Category: Featured

Categories
Featured Meditation

This life is a precious treasure

Frosted zinnia

Recently, I wrote an essay about looking at our lives as humans through the window of metaphor. To see our existence as a complex structure, a pattern that depends on conditions, similar to a whirlpool.

This view of our lives is something that I have found very useful, in helping me explain what we are, and the arc that our lives follow. These metaphors have also given me comfort in my life. But, it would wrong to say that they have removed the sting of death and suffering. And, I have recently found myself worrying that the views in my last essay could be seen as cold, and indifferent when we come to the end of a life.

The very day after I published that last essay, I received a call from a close family member. They had just received some troubling medical news. While not conclusive, a scan had potentially revealed a very serious illness. The month that followed since has been a limbo as we have all waited for more information. And now, once additional tests have confirmed our original fears, we are shifting into trying to learn more about what options might be available.

I would love to be able to tell you that through all of this, that I found myself perfectly prepared for this moment by my meditation practice, by my faith. To be able to tell you that I have handled it calmly, and offered comfort to my relative and their family. To their young child. To my own spouse and children. But, to be completely honest, while I have been able to be present for my family, I have also struggled in deep way ever since I received that call.

I’ve cried more in the past month than probably in all of the past decade. With my spouse, on the phone with my family, alone in my car, in my office. For most of an entire month, this has been with me. In a constant, almost physical way that I am really not used to. Like carrying a heavy stone.

But, if endings are natural, and each life comes to a close when conditions change, then why do we lament the loss of a life? Is our anxiety about loss, or our grief, wrong in some sense?

Feeling stuck in this contradiction, I have thought of a poem by Issa many times over the past several weeks:

The world is a dew drop,
Yes, the world is a dew drop,
And yet, and yet . . .

Kobayashi Issa

⁠Our life as a conscious being, as a single person, is like a whirlpool that depends on the flow of the river and the rocks along the river bed. Our life is like a clear, bright note, trembling in the air, rising as our breath flows across a flute. Each whirlpool will subside. No song carries on forever. It is natural for each to come to an end.

And yet, and yet, it is also natural that we lament: each life is a precious treasure. The grief we feel is an important part of how we honor those lives, and our commitment to the wellbeing of all beings.

In his book, “Buddhism Plain and Simple,” Steve Hagan shared his reflections on the pain of losing a close friend suddenly. And, he pointed to how we must acknowledge that endings, that change, are fundamental to life: “This is human life. We cannot lose sight of it. Weeds will flourish, though we hate them and wish them gone; flowers will fall, though we love them and long for them to remain.“

Frosted zinnia
Zinnias from our garden, wilting suddenly after the first fall frost.

I have been deeply impacted by the teachings of Hagan and other Zen teachers who have not called on us to reject our grief. Rather, they have drawn us back to look more closely at how endings are inextricable from beginnings. And, while we will grieve, we can also see that in a deep, crucial sense, nothing is created in birth or lost in death.

As he reflected on a waterfall he saw in Yosemite National Park, Shunryu Suzuki captured this view well when he said,

… the water does not come down in as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance, it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain… ⁠And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Zen practice, similar to a number of other meditation traditions, tries to help us look past our self, and to loosen the hold of our individual ego on how we see our life. But, the goal is not nihilistic, but rather to help us make a deep shift in perspective. Each drop in a waterfall emerges from the same river at the top, and all will merge again at the bottom. ⁠

Hagan, as he considered our desire to prevent or avoid the changes that we don’t want in our lives (loss, death), also pointed back to how the contingency of life is an important part of why it is precious. Considering how we regret seeing the flowers wilt and fade, he wrote:

One solution to this problem is to ignore the real rose and substitute a plastic one, one that never dies (and never lives). But is a plastic rose what we want? No, of course not. We want the real rose. We want the one that dies. We want it because it dies, because it’s fleeting, because it fades. It’s this very quality that makes it precious.

Steve Hagan, Buddhism Plain and Simple

This example that Hagan uses reminds me of many stories in science fiction about immortality. Many of which explore the promise of new technology to greatly extend the human lifespan. Or, to give our consciousness life in a new body (or perhaps in a computer simulation). Greg Egan’s book, “Permutation City,” is a good example, where Egan considers how humans might live if we could “upload” our consciousness to computer simulations.

What I love about Egan’s story is how much attention he gives to the problem that (really) long life, much less immortality, poses for us. How many of us would really be prepared to live for thousands, upon thousands, of years? Probably very few of us could, if we were to keep living in the ways that we do now. Egan thinks very carefully about this problem, and asks what a person would have to give up of themselves, how deeply they have to transform themselves, in order to truly be able to live indefinitely. His answer?  Quite a bit, and that point has resonated with me.

Like Egan, I think that most of us are not really prepared (emotionally, psychologically) to live forever. But, many of us also find the end of a life of a loved one to come too soon, no matter how old a person is. Some of our fascination with immortality, I think, is more motivated by our fear of death, rather than a real desire to exist forever.

I remember talking with my children about some story or movie about immortality, and I said to them that most people were not really looking for immortality, saying something to the effect, “It’s not that people really want to live forever; they are mostly afraid of dying.”  ⁠

An oversimplification, true. But, I think that for me, it captures an important part of how I feel. I don’t want to see the flowers wilt, or to lose the whirlpools. I don’t want the song to end. I know that they can’t go on forever, sure. I hope they will a little longer.

So, I personally have found this last month to be a difficult experience. There will be more tears in our future. And, that is ok. We don’t know how much time we have left together. But we can savor each moment. As Scott McCloud wrote in “The Sculptor,” (a graphic novel that is a beautiful meditation on death and the urge to leave a legacy):

“Every minute is an ocean… let them in… let them all in…”⁠

For me, my practice has been a comfort in this time. It has given me a refuge that I treasure. But, it has not been some kind of emotional insulation. And, I wouldn’t want that: to avoid suffering by cutting off those feelings. Each life is a precious treasure, and I am grateful for the chance to enjoy this one, and that this practice has helped me to better be present for each minute of it.

Categories
Featured Reality Science

The invisible world beyond sensation

Electric eel

Many meditation traditions involve developing our awareness of what is going on around us. Part of that work involves opening up to more fully experiencing the richness of sensation. But, even as our practice matures, and our awareness of the world deepens, even in that moment we are still surrounded by an invisible world, beyond our senses.

As I noted in an earlier post, our perceptions of the world seem direct, and unquestionable. In fact, though, our brains must do a lot of work to make an accurate guess about what the physical world is like. The gap between our perception and the physical world is something that we can easily demonstrate with visual illusions, where we find our perception is out of alignment with the physical world.

While the idea that our perception may skewed is easy to demonstrate, we may not appreciate that from the very first steps, our experience of the world is also very limited. At a fundamental level, our brains must do a considerable amount of work in order to gather information about the world, using our senses.

And, since gathering information is costly (in terms of developing and maintaining each sensory system), our senses are focused on finding the information that is most useful to us, not on representing the entirety of reality. So, while it may seem as if we have access to the entire world, what we can experience is really only a sliver of the reality that surrounds us in each moment.

What information is it that our brains focus on? Each of is probably familiar with our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. To these, we should also add our vestibular sense (our sense of balance, and the ability to detect when our body starts moving or rotating), and proprioception (our sense of where our body is in space).

We often miss our vestibular and proprioceptive systems when we talk about sensation, probably because they often operate outside of our awareness. We may not even notice them until they are disrupted (think of getting dizzy after a carnival ride, or if you have ever experienced bouts of vertigo). Together, these senses represent the range of information that is available to us, through our direct experience, in each moment.

The challenge for each of our senses is to take some stimulus in the world (the chemicals that make up an odor, the waves of pressure that make up sound), and convert those stimuli into the language of the brain. Changes in the electrical potential across the membranes of the sensory receptors, which drive the release of chemical signals (neurotransmitters) that hand the signal off to the next step along the path to the brain. Research on the neuroscience of sensation has made great advances in our understanding of the intricacies and activity of our major sensory systems. Today we can describe in very fine detail the major steps that go into each of our sensory experiences.

For example, this fall, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine recognized the work of Dr. Ardem Patapoutian and Dr. David Julius on the neuroscience of sensation. Specifically, the prize was awarded for Dr. Patapoutian’s work on proteins that are critical for our sense of touch, and Dr. Julius’ work on the proteins that allow us to detect heat, cold, and pain (and, which are targeted by the chemicals in chili peppers, making them spicy).

The work by Drs. Julius and Patapoutian represent important advances in our understanding of the very first steps of sensation: taking some information from the world (light, vibrations, sound, flavor) and converting that information into the language of the brain. Research in this area has greatly advanced our understanding of how our brains are able to “touch” the world around us, by recoding physical stimuli in neural signals. The proteins that Drs. Julius and Patapoutian have characterized are a key step in this process. Having a protein that can start the process of turning heat into a change in the electrical potential of a neuron is the first step in building a window into the world around us. And without these proteins, we would be deeply anesthetized, unable to feel physical contact with much of the world.

And, research across our sensory systems has also demonstrated the limits of our sensation. We can only directly experience stimuli for which we have receptors. And even then, only for stimuli that fall in their working range.

So, as we look closely at our sensory systems, we find that our direct experience of the world is limited in two major ways: 1) in the range of information we can detect, and 2) in the kinds of information that we can detect.

All of the light we can see is just a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.

For the first point, consider vision. Most humans with normal vision can see a rich range of colors. (And, even humans with color vision deficiencies (often referred to as color-blindness) can distinguish a wide range of colors).

Color is our direct, personal experience of the wavelengths of light around us. What we typically refer to as light is technically visible light. For most humans, visible light is made up of electromagnetic radiation (photons) which have wavelengths that fall in a range from about 400 nm (violet) to just over 700 nm (red), stretching from violet to red. Any color that we can perceive is a representation of the wavelengths (or mixtures of wavelengths) of light that are entering our eyes at the moment.

But, what lies outside of this range, and outside of our vision?  Photons with shorter wavelengths we call ultraviolet (UV) light and gamma rays, while photons with longer wavelengths make up infrared light, microwaves and radio waves. Think about that for a moment. Radio waves, gamma rays, and the calmest color of green we have ever experienced. All are in reality photons, and the only important difference between them is their wavelength.

At this moment, some of those other photons, for instance UV and infrared photos, are all around you. Some are passing into your own eyes. And yet, most likely, you can’t see those photons in the UV spectrum, or infrared light. But, why not? Is it impossible to do so? 

Of course not: we can easily “see” UV and infrared light by using special tools (think of infrared (IR) cameras, which allow us to image heat, or see in the dark, when there is little visible light).

And, other animals have visual systems that detect UV or infrared light. Bees, for instance, have a visual system that is sensitive to a range of wavelengths that is similar to humans, but shifted to shorter wavelengths, including the ultraviolet range. Many flowers have evolved to have striking UV patterns which serve as cues for pollinating insects like bees, so the experience of a flower is very different for bees and humans, even from the very first step. So, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder (or at least starts there).

Flowers under visible light and UV filters. Credit: How Plants Work

Outside of vision, this point holds as a general truth: that what we can perceive is only a fraction of what exists around us at any moment. Consider sounds that are very low, or very high in pitch (beyond our hearing), textures too fine for our fingers to catch, and odors too faint for us to detect. All of these exist in the world, right here and now, just beyond what we are experiencing.

On the second point I raised above, we are not only limited in the range of our experience, but also in the very kinds of sensations we can experience. There are qualities of the physical world that we can demonstrate exist, but which we cannot feel directly. Other animals can, though. For instance, numerous species have developed receptors that allow them to detect types of stimuli that humans do not experience directly, such as magnetic fields, the polarization of light, or electric fields (usually by animals such as fish, living in the water).

In each case, these species of animals have developed proteins that can detect stimuli in the world, and sensory systems that represent that information in a useful way. This allows these animals to directly experience physical stimuli in the environment to which we ourselves are blind. Birds use magnetic fields for navigation, similar to our use of a compass. Some fish have a passive electrical sense, that allows them to feel electrical fields in the water, while others actively generate electrical fields that allow them to feel objects in the water. While we sometimes think of these electric fields as weapons (in the case of electric eels), more often the electric sense is used to feel what is in the water in conditions where vision is ineffective.

Electric eel. Credit: Christine Schmidt

So when we look closely at what we can bring into our awareness of the world, we find that humility is always warranted. Right now, in this moment, there is more to the world than what we can experience directly. That invisible world lies beyond our senses, beyond what we can ever experience directly. To reflect deeply on this is important, lest we become overconfident. We cannot hold the entirety of this moment of the world in our perception.

But along with humility, gratitude is also warranted. While our experience is only a sliver of reality, life is so bountiful that even a drop has depths that we cannot exhaust.

Categories
Featured Reality

A meditation on the breath of our life

Neon whirlpool

In our meditation practice, we hope to better see clearly the true nature of reality. What is it that we see, as we turn our attention to look at our own self? One fundamental insight is that our sense of self, the solidity of “I”, is a kind of illusion.

A tree near our home is showing its age, its branches losing leaves and the center slipping into decay. From a single seed, it grew to towering heights, reaching for the sky as it stood tall over us for many years. And now, it has reached the end of its life. We naturally think of this tree as one living being, the same thing that has been with us since we moved into our home. But, what really remains of that tree, even now, that was there at the beginning?

I have often asked this same question of myself: what really remains, or persists, of my self across time? Day-to-day, and moment-to-moment, it is easy for us to feel that the thread of our identity is unbroken. Of course, I tell myself, I am the same person now (the same, unique individual), that I was an hour ago, or last week, last year. But, why am I right to feel so confident about this point? Consider longer windows of time: as I look back at photo of myself as a child, what really, deeply connects the person who smiled so long ago for the camera, to the person holding that photo today?

As living beings ourselves, each of us is composed of a rich tapestry of cells, from our skin, to our muscles, and the cells that organize and oversee the construction of our very bones. Our brains are no exception, and trillions of cells (called neurons) make up that intricate web in our heads. Each of our thoughts, feelings, memories depends on the activity and integrity of our neurons. The cells that make up us work together, forming a community of sorts. But, they are separate units, and fundamentally replaceable. We could swap out pretty much any cell in our body for a physically identical copy, and we have no reason to think that our body, or our experience, would be impacted.

Where then, is the “I” among all of the trillions of separate cells that form the community of my body? How is it that I persist from moment-to-moment, and day-to-day? Personally, I have found it useful, when thinking closely about our bodies and our selves, to see that what is critical is the pattern of activity that those cells, especially those in the brain, maintain over time.

Neon whirlpool
Photo credit: Creativity103

When I was younger, and beginning to explore Zen, one metaphor that shaped how I understood my self came from a talk given by Charlotte Joko Beck (collected in her book Nothing Special: Living Zen).

We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life… Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself. The stability of a whirlpool is only temporary. The energy of the river forms living things – a human being, a cat or dog, trees and plants – then what held the whirlpool in place is itself altered, and the water passes on, perhaps to be caught again and turned for a moment into another whirlpool.

Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing Special: Living Zen“

The image of a whirlpool, something that we recognize is, at its very core, a transient process – ephemeral – was very useful. With living things, it can be easy to treat them as solid and firm, like the tree near my home. But, we ourselves are no less a dynamic process than is a whirlpool. Across our life, from conception, to birth, aging and death, our physical bodies play out as a dynamic structure of matter and energy. Even in adulthood, after our form has stabilized (for the most part!), we are constantly taking in physical matter (through food, drink, and even the very air we breath).

Beck used the metaphor of the whirlpool to explore the ways that we become defensive, protective, if we identify ourselves only on the basis of our temporary form.

We’d rather not think of our lives in this way, however. We don’t want to see ourselves as simply a temporary formation, a whirlpool in the river of life… We want to see ourselves as permanent and stable. Our whole energy goes into trying to protect our supposed separateness.

Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing Special: Living Zen”

In Beck’s talk, she considers how as becoming protective of our transient form, our whirlpool, can lead us to try to hold on to what comes through our whirlpool. Or, to try to erect barriers, turning ourselves into “stagnant pools.” She asks us to consider shifting our view, from identifying solely with our self as a separate being, and to turn our attention back to the ways in which we are deeply connected to everything (the river).

For me, the metaphor of the whirlpool has also been useful in other ways, to help me think about what we really are, in this world. We often treat living things (my self, my family, our pets, the tree outside of our home) as real things that have a stable existence. This attitude has value for us – it is fundamentally useful to us – and for our ability to function in the world. As social beings, the ability to take into account the history of another being in our interactions is key, helping us to know who is likely to be a source of support, or who might put their own desires above the needs of others.

But while it can be useful to think of living things as stable, and enduring, this firmness turns out to be an illusion. Much as whirlpools begin with gentle rotation, mature, and then fade, living things typically go through a rapid development of their physical form, reach some stability in adulthood, and experience a decline towards the ends of their life. Even if we look the same from one day to the next, we are fundamentally dynamic processes, changing in every moment.

Across this arc, what persists that could be a self? Physically, there is little to nothing left in terms of my actual body today that was with me when I was an infant. In many parts of our body, our cells age, die and are replaced with new cells. Even in those cells that persist (in our brains, for instance, many of our neurons will survive for most of our lives), proteins and other molecules are constantly being replaced. Through respiration, we let go of a part of ourselves, the carbon that has been bound to the oxygen we brought in: we shed something of ourselves with every breath.

In the same way that a whirlpool is a stable pattern, living beings are a stable structure, but not static: physical matter pours into them, and through them, with every breath, meal, and drink.

But, while living beings, ourselves included, are transient patterns of matter, could the stability of our identity be in the mental, rather than the physical, domain? If we look closely, we can see that this is probably not the case. Each thought, memory, emotion we have or experience depends on the activity of the brain. So, anything that appears to be stable in our mental experience is weaved from the activity of a body that is in constant flux.

To look at the relationship between our brains and our conscious experience, another piece that I have personally found meaningful is the short story, “Exhalation,” by Ted Chaing. In the story, Chaing’s unnamed narrator describes a strange world, where all of the inhabitants appear to be mechanical creatures, powered by compressed air. The people living in this world must refill their metal “lungs” regularly from a source of compressed air, some vast underground reservoir. If they fail to do so in time, and their lungs run out of air, they will go limp. Replacing their depleted lung with a full one will bring them back to life, but with all of their memories erased. Indeed, it is not clear if the dead who are revived in this way are able to function at all.

The narrator of the story describes his attempts to understand the workings of their own mechanical brains, and in that way understand the source of their memories. He doe this by examining his own brain in great detail. I won’t go into specifics (as I would not want to ruin the story for you, and I would highly recommend it!), but part of the key insight is that pressurized air is used to power a set of tiny switches (essentially air-based transistors), to accomplish the same kinds of computations that our own brains use.

This insight, seeing clearly the relationship of the air to the narrator’s own conscious experience, produced a profound shift in understanding of their own identity.

… I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation”

With the metaphor of the whirlpool that I described above, often I have thought of our whole bodies as whirlpools: intricate patterns of matter, spinning across the arc of our lives. But, when we focus on our mental experience, our thoughts, feelings, memories, I think that this view can be refined, and I have found the image that Chaing has crafted to be very helpful here.

If we (our conscious experience, our persistence as a person over time) are a whirlpool, then our bodies (including our brains), are the rocks and structure of the river bed, which steers the water of the river into the shape of a whirlpool. Just in the same way as the mechanical brains of the beings in Chaing’s story, where the air flowing from the lungs was harnessed as it flowed through them. Their thoughts were made from the air, but were also separate from it, in the same way that a whirlpool is made from water, but is a different kind of thing.

While we need to breathe to live, just as the narrator in Chaing’s story, the nature of our respective needs are different. For us, breath is critical to bring in fresh oxygen (so that we can make use of the energy that is stored in our cells) and to remove the waste products of respiration (such as carbon dioxide). The breath was the very energy that animated Chaing’s beings: all of their lives depended on the reservoir of pressurized air that powered their minds.

For humans, and most of the rest of the life on our planet, our energy doesn’t come from pressurized air, but instead from sunlight. The force that propels our limbs, drives our blood, and gives speed to our thoughts comes from our sun. That energy could have fallen simply onto the earth itself, warming the planet a bit more. But, some of it was captured by plants, and stored away until it could be released, slowly, and (in a sense) intentionally. In the same way that a windmill harnesses the force of the wind that would otherwise pass by, or a solar panel harnesses light, plants store the energy of sunlight in chemical form.

Every thing that we have done, each word we have spoken, each home we have built, each moment of delight we have felt, has been powered by the sun.

So, instead of air, “the very medium of our thoughts” is, fundamentally, sunlight. The power for our thoughts comes from the energy that has been stored from the sun. That energy powers the neurons of the brain. The activity of those neurons (in the electrical and chemical signals that neurons use to process information and communicate) leads to our conscious experience, the whirlpool that is our self.

Chaing ends the story ruminating on the deep connection of life to entropy: his narrator’s life plays out in the movement of the universe from order (pressurized air) to disorder (equilibrium, where there is no difference in pressure).

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation“

But what about us? In an important sense, all of our motion (each movement, thought, memory) depends on a “breath” that was taken when our universe began in the Big Bang. Our existence depends on the creation of the stars, including our own sun. While in principle there are other sources of energy that we can harness, every food that we consume represents energy that was captured and stored from sunlight that fell on our planet.

Most of that light, a vast amount of it, races past our planet, out into the vastness of space. Perhaps some of that light will be detected someday, by some other civilization, and spur some impact there. But, the majority of it will never have a strong effect on the universe at large, or on sentient beings at all.

That tiny, tiny fraction that falls on Earth though? Living beings harness only a fraction of that light (our plants absorb a tiny slice of light, a small range of wavelengths), and that sliver of the bounty of our sun is enough to power the vast web diversity of life on our planet. Each and every thing that we do depends on using that energy. It is true that someday, our sun and the other stars will exhaust their reserves, and the universe will reach some new state (possibly to settle into its own quiet non-existence, perhaps to head to some new rebirth).

But, just as each whirlpool will merge back into the river, the moment that our universe settles back into stillness will come when it will come. Well beyond the limit of our own lives, and very likely beyond that of our species. For us, the present is more properly our concern. If we can preserve our own planet, we can continue to nurture the miracle of our collective whirlpool, the communities of sentient beings that spring into existence on the Earth, and we can continue taking delight in existence and in this great exhalation of the universe.

Categories
Featured Reality Science

Is there a mystery at the heart of reality?

NGC 3254

Has science removed all of the mystery from our world? In our lives today, science has dramatically advanced how we make sense of reality, allowing us to better understand the causes of events. We know much more today about the factors that lead to every event that happens in the world, leading to the expansion of our technology, the refinement of medicine, among other things.

Note: a version of this essay was published in the first issue of Midwest Zen

Today, it could feel like science will eventually explain every part of our life, and that in today’s world, there is no room for mystery.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, science is built on a set of assumptions about the world (that there is an objective world that exists outside of our perceptions, that phenomena in that world are orderly, and that they can be described by general laws and theories). This work, the scientific approach to the world, has allowed us to peer deeply into the fabric of the world, and to look out into the vastness of the universe.

But, even if science eventually “succeeds” – even if we believed that our scientific understanding could be complete, and that such a goal were reasonable – I would hold that even then, there will remain a mystery at the heart of reality: the mystery of existence itself.

Fundamentally, every explanation about the universe, about this life that we keep finding ourselves in, has to take existence itself for granted. Whether we explain the world based on scientific theories, or we look to religious traditions to make sense of the origin of the universe, we can never find a firm vantage point to clearly see if our explanation is really true.

The very existence of existence, the fact that there is a world that our life plays out in, is mysterious. In science, we can trace the life of the universe back to its earliest moments with reasonably high confidence, and there are many strong theories about how the universe came into existence. Some are speculative, and our understanding of this early period is still developing, but we have at the moment a healthy range of plausible options. But, why was the universe able to come into existence in the first place? Why was it possible for something, anything to be? On this question, we have no good answers. Or, none that would not just push the fundamental question of existence back a bit further, unanswered.

We should have similar concerns about religious traditions that explain the existence of the universe through divine intervention – in the end we are left wondering, why is there a God (or gods) in the first place?

In an essay, William James captured this question very well, as he weighed the various approaches people have used to grapple with the question of being:

Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.

William James, “The Problem of Being“

Since I first read this essay, this line has stuck with me: “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge.”

While I try to acknowledge this mystery in my life, and in my meditation practice, it is not out of an effort to answer the question: I’m not looking for the “truth” about reality, in a way that would banish this mystery. The mystery of existence is perhaps something we can feel, or approach, and it may be that mystical states (a perception that we experience oneness with existence, or a relaxation of our individual ego) can help us appreciate that mystery. But, I don’t believe there is any possible way for us to perceive the source of existence. I could be wrong, but understanding why there is anything at all seems to be a fundamental limit to our existence.

And, while the fundamental question of existence is mysterious, that has not led me to reject the scientific approach. I personally still feel that the world around us is orderly and predictable. I have not felt a need to reach for magic, or miracles (in the sense of causes that operate outside of natural laws) to explain what happens in the world.

For me, this is the same way I feel about the possibility that life, and intelligent life, exists beyond our own planet. In the entirety of the universe, the number of stars around us is likely countable (that is, finite), but vast, deeply vast. The rich variety of life on Earth is supported by a single star, our sun. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars, and that is just one galaxy. In the observable universe (what we can actually observe is limited by how far light can travel and the expansion of the universe), there may be around one hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of potential suns for their own gardens of life.

Spiral galaxy NGC 3254, image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.

The sheer number of stars around us, at this moment alone, is staggering, and really beyond comprehension. In all of that creation, could our planet be the only one to support life? The only one with life that has turned its gaze back to itself, and taken delight in the miracle of existence?

Maybe, but I would not bet against those odds!

However, while I have a great deal of confidence (faith) in the existence of life out in the universe beyond our own planet, I have very little faith in reports about UFO encounters, which claim that our planet is regularly visited by beings from other planets. Recently, there were a set of reports about UFOs, some of them related to releases of information from the United States military. While a UFO, or an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) includes any unexplained aerial encounter, most people who are excited about them see evidence of aliens visiting Earth.

While the possibility of life on other planets is very high, from what we know now, the challenges to actually travel between stars is formidable. Unless we find some solutions that can get around limits like the speed of light, any actual travel to another star will take huge investments of time and energy. Other civilizations on other planets may have solved these problems, but the idea that they would have already found us seems pretty unlikely. Not impossible, but one of the principles of a scientific attitude is when you propose a very unlikely theory (that aliens are visiting our planet), you need exceptional evidence, and we certainly don’t have that yet. I would expect that most UFO reports are going to turn out to have rather mundane explanations (such as problems with specific cameras on military planes).

In the same sense, the heart of our existence is a mystery, but not one that necessarily opens the door for magic (unfortunately!) or other approaches to explain existence. This mystery is the foundation of our reality: a firm bedrock that patiently tolerates our efforts to turn it over, and examine it. A mystery that effortlessly dodges both scientific and mystical attempts to tame it. Each effort to break through this mystery, whether through scientific investigation or through mystical experience, leaves the foundation unmarred, unmoved.

Personally, I have found that appreciating the mystery of existence to be an important part of my own meditation practice, and I think that this quote from Carl Sagan captures my own attitude today:

For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable.

A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull …

A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being.

Carl Sagan, “Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Salt”

When Sagan writes about what is unknown, he was not really referring to that which we can never know, but more to the work that is left to do for science (that part of experience that can be explained using scientific theories). But, I would also say that it applies here: there is something important about understanding that some parts of experience are fundamentally unknowable. To experience directly, to touch the mysterious, is equal parts humbling and wonderful.

Categories
Featured Science

Getting out of our heads

false hand with flower

What is this life that we find ourselves living? What is this place that we find ourselves in? For me, these were the kinds of the questions that brought me to meditation, and to Zen practice when I was younger. Growing up, I was not exposed to a strong religious tradition, and felt that I lacked a framework to explain the larger meaning of this life. Over the years, I have felt that my meditation practice has been an important part of how I have found my way in life, helping me to be more aware of the ways in which my own reactions to events in my life can draw out resistance, and struggle. Meditation has opened up more space in my life, to move out of the comfortable ruts of habit, to act with less defensiveness.

Today, I am somewhat grateful for not having a formal religious upbringing, as I feel that opened some space for my own explorations. And, I am still very concerned with the question: what is the nature of this reality that we find ourselves in? How can we move skillfully through the world?

Beyond my meditation practice, and Zen Buddhism in particular, science has been a critical part of my understanding of the world that we are in, and what we are (the nature of human existence). I see my meditation practice as focused on careful observation of life from the “inside,” so to speak: the world as we actually, directly experience it. Even early in a meditation practice, cultivating awareness of our lives can provide many insights, about how we may close ourselves off to others, or to how rumination can lead us to suffer.

For me, I see the scientific approach as complementary to my practice: if my focus in meditation is often to look at the direct experience of life, then the scientific approach is to look at life (the conditions that give rise to our existence as sentient beings, and the structure of that experience) from the “outside,” so to speak. The scientific approach begins from the observation that our experience is generally not random: there is a structure to our experience, and the world appears to operate according to firm, dependable principles.

Some people will call science a religion, and I can see how that is reasonable, but in my experience it is a useful tool. Science is a way of building knowledge about the world, starting from set of foundational premises, really assumptions, that are critical to the entire structure. When introducing science in psychology and neuroscience, we tell our students that science is grounded in four “canons”:

  • empiricism (knowledge is built on observations of the world)
  • determinism (events have orderly causes)
  • parsimony (if we have two explanations for the same event, we prefer the one that is simpler, e.g. the one that explains the event with the fewest assumptions)
  • testability (that our inquiry is limited to questions that can be answered using empirical observations)

Other scientists might debate the number and nature of the foundations of science, but these basic principles are the bedrock of strong science (and these specific four are ones used in a textbook that I am fond of, by Pelham & Blanton, Measuring the Weight of Smoke, and if you are interested, I’d suggest checking out this sample chapter).

Science has proven to be an exceptional system for understanding the structure of the world around us. However, science also has very strong limits (boundaries) that come from the four canons. One in particular is the focus on testability: as scientists, we are only concerned with questions that can be addressed using empirical observations (our own direct observations, or those we can make based on tools, such as thermometers to measure temperature, scales to measure weight).

For this reason, I feel that science is a critical part of making sense of the world, but I don’t see it as a religion, or a spiritual practice, as science is agnostic, or disinterested, in fundamental questions. As a scientist, I find the important questions (“What is the meaning of this life?” for instance) are unanswerable.

So, then why do I feel that science complements my practice at all?

Mainly, it is because I can see the ways in which our perceptions of the world are inherently limited by our human form, and science, especially psychology and neuroscience, have helped to reveal the nature of our limits, and their sources.

For example, consider illusions: cases where our perception (experience) does not describe the world accurately (as we would measure the world more objectively). The “blind spot” is a good example: people with normal vision often forget that each of us is blind in a small part of each of our eyes, the blind spot. You can demonstrate this for yourself (here is one online demonstration from McGill University, from a site with a number of interesting educational activities about the brain).

The blind spot exists because of a quirk of the anatomy of our eyes (and specifically the retina, the very back of our eye). The light sensitive cells in the retina gather information to send into the brain. That information travels into the brain through the optic nerve. But, the fibers that gather to form the nerve pass through the retina, creating a “hole” where there are no light-sensitive cells. (If you have ever had a photograph taken of your retina during an eye exam, you will likely have been able to see the optic disc, which is where the optic nerve is passing through the retina).

So, each person with normal vision is partially blind in each eye. And, each of us is also generally unaware of the blind spot. Our own blindness is hidden from us. However, with careful observation, we can demonstrate the existence of the blind spot, and some very interesting studies have also been done, to study how the brain fills in the blind spot with a guess as to what should be there, based on the context around that location.

As another example, take the Müller-Lyer illusion (right). For most people, the horizontal line in the top figure appears to be longer than the horizontal line in the bottom image.

Muller-Lyer

But, they are the same length! You can test this by holding up a piece of paper along each end, or try visiting this link to this illusion on The Illusion Index, for an animation that shows the length of each line, and gives more info on the illusion. The reason we experience the Müller-Lyer illusion is still a matter of debate (some have pointed out that the arrowheads at the ends of the lines function as depth cues, for instance).

Illusions such as these show that our perceptions (what we experience) can deviate strongly from the world around us (what people generally would experience, if we measured the world objectively). In many ways, this is expected, as our perceptions are not thought to be intended to report exactly what is out in the world around us. Rather, what we perceive is our best guess about the world, or a balance between our best and most useful guess.

Outside of perception, there are also fascinating cases where our understanding of our own ability to pay attention fails us. One example that I like to discuss with my students is inattentional blindness, a situation in which we are unaware that we are not attending fully to what is going on around us. The video below is based on the work of Dan Simon and his colleagues, and is an excellent demonstration (if you haven’t seen it already, that is!).

Inattentional blindness is related to selective attention, the idea that our ability to attend to what is going on around us is usually limited, and we can only focus on a few things at once. But, we are often blind to the fact that we are not processing other events or objects. And, we may miss something important, even when it feels like we are paying attention intensely!

While people may vary in how strongly they experience inattentional blindness (just as with visual illusions), it is very likely that many of us, much of the time, are blind to how much information we are filtering out all around us.

Work with perceptual illusions and “cognitive illusions,” such as inattentional blindness, have helped to demonstrate not only that our perceptions of the world can be limited in important ways, but that careful measurements of the world can show us more clearly the ways in which our experience can be distorted.

This is the first step, for me, to trying to correct for these distortions (to be more humble, for instance, that I may have missed an important event, has been a great help when the people around me disagree on what happened in a specific incident). I have found this to be a very valuable perspective for my own practice, to approach my own experience with humility.

One other area of science, and especially psychology and neuroscience, that is important for my own practice comes from studies of how our perceptions of ourselves as stable, separate beings is built. For instance, I took a moment just now to look at my right hand. I raised it up, stretched out my fingers, then clenched my fist. The feeling of ownership was very strong: this is my hand, certainly. The perception of ownership comes, almost automatically.

But is ownership of my hand really a given?

For example, in my home right now, there is a silicone replica of a hand on a nearby table. I know that this hand is false, and not a real hand.

(Don’t worry, having an extra hand lying around is quite normal in our home, living with a child who is an artist. Because, after all, who isn’t going to need an extra hand someday?)

Now, imagine that my child were to set this false, silicone hand down on my desk. Right next to my own right hand, maybe while I was distracted. And, imagine that the silicone hand and my own were both covered at the wrists, so I could not see where my arm ended, and my hand began.

Looking down, would I be confused about which was my own hand, and which was the false one? Probably not, but why? Is ownership of my hand natural, and given?

No, that does not seem to be the case. While it seems that the decision (that is a false hand, this is my hand) is easy, and effortless, in reality the decision requires active work by our brains. And one easy way to demonstrate this is with the rubber hand illusion (this piece in The Guardian has a nice description of the illusion, and some interesting work on the effects of the illusion on the brain).

To experience the illusion, I could hide my right hand under my desk, and leave the false hand in the same orientation. Then, if someone were to touch my right hand (under the desk), and the false hand, simultaneously, and in the same pattern, I might start to experience the rubber hand illusion. It would start to feel as if the false hand is actually my own. Not every person is susceptible, but for those who are (and I am one of them), it can be a very disconcerting experience.

I know (in an intellectual sense) that the false hand is not real, that it is not even made of flesh. But as I see someone touching it at the same time I feel someone touching my hand, the perception of ownership is real. It can fluctuate between shades of ghostly displacement, and something sharper, stronger feelings of “self.” This is an illusion just as much as the Müller-Lyer, where lines of equal length appear to differ in our perceptions.

While it seems to be a simple thing to say, “this is my hand, that is not,” in reality, it is much more difficult to do. The existence of the rubber hand illusion points to the fact that it really is difficult to find our body in the world, and we (our brains) weigh information from several senses (sight – seeing our hand, proprioception – feeling where our hand is positioned, and touch – feeling something contact the hand).

Where these sensations are strongly correlated (I see someone touch a hand/I feel my hand being touched), then usually, what I am seeing is my own hand. This leads to the feeling of ownership, that is part of building up a sense of myself as separate from the world around me. What it is especially important, I think, is that this sense of myself is built, not found in the world. And, it is unstable (if something as simple as the rubber hand illusion can unsettle it, momentarily).

Are these insights fundamentally different from those offered by Buddhism? Probably not (many of you can likely identify parallels or independent observations in Buddhism that offer similar insights). But for me, to be able to better understand the nature of our form and how it operates in the world has been invaluable. But, also something that I set aside in my practice, and especially in meditation.

As Shohaku Okumura advised, our intellectual understanding can be important, and we should set it aside in our meditation:

It’s really important to first have a kind of intellectual understanding about what our practice is. When we sit on the cushion, we should forget about it, and just sit. It’s the same as when we drive a car, or when we learn how to drive a car. First we have to study about the parts of the car, and how to deal with it. But when we really drive a car, we should forget about that knowledge, and just drive.

Shohaku Okumura, Mind and Zazen