Sean Reagan

On Being Wrong (And What Comes Next)

A lot of my thinking over the past year rests on an assumption about observers, namely, that cognition and perception are observer-dependent, and thus cannot provide access to any absolute Reality or Truth.

Yet notice that for this assumption to justify the conclusion, it has to be interpreted as being actually real – that is, that the observer is a real object with real capabilities that can be known and measured.

But my conclusion states the precise opposite of that!

Is this clear? It is like I am saying “only the perceiving cognizing human observer is real – everything else is conditional, relative, uncertain, et cetera.” If one looks at it this way, it’s incoherent. It presupposes the reality of the body – of the observer – in order to argue that nothing is real (or certain or true . . . ). The premise undermines the conclusion.

So perhaps I am wrong, or at least deeply confused. Then what?

I might conclude that bodies are actually real and that the world they construct (via perception and cognition) enjoys an actual non-trivial correspondence to Reality. The dead really are dead and the living really do need to eat and sleep.

On that view, a path like A Course in Miracles – and other contemporary approaches to nonduality – are wrong. Embodied duality subject to time and space is the only God there is, and it doesn’t give a damn about our feelings. Kneel before the microscopes and telescopes! Pledge thy fealty to Feynmann!

On that view, religion and spirituality are only useful to the extent they modify our behavior in the direction of helpfulness, kindness, gentleness, et cetera. They ought to be evaluated the same way we evaluate pharmaceuticals – run tests under strictly monitored conditions, gather up data, and then go where the data says go.

A lot of us don’t like that but . . . what if it’s where logic and experience take us? Would that be okay?

Another possible conclusion is to realize that presumptions notwithstanding, we are still left with the observer. There is still this experience. If one explanation for it falls shy of accuracy, and another one doesn’t feel sufficiently magical or otherwise appealing, why not look for others?

Is it possible that a pure approach to nonduality is coherent? That is, to argue that there is only awareness with its unbelievably rich tapestry of experiences, including the one of being a human observer with her intimately dualistic worldview? That everything – from gravity to cancer cells to bullets to pansies – are all merely appearances in, to, and as awareness?

That even this self is an appearance? Even this precious apparent center alternately calling itself “Me” and “I?”

Often, faced with knotty dilemmas such as these, I fall back to shrugging. I can’t prove Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi and Rupert Spira wrong. Feynmann and Maturana and Nagel can’t quite totally convince me they’re right . . . So maybe the best thing is to adopt whatever posture works best. What’s right is what works!

What’s handy about that is it lets me skip the hard questions and instead focuses on defining “works” and how to go about accurate measuring.

Say I want “works” to mean “most efficient at securing a natural and serious happiness throughout the collective,” and I am going to measure it through happiness indexes, food security, statistics on global death by famine, war, disease et cetera.

From a nondual perpsective I can say, well, yes, all that are appearances in consciousness but . . . it makes me happy. And being happy seems to help me make you happy, so . . . yes. We’ll do that. Even if it’s merely appearance.

Is that enough? To just say “hey – nondualism works for me. YMMV. It’s all good!”

What about my neighbor who believes a patriarchal Christian worldview is what makes people happiest? And his standard for measurement is how many women are only able to do what their fathers/husbands/brothers allow them to do?

Must I do battle – epistemological or otherwise – with my neighbor? What if he tries to convert me? What if he tries to convert my daughter?

Or what if my neighbor is a physicist and she mounts a well-sourced, well-articulated rational argument in favor of simply accepting bodies as objects in a universe subject to physical laws. I can’t refute it. And it’s at least moderately predictable (in a Bayesian sense). Adopting it makes me more productive and efficient, and productivity and efficiency help promote this “natural and serious happiness . . . ”

Must I accept her argument? Must I put my crucifixes and tarot cards and A Course in Miracles away?

I don’t think these are trivial questions! Which is not to say they are all equally valid or even answerable. But they do seem to follow from my premise: which is that the premise I adopt viz. human observers may, in fact, be bullshit.

When faced with a seam in the foundation, it’s a good idea to take it seriously.

How do we know anything? How does knowing matter? Is there some degree of unknowing that is acceptable? What degree? Who decides? Who will help us? And how will we know?

Where do we go from here?

Beyond Boundaries

Yet perhaps we cannot go beyond names. Perhaps to even try is to descend into a state of infinite regress. “This tree is a white pine.” But before we call it a “white pine” we call it a “tree.” And before we call it a “tree” we call it “it.”

Can we reach a state beyond names? Beyond labels of any kind?

Most folks schooled in the contemporary neo-advaitic tradition would say “yes, we can reach a state beyond names.” We can be aware of “awareness” itself. Or “God” maybe, if one tracks the language of A Course in Miracles. “That which cannot be named,” “Presence,” “I am that I am,” And so forth.

But notice that each time we do this, we are using language. And language is always referential. And the word is never the thing. And the thing always has a name. And the name . . .

So the snake eats its tail. So this sentence is not the next sentence you read.

Of course, we sense a beyond or behind or above or overarching. Of course there seems to be an All. But that is just the nature of infinite regress to a human observer. We can lay our fingers on the pulse of infinity, press the folds of eternity to our cheek. It is all within us as we are within all and . . .

And we are back in language again, as if we never left.

There is no starting point. There can’t be. How can you claim there is something without claiming there is something?

There is only this, which can be objectified, externalized, talked about, thought about, named, shared, hidden, found, modified, framed, reframed and reframed yet again. It is turtles – excuse me, “turtles” – all the way down.

When I say there is only this – this this – it arises in part from the understanding that saying anything more in an absolute sense is prohibited. Not prohibited by some authority figure like God or Emily Dickinson, but by experience itself. It’s just how it is, or how it appears (and what, really, is the difference?) to a human observer.

Yet it also arises from desire – a desire inherent in language and in our bodies, which are actually not separate either from language or from one another. There is something that longs to be expressed and received, a mutual gift-giving that seems to be the essence of us, as if love were what bodies were for, or even what bodies are, maybe.

This longing includes by definition both self and other and it arises as a unity. My desire to speak presumes you: you are my desire.

Why get lost in the whether we call it dual or nondual, God or not-God, this or that or something else altogether? It is simply joy: our joy, given and received by giving again. And without the other – who could be our self – it is not.

On Descriptions of Spiritual Awakening

Heinz von Foerster once said – here paraphrased – that complexity is a consequence of language; it does not inhere in the world. I want to extend his insight and say that complexity is not a property of experience but rather is a property of descriptions of experience.

Basically, I am suggesting that experience happens – clear and simple to the point of purity – and then we describe experience and our descriptions are partial and relative to the individual observer and are thus complex. Often, what we say is literally incomprehensible to others, if not to ourselves, and vice-versa. It is like smashing a crystal, distributing the pieces, and then trying to describe how the shard fits a (now gone) whole.

Take our experience of a tree. Go sit by one or take a long look at one. Is there any ambiguity in the experience? Is there anything that is unclear? Even if you evoke gaps in understanding – “I don’t know what kind of tree this is” – the gap itself is clear. You know something is missing and how to describe its absence.

This clarity – which is inherent in experience – is often overlooked. Or perhaps I speak to my own confusion. But it is helpful to see that whatever is going on is always clear and direct: it is this experience, “this this” as I like to say. It is deeply present: utterly whole unto itself.

And then we go and talk about it! Then we describe our experience of the tree. We take the clear simple direct experience and atomize it in order to make a copy. That is what a description does: a bunch of details reassembled as a copy of the whole for purposes of dissemination.

If you are a professional forester, your description of the tree will be one thing. If you are a botanist, another. If you are a poet who has been writing under that tree for decades, another. If you are a photographer, another. If you are a squirrel, another. A nuthatch, another. And so forth.

Some of those descriptions will overlap but not always.
Some of them will be contradictory – the forester and the poet might vehemently disagree about the tree. Bipedal descriptions will necessarily be differentiated from those of quadrupeds or birds.

Perhaps the biggest impediment to nondual experience is the fact that a word and the object to which it refers are not the same thing. The word “tree” does not in any way look or act like a tree. Language always dropkicks us into this basic dualism. Indeed, we are only able to speak about nondualism by taking as our premise this basic division between word and object.

But maybe experience and description are in fact a nondual unity albeit without coinciding. Perhaps it looks like this:

Experience => Description / Experience => Description / Experience => Description / Experience => and so on . . .

That is, all description is an experience but is not a description of the experience it seems to describe. In other words, we experience a tree and then we experience describing the tree. Our descriptions are experience which are descriptions.

Once we no longer insist that description and experience align perfectly or truthfully in a static way, then the incoherency subsides. The description is not the thing. Yet it is a thing which may itself be described. In this way, description and experience flow with and into one another as a seamless whole. Maybe.

Often, when we give attention in a sustained way, we end up giving attention to attention which, in a certain sense, closes the loop, somewhat the way a serpent swallows its own tail. One catches a glimpse then of what perhaps cannot be spoken of in language and yet – oddly – longs to be spoken of in language. Else why would this very paragraph exist? Why would you be reading it?

(And what loop have we closed – me writing and you reading – here?)

So we hold description loosely, as we hold experience loosely, and give attention in gentle and sustainable ways. We see what we see: we extend it: extension becomes us seeing what we see.

Dialogue as Love

Recently I wrote this sentence:

There is no other way because we are already what we seek: are already the very home in which we long to rest.

It was in the same paragraph as this little gem:

We are love.

Sigh.

deadfall — Deadfall past the horse pasture . . .

I try to be careful when writing that way. It’s not that the given statements are wrong per se, but that they are poetic in a way that allows for – perhaps even instigates – confusion. And the goal now is to be less confused. Better things happen when confusion abates.

If you read those sentences – now or back when they were first posted – did you like them? Was there a little shiver of yes? A little mental click like finding just the right puzzle piece? Certainly there was for me. Else why would I have written them?

“We are love” and “we are already the home in which we long to rest” are resonant because they link the self (“we”) to a couple of powerful words: “love” and “home.” And it’s a favorable association.

Language has power. Certain words and phrases resonate for us, often intimately. There is no way around this – it inheres in the human experience – and so all we can do is give attention to the experience of resonance and see what, if anything, reveals itself.

Often, we conflate interior congruence – that little shiver of yes, the joyful mental click – with the actual truth of the proposition. That is, we read “We are love” and it feels good and so therefore it must be true. But we don’t actually inquire into it: we don’t test it, we don’t tease its many strands into the open, we don’t look for alternatives, we don’t examine our biases.

And there are plenty of true facts that don’t instantiate any interior frisson in the first place. “Groundhogs have four legs.” Yawn. I mean true, but . . . yawn.

So there is something special about some words and it’s worth digging into this to figure out what exactly appeals to us and whether in our happiness we are accepting a level of confusion we should really be opposing.

Take a word like “love.”

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as love. When someone says “love,” they intend for the word to cover their personal felt understanding of ideal human behaviors, social obligations, historical patterns, et cetera.

“Love” is just a symbol that points to a welter that no single syllable in the universe could possibly reliably contain. It’s like saying that reading the word “wet” feels the same as swimming at night in the sea.

You have two choices when I use the word “love.” First, you could enter into dialogue with me. You could start by asking: “what do you mean when you use this word?” And then work with me for however long it takes to understand what I mean with what I say.

To be in dialogue this way requires time and patience and care. It is demanding. It is form of service, perhaps. To give attention to another human being in the deep way of truly aiming to understand what they mean when they say “love” . . . is itself – as I understand and use the word – an act of love.

The other option – the default option and so the easier option – is to correlate my use of the word to your own interior welter. That is, you implicitly assume that I must mean what you would mean if you had used the same word. A lot of our human communication is predicated on just that kind of assumption.

The problem arises when my use of the word and your use of the word are so apart they could almost be different languages. Then, every subsequent move in our communication only widens the initial divide. We fall further and further apart even as we think we are moving in sync. A lot of our human problems arise from just this kind of ongoing error.

Why do we accept accept this division? Why do we refuse to see it is an error? Why do we deny its ruinous effects?

These are important questions.

What matters is not the word that we use but rather the person who uses it. When we are in dialogue, what works is to see the whole person before us, and to be aware of what it is in us that prohibits us from seeing who is before us. Words are helpful in that meeting – that mutuality – that bringing forth of love – but they are just words. They are not that to which they purport to point.

Our practice is to live lightly with language, ever aware of that to which it points, and unafraid to do the hard work of bringing clarity to confusion.

The work is to go slowly and be careful – to be filled with care – with respect both to our wordiness and the wordiness of others. What do we mean when we say “home” or “love?” What do others mean? How shall we know?

How shall we be in dialogue, you and I?

Accepting Life As Is

In a sense, the work is simply to not wish that life be other than it is, at this moment. That sounds easy but it is actually very hard. If we look closely, we will see that we are in a state of apparently perpetual resistance to life. We compare it to past iterations and find it wanting, we dream of better manifestations going forward . . .

This is essentially a mechanical process to which we acquiesce. Thought hums along doing what it does and we don’t question it. We just assume that it must be true and inevitable. But even a few minutes of attention clarifies that thought is nowhere near as reliable or structured as it seems. In fact, it’s kind of a mess.

We don’t have to do anything about this other than see it. If we can see it, then it will naturally be undone. It’s odd but true: part of the reason that thought (or the ego, if you like) gets away with so much is because we just don’t see it. In the light of attention, it ceases to function because it is a kind of darkness and in light of any kind, it ceases to exist.

The temptation is always to look for more than what is. We become attentive, and life clarifies a little, and we start to look for something additional: a little rainbow, a little angel, a little nudge from Jesus. When we are looking for more, we are no longer looking at what is, and then the default mode kicks back in. Wanting more is what caused Lucifer’s fall from Heaven: we can appreciate the symbolism.

But we are not bad and Heaven’s doors – I am speaking metaphorically – never close. Picture a sign above them: “Open twenty four seven, even on Christmas.” When we see that we are distracted, we are seeing again, and thus we are no longer distracted. Heaven is a state of awareness devoid of a wish it be anything else. When you fall, you return by virtue of attention: and you see that you are still there. It is as if something goes on, even when we are not giving attention to it.

Most spiritual paths and traditions eventually lead one to this juncture, however articulated: attention reveals that there is no separation between the observer and the observed. Again, to get hung up on the articulation is to miss the point. The point is that you are not separate from truth, life, love, God. This is a plain, simple truth. We can apprehend it with our natural intelligence. Common sense can be very helpful. It turns out we know what to do, which is why we are so good at not doing it.

So the point more and more is just to get into that space of attentiveness because there, everything pretty much takes care of itself. We know what to do and how to act.

On Avoiding Conceptual Dead Ends

Say that we are climbing a mountain and the trail becomes hard to follow. We come to a post with twenty signs nailed to it. Nineteen are marked with lines and squiggles that mean nothing to us. One reads “trail to summit marked with orange circles.” We follow its directive and, lo and behold, arrive at the summit.

trail_signs — . . . of the many ways it is said:
do not enshrine
your preference
for one over the other

Thus we say of the sign that pointed the way: “that is the one true sign.”

We all do this, often without noticing. Don’t kid yourself that you’re the one who wouldn’t do it. The best we can hope for is to notice when we do it – as it happens or soon after – and then update our belief system accordingly (more on this anon).

What should we actually say of the sign? We might say something like: “for me, that was the most helpful sign. I can’t speak to the others because I didn’t understand them.”

Not understanding things inheres in the human experience. There are gaps in all our knowledge – collectively and individually. Since we can’t know everything, we have to delegate – let neuroscientists know about the brain, auto mechanics about car engines, et cetera.

But if our ignorance hurts others – that is, if we weaponize it, then we have an obligation to inform ourselves. People have died painful deaths for not agreeing that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. It’s important to realize that we could have been the ones who did the killing and felt their actions were mete and just, and then not do that.

We need to interact more effectively with ignorance. It is not an error to defer to a brain surgeon when it comes to a tumor in our skull. It is an error to assert that “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life” when there are obviously so many other ways.

In the analogy of the mountain trail and its signs, how might we update our ignorance?

Well, we might gaze about the summit. We might notice that we share it with folks who do not read or speak English. Thus, we can infer that some of the signs we did not personally understand were nevertheless accurate for some people.

We could also study language. Even a cursory review would clarify that some of the signs we didn’t personally comprehend said more or less the same exact thing as our sign. If we can say this of ten of the twenty signs, perhaps we can infer it is true of the balance as well.

We might also infer from the fact that somebody put up twenty signs – including one that was helpful in our specific cognitive, perceptual and cultural context – that it is more likely than not they were trying to help as many people as possible. The sign-maker was trying to optimize her helpfulness.

All of these actions would help undo our allegiance to “our” sign. All of them would nudge us in the direction of understanding concepts in terms of “helpful” and “unhelpful,” rather than merely “right” or “wrong.”

The foregoing paragraphs emphasize two ideas.

First, it is wise not to become overly attached to our concepts. They are not “right” or “wrong” so much as “helpful” or “not helpful.” They are pointers, and pointers are never that to which they point. And that to which they point is always more complex and variable than what the pointer can possibly indicate.

This is true whether we are talking about A Course in Miracles or Christan Science or Zen Buddhism or Zoroastrianism or Jungian psychotherapy or crystal healing.

Second, our concepts are tools. Their job is to help us do things – like feed the poor, shelter the homeless, nurture bees, minimize waste, resolve conflict peacefully, bake bread, make art, et cetera. They are good to the extent they are helpful. To the extent they are not, then they should be discarded.

A tool can be very handy for a given job but completely irrelevant for subsequent jobs. For example, a hammer will help me build a horse barn, but it will not help me groom the horse. A saw will help me trim deadfall branches into fence posts, but it will not help me knead bread.

I might have a favorite saw or hammer – one my Dad gave me, say, as his Dad did before him – but it’s still just a saw or hammer. Lots of folks have them, and most of them will do the job as effectively as the one I’ve got.

In other words, the way I feel about my tool won’t make it work better or worse. Two plus two is not five just because I shout “five” with blazing passion, or because my father said it was “five” on his deathbed, or because that’s what the high priests say it is.

Is there another way to be in relationship with concepts? Our default mode is to equate them with truths and then defend them. But perhaps there is another way, one that accepts them conditionally, as subject to inquiry.

That is, rather than say the sign that got us to the summit is THE SIGN we might do something like the following:

1. Acknowledge the tendency to enshrine the concept (our sign is THE SIGN);

2. Acknowledge how this enshrinement promotes a need to defend the sign against other signs, and against those for whom another sign was THE SIGN;

3. Gather evidence;

4. Evaluate the evidence;

5. Talk to folks in order to broaden the inquiry and ensure we are fairly evaluating the evidence; and then

6. Either accept the concept, update the concept, or discard the concept precisely as the previous 5 steps direct us.

Concepts – like all tools – need to be effective. Effectiveness can be measured. It is tangible. Do the concepts make us smarter? Gentler? More inclined to help others rather than hurt or stymie them?

Do our concepts help bring forth love or something other than love?

And, perhaps most importantly, are we willing to go slowly and collectively in order to find out?