DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE UNSTABLE.

The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.

Why fear? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if on the outside it appears confident.

Once, as I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve near Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been once a country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As we approached the property, long overgrown with trees and all kinds of magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put there by the park authorities. It read: DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE UNSTABLE. I said to my friend, “That’s a profound sutra [sacred scripture].” And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself that which is beyond death. Jesus called it “eternal life.”

- Eckhart Tolle

How is the formless in you beyond death?

the truth is formless

The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the behef that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won’t find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That’s why Buddhists say, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.

- Eckhart Tolle

the axial age:

The Birth of Axial Thought:

For thousands of years godlike kings had anchored the moral order in chains of ritual, linking the humblest villager to rulers who touched heaven by sacrificing on ziggurats or slaughtering captives in cemeteries. But as godlike kings reinvented themselves as chief executives, the enchantment was going out of the world. “Would that I had died before or been born later,” complained the seventh-century Greek poet Hesiod, “for now is truly an age of iron…Righteousness and Indignation, their loveliness wrapped in robes of white, depart the wide-avenued earth. They abandon mankind to join the deathless gods on Olympus; bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men; and there will be no more aid against evil.”

But that was only one way of seeing things. From the shores of the Aegean to the Yellow River basin, other thinkers began developing radical new views of how the world worked. They spoke from the margins because most stood on the lower rungs of the elite; and geographically, because most came from small states on the fringes of power. Despair not, they said (more or less); we do not need godlike kings to transcend this sullied world. Salvation is within us, not in the hands of corrupt, violent rulers.

Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher struggling at the end of World War II to make sense of the moral crisis of his own day, called the centuries around 500 BCE, the “Axial Age,” meaning they formed an axis around which history turned. In the Axial Age, Jaspers portentously declared, “Man, as we know him today, came into being.” Axial Age writings and Daoist texts in the East, Buddhist and Jain documents in South Asia, and Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (with its descendants the New Testament and the Koran) in the West became the classics, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meaning of life for countless millions ever since.

The classics all agree that their ultimate subject, a transcendent realm beyond our own sordid world, is indefinable. Nirvana “blowing out,” a state of mind in which the passions of this world are snuffed out like a candle be described, said the Buddha; even trying is inappropriate. For Confucius, sen translated “humaneness” was similarly beyond language. “The more I look up to it, the higher it is; the more I penetrate it, the harder it becomes; I see it ahead of me and suddenly it is behind…in speaking about it, can one avoid being hesitant?” Likewise, when pressed to define to kalon, “the good,” Socrates threw up his hands: “it’s beyond me, and I try I’ll only make a fool of myself.” All he could do was tell parables: the good is like a fire that casts shadows that we mistake for reality. Jesus was equally allusive about the Kingdom of Heaven, and equally fond of parables. Most indefinable of all was dao, the “Way” that Daoists follow:

The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way;

The name that can be named is not the true name…

Both may be called mysterious.

Mysterious and still more mysterious,

The gateway of all subtleties!

The second thing the classics agreed on was how to attain transcendence. There is more to Confticianisrn, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on than bumper-sticker slogans, but one I saw on a car outside my favorite coffee shop while 1 was writing this chapter summed things up nicely: “Compassion is revolution.” Live ethically, renounce desire, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you will change the world. All the classics urge us to turn the other cheek and offer techniques to train the self in this discipline. The Buddha used meditation; Socrates favored conversation. Jewish rahbis urged study; Confucius agreed, and added punctilious observation of ritual and music. And within each tradition, some followers leaned toward mysticism while others took a down-to-earth folksy line.

The process was always one of self-fashioning, an internal, personal reorientation toward transcendence that did not depend on godlike kings even, for that matter, gods. Supernatural powers, in fact, often seem beside the point in Axial thought. Confucius and the Buddha refused to talk about divinities; Socrates, though professing piety, was condemned partly for failing to believe in Athens gods; and rabbis warned Jews that God was so ineffable that they should not mention his name or praise him too much.

Did Axial thought promote social development?

Unlikely. Geography is against it. The most important Axial thinkers came from small, marginal communities such as Greece, Israel, the Buddha’s home state of Sakya, or Confucius’ of Lu; it is hard to see how transcendent breakthroughs in political backwaters affected social development in the great powers.

Also, logic is against it. Axial thought was a reaction against the high state, at best indifferent to great kings and their bureaucrats and often downright hostile to their power. Axial thought’s real contribution to raising social development came later in the first millennium BCE, when all the great states learned to tame it, making it work for them. In the East, the Han dynasty emasculated Confucianism to the point it became an official ideology, guiding a loyal class of bureaucrats. In India, the great king Ashoka, apparently genuinely horrified by his own violent conquests converted to Buddhism around 17 BCE, yet somehow managed not to renounce war. And in the West, Romans first neutralized Greek philosophy then turned Christian into a prop for their empire.

The more rational strands within Axial thought encouraged law, science, history, logic, and rhetoric, which all increased people’s intellectual mastery of their world, but the real motor behind development was the same as it had been since the end of the Ice Age. Lazy, greedy and frightened people found easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things, in the process building stronger states, trading further afield, and settling in greater cities. In a pattern repeated many times in history, as social development rises, the new age develops the culture it needs. Axial thought was just one of the things that happened when people created high-end states and disenchanted the world.

If further proof is needed that Axial thought was more a consequence than a cause of state restructuring, we need only look at Qin, the ferocious state at the western edge of the Eastern core. “Qin has the same customs as the barbarians,” said the anonymous author of The Stratagems of the Warring States, a kind of how-to book on diplomatic chicanery. “It has the heart of a tiger or a wolf; greedy, loving profit, and untrustworthy, knowing nothing of ritual, duty, or virtuous conduct.” Yet despite being the antithesis of everything Confucian gentlemen held dear, Qin exploded from the edge of the Eastern core to conquer the whole of it in the third century BCE.

- Ian Morris

music --> religion --> trust --> civilization

The cognitive capacity and drive toward holding religious / spiritual beliefs (though not necessarily the beliefs themselves) underlie the foundation of society. Human organization could not have come into existence in the absence of religious beliefs. Societies, by necessity, are built upon orderliness, organization, and cooperation. In many cooperative undertakings, such as building granaries, fending off invaders, plowing fields, providing irrigation, and establishing a social hierarchy, members of society must accept certain propositions as true, even if they are not directly verifiable. Preparing food in a certain way allows us to escape toxins in the food. A leader asserts that a neighboring tribe is planning to attack and we need to either prepare a defense or launch a preemptive strike. A wait-and-see approach is potentially calamitous—we need to act on faith.

Religions trained us and taught us to accept society-building, interpersonally bonding propositions. Ceremonies with music reaffirm the propositions, and the music sticks in our heads, reminding us of what we believe and what we have agreed to. Music during ritual is designed, in most cases, to evoke a “religious experience,” a peak experience, intensely emotional, the effects of which can last the rest of a person’s life. Trance states can occur during these experiences, resulting in feelings of ecstasy and connectedness. Because the sacred belief is associated with the ecstatic state (and belief becomes truth), it becomes reconfirmed in the experiencer’s mind, with the music acting as an agent for reconfirmation every time it is played, ad infinitum. The emotion marks the belief. Three emotions in particular are associated with religious ecstasy: dependence, surrender, and love. These same three emotions are believed innately present in animals and human infants and were no doubt present in humans before religion gave them a system for expression and indeed for uplifting thoughts in self-conscious adults.

It is especially true that a cornerstone of contemporary society is trust and the ability to believe in things that are not readily apparent, such as abstract notions of justice, cooperation, and the sharing of resources implied by civilization. Indeed, modern technological civilization requires that we trust millions of things we cannot see. We have to trust that airline mechanics did their jobs in tightening all the bolts, that drivers on the road will keep a safe distance and stay within the lines, that food-processing plants observe health and hygiene codes. We simply cannot verify all these propositions directly more than the religious can verify the existence of God. The fundamental human ability to form societies based on trust, and to feel good about doing so is intimately linked to our religious past and spiritual present.

If love is viewed only narrowly as romantic love, then it is probably not a cornerstone in the creation of human nature. But love in its larger sense sweeping, selfless commitment to another person, group, or idea the most important cornerstone of a civilized society. It may not have been important for the survival of our species as hunter-gatherers and nomads, but it was essential for the establishment of what we think of today as human society, what we regard as our fundamental nature. Love of others and of ideals allowed for the creation of systems of courts, justice that is meted out to all members of society equally (without regard to financial status or race), welfare for the poor, education. These fixtures of contemporary society are expensive in terms of time and resources; they work because we believe in them, and are willing to give up personal gain to support them.

- Daniel Levitin

evolution

God made man, but he used the monkeys to do it

- Devo

the game of life needs myths and rules

A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness a sense of meaning in existence, which, my dear friend, has no meaning it simply is. But the mind goes asking for meanings; it can’t play unless it knows (or makes up) some system of rules.

Mythologies present games to play: how to make believe you’re doing thus and so. Ultimately, through the game, you experience that positive thing which is the experience of being-in-being, of living meaningfully. That’s the first function of mythology, to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, art image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. This function we may call the cosmological function of mythology.

The question of truth doesn’t matter here. Nietzsche says that the worst point you can present to a person of faith is truth. Is it true? Who cares? In the sphere of mythological imagery, the point is, I like it this way; this is the source of my life. Question the cosmological authenticity of a clergyman’s archaic image of the universe, his notion of the history of the world—“Who are you, pride of intellect, to question this wonderful thing that’s been the source of all my life?”

People live by playing a game, and you can ruin a game by being Sir Sobersides who comes in and says, “Well, what’s the use of this?” A cosmological image gives you a field in which to play the game that helps you to reconcile your life, your existence, to your own consciousness, or expectation, of meaning. This is what a mythology or a religion has to offer.

Of course, the system must make sense. One of the most bewildering experiences I ever had was during the Apollo 10 moon flight. This was the one just before the actual moon landing, when these three wonderful men were flying around the Moon just at Christmas. They were talking about how dry and barren the Moon looked. And then, in honor of the holiday, they began reading from the first Book of Genesis. Here they were, reading these ancient words that had nothing to do with the cosmos they were flying through, describing a flat three-layer cake of a universe that had been created in seven days by a God who lived somewhere below the sphere that they were in at the time. They talked about the separating of the waters above and the waters below, when they had just pointed out how dry it was. The whole discontinuity between the religious tradition and the actual physical condition struck me very strongly that evening. What a calamity for our world that we do not yet have anything that can wake people’s hearts the way that those verses do and yet would make sense in terms of the actual, observable universe!

One of the problems in our biblical tradition is that the universe presented is one posited by the Sumerians five thousand years ago; we’ve had two universe models since then. There’s been the Ptolemaic system, and, for the past four or five hundred years, we’ve had the Copernican universe, with the solar system and the wheeling galaxies. But here we are, stuck with that funny little story in the first chapter of Genesis. This doesn’t have anything to do with any of the rest, not even the second chapter of Genesis. The second function of mythology, then, is to present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with in the universe around you.

- Joseph Campbell

joseph campbell quotes

Life is without meaning.

You bring meaning to it.

The meaning of life is

whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

We must be willing to get rid of

the life we've planned, so as to have

the life that is waiting for us.

fictions--money, religion

By "performative ideology" Zizek means a form of ideological consciousness in which we know that we are dealing with a fiction, but in which the fiction nonetheless regulates our actual real behavior. Although we know that we are dealing with a fiction, we regulate reality as though the fiction were real. Ironically, in doing this we make the fiction real. Money is one example. When people use it, they know that there is nothing magical about it. It is a simply a means of exchange that gives the one who has it the right to certain things. The problem is that people act as if money in itself is wealth.

Religion is another example. Faith makes a fiction--money, religion--real.

Kant vs Schopenhauer on morality

Schopenhauer finds Kant’s idea that moral laws exist a priori and are knowable “independent of all inner and outer experience ‘resting simply on concepts of pure reason’” without any empirical basis. He pointed out that Kant rejected the very idea that morality might be bound up in consciousness and connected to natural feelings “peculiar to human nature, which would give morality an empirical grounding. Kant is very clear on this point. In the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes that moral law

must not be sought in man’s nature (the subjective) or in the circumstances of the world (tile objective)…here nothing whatever can be borrowed from knowledge relating to man, i.e., from anthropology...indeed we must not take it into our heads to try to derive the reality of our moral principle from the particular constitution of human nature.

What we are left with, argued Schopenhauer, is an ethics that exists a priori of human experience and which is “entirely abstract, wholly insubstantial, and likewise floating about entirely in air.”

So, if morality is not found in human nature but, rather, exists a priori and independent of human nature, what compels someone to be moral? Kant says one acts in a morally responsible way because of “[t]he feeling that it is incumbent on man to obey the moral law…from a sense of duty, not from voluntary inclination. Kant specifically dismisses feelings as a basis for morality.

Feelings of compassion and of tenderhearted sympathy would even be a nuisance to those thinking on the right lines, because they would throw into confusion their well-considered maxims and provoke the desire to be released from these, and to be subject only to legislative reason.

Schopenhauer finds Kant’s categorical imperative unpersuasive. Human beings simply don’t act in a disinterested, moral way, because of a duty to uphold an a priori moral code. Unless, that is, there is some reward or punishment attached. On a closer examination of Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer concluded that it sounded an awful lot like a theological ethics absent God’s presence. After all, the Abrahamic religions are based on God’s Ten Commandants, an a priori moral code handed down by God that exists independent of human nature but is expected to be obeyed because God wills it.

Schopenhauer argues that the moral code that accompanies theological consciousness is purely prescriptive. If human nature is “fallen,” as the Abrahaimic religions suggest, then there is no moral basis within an individual’s being that would predispose him to do the morally right thing. God’s commandments, therefore, are a prescriptive device telling human beings that this is the way they “ought” to behave if they are to be rewarded by God’s grace and not punished by his wrath. But if there is nothing in the biological nature of a human being that would predispose him to be morally good, then why would he choose to do so out of pure duty to some a priori existing moral code, as Kant suggest, especially when there is no reward for doing so or punishment for not.

What Schopenhauer is really saying here is that Kant is attempting to offer a moral defense for the Age of Reason using a prescriptive device borrowed from the Age of Faith. In the end, concludes Schopenhauer, Kant fails to show how reason alone, as an abstract idea, can be the basis of a moral ethic.

The question then becomes whether there is any other source within the human animal itself that might be the basis of morality. Can we describe some quality of human behavior that predisposes people to be moral so that we don’t run the risk of having to slip from what is to what ought to be famous is/ought gap? If we can’t find such a predisposition burrowed deep in the nature of human beings, then the only way to save morality is to journey back to an earlier theological consciousness and view morality as always prescriptive and never descriptive.

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behavior that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature—with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realized. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of our human nature. Here’s how he describes the phenomenon. In feeling compassion for another,

I suffer directly with him, I feel his woe just as I ordinarily feel only my own; and, likewise, I directly desire his weal in the same way I otherwise desire my own…At every moment we remain clearly conscious that he is the sufferer, not we; and it is precisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel the suffering, to our grief and sorrow. We suffer with him and hence him; we feel his pain as his, and do not imagine that it is ours.

In this single statement Schopenhauer becomes the first person in history to clearly define the empathic process. All that is missing is the term itself.

- Jeremy Rifkin

empathy enables I to become We to become Being to become Ecstasy

Empathy requires trust and the willingness to surrender ourselves to the mystery of existence at both the cosmic level and at the level of everyday life with our fellow beings. Trust becomes indispensable to allowing empathy to grow, and empathy, in turn, allows us to plumb the divine presence that exists in all things. Empathy becomes the window to the divine. It is by empathic extension that we transcend ourselves and begin connecting with the mystery of existence. The deeper, more universalizing our empathic experience, the closer we come to experiencing the totality of being is, we become more all-participating, all-knowing, and all-belonging.

The Romantics seemed to believe that by becoming integrated into nature's flow, they somehow sheltered themselves in some spiritual way from the finality of their own deaths.

the yin and yang of everything

All things come into being by conflict of opposites.

- Heraclitus, 500 BC

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

- William Blake, 1790 AD

The ancient Chinese symbol of yin and yang represents the value of the eternally shifting balance between seemingly opposed principles. As the epigrams above from Heraclitus and Blake show this is not just an Eastern idea; it is Great Idea, a timeless insight that in a way summarizes the rest of this book. Religion and science, for example, are often thought to be opponents, but the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, and physics, but many were good psychologists. Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference.

The Eastern and Western approaches to life are also said to be opposed: The East stresses acceptance and collectivism; the West encourages striving and individualism. But as we've seen, both perspectives are valuable. Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.

And, finally, liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite their own. But the most important lesson I have learned in my twenty years of research on morality is that nearly all people are morally motivated. Selfishness is a powerful force, particularly in the decisions of individuals, but whenever groups of people come together to make a sustained effort to change the world, you can bet that they are pursuing a vision of virtue, justice, or sacredness. Material self-interest does little to explain the passions of partisans on issues such as abortion, the environment, or the role of religion in public life.

An important dictum of cultural psychology is that each culture develops expertise in some aspects of human existence, but no culture can be expert in all aspects. The same goes for the two ends of the political spectrum. My research' confirms the common perception that liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists. Conservatives, on the other hand, are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness. When one side overwhelms the other, the results are likely to be ugly. A society without liberals would be harsh and oppressive to many individuals. A society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints that are so valuable. Anomie would increase along with freedom. A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side. If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time.

By drawing on wisdom that is balanced—ancient and new, Eastern and Western, even liberal and conservative—we can choose directions in life that will lead to satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of meaning. We can't simply select a destination and then walk there directly—the rider does not have that much authority. But by drawing on humanity's greatest ideas and best science, we can train the elephant, know our possibilities as well as our limits, and live wisely.

- Johnathan Haidt

why we have religion and spirituality

Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear…When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?

- Upnishads

I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

- Willa Cather

Wilson examines religion from this co-evolutionary perspective. The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always see to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.

Wilson shows how religious practices help members solve coordination problems. For example, trust and therefore trade are greatly enhanced when all parties are part of the same religious community, and when religious beliefs say that God knows and cares about the honesty of the parties. Respect for rules is enhanced when rules have an element of sacredness, and when they are backed up by supernatural sanction and the gossip or ostracism of one's peers. Wilson's claim is that religious ideas, and brains that responded to those ideas, co-evolved. Even if the belief in supernatural entities emerged originally for some other reason, or as an accidental byproduct in the evolution of cognition, groups that parlayed those beliefs into social coordination devices (for example, by linking them to emotions such as shame, fear, guilt, and love) found a cultural solution to the free-rider problem and then reaped the enormous benefits of trust and cooperation. If stronger belief led to greater individual benefits, or if a group developed a way to punish or exclude those who did not share in its beliefs and practices, conditions were perfect for the co-evolution of religion and religious brains.

Religion, therefore, could have pulled human beings into the group-selection loophole. By making people long ago feel and act as though they were part of one body, religion reduced the influence of individual selection (which shapes individuals to be selfish) and brought into play the force of group selection (which shapes individuals to work for the good of their group). But we didn't make it all the way through the loophole: Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

Reading Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral is like taking a journey to Spaceland. You can look down on the vast tapestry of human cultures and see why things are woven in the way that they are. Wilson says his own private hell would be to be locked forever into a room full of people discussing the hypocrisies of religion, for example, that many religions preach love, compassion, and virtue yet sometimes cause war, hatred, and terrorism. From Wilson's higher perspective, there is no contradiction. Group selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group's ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization. Atrocities committed in the name of religion are almost always committed against out-group members, or against the most dangerous people of all: apostates (who try to leave the group) and traitors (who undermine the group).

A second puzzle that Wilson can solve is why mysticism, everywhere and always, is about transcending the self and merging with something larger than the self. When William James analyzed mysticism, he focused on the psychological state of "cosmic consciousness" and on the techniques developed in all the major religions to attain it. Hindus and Buddhists use meditation and yoga to attain the state of sarnadhi, in which "the subject-object distinction and one's sense of an individual self disappear in a state usually described as one of supreme peace, bliss, and illumination. James found much the same goal in Christian and Muslim mysticism, often attained through repetitive prayer. He quoted the eleventh-century Muslim philosopher Al Ghazzali, who spent several years worshipping with the Sufis of Syria. Al Ghazzali attained experiences of "transport" and revelation that he said cannot be described in words, although he did try to explain to his Muslim readers the essence of Sufism:

The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God.

From Wilson's perspective, mystical experience is an "off" button for the self. When the self is turned off, people become just a cell in the larger body, a bee in the larger hive. It is no wonder that the after effects of mystical experience are predictable; people usually feel a stronger commitment to God or to helping others, often by bringing them to God.

The neuroscientist Andrew Newberg has studied the brains of people undergoing mystical experiences, mostly during meditation, and has found where that off-switch might be. In the rear portion of the brain's parietal lobes (under the rear portion of the top of the skull) are two patches of cortex Newberg calls the "orientation association areas." The patch in the left hemisphere appears to contribute to the mental sensation of having a limited and physically defined body, and thus keeps track of your edges. The corresponding area in the right hemisphere maintains a map of the space around you. These two areas receive input from your senses to help them maintain an ongoing representation of your self and its location in space. At the very moment when people report achieving states of mystical union, these two areas appear to be cut off. Input from other parts of the brain is reduced, and overall activity in these orientation areas is reduced, too. But Newberg believes they are still trying to do their jobs: The area on the left tries to establish the body's boundaries and doesn't find them; the area on the right tries to establish the self's location in space and doesn't find it. The person experiences a loss of self combined with a paradoxical expansion of the self out into space, yet with no fixed location in the normal world of three dimensions. The person feels merged with something vast, something larger than the self.

Newberg believes that rituals that involve repetitive movement and chanting, particularly when they are performed by many people at the same time, help to set up "resonance patterns" in the brains of the participants that make this mystical state more likely to happen. The historian William McNeill, drawing on very different data, came to the same conclusion. When McNeill was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, basic training required that he march for hundreds of hours on the drill field in close formation with a few dozen other men. At first, McNeill thought the marching was just a way to pass the time because his base had no weapons with which to train. But after a few weeks of training, the marching began to in duce in him an altered state of consciousness:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive wellbeing is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.

Decades later, McNeill studied the role that synchronized movement—in dance, religious ritual; and military training—has played in history. In Keeping Together in Time, he concludes that human societies since the beginning of recorded history have used synchronized movement to create harmony and cohesion within groups, sometimes in the service of preparing for hostilities with other groups. McNeill's conclusion suggests that synchronized movement and chanting might be evolved mechanisms for activating the altruistic motivations created in the process of group selection. The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers. McNeill quotes an extraordinary passage from the book The Warriors: Reflections of Men in Battle that describes the thrilling communal state that soldiers sometimes enter:

“I” passes insensibly into a "we," “my" becomes "our" and individual fate loses its central importance…I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments relatively easy…I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.

There is indeed something larger than the self, able to provide people with a sense of purpose they think worth dying for: the group. (Of course, one group's noble purpose is sometimes another group's pure evil.) What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life? What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health depends on the two working together, each drawing on the others' strengths. I don't believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, "What is the purpose of life?" Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality.

Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

- Jonathan Haidt

meaning of life and happiness

Two very different approaches to the question of the meaning of life:

External: what is the purpose of life?

Internal: what is the purpose within life?

When a computer breaks, it doesn't fix itself. You have to open it up and do something to it, or bring it to a specialist for repair. The computer metaphor has so pervaded our thought that we sometimes think about people as computers, and about psychotherapy as the repair shop or a kind of reprogramming. But people are not computers, and they usually recover on their own from almost anything that happens to them. I think a better metaphor is that people are like plants. During graduate school, I had a small garden in front of my house in Philadelphia. I was not a very good gardener, and I traveled a lot in the summers, so sometimes my plants withered and nearly died. But the amazing thing I learned about plants is that as long as they are not completely dead, they will spring back to full and glorious life if you just get the conditions right. You can't fix a plant; you can only give it the right conditions—water, sun, and soil—and then wait. It will do the rest.

If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement. In the modern world, people can find goals and flow in many settings, but most people find most of their flow at work. Love and work are, for people, obvious analogues to water and sunshine for piants. When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, "Love and work."

Work at its best should be connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, "Work is love made visible." Echoing Tolstoy, he gave examples of work done with love:

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,

even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection,

even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were

to eat the fruit.

When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a career field is healthy.

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors. The correct version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness

comes from between.

People are multilevel systems in another way. We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence. When the three levels of your existence are aligned and mutually interlocking: your physical feelings and thoughts cohere with your actions, and all of it makes perfect sense within the larger culture of which you are a part of, a spiritual contentment will inevitably follow.

Think about the last empty ritual you took part in. Maybe you were asked to join hands and chant with a group of strangers while attending a wedding ceremony for a friend who is of a different religion. Perhaps you took part in a new age ceremony that borrowed elements from Native Americans, ancient Celts, and Tibetan Buddhists. You probably understood the symbolism of the ritual—understood it consciously and explicitly in the way that the rider is so good at doing. Yet you felt self-conscious, maybe even silly, while doing it. Something was missing.

You can't just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time. To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions. If the community also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value, then people are unlikely to wonder about the question of purpose within life. Meaning and purpose simply emerge from the coherence, and people can get on with the business of living. But conflict, paralysis, and anomie are likely when a community fails to provide coherence, or, worse, when its practices contradict people's gut feelings or their shared mythology and ideology.

- Johnathan Haidt

agape as sublime

When any . . . act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary, when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

Jefferson went on to say that the physical feelings and motivational effects caused by great literature are as powerful as those caused by real events. He considered the example of a contemporary French play, asking whether the fidelity and generosity of its hero does not:

…dilate [the reader's] breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does [the reader] not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?

This extraordinary statement is more than just a poetic description of the joys of reading. It is also a precise scientific definition of an emotion. In emotion research, we generally study emotions by specifying their components, and Jefferson gives us most of the major components: an eliciting or triggering condition (displays of charity, gratitude, or other virtues); physical changes in the body ("dilation" in the chest); a motivation (a desire of "doing charitable and grateful acts also"); and a characteristic feeling beyond bodily sensations (elevated sentiments). As an act of crypto-religious glorification, I considered calling this emotion "Jefferson's emotion," but thought better of it, and chose the word "elevation," which Jefferson himself had used to capture the sense of rising on a vertical dimension, away from disgust.

The relationship of elevation to love and trust was beautifully expressed in a letter I once received from a man in Massachusetts, David Whitford who had read about my work on elevation. Whitford's Unitarian church had asked each of its members to write a spiritual autobiography account of how each had become the spiritual person he or she is now. In one section of his autobiography, Whitford puzzled over why he was so often moved to tears during church services. He noticed that he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first he called "tears of compassion," such as the time he cried during a sermon on Mothers' Day on the subject of children who were abandoned or neglected. These cases felt to him like "being pricked in the soul," after which "love pours out" for those who are suffering. But he called the second kind "tears of celebration"; he could just as well have called them tears of elevation:

There's another kind of tear. This one's less about giving love and more about the joy of receiving love, or maybe just detecting love (whether it's directed at me or at someone else). It's the kind of tear that flows in response to expressions of courage, or compassion, or kindness by others. A few weeks after Mother's Day, we met here in the sanctuary after the service and considered whether to become a Welcoming Congregation [a congregation that welcomes gay people]. When John stood in support of the resolution, and spoke of how, as far as he knew, he was the first gay man to come out at First Parish, in the early 1970s, I cried for his courage. Later, when all hands went up and the resolution passed unanimously, I cried for the love expressed by our congregation in that act. That was a tear of celebration, a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says it's okay, relax, let down your guard, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it's in our nature. That kind of tear is also like being pricked, only now the love pours in.”

For many people, one of the pleasures of going to church is the experience of collective elevation. People step out of their everyday profane existence, which offers only occasional opportunities for movement on the third dimension, and come together with a community of like-hearted people who are also hoping to feel a "lift" from stories about Christ, virtuous people in the Bible, saints, or exemplary members of their own community. When this happens, people find themselves overflowing with love, but it is not exactly the love that grows out of attachment relationships. That love has a specific object, and it turns to pain when the object is gone. This love has no specific object; it is agape. It feels like a love of all humankind, and because humans find it hard to believe that something comes from nothing, it seems natural to attribute the love to Christ, or to the Holy Spirit moving within one's own heart. Such experiences give direct and subjectively compelling evidence that God resides within each person. And once a person knows this "truth," the ethic of divinity becomes self-evident.

- Johnathan Haidt

the self as sin

The self is one of the great paradoxes of human evolution. Like the fire stolen by Prometheus, it made us powerful but exacted a cost. In The Curse of the Self, the social psychologist Mark Leary points out that many other animals can think, but none, so far as we know, spend much time thinking about themselves. Only a few other primates (and perhaps dolphins) can even learn that the image in a mirror belongs to them. Only a creature with language ability has the mental apparatus to focus attention on the self, to think about the self's invisible attributes and long term goals, to create a narrative about that self, and then to react emotionally to thoughts about that narrative. Leary suggests that this ability to create a self gave our ancestors many useful skills, such as long-term planning, conscious decision making and self-control, and the ability to see other people's perspectives. Because these skills are all important for enabling human beings to work closely together on large projects, the development of the self may have been crucial to the development of human ultrasociality. But by giving each one of us an inner world, a world full of simulations, social comparisons, and reputational concerns, the self also gave each one of us a personal tormenter. We all now live amid a whirlpool of inner chatter, much of which is negative (threats loom larger than opportunities), and most of which is useless. It is important to note that the self is not exactly the rider—much of the self is unconscious and automatic—but because the self emerges from conscious verbal thinking and storytelling, it can be constructed only by the rider.

Leary's analysis shows why the self is a problem for all major religions: The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement, in three ways. First, the constant stream of trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity This is why Eastern religions rely heavily on meditation, an effective means of quieting the chatter of the self. Second, spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back—in some sense, killing it—and often the self objects. Give up my possessions and the prestige they bring? No way! Love my enemies, after what they did to me? Forget about it. And third, following a spiritual path is invariably hard work, requiring years of meditation, prayer, self-control, and sometimes self-denial. The self does not like to be denied, and it is adept at finding reasons to bend the rules or cheat. Many religions teach that egoistic attachments to pleasure and reputation are constant temptations to leave the path of virtue. In a sense, the self is Satan, or, at least, Satan's portal. For all these reasons, the self is a problem for the ethic of divinity. The big greedy self is like a brick holding down the soul.

- Johnathan Haidt

Morality, Truth, Beauty

Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.

- Katha Upanishad

The word religion comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies the re-establishment of a connection which has been lost.

The primary purpose of myths is to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.

Compared with the majesty of God which has created every last minute detail of the universe, man knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow connected with his existence, gives man a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, ‘the One’.

Man used to be an animal, part of nature, life completely dictated by instinct.

Then man opened up Pandora’s Box, ate the Apple, was awoken and became aware, conscious. Instinct no longer dictated man’s life. Ego ruled.

With freedom and consciousness, man was free from nature’s bound, and soon fell prey to envy, greed, lust, hatred, cruelty, depression, loneliness, sin.

Now humans live in lives of constant tension. At the deepest level, there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves.

But to do this they have to make a constant, conscious efforts. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.

...The need to resolve this psychic split gives rise to other distinctive features of human behaviour for which the animal kingdom offers no real parallels. One conspicuous means whereby human beings sublimate their tendency to egocentricity is through their love of games and sport. Not only does the rivalry between teams and individuals provide a socially acceptable channel for competitive impulses which might otherwise become socially disruptive. By disciplining physical or mental activity within a strict framework of rules, the participants in a game or sport become subordinated to something higher than themselves. A psychological model for all sporting activity is the spiritual discipline of Zen archery, in which the archer's purpose is so to eliminate the distortions arising from his own ego that the arrow naturally flies to its target. Whenever a game is played well it produces those moments when body and mind come into such instinctive co-ordination that the players seem to have been lifted above themselves. This was why, until it became corrupted, the original Olympic Games were one of the central religious ceremonies of the ancient Greek world. The skill of the competitors expressed an ideal of perfection which elevated not only the athletes themselves but all those who watched them. Something of the same sense of transcendence, although it is similarly open to corruption by the ego, accounts for the extraordinary glamour which surrounds sport in our modern world.

An even more significant instance of how human beings express this urge to transcend the limitations of their ego-existence is through every kind of artistic expression. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order. From music to painting, from architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution. Any work of art thus seeks to create a marriage between those complementary aspects of the psyche we see as masculine and feminine. Analyse the appeal of a Beethoven symphony and we see how it is made up of that familiar fourfold combination of strength and mind, heart and soul. The music commands our attention by its masculine power. It appeals to our intellect by the formal subtleties of its structure. It moves us by its feminine grace and delicacy, its flowing life, its appeal to our feelings. It elevates us by evoking something beyond ourselves, a sense of perfect totality. Like all great art it thus harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.

Any work of art can be analysed along similar lines, even if only in terms of how it may fall short of such perfect balance. Whenever we sense any artistic creation to be in some way deficient, this is either because it somehow lacks life or because it is inadequately organised, or both. Any work of art which succeeds, however, can make us feel mysteriously more alive, by connecting us with the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego. Such is what the artistic impulse in mankind is all about. But no device for re-establishing that sense of unity with our inner life is more ingenious than one coded into us by the process of evolution itself: to conjure up inside our heads those patterns of imaginary events we call stories.

- Christopher Booker