Becoming Human

Why I am not a Buddhist

For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

Zwarte Piet

As always around this time of year, some people are getting upset about the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition of “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete). Although it is pretty clear that the origins of this character have nothing to do with racism (some say it goes back to two black ravens who accompanied Wotan in Germanic mythology), and it is even more obvious that it also has nothing to do with racism today, it seems that some people nevertheless take offense at it, thereby playing into the hands of the Dutch political far right and their hate-filled discourse of an immigrant threat to Dutch culture.

Not, I think, very smart, particularly as Black Pete lost his role of tormentor of bad children a while ago, at least in “official” traditions. This hardly seems like the worst social ill one could imagine to protest against, and its elimination would do nothing to promote non-racist attitudes on the part of those stupid enough to have such attitudes in the first place. I venture to suggest that the only reason the Zwarte Piet tradition attracts criticism is because it is an easy but irrelevant target for a complex problem. In other words, this is the availability heuristic at work. During the decades it might take to shame the tradition into submission, actual important issues around say education, policing and discrimination will receive less attention than they could and should. It is easier to blame Zwarte Piet. In fact, the word in everyday Dutch has become a byword for a symbolic figure made to carry the weight of society’s ills: a scapegoat.

The myth does bear deconstruction, however. Although it is said that the contemporary figure no longer has this association, older Zwarte Piet songs make clear that his role, at a certain moment in history in any case, was to punish children who misbehaved and therefore did not merit the rewards that Saint Nicholas was set to bring. It seems that this role separated out from an earlier ambiguity in the person of St Nicholas himself, who, as a saint, was felt to be too good to inflict punishment, a role that therefore needed to be delegated to another character, even if one whose scope of operations was closely linked to that of St Nicholas himself and bore no signs of autonomy. That such a menacing figure is portrayed as being black might constitute or at least contribute to racial stereotyping, but I venture to suggest this is not really the point. The point is that he exists at all. In other words, that we fail to criticize the way in which we fabricate myths in order to control the behavior of children, and then don’t even take responsibility for it by delegating the dirty jobs to someone else.

Zwarte Piet is just one incarnation of this universal bogeyman who happens, unlike the German “Schwarzer Mann“, to be literally, and entirely incidentally, black. His scarcely critized social purpose is to allow adults to manipulate children through the threat of unspoken evil consequences vectored by the agency of omnipotent spirits which inexplicably have not, however, vented their disapproval on the adults in questions rather than their kids.

The Bogeyman has a lot in common with the devil or the demiurge, figures who crystallized out of the ambiguity of traditional representations of God as both loving and savage. He also lives on in adult imaginations, infusing the sinister powers of any public institution that is there to enforce supposedly moral order, and frequently also other more nebulous spirits.

That can lead to real psychic damage, and it’s a game we should stop playing, whatever the color of the skin of the personality we delegate it to. If a compliance-figure has any role, he or she should take moral responsibility for all of his or her decisions, favorable and unfavorable. Better yet, we should not delegate the enforcement of necessary social norms to any fantasy personality at all, whose actions are beyond reasoning and debate. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but God and Father Christmas have crystallized out of the same dissociation that subsequently produced the devil and Zwarte Piet as mere second-order emanations of our inability to reconcile what we think we need to do with how we want to feel about it and how we want our children to view us. We would do better simply to reunite moral authority and enforcement in the same flesh and blood person, quite able to reconcile these diverse roles, ourselves.

A new political paradigm?

Interviewed recently on BBC’s Newsnight program, Russell Brand has achieved a feat that had for so long been unseen it seemed to have become impossible: ignited the political imagination of a generation.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970’s, from a lower middle class background but happily spared the ravages of inner city social decay, I never felt myself drawn to the left. My political philosophy always has been, and I would say still is, a liberal one. When later I discovered the post-modern social liberalism of philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1990’s, I found him to be articulating the kind of political values I had always believed in. Philosophically this was a comfortable home. Politically, liberalism in the UK, and most other places, was of marginal relevance, caught in a squeeze between the self-interested conservatism of the empowered classes and the equally self-interested socialism of the struggling working class masses. Somehow, these two opposing political forces managed to run the country in alternation, with a good deal of unpleasant rivalry but without either of them going totally off the rails. The left knew its place and was seduced by power, the right had a tradition of social concern, albeit with a dose of condescension and paternalism. Marxists railed on the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1980’s, while Mrs Thatcher foisted an alien set of values on the party of the landed classes whose attitudes had become too archaic and whose appeal had become too limited to address mounting social unrest. Then Tony Blair introduced third-way socialism, in its origins an attempt constructively to engage with the economics of wealth creation which attracted many social liberals to its ranks. But Blair never won over the radical heart of his party, only its pragmatic head, and in hindsight his agenda seems naive, or at best inadequate.

I mistrusted the Left for the reasons most people did who grew up during the Cold War: the spectre of collectivism crushing human individuality and turning all of society into a grey, joyless, paranoid dystopia. This was not, of course, the progressive Left my parents knew. But the fear of nuclear annihilation hung heavily over my generation, and a political system that so elevated ideology over human community could never be my home. To this day, the soul and direction of the Left has seemed to me fatally compromised by its inner ideological struggles. Brand, who by background knows the social reality of the so-called working, increasingly however rather unemployed and economically marginalized, classes much better than I do, sums this up succinctly in his piece in the New Statesman, which is an angry, brilliantly poetic, iconoclastic yet supremely humanistic, epochal rant: the Right has always sought converts, while the Left has looked for traitors.

Brand’s passion for social justice is unquestionable, and at the same time he manages to nail what have always been my misgivings about the British Left. Paraphrasing what I see to be his key message, the Left has always remained in thrall to a system and a political class that embody values which have been taken by the British public to be quasi-constitutional, as the precondition of social stability, values which in fact, however, have never made a clean break from their feudal origins. There is no vision of a new humanity, of a new coexistence. Underlying this strange cohabitation, and it is excruciatingly obvious when it is pointed out, is not just the cult of production but the one unifying institution which bridges, or bridged, the Left-right divide: the church. Today though, it has lost its power to compel acquiescence in a supposedly divinely ordained political order which pretty well every thinking person realizes is no longer fit for purpose, and will not secure any continued human existence, never mind coexistence. There is a gaping hole, increasing angry impatience with the positivist social myth of progress we have been brought up on, and this crisis is not just spiritual and individual, but political and collective. Marxism has failed because it, too, exalted work and production over spirit and community (and fun).

Brand does the unthinkable: he marries the imperative of inner transformation known to us from the mystic core of all religions, but which has always had to seek shelter within and therefore accommodate itself to a hierarchical social order, with a call for radical social change. He seeks to refound the progressive left on essentially a completely novel spiritual basis. Unto Caesar will not be rendered that which is Caesar’s, because nothing is Caesar’s: all that is his is ours. This is truly a prophetic moment, a call for a spiritual democracy from a spiritual demos, a spirituality which itself is phenomenological, unmediated, unimposable, effervescent and evanescent, different in every moment but real, alive, because intrinsically, biologically, shared by every conscious human soul.

There is no doubt that Brand is right, that this is the direction we must take, and there is no doubt either that he is right that revolution is coming whether we like it or not, and the longer we unimaginatively hold on to stale repeat episodes of the old political sitcoms the more painful for everyone that change will be. The direction of change, though, is uncertain, in no way preordained. Contemporary spirituality, the preserve of fortunate middle classes, is far from yet ready for the task. Brand knows it. Those he grew up with have mostly no inkling of this dimension, no idea of this alternative. They are still living as slaves within an archaic paradigm. Or so, at least, I assume. Contemporary spirituality is an ethereal consumer good out of their financial reach and with almost no outreach to them. What they do see and read, if anything, is dumbed down and pious. The media and the marketing engine still have huge influence. Thus modern spirituality at best may inspire a new way of thought; it is, de facto, politically irrelevant. That is a major work ahead of us.

Tolerance and civil rights in the internet age: an essay in honor of national coming out day

Tomorrow is (inter)national coming out day.

I strongly believe that coming out – if you can do so safely – is both personally and ethically imperative. The personal imperative behind coming out is to live ones life in the light rather than in the closet. As LGBT writers and activists have made clear, living life in the closet, though it may be a necessary survival strategy, has extremely perverse effects. The Wikipedia article notes that reasons not to come out include (a) societal homophobia and heterosexism, which marginalize and disadvantage LGBT people as a group, resulting in potential negative social, legal, and economic consequences such as disputes with family and peers, job discrimination, financial losses, violence, blackmail, legal actions, restrictions on having or adopting children, criminalization, or in some countries even capital punishment as well as (b) internal conflicts involving religious beliefs, upbringing, and internalized homophobia in addition to feelings of fear and isolation. Coming out of the closet has even been shown by researchers in Montreal to have significant positive effects on health.

As an ethical matter, one should come out – in Western democracies at least – because the right to do so has been hard-won, and because doing so makes it harder to discriminate against ones community. It encourages others to follow in ones own footsteps, diminishing the personal cost to them of living their life in the light. It also avoids the risk of being blackmailed when ones sexual orientation inadvertently comes to light, and of living ones life in fear. For persons in the public eye this is particularly important.

The Montreal study cited above also contains the interesting observation that “contrary to our expectations, gay and bisexual men had lower depressive symptoms and allostatic load levels than heterosexual men.” (emphasis added)

This may well have been contrary to the researchers’ expectations, but it perfectly coincides with mine. We heterosexuals live our lives in the closet in numerous ways, including but not limited to the sexual. For my part, I can share that I am “monogamish” (that is, de facto socially but not sexually monogamous) and to some degree heteroflexible. In both regards (social monogamy merely being a choice of lifestyle and not an orientation), it is my belief and current understanding, as frequently argued on this blog, that I merely represent what a typical male of our species would be if social restrictions on these ways of thinking and being were removed.

Since I therefore belong to the entitled majority – albeit that majority may beg to differ – it shouldn’t be too difficult to out myself as a member of it. But it is non-trivial all the same. First I had to understand these facts about myself and accept them, which has taken half a lifetime (on an optimistic reckoning: and there may well be more I do not yet know) and then I, just like my LGBT brothers and sisters, have still needed to look societal prejudice in the eye (as well as consider the interests of my family) and say: tough, this is me (and by the way, it’s quite likely to be you too). Like I say, I don’t consider this act by a typical member of the entitled majority particularly brave. I think if I could not say these facts about myself publicly, I would be an outrageous wimp and betray generations of civil rights activists who have fought for the freedoms I now take for granted. I would be free-riding, and possibly living on borrowed time, instead of making my own contribution to a better, more tolerant and loving future for all of humanity. The ethical imperative is so overwhelming it is the greatest no-brainer I know of.

Today I read – I believe it was in Flemish daily Het Nieuwsblad, though I haven’t found a link to the article – that new rules requiring telecoms operators to log internet use are likely shortly to become law in Belgium. According to the article, these rules go beyond a European guideline of 2006, and it has been argued by police and judicial authorities that they need to do so in order to keep up with technological developments and stay ahead of criminals using new technology to dissimulate their plans. The article didn’t talk about civil right safeguards or give much detail on the specific arguments behind the plans. Although I certainly start from a position of caution regarding limitations on freedom, I don’t want to judge these plans here, and certainly not on the basis of that one article. But what does seem to be the case is that the space for freedom of expression which the internet has opened over the last decade and a half is starting, globally, to become a little less private than we thought it was. And this means, the closet is being busted into. Aside from the benefits of coming out, the closet is no longer a safe place to stay.

In the space of only a few years, we have become used to a freedom we never before imagined. The internet has been so tremendously successful as a social platform because it addresses basic human needs to communicate and build community. But long before the state surveillance angle became a topic of discussion, it was already clear that the explosion in the social use of the internet and in self-publishing meant that society was faced with a choice between one of two paths: either to embrace greater tolerance and diversity or to foster an environment in which everyone was enabled and hence driven to share, but nervously required, like in the communist societies of the past (and many of course still today), to look over their shoulder at the possible worst-case social consequences of their sharing.

As time has gone on, this social choice has become more and more stark. It is now certain that both governments and major corporations have the means to put together a very detailed picture of any internet user, even the more careful – their political and religious views, sexual orientation, fantasies and paraphilia, their friends and family, socioeconomic status, and a host of consumption preferences. To some extent the use of this information is constrained by the law: currently insufficiently, but conceivably and hopefully more robust legal safeguards will be put in place. Jurisdictions with stronger rules on online privacy may find themselves at a competitive advantage to host social internet services. Strong encryption systems and distributed peer-to-peer application topologies may wrest a certain level of control back for the user.

But I suspect it will always remain an uphill battle. And the consequence of this is that anything about which you may feel personal shame, or which may be societally disapproved of, always may come to light. Unless, that is, you bury it deeper than your relationship to it may make possible.

This in turn means that a host of situations in which collectively vast numbers of people are implicated and which today exist in a tolerated, if sometimes disapproved of, grey area, may tomorrow have to choose if they are black or white. Legal norms against widespread practices are routinely subject to a degree of latitude in their implementation. But if, tomorrow, we cannot leave this equilibrium untouched, we will have to legislate more sensibly and with considerably more regard for the facts relative to populist sentiment. Not only legislation, though, will have to change merely to maintain the status quo: ultimately, it is societal attitudes which will have to become considerably more accommodating if we are not to find the space for freedom and diversity shrinking intolerably and ourselves facing the prospect of a totalitarian control of society which formerly could only be imagined as the grimmest of science fiction.

I want our societies to be safe, and I want us to stay ahead of terrorist and criminal threats. This is not only a legitimate role of government, but one of its basic functions. Both sensationalist reaction and counterreaction are dangerous, and must make way for serious and informed debate. At the same time, democratic controls over the use of personal data by governments and corporations must be put in place and procedural safeguards made robust.

I also value the ease with which the internet makes information available and allows us all to grow in our knowledge of the world and of each other. The benefit to all of humanity of this must far outweigh the danger which this same fact poses in relation to persons with malicious intent.

Ultimately, we are only going to get this balance right if, collectively, we all grow up. In the internet age, every civil rights issue you ever heard of has merged with a host more of which you have not. We are all interdependent and the freedoms of all depend on the freedoms of each. I feel very close to the LGBT community, as I do to feminist thought and anti-racist campaigners. Ultimately, all of these have a single message: my right to be me. Society, whether through government or private initiative, has a right to limit self-expression only when there is an overwhelming, objective need to do so – not just out of political expediency in response to populist sentiment. This basic unifying principle must be placed at the heart of democratic institutions and of the law and replace the partial protections of the past – based on sexual orientation, race, gender, disability or religion – with a full protection of the human being as such. It must be constitutionally guaranteed.

Religion is the best example of what I am talking about, because unlike all of the other attributes it is not objective : I can change my religion in a way I cannot change my race, gender or sexual orientation. In fact I personally have done so more than once in my life, and am still not too sure what term to apply.

Although religion is not an objective attribute, the protection of religious minorities in fact antedates by far the protection accorded to any of the other categories. This is the consequence of one simple fact: the murderous wars of religion and the eventual realization, first tentatively recognized in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, that it was only if the mutual right to exist was guaranteed by law that sectarian strife could be brought under control and stable, prosperous societies emerge (“Pour ne laisser aucune occasion de troubles et differendz entre noz subjectz, [nous, i.e. the King] avons permis et permettons à ceulx de ladite Religion pretendue reformée vivre et demourer par toutes les villes et lieux de cestuy nostre royaume et pays de nostre obeïssance sans estre enquis, vexez, molestez ny adstrainctz à faire chose pour le faict de la religion contre leur conscience, ne pour raison d’icelle estre recherchez ez maisons et lieux où ilz voudront habiter“).

Yet although religious rights antedate other minority rights by a substantial margin, it is not very clear – any more – what a religion is. Is there a positive list or can anyone found one? In the latter case, is there a presumption of legality, or a process to become included in the positive list? When religions fracture, do all groups acquire the rights of the parent religion, or do some have to reapply? What rights apply to individuals, and which to the religion as such? Do some religions have a more restrictive set of rights than others? What is a critical set of beliefs (or number of adherents) which sets a “religion” apart from a simple philosophical worldview? And so on.

I am sorry if this sounds ill-informed about the jurisprudence on this topic: it certainly is. But the point is that religion, if it ever was a simple matter, is so no longer. The reality is that each of us, today, is free to make up his own religion, and many of us actually do (if you want to try, Daniele Bolelli has even written a “how-to book without instructions“).

In the past, religion involved a choice between a very limited number of options and religions as such could have rights, not just individuals qua members of that religion. Now, many people espouse a religious identity with no audit trail of “membership”, chop and change, may differ widely in beliefs from any sanctioned mainstream dogma, and some religions (such as, to its credit, Islam) never had a single voice of authority in the first place.

Under these circumstances, religious rights cannot mean what they meant in the past – they must extend to the right to live ones life in any way one personally finds meaningful and which is not demonstrably and significantly dangerous to the rest of society or to vulnerable groups (like children) within it, whose constitutional rights may override religious ones. The rest of society may not like a particular worldview, agree with it or (even more likely) for that matter understand it: if it is my own, ever-changing worldview then the latter is certainly the case (not even I could tell you exactly what it is today but it certainly differs from what it will be tomorrow). But my right to hold it must be at least as sacred as the rights of Quakers, or Baha’i, Sufis or whomever. I should not have to seek sanctuary within any of these groups if I do not wish. As I argued in a recent post, true spirituality is creative and actually requires me to be different from anyone else – I cannot follow a dogma.

The internet age demands extraordinary efforts of adaptation on the part of society, but we have the resources we need, in the form of long-cherished principles of political liberalism, to seize this opportunity to build a stronger, better and more inclusive world. By standing up for who we are and what we believe, placing ourselves proudly within the illustrious heritage of all those courageous predecessors, each of us brings that world a little closer.

Consumerism and entitlement

Like many of my fellow earthlings, I am asphyxiated by the perillously thin air that passes today for social intercourse. I am sick of a society which flaunts its technological prowess and has not even the beginnings of a notion of what constitutes a good life. And I am sick of attitudes which are antithetical to the most basic human values, to the innate sense of what it is to be human. The society I live in is on a crash course towards self-destruction.

I do not conceive of myself in society as a one-man business, providing material and spiritual benefits in return for eking out an emotional existence. I am not a beggar. I am abundant.

Unlike many people I encounter on the “spiritual” path, I do not object per se to the existence of an economic system with property rights, labor relations and currency. These are all very strange concepts, totally alien to our human nature, but they make a world possible in which there is reasonable physical security and material well-being. I am willing, in short, to play the game, and even to defend the game. A society organized on tribal principles isn’t going to be sufficient given the level of global interdependency and complexity required to sustain ten billion human beings on this planet.

However, this doesn’t change who I am or what I aspire to; it doesn’t change that the economic system should be at the service of humanity, not at the service of itself. In fact, it does not change the fact that the entire edifice which we call the “economic system” would not work for five minutes if it really had to function in the way it is imagined to work by materialist utilitarians. Our human nature is not an inconvenient maladaptation to economic reality: it is its basis as well as its raison d’etre.

The rampant power of the creed of self-interest is intensely depressing. It has turned us all into social zombies, unable to think about any situation in life, even the most intimate, in terms other than “what’s in it for me?” It has cut us off from all other strategies than manipulation to get what we need, from the very ability to perceive other human beings as incarnate entities preceding their casual and casuistic attributes. This cancerous religion of self-interest is the true, most fundamental incarnation of evil in our midst. Around me, all I see is entitlement, cynicism, an attitude in which people are disposable, in which everyone is training for their black belt in manipulating everyone else and no-one has the sense to call time on the insanity. Where I am required to frame my every gesture as the first move in a commercial transaction in which I will be, experience shows, invariably outsmarted by a more talented bargainer.

Human life, human relationships, are sacred. But we are so degenerate, such sleepwalking machines, that none of us has any idea any more of what this means.

Neurofeedback

I have not yet any experience with it, so I may come back to this theme, but I have recently been looking into the potential of neurofeedback for spiritual development, in particular for training in meditation and self-hypnosis. Neurofeedback (NFB) consists in monitoring brain activity so that the individual can more easily learn how to influence his or her mental state. As such it is a subdomain of biofeedback, which covers the monitoring of various indices of bodily function (such as cardiac function, respiration, perspiration, muscle tensions etc). Biofeedback in turn, as regards its use by individuals at home, so in non-clinical settings, is a subfield of the growing trend towards what is now known as “quantified self“. Quantified self technologies allow for the capture of data regarding bodily functioning and condition with a view to harnessing the powerful goal-driven behavior of the human brain (well described by behavioral economist Dan Ariely).

In this context, I happened upon (to judge by the comments) a rather controversial post by Dr Christian Jarrett, a British psychologist, on Psychology Today (PT) website. Dr Jarrett writes that “Neurofeedback as a clinical tool definitely has a growing evidence base for a range of conditions. However, its use as a form of lifestyle therapy to achieve calm and enlightenment and good moods remains dubious.”

While I keep an open mind on NFB, I felt I needed to point out in the comments that the use of anything at all to achieve spiritual benefits “remains dubious“, if by “dubious” is meant “not empirically demonstrable”. This is intrinsic to spirituality…

Also, while one may perhaps regret, if it is the case, that some people who might otherwise take NFB seriously for demonstrable conditions do not do so because they perceive it as tainted with mystical associations, looked at from the side of those spending money on methods which might bring them spiritual development and not a solution to a specific underlying condition, NO such methods have demonstrable and indiscriminate efficacy. The choice of a method which at least has some scientific grounding to it, even if unproven, may be better than the choice of any of the many other methods which have none at all. If the author is right to dismiss the “spiritual” source of demand for NFB then essentially he is dismissing, it seems to me, spiritual inquiry itself. But then why be concerned with the futility of NFB for spiritual inquiry specifically, if spiritual inquiry itself is necessarily futile?

It seems to me, therefore, that the incorporation of NFB into spiritual training is at least as legitimate as any other practice in the domain of spiritual training. From the standpoint of a spiritual enquirer, Dr Jarrett’s article really does no more than state the obvious: caveat emptor. Unfortunately, much as I might like to, it is rare that I get to use scientific standards to guide choices of spiritual method. At best science may be suggestive. But spiritual inquiry is imperative and we are constrained to use the tools at hand in our choice of methods. Given this fact, NFB seems to me actually rather interesting.

I will post in the comments any reply I might get over on PT.

Proof of Heaven?

On a recent trip to Germany, I picked up a copy of Eben Alexander’s bestselling book Proof of Heaven, an account of what he claims was a near-death experience which he underwent while in coma. It turns out the book has been more than controversial: he has not only been roundly criticized by materialists (masquerading as scientists) but also (surprise, surprise) by a bunch of Christian fundamentalist zealots, disturbed that the picture Alexander paints of the afterlife does not fully accord with their biblicist preconceptions.

This is a book which certainly has its faults. Trivially, it is not a proof of anything: Alexander’s experience cannot be repeated nor can it be falsified; it can only be taken on trust. Hence the precipitation to impugn his character. I find these attempts (which will cost you $1.99 just to read) unconvincing and beside the point. Alexader’s experiences, in so far as they are laid out in the book, are of limited intrinsic interest and scope – what is of interest is the fact that he had them, and not, beyond some general features, what they were. He had to make a book out of it, and accordingly most of the book is more of a dramatic retelling of the facts surrounding his falling into coma and emerging from it, rather than what he experienced when he was there. Apart from the fact that the end is preannounced, he makes a fair job of it: it is quite readable, and this is hardly a flaw. Towards the end of the book, he starts unfortunately to belabor endlessly his rather simple message, and this becomes irritating. But so much for the literary critique.

What Alexander describes is hardly surprising to anyone with a knowledge of the literature on near-death experiences (what he elsewhere calls “non-local consciousness”) and on reincarnation. If the purpose is to get a feel for what these experiences look like, other sources would offer a much better comparative overview. Indeed, Alexander’s own account is rather obviously colored by his cultural and religious environment; this is perhaps inevitable but underlines that a cross-cultural approach would be more scientifically interesting.

Alexander goes to inadequate lengths to avoid giving the impression that what was surprising to him necessarily should be to anyone else. I did not find his account surprising in the least. Nor do I lay much importance by the question of whether his neo-cortex was or was not incapacitated throughout the experience. I do not at all see why this should be critical and I believe experiences that multitudes of people have had under the influence of entheogenic substances – or for that matter in dreams, shamanic journeys or waking reality – have plenty in common with his own. This hardly invalidates his experience, rather the reverse. I do not think there is any “scientific” explanation for the content, or even fact, of any of these other experiences either. All such “explanations” fall well short of capturing the subjective intensity of the experiences in question.

Ultimately, I see little reason why someone disinclined to believe in the possibility of consciousness existing apart from the brain, and not knowing him personally, would be swayed by Alexander’s account. Nevertheless, I certainly wish him well in trying to move mentalities in that direction. His story, in isolation, is hardly the dynamite for the materialist worldview which he makes it out to be.

Its true power, which he does not mention at all, lies elsewhere. Even if it features pastors and prayer groups, even if he is moved to tears by the eucharist, it still does not accord with the primitive, brutalist worldview of Christian (or any other) fundamentalists. Imagine this: God is unconditional love. Yes, you read that right: unconditional. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Christian or Jew, it doesn’t matter if you believe in a salvation history or do good works, you are loved unconditionally.

That sort of puts a spanner in the business model of all those whose value proposition depends on helping you negotiate God’s favor in the afterlife.

And on this key point, anyone whatsoever who has ever had any genuine spiritual experience – including those who would rather avoid the term of God like me – knows that Alexander is absolutely right.

I guess it’s just a technicality that this is not a proof of heaven.

Street religion

cyberdog_and_grafitti_by_we_will_break-d31amhx — Nigel Harvey Photography. Source : http://we-will-break.deviantart.com/

London on a Saturday night is brimming with raw sexual energy. Party goers dress to impress – and to excite.

A couple of hours earlier I had been in the delightful energy of the alternative fashion scene in Camden Market, beating out ecstatic dance music and brimful of creativity (at this point, I have to link to Cyberdog and Sai Sai, I just love them too much!).

I’m not sure if the denizens of this milieu see themselves as a subculture or counterculture, I have no doubt that society (still) does, but I see them as in the very vanguard of culture, its vibrant, beating heart. They turn me on, excite me, leave me spellbound and dumbstruck at their artistic prowess. Where stuffy old conservatives see decadence and degeneration, I see the opposite… cadence, generation, life springing inexhaustibly from its source.

Leaving Camden market, I was on my way to a self-styled “Ecstatic Dance” event. There was live tribal-style dance music with drums and other instruments, accompanied by incantations to Gaia and helper spirits, all mixed up with yoga breathing and chakra meditations. The participants were dressed casually – read, in many cases, badly – and they interacted very little with each other. While the music was OK, it was nowhere near the ecstatic heights of what I had been listening to in a mere retail store a few hours before. And raw vegan food meant lots of sugar and plenty of chocolate.

I’m not knocking it. Well OK, I am, but the thing is this. One experience was creative and ecstatic, if maybe lacking in self-awareness. The other was derivative and stale, a veneer of spirituality on top of behavior with which everyone was comfortable. No remise en question. An attempt to recreate a tribal dance and shamanic healing “vibe”, but achieving at most only something of the form, very little of the substance.

In the world of spiritual practice there is nothing which is true or false, but there are some things which are authentic and alive and there are other things which are stultifying and dead. The two may resemble each other in form, but they differ wildly in spirit.

Spirituality, you see, is creative. It is an attempt first of all to imagine, and then to create, a more beautiful world. There are innumerable ways of doing that, but there are many more ways of failing to do so. The spiritual seeker is an artist. Copying someone else’s form of spirituality is nothing more than plagiarism. It will never put you in touch with yourself. That is what people who have no wish really to change are doing all over the world, day in day out, and it makes no difference if they do it in a traditional place of worship within an established religion, or in a community center hired for the occasion with an ad hoc crowd of revelers who found each other, as we did, on the internet. Of course, learning from a true master in any sphere of life may be a wise choice of apprenticeship. But this does not change that there is great art, and there are sad imitations.

Spirituality is out on the streets these days (perhaps it always was). It is the quality of all those who rebel against social conditioning, who strike out on their own or with a group of friends, who believe in themselves and dare to change the world, but never retreat from it. It goes as unnoticed by self-styled new agers as it does by the established church, yet it is way more authentic, way more life-affirming, than either. This post is my attempt to tell these kids (of all ages) that those who are really spiritual esteem them beyond measure. That if only they have the courage to stick with who they are, explore and, over time, deepen their youthful intuitions, they will make the world better for all of us. And while peaceful meditation in nature and solitary moments under the stars may be just as numinous, I wish more of us would cast aside stale, “ecstatic” asceticism and worship there, in the thick of life, at its source.

Oh, and I wish that they would start their parties just a wee bit earlier… 😉

God, sang Faithless, is a DJ. But not quite. In fact, it’s the DJ that is God.

The flight to community

I am moved to share this article over on Guernica in which a journalist – Katherine Rowland – pays a sympathetic visit to the ZEGG “free love” community near Berlin in Germany.

The writing is perceptive and beautiful; it is a gorgeous portrait, and as Johanna in the comments implies, does not only illuminate the contemporary struggle between monogamy and polyamorous community but the whole social history of the sixties free love movement.

The problem, it seems to me, as I suggested in my earlier blog post on polyamory, is that what we have here is a utopian community for dystopian individuals. By that I mean simply that there are many obstacles to leading what may be a more natural existence, and only those whose biological nature is the most exhausted by struggling with social norms (like me) are moved to try. Groupthink in such a context is almost inevitable. Such communities are courageous experiments which one may envy, but on the whole they are not very self-reflective or self-aware. A bit like launching off across the ocean with only a hollowed-out canoe. It’s not going to work unless set in a very careful therapeutic context, and at present our lamentable state of almost-inexistent knowledge as to what it is we truly desire as human beings, coupled with the neurotic state of how these drives are expressed in contemporary society, affords few points of safe anchorage. Which may, though, not matter if we just view it as one resource in a personal journey of self-discovery.

For my part I do not believe that this kind of community is a solution to most people’s socioerotic ills. It may provide a framework for important experiences to occur, but it does not provide a complete answer to the needs of the heart. This is because of the ways in which it necessarily differs from ancestral communities and because, as a species, we are also on a journey and cannot simply return to the conditions of the past; we must adapt, and we are very (but perhaps too) adaptable.

The needs of the human heart are most practically met, for most people, in structures which build upon social monogamy. This is for reasons which have nothing to do with our biological nature, but only with the consequences of our fall from grace. Already a relationship with a single person is hard; there is every risk that adding more people in makes it worse and not better. Worse, because it makes it easier to dodge the inevitable confrontations with self which come up in a relationship, to slip into a superficial, self-indulgent erotic reverie.

We nevertheless have little choice than to invent new models, because as far as human sexuality is concerned, the cat is not only out of the bag, but equipped with a dazzling array of techno cat-toys with which it can catch all the mice it could ever dream of – and more. The Aquarian couple is different from an “open relationship”, swinging or “consensual non-monogamy” in that it is about love and self-discovery, not just getting sexual “needs” met (there is no such thing as merely “sexual” needs anyway – impulse perhaps, but not needs). But it is also different from polyamory in that it does function based on something close to a traditional family unit. Unwavering commitment to truth, freedom and self-discovery are as important as the commitment to the spiritual and financial needs of that unit. Only such a marriage of yin and yang can, I believe, take society on the next step of its painful journey to more joy, love and inclusiveness.

The neuroscience of fear

Continuing my interest in the neuroscience of emotion, I recently finished reading neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s book “The Emotional Brain”(*). This is a quick review and synopsis, in particular of those points relevant to psychotherapy.

LeDoux is one of the best known figures in the field, alongside Antonio Damasio, whose work I have also delved into, but found rather indigestible. Although I found Ledoux more readable than Damasio, I have two major gripes with the book. The main one is the title: there is not a lot in the book about emotions in general; Ledoux rapidly zeroes in on the single emotion of fear, which is his area of specialism. On this subject he is relatively enlightening, but it wasn’t what I expected or hoped for. In addition, some of the statements he does make about emotions in general, even if they may apply to fear are not obviously true of all emotions.

Additionally, the blurb suggests a book which is highly readable, but I did not find this to be really the case. It’s fairly readable, but has a tendency, especially in the later chapters, to get lost in detail. I would say it is not ideally pitched to the non-specialist reader (though likely at the same time to be oversimplified for a specialist), and does not belong to the best in science writing. Having been written in 1998, it is of course also somewhat dated by now, though I have not come across anything more recent.

LeDoux argues convincingly – but it is not very surprising – that there is no single “emotional system” in the brain, but we have to look at each emotion separately. As i said, he focuses on fear, which presumably is one of the easier emotions to study because it has a much longer evolutionary history than some of the “higher” emotions like love and joy which seem more particularly to relate to human experience. It is quite hard to read any conclusions across from fear to these other emotions.

LeDoux argues that we typically have little reliable insight into the factors which trigger our emotions, but a great tendency to make up stories about them and to believe in these stories. Indeed, we are unreliable in our reports of our emotional states as such. Emotions, unlike cognition, are intrinsically linked to the body and prompt bodily response; they evolved as “behavioral and physiological specializations” (p.40). The characteristic “feel” of emotions reflect their different physiological signatures.

Emotions operate below the level of consciousness. This is illustrated by the phenomenon of “emotional priming” whereby the response to an explicit stimulus is influenced by a preceding stimulus the duration of which is too short for it to be captured in conscious memory (p.59). Mere exposure is sufficient; there is no need for any logical connection between the two stimuli.

The study of fear has, of course, a particular relevance to psychotherapy and some of LeDoux’s arguments bear consideration in this context, as he himself notes, though does little to develop. LeDoux argues that fear, and comparable emotions, are registered in the amygdala from where they govern programmed physiological reactions; at the same time there is a feedback loop to cognition which passes via the hippocampus. This latter circuit is obviously much more developed in humans than in lower mammals, but in all species it is notably asymmetric: the hippocampus, which is where new memories are created, has the equivalent of a broadband connection to the medial prefrontal cortex, but the available bandwidth is much less in the opposite direction. This, LeDoux argues, makes it difficult to reprogram the association made in the hippocampus between certain remembered events and the fear response. This sounds plausible, and may reflect experimental observations on the persistence of conditioned fear responses in rodents as well as the observed difficulties of therapy, but it is no more than suggestive of the conclusion which LeDoux draws.

Fear conditioning is the process which “turns meaningless stimuli into warning signs” (p.141). Some stimuli are preprogrammed: “laboratory-bred rats who have never seen a cat will freeze if they encounter one” (p.143). But most, of course, are learned. The simultaneous presence of two stimuli of which only one, the “unconditioned stimulus” (US) is intrinsically unpleasant is sufficient to form a link between them, on the basis of which the second or conditioned stimulus (CS) is subsequently sufficient to evoke the fear response, regardless of its intrinsic link to the US. This link is highly persistent and may indeed be impossible to forget completely even if, subsequently, no link between the stimuli is observed for a protracted period. The best that can be done is to extinguish it by presenting the CS repeatedly in the absence of the US, but there is always the risk of recurrence if relevant circumstances, such as re-exposure to the unconditioned stimulus, or simply a high level of ambient unrelated stress, arise. A CS may be almost anything: a place, a gesture, an expression, a tone of voice… Of course, the atomicity of these candidate stimuli is hard to determine : is being in exactly the same place necessary to evoke the conditioned response, or is it sufficient that a place bear some resemblance and, if so, in what respects?

In stressful situations, memory formation by the hippocampus is impaired. This would imply that traumatic events might not leave a memory trace, but still result in fear conditioning. In such cases, there may be no way to “reverse-engineer” the event out of the conditioned reaction. This has the clear implication that going after memories of traumatic events may be a fruitless strategy, and that resolution of trauma might happen without those underlying events ever being recalled, even if they occurred past the stage of childhood amnesia. However, the stress hormone cortisol has the opposite effect on the amygdala. Thus it is “completely possible that one might have poor conscious memory of a traumatic experience, but at the same time form very powerful implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p.245). At the same time, recreating the emotional state conditioned does facilitate recall of explicit memories (p.212).

LeDoux’s analysis of conditioning and memory therefore sheds some light on problems encountered in therapy and on effective therapeutic strategies. I learnt something from this book, but I suspect that a general book on recent contributions of neuroscience to psychotherapy might have gotten me more rapidly to my goal.

———————————————–

(*) References are to the 1999 paperback edition published by Orion books.