David Byrne and David Levitin kind of interview each other:

DL: So you're interested in trance states.

DB: Yeah, I am. I'm interested for a few reasons. One, because there's a lot of popular secular music that I think borrows from sacred music. And because of the way it generates a kind of trance state or a transcendent state in the listener.

DL: Yeah.

DB: So you see through the crack in the door or whatever—you can see that wow, this music is taking me to a place that generates all those kind of vaguely spiritual feelings—like I've gone outside myself, or I had an out-of-body experience, all these kind of things. And music is often talked about in these spiritual terms. So I feel that there's something going on here. Obviously, these musical experiences are touching another part of the brain that's linked to a kind of spiritual or religious experience. Probably because it takes us out of ourselves in that kind of sense, for want of some better term.

DL: I think that's a perfect description of it: out of ourselves.

DB: And it's a little bit of ego loss, which, like in Eastern philosophy, is a kind of pleasurable, transcendental experience. You become one with all these other people around you.

Coming out of the recent Steve Pavlina interview, Julian came up with a great idea for 7 like-minded bloggers who had participated in the Pavlina/NewAge group discussion to come together and offer a series of personal perspectives on integral spirituality for the modern age. The topic at hand is: Integrative Spirituality: Grounded Contemporary Perpsectives. Julian asked me to participate, and I was happy to accept.

The format is 7 contributors posting an essay each on successive days beginning next Monday, and the sequence will be Julian, Hokai, Grey, Elektroglide, Bob, Mr Teacup, and Balder. To me, these guys are the heavy hitters of the Integral blogosphere, and I have a great deal of admiration for them and their work. I'm honored, flattered and slightly terrified to be included in their number.

Much respect also to Julian for coming up with the idea and co-ordinating the symposium. The man is a fountain of energy and ideas, its crazy. I don't know how he does it.


Update: Links to the individual essays:

• Julian
• Hokai
• Grey
• Elektroglide
• Bob
• MrTeacup
• Balder
  

Boxes and Arrows published a book review called Zen and the Art of IA (Information Architecture), about designing web applications. Someone should start collecting these. Its kind of fun to read these little interpretations and misinterpretations of Zen and Buddhism, because you get a really great view of what it often looks like from the outside. Very little dharma, just aesthetic.

The actual book that was reviewed seems amazingly good though, if you happen to be a web designer.

Grounded Practice

For me, the heart and soul of spiritual practice is practice and inquiry. In considering the theme of this symposium, I attempted to strip down and simplify, focusing on the things that I have personally felt most useful and profound. The conclusions that I've come to are tentative and always open to future revision, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge the many writers, teachers and fellow Zaadzters who have contributed to my understanding -- I hope to do them justice by synthesizing some ideas that I consider not just intellectually valid and true, but also so profound that realizing them somehow seems more like remembering long-forgotten truths than learning something new.

Many good and interesting things have unfortunately been given minimal consideration or ignored altogether, but I hope that I have left enough space that other viewpoints and priorities to co-exist with my own.


------------------------------


If you had to pick all the spiritual people out of crowd, you probably wouldn't pick me. I don't wear spiritual clothes, drive a spiritual car or listen to spiritual music. Its not that I think there's something wrong with doing those things, it just never seemed to make any difference. And if there is something real that transcends time, space, culture and personality, something so immense and foundational that it underlies everything in the universe, why would it make a difference?

Its common to hear people say that we don't live in a spiritual culture, because we're materialistic or shallow or out of touch with nature or too individualistic or not individualistic enough. Those things might be true -- I think some of them are -- but so what? I think it’s closer to the truth to say that we are a culture that stopped believing that we are spiritual, but even that doesn't really change anything. Believing in something spiritual doesn't bring you any closer to discovering fundamental truths about existence, and maybe it takes you further away from them. Belief and unbelief in God, a higher power, Absolute Self or Buddha nature have no bearing whatsoever on anything that could be called a fundamental truth, because if it is truly fundamental, how could we ever be apart from it?

It is sometimes said that astronauts in space are in zero gravity. They aren't, they are just weightless. This is because you can never really escape the pull of the earth's gravity, because no matter how far away you get, it will still exert some force on you. And every other object in the universe does too. So it’s an under-appreciated fact that you are, at this moment, connected to everything in the universe through the force of gravity. This is perhaps a useful metaphor for the experience of oneness, interconnectedness, Buddhist dependent co-arising, God's unlimited grace or other religious concepts, but this is not, in itself, evidence of them. It should not be interpreted that interdependence is communicated through gravity or any other physical forces, partly because an experience of excess gravity is nearly always fatal, but also because, as countless high school students will tell you, a demonstration of Newton's theory of universal gravity does not generally create an experience of transcendence. But there's a marked tendency among some to want to find objective evidence of something that requires no evidence; to misuse metaphor to prove something. This is a defensive posture that reveals that the speaker believes that arguments could, in principle, be marshaled in support of a set of conclusions about ultimate reality that would definitively prove its nature. But if doubt about statements about ultimate reality -- whether those statements are emotional, intellectual, magical or logical -- they can't be perfect descriptions of that reality, because any statement always implies the possibility of its opposite. Even the term 'ultimate reality' is insufficient because it implies the existence of the non-ultimate and a non-reality which we have to exclude in order to form the concept at all. What grounded spirituality proposes is to discover what is prior to all statements, which no statement can truly describe.

It’s easy to get swept up in spiritual imagery or blissful poetic descriptions, because it takes you up and out of the dullness and ordinariness of life. We rightly cherish those kinds of moments, but tend to forget that states of fear, insecurity, anxiety and despair can also be non-ordinary, and just as profound and real as the blissful states. Among spiritual seekers, I notice at least two distinct viewpoints on these experiences, and they couldn't be more different. The first is the view that paranormal, supernormal, supernatural, psychic or non-ordinary states are proof of the existence of another transcendent, more real reality beyond this one, and that they should be pursued and cultivated.

The other approach is what I'm going to call a grounded view, which avoids assigning tremendous meaning and value to these experiences, not because they are illogical or inherently false (though they may be), but because in some sense, all statements are inherently false. Under this view, non-ordinary experiences are important, not because they different, but because they are not different. We are seeking something simple, a fact so basic and familiar that it passes unnoticed. This is not an experience, but the place where all experience manifests and it remains no matter how extraordinary and other-worldly our experience gets.




If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything, give up everything.
 - Tao Te Ching

If you were trying to find God, where would you look? Where do you find your true self? At 19, I was a Christian, and in trying to figure out what God wanted from me, I put two continents and an ocean between me and my family and forgot everything I ever knew. It was my dark night of the soul. Up until then, I was a serious student of the Bible and had dutifully memorized scripture. But then, I began to realize that what I supposed was the inerrant (or at least very accurate) word of God could be interpreted quite differently depending on who was reading it, and if God did plan on punishing me for my misdeeds, it was only fair that he make his standards clear. And yet after 2000 years, Christians still can't agree on the answer to the worst question you could possibly get wrong. In terms of ambiguity, legislatures composed only of mortals can come up with a higher quality product compared to what is supposed to be divinely inspired. The Holy Spirit, I reasoned, badly needed an editor, so if God had something to say, it was time that he spoke directly. So I told him that it wasn't working out, that sure, we'd had some good times, but its time to move on. We'd grown apart. I said, I'm sorry God, but I can't do this long distance relationship thing any more -- so I broke up with God.

Then, a miracle:

Nothing happened -- no thunderclaps or lightning bolts, no satanic voices entered my mind, there was no signal at all that God had withdrawn his grace. I'm not sure that I really expected anything, but surely rejecting God is a serious offense? Yet the world seemed unmoved by the immensity of the moment. At that point, spirituality became inquiry, not certainty. I knew that no teachings or scriptures could provide certainty, because ultimately, I still have to decide whether it’s true. You can't find God second-hand. Everything that tries to speak about God can, at best, only help your form your own hypothesis, and hypotheses are useless if they aren't tested. A few years later, reading Sartre, an atheist, that we are condemned to be free, I understood what he meant.




For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.
- 1 Corinthians 13

The transcendent must be available to each of us, directly and unmediated, but what words can be spoken of it? Wittgenstein asks us to remain silent, and that seems like the wise choice. God is... what? I open my mouth, but no words come out. No wonder its blasphemy for Jews to say the name of God. Isness. Suchness. Thisness, thatness. Language breaks down and becomes a parody of itself, like when you stare at word until you can't tell if it’s spelled right or not. The metaphysical question is why is there something rather than nothing? And the great existential question is, what happens when, being something, I become nothing? To respond to this question with ideas of an afterlife or questionable supernatural speculations is to refuse to answer at all; hiding ignorance with a promise that another dimension exists where all questions about being and meaning are definitively answered. For me, the big problem is not that supernatural ideas are often pre-rational magical thinking -- they often are, but I'm open to the possibility that it is not -- but that they are often used as a promissory note, an IOU, the magic eight-ball saying, "Ask again later."

You'll find it in all exoteric religions: mystical or supernatural ideas are used to justify a system of beliefs and practices, but they never seem to get around to asking the important question -- what is the eternal, unborn mind? Waking up to this is the goal of a true spiritual path, but so often the exoteric religions wrap the question up in supernatural fantasies and forget about it. Modern New Age spirituality claims an affinity for contemplative traditions and for "enlightenment", but if people don't actually engage in contemplative practice, if they don't ever wake up to Spirit, the movement is functionally exoteric. Esoteric spirituality differs from exoteric religion in that it does not put off knowing the truth. It doesn't attempt to quiet our suffering and our pain; instead, it offers liberation by seeing things as they actually are. Exoteric religion hopes to "see face to face" after death; esoteric spirituality is the realization that we can see clearly now.

Saving the world is not really part of it. The world may be awash in suffering, death, materialism, logical fallacies, superficiality, religious fanaticism, environmental degradation, terrorism, but none of these concerns are directly related to the project of waking up. That's not to suggest that these concerns are unimportant or that we shouldn't care about them, but to point out that to the extent that we are caught up in our own delusions and our personal perspective, we don't care about them. It we want to make a difference in our own lives or in others', it’s necessary to see clearly or we run the risk of perpetuating delusion and suffering. We fail to notice that our "solutions" to external problems are often truly motivated by our own self-concern. Painful experiences trigger a cascade of feelings and anguish, and we are moved to solve it, to make certain that the trigger never happens again, so eventually wear a groove into our psyches that says, "I shouldn't have to feel this way." Why me, why do I have to suffer? When our actions are motivated by reaction against our experience, a very basic rejection of what is, we give up freedom. Seeing clearly allows us to choose to respond, instead of instinctively reacting.




Literalism and Positivism

What I mean by positivism is the belief that all meaningful statements are derived logically from empirical, objective observations. Positivism, under this definition, has a hyper-logical, but impoverished meaning-making apparatus -- if it can't appear on a dial or a meter, it doesn't exist, and implicitly views subjective experience as inferior or even meaningless, even if it concerns itself purely with subjective experience. For example, you went to see a movie with some friends. Was it good? A positivist would say that this is a meaningless question since the quality of a movie is not an objective fact that can be measured, and no answer to this question would be meaningful that did not follow logically from objective facts. We would probably not invite such a person to the next movie we go to see, because we generally have no trouble asking and accepting answers to questions about subjective experience, and find it useful to do so.

Spiritual seekers tend to have two distinct approaches for dealing with their positivist friends. The first simply accepts the fact that positivism is the dominant mode of discourse in describing "real reality", and attempts to use rational, scientific tools to prove spiritual truths. What is wrong with this? Nothing, if you believe that logic will lead us to all the answers, and is the sole source of truth and meaning. But spiritual seekers, though they frequently deny this positivist dogma, make their case for spirituality by unknowingly affirming the same dogma. This is kind of like trying to fill a hole in the ground by digging it deeper, while the digger celebrates the quantity of dirt he or she is able to produce, intending to use it later to fill the hole. Ironically, in resisting this effort, I am suspected of being a crypto-positivist, not a genuine spiritual seeker at all.

In fact, I'm advocating a second approach, one that closely echoes Ken Wilber's Integral Methodological Pluralism. To stretch the metaphor a bit, this says that you can't dig a hole in the sky. Positivism only denies spiritual truths if we accept that it has anything to say at all about spirituality. But the converse is also true -- anything fact that logic can prove or disprove cannot be a spiritual truth. In this way, we preserve the integrity of both science and spiritual inquiry. One digs in the dirt, the other contemplates the sky. Under this approach, authentic spirituality can only be restored to the culture after we have freed ourselves of positivist excesses, not by continuing to enslave ourselves to them. (Incidentally, this same dynamic is present when people attempt to show that women are essentially the same as men. The majority mode of discourse is used to elevate minority priorities, but at the same time, it continues to do violence to minority modes of understanding the world. Other works in this genre include: Black People: Basically White People, and Hinduism Is Really Christianity)

Positivism is not the same as precision. Logical people are often precise (and often not), and it’s easy to mistake imprecise confusion with 'surrendering to the mystery'. Most people carry a huge amount of unconscious beliefs, habits, assumptions, cultural orientations and psychological baggage that filters experience to produce the reality we want instead of the reality that is, and that occurs in very systematic and subtle ways. A precise, non-judgmental examination of the workings of the mind is a useful tool to counter this. Examining our belief structures logically can reveal to us what we take to be real is not, and is best understood non-literally and metaphorically.




Other Symposium Essays

• Day 1: Julian
• Day 2: Hokai
• Day 3: Grey
• Day 4: Elektroglide
• Day 5: Bob
• Day 6: MrTeacup
• Day 7: Balder

I love the bass on this track...

So I uploaded a picture of myself. There goes my carefully crafted mysterious persona!

This guy, I think, has the right idea:

These Founders were not simply “taking” the Christian religion as they found it; they were actively involved in a project to make such kinder, gentler, more sober and rational.

We should do the same with Islam.

The interesting thing is that the founders of the United States didn't try to tell people to stop believing in God, they tried to appeal to a rational Christianity. Some of my atheist friends have a problem with this. Rational Christianity is not authentic, they say. But this confuses me -- if you don't believe in God, why would you care about authentic Christianity?

This goes to the heart of a central disagreement that I have with most atheists: they think that literal belief in a mythic God causes irrationality. But there's circular logic in there. Belief in a mythic God is supposed to cause irrationality, but a person has to be irrational to believe the myths in the first place.

I see it the other way around: irrationality causes belief in a mythic God. Its an important distinction, because atheists frequently act as though proving the non-existence of God rationally is somehow going to convince people to behave rationally, that if only we could get that one thing out of the way, everything else would follow. But to me, even if you did manage to convince people to stop believing in God, they would just start believing something equally irrational.

This NYT article reports that healthy, well-adjusted people tend to remember bad experiences in the third person, while maladjusted people tend to remember then in the first person. To this, Jason Kottke says:

But things like eating disorders and mental illness aren't external forces and thinking about a bad memory as if it happened to a third party is not the truth.

Perhaps the way to true personal acheivement and happiness is through lying to yourself instead of being honest, loafing instead of practicing, and purposely forgetting information.

But maybe it is the truth. Who is this "I" who had that bad experience? It's not me. There's a historical me, sure... but that's just a collection of memories. The real me exists only in this moment, and never leaves it. Even recalling a memory happens in this moment. Maybe reliving a past experience in the first person, as if it was happening to me right now, is the real deception.

But if the only Me is the now-Me, then telling a fanciful tale of triumph over adversity is also a delusion. All histories are false histories -- biased and altered and filtered and edited by your immediate concerns. It might be better to have the happy story because it keeps you safe from the unhappy story, but if you drop stories altogether, why have a story at all? They are handy if you need to tell someone something about yourself, but you don't have to believe in them, do you?

What if someone asked you about a distant, painful experience, and you told them every detail as you remembered it. But what does it mean, they ask? I don't know. Why interpret it at all? Maybe this is actually what the healthy people are doing. They don't know what it means, but they remember it happened, so they tell you a story drawn from the culture's myths about how they faced down their demons. Its not so much that healthy people have stories with happy endings; they just aren't tied to unhappy stories, they have the flexibility to paint it in a positive light. But this is very different from dissociation, in which case you'd supress your memories of the event.