Under the Spell of Words

On The Daodejing — Dualism and Nondualism

Originally I was going to go ahead and talk about one of the second chapter’s themes, but the more I tried to write, the more I realized that there was another theme from the first chapter that I still needed to address.

After saying a bit about the Dao and about the limitations of language in trying to convey its truth, Laozi goes on to briefly describe two different perspectives on the world. From the Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation:

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name

These two perspectives of which he speaks can be called nondualism and dualism, respectively. Much has been said about them elsewhere, but here I will attempt to give a brief description of how I understand them, with the caveat that I haven’t as yet experienced a nondualistic perspective so I can only approach it on a purely intellectual level.

Beginning with dualism, which is the perspective most familiar to us, we might say that it’s a perspective from which the world is seen as being composed of various different objects and phenomena. There are trees and mountains; houses and cities; me and you; hot and cold; light and dark; right and wrong.

In nondualism, by contrast, one sees the world as a totality. “Trees” and “mountains” and all those other things are not real to the totality; they are categories invented by the human mind to help it make sense of the inchoate world of raw perception by artificially dividing it into distinct phenomena it can then then understand separately.

Of course any description of nondualism inevitably falls short of conveying a true nondualistic perspective because language is an inherently dualistic thing. Still, I believe this is an adequate starting point for anyone who wishes to investigate the matter further.

Now, some people, after being introduced to nondualism, understand it as invalidating the dualistic perspective by revealing it to be a set of illusions produced by the human mind. After all, if nondualism shows us the world as it really is, without any extraneous concepts added to it, then the dualistic world of concepts must represent an inferior perspective which is best rejected.

But Laozi does not promote this sort of thinking, and if he grants primacy to the nondualistic perspective, he still grants the validity of the dualistic one. Indeed, this idea of an opposition between dualism and nondualism is itself a form of dualistic thinking, even if you’re ostensibly siding with nondualism over dualism. In nondualism there is nothing distinct from the totality, not even dualism, as dualism is itself one of the ways in which the totality expresses itself.

Yes, dualism can go wrong and give rise to many misunderstandings, some of which will be addressed in future posts, but it does still grasp some part of the truth. It cannot give us the whole truth by itself, and for that we must reach beyond it, but neither can we have the whole truth if we outright reject dualism. It is only by embracing dualism and nondualism as complementary perspectives that you can begin to see what Laozi calls “The gate to all mystery.”

On The Daodejing — The Dao

A couple years ago I started a series of posts on the Daodejing in which I attempted to say anything I could think of regarding every one of its 81 passages. This turned out to be a bad approach for me, and I soon started skipping chapters before dropping the project not even halfway through the book.

Now I return to the classic with a new approach in mind. This time I mean to explore one theme at a time, saying as much as I can about each before moving on to the next one, avoiding any topic I feel unqualified to speak of.

For this first post, it’s only natural to begin with the very first theme spoken of in the book, and indeed the very first thing mentioned in its pages: the Dao itself.

It is very difficult to say much of anything about the Dao, to the point where the first thing Laozi says about it is precisely that language can never fully convey an understanding of the Dao; anything we say of it will inevitably fall short of the real thing. That doesn’t mean that we can’t say anything about it—if it did, Laozi wouldn’t have written a whole book about the Dao—but it does mean that you will never understand the Dao simply by knowing what others have said of it.

So then, what can be said bout the Dao? What is the Dao?

Well, for starters, “Dao” is usually translated to English as “Way”; to speak of the Dao is to speak of the Way. To be a more specific, we might speak of the Way Things Are, though not in the sense of a static state of affairs. The Way Things Behave, or the Way Things Happen, might be better descriptions, though all of these fall short by implying a distinction between the Way, the things, and their being, behaving, or happening; the Dao makes no such distinctions.

To use more western terms, the Dao might be understood as the “ground of being”—as that which allows things to exist—but is, at the same time, identical with those existing things. It might be understood as the “laws of nature” which determine how things act, as long as it’s not taken as being distinct from the things and their acting. It might also be understood as existence as the thing-in-itself rather than existence as the subject of perception or conceptualization, but only if we remember that perception and conceptualization are themselves a part of this existence.

All of these descriptions approach the Dao in some way, but all fall short of communicating the reality of the Dao because, at the end of the day, what they’re describing is not “the Dao”, but rather “a Dao”. They describe the abstract idea of what it means for something to be a Dao, but not the Dao that actually exists.

It’s like the difference between speaking of “a cat” versus “the [specific] cat”. I could tell you what a cat looks like, but this description would necessarily be vague and nonspecific as it’s supposed to be applicable to all cats, and so it wouldn’t be an accurate description of any actually existent cat.

“Alright,” you might say. “So then why not just talk about The Dao instead of A Dao?”

But consider: even if I tried to describe a specific cat to you, it would still fall short of actually seeing the cat for yourself and understanding what it looks like firsthand. The same holds true for trying to describe the Dao.

It’s like if I spoke to you about “the contents of this box” without you knowing what those contents are. You know that I’m talking about whatever is in the box, but you don’t know what the thing I’m talking about actually is. For all you know it could be a bowling ball, or a bag of beans, or another box. It’s only after seeing seen what’s in the box that you might begin to connect the things I’m saying to an actual object and really understand my words.

Want to know the real Dao? Then open the box and look inside. Or, in this case, open your eyes and look around. After all, the Dao embraces all of existence, and wherever you look, there it is.

But if the Dao embraces all existence, then what does Laozi mean when he speaks about things being against the Dao? How can some things be with the Dao and others go against it? Are they not all the Dao?

Here we need to draw a distinction between an action arising from the Dao and an action being in accordance with the Dao. All actions arise from the Dao because the Dao embraces everything that is. But, for an action to accord with the Dao, that action must also embrace everything, or at least everything that is relevant to the action.

For animals, whose actions are mostly mediated by instinct and perception, this comes naturally, and their actions tend to have a high degree of accordance with the Dao. Not so for us humans. More than all other animals (so far as we know), we are equipped with a well-developed faculty of cognition, by which we may come to understand the world—and, conversely, to misunderstand it. Through our cognition we can form an inner picture of how we believe the world to be, and this inner map of the world can become as much a guide for our actions as our perceptions and our instincts; it can even overtake and displace them as the dominant guide to our actions.

Where this map matches the terrain, our actions will be in accord with the world. Where it is inaccurate, or incomplete, our actions there will fall into conflict with the world. This is what it means to not accord with the Dao.

If you have a full understanding of some aspect of the world, then your actions in regards to that aspect will be in accordance with that aspect of the Dao. If you understand everything to do with cutting meat, you will accord with the Dao of the butcher. If you understand all there is to know about hunting, you accord with the Dao of the hunter.

But according with the Dao in these contexts doesn’t mean you accord with the Dao in a more general sense; for that you need to have an understanding of existence itself. Not in the sense of knowing everything down to the most trivial detail, mind you, but more in the sense of understanding those principles which can be seen operating in just about every area of life. An understanding of these broad principles represents an understanding of the very art of living. Cultivate such an understanding and your actions will effortlessly follow the currents of life.

Such is the way of the Daoist sage.

Issues in Extrapolating a Physicalist Conquest of Consciousness from Physicalism’s defeat of Vitalism

In online discussions on the hard problem of consciousness, I have on many occasions seen people object to the alleged intractability of the hard problem by drawing a comparison with vitalism.

They point out that vitalism, much like the hard problem, posed a challenge to physicalism by arguing that physicalism was incapable of fully explaining certain phenomena—the life processes in the case of vitalism, and consciousness in the case of the hard problem. However, physicalist accounts of the life processes eventually managed to meet the challenge posed by vitalism so well that the theory has since been abandoned. Extrapolating from this, they argue that it’s reasonable to assume that there will eventually be a physicalist account of consciousness which meets the challenge posed by the hard problem, or at least, that it’s unreasonable to assume that no such account could ever be formulated.

Now, while I grant that vitalism and the hard problem have this point in common, there are salient differences between them which make this comparison far less meaningful than is being presumed. To see them, let’s take a closer look at the exact problem each position presents to physicalim.

Vitalism runs counter to physicalism in that it proposes the existence of an immaterial force (a “life force”) which is present in living beings but not in inanimate matter. Proponents of the theory argued that the mere mindless matter was not capable of giving rise to the complex biochemical phenomena observed in living beings, hence the need for an immaterial guiding force.

But though the life force as posited was immaterial, the phenomena which it pretended to explain were distinctly material. As such, the challenge it posed to physicalism could be, and was, met by elaborating better physicalist explanations of those phenomena, such that the apparent need for an immaterial guiding agent disappeared.

This differs completely from the hard problem of consciousness. Unlike the life force, consciousness is not being posited as an explanation for this or that physical phenomenon; rather, the existence of consciousness us taken as a fact which we know to be true because we have conscious experiences.

The life force was proposed as a potential way to fill in an explanatory gap between what was then known about physics and the complex phenomena observed to occur in living beings. It was discarded when a better way to fill the gap was found.

This is not so for consciousness. The hard problem is not about positing consciousness to fill an explanatory gap; it is about pointing out a contradiction between physicalism, which claims that everything is physical, and the fact of the existence of consciousness, which by all appearances is not a physical thing.

Put another way, Vitalism says, “Physicalism is insufficient to explain this, therefore an immaterial agent must be posited,” whereas the hard problem says “An immaterial thing exists, and physicalism cannot explain that.”

To resolve the hard problem in a way which is satisfactory for physicalists, it would have to be shown that consciousness is actually a fully physical phenomenon. To compare this to vitalism, this would be like accepting that the life force exists but arguing that it is actually a purely physical force, which is not the approach that was used to resolve the problem posed by vitalism.

In summary, the problem posed against physicalism by vitalism is wholly distinct from the hard problem of consciousness, and the approaches necessary to find a solution to each problem are equally distinct form each other; thus, the fact that the problem of vitalism was eventually resolved in favor of physicalism does not tell us anything about whether or not the hard problem of consciousness will eventually be similarly resolved.

Knowledge in Theory and Practice

As human beings, we all hold beliefs about which we feel so certain as to call them “knowledge” (in the sense of “knowledge-that”). Despite our confidence in these beliefs, in some future we might encounter information showing that they’re mistaken. We would then reevaluate these beliefs and say that they were never really knowledge; but even though they were not knowledge, we could still have been justified in calling them knowledge at the time.

Consider this case: Mary says that she knows that Valentine’s Day will be a on Wednesday because that’s what she saw in the calendar. Unbeknownst to Mary, the calendar she consulted was one for the previous year; this year’s Valentine’s Day won’t fall on a Wednesday. Later on, Mary realizes her mistake and corrects her beliefs. She now looks back on her prior belief and concludes that it didn’t really qualify as knowledge.

In the case above, Mary thought she knew that Valentine’s Day will be on Wednesday because she thought that she had all the relevant information; it wasn’t until later that she realized this wasn’t the case.

When Mary first called her belief “knowledge”, the label was expressing a strong sense of certainty regarding the belief in question. When she later judged that it had never been real knowledge, she was using “knowledge” to mean a belief that meets certain objective criteria, such as being true.

To differentiate between the two, we might call the former “knowledge-in-practice” and the latter “knowledge-in-theory”.

Knowledge-in-theory is about knowledge as an ideal. A belief counts a knowledge-in-theory when it meets a set of objective criteria, such that if we had knew all of the relevant information regarding that belief, we would be able to judge for certain whether or not the it qualifies as knowledge. By and large, this sort of definitive judgement is only possible in hypothetical cases, such as the one above, where by simply reading the case we can take the information it provides as objectively and infallibly true as far as that case is concerned. In the above case, for instance, when we are told that Mary checked the wrong calendar, we are to take this as an established fact.

Outside of such cases, we are constantly faced with situations in which we can never be sure that all our information is correct or that we have all the necessary information to judge whether or not a belief is true or justified, like how Mary didn’t know that she was consulting the wrong calendar. This is where knowledge-in-practice comes in. When dealing with matters about which we can’t (yet) be absolutely certain, we can still treat beliefs about them as knowledge when we feel they carry a high degree of certainty, such that it seems they are very likely to be true.

The collective means by which a person decided when their beliefs can be considered knowledge-in-practice are what we might call our “sense of knowledge”. Ideally, this sense of knowledge aims at making our knowledge-in-practice as close as possible to knowledge-in-theory. This means that what we take as true should be true, and what is true we should take as true. Put another way, our sense of knowledge should not lead us to believe something which is false, nor to fail to believe something which is true (assuming that we have enough information to justify the belief in question).

Of course, we don’t begin our lives with a sense of knowledge already capable of this. Rather, our sense of knowledge must be refined over time, becoming ever more reliable. This is done in large part through trial and error.

As we go through our lives, we use various methods to form beliefs. Later on, we might encounter new evidence with disproves or supports any given belief. If a method consistently gives us beliefs for which we find more support later on, we come to regard that method as a reliable source of true beliefs. Conversely, if we find that a method often gives us false beliefs, we come to regard that method as a poor source of true beliefs, and either stop making use of it, or make corrections to make it more reliable. In the above case, for instance, we might assume that when Mary consults a calendar in the future, she will make sure that it corresponds to the correct year. In this manner our sense of knowledge approaches, though never quite achieves, the ideal of perfect knowledge.

On Desire; Its Motivations and Perversions

It moves us. Motivates us. Pulls us along as if on strings. It has been called the cause of all suffering, and many people have fallen into misfortune for following its siren song. Seeing the problems desire can cause, some people call for its elimination. So long as we live, however, desire is inescapable, and so the solution to the problems it causes can’t be to eradicate desire. We must instead come to understand our desires and learn to approach them in a healthy manner. It is this goal to which I hope to contribute here.

(To be clear, I’ll be using “desire” here in the broader sense of the word, to refer to all feelings of wanting something, however mild they may be.)

To start with, I would like to pose a question: does there exist any desire that is inherently healthy?

Among the first potential candidates for such desires are those for the basic necessities, such as food and water. Are these inherently healthy?

No. Food and water are necessary, but too much of either can make us sick or even kill us.

It occurs to me, however, that most of us do not desire food for its own sake; we desire food for a variety of reasons, chief among them because we are hungry. We might then say that the desire for food is motivated by the desire to satiate our hunger. Is this desire healthier than the desire for food? I would say yes; if we only desire to eat until we stop being hungry then we are not likely to overeat. However, it can still be unhealthy if it leads to us eating things that are filling but bad for us, or if our sense of hunger tells us to eat more or less than what we actually need.

Now, we have just done something very interesting here; something that warrants closer examination.

We have just taken one desire—the desire for food—and, looking for the thing that motivates it, we found another desire—the desire to satiate our hunger.

Of these two desires, the latter desire is the cause of the former; that is, we desire food because we need it to fulfill our desire to satiate our hunger. This latter desire points towards an ideal or goal, whereas the former points to the relatively concrete means by which that goal is to be reached. Also, the latter desire appears to be healthier than the former desire.

If it’s possible to apply this same process to other desires, then, assuming the same pattern holds, it should be possible to obtain progressively healthier desires with it, and maybe even an inherently healthy one. To see if this works, let’s try applying it to the desire to satiate our hunger.

What do we accomplish by fulfilling this desire? We seek to address our hunger because hunger is our body’s way of telling us that it needs more food to keep functioning properly. The desire to satiate our hunger, then, is caused by the desire for physical health.

Is the desire for physical health healthier than the desire to satiate our hunger?

Yes. Unlike the desire to satisfy our hunger, the desire for physical health cannot lead to us eating things that are filling but unhealthy, nor would a malfunctioning sense of hunger lead to us overeating or undereating because we would not be guided solely by our hunger, but rather by our goal of being healthy.

Can this desire still be unhealthy?

Yes. We can value physical health so much that it leads to us neglecting our health in other areas, like our emotional or psychological health. Still, it does seem that we are approaching an inherently healthy desire.

Now, why do we desire physical health? What do we hope to achieve by it? It seems to me that we desire physical health because it contributes to our overall health—to the health of our whole being as opposed to just, say, physical or emotional health. We desire physical health, then, because we desire health in this wider sense.

(Incidentally, the desire for health might also be called the desire for wholeness, the two words being derived from the same word root and having similar meanings. For that matter, the Latin word for health, “salus”, as well as its descendants in the Romance languages, also derives from a root which means “whole”.)

Can the desire for health or wholeness still be unhealthy? By definition, no. Anything that is unhealthy runs counter to the desire for health, and so cannot result from it.

Might there be a desire for something else informing the desire for health? Perhaps, but as we have already found what we were looking for, there is no need to go looking any further back at the moment.

Now let us take other desires and see if we can get a “chain of desires” from them similar to the we just derived from the desire for food.

Let’s consider the desire for housing.

We want housing because it brings us safety and a comfort. We want safety for the sake of physical health, and comfort for the sake of emotional health, and we want both of them for the sake of our general health.

How about money?

We want money because it provides us security and allows us to access many of the products and services we need to live, among them food and housing—which, as described above, we desire for the sake of our health.

What about something less necessary—say, the various forms of art or entertainment, such as books, movies, music, or games?

Well, we might want them because they bring us enjoyment, help us relax, teach us things, or even help us see the world in a new light. In general, these contribute to our emotional and psychological health.

Now, granted, in identifying the motivation for the desires mentioned above I have opted in each case for one of the most benign options. In the case of money, for instance, it’s true that some people want it because it allows them to afford the essentials, but there are also those who want it because it gives them power over others. But what is the desire for power motivated by? Is it not often motivated by a desire for security? After all, so long as I have power over someone, that person no longer represents a threat to me—in theory, at least.

I could give more examples, but I don’t think that’s necessary by this point. Let us suppose for now that the patterns explored above apply to most, if not all, of our desires, and recap we can take away from this.

In the first place, we can say there exist chains of desire, which lead from more ideal desires (desires that point towards a goal) on one end, to more concrete desires (desires that point to things that are needed to achieve the goal in question) on the other end.

In the second place, at the ideal end of many, if not all, chains of desires, there lies the desire for health or wholeness, this being the ultimate goal to which these desires aim.

The closer the other desires in the chain are to this desire for health, the less likely it is for the desire in question to turn unhealthy. Conversely, the more concrete a desire is, the more possibilities there are for it to turn unhealthy.

If, however, all desires are informed by the desire for health, this raises the question of how unhealthy desires come to be.

There are two ways this can happen. The first occurs when a more ideal desire begets a more concrete desire that does not contribute to the goal of the informing desire. Suppose, for instance, that you want to eat healthy, and so you develop a desire for a certain food which people say is healthy. In reality the food is unhealthy, but you continue eating it because you don’t know that.

This type of unhealthy desire is due to misinformation. In this case the misinformation originates in the erroneous claims of others, but it can also come from our own faulty reasoning or from a fundamental malfunction of some sensory organ or mental process. To address this sort of unhealthy desires, one must come to realize that they are not as healthy as one believes.

The second way in which a desire can turn unhealthy is when a more concrete desire becomes more and more independent of its informing desires—when we begin to desire a thing for its own sake more than for any other reason. For instance, we might desire money for the sake of having money rather than because it gives us security or power, or we might desire to eat simply for the sake of eating, not because we need the food or even because we like its taste.

In its advanced stages, we call this sort of perverted desire an addiction. The desire in question might begin as a healthy one, but as it develops into an addiction it becomes unrooted from the desire for health, taking on a parasitic existence; it becomes as something external to the individual in question, supporting itself by leeching off of them.

To correct this sort of unhealthy desire, the addict must reconnect with his deeper informing desires. He must realize that he has to choose between his addiction and his health, then willingly choose his own health. Where before his acts were guided by his addiction, he must now turn towards the desire for health and allow it to be his guide.

Without this choice and dedication, recovery will not occur. Knowledge of the issue and of how to fix it is important, but unless acted upon, that knowledge is worthless. Above all else, one must earnestly work to get better; lacking that, all else is futile.

Daoism as Going with the Flow

When first looking into Daoism, it is common for people to understand the philosophy as saying that one should go with the flow, or just do whatever one feels like doing. While these descriptions aren’t entirely wrong, they’re vague and ambiguous, and not every sense in which they can be taken actually agrees with what Daoism teaches.

Consider a sailboat. The captain of the boat might choose to “go with the flow” by refusing to use the rudder or sail, simply allowing the boat to be pushed around by the air and ocean currents. This might lead to the boat being taken to some pleasant beach, or it might lead to the boat being dashed against some rocks and sinking into the depths, or it might simply lead to the boat drifting endlessly at sea until the captain dies of thirst or starvation.

On the opposite extreme, the captain might choose a destination and doggedly pursue it without taking the flow of the currents into account. If the currents favor his course, he’ll get there quickly and with little effort. If they don’t—if he tries to go against the currents—he’ll end up wasting a great deal of time and effort trying to pursue his goal.

A third approach, between the two extremes, is for the captain to become acquainted with the currents, learn what courses they will or will not permit him to take, chart out a destination, then harness the currents to get there with the least among of effort.

To restate this without the metaphor, we might say that what Daoism teaches is that we ought to seek an understanding of how the world works, allowing this understanding its due place in helping us to determine our aims, and making skillful use of it to get us there without unnecessary effort.

Ruminations on Zero (and Infinity)

Zero is a strange beast. It is the only number that is neither positive nor negative, it is arguably neither real nor imaginary (or maybe both), and it’s the only number that in modern mathematics no number can be divided by.

The way that 0 sometimes behaves like any other number and sometimes doesn’t reminds me of words like “nowhere”, “never” and “nothing”. “Nothing” is a word that doesn’t refer to any thing, and yet it can often be coherently used in places where you would normally expect a word that does refer to some thing; for instance, a question like “What are you doing?” seems to demand an action as an answer, yet it can also be answered by the word “nothing,” which doesn’t refer to any action at all.

Regarding division by 0, it is often said (though never by actual mathematicians) that 1/0=infinity. This is based on the observation that in the function 1/x=y, as x approaches 0, y approaches infinity (assuming x approaches 0 from the positive side. If it approaches 0 from the negative side, y approaches -infinity). For a number of reasons, however, 1/0=infinity is rejected by serious mathematicians, as it simply doesn’t work in the system of mathematics that’s been built up over millennia.

Whether or not it’s valid, however, it obviously seems intuitively true to a lot of people, as does the inverse equation, 1/infinity=0. I also note that infinity is another concept that can sometimes be used like a number and sometimes can’t, and it’s very interesting to see these two concepts which parallel each other in this way bound together by such a simple equation.

Now, the problem with this equation surfaces when you realize that if this equation were valid then 0*infinity=1 would also be valid, as would 0*infinity=2, 3, or any other number, and this is one of the main reasons why these aren’t considered valid equations by mathematicians.

0 and infinity could be seen as being equivalent to nothing and everything, respectively, while all other numbers might be thought of as being different somethings. Something I find interesting about this is that the idea all existing somethings being a product of nothing and everything is reminiscent of some mystical texts I’ve read, such as in Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which states that the absolute, unmanifest reality from which all concrete, manifest things spring can be described as either absolute being and yet nonbeing, or absolute consciousness and yet unconsciousness.

On Epiphenomenalism

Physicalist philosophers, recognizing that the existence of consciousness poses a threat to their worldview, have been trying recently to come up with theories that can explain the existence of consciousness within a physicalist framework, which usually involves turning consciousness into a completely pointless addition to the universe. They dismiss it as a mere illusion or artefact that has no effect on physical reality and treat it as a pesky little phenomenon good for absolutely nothing except fooling people into believing theories such as idealism, dualism or panpsychism.

One of these theories that attempt to minimize the role of consciousness in the universe is known as epiphenomenalism. This theory proposes that consciousness is caused by physical phenomena as a side effect, but itself has no effect on any physical objects or events.

The problem with this theory is that if consciousness has no causal efficacy then we wouldn’t be writing books, giving lectures, holding discussions and typing out blog posts about consciousness. These are all effects of the existence of consciousness. Even the invention of epiphenomenalism itself is an effect caused by the existence of consciousness.

If consciousness caused no effect, we would have no idea of its existence; thus, if epiphenomenalism were true, there would have been no reason to come up with epiphenomenalism in the first place.

My Meditation Story

Over the past couple years, I’ve been practicing meditation on and off and I wanted to write down some of my journey over that time.

I started out trying to learn how to meditate for the same of learning how to lucid dream through the WILD method (which I never did achieve), though I soon started doing it for its own sake. I spent a few months at it, gradually getting better, until I wan eventually able to lie down without moving or fidgeting for an hour at a time.

Then I started hitting a nasty wall. Every time I would lie down to meditate, I would start getting these uncomfortable sensations in my head, like there was this tension in my skull that had me fidgeting around and unconsciously clenching my jaw. I tried a few different methods to get rid of them but none of them were working, so I figured maybe I had overdone it on the meditation and should take a short break from it.

Eventually, the weird sensations left me and I started meditating again. I didn’t have as easy a time at concentrating and staying still as I had before the weird sensations started, but I was still doing it and getting a bit better at it. However, I found that if I ever tried to enter a lucid dream, I would get the same feeling of pressure I had first gotten months ago.

Gradually, these sensations started becoming more common, even outside of meditation, so I would intermittently leave meditation aside for a few weeks, try it out again, then leave it aside, rinse and repeat. I realized if I was going to get anywhere in my meditation practice, I was going to have to address this issue somehow.

I tried several methods to get rid of it; using certain breathing patterns, trying to ground my energy, concentrating really hard on my object of meditation, among others. Some of them appeared to work at first, and the sensations lessened at least a little bit when I tried applying them, but after a couple days they stopped working and I’d have to drop meditation for a few days again while the sensations disappeared. During this time, there were a few moments when I completely unintentionally entered a state of mind where I was able to meditate better than I had for the past several months, but whenever I tried to replicate the process that led me to those mental states, I would just end up getting the head tensions again.

During all this time, I was still slowly but surely learning more about my mind, and though I didn’t know how exactly I could get rid of the odd sensations I got while meditating, I was sure by now that it involved the relaxation of some mental function which I had managed to feel out a few times while meditating.

Anyways, a few months back I bought the book Become What You Are by Alan Watts, which I found offered some insight into my problems with meditation. The explanation I found was basically that my ego was trying too hard to control the process of meditation rather than letting it unfold naturally.

So now I had a major clue as to what was wrong and what I should be doing, but I didn’t know how to get from point A to point B–that would involve yet more months of on-and-off meditation to figure out what my ego felt like and what it felt like to let a process unfold without the ego.

The ego I would eventually learn to identify as a little “clinging” mental function–one which I recognized as that same mental function which prevented me from falling asleep when I was trying to meditate to fall asleep.

The egoless process, on the other hand, I primarily identified through the actions of breathing, walking, and pretty much everything else that the body (except the head, which was and still is strongly identified with my ego in my mind) does without me having to consciously tell it what to do.

While I was figuring these things out, the “symptoms” of my issues with meditation started getting a bit worse. I would experience slight fasciculations affecting a few patches of muscles in places like my right upper eyelid, my lower lip, my lower neck, parts of my legs, and parts of my abdomen. These would appear when I was trying really hard to figure out how to get my ego under control, so then I would try to distract myself with mindless entertainment so they would stop.

Recently, I made a breakthrough that has raised my baseline mental state to something much more amenable to attempting meditation. I’m still not familiar enough with what it is that I do exactly to be able to put it into words, but my ego has become much less tense, more willing to let things happen without insisting it should be a part of the process. I hope in a couple more months I’ll have passed this roadblock for good.

Unmagical Magic

Most people believe that magic–not in the sense of prestidigitation and illusionism, but in the sense of sorcery–involves such exotic things as immaterial beings, subtle substances, and other planes of existence. However, there are practitioners of magic who assert that invocations, spells, charms and the like all work, but they do so through purely psychological means; they say that they use alternate mental states coupled with objects, symbols, and sense impressions that have specific effects upon the unconscious mind, in order to plant an idea or produce a change in someone’s mind.

If this is true, I think it raises an interesting question, that being whether or not this could be called “magic” even if it is purely psychological. The idea of magic is so deeply associated with the spiritual, immaterial, and unexplainable, that such a mundane mechanism hardly seems deserving of the label. Nonetheless, I would argue that these methods would be deserving of the label “magic”.

Imagine a group of assassins–the Rellik–who kill people though means that the rest of society can’t identify. In reality they simply use special poisons, but people begin to come up with all sorts of ways in which the assassins might kill their victims, ascribing to them all sorts of strange abilities such as the ability to kill you through your shadow. Over time, these special techniques become so strongly associated with the name “Rellik” that it seems the name must refer to a group that makes use of those techniques, so that as the group recruits new members it has to go to great lengths to make them forget all their mistaken ideas about killing people through their shadows or whatever other nonsense they associate with the organization.

In the same way, if the psychological theory of magic is true, then magic began as a set of methods and procedures that had certain effects on people. Since people didn’t know how these things worked, they began thinking that they made use of exotic, immaterial substances and beings. Over time, these associations became so strong that people began to think “magic” refers to practices that make use of immaterial forces and beings, so that even if the methods were shown to work, as long as they didn’t work though exotic means most people would take it as meaning that magic doesn’t exist.

Anyways, though I would be for calling these things “magic” if they did indeed work as advertised by the psychological model of magic, it’s ultimately just a matter of preference. It’s just as valid to label them “magic” as it is to label them “not magic,” it just depends on what your definition of “magic” is.