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Thinking In Pictures
Chapter 11 - Stairway To Heaven - Religion and Belief
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P190 ...To my mind, all methods and denominations of religious ceremony were equally valid, and I still hold this belief today. Different religious faiths all achieve communication with God and contain guiding moral principles. I’ve met many autistic people who share my belief that all religions are valid and valuable. Many also believe in reincarnation, because it seems more logical to them than heaven and hell.
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For many people with autism, religion is an intellectual rather than emotional activity. Music is one exception. Some people feel much more religious when their participation is accompanied with extensive use of music. One autistic design engineer I know said that religious feeling is utterly missing for him, except when he hears Mozart; then he feels an electrifying resonance. I myself am most likely to feel religious in a church when the organist plays beautiful music and the priest chants. Organ music has an effect on me that other music does not have.
This seems to be one part The Birth of Tragidy and one part The Righteous Mind. Music in particular and religion in general connects us with something more profound and brings us together in our group.
P191 Music and rhythm may help open some doors to emotion. Recently I played a tape of Gregorian chants, and the combination of the rhythm and the rising and lowering pitch was soothing and hypnotic. I could get lost in it... I have strong musical associations, and old songs trigger place-specific memories.
I’ve already written about this.
In high school I came to the conclusion that God was an ordering force that was in everything after Mr. Carlock explained the second law of thermodynamics, the law of physics that states that the universe will gradually lose order and have increasing entropy. Entropy is the increase of disorder in a closed thermodynamic system. I found the idea of the universe becoming more and more disordered profoundly disturbing...
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Stairway to Heaven
P197 This is something Grandin wrote in 1974 after completing her first major project for the Swift facility in Phoenix which she called “The Stairway to Heaven” as it led the cattle to the place where they were slaughtered.
"I believe that a person goes on to someplace else after they die. I do not know where... I watched the cattle die and even killed some of them myself. If a black void exists at the top of the Stairway to Heaven, then a person would have no motivation to be virtuous."
So she’s in Dostoevsky's camp here. Meaning must exist or we would not behave ourselves.
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P198 In the summer of 1978 I swam through the dip vat at the John Wayne Red River feed yard as a stupid publicity stunt. Doing this stunt provided a great boost to my career and got me several speaking engagements. However, coming in contact with the chemical organophosphates had a devastating effect. The feeling of awe that I had when I thought about my beliefs just disappeared. Organophosphates are known to alter levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, and the chemicals also caused me to have vivid and wild dreams. But why they affected my feeling of religious awe is still a mystery to me. It was like taking all the magic away and finding out that the real Wizard of Oz is just a little old man pushing buttons behind a curtain.
This is amazing, her experience of losing her religious feeling due to exposure to chemicals suggests a chemical basis of religious feelings.
Also, she was building her Stairway to Heaven while I was driving taxis. That sounds about right.
This raised great questions in my mind. Were the feelings of being close to God caused by a chemical Wizard of Oz behind the curtain? In my diary I wrote, “To my horrified amazement the chemicals blocked my need for religious feelings.” They made me very sick, but gradually the effects wore off and the feelings returned. However, my belief in an afterlife was shattered. I had seen the wizard behind the curtain. But there is something in me that really wants to believe that the top of the Stairway to Heaven is not a black void.
She needs to read what I blogged about Zen Physics.
P199 The possibility that a void exists after death has motivated me to work hard so I can make a difference -- so that my thoughts and ideas will not die... Ideas are passed on like genes, and I have a great urge to spread my ideas... Maybe immortality is the effect one’s thoughts and actions can have on other people.
... It was quantum physics that finally helped me believe again, as it provided a plausible scientific basis for belief in a soul and the supernatural...
She proceeds to push quantum entanglement where she wants to go.
P204 [She talks again about the kosher slaughter house from before] ...during those few hot days in Alabama, old yearnings would be reawakened. I felt totally at one with the universe as I kept the animals completely calm while the rabbi performed shehita. Operating the equipment there was like being in a Zen meditative state. Time stood still, and I was totally, completely disconnected from reality. Maybe this was nirvana, the final state of being that Zen meditators seek. It was a feeling of total calmness and peace until I snapped back to reality when the plant manager called me to come to his office...
P205 When it was time to leave, I cried as I drove to the airport. The experience had been so strangely hypnotic that I was tempted to turn around and return to the plant... I thought about the similarities between the wonderful trancelike feeling I had had while gently holding the cattle in the chute and the spaced-out feeling I had had as a child when I concentrated on dribbling sand through my fingers at the beach. During both experiences all other sensation was blocked. Maybe the monks who chant and meditate are kind of autistic. I have observed that there is a great similarity between certain chanting and praying rituals and the rocking of an autistic child. I feel there has to be more to this than just getting high on my own endorphins.
She returns to the plant months later,
"When the animal remained completely calm I felt an overwhelming feeling of peacefulness, as if God had touched me. I did not feel bad about what I was doing. A good restraint chute operator has to not just like cattle, but love them. Operating the chute has to be done as an act of total kindness. The more gently I was able to hold the animal with the apparatus, the more peaceful I felt. As the life force left the animal, I had deep religious feelings. For the first time in my life logic had been completely overwhelmed with feelings I did not know I had."
I hate to toss this into such a tender moment, but I’m almost certain I could find a similar quote from a serial killer or sniper or torturer. These feeling are telling us something but I’m still not quite sure what.
She goes on to wax poetic about global slaughter traditions and I don’t disagree with what she writes. But what interests me is that this religious transcendence is part of life not part of the ritual avoidance of life practiced by many religious cults. We’re back to Moksa and Lila and the Hindu goddesses.
Well this ending pushed the book from a "maybe" to a "must blog." It will be shorter, less in depth (I think) but there's too much good stuff... plus our overlap at ASU is just too perfect.
A New Beginning
It had always been my expectation that I would, eventually, blog about The Magic Mountain. I even have notes from my last reading. But at this point I don't think I need to. In time I may change my mind and return to this, but for now I'm going to move on to something new: writing an actual blog in real time. This suddenly appeals to me so I'm going to give it a shot.
If you care to follow me there, HERE's the link. [But not yet, perhaps tomorrow?]
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Zen Physics
Chapter 12 - Now and Zen
p151 Zen is... difficult to talk about. So alien, indeed, is Zen to the analytical Western mind that it is perhaps easier to say what it is not. Zen is not a faith because it doesn’t urge the acceptance of any form of dogma, creed, or object of worship. Nor is it antireligious or atheistic; it simply makes no comment on the matter. Zen is not a philosophy or even, to the Western mind, a form of mysticism. As we normally understand it, mysticism starts with a separation of subject and object and has as its goal the unification or reconciliation of this antithesis. But Zen does not teach absorption, identification, or union of any kind because all these ideas are derived ultimately from a dualistic conception of life. If a label is needed that best approximates to the spirit of Zen then ‘dynamic intuition’ is perhaps as close as we can come.”
p152 ... Living in a world of words and concepts and inherited beliefs, says Zen, we have lost the power to grasp reality directly. Our minds are permeated with notions of cause and effect, subject and object, being and nonbeing, life and death. Inevitably this leads to conflict and a feeling of personal detachment and alienation from the world. Zen’s whole emphasis is on the experience of reality as it is, rather than the solution of problems that, in the end, arise merely from our mistaken beliefs.
Because it eschews the use of the intellect. Zen can appear nihilistic (which it is not) and elusive (which it is). Certainly, it would be hard to conceive of a system that stood in greater contrast with the logical, symbol-based formulations of contemporary science. More than any other product of the Oriental mind, Zen is convinced that no language or symbolic mapping of the world can come close to expressing the ultimate truth...
...before trying to appreciate its final flowering, it is worthwhile digging down to examine Zen’s roots -- roots which are set firmly in Indian soil, in the fertile ground of Mahayana Buddhism.
The Indian mind was, and is, different in character from the Chinese and Japanese. It is expansive, more austerely intellectual, less concerned with practical, everyday affairs, and more inclined to complex exposition and exploration of ideas... the monk-philosopher Nagarjuna... [was] the founder, during the second century A.D., of the Madhayana (“Middle Path”) school [of Mahayana Buddhism]. Nagarjuna wrote two key treatises, Madhyamika Sastra and The Discourse of Twelve Sections, in which he probed the nature of reality... he argued strongly that the basic quality of existence is relational. There is no soul, no thing, no concept independent of its context; all things are devoid of absolute reality and exist only relative to conditions. In Nagarjuna’s view, the universe is a true unity of interpenetrating processes: a continuous, interpenetrating flux.
p153 ...The data for... [the resulting] theoretical studies came from what might be called “subjective empiricism” or, alternatively, “participatory observation” -- that is, a methodical, progressive, introspective inquiry into the domain of direct, nonsensory experience.
Parallels may be discerned, then, between the goals, the rigorous application of technique, and the lively skepticism of Buddhist “researchers” on the one hand and, on the other, modern scientists... But we Westerners are not so inclined to give credence to the results of subjective inquiry -- in fact, we instinctively react to them with downright suspicion. In the West, the emphasis is almost exclusively on objective methods, on the primacy of what is taken to be an independently existing outer world, and on the dualistic logic of Aristotle as later formulated by Descartes and Galileo...
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p154 Among the notable features of Buddhist cosmology is the doctrine of Dharmadhatu -- the Universal Realm or Field of Reality. In this scheme there are no dividing boundaries between things, no separation between subject and object; every entity is seen to interpenetrate every other -- a view strikingly in keeping with the ideas of interconnectedness that have emerged from modern quantum mechanics....
p155 Buddhist belief is also remarkably in sympathy with our modern, macroscopic conceptions of space and time. Eastern philosophy, unlike that of the Greeks, has always maintained that space and time are constructs of the mind. A passage in the Madhyamika Sastra, for example, reads:
{T}he past, the future, physical space, . . . and individuals are nothing but names, forms of thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities.
The French physicist Louis de Broglie, outlining the new view of the universe as revealed by relativity theory, holds out a similar concept:
In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc . . . Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time, which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble constituting space-time exists prior to his knowledge of it.
Both these commentaries point out the essential unreality of the present moment and the passage of time. There is no ‘now,’ no real barrier between the past and the future, and no flow of time outside the observer’s ego-centered awareness. These are concepts relevant only within the context of our personal, I-focused existence. Upon this, both Buddhism and the General Theory of Relativity agree, and both espouse a much grander, four-dimensional scheme of the universe in which all of space and time, in a sense, already exists -- past, present, and future laid out in complete topographical detail for anyone who can command the vantage point from which to see. [I originally was going to end this here and skip to the next section on Buddhism in China; but I notice, the second time through, that this next bit relates to our ongoing examination of individuation and man’s separation from nature -- or semi-divinity, however you choose to look at it.] Einstein himself well understood our personal limitations in coming to grips with the true nature of reality. Indeed, he might have been acting as a spokesman either for mysticism or for physics when he said:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
I wonder if there isn't also a little bit of Kurt Vonnegut's being unstuck in time (from Slaughterhouse-Five), in addition to Zossima's Christian mysticism here.
Einstein grasped what other visionary minds have done before: that a principle aspiration of mankind should be to see beyond ourselves, beyond the parochial self-oriented here and now, to a wider, cosmic panorama. But how to do this? The very reason human thought has progressed as far as it has is by virtue of having access to a sophisticated language. And all of human language, Oriental and Occidental alike, hinges on the use of words, names, labels, and symbols -- the purposeful fragmentation of the whole and the substitution of tokens for the pieces into which we have broken reality. [So now he have, not only the “gifts” of Prometheus and the Serpent to think about but also that semiotic bit at the beginning of Goethe’s Faust where he uses words and then symbols to transcend his ennui or anomie.] Removal of the wall between ourselves and the cosmos at large, dissolution of the subject-object barrier, can only come with the cessation of thought based on language. [Hello, Foucault’s “unthought”] Yet, try as we might, we cannot stop thinking. The very act of attempting to shut out thought involves thought, so that this approach is defeated from the start. If we apply our intellect to block our intellect we only make matters worse -- we simply end up distancing ourselves further from an innocent awareness of how things actually are.
p157 All human beings the world over face this same dilemma. Evolution has made us into inherently self-centered individuals bent on survival. But our conscious experience of selfhood, of our individuality -- which is ultimately the creation of language and rational thought -- can lead to suffering and anxiety and, in particular, a preoccupation with death... in the West, our difficulty is made more acute [than in the East] by the belief in the supremacy of the intellect. Our immediate reaction to any problem is always to try to think or reason our way to a solution: an approach that, being predicated on the notion that the self is separate from the world, can never in itself lead to the experience of selflessness... [I think this passage could have appeared in either of these two books.] ...although we have discerned... [that “all divisions and boundaries imposed by us on the universe are... illusory...”] at an intellectual level, we still feel ourselves to be apart from -- rather than a part of -- the universe as a whole.
...although Buddhism has a rich intellectual base and body of philosophical teachings, it uses these not as an end in itself but as a way of pointing to the greater truth that can only be attained by a suspension of logic and symbolism.
As that branch of Buddhism known as Mahayana (Sanskrit for “Great Vehicle”) spread out of its original homeland into neighboring China, two main developments took place. On the one hand, the translation of the Buddhist sutras, or expository texts, stimulated Chinese thinkers to interpret the Indian teachings in the light of their own philosophies. On the other hand, the more pragmatic Chinese mentality fused abstruse spiritual disciplines -- the meditation techniques -- of Indian Buddhism with Taoism to give birth to the system known as Ch’an. [Footnote: Ch’an is the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word “dhyana,” which signifies the mystical experience in which subjectivity and objectivity merge. Zen is the transliteration into Japanese of Ch’an.] This, in turn, was acquired by the Japanese around 1200 A.D. and reached its final fruition in Zen.
p158 In a sense, what modern physics is to the history of Western thought, Zen is to the development of the Eastern worldview: the ultimate refinement of more than two thousand years of incisive debate, discussion, and critical development... Zen uses language... to point beyond language, beyond concepts to the concrete.
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[I’m skipping the account of the two major schools of Zen in Japan.]
p159 ...The sole purpose of studying Zen is to have Zen experiences -- sudden moments, like flashes of lightning, when the intellect is short circuited and there is no longer a barrier between the experiencer and the reality [satori, like Paloma seeing the flower fall in her silent kitchen]...
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Zen uses language to point beyond language, which is what poets and playwrights and musicians do. But, less obviously, it is also what modern science does if the intuitive leap is taken beyond its abstract formalism. The deep, latent message of quantum mechanics, for instance, codified in the language of mathematics, is that there is a reality beyond our senses which eludes verbal comprehension or logical analysis. And this is best exemplified in the central idea of ‘complementarity’ -- an idea introduced by Niels Bohr to account for the fact that two different conditions or observations could lead to conclusions that were conceptually incompatible. In one experiment, for example, light might behave as if it were made of particles, in another as if it were made of waves. Bohr proposed, however, there is no intrinsic incompatibility between these results because they are functions of different conditions of observation; no experiment could be devised that would demonstrate both aspects of a condition. The wave and particle natures of light and matter are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually inclusive -- necessary, complementary aspects of reality. Bohr gained his inspiration for this concept from Eastern philosophy, in particular from the Taoist concept of the dynamic interplay of opposites, yin and yang. And so, one of the central principles of modern physics is coincident with, and actually derived from, one of the most basic doctrines of the Eastern world-view.
p160 Intuition has ever been the handmaiden of science. And although science presents its theories and conclusions in a “respectable” symbolic form, its greatest advances have always come initially not from the application of reason but from intuitive leaps -- sudden flashes of inspiration very much akin to Zen experiences.
Zen and physics, then, seemingly so different, are not so different after all... the branch of physics that is closest to the bedrock of reality, quantum mechanics, now appears to be as profoundly paradoxical and enigmatic as Zen. Physics even poses riddles that, like koans, make a mockery of our logic: “Does a particle that is not watched exist?”... Physics and Zen, pragmatism and poetry, conceptualization and creativity, meet at such points -- and become one.
But what does this mean for the ordinary man and woman? ... How can we, in our everyday lives, discover our true place in the universe? How can we see beyond the narrow confines of our individual existence to the timeless, deathless, frontierless place that, the sages of both the East and the West now tell us, is the one true reality?
