Part of a whole

In an excellent article on the Humanists UK website, Jeremy Rodell quotes Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe – a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for those nearest us…

There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.

This comes very close to my own sense of the ground of being as not simply another name for a personified God, but (as Paul Tillich himself saw) the metaphysical source, Being itself, (forgive the capitalisation!) from which anything comes to be at all. Perhaps the closest expression I had found before I read Rodell’s article was the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen sense of the pristine awareness that is the fundamental ground itself.

Rodell goes on (ibid.):

Almost all humanists would agree that the scientific method is by far the best way to understand objective truths about the world, including brains. But subjective experience is not, by definition, open to direct observation by anyone other than the person experiencing it, though it is undeniably both ‘real’ to that person and, as far as we know, unique, as we can’t get into the minds of others other than through their descriptions, or their artistic expression.

This “experiential spirituality” (Rodell’s phrase) is the realm of contemplative practice, surely. Our practice is very simple, no more than a matter of being set free from the entanglements of discursive thought in order to find ourselves consciously resting in the “groundless ground” of all that is. This is our home, after all; we can never fall out of being, and if philosophers like Philip Goff and Annaka Harris are right (not to mention the Dzogchen teachers like Longchenpa) even consciousness itself is fundamental to coming-to-be. The part, in effect, is not other than the whole!

Ain’t superstitious

In the old Willie Dixon song, he claims not to be, but believes the signs anyway: “Well, I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail…”

Stevie Wonder has a different take: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…”

Sam Harris writes, “Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die.” The same thing, perhaps, applies to metaphysics.

Metaphysics can be a slippery word these days. “Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.” (Wikipedia) But Harris (ibid.) lists it along with mythology and sectarian dogma.

While it is true that probably all religions are filled with mythology and sectarian dogma, they do not all approach metaphysics like magic – and it seems to me, from experience, that metaphysics, at some level, is inseparable from the contemplative life.

[W]hen we look closely, we can’t find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. These are both deeply counterintuitive outcomes, and this is where the mystery of consciousness starts bumping up against other mysteries of the universe.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all. When we view our own experience of consciousness as being “along for the ride,” we suddenly find it easier to imagine that other systems are accompanied by consciousness as well. It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism. If the various behaviors of animals can be accompanied by consciousness, why not the reaction of plants to light—or the spin of electrons, for that matter? Perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. It sounds crazy, but … it’s worth posing the question.

Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Sam Harris again,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion

Things that seem very strange at first glimpse (like Willie Dixon’s black cat) may turn out on closer examination to make an uncommon degree of sense. Annaka Harris (op cit.) quotes a personal communication from Rebecca Goldstein to the effect that, “[c]onsciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.”

If matter is, as it seems, fundamental to existence, or at least to the material universe, and if it is in some way intrinsically conscious, then Paul Tillich’s conception of God as “ground of being” (being-itself rather than a supreme being among, or above, other beings – as the apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides (Acts 17:28), “[f]or in him we live and move and have our being”) seems inescapable. Only, as Tillich himself suggests, we may then have to give up using the word “God”.

There is, it seems, no way to “fall out of” being. If being itself entails consciousness, then even to say that individual consciousness ceases at death is, to say the least, problematic. And in any case, our conventional sense of an individual self is an illusion, as contemplatives throughout history have discovered. It is only a fiction of convenience, a way for the mind to locate itself, for a moment, in the body of which it is aware. (See Susan Blackmore’s wonderful book Seeing Myself for the correspondence of contemplative and neuroscientific insights here.)

It ain’t necessary to be superstitious: the belief in things we don’t understand turns out to be a mistake. There is enough wonder in what is.