Is God the "Ultimate Reality"?

Religion is (and still is) a means whereby cultural norms are enforced through means of authority derived from "off planet". Zero-cost credits for carrots and sticks are offered to be cashed in in that alternate universe. Religion justifies the infliction of terrible punishments in the here-and-now and has sponsored genocidal wars. Religions that we generally regard as "peaceful" seldom live up to their own reputation. Good Christian folk brought their kids to watch lynchings in the US South. Buddhism is playing a key part in the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar and a similar role in the violent suppression of the Hindu minority in Ceylon. Religious authority is behind the rape of thousands of children and the coverup of these crimes. Religious authority enthusiastically participated in the attempted genocide of indigenous people in Canada in the residential school system.

If these are the benefits of religion, we can clearly do without them. Rational human being should not only reject "organized religion" but push back hard against the claims of religious enthusiasts to exert outsized influence on the rest of society.

That said, we must also recognize and respect the fact that, for many, the religious "matrix" is as real as our own. Moreover, the religious experience is quite real and waiting around the corner for any of us.

At one point in my life, I was an enthusiastic member of the evangelical wing of Christianity. What was I thinking? All this is usually comfortably buried under half a century of skepticism but sometimes I'm pulled back at the most unexpected moments.

On my latest dog walk as I watched the trees reaching for the light in a way that reminded me of my "Roots" analogy - how we blindly reach our roots into "reality", sucking up information for our survival. The tree does not "know" about sunlight, wind, and water, yet its existence depends on all these things. What is there "out there" that is equally vital to human beings but forever beyond our ability to understand or even suspect?  That line of thinking was 100% in line with the way I thought in 1977.

Back then, the theology of Paul Tillich was popular - he spoke of God as the "ground of all being". I recalled for the first time in decades the impressive Theology of wonder by G. K. Chesterton. My insight on the dog walk was not new, but perhaps more mature and articulate.

The world truly is wonderful. We do indeed reach out to a vast, unknown - perhaps unknowable Universe. What is more, we are rooted in this vastness. We rely on it for our existence. It is very natural for this feeling of dependence, combined with the feeling of awe and helplessness to be translated into what theologians call an "I/Thou" relationship. This means that we regard the other end of this relationship (the vast, unknowable Universe) as personal - i.e. God. Of course, it actually is personal. We are experiencing the Universe through our own brains which are alive and, in some sense, playing it to us on our "inner movie screen". That screen is not flat, dead and impersonal. It's created by live neurons in our heads. But our brains also create the illusion that what we see "out there" really is "out there".

"Professional" theologians will ignore the neuroscience and try to build a rather academic "Christian" theology on this slim foundation. In the same spirit, people make from the "First Cause" argument** that "proves" the existence of God to swallowing whatever version of Christian theology that appeals to them. Paradoxically, people of "faith" acknowledge our the palpable lack of ultimate knowledge but then turn this into a surprisingly long list of certainties large and small.

"Peak experiences" are often interpreted in whatever religious context (matrix) that's "in the air". Peak experiences are a real thing (I've had a few myself). In fact, my insight about the trees on my walk might qualify as a mini-peak experience. After years of such jolts of insight, I more readily attribute them to bipolar illness than any special insight.

Since the '70's we have been able to produce "peak experiences" quite reliably with a pill - LSD, MDMA or psilocybin. In the long run, that puts peak experiences and religion itself under the umbrella of neuroscience. Back when all this became a tsunami of "experimentation", we were also experiencing a much more cosmopolitan view of religion. In the end, this resulted in the invention of whole new religions and new religions under old names, such as what passes for "Eastern Philosophy" in California. For many, peak experiences could not stand on their own. If a matrix of religion were not readily available, one could be invented. Space aliens served as well as God. But whatever the psychic explorers thought about the details, we all agreed that there was another "level" to the Universe. Peak experiences were the door into this Universe.

There were other ideas "in the air" back in the 70's. At the time, I did not regard Christianity positive drag on human progress. I was quite aware of how empty dogma served as the glue to identify the "in group" vs the "out-group" (I called this the "Creedal Group" and eventually wrote a whole blog about it). But "hardcore" professional theology was not what people assumed it to be. Still isn't. For this, you need to attend a liberal Theology school (I went to Queens University in Kingston). It turns out that the musings of "professionals" about God are as dry and irrelevant as trigonometry. They have nothing at all to do with the daily life of a "true believer". For a true believer, Christianity makes life an adventure. The theory of it all is left to others or simply left out entirely.

There was something in the air called Liberation Theology  This pushed many in the Catholic Church "hard left"*- to see Christianity as a champion of the poor - especially in South America, where US-backed right-wing dictatorships were slaughtering the poor by the thousands. For young, idealistic folks like myself, it married political outrage to a nascent knowledge of the Bible. You can certainly read the Bible and especially Jesus this way. Back then, the "standard" portrait of Jesus looked a lot like the standard portrait of Che Gueverra.

Being smart, arrogant and gullible is a dangerous combination. I can now see that I knew nothing about Christianity, Liberation Theology, Marxism or Che Gueverra. But sometimes a sprinkling of knowledge is precisely what you need to inspire projects to save the world. For me, Christianity, or at least Jesus (interpreted correctly) was on the right side of history. It was also more fun than Computer Programming.

I am a human being - just as likely to be trapped in a matrix as anybody else. I had been warmly accepted into an open-ended social group for the first time in my life. Our awkward questions can be put on the back burner. Sometimes permanently.

In, "Going Back to Church", I take on the same subject, looking back on my theological education and the future as a Minister that I escaped through no honorable effort of my own. I write from the pews in a modern congregation with the old ladies and my 98-year-old mother in law.
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* As it turned out, the Catholic Church pushed back hard against Liberation Theology and embraced the "powers that be". The Catholic Evangelical movement (of which I was part) would become a vehicle for conventional dogma. It would not be until the elevation of Pope Frances that social responsibility - or maybe not raping little kids quite so much - asserted itself at the highest level of the Catholic Church. Just a bit.

** The "First Cause" argument is something that is only offered by people who already want to believe in God and are looking for a way stop thinking about it. It is for children.

Near Death Experiences

If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, I refer you to that the breathless and uncritical treatment of the subject in near death experiences on CBC Ideas. It seems fairly common for people who are "near death" in the sense of having their heart stop to have a vivid memory of leaving their body, seeing themselves from the outside, perhaps hearing and/or seeing what's going on around them, seeing a wonderful light and feeling a great sense of peace and well-being. The classic treatment of the subject, "Life after Life" is cited with approval by the "expert" for the CBC audience.

"People have reported "near death experiences", or NDE's, over centuries and across cultures. The nature of them has historically been the territory of religion and philosophy. But now science has staked its claim in the discussion. And the questions are profound: where is consciousness produced, in the brain, or somewhere else? Can consciousness continue to exist even after the heart and brain have stopped working? Contributor Ashley Walters explores the science and the meaning of near death experiences. **This episode originally aired December 7, 2016"

Of course, one may listen closely to the episode and fail to find any mention of how"science" is "staking a claim" in the discussion. The piece is basically a book report.

The CBC program is a textbook case of the kind of muddle that surrounds the NDE issue. Time and again, the subject is claimed to have undergone "clinical death", yet somehow remembers something. The central paradox is, How can he remember anything when his brain has stopped functioning? It must be true that his "soul" somehow works without the brain.

This is all turns on a deliberate misuse of the term "clinical death", which does not involve cessation of brain function: merely cessation of heart beat and respiration.  In the cited cases, even this is far from certain, since the subject is usually revived before medical assistance arrives (otherwise real death is the likely outcome). Certainly in the ambulance and even on the operating table, the patient is rarely instrumented to detect (or not detect) brain function. In any case, I am not aware of any case where brain function has actually ceased and the patient has revived. Even in cases of deep coma, there is some brain function. To put the case clearly: we don't have anyone coming back to tell us what it's like to be brain dead. There's a good reason for that, I think.

This removes the central mystery. There is certainly nothing stopping a person undergoing "clinical death" from having (or at least remembering) some kind of experience.

An important element in the NDE mythology is the "fact" that so many of these experiences have so much in common. The problem with this claim is that the "journalists" that write about the experience actually go out looking for the people who have that exact experience. The vast majority of people with a different experience (especially no experience at all) are passed over. You would think this would be a serious problem for the theory that we all pass on to another reality upon death when obviously most of us don't. In a word, it's cherry picking.

So there goes the second source of wonder. Some people have similar experiences when their heart stops. It's starting to seem to be a somewhat weaker challenge to the "conventional" idea that we need a brain to "be".

For those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of consciousness itself, the fact that people can hear what's going on while "blacked out" is remarkable. However it is a well established fact that the brain's auditory systems are alive and working even under general anesthesia - we just can't normally remember what we hear. In the unusual brain state of the "NDE", it is not to much of a stretch to assume that what the subject is hearing will be woven into whatever visions are remembered.

So what about the sensation of leaving the body? Well, you can ask this a different way. Why is it that we usually have the feeling that we are in our body? The familiar exception to this experience is the dream. Why is this not relevant?

The sensation of being "in" the body can be knocked out of action by, for example, a shortage of oxygen to that part of the brain. Feelings of being outside the body can be triggered by a variety of situations - you don't need to be "clinically dead". Feelings of euphoria and heavenly visions can also be attributed to release of endorphin in the brain - akin to a big shot of morphine released as an automatic response to the trauma that stopped the heart in the first place. It makes more sense to ask how the brain creates a vivid "trippy" dream rather than ask how the experience happens without the brain. While the brain still holds many mysteries, we are quite sure what parts of the brain are active when an "experience" is going on and what parts are necessary for that experience to be remembered. Why is it that we so casually set aside all this knowledge and embrace the idea that all these brain functions happen without the brain? Where is the evidence that the brain is not responsible for these experiences?

It should be noted that these "trippy" experiences (known as "peak experiences") happen to people who are in perfect heath and do not require "clinical death". Peak experiences are also notorious for fitting into a matrix of mythological interpretation that is familiar to the subject - such as "seeing God" or being "saved". The subject needs to be "primed" to find the right words to describe the experience.

What we are left with is claims that the disembodied soul went wandering around and learned things that could not have been otherwise learned. This is essentially a claim of a telepathic experience. In these cases, we have more theories available than wandering souls. The wandering soul hypothesis is, after all, a rather radical one. Following Carl Sagan, we demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. (Skepticism 101). What must we assume in order to be left with the conclusion that of telepathy is the only possible explanation?

• The subject is not lying. Lying is an ordinary behavour and does not require supernatural explanation.
• The subject perfectly remembers the experience. This is an odd assumption to make since we know that none of us has perfect memory and these subjects are specifically selected to have been recovering from a near-fatal trauma.
• Third party testimony (the gold standard in these fables) is accurately reported. The "witnesses" also are credited with perfect memory even though they themselves have usually been part of an extremely traumatic experience.
• We must ignore powerful confirmation bias acting to confirm the subjects belief that he has proven that death is not the end. Confirmation bias is the bane of serious scientific investigation. Why not a problem with amateur interpretation of a once-in-a-life-time experience?

What we are left with is lots of strange tales. The plural of anecdote is not evidence. We can't toss aside everything we know about the brain without compelling evidence. That's Sagan's rule.

But then all this fits nicely into the religious mythology of the culture. As stated in the outset of the piece, "all" religions teach that there is a life beyond death. Even if the subject doesn't believe this, the experience in question will tend to convince him otherwise. It's an available "explanation". He is more likely to be familiar with Christian mythology than neuroscience.

None of these points are addressed in the CBC piece, which is really nothing more than a pitch for another "New Age" book helping the credible to deny death and put the whole issue on the back burner pending the next boozy discussion over the camp fire.

My personal opinion is that the brain is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness. Consciousness critically depends on a social setting. We experience the world together. This is starkly evident when the individual is placed in a situation that departs widely from everyday experience., It makes perfect sense for the "self" to dissolve finally into a drug-assisted and muddled dream set in a comfortable mythical world. The story is told not only by the "subject" whose heart stopped for awhile, but by those around him who cooperate to keep the myth alive and authors who sell books to the gullible. It is that social matrix of ideas - right, wrong, good and bad - that lives on. These ideas don't need to reside in any one particular brain. When one brain goes dark, the "memes" live on.

Models of Mind

In a previous post I sketched out the importance of being a bit more imaginative when we ask the difficult question, What is the mind like. It's time to abandon the ancient assumptions that I have a little person inside my head that's the "real me" and somehow, perhaps this little person (the soul) will survive death. It's obviously not like that. There is "nobody home" in the brain, nothing "controlling" it.

The "self" is what it feels like to be a brain. That is still a big mystery, but progress nonetheless.

Here, I'd like to discuss another aspect of the ancient view. Is there only one "self" running around in my brain? And, while we are at it, is there more to the "self" than this entity that seems to be looking out my eyes? Is there more to "me" than the "me" I feel writing these lines? Mountains of experimental evidence says there is. Lots more.

I have always been very interested in dreams. I often remember them very well and sometimes become aware that I'm dreaming while continuing to dream. There are many things to learn in this state. For one thing, I encounter other people in my dreams. They seem to be rather stupid and inarticulate. It's hard to understand what they are saying and they don't seem to pay much attention to me, but they are separate personalities nonetheless. I can have a heated argument with one of these dream ghosts. I can wake up angry about some completely ridiculous discussion that, after all, was conducted entirely within my own head.

Under normal circumstances, the brain doesn't seem to be able to animate more than one fully functioning personality during wakefulness, but there are important exceptions. We take it for granted that we are different people in different situations, especially when assisted by chemicals. The difference can be very substantial, as in psychosis.

Sufferers from schizophrenia frequently hear voices that seem to be totally separate from the "self". Obviously, such voices are being animated by the same brain as the one that "hears" them. I think of this as the diseased brain "booting up" little "partial people" running in parallel with the one that feels like "me". I consider this to be the root of many (perhaps all) religious experiences where the voice of God (or spirit) is heard or perhaps appears visually. To me, it is not surprising that some people occasionally hallucinate fully functioning, visible and tactile people wandering around in the "real" universe, that is, after all, constructed inside their heads under normal circumstances. It would be hard for most of us to get through the day if such experiences were common. However, the very rarity of these experiences does not make them miracles. They are authentic experiences, as "real" as any other, but that does not mean that they are evidence of an alternate universe. For example, "ghosts" are not evidence of an afterlife.

All this leads me to think of the "self" as a specific "mode" or configuration or "state" of the "program" running in the brain. The brain can configure itself in different ways. Each configuration has access to all the memories in the brain and the sensations of the body, along with the experience of "selfhood", the experience of being "me". When I'm asleep, the brain has he ability to "boot up" one or more additional personalities. The one that feels like me is barely ticking over, deprived (for example) of the use of the frontal lobes (logic). In a dream, I can often switch characters, with the sense of "me" moving to a different personality in the dream or "I" can become a kind of author or stage director.

If I am an actor or the "stage director", who is building the set? Where does the scenery come from? Obviously this is an important category of the "contents" of the mind, or self. More profoundly, this is also true of the "set" that I observe when wide awake. The entire perceived world is created in my brain from "evidence" rather indirectly from my senses or assumptions I make about what is "out there". So this, too is "me". All this is created actively, "on the fly" so to speak.

I have sometimes had the type of "peak experience" where a I suddenly feel that there is a personality behind the entire universe. It feels like seeing God. But of course there is a person behind the Universe. It's me. Under normal circumstances, my brain tricks me into thinking that I am moving around in a "real" world, not the world as simulated by my brain. Sometimes the veil slips and I glimpse the living mind behind the scenes. It's me, or perhaps the most interesting and wonderful part of "me".

One of the objects of Zen practice is to experience the world this way. The object is not to discover some occult reality hiding behind everyday experience. The object is to experience reality "as it is". Of course, opinions differ on just what is experienced by the "masters". Are we reaching to experience ultimate reality beyond the self? I'd say, no, we are attempting to more fully experience the self.

I am willing to leave the door open, just a tiny crack, to the possibility that the "deep self" is not entirely confined inside the skull. The more we learn about "reality", the more we discover the vastness of our own ignorance. We seem to make our biggest mistakes by assuming that certain things are obvious and not open to discussion or investigation. We must admit that the idea that the self is "nothing more" than what it feels like to be a brain is not even entirely obvious. It may not be possible to escape the self, but the self is much bigger, more complex and more wonderful than we imagine.

It is more wonderful than we can imagine.