how to save the world

image by amira_a from flickr, via pixhere, cc by 2.0

Several people have recently asked me questions (sometimes with concerns about my mental health) about why I have tentatively come to believe in what is being called ‘radical non-duality’. So I thought I would try to answer them, for the record. Here’s the basic message of radical non-duality:

There is no you. The sense of a separate person with free will and choice inhabiting a body is an illusion, an evolutionary misstep, a psychosomatic misunderstanding that seemingly arises in creatures with large brains. The brain and body have no need of a ‘self’ in order for the apparent human they are seemingly a part of to function perfectly well. Since there is no you, there is nothing you can do or learn or become to dispel or see through this illusion. It’s hopeless.

Nothing is real. Nothing is separate. There is no thing. There is only this (or nothing, or everything, or whatever word you want to use), appearing as things and actions. These appearances are not illusions like the self, and they’re not real, or unreal; they are just appearances. Inexplicably. For no reason or purpose.

Q1: How is ‘radical’ non-duality different from other spiritual traditions of non-duality that date back millennia?

It is a completely different message, and it is not at all ‘spiritual’. It is ‘radical’ in the sense that it asserts simply and categorically that there is ‘not two’ — nothing separate, no thing, no one, no time, no space, just nothing appearing as everything. And since there is no one and no thing and no time, there is no ‘path’ to realize this, and no advice on what to do or how to live to achieve anything, or any kind of self-improvement. All spiritual and traditional non-duality messages offer a path or advice for ‘you’ to follow, when the essence of non-duality is that there is nothing separate and hence no ‘you’.

Q2: How can there be ‘no one’ and ‘no thing’ when it’s obvious that we’re real and so is everything we see — we can see it, touch it, move around it, use it?

Everything is just an appearance, neither real nor unreal. It’s kind of like (but this is only a metaphor) how a movie on a screen is just an appearance — the people and events it depicts aren’t really there or happening when you watch it, though you might get so engrossed in the movie that your whole body will react as if what is being depicted is actually happening, and you may even ‘forget’ it’s just an appearance. Quantum science suggests that time and space are likewise just inventions, ideas, the mind’s way of making sense of what our senses ‘report’.

As for there being ‘no one’, neuroscience has been unable to identify any part of your brain whose activity equates to what we think of as the self, or to anything the self seemingly does. In fact there’s evidence that what we think of as the self’s decisions are merely after-the-fact rationalizations of what the body had already begun to do.

Q3: If the self is so useless and even traumatizing, why and how would it have evolved in humans? Why would the mind have invented the self, and the concepts of time and space, and come to believe them to be absolutely real, if they are not — if they are just dangerous distractions?

It’s possible the invented self is a spandrel — an accidental consequence of a brain that got large enough to be able to construct an imaginary sense of self and separation. Nature is always trying things out. Such constructions, after all, may turn out to be evolutionarily advantageous. As it turned out, however, the invention of the self confers no survival advantage and has a number of disadvantages (like capacity for trauma). In that sense it might be like the appendix — a well-intentioned nuisance that evolved but which humans would be better off without. Perhaps the reason they haven’t disappeared yet is the same reason our toes and appendices haven’t disappeared — they haven’t been around long enough yet for our genes to evolve to eliminate them.

Q4: If the self is so useless and dangerous, how have humans with selves survived so long?

Look around. There’s plenty of evidence that we won’t survive much longer. We did fine for a million years before the sense of self seems to have emerged in our species. Now, despite all the competitive advantages having a large brain would seem to confer, we deemed destined for collapse and perhaps even extinction.

Q5: But how could humans function if there was no self in control of what we do?

The same way animals do. Everything that animals (including us) do is the result of our biological and cultural conditioning given the complex circumstances of every moment. This conditioning has evolved successfully in life forms over billions of years, and conditioned creatures have no need of a ‘conscious’ mind or self to thrive. So why would we?

Q6: Aha! There’s a contradiction in that answer. How can you say something has evolved over billions of years when you also insist there is no time (and, for that matter, ‘no thing’ to evolve)?

Everything that happens, including evolution, and every ‘thing’, is an appearance. These appearances, a bit like our dreams (again, this is a metaphor), seem to follow patterns. When we (and science) attempt to make sense of things, we look for patterns, and we create models and maps that seem to represent reality. But we do have a habit of mistaking the map for the territory! Evolution is just a story, an attempt to find patterns. And every ‘I’ is likewise just a story, made up by our large and complex brains to try to make sense of things and perhaps to try to provide a locus for acting on what it makes sense of. Other creatures simply don’t have the brain power to concoct such a fiction — nor do they need one.

Q7. Why do you believe all this? You can’t prove it, and it’s completely useless — it doesn’t help you in any way. What’s its appeal?

Two reasons I am inclined to believe it. First, there are people (some of them listed on my right sidebar, if you want to check them out) who report not having a self, and not needing one. When this loss-of-self seems to happen, they say, it’s obvious that there is no thing and no one real, just appearances. They say it’s obvious, unarguable, that ‘nothing’ just appears as ‘everything’, for no reason. And secondly, there have been glimpses ‘here’ when it was absolutely obvious this was the case — when ‘I’ disappeared and everything continued to appear exactly as it did before, but with no ‘one’, no ‘me’ witnessing it. And it was clear that this appearance of everything has no substance, no weight, no actual reality. It’s impossible to describe until a glimpse apparently happens and then you can no longer deny it.

The message appeals because it resonates with something intuitive that I think we sometimes all feel or suspect. It also makes sense intellectually — it’s an irreducible ‘theory of everything’ with no inconsistencies or missing explanations to figure out. And it even appeals emotionally — I keep thinking it never made sense that life on earth would evolve to be so hard, so full of suffering and destruction, and if this message is correct, life is instead perfect and simple and easy. And even better — it’s only an appearance.

Q8. So who are ‘they’ — these seemingly-real people saying that there is no one? And if it wasn’t you who had these ‘glimpses’ you refer to, who had them?

They are just, apparently, ordinary people. They are not coordinated. They are not exceptional in intelligence, scientific knowledge, brain wave patterns, use of drugs, or in any other way. They are not trying to make money from this, or convince anyone of anything, or suggest any kind of ‘path’ or process to see it. They are just describing what is ‘seen’, what is obvious, ‘there’, when there is ‘no longer’ any self. In fact they assert there is nothing anyone can do; this apparent falling away of the illusory self just happens. Or it doesn’t. So they aren’t selling anything; they have nothing to sell. They say there is no one ‘there’, in their apparent bodies, and no need of anyone.

Likewise, during the glimpses there was no one ‘here’, so they were not ‘my’ glimpses, merely glimpses of the truth when ‘I’ got out of the way. They were no one’s glimpses.

Q9. Sounds like a rationalization to make you feel better, by denying the reality of everything horrible going on in the world, and everything horrible that’s been done, and hence denying responsibility or any requirement to do anything to make things better. Sounds like a form of disengagement or desensitization or nihilism.

I suppose that’s possible, but I wasn’t particularly troubled by any of these things at the time I discovered and became intrigued by the message of radical non-duality. I’ve suffered from lots of depression and anxiety in my life, but learning about this new explanation of the true nature of reality came during the most joyful time of my life. And if it’s a form of escapism, it’s a pretty lousy one — it offers no escape whatsoever, no solace, and it is impossible to explain to others (despite my endless efforts to do so).

Q10. If there is no one, why do ‘you’ continue to call yourself ‘I’, and behave in ways that suggest you do see real people doing and interacting with real things?

That’s partly my conditioning, and partly the fact that our languages all evolved to allow selves to communicate among each other — for us to reassure our selves that our hallucinations about reality are real. Language has no words and no capacity to express this message precisely.

And I should also stress that I still sense an ‘I’ here, still feel that ‘my’ actions have consequences and make a difference. My self has not fallen away (to my endless annoyance). It’s similar (again, only metaphorically) to the fact that I still see the sun revolving around the earth, and even refer to things like ‘sunsets’, even though I know that’s not what is really happening. There’s a huge cognitive dissonance between my intellectual and intuitive acceptance of this message, and my conditioning that suggests a very different reality and way of behaving. But the message of radical non-duality is that nothing matters, so even though it offers only cold comfort, the cognitive dissonance it produces is actually OK. Or so my conditioning has led me to believe!

Q11. This still seems riddled with logical inconsistencies. Look in the mirror. Is there a human being there, or not? A body, or not? Is it doing things, and aging, or not? Will it die, or not?

Hmm. Yes, none of this can be explained logically, even though recent science intriguingly hints at its truth. Logic is the language of selves. There is an apparent human being, an apparent body, and apparently things are being done and bodies are apparently aging. But there is no ‘real’ human or body or mirror — just the appearance of ‘being’ and ‘bodying’ and ‘mirroring’. And ‘things being done’ and ‘aging’. These are gerundive (not really either noun or verb) terms and they’re the best that language can offer to explain that there is no one and no thing and nothing happening, not really — just appearances. And appearances are not things and not actions — they are just nothing appearing as everything, for no reason. All there is, is that.

Q12: So there is no birth, no death, and no life either? When you die, what actually happens?

Nothing. There is no time in which any of these things can actually happen. There is apparently being born, dying and living, but these are just appearances. This is already everything, complete. There is no process, no causality, no trajectory. That’s just the brain’s patterning to try to make sense of everything. Death is perhaps the self’s worst invention, other than maybe the invention of its self. The self fears the body’s apparent dying because it suggests the end of the self, and to the self that’s unbearable, terrifying. When the self seemingly ‘falls away’, the illusion ends, and what’s left is just nothing appearing as everything, in wondrous, awe-inspiring ways. With no ‘ownership’ of anything. There can still be apparent emotions and feelings and thoughts, like fear and pain and imagining death, but these are just appearances, too, not belonging to any ‘one’. A body’s apparent dying, or being born, is just another appearance. Of no consequence, for no reason.

Q13: So when this body walks into a wall and gets stopped, what is doing the stopping and what is being stopped?

Nothing. What the self conceives of as a body walking into a wall and being stopped, is actually just nothing appearing as bodying, walking, walling, and being stopped. Back to the movie metaphor or the dream metaphor or the story metaphor: In a movie or dream or story, you would expect an apparent body to be apparently stopped by an apparent wall. That’s the pattern you’ve always observed. But there’s no ‘real’ body or wall or being stopped in a movie or dream or story. There doesn’t have to be. The being stopped is just a story your brain makes up to make sense of what ‘you’ perceive to be actually happening. But nothing is actually happening. You’re just making it up. Including making up your self as the observer of the story.

Q14: That’s just sophistry. You haven’t answered the question. I could make up a story that the universe is a hologram created by an extraterrestrial intelligence, that we’re caught inside. It’s equally plausible and equally absurd.

If by ‘sophistry’ and if by ‘absurd’ you mean it doesn’t really make sense, you’re right — not by the logic of language and selves. But the hologram idea is staggeringly complex, and rather unimaginative, drawing as it does on our limited, self-obsessed human ideas of intelligence and the universe. It’s plausible, but not very. Whereas the message of radical non-duality is extremely plausible. It explains everything, quite simply.

I’m not trying to convince you. It takes a glimpse, I think, before it can be really convincing. The glimpse plants a seed of possibility in the memory, and that and the inherent intellectual and intuitive appeal of the message was all it took to convince me. The radical non-dualists simply articulated it in a way that even my Doubting Thomas self could kind of make sense of.

Q15: So if you’re not trying to convince anyone of it, why do you prattle on about it so much?

I suppose for the same reason I prattle on about the inevitability of global collapse of our civilization in this century. It’s just really interesting. When you find something really interesting, especially when it’s contrary to popular wisdom, you tend to want to talk about it.

Image is from iTunes visualizer.

Consciousness is a social construct. It never would have taken conceptual shape if people hadn’t talked about it with one another. It did not cause us to reflect on it. Rather, our reflection on it caused it to appear to exist. The absorbing search for the “self” is really a search for a Creator. Which makes cognitive psychology the Creationism of science. Words bound to anger many, even if true…

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson

In my endless, futile, and irresistible attempts to rationalize the message of radical non-duality and reconcile it with what ‘I’ perceive, perhaps the greatest stumbling block is making sense of our conditioning.

I’m a late convert to the belief that we have no free will — that we’re completely conditioned by our biology and our culture in everything we do, such that, given the circumstances of each moment, there is no role for ‘me’ in deciding anything. And that there is no need for a ‘me’, in order for that conditioning to play out the only way it could have.

There is, of course, enormous tension between our biological and cultural conditioning — our bodies and genes often ‘tell’ us to do one thing while our culture ‘tells’ us to do something very different. Perhaps that’s how the illusion of the self evolved — as an attempt to provide a referee between the two.

And to be clear there is nothing deterministic in this belief — there are an infinite number of (apparent) variables in the complexity that is life, so the circumstances of the moment can never be predicted, and hence neither can the effects of our conditioning. Belief in our conditioning (and our lack of free will) does not support or necessitate fatalism or nihilism. It’s actually rather liberating. No one to blame, nothing to feel shame or guilt (or pride, or smugness, or even responsibility) about or for.

The problem with reconciling conditioned behaviour with radical non-duality is that conditioning implies causality. It implies, for example, that my cultural conditioning caused me to do work I hated for many years, to the point it nearly killed me.

But the message of radical non-duality is that there is no causality, only appearances. Things apparently happen, the message goes, for no reason. They don’t even happen in time or space. Nothing causes anything else, except in the totally fictitious story of ‘me’.

Our brains instinctively look for, and often ‘see’ things that aren’t real, such as animals and faces in cloud patterns. It could be argued that, similarly, our brains look for patterns that might explain everything that has apparently happened. And, when they find patterns, then they create a model or representation of reality that seems to explain the connection between things, and that process causes us to believe that that model, that patterning, describes what ‘really’ happened. Similarly, it could be claimed that our arguments for why ‘we’ made a decision are merely rationalizations after the fact. Why would we do that? Because we simply cannot believe that ‘we’ have no free will or choice over what the body and brain ‘we’ presume to inhabit does or decides. Such a belief would be terrifying.

These false connections, these fictitious stories we tell ourselves about what happened, is a major preoccupation of the modern human brain. The human brain is a patterning, and then sense-making, machine. It goes so far as to invent the concepts of time and space to explain, sort, and ‘memorize’ the ‘meaning’ of the signals that reach its senses. And then it goes even further and conceptualizes the existence of a separate ‘self’ in the centre of everything, along with a universe of ‘other’ separate things. In its imagined world, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

So presented with the radical non-duality argument that there is no time, no space, nothing separate, no ‘one’, and hence no causality, it cannot help seeing that argument as either dangerous or absurd.

What, then, are we to make of the very compelling evidence of our conditioning ‘causing’ what we do, in light of the equally (to me at last, after glimpses where ‘I’ seemingly disappeared, without consequence) compelling evidence that there is no causality?

We could say that causality is just an “appearance”, just as the sun apparently orbiting earth is an appearance, not an actual reality. If our only experience (and the experiences of others we talk with or read about) is that x precedes y, and if it seems to make sense that x would lead to y, then it is not surprising that we would be convinced that x causes y.

This is different from the causality vs correlation argument, which warns that sometimes things may occur in close proximity, but the seemingly ‘obvious’ causality between x and y is likely just a coincidence.

This distinction is subtler than it might appear. We will generally acknowledge that x and y are correlated rather than causally related only when there is evidence of situations where x was not followed by y, or where we believe the sample was biased. But we will not easily dismiss our belief in the causality between x and y in the absence of such contrary evidence. That is, unless our conditioning has led us to believe that x cannot possibly cause y. And everyone’s conditioning — and hence threshold for believing or disbelieving that x causes y — is different.

In my case, my exposure to certain people and readings (some of which may have been serendipitous) seems to have conditioned me to completely change my belief in the existence of free will. It ‘makes sense’ to ‘me’ that this exposure caused my dramatic change in beliefs. It’s comforting to make sense of everything in this way, rather than believing it was an utterly random, meaningless change in beliefs. I want to believe that’s what was ‘behind’ my change of beliefs on this subject.

It is much harder for me to accept that this belief change just happened for no reason, let alone to accept that my self and all its beliefs are just an illusion, the conjured-up fiction of an over-active and desperate-to-make-sense-of-everything brain. And only an ‘apparent’ brain at that.

When I try to dig deeper into the implications of the radical non-duality message, I have to use metaphor. Perhaps my beliefs changing make sense in the same way that things happening in our dreams seem to make sense. The people and actions in my dreams are clearly illusory, inventions, yet there seems to be some internal logic and flow to what seems to happen in them.

What is actually happening in our dreams? Nothing. How do we explain the apparent causalities of events in our dreams? We cannot. They may be logical, but they are not real.

It is understandably annoying to be told that we, and our stories, are just conjured up inventions of our brains, no more real than dreams. It is a useless, disturbing, and unprovable assertion. Yet when there have been glimpses, it’s astonishingly and intuitively true, even obvious. And this message is repeated, consistently and as articulately as language can permit, across time and around the world, its messengers seemingly now unable to see or talk much about any other truth. And it does tend to resonate with some new, astonishing, findings in science about the nature of self, time and space, and free will (specifically, that none of these things can be scientifically shown to actually exist, and that there is evidence that they don’t).

It does not, and cannot, make sense. Yet as a ‘theory of everything’ it is utterly simple, elegant, and internally consistent. It cannot be proved, or disproved. So why believe it, any more than any other unprovable theory of everything, such as that everything was created by an old white guy with a grey beard two millennia ago, or that everything is made of z-dimensional strings?

Because, perhaps, science has successfully disproved, or cast huge doubts upon, just about every other such theory, statement and assertion about the true nature of reality, and of the self. Radical non-duality may, if we live long enough, turn out to be the last one left standing.

So where does that leave me, on the fence between the explanation of conditioning, and the unconditional causation-free message of radical non-duality? They both assert we have no free will. And the argument that we are merely the product of our conditioning can be very useful, while the argument that ‘we’ are not (anything) is the opposite. So why am I so intuitively and intellectually drawn to the message of radical non-duality?

‘I’ have no idea.

thanks to Kelly for helping me think through the ideas in this post

image by Paul79UF

When I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as free will, it changed my perspective on many of the human practices that presume we do have free will — religions, cognitive behavioural therapy, ‘mindfulness’ practices, the brutal 12-step programs, the lefty spiritual programs that focus on ‘self-improvement’, and all of the quasi-religious programs that advocate ‘surrender’, cracking open ‘so that the light gets in’, redemption, rebirth, ‘liberation’ and ‘enlightenment’.

This was a big mindset change for me — it has barely been a decade since, on this blog, I was writing about what I called ‘let-self-change’ practices, which were earnestly laid out to enable me (and anyone who cared to follow) to evolve myself into a better, happier, healthier, more useful person. Like much of my early blog writing, I now see this as ridiculous, but I’m not embarrassed by it. This blog is a chronicle, a diary, and I’ve learned much from looking back and seeing where I’ve come from. But it’s not a path, and not anything I had or could have had any control over.

If there has been any evolution of this ‘self’, this illusory Dave-person, it has not been ‘my’ doing, but rather, as I’m sure you are tired of hearing me say, the inevitable result of my biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of each moment. In many respects, my ideas, beliefs, and worldview make more sense to me now than ever before, but of course they would, since all this ruminating has been towards the very intentional end of making sense of things. Their evolution, or at least my story about it, would suggest that this self has at least become more self-aware than it seemingly used to be. It catches itself in a lie, or in an over-reaction, more quickly than it used to. And it is more tolerant of not knowing, and of cognitive dissonance, than it seemingly used to be.

One of the hardest lessons in all of this has been the realization that there is no ‘letting go’, no conscious process or action that will unburden this self of its sorrows, its anguish and anxiety, its fears and fury and shame and guilt and grief.

It is not that my self is holding on stubbornly to things it should best let go of. It is rather that the self is the holding on. The self is not tethered by delusions and unhealthy feelings — it is the tether, the construct that inexhaustibly pulls all these things together, tossing one out and replacing it with another from time to time, or not.

The self is the holding on, is the tether, is the ‘story of me’, is all this accumulated gunk that is stuck to us, is the glue that holds our absurd beliefs and ghastly traumas and terrible and wonderful feelings and thoughts in this messy bundle called ‘me’. When we long to ‘let go’ of it all, we are really longing for the end of our selves, while still of course hoping to keep an imagined ‘pure essence’ of self (a ‘higher self’) that we can, at last, be happy with. We want to jettison all the baggage but still have all the stuff ‘we’ think is important waiting for us at our destination — that is, when we arrive at salvation, enlightenment, or whatever other word we might use for that more perfect place.

What I believe now is that (almost) all humans are afflicted with a physical and mental illness that seemingly arises in early childhood. That affliction is the inescapable sense that there is a separate self that is ‘us’, and that there is everyone and everything else apart from it, moving through time and space. And there is no cure.

Here, it has occasionally been seen that this is an illusion, a whole-body misunderstanding of the signals that reach our senses, and that there is actually no one, no self, no separation, no space or time, merely appearances. And that there need not be any of these things for each conditioned apparent body to function perfectly well, exactly as it does without the pretence of a ‘self’ in control.

We can lament this horrific, endemic, but uniquely human disease if we want, but doing so is as useless and pointless as raging that suddenly being afflicted with unending, incurable, horrific hallucinations is somehow unfair, a curse, a kind of cosmic injustice that needs rectification or redemption. This is who ‘we’ are, and our severely damaged species has wrought enormous destruction on the world in acting out its outrage at the suffering this malaise creates in us all.

At least in our story, a story that reverberates across many cultures and belief systems (eg eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge), this tragedy was an accident, the unavoidable consequence of a brain that just got too large for its own good — an horrific evolutionary misstep. But that’s just a story, an attempt to make sense of what makes no sense. There is no one, and hence no one to blame. The play of life — and it is only a play — will go on, a wondrous unfolding outside of time and space, always and already and everywhere and inevitably nothing appearing as everything, with no meaning or purpose.

And in a tiny part of that play, on what appears a lonely little blue planet, one strange species of apes suddenly appeared to develop an accursed affliction that had all of its members asserting to each other that its hallucinations were real and meaningful, and its resulting ghastly suffering in need of some divine or other cure.

Not a very good story, by our human standards — no hero, no plot, no redemption, no resolution. But no matter. It’s only a play, an invention. Just an appearance. No improvement needed. It had its entertaining moments, and in any case it will never be repeated. Fade to black. Exeunt omnes.