Sean Reagan

One of things that’s hard about these questions of consciousness is that we are ostensibly very close to the evidence. We are conscious.  We are having the experience of consciousness. Why should we listen to anybody else? What could they tell us that we don’t already know by virtue of our very experience?

If I am eating a peanut butter sandwich, and somebody says “peanut butter sandwiches taste bad,” I am probably going to ignore them. Since I have all the evidence I need, why listen to anybody else?

Say that somebody comes along and says, “peanut butter sandwiches are bad for you because they have too many carbohydrates.” That’s different. Do I actually know how many carbs are in two slices of bread and some peanut butter? If I don’t, can I get with relative ease?

In this case, I am probably still going to ignore the other opinion. It will take a little time and effort, but I can get the evidence myself.

But that still leaves the question of whether those carbs are good for me. That’s trickier yet. I’m probably going to need to read up on that. What’s the latest research on carbs? What other issues are entailed? What is my confidence level in the material and my understanding of it?

If the person telling me peanut butter sandwiches aren’t healthy is a licensed nutritionist, I might skip the research and trust them. If they’re a professional clown, then maybe not.

But hopefully, if I don’t know the answer to the question, then I will admit that and take steps to either learn the answer or find an expert I trust to give me the answer.

Generally, evidence trumps experts. Say I hire a woodcutter to help me cut firewood. She says “those six maple trees will produce twelve cords of wood.” We cut them down, split and stack them and end up with . . . nine cords. In this case, the evidence has rendered the expert’s opinion null. I don’t need it – I’ve got the evidence right here.

All of this nudges us in the direction of trusting ourselves when it comes to consciousness. We can’t be in greater proximity to the evidence!

Trusting ourselves is fine so far as it goes. The question is how far it goes.

Say a doctor shows me an MRI  of my brain and says, “that looks like a tumor. We’ll need to do some more tests.” I tell her, “actually I feel fine. Haven’t had a headache in weeks. More tests aren’t necessary.”

In that case, I should trust the expert more and my experience less.

Between knowing that this peanut butter sandwich tastes awesome and what’s going on with our brain cells lies a vast spectrum. Somewhere along it we have to say: “I don’t have all the evidence” and then decide how to handle our ignorance. If we really need the evidence to function than we need to either a) get it ourselves or b) find a trustworthy expert or, perhaps ideally, c) some reasonable combination thereof.

The key is to recognize those instances when rather than rely on our own data we should update with new or revised data.

We are inclined to say – or believe others when they say – “consciousness is infinite and eternal” because that’s how it feels to us upon inquiry. But what if we’re wrong? What if “infinite and eternal” is just how it feels – or seems – when observed by a human being?

Most of us, when asked if we are below average, average, or above average, respond that we’re “above average.” But this is mathematically impossible! Some of us must be wrong.

We overestimate and misunderstand all the time. Why should our understanding of consciousness be any different?

Why work through a study of consciousness – reading James, Sperry, Edelman, Parfit, Chalmers et al. – when you can just say “it’s God.” Or “Theta.” Or “everything is just an appearance in infinite consciousness.”

Faced with a choice between a time and energy-consuming curriculum (it takes years to finish Consciousness 101, especially if you have to first brush up on biology, chemistry, physics, et cetera) and an easily articulated handful of sentences, most of us will take the sentences. Memorize them, spit them out when necessary, and call it a day. We are apes, not bees. We like the easier, softer way.

Faced with apparently big mysterious problems, human psychology tends to assign mysterious solutions. Why does it rain? God! Since it’s hard to prove a negative (God doesn’t exist), saying “God” is a handy way of stifling debate. “This is just how it is and has always been and if you can’t accept that, then I feel sorry for you / don’t accept you as a member of the tribe / will actively denigrate you / et cetera.”

If smart thoughtful people disagree with us, rather than double down on our position by attacking them – who needs those academic eggheads anyway – why not go slow, listen, reconsider our position, refine our argument etc. There is no law that says we have to change our minds. In fact, if we’re right, and we are patient and faithful to the dialogue, then the other mind will change.

In either case, we are standing for truth and coherence. Isn’t that where we want to be?

I was raised and educated Catholic by serious Catholics among lots of other serious Catholics. When somebody says “Jesus” or “Christ” my brain lights up in very familiar and comforting ways. When someone says to me, “all this is an appearance in Christ Mind which is what you are in truth,” I feel super loved and accepted. When I say it to someone else, I feel righteous and holy.

Those words make me feel good. And that which makes me feel good must actually be good. And what is good must be protected . . .

In the same way I don’t want anybody stealing my kale smoothie, I don’t want anybody spoiling my righteous self-affirming belief system. In both cases (and for largely the same reason, i.e., fear of suffering, pain and death), I will do what I have to do to take care of myself and my tribe. There’s a reason the Old Testament is so violent and it’s not because of “people back then.”

But you see, those two things – food and belief systems – are not equal. I do need food to survive. This is true for all human beings. But I do not need “Jesus” and “Christ.” Clearly lots of human beings do just fine without those two specific words. They’re optional (whether belief systems themselves are optional is another question for another post).

Thus, defending them as if they are actual milk and honey is . . . incoherent. Which in turn leads to further incoherence.

What if the origins of consciousness are more complex than the stories in the Upanishads? What if Nāgārjuna’s insights have been largely eclipsed by a couple centuries of science? What if Sri Ramana and Nisargadatta were just confused but didn’t know they were confused and so their confidence and serenity was just a benign illusion?

Would that be okay?

When I began to practice “giving attention,” one of the things that was almost instantly clear was the number of issues about which I knew very little but pretended to know a lot.

For example, I had spent decades in a religious mode – praying to God, reading about God, writing about God. I was confident that my understanding of Christian theology was sound and righteous. One day I was walking with a friend who is a doctor and an atheist. Our conversation went something like this:

Sean: That falling leaf is merely an appearance in consciousness.

Doctor: Why isn’t it an object moving in space being struck by photons that enter your eye and are processed by neural circuits in your brain?

Sean: Umm . . . That falling leaf is merely an appearance in consciousness.

What was interesting was that I couldn’t say why the falling leaf wasn’t a material process because I didn’t know anything about it. It wasn’t a question of being right or wrong. I lacked the necessary information to participate in the dialogue. This was . . . troubling.

Imagine these two conversations:

ONE:

Q: Why does it rain?

A: God makes it rain because He loves us and we obey Him.

Q: Oh. Ok.

TWO:

Q: Why does it rain?

A: Well, there are these mechanisms called evaporation and condensation and gravity which, under certain environmental circumstances, together cause rain.

Q: Oh. Um, what is evaporation?

A: Evaporation is the process by which water is transformed into a gaseous state. When water molecules obtain a certain degree of heat energy and are close to the surface, they escape the water and rise.

Q: What’s a molecule again?

The first dialogue has the advantage of being simple and quick. The second is more demanding because it’s not intuitive. We have to work at it. If we don’t know what evaporation, condensation and gravity are, then we have to fill in those gaps. That “filling in” is likely to expose more gaps (what’s a molecule? what’s a gaseous state?). And since we’re apes, not bees, we only work for things when it’s really (and obviously) necessary.

It’s like that with consciousness. We assume that our experience of consciousness is accurate and true. We cannot find its edge, so it must be infinite. We cannot find where it began, so it must be eternal.

In the ancestral environment, that logic made a lot of sense. Knowledge was what you experienced and what people in your tribe told you. God makes it rain: that’s the end of the inquiry. So what if you have to sacrifice a few virgins during a dry spell?

But what if that logic no longer serves? What if consciousness is finite and limited and only feels infinite and eternal because of how human brains work?

Would that be okay? Why or why not?

When we are diagnosed with cancer, we go to the hospital. We submit to machines so complex, humans couldn’t have made them a century ago. Certainly you and I can’t make them. We receive treatments that involve understandings of biology and chemistry et cetera that are so nuanced and specialized we couldn’t possibly understand how they work without years of training and study. And yet we trust the doctors and get on with it. (As well we should).

Why is it that when consciousness is on the table, those of us with a spiritual bent are so quick to default to “Christ Mind” or “I am that I am?” To past lives and burning bushes? Ascended masters and psychics?

Giving attention is not spiritual. It’s practical. “Spiritual” is a label we might tack on later. But in the moment, it’s just practical. If you are hungry, you eat some food. You might later call the meal “divine,” but you didn’t eat because you needed something divine. You ate because you were hungry. If you are feeling confused, lost, guilty or scared, then you give attention.

Attention is about seeing what is happening as clearly as possible which also reveals what, if anything, should happen next: take an aspirin, go for a walk, make an amends, read some writer you’ve been avoiding, take up knitting. Attention is rational, inquisitive, honest and deliberative. It wants dialogue, no matter how tedious and frustrating, because dialogue is what delivers us to coherence. And coherence is what makes us happy and helpful, which is where we want to be, for our sake and everyone else’s.

When we think of our spiritual search / quest / process / practice / whatever, what do we take for granted? Who do we agree with without bothering to check their sources? Who do we not even let finish a sentence? What haven’t we discovered yet? How do we know? What does it mean to not know?

For me, giving attention begat a diverse, demanding and humbling curriculum which – in a particularly lovely afternoon – revealed itself as The Answer, while simultaneously making clear that it was going to go on Answering forever and that I didn’t personally matter to it in the least though I was more than welcome to tag along, lend my voice, et cetera. This was very liberating. My study has been mostly joyful and productive ever since. I truly wish the same for all beings.

So yeah. Maybe God makes it rain because She loves us and we’re good doobies. But maybe not. Maybe the best way to understand rain is through science, even if that means we have to let go of some cherished mythologies and semanticss and undertake some rigorous reading and study to understand it.

Is that okay? Why or why not?

The so-called spiritual search is circular in nature. It begins with a self winding its way through the world and it ends there, too. Whatever the way, it always delivers us to where we began: this. This this right here.

When most of us begin the search, we are unhappy. Life is confusing and unfair. Bad things happen with disturbing regularity. What was supposed to work does not, and we can’t find a consistently useful alternative.

We are unhappy and we want to be happy. It’s an old story, but a good one. It matters.

We turn to Jesus, say. Perhaps we do so formally – indulging liturgy and sacrament performed by men in medieval garb. Maybe we follow Thomas Merton’s idealized lead and graft on a half-assed Zen practice. Maybe we dart to the fringe and study A Course in Miracles which in turn dropkicks us into Sri Ramana and his confused and confusing lineage who unwittingly shove us into science and rational thought . . .

On and on it goes in apparently endless permutations until one day – for reasons that often aren’t realized until later, and don’t have to be realized at all – it clarifies that we are simply human observers having a human experience. That was all that was happening all along.

At this juncture, religious and spiritual explanations tend to confuse things, so we set them aside. Just give attention. What is really going on here?

When we do that, sooner or later, we learn that it is possible to be happy. Here and now. This body, this world. We learn that the means of happiness were always right at hand. They are inherent in us.

We eat simple healthy meals. We do as much of our growing, harvesting and cooking of our food as possible. We get a reasonable amount of exercise – walking, yoga, weight-lifting. We avail ourselves of consensual intimacy – hugs, hand-holding, making love. We partake of beauty – sitting by rivers or lakes, reading poetry, listening to music. If we have a headache we take an aspirin. If we’re sad, we say we’re sad. We trust what passes will pass.

And slowly but surely – though not perfectly, for perfection is the enemy – we become happier.

When we are happy in this way, we see clearly how simple and elegant the human experience can be: nurturing, gentle, generous. We realize that what makes us happy – healthy food, clean water, safety in which to walk and sleep and play, free time in which to make love, visit a museum, or go to a library, unsullied nature in which to hike and canoe – are privileges. And privilege is not just. Everyone without condition or exception should have access to these things.

For happiness is not ours alone, and who hoards the means to be happy – by design or ignorance – denies happiness to their sister, which injures (by postponing) the happiness of both.

Thus, the end of our spiritual search is not only our own peace and happiness, but our insistence that our calling is to be servants of the collective. We necessarily work to reform society that it might uniformly ensure fairness and justice. We advocate for policies and practices that make it easier for human beings to be happy. We advocate against practices that restrain, restrict or otherwise inhibit our natural inclination to love.

This advocacy is nonviolent. It is conducted by reason and example. It is okay to try and persuade people there’s a better way so long as you are not secretly (or not so secretly) planning to burn them at the stake if they disagree.

If we are not working hard to ensure the happiness of others, then our own happiness is not yet whole and full. It remains conditional and fragmented. And we will remain unsatisfied, frightened and confused. For it is well and truly written of joy: It ain’t real until it’s shared.

It is possible to be deeply and naturally happy, and this happiness by definition entails a profound desire to extend the means of that happiness to all living beings.

This is the law and the prophets.

As languaging self-reflexive primates, we like to explain things. More to the point, we like stories that explain things – why the sun appears in the east and disappears in the west, why the North Star appears so consistently still in the sky, how people came to exist, why they have to die, what happens after they die, what’s beneath or behind the various surfaces we encounter, et cetera.

A good story satisfies us. It explains how the world works, what the proper order of life is, and how we fit into it. Good stories solve mysteries and bring clarity to complicated issues.

The thing is, these explanatory narratives are often wrong. The Romans butchered white castrated oxen on the day new consuls swore their oaths in order to appease Jupiter – that was wrong. Jonathan Edwards believed that if a person’s behavior deviated from very narrow tenets, then God would drop them into a fiery pit for all eternity – that was wrong. Lord Kelvin argued that élan vital infused matter, bringing it to life – that was wrong. Charmaine Yoest, Trump’s assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, believes that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer – that’s wrong.

The point is not to gloat, to point out all the poor saps who have fallen prey over the years to illusion, misinformation, junk science and so forth. They’re just human observers being human observers. Human psychology is human psychology. Thinking that we’re unique exceptions, that we would never make those kinds of errors, well, that’s an error. There are no high horses, no royal roads. The fool and the king both put their pants on one leg at a time. Us too.

The point is to become aware of the ways in which our own thinking, our own explanatory stories, deviate from coherence. If we can’t do that – or think that we don’t need to do it – then that’s our first example of incoherence. We are human observers having a human experience and that includes a) having nontrivial perceptual and cognitive blind spots and b) being sometimes blind to our own blindness. Pretending otherwise is silly.

One way to check our blindness is to notice words and phrases that “seem” explanatory but in fact just provide a hit of feel-good emotion. “Nothing real can be threatened.” “Jesus saves.” “If you take one step towards Allah, Allah will take ten steps towards you.” “Consciousness is all.” And so forth.

Those phrases are not helpful in terms of figuring out how to act in the world. If your child had a bad fall, saying “consciousness is all” won’t help you calm your child, get a medical kit, and decide whether to call for help. If you forget to mail a critical package for work, saying “Jesus saves” won’t magically retroactively mail it.

No, what those phrases do is make us feel better. Bad shit happens, call Jesus. Scary events happen but really it’s all neutral because there’s only consciousness. This divorce really hurts but don’t sweat it because neither the world nor the bodies in it are real. How many times have we said “God has a plan” and felt better about whatever adverse circumstances were then enveloping us?

It makes sense we want to feel better. It is healthy to develop strategies that will help us feel better. But if we are indulging fantasies, specious logic, and other forms of incoherence as the means of feeling better, then we are setting ourselves up to feel bad again. And maybe bring others along with us.

There is a better way.

If you tell me that calling on Jesus calms you so you can better attend your injured child or deal with some other crisis, ask why that is what calms you. If you didn’t believe Jesus was real and involved – was really there in some tangible way – then calling on him wouldn’t work.

And if you really do believe that God and his son Jesus are present and attentive to you in a personal way, then why do bad things happen at all? Why doesn’t God nudge the branch aside over which your child is about to trip? Why does Jesus wait on your call, rather than just showing up when needed?

If you say, “well, it’s just one person telling themselves God loves them or Jesus saves so what’s the harm” then you are missing the key point that nothing we do is without effect in a broader way. Everything we do affects those around us. It was just one Mayan who thought cutting the heart out of living prisoners was a good idea, but he managed to convince a lot of other Mayans it was a good idea, and so a lot of people died very painful deaths. Don’t sell yourself short!

Our fictions reverberate and those reverberations have a direct impact on other lives. If you are indulging a God who can actively affect your life, then you are simultaneously providing cover for folks who think God is active in their lives – and their God may want women to hide their bodies and submit to men, or blow up abortion clinics, or keep gay folks from marrying or adopting children or even just holding hands in public.

If you say, well, your God is different than the God of those crazy people, or that those crazy people are worshiping the wrong God, or the right God the wrong way, well, congratulations. Your argument means that everyone is entitled to their God, which means that some of those Gods are going to be very Jonathan Edwards-like. Some may even lean in directions that Mayans would find familiar. It is a slippery slope and our feet are bathed in grease.

I am saying that if you are turning in the direction of God – however you frame that turn and that-to-which-you-turn – then you are turning in the direction of incoherence. You are turning in the direction of pain – for you and for others, some of whom you love and care for, and wouldn’t hurt in a million years.

Feeling crappy is okay. Bad luck is okay. Rough patches are normal. They are all part of the human experience. Wanting to avoid what hurts – and minimize the hurt when it does happen – is also okay. That, too, is part of the human experience. A nifty thing about human observers is that we can reflect on our experience, dialogue with others, learn new practices, make predictions, adapt our behavior and so forth. It is possible to be happy – deepy happy – and in our happiness to be kind and helpful to others in tangible sustainable ways. It doesn’t take a deity.

When we feel better because we believe God or Jesus or the Buddha or the Beloved or the All is there for us, intervening for us, guiding us, then we are reenacting the same story our ancestors enacted. We probably aren’t cheering for the ritual sacrifice of virgins we kidnapped from neighboring towns, but we shouldn’t get too smug. Incoherence is still incoherent, even if its affects are not as dramatic as they once were.

Give attention to your stories. Notice how some of them purport to explain life and death and love and loss. Notice how these stories sustain you in the face of both internal and external adversity. Then notice how these stories are not actually explanatory at all. They’re more like code words to set off a temporary boost in our dopamine levels. They provide a temporary – a transitory – respite from what ails us.

If we can notice our incoherent stories, then we can ask what an actual coherent story would look like. How can we actually explain what scares us – death, loss, uncertainty, et cetera? If we don’t presently have helpful explanatory stories, is that okay? How should we go about getting one? What can we do in the interim? Who should we turn to for help?

Check your stories. Make a practice of telling more effective ones. Don’t be embarrassed to discard what no longer works – it happens to all of us. Don’t go with the first idea. Ask what this would look like to someone who doesn’t care what you do with your life. Look for questions you don’t want to ask, and answers you shy away from.

It is counter-intuitive to do this! It’s hard. We are not wired to doubt our intuitions and instincts. But it is helpful to persist. Not because we are going to become perfect or Godlike, but because we are going to become happier, and in our happiness be more helpful to those around us, which will increase their happiness in turn. That is a reasonable goal. That is meaningful living.