledge Movement. Their idea was to make war impossible because everyone would have pledged not to participate. When WW2 broke out, Leonard did refuse to participate and he was jailed. On his release he was assigned to agricultural work. Sid did not yet notice that Whalley was occupying his body, too.

Further study felt useless to Sid by the time college was due to start and he decided he must get a job. Having no other idea how to get one, he went to the government office where jobs are posted and was given one picking apples. When all the apples were picked, someone told him jobs are also listed in newspapers and showed him one as an inventory clerk. A couple of years later someone told him the computer department would be better so he went there as a computer operator.

A year later, married and living in London, Sid for the first time searched for a job. He found one as a programmer at a Dickensian insurance company. A year or two later someone encouraged him to apply to IBM where for three years he for the first time worked alongside thinking people. He liked that but disliked the culture. Asked “What is the purpose of business?” he realized he didn’t know. The answer was: “To make a profit”. That can’t be right, he thought. It’s like saying the purpose of life is to breathe.

So, when Sid saw a small American company’s advertisement about opening for business in England, he joined them. A couple of weeks later they decided not to enter England but gave him a job in America. It was 1970, and that was when Martin Sidsson, the third person to do so, took the reins of what was by now a 26 year old body.

Sidsson made a determined effort to fit into the entrepreneurial technology startup and the local culture. It was not hard because everyone he worked with was smart and interesting. He also made a determined effort to take the initiative and he was soon assigned to manage development of a precursor to the Internet. Over the next few years he eagerly took on additional responsibilities and made a determined effort to manage according to his belief that the chief purposes of business are to delight customers and provide opportunity for employees.

He eventually remedied his utter ignorance of business operations, established a management consultancy and learned how to market and sell. That led him to study why businesses fail and how to set effective strategies. His last decade of work was in leadership positions in a long established global business followed by an Internet-based startup.

Sidsson’s career was not entirely a smooth progression, however. In the same way that Whalley and Leonard Sidwell had played an important role in Leonardsson’s life, Leonardsson resurfaced a few years into Sidsson’s. Sidsson always started out ignorant about new responsibilities he took on and he enjoyed the necessarily fast learning, but because his responsibilities grew rapidly, it was stressful. Also, everything took extra effort because of the depression he had inherited from Leon, Sid, Leonard and Whalley.

As Sidsson’s stress built up, Leonardsson saw an opportunity to regain control. Believing farming to be the only truly satisfying occupation and unhampered by understanding the unending work required or why small scale farming was no longer viable where Sidsson lived, he got Sidsson to establish a sheep farm.

Some years later, Sidsson recognized another presence in “himself”. His mother, Florence Sidwell, had believed there was no problem she could not fix and no challenge she could not overcome. Without her presence Sidsson could never even have attempted what he had achieved.

By the time he retired, Sidsson was aware not only of his immediate predecessors, Leon and Sid, who were still vying for control of his body, he also saw his parents, Leonard and Florence, taking action with his body. He no longer had a strong sense of self and was not surprised when a new person, Martin Martinsson, emerged and took control.

Martinsson went trekking in the Himalayas and experienced there a culture that attracted him greatly. People were cheerful, as if that was their policy, and they were respectful of each other. What was the cause? It seemed to be their Buddhist practice. A few years later, after many more long treks, much reading, and closer study of the reality, he realized the truth is much more complicated. The people he thought were Buddhist were mostly animist, Nepal’s traditions come to a great extent from its Hindu aristocracy, and it is a caste society with much domestic violence.

But by the time Martinsson saw that more complex picture, he was acting on what he had first sensed. He was practicing Tibetan Buddhism. He had received teachings from Anam Thubten whose book, “No Self, No Problem”, makes clear that we do not have an intrinsic self and whose magnetizing presence shows that one really can he happy in all circumstances and can always be spontaneously kind.

He then met a second teacher, Phakchok Rinpoche, who insists his students follow a disciplined program to reach the state Anam Thubten and others exemplify. We can’t think our way to that state, he insists, we must slowly, slowly retrain our mind by observing how it works, studying teachings, and reflecting. Now Martinsson had something to work at, which felt good because it exercised the discipline his first incarnation, Leonardsson, had inherited from his parents, Leonard and Florence.

“What is Buddhism?” Rinpoche asked. The answer: “Selflessness!” When you experience not having a self that is intrinsically separate from others, your behavior naturally is selfless. But gaining and sustaining that experience takes practice. Having “no self” is not how we ordinarily feel. Instead, we feel we are in a body that actually is separate from others.

Struggling to understand this, Martinsson returned to physics. The butterfly effect and more in James Gleick’s “Chaos” got him reflecting on the weather, which manifests in different ways in different places, calm, windy, hot, cold, clear, foggy, sunny, raining, snowing, and always changing. He came to see that what we call weather is the product of a giant energy field of swirling currents which constantly interact with and change each other, that have no fixed boundaries, and that are always different from moment to moment but which recur in broad form from season to season.

Martinsson recognized that just as weather manifests in the Earth’s environment, what we think of as selves manifest in the environment of bodies.

He continued deeper into quantum physics. Einstein recognized decades before even Leonardsson was born that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. Sid had not felt that truth in High School physics classes but Martinsson now began to feel the reality that atoms are not solid things, and nor are solar systems. Studying Lee Smolin’s explanations of theoretical physics in “The Trouble with Physics”, he began to see that what we experience as things like the Earth, our own body, atoms and everything else do not in fact have fixed boundaries or any intrinsic nature.

Matter is congealed energy; energy is liberated matter. It only appears to us sentient beings that matter and space are different. The boundary between them is simply a product of our mind.

The configuration of energy that manifests as a human body is sentient, but with limitations. Every human body is uniquely configured — the high intelligence of Leon, Sid, and the Martins results from the configuration of the body they share, for example – and every body is constantly changing.

Martinsson began to see not just that everything is in flux, but everything is a manifestation of an energy field whose flows constantly interact producing results that propagate endlessly.

There is no real beginning or end of anything, only of appearances in our minds that manifest from flowing energy.

Catching up on quantum physics made the Tibetan Buddhist teachings real. Martinsson could now to a growing extent feel the two levels of reality, an underlying energy field and what manifests from that energy to our senses and concept generators as, for example, things and personalities. Leon Leonardsson, Sid Leonsson, Martin Sidsson and Martin Martinsson all exist on both levels, manifestations of an ever-changing energy field that has also manifested Leonard Sidwell, Florence Sidwell, Anam Thubten, Phakchok Rinpoche and so many more who we think of as “others”.

Well now, am I saying that Leonardsson, Leonsson and Sidsson were real people? Yes and no. The more I told you about them, the more real they would seem, but that’s also true of Martinsson. All of them manifested as real in a situation which made that possible. They were real in the same way as a rainbow when sunlight is separated by raindrops into colors that we usually perceive as one. We think of a person as having an intrinsic nature in the same way we think of a rainbow as a thing.

Is a rainbow made of matter? Is it energy in the form of light? We don’t ordinarily ask such questions. We do speculate about people and their nature, but with the wrong perspective. We think of behaviors that manifest as a person as something with an intrinsic nature although those behaviors are in fact manifestations of an ever changing interaction of energy flows with no fixed boundaries and which, although ever changing, never end.

What does all this imply? The body labelled Martin Sidwell was conceived at a specific time, was born at a specific later one, and will die at a specific future moment, but the sentient being who manifests in that body had no fixed beginning, it has no fixed nature, and it will have no definite end.

Our every act takes place within and is part of an unimaginably complex energy field. Our every act changes that flowing energy, just as the tiny force of the butterfly’s flapping wing interacts with the results of other acts and eventually manifests a tornado.

Buddhists refer to how the system operates as karma. To a great extent our actions are shaped by our concepts and emotional habits. We rarely respond directly to what we see because what appears in our mind is something that fits an existing pattern there. We see what we expect to see. We don’t experience each new moment as unique. We don’t experience it as it really is. Karma means we keep reacting as we always do until we shed our fixed ideas and emotional habits.

So everything we do matters, and everything we do out of habit instead of what is actually present is flawed.

Pattern recognition and autopilot enable us to navigate what appears — we must, after all, stop automatically for red lights. Feeling the energy behind what appears — that results in compassion and brings happiness.

Feb 9 2016

Maslow Misapplied to Nations

I was excited 35 years ago to see the rewards for structuring data into quadrant charts. That was for me! And management consulting with those charts was fun, but I saw how misleading they can be and at last returned to product and business development.

The chart tool began as a guide for business and product strategy, the idea being that you’re in trouble in the bottom left where your competitive advantages are few and small. You must develop more and stronger advantages to soar to the profitable heavens on the top right.

BCG Advantage Matrix

Learning how to use and not abuse that tool has continued to be useful. What provoked this post is research from 1981 to 2014 that is well illustrated by this animation but misleadingly presented in chart in the Findings & Insights summary linked to on this page.

The religion-based labeling is accurate but, in the two-dimensional chart context where the goal is to move from bottom left to top right, it is misleading.

And in this article by a different researcher the data is naively misinterpreted to suggest that capitalism transforms national values toward the political left.

So this is an example of tool abuse. The data points are real, the research is valuable and the animation of changes over time is meaningful. But the complex underlying reality is distorted by a static chart labeled in this way.

Nations' Survival vs Self-espression

The World Values Survey (WVS) researchers describe the two dimensions as follows:

Traditional values emphasize religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority, traditional family values and national pride
Secular-rational values place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority
Survival values emphasize economic and physical security, are relatively ethnocentric and feature low levels of trust and tolerance
Self-expression values emphasize environmental protection, tolerance, and participation in economic and political decisions

The researchers say the data show that as a country moves from poor to rich, it also tends to move from traditional to secular-rational. The move is a tendency not inevitable because values are also highly correlated with long-established cultures.

And there is movement in both directions over time. The USA, for example, is in 1989 a little toward the traditional end and quite far toward self-expression, then it grows more traditional over the next decade, less so in the next, then steadily less traditional and less concerned with self-expression.

The writer claiming that capitalism transforms national values so nations labeled Islamic will, if they embrace capitalism, naturally move toward Protestant heaven, confuses correlation with causation.

His explicit blunder is conceptualizing nations as people to which Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” apply.

Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Maslow illustrates how, if we have no food, all we care about is getting our next meal, but once we have that, we start caring about how to get the next meal and the one after that, and if we secure a reasonably dependable supply of basic needs we put effort into friendships, then start working for the respect of others, and finally devote effort to self-actualization.

Here’s a simpler way to see what Maslow was driving at (hat tip to Lexy):

Lexys-Version-of-Maslow

What Maslow’s hierarchy does not show is how circumstances impact the motivation of nations. It can’t because nations are not people. They are made up of people whose situations can be very diverse.

This comment on the naive article (click on the link and wait for it to scroll down) summarizes what the research actually illuminates: “Economic and political systems, and culture/psychology interact with each other in both directions … autonomous individuals create capitalism, safety creates capitalism, peace creates capitalism.”

The top left is not unalloyed heaven because “increasing empathy and mutual respect [and] the breakdown in social capital go hand in hand with secularization and the domination of the market.”

And good governance is a prerequisite: “the state monopoly of coercion helped create the safety required for the large social networks of trust, and individual autonomy.”

According to the US Census Bureau, 15%, i.e., 47 million Americans are living in poverty meaning “a lack of those goods and services commonly taken for granted by members of mainstream society.” That includes more than one in five of all children under age 18.

The WVS research, excellent as it is, can tell us nothing about the value those 47 million Americans place on traditional vs secular-rational values.

And we would be utterly mistaken to imagine they over-value self-expression relative to survival.

Dec 29 2015

Poetry, Physics, Practice & the Ineffable

This story about Everyman exploring where he does not know the language has a deceptively deep point.

We enter the story as Everyman asks his guide “What’s that?” pointing to something intriguing. It’s the same every time and so frustrating! He understands none of the few words reply.

They walk on. Suddenly, through a gap in the trees, Everyman notices an odd looking building.

“What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the building, and again understands none of the few words reply.

Now the path leads up. From the crest he sees a beautiful stone structure that seems to overlook the next valley.

“What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the beautiful structure, and yet again understands none of the familiar reply.

So it goes every day.

Then one day they happen upon a man who speaks not only Everyman’s but also the local language.

“I don’t understand,” Everyman says. “Every time I want to know what something is I ask my guide, but I never understand his answers and the really odd thing is, it feels like he always says the same thing!”

“Show me what you mean.”

“OK.” Everyman beckons the guide over, nods to him and points to a colorful bird on a nearby branch. “What’s that?” he asks, and the guide replies.

“There!” Everyman exclaims. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘It’s your finger, you fool.'”

The point of the story is we think words are the names of things when in fact, they just point toward “things.” If we don’t see what is being pointed toward, we imagine words to mean what we already think they mean.

My experience working to understand, experience and embrace Buddhist metaphysics has been much like that of Everyman and his guide.

The ethics are the same but the Buddhist understanding of existence is fundamentally different from what I learned growing up. The difficulty is, all the words available to express that understanding already have meanings in my mind.

I soon realized I must work to see what is different that familiar words are pointing towards. That takes persistent effort and what is very unfamiliar to me, persistent relaxing.

There’s meditation that calms the mind, like waiting for the wind to slacken, because it’s hard to see clearly in our usual mind-storm.

There’s close observation and rigorous analysis that make it possible to recognize what is real.

And there’s chanting poetry, a disorienting ritual practice that facilitates the experience of what is real.

I’m so blessed to have been introduced to three approaches to the ineffable — poetry, physics and practice!

Dec 11 2015

TCN, Episode 9 – Retreat and Empowerment

Nov 6 – I ask Nagendra what he thinks about retreats. The longest ones I’ve done have been a week long. My mind calmed, it became easier to observe what thoughts arose and see their origin, and that helped the meaning of teachings get through the usual distracting clutter.

I hope to do a one month retreat sometime because that’s the traditional next step, but I shall not take the following step, a three year retreat.

The two week-long classes I just took were a form of retreat. We were instructed to consider them so. At one point our teacher said: “People think what it means to be a lama is we give up sex, but it’s so much more than that. We make more than two hundred commitments about what we will and will not do, and after the third empowerment we must have a consort for the next practices.”

Empowerments authorize you to perform certain practices. They are given by teachers when you have attained the results of your current practice. Each of the four empowerments authorizes one to perform a certain class of practices. One is then granted approval for specific practices within that class.

I am at the first level and feel unlikely to get to the second.

The original set of Buddhist practices is known as Nyingma, the Old School. My teachers are in this tradition. Three New Schools came later, one of which split into two, and the latest of which is headed by the Dalai Lama.

An important way the Nyingma tradition is different is its practitioners can live an “ordinary” life with an approach that is different from ordinary.

Both my teachers are married with children. The younger one, who is mid-30s, was told by his chief teacher: “It is time for you to have a wife.” He was quite surprised but did as he was told and is happy that he did. His wife alerts him to negative behaviors that he had not noticed. There was no question of disobeying, anyway. He is unusual in teaching from his own experience, which makes his teachings more accessible.

I’d been thinking the Nyingma ordinary life approach seems the most effective. Our experiences in ordinary life trigger our habitual negative concepts and emotions. That causes us to suffer, which can motivate us to change those habits. If we hadn’t triggered our suffering, we would not have noticed the existence of our negative concept or emotion.

But doesn’t that mean a three year retreat is counter-productive? If I sit by myself in a cave for three years I won’t interact with anyone and trigger any new suffering. “What do you think, Nagendra?”

A long pause, then: “When there is no temptation there is no examination.”

“Is that original? It must be a quote!”

“Oh, it’s original…” He was just articulating his opinion. Pretty amazing.

In any case, it’s what I always thought. But then Nagendra went on to say his more considered opinion. What would happen in long solitude is thoughts would come from one’s past experiences. You might recall a particularly fine meal in a restaurant. You would think about going for such a meal again but it would be impossible.

Or you might think only about your Buddhist practice. In that case you might imagine the results you hope your retreat will bring, or fear that it will not.

The lama who taught the classes I just took mentioned the most powerful teaching he ever received . He asked his teacher what he gained from twelve years of solitary retreat. He replied: “Oh I wasted all that time in hope and fear about the results I might get.”

So I see how I might benefit from a three year retreat — but I still won’t be doing one

After that our conversation degenerated into more examples of what is wrong in Nepal now and the deep rooted origins. Every so often, to vary my response, I would say “Bullshit!”

At last Nagendra said: “I like this concept, bullshit. It gives us the power to ignore what we label that way.”

I was very happy. I had originated the Bullshit Empowerment.

Dec 8 2015

TCN, Episode 7 – Confusion Dawns as Wisdom

Oct 28 – A famous saying in the tradition I’m practicing is: “Confusion dawns as wisdom.” That is truly skillful phrasing!

The practices I’m learning aim to disrupt misunderstandings that we crystallize in words whose meaning we no longer question. Words that point in more than one direction can shake us up, help us to see multiple truths simultaneously.

“Dawns” directs us to recognize that just as night’s darkness is replaced at dawn by the light of day, the confusion in which we live will be replaced by lucid awareness when the result of our training dawns.

The same word also directs us to recognize that while at first light we can see wisdom, confusion reigns in the full light of day because we bring our perspective and assumptions to everything.

My experience is very much of both meanings. Sometimes there’s a sudden clearing in the fog. Other times I suddenly recognize the fogginess of what I thought was clear.

I’m committed to this training because I’ve seen its inspiring results in others. But it is indeed confusing! The practices are either so simple that they don’t look like they could have any effect, or so complicated as to seem incomprehensible. And they’re hard to do.

Try creating a highly detailed and colorful movie in your mind while chanting Tibetan sentences over and over again, remembering when to ring your hand bell, what melody to use when, and what gestures to make with your hands at what points while narrating a story.

And try understanding the changes you’re working to make in your mind and its resulting behaviors while you’re doing all that.

This is why the teachers are always telling us: “Slowly, slowly…” It’s a long and arduous process breaking up the mess our minds have gotten into over the whole of our life to this moment.

I’m thrilled to find it working a little bit. So thrilled that I must show you this picture I took a few years ago in upper Mustang near the Tibetan border even though it has nothing to do with what I just said!

One of my teachers says we are all baby Buddhas. That’s very reassuring.

Recognizing a few days ago that we are simply a locus of cognizance within an energy field has now enabled me to understand, in a foggy way so far, how the ever-changing energy field that manifests as us while we’re alive can survive our body’s death.

The ever changing waves and particles that manifest as “me” will be disrupted when my body dies but they will not cease to exist, just keep changing.

It was the same when my body was born. The sentient being that I think of as “me” did not come from nothing. The waves and particles of energy that manifested as “me” already existed. They just manifested in a new way when my body emerged.

But in the everyday world here in Nepal I see no signs of confusion dawning as wisdom. Now the big festival is over, violent protests have resumed on the border. Vehicles torched, people beaten up…

Newspaper editorials call for politicians and protesters to talk to each other. It’s not talking but listening that’s missing. Nepal will not become a functioning democracy just because its Constitution calls for that. It could take three or more generations for dawn to manifest in Nepal’s governance sphere.

Now, back to the monastery for the afternoon class.

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Exploring with an Open Mind and an Opening Heart

Tag Archives: Psychology