Covid Meditation--Episode Three

Approximately two months ago, on day 67 of the lockdown, I began to meditate more seriously, a resolve which has been assiduously followed. What have I learned in the interim?

1.
There are two things that I do spectacularly well. When I sit in meditation, which I've been doing longer and more frequently, I observe plain air going through my nostrils and into my lungs. After it accomplishes its ancient business of respiration, it exits, albeit modified, just as mysteriously as it entered. In and out, in and out; in my 76th year of life, I still do this with the same expertise I did when I started.

And, a fact which thoroughly delights me, I do this no better or worse than you. You might sing better than me, I might sing better than you; you might have more or fewer friends; no matter your circumstances or mine, we are expert breathers. Why isn't this enough?

2.
Before the covid epidemic, I did some volunteer work with a hospice program. The patient whom I visited, first every week, than more frequently as he got sicker, had had a tough life. At age 18, he had witnessed the murder of his mother by strangulation at the hands of his father. He was raised in a very tough neighborhood; once as a young man, he remained hospitalized for three months, having been an accidental victim of a drive-by shooting. The worst time in his life, he told me, was when he was homeless for a year in Baltimore; he said he was very near hopeless during the brutal winter of this homeless year.  That was the only time in his life during which he had occasional suicidal ideation.

Talk about a reactive depression.! Otherwise, he--I will call him Mr. C-- was remarkably upbeat. Saved by social workers, he lived in public housing for the last two and a half decades of his life. He was a social worker's dream--he never complained, and never used drugs.

If you ever got to know this champion breather, you would never waste your breath again.

Being an artsy guy, I asked him what his favorite piece of music was. It was "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted" by the Temptations:

He listened to this beautiful song on his phone over and over. It reminded him of his mother, to whom he had been very attached.

Mr. C was an amazing, unforgettable person. Everyone in the nursing home loved him. So many of the other patients complained; Mr. C. never complained.

As he was dying, I increased my frequency of visits. The last time, the day he died, he could no longer talk. I was well aware that he could still hear me--at least I thought so. Still feeling a bit guilty that I was not at my mother's side when she passed away in 2001, I shut the door, vowing to stay by his side until his last breath.

I closed the door, and kept on singing softy gospel tunes I knew he would know. How many times I sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," I'll never know. Eventually a soft death rattle became apparent. As his lungs filled with fluid, I raised my singing voice level, and continued. I'll never forget the last breath of this wonderful, gentle man. His suffering was almost over; his face relaxed. 

Mr. C. had been an expert breather for nearly sixty-five years. I will miss his expertise forever.

Mr. C. had led a simple life. He was not a doctor, lawyer or accountant; he was not a mailman, salesperson or clerk. He had earned some supplemental income when he could, by helping  a friend of his paint houses. Yet Mr. C., in my book, was a towering figure. Nearly everyone could learn a lot from him. One of his favorite sayings was "Go with the flow"--the current of life kept him afloat for years with hardly a complaint on his part. 

As I witnessed his final breath, I realized why the ancient Hebrews thought that breath and soul were one. G-d had breathed the soulbreath, the ruach adonai, into Adam's nostrils. We humans begin breathing at the first cry, and end it as we breathe our last.

3.
Meditation is a wonderful way for us to know that breathing is enough. You can always fall back on it periodically; it will support you; it will make you wiser. Yes, do what you do best as best you can, but, in this highly competitive world, if you sometimes think you have failed, do what you do best with unquestionable expertise: breathing. 

Buddhism, (and science), with its doctrine of anatta, "no soul," denies the existence of an eternal soul, even in this life. The ego is a fiction! If your id is doing a number on you, remember it has no more substance than the Wizard of Oz. Peak behind the curtain--smile, and realize what a fool you've been listening to him rather than listening to your own breath.

Thank you, plants, for the oxygen. Thank you, universe, for the privilege of meditation. Who focuses on breath begins to clear the hot air that has condensed into faulty thoughts. It might take some time to achieve tranquility, but, if one is persistent, one will be rewarded, After all, you've been breathing for a lifetime. Becoming truly aware of what you're doing is the best way to become aware of what truly is. 

Choose life, as the ancients taught us. Choose relationships, not love of money or fame. Chose wisdom, not distractions, of which there are many. Once again, choose life! Periods of silence, focusing on breath, refining periods of action, focusing on deeds--

Just live justly.  Breathe!

Some Similarities Between Science and Eastern Thought

                                             In Memoriam: Clifton White (1953-2019)

On May 24, 20019, one of the most prominent physicists of the twentieth century, Murray Gell-Mann, died in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His achievements were numerous. For instance, he, with another physicist, devised a classification of elementary (quantum) particles which he called The Eightfold Way, a nomenclature inspired by the Eightfold Path of Buddhism. As reported in the Times obituary, he didn’t have “a mystical bone in his body” and objected to those who believed in any correlation between modern physics and Eastern teachings.

I do, however, see some consistencies between modern science, particularly physics, with Eastern teaching. That this makes me a mystic I seriously doubt. I leave the subject of levitation, for instance, to those who have feathers between their ears instead of gray and white matter.

I will briefly discuss in this essay five areas of convergence between science and Eastern philosophy, only one of which, I think, is controversial.

1. Anicca, Impermanence

Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, teaches, since time immemorial, that no phenomenal existence lasts forever. It is only recently that Western science is in agreement with this view.The Greeks taught that change occurred only on earth, and everything else, namely the moon and the stars, were immutable and lasted forever. Einstein, after he devised his seminal theories of Special and General Relativities, believed, despite what this own theories indicated, that the universe was eternal. He, in fact, committed what he called the greatest blunder of his lifetime, by theorizing that there was a repulsive force, lambda, that prevented the eternal universe from imploding. (That there is a repulsive force, responsible for the accelerating expansion of space, confirms the universe’s impermanence, not its eternity. Stars will eventually cease to exist; there will be nothing left except so-called "empty space." T.S. Eliot was quite prescient when he wrote, in another context, regarding the end of things: This is the way the world ends/ this is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.)

One can understand why Western ancients concluded that the universe was eternal, since they saw little evidence of cosmic impermanence, limited as they were to the use of their eyes, and not telescopes, as the means of gathering data. Comets and occasional supernovae were thought to be evidence of divine intervention, not mutable phenomena.

Another factor why it was thought that stars never changed is due to the awesome discrepancy between the lifespans of humans and stars. We know now that galaxies began to form shortly—by cosmic standards—after the universe came into existence over thirteen billion years ago. We know now that Shakespeare was more correct than he probably knew when he wrote that “We are the stuff that stars are made of.” Supernovae, the death events of massive stars, ejected heavier elements, formed by the immense pressure of collapse, into space, Some of these elements became the clouds which formed our solar system. Some of these heavier elements, notably carbon, became the stuff of  life on our planet. From birth to death, we carry around this ancient stellar material in our bodies.

Regarding time, the West had been wrong fora very long time. Since the twentieth century, however, science is in complete accord with Eastern teaching in this respect, namely, that everything we know, or know of, including the entire universe, is subject to change; everything, from the oldest galaxy to the youngest child, is born and will eventually die.

2. Anatta, No Abiding Self

This is the second characteristic of existence according to Buddhism; the doctrine that there is no soul has been part of Buddhism since Buddhism began. You are your thoughts; you don’t have thoughts, Science is in complete agreement. Recently, in the New Scientist an article discussed the great “illusion of the self.” Scientists have found areas of the brain that correlate with conscious experiences, such as recognizing colors or even having an 'out-of-the body experience,' yet never an area of the brain that could in any way be considered as the center of the self.

I have come to the conclusion that a sense of self, a.k.a. the soul, whether considered to be mortal or immortal, is a wonderful trick of evolution. Once the nervous system attained a high degree of complexity, it is “natural” that the brain imagined a Wizard behind the Oz of neurons. This had a great biological advantage for the survival of the species. Once one imagined oneself as separate from nature, one could remove oneself temporarily from society and create things, such as tools, weapons, and music. Without this ability to separate in order to think and create, Mozart—and, alas! Hitler, would not have been possible. This sense of self needs to be, and indeed is, extremely strong. I find it amazing that Buddha came to the knowledge of anatta millennia ago, while science has only come to this conclusion recently.

In the motor, as well as the sensory cortex, there is a neurological map of motor and sensory areas called the homunculus, Latin for “little man.” The poor guy is not only upside-down, but downright freaky. The lips, for instance are heavily represented, as well as are the hands. But the little man is as real as the constellation of Orion depicts an actual hunter. There are stars, but no hunter. There are neurons, but no little wizard.

Although, as I mentioned, this ‘trick' of evolution is very deeply seated, the knowledge that there is no such thing as the self defies common sense. (So do the actions of photons, which are nevertheless real entities.) It leads to discussions that get nowhere. For instance, I find debates about the existence of God wastes of time. If self is an illusion, God is doubly non-existent, an illusion of an illusion. First figure out what the self is, that is, a concatenation of thoughts, which will stop such debates before they begin.

If there is no self, free will is an illusion as well. But one can’t live without this illusion. As creatures of evolution, we must live with our "selves” even though we know, upon analysis, that the self is not a real entity, The knowledge of no-self, however, provides balance and keeps one humble, two qualities which are very much lacking today.

The self is a great illusion—here science and Buddhism are in complete agreement.

Dukkha

Dukkha (suffering, or better, insufficiency) is, after anicca and anatta,  the third characteristic of phenomenal existence according to Buddhism. It is here included for completeness’ sake, since it has more to do with inner psychology than scientific objectivity, the concurrence of the later with certain Buddhist principles being the subject of this analysis. 

Evolution has equipped the human individual with sexual desire, as it does with most animals; it also provides humans with imagination and  egoism. Desire in humans, unlike desire in animals which is balanced and in equilibrium with the environment, can know no bounds. Much of human suffering—wars, poverty, defalcations, etc. etc, have their root in unbalanced human desire. Buddhism teaches that egotistical desire—not desire per se—is unsatisfactory and can lead to suffering. Acceptance of life as it is and not how we want it to be is a good antidote to the poison of psychological suffering.  Buddhist doctrines that have psychological meaning and, sometimes, no scientific counterpart or corroboration, include karma, rebirth, and an absolutist sense of causality. These are what scientists call “unfalsifiable” doctrines, which have more in common with religion than with science, and, for obvious reasons, will not be discussed further here.

3. Cosmic Time

As Carl Sagan pointed out, Hinduism (and its derivative, Buddhism) were the only cultures on earth with a sense of cosmic time. Ancient sages did not come to their conclusions through experimentation and scientific proof, but through insight. It remains a truly stellar achievement and is roughly in accord with modern cosmology.

I think the main reason why the East was right and the West for so long was wrong is due to the fact that Eastern ways of looking at the world are characterized by wisdom, the idea that everything is connected, which is much more impersonal than the more human-scale assessment of time, current in the West until fairly recently, and still accepted by creationists.

The comparisons are staggering. Ussher, a 17th century Irish bishop, concluded, through careful analysis of scripture,  that creation occurred in 4004 BCE. The current Jewish year of 5779 commemorates, supposedly, the time elapsed since creation. Compare this with Hindu reckonings in kalpas, each 4.32 billion years, two of which constitute a day of Brahma. We are currently thought to be in the 51^st year of Brahma! According to Buddhism, if you take a mountain, taller than Mt. Everest, and brush it once every hundred years with a silk cloth, the lapse of time it would take to completely wear down the mountain would be less than one kalpa!

These calculations are not meant so much to be accurate, rather than to indicate a near-infinite age of the cosmos, which is in accord with modern calculations. Science dates, with remarkable accuracy the date of the Big Bang to have occurred 13.4 billion years ago. However, the theory of eternal inflation, not provable at this time but quite plausible, posits that universes come into and out of existence eternally. The age of the multiverse, according to this theory, is indeed infinite and an infinite lapse of time is indeed what the Buddhist/Hindu calculations indicate.

These estimates of the age of the universe are fairly new to science. Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century estimated the age of the sun to be about 400 million years, a  challenge to Darwinism, since evolution demanded that the earth was much older than that. (Die-hard creationists still quote Lord Kelvin, who was unaware of the nuclear source of stellar energy!)

Kelvin was wrong, Buddha was right!

4. No Creator God

Buddhism denies the reality of a creator god. It bears repeating that, since the self is an illusion, the concept of god is nothing more than an illusion of an illusion. Science finds no indication of a creator external to consciousness as well. When Napoleon confronted the scientist Laplace with the comment that god had no place in his worldview, Laplace replied that he had no need for that hypothesis. Among the majority of scientists, nothing has changed since then in this regard. 

Hinduism, at first glance, and due to the devotional nature of a large section of current Hindu practice, seems to permit many gods. But in the highest form of Hinduism, Advaita Hinduism, gods are merely representations of internal realities.

To paraphrase Tina Turner’s hit song, What’s God Got to Do With It? Buddhism, Hinduism and science respond: Very little. Very little indeed.

5. Consciousness

There are other aspects with which Buddhism and science are in accord; even greater accordance is found between Buddhism and wisdom. Just a mention of the three hindrances, greed, hate, and delusion, gives a good indication of what is to be avoided in all situations and in all cultures. This is, of course, the realm of ethics, which is 'beyond' science.

A further agreement, at least a partial one, exists regarding consciousness. The East, especially Hinduism, teaches that consciousness is the key to everything. According to Hinduism, consciousness, not science, is primary. Ramana Maharshi, for instance, taught that consciousness and science equals science; stones, for instance, do not have science!

John Wheeler, the noted physicist, thought that consciousness might indeed be the center of reality. Information (the so-called Its from Bits theory) is, according to Wheeler, the very basis of reality—and there is, of course, no knowledge of information without consciousness—at least as far as we know!

This world-view is best addressed in another article. Suffice it to say here that the ancient East and modern science are in agreement regarding many basic concepts. This is astounding, since the ancient Indians came to their conclusions through insight alone.

Was Murray Gell-Mann aware of this concordance? If he wasn't, an ancient proverb can be paraphrased to characterize his genius: even Gell-Manns nod.

Ramana Maharshi, Pessoa, and Ninguem

1.

I recently read The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. One cannot help but be moved and fascinated by the insights—the book is a collection of short, philosophical commentaries on his life and on life in general—of this solitary writer, one of the great literary masters of the past century. You can read the sections out of order; the sections are not progressive. Some of the passages are astonishingly profound.

On a recent trip that included a brief visit to Lisbon, I headed for the A Brasileira, the café that Pessoa had frequented.  I had read that there was a famous brass statue of Pessoa in front of the café; I wanted to see it. (Unfortunately, there was not time to visit his residence nearby, which has since been transformed into The Pessoa Museum. Next time!)

My wife, Nirmala, and I took some photos of the statue, one of which I include here:

At the base of the statue is the following quote from Pessoa's best-known work,The Book of Disquiet:

Ler é sonhar pela mão de outrem.

(To read is to dream while led by another.)

An interesting quote! It is, however, only the opening phrase of a passage of remarkable insight. This will be discussed at length in a subsequent essay.

I immediately began to play with the sentence in my mind, transforming it with a twist of non-duality into a philosophical statement regarding the human condition. (I asked our guide. Leonor, who is Spanish, what the Portuguese equivalent of “nadie,” ("nobody") is, a word without which the sentence, with my very limited knowledge of Portuguese, could not have have been written:

Viver è sonhar pela mão de niguem.

(To live is to dream while led by no one.)

This sentence provides, I think, a summary of Eastern thinking, a glorious worldview that is completely consistent with science. Leonor, an intelligent woman, didn’t get it; most are too captivated by their own identities and the necessary prose-colored glasses that their worldview provides, to see the world-play beyond the word-play.

Just what is the significance of this sentence?

2.

Pessoa’s quote is an opening phrase of a longer sentence which gives the whole quote a considerable degree of profundity; the phrase is, on a lesser level, complete in itself. Pessoa is informing us, at least in my interpretation, that reading, whether the material in question is fiction or nonfiction, is based on illusion. I don’t mean that merely a partial view of an only partially comprehensible world takes place during reading, I mean that our partial view of a partially comprehensible world is illusory on both counts.  The basic illusion of human existence, the belief that we are individuals, separate from nature, is a fiction, albeit an evolutionary advance of the utmost importance to human survival. If we did not imagine that we are separate from nature, how would we separate ourselves, as it were, from the world and create tools, culture, art—and, alas! war? There is no getting around this fact. If we are not wholly part of nature, we possess something which many traditions have referred to as a soul. Very few modern scientists, however, believe in the duality of soul and world.

If we are ultimately fictive, readers reading fiction or nonfiction must be illusory as well. (Illusion, however is strong, it comprises the majority of our identity. At the center of our identity, there is, at least according to my experience, something impersonal. It, however, comprises a small fraction of our identities).  I, for one, am convinced, as Buddha and Ramana Maharshi taught, that one of the central truths of our reality is anatta, that is, non-self. This doesn’t stop me, however, from living as if the little man inside my brain, really merely a concatenation of thoughts, were something more than that, an individual, a soul.

Pessoa, however, is also informing us how to read. We must leave our egos behind; we must  enter the world of the author without preconceptions. For instance, we must not approach Shakespeare with a point of view in mind, be it Christian, Hindu or secular; we must let Shakespeare overwhelm us. Attempting to put an ineffable experience into words comes later.

We must be guided by the hand of another, as Pessoa so aptly puts it. This applies, of course, only to authors who delight us. If we feel like we’re being guided by an idiot, we put the book down after a few pages and choose something else. Pessoa certainly would have agreed with that!

3.

When I told our Portuguese guide,  Rafaela, about the quote I copied off the base of the statue, she revealed herself to be an admirer of Pessoa.  She wrote in my notebook one of her favorite Passoa quotes;

Tudo vale a pena quando a alma não e pequena.

(which I translate us: Everything is worthy of effort once the soul is not small.  NB—Please don’t assert here that this great writer believed in the reality of the soul. He means the reference to be taken metaphorically).

This is an interesting quote. Everything is worth the effort once one has gone beyond effort. It is a paradox. Ramana Maharshi stated that once one realizes one’s true nature, there is no more volition; there is nothing more to accomplish. One thinks of Li Po’s poem in which he enjoins us to meditate before a mountain until only the mountain remains. This transformed human being would thus find everything worth the effort that is consistent with its true nature, that is, breathing, eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, serving as an example, helping others. I doubt Pessoa meant that once the soul isn’t small, viewing telenovelas or soap operas is worth the effort! (And if the man-mountain did, what would the man-mountain see?)

4.

I couldn’t help riffing in four languages on Ramana Maharshi’s teaching that once enlightenment is obtained, there is nothing more to do.

Freneh version: Quand l’alme est tellement grande, ce n’est pas nécessaire de faire quelque chose, parce que on est déjà le monde entier.

Spanish version : Cuando la alma es bastante grande, no es necesario de hacer algo, porque eres ya el mundo entero.

German version : Nichts muss man tun, wenn die Seele gross genug ist, weil man schon die ganze Welt ist.

English version: When one’s soul is big enough, one need not do anything, because one is already the entire world.

Note; You might think that these quotes foster passivity; they do not, however. Very, very few "individuals" permanently go beyond illusion; complete enlightenment is extremely rare. (Having episodes of cosmic consciousness, which inevitably delight, is not at all rare, however).

Once a man, in visible distress, approached Ramana Maharshi, Should he give up the world and become a sage, or continue to meet worldy obligations? Ramana smiled. If it were your destiny to give up the world, he told him, it would happen as naturally as a leaf falling from a tree.

Such leaves, however, very rarely fall.  Ramana Maharshi is telling us to accept ourselves as we are.  Not bad advice.  And since my bouts of cosmic consciousness do not last, my advice is: accept yourself, find yourself--and do good in the world.