7 posts tagged “spirituality”

In an era when many many moral rules seem to be arbitrarily based on culture we need a deeper foundation.

Simple observation shows that humans are motivated by various and often different interests and desires. We know now that these interests are a combination of genetic, cultural, and upbringing factors. Initially one can not say one interest or motivation is inherently better than another. To do so is to arbitrarily value one interest or motivation more than the others then use that one as the rule by which others are valued.

If all individual interests and motivations are equally valued then society as a whole must maximize the expression of these interests. Consequently this maximization process thus should be the source for all moral guidelines because  the expression of certain interests by individuals will inhibit the expression of other interests by other individuals. In addition immediate expression of certain interests by a single individual can inhibit the expression of a greater number of their interests or some more highly valued interests over a longer term.

Since this morality involves working well with others in groups one should not be surprised that its core has been provided by our own evolution.

The maximization of the group experiential requires that each human develop wisdom which involves a deep understanding of how human emotions work within oneself and others combined with a knowledge of how the world works (its causal flows). All religions value wisdom yet wisdom never seems to be at the primary concern.

Wisdom stands upon three legs. The first leg is the development of one's spirituality, the understanding of oneself in the fullest sense realizing one's emotions and motivations are some unknown mix of genetics, culture, upbringing, and immaterial conscious sensations. In practice this requires the development of a certain level of emotional detachment so one can investigate ones own motivations and (often unexpected) emotional responses. This requires one seek out and explore emotion laden experiences. Our brains will inevitably put our experiences into some sort of mental framework that most closely matches what we feel depending on which frameworks we have run across in our life. To suppress this  direct experiential "natural" framework in preference to a framework that is supposed to be true based upon culture or rationality is to inhibit one's spirituality. Rationality and emotions are handled by two different regions of the brain so one should not expect them to be coherent. There is an appropriate time for each.

The second leg for developing wisdom is the understanding the motivations and emotions of others. This requires the development of empathy (love) in preference to a quick judgment. The key here is the realization that everyone may have a different spirituality, only some of which you may directly understand for unless you have experienced something similar you will really not understand it. Yet the maximization of the group experiential means you must accept it unless it is inhibiting to the long term experiences of everyone. Those with similar spiritual experiences will tend to group together to form various religions or spiritual movements so freedom of religion is a basic moral issue.

The third leg is the understanding causal flows, the cause and effect of everything. Like the development of spirituality this also requires the development of a certain level of emotional detachment so that one can analyze worldly evidence without having one's judgment blinded by one's own cultural biases. The scientific method with its mathematical theories that describe causal flows is a method that has proven itself successful at this. If one must make decisions that affect others one had better understand causal flows well for the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. One should not try to convince others to believe a certain way unless one is prepared to present evidence of causal flows. Often various religions revert to immoral coercion or propaganda methods to gain converts instead of allowing each human to discover their own spirituality in their own time. One can never have too much education although such education does not need to be formal.

Date
The date in which the Bhagavad Gita was first written can be determined accurately based upon language analysis. I quote below from the scholarly translation by Winthrop Sargent (published by State University of New York Press in 1994) who in his book provides a literal translation of the Sanskrit in one column, in another column he provides a dictionary of alternate meanings to the various Sanskrit words, and who at the bottom of the page gives his own preferred translation into English.

"The Bhagavad Gita, in its written form at any rate, is generally thought to date from the second or third centuries A.D., being considered a later interpolation in the long epic, the Mahabharata, most of which describes and India of an earlier period, possibly 800 B.C." (page 4)

The reason for this conclusion is the grammer of the Sanskrit used. The long compound words of Classical Sanskrit (400 to 1500 A.D.) have not year appeared although a rarely a Classical Sanskrit grammar form will appear which in only to be expected from written transmission. This earlier Sanskrit called Epic-Puranic Sanskrit probably originated around 500 B.C but was only started to be written down after 300 B.C. Before that was the Vedic Sanskrit (1400 to 300 BC).

Purpose

The purpose of the Bhagavad Gita is to show there are many way to spiritual liberation (inner peace).

Book One introduces the moral dilemma of life in which one is often forced to choose the lessor of two evils. In this case the warrior Arjuna must chose between fighting and not fighting.

Book Two is the Yoga (teaching) of knowledge in which inner peace comes from understanding everything earthly is transient and thus not worthy of attachment.

Book Three is the Yoga of action in which inner peace comes by the control of unrestrained passions by mastering the Self.

Book Four is the Yoga of the renunciation of action in knowledge in which inner peace is obtained from certain knowledge (faith) no longer having doubts.

Book Five is the Yoga of Renunciation in which inner peace is obtained by no longer experiencing negative emotions such as desire, fear, and anger.

Book Six is the Yoga of Meditation in which inner peace is obtained by merging one's inner self into the Divine.

These next yogas have more in common with western religious tradition in the form of early Christianity than with the early eastern religious traditions.

Book Seven is the Yoga of Knowledge and Discrimination in which inner peace is obtained by worshiping and knowing Krishna (God).

Book Eight is the Yoga of Imperishable Brahman in which inner peace is obtained from serving Krishna (God) via study of the Vedas (scriptures), sacrifices, austerities, and gifts. From that one will gain eternal life by merging with the All (Brahmin).

Book Nine is the Yoga of Royal Knowledge and Royal Mystery in which inner peace is obtained by being devoted to Krishna with the knowledge that such devotion will bring one to Krishna.

Book Ten is the Yoga of Manifestation in which inner peace is obtained by realizing everything comes from Krishna.

Book Eleven is the Yoga of the Vision of Universal Form in which inner peace is obtained by receiving grace from a Lordly Krishna in his human form.

Book Twelve is the Yoga of Devotion in which inner peace is obtained by combining all the characteristic described in the previous books.

Now the books begin discussing metaphysics mixing eastern and western concepts.

Book Thirteen is the Yoga of Distinction Between the Field-Knower and the Field in which the Self is distinguished from material nature.

Book Fourteen is the Yoga of Distinction Between the Three Gunas (types of personality). The three Gunas are: Rajas - passionate, emotional: Sattva - truthful, pure, realistic; and Tamas: darkness, slothful.

Book Fifteen is the Yoga of Supreme Spirit identifying all powers with Krisha.

Book Sixteen is the Yoga of Distinction Between the Divine and Demonic Destinies.Those devoted to desire, anger and greed will go to Hell.

Book Seventeen is the Yoga of Distinction of Three Kinds of Faith. Actions not backed up by proper motivations lead to Darkness.

Book Eighteen is the Yoga of Renunciation. Those who teach these secrets will come to Krishna, the Lord of all beings.

 

In any sudden event something exceeds some kind of threshold. Common examples of this would be the start of an avalanche in which to weight of the snow or rock exceeds its stickiness or the creation of an action potential in a neuron when its charge exceeds its threshold.

The Big Bang which created our universe is another sudden event so what could possibly be exceeding a threshold there? It cannot be any sort of matter (mass / energy) since those are confined to the three dimensional space of the universe. So it must be something immaterial.

Now the key property of eternity (an infinity of time) is that what ever it consists of cannot be growing or shrinking by even a little bit since that something would then get infinitely large or small. Yet the things of eternity could be cyclic, increasing and decreasing in an infinite cycle.

This means that the creation of the universe is part of the cyclic process in which that eternal something is brought back into balance. The only non-material part of our universe is our conscious sensations, sometimes collectively known as the soul. What, if anything, these conscious sensations contribute to personality apart from our material biology is unknown. All we can say for sure right now is that conscious sensations are triggered by material experiences.

So one must conclude that the activation of conscious sensations is what will bring eternity back into balance. The universe was created for the purpose of developing creatures who could connect to these conscious sensations and activate them via there own experiences. The creation of complex life forms is the goal of the universe.

This metaphysical hypothesis should affect our morality at a cultural level. If we want to conform with the goals of the universe we need to promote the self-fulfillment and experiential possibilities of all complex life over the long term.

Overall I found this book to be a very good introduction into the New Age movement by presenting what seems to be the common core ideas. For the author the core idea of New Age spirituality is the connectedness between all conscious beings. His only limitation is that he and the New Age movement in general do not have a theory to describe how this might be possible even though such a theory does exist. He relies on intuition which in his case is rather good.

The first chapter entitled "Early Intuitions" give a quick review of spiritual trends since the 1960's. This paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the book:

"Immediately, we realized that his focus within, this analysis of our personal history, was helpful and important. Yet, in the end, we found that something was still missing. We found we could analyze our inner psychology for years, only to have our same old fears and reactions and outbursts come back again every time we were in situation of high stress and insecurity.

By the end of the 1970's, we realized that our intuition of more could not be satisfied by theapy alone. What we were intuiting was a new awareness, a new sense of self, and a higher flow of experience that would replace the old habits and reactions that plagued us. The fuller life we sensed was not about mere pschological growth. The new awareness necessitated a deeper transformation that could only be called spiritual." (page 4)

For the author this spiritual interconnectedness is best exemplified by meaningful coincidences popularly known as synchronicity, a term first coined by Carl Jung. Now coincidences could be just that or they could be due to some sort of inter-conscious telepathy. Our brains are wired to "see" cause and effect in coincidences at a deep emotional level. This is known as classical conditioning. Even simple brains such as sea snails have simple neural circuits that accomplish it. So it is natural to see cause and effect in coincidences and if it was not for the existence of conscious sensations I would leave it at that.

But conscious sensations exist so they must have some evolutionarily advantage to our and perhaps other species. Conscious Sensations are elicited via electrical stimulation in awake neurosugery patients only in deep emotional and primary sensory cortex regions of the brain meaning they are not needed for intelligence. This seems to leave some sort of loosely coupled (weak) emotional and perceptual biasing telepathy as the only remaining evolutionary reason. This means spiritual connectness is rationally plausible and that it is something more that intuition.

This interconnectedness of consciousness seems to explain all forms of religious experience beyond that attributible to psycholgical effects. Using the principle of Occam's Razor one does not need to postulate the existence of a human like (emotional and intelligent) god or goddess to account for spirituality.

Not having this theory of conscious sensations the author says this:

"Synchronicity, as well as the overall new spiritual awareness that we're building, is merely a consciousness of the way the divine operates in our lives. All major religions - Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic - as well as the many shamanic traditions shar the notion of being responsive to the will of God. To put it differently, all are concerned with our growth toward unity with a Godhead or coming into communion with the creative force behind the human condition." (page 26)

The fact that the author had to base his core concept of spiritual connectedness only on intuitive arguments seems to have bothered him so much that he spends a good part of the book trying to debunk science in general and some scientific theories in particular. This is the biggest downside of the book since the author does not know what he is talking about here.

Because of this lack of theory the author mistakenly equates spiritual psychic energies (the sum total of one's various conscious emotions) with real physical energy. He like many other New Age followers seems to think quantum physics makes this possible when it does not. The author then goes on to describe how various inter-personal interactions affect psychic energies in a simplistic but easy to grasp psychology. If one considers the complexity of human emotions and the variety of our motivational dimensions one can easily realize just how simplistic this psychic energy psychology really is. Still it is a good first order approximation of inter-personal behavior and it is easy to use it to describe general concepts.

The author describes some common attributes of mystical experiences as (page 97):

1. A sense of lightness
2. A sense of closeness and connection
3. A sense of security, eternity, and love

In the preface the author mentions an insight that was not really developed:

"In most cases to experience higher spiritual experience, we must at least open to the possibility that such perception exists. We know now that one actually has to suspend or 'bracket' skepticism and try in every way possible to open up to spiritual phenomana in order to experience them."

This is very true. Earlier I mentioned how the brain is wired to perceive coincidences as cause and effect. Many other such examples of pre-wired perceptions exist. Another one occurs if we are traveling in a very smooth riding car. In that situation we perceive the world is moving past us, not that we are moving past the world. We have to step back and analyze the situation to realize that we are really the moving one. Likewise, we naturally experience the spiritual when we step back and take down our analytical defenses. This feeling is why some people are pantheists, feeling spirits in everything even though this cannot be the case since conscious sensations are not common to our whole brain and body so one cannot expect them to be common to most of the physical universe. So the key to life is balance with a proper time for every thing.

Once one realizes and feels the interconnectness of everyone and everything one gains a more deteched perspective on life (to use the Buddhist term). The author puts it this way:

"Once we find the transcendent experience and open up to a greater flow of spiritual energy and security within, something profound begins to occurs. We begin to see ourselves and our behavior from a higher perspective, from the viewpoint of our more energized self. Our sense of identity moves past the insecure reactions of our ego self and assumes a witness viewpoint, identified now with all of divine creation and able to see our socially defined self with a new objectivity." (page 105)

Not really developed by the author but perhaps assumed by him is the process of self-discovery to reconcile ones enculturation with ones deep emotions and to reconcile any conflicing emotions by a lifestyle change or a mental detachment from the least wanted motivation. These would seem a pre-requisite to feel and project positive psychic energy.

So we live in a cloud of spiritual energy generated by other conscious beings. Making this cloud's energy more positive benifits everyone and this is the foundation of New Age ethics. By healing one's own psychology one projects postive spiritual energy outward and becomes a living example of enlightenment. The positive energy is then reflected back in a virtual cycle, a positive feedback loop. In contrast negative energies, our negative emotions, are reflected back to us as well both via both realms of physical and spiritual.

Not mentioned by the author but Wicca takes this one step farther by using "tools" to aid in the generation of various types of postive spiritual energy for themselves or for projection outward. These "tools" can be any thing, action, or practice, that has emotional meaning to the person using them. Wiccans also follow the cycles of nature closely since nature itself is a strong generator of postive emotions (psychic energies). Instead of trying to create positive psychic energies out of nothing Wicca grounds the practitioner in mental and emotional constructs to generate various postive feelings and emotions.

One comic once said that reasoning was just another name for rationalization. That statement has a lot of truth behind it, especially when reasoning is done with language since motivations and emotions play such a strong part in  defining the context in which we see the world (our paradigm or world view). Language is very context based even at the tripartite deep structure level.

The deep structure of language has a possessive ("has") and declarative component ("is"). For example these sentences mean the same even though they are syntactically different as the words are rotated forward.

1. The weight of the ball is ten.
2. Ten is the weight of the ball.
3. Ball has a weight of ten. 
   

Edit (March 3, 2007): The possessive defines the context (the "box") for the thought. All our thoughts occur within some context or hierarchy of context (world view).

This is another reason why objective reality needs to be modeled as much as possible using mathematics since reasoning via language is so untrustworthy.

If some one believes deeply in a paradigm and has the sort of personality that is very emotion based then that person has a malleable mind. Derren Brown has a show on Channel 4 in Britain in which he explores the malleable mind.  Of particular interest is this example of a modern British citizen who believes that spirit energies work in our material 3-D world. By using a voodoo doll she can be paralized. You can view the web page for this example here and download the video clip showing it from that page. I encourage everyone to check out his web site thoroughly. On the plus side one would expect the placebo effect to work well on such a person in terms of healing and this is a very real beneficial effect. Drugs to be considered effective must be better than a placebo. The placebo effect was really the best form of medicine our ancestors had. I will eventually be saying more about placebos in future posts.

This experiment conducted by Derren Brown is also a good refutation of the idea that spiritual energies act via our material world. There is no such thing as sympathetic magic (magick). The only possible way spiritual energies could work is via a loosely coupled telepathy from conscious brain to another conscious brain. Yet this sort of communication has not be proven and it may not be possible to prove it if the effectiveness of this communication depends on the mental states of both sender and receiver since we have no way to accurately measure mental states. Yet conscious sensations exist for some evolutionary purpose and some sort of telepathy at the emotional and perceptual bias level seems to be the only possible explanation since the locations where conscious sensations are elicited in the brain are not involved with higher degrees of intelligence.

I just ran across this news article from Science Daily entitled  Why Do Humans And Primates Get More Stress-related Diseases Than Other Animals? . In order to avoid stress we humans need and do turn to spirituality.

It starts out with this:

Why do humans and their primate cousins get more stress-related diseases than any other member of the animal kingdom? The answer, says Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, is that people, apes and monkeys are highly intelligent, social creatures with far too much spare time on their hands.

Then

In the short term, he explained, stress hormones are "brilliantly adapted" to help you survive an unexpected threat. "You mobilize energy in your thigh muscles, you increase your blood pressure and you turn off everything that's not essential to surviving, such as digestion, growth and reproduction," he said. "You think more clearly, and certain aspects of learning and memory are enhanced. All of that is spectacularly adapted if you're dealing with an acute physical stressor--a real one."

But non-life-threatening stressors, such as constantly worrying about money or pleasing your boss, also trigger the release of adrenalin and other stress hormones, which, over time, can have devastating consequences to your health, he said: "If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult onset diabetes and high blood pressure. If you're chronically shutting down the digestive system, there's a bunch of gastrointestinal disorders you're more at risk for as well."

In children, the continual release of glucocorticoids can suppress the secretion of normal growth hormones. "There's actually a syndrome called stress dwarfism in kids who are so psychologically stressed that growth is markedly impaired," Sapolsky said.

Studies show that long-term stress also suppresses the immune system, making you more susceptible to infectious diseases, and can even shut down reproduction by causing erectile dysfunction and disrupting menstrual cycles.

"Furthermore, if you're chronically stressed, all sorts of aspects of brain function are impaired, including, at an extreme, making it harder for some neurons to survive neurological insults," Sapolsky added. "Also, neurons in the parts of the brain relating to learning, memory and judgment don't function as well under stress. That particular piece is what my lab has spent the last 20 years on."

Next

"We've found that baboons have diseases that other social mammals generally don't have," Sapolsky said. "If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression."

The same may be true for elephants, whales and other highly intelligent mammals that have complex emotional lives, he added.

"The reason baboons are such good models is, like us, they don't have real stressors," he said. "If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other."

It turns out that unhealthy baboons, like unhealthy people, often have elevated resting levels of stress hormones. "Their reproductive system doesn't work as well, their wounds heal more slowly, they have elevated blood pressure and the anti-anxiety chemicals in their brain, which have a structural similarity to Valium, work differently," Sapolsky said. "So they're not in great shape."

Among the most susceptible to stress are low-ranking baboons and type A individuals. "Type A baboons are the ones who see stressors that other animals don't," Sapolsky said. "For example, having your worst rival taking a nap 100 yards away gets you agitated."

But when it comes to stress-related diseases, social isolation may play an even more significant role than social rank or personality. "Up until 15 years ago, the most striking thing we found was that, if you're a baboon, you don't want to be low ranking, because your health is going to be lousy," he explained. "But what has become far clearer, and probably took a decade's worth of data, is the recognition that protection from stress-related disease is most powerfully grounded in social connectedness, and that's far more important than rank (italics mine)."

And Finally

According to Sapolsky, happiness and self-esteem are important factors in reducing stress. Yet the definition of "happiness" has less to do with material comfort than Westerners might assume, he noted: "An extraordinary finding that's been replicated over and over is that once you get past the 25 percent or so poorest countries on Earth, where the only question is survival and subsistence, there is no relationship between gross national product, per capita income, any of those things, and levels of happiness."

Surveys show that in Greece, for example, one of Western Europe's poorest countries, people are much happier than in the United States, the world's richest nation. And while Greece is ranked number 30 in life expectancy, the United States--with the biggest per capita expenditure on medical care--is only slighter higher, coming in at 29.

"The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth," Sapolsky noted. "We're also ranked way up in stress-related diseases."

Japan is number one in life expectancy, largely because of its extremely supportive social network, according to Sapolsky. He cited similar findings in the United States. "Two of the healthiest states are Vermont and Utah, while two of the unhealthiest are Nevada and New Hampshire," he noted. "Vermont is a much more left-leaning state in terms of its social support systems, while its neighbor New Hampshire prides itself on no income tax and go it alone. In Utah, the Mormon church provides extended social support, explanations for why things are and structure. You can't ask for more than that. And next door is Nevada, where people are keeling over dead from all of their excesses. It's very interesting."

Typically, observant Mormons and other religious people are less likely to smoke and drink, he noted. "But once you control for that, religiosity in and of itself is good for your health in some ways, although less than some of its advocates would have you believe," Sapolsky said. "It infuriates me, because I'm an atheist, so it makes me absolutely crazy, but it makes perfect sense. If you have come up with a system that not only tells you why things are but is capped off with certain knowledge that some thing or things respond preferentially to you, you're filling a whole lot of pieces there--gaining some predictability, attribution, social support and control over the scariest realms of our lives."

Needless to say I have ordered his books from Amazon.com.

Rationality and spirituality are not contradictory eventhough most people think they are. One meets people who tend to be predominantly one or the other but most of us are somewhere in between where the two sides of our nature have in the past existed in an uneasy tension.

Yet one does not have to ignore rationality in order to be spiritual. The key to this new understanding is simply to consider the source of our own conscious sensation, that quality within us that allows feelings and sensory perceptions to be more than active neural signals. Some day humanity might be able to make smart robots that mimic human behavior but they will not have conscious perceptions. They will respond to "red" objects but they will not "see" red. To them the concept of "red" is simply an activated byte of RAM memory or an activated synthetic neuron.

The next step is to wonder why we developed conscious sensations in the first place. According to evolution it must be beneficial to our survival as a species yet it is not needed for accomplishing our intelligence or artificial intelligence (A.I.) for that matter. This does seem to leave some sort of communication of a perceptual and emotional bias between people as the only alternative. This type of communication is the source of all spiritual and religious experience! This spiritual communication probably depends on one's emotional state and even on the receiver's emotional state and science would have a very hard time isolating and characterizing these states. With this difficulty the exact nature of this communication may never be completely known. This really exposes the limits of human knowledge.

As Olmsted points out in his paper conscious sensations most likely are inherent properites of a higher dimensional space. At least conscious sensations do not belong to our physical universe. He suggests that physics can be extended to accomodate conscious sensations by assuming that the sub-atomic properites such as charge are not static but are instead a dynamic flow passing through the interface between our physical 3-D space and some higher dimensional space.

Since I also know something of quantum mechanics this idea makes a lot more sense then Roger Penrose's idea that quantum mechanics somehow produces conscious sensations. This idea seems to keep hanging around even though quantum mechanics is only good for our physical universe. Our physical universe is finite and expanding or contracting within some higher dimensional space and to assume that our little universal bubble is all there is to reality is just ludicrous.

References:

Conscious Sensations Possibly Derive from Qualities of Space External to the Universe by David Olmsted

What Can Science Tell Us About Collective Consciousness by Robert Kenny