a crazy letter i wrote to a friend of mine over three years that i found while going through some old things. (i can't believe i actually sent it.)

May 1, 2008

Dear E___,

I have found, to both my happiness and dismay, that there are a great deal of similarities between the man in the mousehole and I. (I must confess that I have recently been reading Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, and I find it to be the most beautiful and terrifying thing I have ever read... and I am not saying this out of any kind of pseudo-pretentiousness; it speaks to me in a way that no other piece of literature has ever spoken to me before). Not unlike him, I had always thought that knowledge and intelligence were the keys to happiness and victory—the more intelligent we were, the more answers we would have; the more answers we had, the happier and more victorious we would be. And much to my dismay, I have found that this assumption has not proven to be true. I have since found that my intelligence, if you wish to even call it that, makes me content and miserable all at the same time; I am content, for example, in my knowledge, my self-awareness if you will, that sets me apart from the fool who acts without thinking, and yet that thinking more often than not prevents me from acting at all! This honest self-analysis that the person I envision I could be, the person that I desire to be, is little more than a mirage eats away at my sanity; I can see it so clearly, my imagination runs wild and the experience of my triumphs are so real and seemingly within my grasp that I almost leap into the world and give myself to this delicious dream completely, and yet it is a goal that I know I can never reach because it is simply a trick of my mind—the ghost of a long departed idealism that once captured my heart. I am as cowardly as I am courageous.

In reality, this thing that I loathe to call my intelligence simply alienates me even further from the rest of society; and even though I am quite an unsociable person by nature, I still get lonely and crave the kind of companionship that the Buddha called 'admirable friendship.' When we first met, I saw a lot of similarities between you and I (not that I thought you were a miserable person who failed to act out of a perplexing array of philosophical conundrums such as myself, only that you did not seem to truly be happy but in search of happiness). I might not have been at your intellectual level (I am certainly not an 'educated' man nor do I have the benefit of attending an institution of higher learning), but I felt that I was sufficiently intelligent enough to spark your interest and your friendship. (In fact, embarrassingly enough, I even entertained the idea that perhaps one day, we would become the best of friends.) Yet, after a short time, I realized that it was merely wishful thinking on my part. My realization was confirmed (painfully I might add) time and time again, like, for example, the last two times that I attempted to gather the courage to engage you in conversation. On each occasion, you gave me what perhaps you thought to be a clever excuse to prematurely end our (admittedly awkward) interaction in the form of an overwhelming urge to go to the book store, remember? (Perhaps you really did just want to go to the book store and it had nothing to do with me, but then I wonder why you did not invite me along if that were indeed the case. I like books too. Either way, I found it terribly insulting—especially on the day of my birthday when not only did I go to a job interview and the owner not show up, but then on the way home, I was greeted with a double-dose of rejection when you excused yourself to go to the book store.) The worst part is that I realize it was most likely my fault, that it is my personality that puts you off, and that it was my personality that drove you to make such excuses out of concern for my fragile intellect as much as your own boredom.

As I think about what I am writing, I can imagine you thinking while reading this, "What drivel; what absolute nonsense!" I can even imagine you showing this to some of you other friends while sharing a bottle of wine and having a good laugh at my expense, but to be honest, I do not care (OK, that is not entirely true; I do care, but there is nothing I can do about it so I have to tell myself that I do not care while secretly hoping that you will find my words amazingly refreshing and insightful, so much so that you will at once desire to invite me over for a cup of coffee and a long chat about our innermost thoughts. But I am not so deluded as to think this will actually happen, and in all probability you will have a good laugh at my expense. So be it!). I confess that if I were to receive a letter of this sort, I would probably do the same myself. I cannot begrudge you too much then, can I? Ha! Of course I can, and I probably will; nevertheless, I hope that you will at least see, behind all of my existential gibberish and this admittedly poor attempt at writing in a cliché Dostoyevsky-esque style, what it is that I am so desperately trying to say. In other words, I am sorry that we could not have been better friends, and as I try to understand why the majority of my friendships turn out the way that they do, I realize that I am doing so through the eyes of a man in a mousehole. In fact, that is how I see the whole world. For good or for ill, it is the only perspective that I have ever known without ever knowing it until know. Perhaps now you are wondering why I have written this, and all I can offer is that sometimes being truthful can be therapeutic; but more than that, I hope that you will at least understand me from an intellectual standpoint. Being a man that is familiar with the dialectic method, I know that if anyone can make sense of this gibberish and glimpse the confusion and clarity that is within my heart, you can. I am not sure that you want to, but I am willing to overlook that fact for the sake of the 'sublime and beautiful.' No, that is poor joke that I have borrowed from our dear friend Dostoyevsky; the truth is, it is my hope that this confession will finally rid me of the humility of rejection that I feel, imaginary or not, which rises like bile in my throat every time I am reminded of you.

Perhaps this 'man in a mousehole' phase will pass in time and I will see things from a different perspective, but for now this is something that I must accept. I must also accept that as pretentious as I sometimes find you to be, I admire and respect you all the same. And, since I am being completely honest, what pains me the most in this world is to be spurned by those that I look up to and admire. While I am no stranger to having others reject me or write me off, to having others not understand me, to being seen by others as nothing more than an eccentric anomaly that is tragically out of place, I am not used to having this be done by someone who I think is actually worth getting to know. It is painful and humiliating and absolutely maddening to a person such as myself—a person with intelligence, self-respect, and worst of all, stubborn pride. What is even harder to bear is admitting it, whether to myself or to my perceived transgressor. In fact, this is turning out to be one of the hardest things I have ever done (OK, that is bit of an exaggeration, but it certainly not an easy task for me in the least), and we shall see if I manage to gather the courage to send this to you at all. (And, if you are reading this, then it is safe to say that I did and my judgment did not get the better of me before I managed to send it.) But regardless of what you think or feel after reading this and reflecting upon it, for me it has been cathartic in the true sense of the word, and for that I truly thank you.

Sincerely,

Jason Merritt

so i had fun at church today....

I was sitting at home this morning, drinking a cup of coffee and rather bored, when I decided to attend Mass at the Greek Orthodox church near my house. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think part of it may have been the fact that I've been reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov lately, in which the Russian Orthodox Church plays a prominent role.

Apparently, I picked a good day to go as the bishop of Atlanta, Metropolitan Alexios, was visiting and gave a surprisingly good sermon based on Mt 8:5-13 despite it being rather 'faith' heavy (I'm generally what you'd call a rationalist). I also got anointed with some myrrh from the Myrrh-streaming "Hawaiian" Iveron Icon of the Theotokos, which I guess just happened to be making the rounds of Orthodox churches in the Pacific Northwest. It was definitely a surreal experience for me.

Only one person there happened to know that I wasn't Orthodox (or even Christian for that matter) as we'd met before at the annual Greek festival, but he didn't seem to care. In fact, he invited me out to lunch after the service and we had a nice discussion (well, he did most of the talking) about everything from The Matrix to his trip to Japan to what the 'icon' of the communion ritual truly represents. The last was especially enlightening.

I half expect to burst into flames whenever I walk into a church considering the kind of person I used to be, or at least the kind of person I imagined myself to be (think Damien from The Omen), but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself and how welcomed I felt. I suppose much of that was due to the company; but whatever the case, I'm glad I went.

google+: possible 'facebook killer'?

Almost everyone I know talking about Google+ seems pretty psyched about it and its potential to revolutionize social media. For example, check out this discussion between Trademark CEO Dwight Zahringer and my friend, Brian, about Google+ being a possible "Facebook killer."

Personally, I'm a bit skeptical as to whether it'll be as revolution social media-wise as they're predicting. That said, I agree with Brian that Google+ has a much cleaner look and simpler interface than Facebook, especially when it comes to privacy controls. Combined that with Facebook's comparatively complicated interface and increasingly more intrusive ads (not to mention their ever-changing privacy policy, etc.), plus Twitter's problems with spam, I think it has a good chance of replacing both as the default social media network for most people at some point.

The fact that you can actually edit your comments is another bonus. That's enough to sell me.

In the end, I think it'll all depend on how Google plays it, especially how well they integrate new features and services (it's pretty bare bones at the moment) and how quickly they open Google+ to the public. I think there's enough buzz out there right now to get people to join, and pretty much everyone I know uses Google and has a Gmail account already, so I don't think it'll be that hard to get people to eventually switch. The only question is whether they'll stay.

I think that predominately tech savvy people will find it more appealing at the beginning. But as Brian points out, the Circle feature definitely has a lot of promise; and if Google plays their cards right, I think it'll be extremely popular with a variety of people since it allows you to have a lot of sub-networks (e.g., family, friends, co-workers, etc.) within your larger network with little-to-no crossover. Even the beta version makes sharing things will certain people, and them alone, much easier than on Facebook or Twitter.

The obvious advantage to this is that it'll help people consolidate their social networks into one, eliminating the need to have a network dedicated just for work (e.g., LinkedIn), another one just for friends (e.g., Facebook), etc. Google+ puts you more in control of your content by giving you the choice of which Circles you share each post, picture, video, etc. with as you post them, which is something Facebook should have done a long time ago (along with the ability to edit comments). You can limit which groups see certain content on Facebook as well, but it's nowhere near as intuitive.

At least for moment, it looks as if Facebook is going to have to play catch-up with the beta version of Google+. And I'm guessing that if they don't come up with something to rival the convenience of Circles before Google+ is open to the public, they may have a serious challenger on their hands.

growth for the sake of growth isn't a sustainable model

Personally, I don't think that growth simply for the sake of growth is a sustainable model. While economic growth isn't necessarily a bad thing (as it tends to promote higher quality education and standards of living), it's not without its dangers, especially when it forms the very basis of our economic system.

Generally speaking, for national economies to continually experience growth, they need access to natural resources, a supply of relatively cheap labour and, more importantly, to eventually expand their markets. For many countries, especially those with limited space and natural resources of their own, this has been done through imperialist policies. The most blatant example being fascist Italy, where Benito Mussolini, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, wrote that:

For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death.

Of course, this doesn't mean that imperialism is the only effective means of acquiring natural resources and cheap labour, or expanding markets; but historically speaking, it's been one of the most popular, as well as one of the most effective (which is probably why it's so popular).

The focus on continual economic growth also requires a continual increase in consumption, and in turn, continually expanding markets and/or an increase in population to create and sustain such growth. This, naturally, tends to lead to consumerism, which has its own downsides, such as environmental degradation, the depletion of natural resources and the promotion of unnecessary and even harmful jobs as long as they contribute to growth.

In addition, things like sharing and reusing are actively discouraged by capital and the methodological individualism that underlies consumerism (and capitalism in general), which slows growth even though things like Portland's 'tool libraries' would arguably help people and the environment more than coercing them to purchase their own equipment or whatever simply to stimulate production.

In essence, I completely agree with C. A. L'Hirondelle that:

Blanket-over-head advocacy of jobs, jobs, jobs, ignores that

A) many jobs are wasteful, unnecessary or outright harmful (e.g. workin' hard at snaring new generations of smokers);

B) many 'non-jobs' such as being an unpaid carer, or doing volunteer work ---activities that are often essential to human health and happiness---are considered 'unproductive' according to conventional economic measures such as the GDP.

C) the idea of green jobs and green growth is just greenwashing the ugly roots, facts and outcomes of the economic growth imperative.

(I think B is an especially important point.)

I also get the feeling that things like 'green economy,' 'job growth' and 'sustainability' are little more than buzzwords being used by the current administration, as well as others, to promote the continuation of an inherently unsustainable system at a time when many are unemployed, disillusioned and beginning to question the status quo.

Sure, historically speaking, capitalism and the technological advancements it's fostered have arguably provided a greater standard of living for a large portion of the population in what amounts to the blink of an eye. But the system is designed to give people what they want, regardless of the consequences, and places profit in their production and distribution above everything else. Why? Well, for one thing, I'm inclined to agree with Martin Luther King Jr. when, on April 4, 1967, he said:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The way I see it, we really need to start looking at capitalism and what we're being told by businesses, politicians and the mainstream media more critically before we do even more irreparable harm to the planet, not to mention our future on it. Unfortunately, I think my friend, Joe, was right when he wrote:

Yeah, and a lot of sustainability issues are dealt with strictly in terms of material causes (in the Aristotelian sense). The teleological, efficient and formal causes for capitalist bullshit go unchecked. You can't base your economy on monetary profit without it leading to cancerous growth of the economy or without completely crashing it and starving people with austerity measures.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who'd probably disagree with me and my predominately critical/pessimistic point of view, but that's the way I currently see things. I'm fairly certain that things need to change, and I mean seriously change, for us to survive another millennium, let alone to truly flourish as a society. I'm talking about the need for a radical shift in human consciousness and/or a socio-political revolution on an epic scale here, people.

sam harris: a neo-buddhist after my own heart

Sam Harris is by far my favourite of the so-called 'New Atheists.' I especially like his approach to trying to bring things like science, spirituality and reason together, and I think he's more or less on the right track when it comes to these kinds of things, i.e., having no problem being a vocal atheist and critic of religion while at the same time being open to the fact that people have 'spiritual' experiences. As he wrote in "10 Myths - And 10 Truths - About Atheism":

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

Being a 'Buddhist' myself, I also like the fact that he's actually practiced meditation, and comes at things like vipasana meditation from the standpoint of neuroscience, de-emphasising their strictly religious roots in an attempt to move more towards developing "a scientific account of the contemplative path" (A Contemplative Science).

I think that if there were more people like Sam Harris who were interested in what Buddhism and other contemplative paths have to offer from a scientific standpoint, we could easily create a contemplative science of our own utilizing the latest in modern technology and knowledge of how the brain functions. For example, I think his latest blog post does a great job of pointing out the importance and usefulness of meditation and transcendent experiences:

My friend Jerry Coyne has posted a response to my recent video Q&A where he raises a few points in need of clarification about meditation, transcendence, spiritual experience, etc.:

This discussion continues at 21:25, when Sam criticizes atheists, scientists and secularists for failing to “connect to the character of those experiences” and for failing to “give some alternate explanation for them that is not entirely deflationary and demeaning and gives some warrant to the legitimacy of those experiences.” He implies that these experiences are somehow beyond the purview of science. I find that strange given Sam’s repeated emphasis on the value of science in studying mental states.

I’m not quite sure what he’s getting at here, and he doesn’t elaborate, but I don’t see why giving credence to these über-transcendent experiences as experiences says anything about a reality behind them. Yes, they might indeed change one’s personality and view of the world, but do any of us deny that?

I had similar experiences on various psychoactive substances when I was in college, and some of them were even transformative. The problem is not with us realizing that people can feel at one with the universe or, especially, at one with God; the problem comes with us taking this as evidence for some supernatural reality. What does it mean to say that an experience is legitimate? If someone thinks that he saw Jesus, I am prepared to believe that he thought that he saw Jesus, but I am not prepared to say that he really did see Jesus, nor that that constitutes any evidence for the existence of Jesus.

So my question for Sam would be this: “So if we accept that people do have these seriously transcendent experiences, what follows from that—beyond our simple desire to study the neurobiology behind them?”

These are all good points. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that transcendent experiences are “beyond the purview of science.” On the contrary, I think they should be studied scientifically. And I don’t believe that these experiences tell us anything about the cosmos (I called Deepak Chopra a “charlatan” for making unfounded claims of this sort). Nor do they tell us anything about history, or about the veracity of scripture. However, these experiences do have a lot to say about the nature of the human mind—not about its neurobiology, per se, but about its qualitative character (both actual and potential).

So, to answer Jerry’s question: yes, many things follow from these transcendent experiences. Here’s a short list:

1. It is possible to feel much better (in every sense of “better”) than one tends to feel. It is, in fact, possible to be utterly at ease in the world—and such ease is synonymous with relaxing, or fully transcending, the apparent boundaries of the “self.” Those who have never experienced such peace of mind will view the preceding sentences as yet another eruption of “mumbo jumbo” on my part. And yet it is phenomenologically true to say that such states of well-being are there to be discovered. I am not claiming to have experienced all relevant states of this kind. But there are people who appear to have experienced none of them—and many of these people are atheists.

This is not surprising. After all, experiences of self-transcendence are generally only sought and interpreted in a religious or “spiritual” context—and these are precisely the phenomena that tend to increase a person’s faith. How many Christians who have felt self-transcending love for their neighbors in church, or body-dissolving bliss in prayer, decide to ditch Christianity? Not many, I would guess. How many people who never have experiences of this kind (no matter how hard they try) become atheists? I don’t know, but there is no question that these states of mind act as a kind of filter: they get counted in support of ancient dogma by the faithful; and their absence seems to give my fellow atheists yet another reason to doubt religion.

Reading the comments on Jerry’s blog exposes the problem in full. There are several people there who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about—and they take this to mean that I am not making sense. Of course, religious people often present the opposite problem: they tend to think they know exactly what I’m talking about, in so far as it can seem to support one religious doctrine or another. Both these orientations present impressive obstacles to understanding.

2. There is a connection between feeling transcendently good and being good. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, of course. And there are surely pathological forms of ecstasy. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before detonating themselves in a crowd. But there are forms of mental pleasure that seem intrinsically ethical. In fact, there are states of mind for which phrases like “boundless love and compassion” do not seem overblown. Of course, it is possible for a person not to know that this is a potential of the human mind, or to imagine that such experiences must be signs of psychopathology. Again, people who think this way seem to gravitate toward atheism. And it is decidedly inconvenient for the forces of Reason that if a person wakes up tomorrow feeling “boundless love and compassion” the only people likely to acknowledge the legitimacy of his experience will be representatives of one or another religion (or New Age cult).

3. Certain patterns of thought and attention prevent us from accessing deeper (and wiser) states of well-being. Transcendent experiences, in so far as they are usually temporary, are often surrounded by a penumbra of other states and insights. Just as one can glimpse deeper strata of well-being, and briefly see the world by their logic, one can notice the impediments to feeling this way in each subsequent moment. There is no question that all of these mental states have neurophysiological correlates—but the neurophysiology often has subjective correlates. Understanding the first-person side of the equation is essential for understanding the phenomenon. Everything worth knowing about the human mind, good and bad, is taking place inside the brain. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to know about the qualitative character of these events. Yes, qualitative character can be misleading, and certain ways of talking about it can manufacture fresh misunderstandings about the mind. But this doesn’t mean that we can stop talking about the nature of conscious experience. At one level, there is nothing else to talk about.

4. Certain “spiritual” experiences can help us understand science. There are insights that one can have through meditation (that is, very close observation of first-person data) that line up rather well with what we know must be true at the level of the brain. I’ll mention just two, which I have written about before and will return to in subsequent posts: (1) the ego/self is a construct and a cognitive illusion; (2) there is no such thing as free will. There is simply no question that these statements are well grounded scientifically (in fact, it is very difficult to even imagine a physical account of the human mind that would suggest their falsity at this point). So, here are two facts which science gives us good reason to believe, and which I believe we can know through introspection, but which seem quite paradoxical and troubling to most people.

As for the “various psychoactive substances” Jerry mentions, I’ll address the risks and rewards of these in my next post.

At this point, I should probably make it explicitly clear that my admiration for Sam Harris isn't due to his vocal support of atheism nor to his vocal criticism of religion; but because of his scientific approach to contemplative issues. I think he finds a good balance between his atheistic/materialistic worldview and the fact that people have and can benefit from these kinds of spiritual experiences, something that's definitely missing from other 'New Atheist' writers such as Richard Dawkins.

philosophizing at 6am

Walking home this morning, I found myself reluctantly agreeing with Ivan Karamazov (from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov) that it's more difficult to love another human being face-to-face than in the abstract: that our immediate perceptions and prejudices make any kind of truly 'Christlike' love difficult, if not impossible; whereas it's easier to idealize humanity and love them from a distance, in the abstract, because people can be so annoying, brutish, cruel, stupid, ugly, etc. And any expression of this so-called Christlike love is more likely just a type of 'self-laceration' we inflict upon ourselves as a form of charity imposed by duty as penance. (If so, penance for what?) This then reminded me of something I recently read about the dilemma faced by the Freudian socialists who wondered (and perhaps still do) whether the aggressive instinct, which Freud thought rooted in/part of the death drive or Thanatos, was part of our nature. Eros, love, libido, or whatever you want to call it, was seen by Freud as a constructive and binding force (an idealized form being Ivan's conception of Christlike love); and building on this innate drive, a socialist society (or, in an idealized form, the kingdom of God on earth) can, at least theoretically, arise. But throw the death drive into the mix, with its aggressive and self-destructive tendencies, and now you have a contradictory force that opposes and even undermines this constructive and binding force (which is like the torturous cruelty that Ivan uses to question the reality of truly Christlike love). A Hegelian or Marxist might see these two conflicting forces in the context of a dialectical relationship, which can be seen as a mechanism for change and progression in both the individual as well as society (and even a socialist society would have contradictions that'd be resolved), neither giving either force an absolute existence nor denying them completely; but Ivan seems to take the existence of the latter to refute the possibility of the former. Of course, since he's dealing with Christlike love and not Freud's libido, it's easily to see why he'd do this since it's the love of an immortal God, which is something that lies far beyond the range of his Euclidean (i.e., earthly) mind, he's juxtaposing to the material reality (and suffering) he's experiencing. From one point of view, this isn't unlike a literary/psychoanalytic version of the theoretical conflict between utopian and scientific socialism being played out in the form of an abstract, internal dialogue. Then again, I'm not sure any of this makes any sense since I've been awake for 24 hrs and I don't know a damn thing about Freudian psychoanalysis.

yeah, we're probably fucked...

Sigh, yet another doom-and-gloom scenario linked to climate change and our collective impact on the environment, this time courtesy of the BBC in the form of an article, "World's oceans in 'shocking' decline." The gist of it is, a 'panel of expert scientists' have concluded that if we don't change our behaviour right now, our oceans are basically fucked.

Personally, I agree that we need to change our behaviour, particularly the ways we produce our means of subsistence, but I doubt that we're going to in time to prevent our actions from doing even more irreparable harm to the planet. Capitalism has become the dominate economic system worldwide, and with it, rampant consumerism, depletion of natural resources and industrial pollution on a global scale. The market itself is designed to give people what they want, regardless of the consequences, and it's unsustainable.

Sure, historically speaking, capitalism and the technological advancements it's fostered have arguably provided a greater standard of living for a large portion of the population in what amounts to the blink of an eye; but the system is amoral (if not immoral), and it's basically turned us into a bunch of greedy parasites intent on killing our host. Barring a radical shift in human consciousness and/or a socio-political revolution on an epic scale, I'm pretty sure we are fucked.