Posts Tagged ‘Science’
Authority
In the summer of 1986, I gave a public talk at a Zen center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After the talk, a woman who had been in the audience handed me a sheet of paper printed on both sides and assured me I would find it edifying. I read the front page of the sheet and learned the document in my hand contained the teachings of an entity named Lazaris, who lived in one of the dimensions that somehow had remained undiscovered by science and who sent messages to the beings in the dimensions that human beings occupy through a channeler. The dissemination of the teachings of Lazaris have progressed since 1986 from the crude and unhygienic medium of the printed page to the aseptic medium of the Internet. Lazaris now has a website, on which we learn this:
Since 1974, Lazaris has channeled through Jach Pursel, his only channel, offering his friendship and love and generating a remarkable body of tools, techniques, processes, and pathways for our Spiritual Journey.
Learning more than some basic information about Jach Pursel and his assistants and getting more than a few short quotations from the teachings of Lazaris requires going to the shopping page and buying access to audio recordings, which range in price from $7.95 to $74.95 for the basic teachings, although some basic teachings are free. Learning what Lazaris has to say about being prosperous and successful can cost up to $250. Prosperity is rarely inexpensive.
Another website gives more information about what Lazaris is:
Lazaris is a nonphysical entity who first began channelling through Jach Pursel, his only channel, on October 3rd, 1974. He is a spark of Light, a Spark of Love, who has helped tens of thousands of people to expand personally, metaphysically and spiritually on their Spiritual Journey Home.
Another page on that same website offers a taste of the wisdom of Lazaris through a few quotations
Your love has a fierce majesty that cannot be matched; your love has a tenacious magnificence that cannot be contained or measured. You of the Human Race stand alone among the many Races within the dimensional universes in your capacity to love and in your ability to care – in the way you care for each other. Others love, but none like you do… Others care, but none like you do.
Back in 1986, a friend who was with me as I perused the double-sided sheet of printed paper commented “I wonder why it is that some people feel they need a nonphysical entity to tell them the sorts of things they could probably figure out for themselves by paying attention to their own experiences in life. If people feel a need for help from others, there are plenty of ordinary physical entities who have given us more than enough good advice.” I wondered the same thing.
Thirty years later I am still wondering, although to be honest I have not given the matter much thought. It is not that we human beings need better advice, I am inclined to believe, but that we would do well to follow the good advice we have been given. The only reason I am giving the matter of the appeal of Lazaris and various other allegedly disembodied entities some thought right now is that the United States seems about to embark on an era of authoritarianism. The man elected to be the 45th President of the United States has said that he does not need extensive intelligence briefings, because he can be told about a situation for twenty seconds, and he gets a gut feeling about what to do. It’s as if he “just knows” what to do and how to do it. His way of just knowing does not require the careful gathering of evidence, the consideration of all the different conclusions that any body of evidence could support, assessing the limitations of the available evidence, and the painstaking weighing of possibilities and probabilities. No phronesis is required. All that is needed is to listen for twenty seconds and then let intuition and instincts lead the way. If others question the decision, they simply need to be told “I am very smart. I know things that no one else knows.” There is no admission that there could be any legitimacy to questioning the conclusions that such a method yields. It is absolute. In that respect, the pronouncements of the 45th President are like the statements of an oracle, or a nonphysical entity that channels wisdom through just one person.
In his book The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It, Shawn Lawrence Otto chronicles several of the human tragedies that have unfolded when authoritarians have suppressed both questioning and evidence that casts doubt on firm convictions. When, for example, unimpeachable leaders have insisted that particular agrarian policies would produce more crops, then have fired or imprisoned or even killed observers who dared to bring forth conclusive evidence that crop yields were in fact poor, masses of people have starved to death.
Authoritarianism manifests itself as an inability to accept that one has been mistaken. An antidote to authoritarianism is scientific method, which has at its very core not only the realization that one may very well be mistaken but the practice of trying to show that the currently accepted conclusions are mistaken, or at least incomplete and oversimplified and liable to be modified as new evidence comes to light. Failure to falsify a tentative claim reinforces the claim for now, but of course the claim can always be overturned in the future as better and more complete observations are made. It is falsifiability that distinguishes scientific claims from claims that are placed out of the reach of questioning or criticism. Authoritarianism and scientific method are fundamentally incompatible, which is why politicians with an authoritarian streak tend to be wary of science, scientists and evidence-based reasoning.
People, either individually or collectively, who have various kinds of vested interest have often used the greatest strength of those who practice science—their ability to replace a tentative conclusion with a more accurate one—against science. The tobacco industry, for example, sought to undermine public confidence in the conclusion that tobacco use entails numerous health risks by pointing out that what scientists say in one decade is shown to be false in later decades. If researchers are saying today that tobacco use entails health risks, suggested the practitioners of denial, ten years from now they may be saying something completely different. Exactly the same strategy was used by the pesticide industry to undermine public confidence in the finding that some pesticides and herbicides do damage to the environment and some health hazards to human beings. The same strategy has been used by the petroleum industry to manufacture doubt that the combustion of fossil fuels is a cause of changes in the climate that result in the melting of ice caps and glaciers, rising ocean levels, lethal acidification of waters, more turbulent storms and generally more unpredictable meteorological events. The transition team of the 45th president-elect tried to create doubt about CIA and FBI findings that Russia was involved in hacking into the email servers of both political parties by pointing out that those entities were mistaken in 2003 in saying that Saddam Hussein probably had, or would soon have, nuclear weapons. The doubt-creating strategy consists of making the fallacious argument that if someone was mistaken about something, then they cannot be believed about anything. That being the case, no one is to be believed but an infallible authority. But ordinary human beings are notoriously fallible, so the safest bet is either an extraordinary human being or a non-human entity.
If scientific method and authoritarianism are incompatible, then science is a way to counter authoritarianism, but authoritarianism is also a way to counter science. The authoritarian method consists in making claims, repeating them until people believe them, undermining the credibility of those who make contrary claims, deliberately silencing those who disagree with or question one’s claims, or by casting aspersions on the character of those who do not readily endorse one’s claims. A good many politicians practice all of those techniques. Probably every human being uses those techniques at one time or another.
This squib began with a reference to the teachings of Jach Pursel, which he claims are really the teachings of a nonphysical entity called Lazaris. Since I have no idea what these teachings are, because I am not inclined to pay money to find out, I am not at all in a position to suggest that there is anything pernicious in those teachings. In fact I suspect, but do not know, that the teachings are innocuous enough and unlikely to do anyone direct harm. They are probably not at all in the same league as the claim that nothing need be done by human beings to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. There is, however, a potential unintended consequence of disseminating advice by making the untestable claim that the advice comes from a nonphysical entity rather than taking the more straightforward route of saying “Here are some ideas I have that I would like to share with you (for free).” Claiming that the advice is not just the outcome of the thinking of another ordinary human being, but is the communication of a nonphysical entity who speaks through only one human being, makes the advice seem extraordinary and therefore (in the minds of some) more credible, less prone to the errors made by minds encased in meat, fat and bones. Presenting the advice in this way is an attempt to make an end run around critical thinking. In an age about to embark on an autocratic and authoritarian presidency, critical thinking is not something to try to run around. It is something to embrace and to use as well as one is able. There is no area of life that I can think of that is not enhanced by critical thinking.
Many a political and economic commentator has expressed the view that the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States is likely to be the beginning of a dark and dangerous period on undemocratic authoritarianism in American history. For what it’s worth, Jach Pursel, blogging on behalf of Lazaris, is inclined to disagree. His cheerful advice is remarkably similar to that of the President so many people are dreading:
Be a champion of change, a champion of the new future—a future no one has yet imagined.
Some, I think, may have imagined our future. Names such as William Golding and Eric Arthur Blair (alias George Orwell) spring to mind.
Genetic mutation as a spiritual practice
clinicians have long known that there are plenty of people who experience anxiety in the absence of any danger or stress and haven’t a clue why they feel distressed. Despite years of psychotherapy, many experience little or no relief. It’s as if they suffer from a mental state that has no psychological origin or meaning, a notion that would seem heretical to many therapists, particularly psychoanalysts.
An article in the New York Times reports that neural scientists have discovered that a genetic mutation that occurs in approximately 20% of the population results in an abnormally high production of a molecule called anandamide in the brain. Anandamide, named after the Sanskrit word ānanda, which means bliss, results in lower-than-normal levels of anxiety and higher-than-normal feelings of well-being. Anandamide also occurs naturally in cannabis, which could account for some of that plant’s popularity. Interestingly enough, people with the genetic mutation that produces abnormally high levels of anandamide typically have little interest in marijuana; they don’t feel a need for it, and many find that cannabis actually decreases their pleasure and feelings of happiness and well-being.
If the clinicians are correct that a naturally-occurring chemical is a significant condition in subjective feelings of well-being—and in a culture with very high levels of legal and illegal mood-altering drug consumption, who would doubt it?—then it is not only psychoanalysts who might be challenged by these findings. Also challenged should be some religious traditions, such as Buddhism, that claim that people can change the quality of their experiences of the world simply by learning new patterns of thinking and by taking up certain contemplative practices.
Buddhist teachings tend to place an emphasis on the importance of studying causal relationships, and especially learning what kinds of thinking result in unhappiness so that one can eliminate those kinds of thinking and replace them with patterns of thinking that result in more happiness. That sounds much more easy to achieve than it in fact is. First of all, given that (as Buddhists universally acknowledge) every event and state is the consequence of innumerable conditions, it is in practice at best very difficult and at worst impossible to isolate which internal and external conditions are producing the frame of mind that one is currently experiencing. Without being able to identify the most significant conditions, one has no ideas which conditions to eliminate and replace with others. And even if one could identify the offending conditions, replacing them may not be possible. (What if, for example, it should turn out that genetics plays a significant role in how happy one is capable of being? Does one then just replace one’s grandparents with better ones?)
I have written before about how difficult it is to know whether a contemplative practice is a factor in one’s overall psychological health. For my entire life I have wondered whether I have a sanguine temperament and have a tendency to be alarmingly cheerful because I meditate regularly and practice Buddhism. It has always seemed a real possibility that in fact I meditate and feel an affinity with Buddhism because I was born with a sanguine temperament.
When I look at my own temperament, I see a great deal of my father’s mentality. He was rarely discouraged, almost never depressed, remarkably resilient, hardly ever sad, almost never exhilarated, rarely excited and yet prone to moments of unpredictable angry impatience. That also describes me (as I see myself at least, but also how at least a few others have reported that they see me). In trying to account for the similarity in my temperament to my father’s (which, incidentally, I see in a good many of my blood relatives), one set of conditions that we do not have in common is our diet or our religious beliefs and practices. Put perhaps a little too simply, my father had very little interest in religion. He did not read religious texts, never (that I knew of) meditated or prayed, and he showed no inclination to study the biographies of saints in translation or in their original languages. In short, he never did, even in a casual way, the things I spent my entire adult life doing. Very few days went by in which he did not consume a moderate amount of alcohol, whereas I often go months at a time between one glass of wine or beer and the next. He had very little interest in paying attention to diet, whereas I have been almost obsessively interested in getting a balanced diet of organic foods sold by fair-trade merchants. He lived to the age of 89, as did most of his close relatives, who collectively held a remarkable variety of religious beliefs and followed very diverse lifestyles. All of this evidence predisposes me to think that I am as I am largely because of genetic factors that I could not change even if I wanted to. Fortunately, there are few genetic factors I would be even momentarily tempted to change, aside perhaps from wishing for better eyesight.
Talking about all this recently with other Buddhists, I was asked whether I think that my religious practice has been a waste of time. I gave the somewhat feeble answer that calling anything a waste of time presupposes that one can think of other ways that one wishes time had been used; I do not wish I had done something with my time rather than meditate, read Buddhist texts and think about them and study Sanskrit, and therefore I do not consider any of that a waste of time. But that dodges the real question that was being asked, which was probably this: Do I give meditation and Buddhist practice any credit for bringing about the fortunate mentality I enjoy today? I think my answer to that would have to be negative. I had pretty much the same mentality that I have now even when I was a child, long before it ever occurred to me to meditate or think about the Buddha and his teachings, let alone go to them for refuge. If I had the courage to speak frankly of my experience, I might even say that going for refuge to the Buddha and the dharma has hardly had any effect at all on me, other than perhaps to allow me to remain the rather sanguine, calm, even-keeled, uninspired and uninspiring, rather plodding and occasionally irritable person I have always been.
Having said all this, I am inclined to say that doing contemplative practice for the sake of bringing about positive changes in one’s mentality may be the wrong way to go about it, if only because one is bound to be disappointed. Rather, I am inclined to see my own contemplative practice as an expression of gratitude for the fact that there is not much about my mentality that I feel inclined to change. (I am minfdul that this may sound smug, but like it or not, it happens to be true.)
In Buddhist technical terms, I suppose this places me rather squarely in the camp of those who believe in what the Japanese Buddhists called tariki (他力), that is, the conviction that whatever blessings one has have all been caused not by one’s own efforts but rather have been brought as gifts from others over whom and over which one has no control or influence. One could also call it blind luck. Or one could call it by the Sanskrit term śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness, a term that succinctly expresses the conviction that if one were to subtract from one’s “self”—that is, from one’s body and mind—every single element that was produced by something outside oneself, there would be absolutely nothing left that one could rightly claim to be one’s own.
I have that conviction of the correctness of the doctrine of “emptiness” myself, but I have no idea whether I came to it through careful thinking (yoniśo manaskāra) and study or through the accidental mutation of a gene that has resulted in a generous helping of the insentient molecule anandamide.
Out of a living silence 