When You Really Need There To Be A Point To It All.

A while ago I outlined the importance of having two positions on something at the same time. In that spirit I will now write a post that has a completely different position from the two previous posts, about pointlessness, and more pointlessness. The position of this post is that sometimes you just want there to be a point to it all. Sometimes you want to be connected to a grand scheme in which all the trials and tribulations of the world have some deeper meaning that makes it all not as bad as it might seem.

The simplest method would be to have the great point be that everything exists so that we can love one another. If you can manage that point without getting further I suggest doing that and not reading further. However, many of us when wanting there to be a point want not only a point but that point to be the result of a plan, which requires a planner. otherwise it's just like we're making up the point for ourselves, and that wouldn't be much of a great plan, would it? So the grand scheme often needs a grand schemer to be really emotionally satisfying.

Many, in fact most, people have such grand schemes that they use on a regular basis, but these schemes generally have problems with them such as the problem of evil, or being based on a book that is internally contradictory, or that make claims that are false, such as that if you sincerely pray it will be answered, or that those who believe in this scheme are more moral than others. When trying to solve these problems either one must go through some rather convoluted intellectual leaps to avoid thinking about the problems, or one is left with less impressive schemers with limits on their abilities, or failings in their characters.

My grand scheme borrows from Hindu concepts of the highest form of art being a play, from my principle that the best life is a good story, and from the knowledge that everything we conceive of as real is simply a creation within our own minds (that is probably based on some other level of reality, such as the material world.) My grand scheme is that we have a grand schemer of noble attributes, a thinker and a dreamer of the most awesome and amazing kind. This thinker spends their time deep in contemplation of possibilities, and not just any possibilities but in the contemplation of the greatest art that could be possible. This greatest art would be a moving, living thing in which there are the most dastardly villains and the most pure heroes, the most bawdy gypsies, and the most ridiculous prudes. The piece of art would of course be the highest form of art, the play, in which everyone plays a role for the betterment of the story. The scale would be vast, and the scenery jawdropping. Within this story would be billions of smaller stories, and stories about stories, and even self-referential stories that would have the idea of the great schemer and his scheme.

My grand scheme is that reality consists of this idea of this great schemer. Reality is a work of art of the highest order, a grand story put on as a play by all of matter. There is evil because without evil no story is that interesting. People are flawed because flawed characters are more interesting.

Where do we fit in this grand scheme? Well, we are both the performers and the audience in the grandest art of all. Our role is to notice the great piece of art, the story, to really appreciate this reality in the same way as we might appreciate a Van Gogh at The Louvre. Our other role is to play our parts as well as we can, what ever that part might be. And how dull would it be if everyone was a saint, and everyone agreed, and no-one was a bit naughty once in a while? The two roles are in somewhat of a contradiction, but that is one of the facets of art, a certain suspension of disbelief in order to appreciate the art is necessary or it isn't art.

Feel free to use this grand scheme when you need a point, I think it's a doozy.

Follow Up On Pointlessness.

I have had a request for more commentary on pointlessness, how wonderful.

"Can you comment on how pointlessness and "living in the moment" (appreciating those few blades of grass, or the moment when the water sheers off a clean plate) are related?"

Living in the moment is easy to describe but harder to do. Living in the moment simply means that all your attention is on this moment, and devoid of memory or planning. In practice what this means is turning off the "Self-talk" that goes on in almost everyone's mind nearly continually. Self-talk tends to be all about memories, plans for the future, worries about what might happen. There isn't very much self talk about looking at the tree, or feeling the sunshine (although often these can be used to deliberately start living in the moment). One of the issues with this is it is possible to not think, but not really be either. Western culture calls this "zoning out", and it is not thinking without appreciating.

I think the difficult part of this is turning off the "self-talk" rather than turning on the appreciating. As I have said before your consciousness fills the spaces that is left. If there is no talking, planning and so on your consciousness fills with perception. When you are using your whole mind to notice things, you naturally will appreciate them.

Turning off the self-talk requires practice. This is why spiritual practice is called spiritual practice rather than spiritual school, or spiritual learning. I can tell you the method of the zen masters in one or two sentences, but the results take time. Practicing is simply sitting comfortably with your back upright in a stable position that you can maintain, in a quiet place in front of a blank wall. Then with your eyes half-open, in a concentrated manner notice your breathing and nothing else. That's it. do that for fifteen to thirty minutes a day for six months and it will change your brain.

However, the practice of it can be extremely difficult. I have known people say they simply cannot do it. The absolute key is to remember that just like with the breaking of any new habit you will fail, and fail, and fail at first. As soon as you sit quietly your brain will fill with talk, then you will tell yourself you are doing it badly, then you will tell yourself to stop it, and so on. This is completely normal and you should expect it and forgive yourself for it. Just keep going back to your breathe (and don't try to change it, just notice it). If you do it enough it will work, and after a while you may have some astonishingly intense feelings, they don't really matter either.

But to answer the actual question on how pointlessness and living in the moment are related. You cannot live in the moment without pointlessness, and if you get to pointlessness you will automatically be living in the moment. Pointlessness does not mean inaction. The best all-time explanation that I have heard for zen is the feeling that you have when you hit a perfect golf shot. When you hit that perfect shot you aren't trying to hit it, you aren't thinking about what your body should do, you aren't thinking at all. Driving a car is also very good for this, you drive unconsciously, but you do very complicated things, making difficult decisions. When you get really good at pointlessness/living in the moment you can actually watch yourself driving a car.

Another, " Or, another recent pet topic of mine: how our current culture with its value of productivity and thus "multi-tasking" is eroding the individual's ability to focus on a single thing for an extended period."

I'm not sure if this is true. I do absolutely think that our modern culture multi-tasks, is very fast paced, and spends much less time on average on any particular activity in general. I think our patience for something that doesn't fully engage us has dramatically declined. But I'm not sure this directly means that the ability to focus on things for a long time has decreased. I think of all the amazing artists, musicians, scientists, thinkers, engineers who are producing the most amazing things as a result of months, years, decades of the most remarkable focus at the extreme edge of the human brain's capacity.

So, I think the human capacity, the ability is there. In fact I think it is probably there at a level as great as at any time. What I think is happening is that the available stimuli are so much more varied, so much more intense than previously. The amount of choice is so high, and the intensity of the choices are so high, that if something doesn't measure up to that it is dropped so quickly and something more intense is chosen instead. I think the ability to focus on something is still there, kids can play a single video game that is absolutely exhausting to the mind with its intensity for hours and hours, longer than I can, but the ability to focus on things with low levels of stimulation is going down. People choose more stimulation rather than less stimulation most of the time.

I think the consistent choosing of more stimulation rather than less stimulation leads to a problem. For a start, what do you do when there isn't much stimulation, like in wintry lakeside cabin? You get bored. The second problem is that, just like an addict needs more and more of the same drug (except hallucinogens) to get the same high as the body adjusts to the drug, people need more and more stimulation to get the same sensation. For the people who saw the first black and white silent film it was more exciting than for the people who saw the latest CGI generated, 3-D, science fiction film on a giant screen with vibrating seats and a booming quadrophonic sound system.

This is one of the reasons why practicing meditation is so useful. As explained in one of the books I read, you don't really know if your meditation was successful until later. If you did it well the difference between the quiet of meditation, the reduction in self-talk, gets you a baseline to which everything else compares. When comparing a stimulation of 10 to 8 it's not that exciting, when comparing 10 to 0 it is really amazing. Meditation also helps to train you to notice things, making non-obvious things more obvious.

So, this multi-tasking, constant stimulation effect is real. While writing this I had the tv on in the background (I just turned it off because I realized the irony) and really didn't notice it except to fill in any pauses. But the pauses inform the activity. I think the ability is still there for people to really focus, but this focus only comes when people really, really love what they are doing or when they deliberately decide to learn the skill. If you have ever seen teenagers skateboarding in the summer I think you would believe the focus is there. Endless failures, often painful, but they just go back to it over, and over, and over again for hour upon hour. Why? because they love it.

The most important thing is not to worry about any of this. The greatest failure you could have would be to worry yourself to being stressed over whether you are calm and serene enough.

If you don't cut the stress out of your life right now, it will ruin your kids forever and you'll die of a heart attack and your whole life will have been worthless!

Pointlessness is Great!

I've been meaning to write this post for some time now, several weeks, but haven't quite got around to it before now. I think this is largely because I quite like the living joke involved.
"I was going to write about pointlessness, but somehow I can't bring myself to do so."
That's probably not funny for you, but it is for me. However, I was going to write another post that feeds off something in this post, and so to write that one I finally have to get to it and write this one.

When religious people find out I am an atheist they often comment in some manner that my life must be meaningless, that there isn't a point to it all. This is never a comment that comes from atheists. The usual response is to say that there is meaning and a point to my life, just as much as there is to the life of anybody else. I can then list points, such as love and happiness, intellectual exploration, self-development, compassion, the arts and so on. But I think this is fundamentally a shallow answer, it presupposes the worth of meaning, that having a point is better than not having a point.

Why is this concept, that having a point is better than not having a point, assumed to be true? It seems to me that it must have to do with being productive. Someone with a point will work towards the fulfillment of that point. A hypothetical person with no point at all will die of starvation lying on the ground at some random place. To survive there must be a point, although in that case the point is survival. All the great achievements, and the crappy little ones too, came about because someone had a point. The construction of of Western Civilization is an aggregation of billions of smaller points. When people think that having a point is better than not having a point, they have a point.

So some level of meaning and a point is vital. However, I think in our western culture this has been taken to such lengths that everything at all times must have a point. Many people without a point at any moment become agitated, and fret, feeling bored and anxious at the same time. These people are easily identified, they are the people who fill all their "off" time with chores and duties. They are the people who on the weekend trim the edges of their lawns, and fold dish cloths, and arrange, arrange, arrange. They are the people who create freakishly perfect gardens but can never sit in them and enjoy them because they have to go fix them.

This anxiety, downright guilt, that western people in particular (including myself) feel when not being productive is so pervasive it is taken as a given. Even vacations are provided with a point, either to see all the things that must be seen, to do all the things that must be done, or to recharge the batteries so that you can be more productive later. There is little more annoying to me than to be on vacation with someone, go to see something amazing and have the other person take a photograph and immediately ask, "What's next?" There shouldn't be a next when you haven't looked at the Taj Mahal for more than five minutes, there should be a whole lot more of now. It is one of the things that is simply not seen, something that the very "why?" of it is not asked.

In the east there has been a massive and amazing examination of pointlessness. It has reached such a level of sophistication and power that the largest religions in Asia are organized around people who professionally try to get to the point where they recognize that not only is there not a point, but that there isn't an I to have it. Hinduism and Buddhism are about going through extremely deeply researched methods of finding all the points in your life, dismissing them, and then reaching a point where the you and the it are the same, and the thisness of this is all there is.

Once having reached this point the reported effects are serenity, compassion, peace, and love. That's pretty cool, but one of the fantastic things about the whole thing is that if you are going through the process to get the serenity, that the point of it is serenity, then you are missing the point. It's about the pointlessness. This oxymoron is the crux of the matter in Zen Buddhism, where realization is through experience rather than intellect. Nonsense questions of seemingly great wisdom called koans are used to essentially break down the students intellect. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is the most famous one. Essentially these work by using the eager student's own intellect against itself until it collapses under the pressure.

In terms of experiences pointlessness is right up there among the best, the most important, and yes, the most useful of all experiences. Sitting in your garden without thinking, without deciding what to do next, without worrying about anything, is fantastic. It is soothing, beautiful, relaxing, deep, perceptive. It is impossible to be bored when things are pointless. Nothing to do, is just not doing anything. When you do this your awareness of what actually is around you expands to the full size of your consciousness. Perception fills the empty spaces that were filled with your thoughts. A few blades of grass take up the same attention as your sudoku puzzle.

Now, this doesn't mean that I am recommending that everyone stop everything they are doing and just sit down. My favorite Buddhist story is when a new monk. full of excitement and passion for achieving enlightenment, joins a monastery. He has eaten his rice and has a few spare moments without any tasks and he sees the great master sitting across the courtyard, seemingly with a few spare moments himself. The young monk scurries across to the master and asks, "Great master, please give me some of your wisdom, just a piece of advice. Sir, what should I do?"
"Have you finished you rice?"
"Yes, master."
"Then you should clean your bowl."

I have applied this concept, that the full wisdom of the zen master is to do the things that you need to do while maintaining the full realization of the pointlessness of everything, most effectively to chores. Washing dishes is the best one because to a large extent it is so unpleasant if done another way. Who likes doing dishes? One of the main problems with doing dishes is the knowledge that it must be done, but you don't want to do it. This makes doing dishes so much worse. But if you can instead simply turn your full attention to the dishes, noticing the colours, the feel of the water, the smells, the sounds, without having any awareness of the point of it all (to be not doing it) it can be a really nice experience.

The real point of this whole post is to take this value of pointlessness, the value of this as it is, to the largest possible level. It is a common view that there must be a point to it all, that the Universe must have been created to do something. To many it is inconceivable that there isn't a point to something so vast, which is a shame because the inconceivability of it is largely down to the not-willing-to-try-to-conceive-it of the individual. It is common to think there must be a plan, and so we better work out what the plan is, and make sure everybody else knows what the plan is, argue about the plan, and then kill and enslave those who think there is a different plan, teach our children the plan, and then to make sure they have the right plan tell them that if they don't follow the plan they will be tortured in the fires of Hell forever.

How about there not being a point? How about that the Universe exists, full stop? It is, and that's it. This would enable our minds to open up simply to notice what the Universe is, and that is enough to fill anyone's mind for lifetime after lifetime. If taking some time to remove the everyday point and meaning from our activities helps us be more serene, why shouldn't that be true with the biggest questions?

I think the search for meaning that goes on in so many lives is an entirely natural, completely human endeavour. It is a basic thing to our psychology. On the other hand, so is rape, murder, xenophobia and bigotry. The human mind is such that it can examine itself, and then alter itself to experience a better life. If nothing else I hope those of you who read this long post who haven't seriously examined pointlessness will give it a try. One of the fascinating things about it is that it is much harder than you might think, and yet by definition requires no effort at all.

Important Music.

In the winter of 1996 I was living with a girlfriend in an apartment in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I had been let go from a job, my girlfriend was cheating on me but keeping quiet about it because she wanted me to give her my car, and I had almost no friends at all. Two years previously, in similar circumstances I came very close to killing myself out of abject depression. To stave off the chances of this happening I went on a regimen where every week I got three books, a biography, a self-help book and a novel. The greatest help to me in this time were the writings of Alan Watts who taught me about meditation, and a new way to look at the world.
Each morning I would drink some tea, sit in a chair and meditate while listening to Let It Be, by The Beatles. Then I would go for a walk. Three months later, while sitting in a park, I had the enlightenment experience. The last song I remember hearing before this was Across The Universe. That experience has transformed my life, and entirely for the better.


Sometime in the year 2000, I think, in a backyard barbecue on SE 49th street in Portland, OR my friend Dade asked if I wanted to be a band he was starting. The reason for him asking me was at the barbecue I was banging on a hand drum while he played guitar and sang. My musical ability at the time ranked very close to non-existent and so I initially said no. He said to think about it, and a couple of days later I called him and said I would like to try it, but if I was holding the band back he should tell me and I would quit. Some time later we played an open mic night at the Snake and Weasel, (by the way, another friend of mine that I met years later turned out to be the Weasel, Portland has things like that happen all of the time) and the first song that we played was Crazy, by Seal. I was sitting at the front of the stage, on the right, nervously pounding on a huge djembe drum. The song seemed to go OK, we stopped, there was the slightest of pauses (which is a precise, crystalline moment in my memory), and then yelling and clapping and cheering. What a feeling. I didn't sleep for hours and hours that night, loving every minute of it. I'm in a band today, trying to help a couple of people to get to that point where they get their first round of applause. I will always play music now, because of that moment.


The third album that I ever had (the first two being Queen's Greatest Hits and Difficult To Cure, by Rainbow) was a copied tape from a friend of my mother, who's name I can't recall. It was Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms, and I have been a fan of Dire Straits ever since.
In 1994 a girlfriend of over four years duration (from when I was nineteen!) who had lived with me for a couple of years realized that she needed to move on and not spend her entire life with one person. Looking back on it now it all makes sense, and she didn't try to break my heart, and I was good to her and her new guy. There were only decent people involved, but I have a memory that still brings tears to my eye to this day just thinking about it. I was at a party at my friend Josh's apartment, full of engineers. It was later on in the evening, she and her new boyfriend were there and people had been remarkably good. Then someone put on Romeo and Juliet, by Dire Straits on the stereo and my heart shattered. Tears rolled down my face. She came and hugged me, and I collapsed in shuddering sobs. Just broken, broken as a person.

On the album Making Movies there are two songs that follow directly one after the other, Tunnel of Love and then Romeo and Juliet. They are essentially a single song, in two movements, Tunnel of Love telling about the youthful flowering of love, and Romeo and Juliet about the death of love and the ashes left. So, please try to listen to one immediately after the other. It says more clearly how I feel about love than anything I can write.

Principles.

This is a picture of the Chinese philosopher Mencius, thought of as the main teacher of orthodox Confucianism. As perhaps the most influential Chinese philosopher it is interesting to note that until I had read the Wikipedia article I knew nothing about him other than he was a Confucian Chinese philosopher, which is probably more than most in the West.

As with most Chinese philosophers his area of interest was in how people should live, and as a result he probably based his teachings on principles. However, it seems he was smart enough (and psychologically liberal enough) to know that you cannot educate goodness down to the last detail. No principle that you can teach a student will be the best answer in all situations, and so students need to be brought up in an environment that promotes an innate sense of goodness which that student can guide themselves with in all situations.

I want to try and talk about the guiding principles in my life, but I do so with the understanding that these are not laws set in stone, but rather guides, suggestions, rules of thumb.

Thinking: The first, and most powerful principle that I have about my life is that I must think about my life. It is important to me that I know why I am doing something, that the choices I make are decisions based on a good understanding of myself and my circumstances. I don't want to do things unwittingly, because those around me do it, or because people have done it before. I want to do things because after having looked at the situation I have decided that the best action is what I will then choose to do.
I think this is something that people think they do, but generally they do not. Most things are done by habit, and that's efficient, but I wish to at least choose my habits.

Non-Violence: This is a not-natural-to-me principle. I am more naturally inclined to violence than non-violence. I have a bad temper, with a very short ignition time. At sixteen I realized that if I didn't do something about this temper I was going to end up in jail. So I did something about it and I have not been in a fight since that time. However, I have threatened people with violence, I can yell and seem intimidating. These are against my principles, but it still happens. However, I do sincerely believe that violence is the basic nature of evil and is the primary activity which humanity should be looking to minimize. Violence is the act of someone (or a nation) that wants others to do as they wish, but does not have the moral strength to convince others of their position.

Optimism: Happiness is largely about how you view the world, whether things will go well for you, or whether you are doomed to misery. The thing about it is that if you think things will go well your mood is improved, and as a consequence your life has gone better. Now, this principle could be seen as sometimes being in opposition to the first principle, that of Thinking. This is because some things really are better than other things, and some things just are bad. This is true, but the principle of Optimism for me is as a default position. Before I start taking in data about my circumstances I wish my position to be one of optimism, that what I will find out will be pleasing, interesting, and full of opportunities. I don't think there is really any huge danger of optimists missing out on important aspects of life that cynics would notice, but even if they did, would that be so bad?

Courage: This has always been a guiding principle of mine. I don't mean courage for pride's sake (although this indeed a massive reward to your pride when you are courageous) but courage for the sake of doing what you want to do. Benjamin Franklin, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." There are things that I want out of my life, I wish to see amazing things, feel extraordinary feelings, be part of special moments. To do so I need to have courage in the face of obstacles, the greatest of which is the opinion of others. At my core I am opposed to those who stay close to home, love the things they have always loved and fear and despise that which is different. This is a lifelong slog, a trench warfare struggle over decades with casualties on both sides. It is an easier struggle for the young, but I see no reason whatsoever that my age should diminish my courage to do, say, think and believe the extraordinary. I need to do better at this.

The Story: I think life is best thought of as a story that you are telling as you go. When thinking about each portion of your life, if you can tell it to people whose opinion you think worthy of notice as a story, then that portion of your life was worth living. If ten years of your life have gone by and what you can tell people is that you lived somewhere and it was a nice place, that's not a story. The best stories have challenges, amazing settings, are filled with love, music, poetry and laughter. The best stories have a hero, and a hero is someone who makes the world a better place through the application of the principles of their basic nature.

A principle that I had thought about putting in here was the principle of honesty. I think if you do something that you have to lie about, then you probably made a mistake. However, over time I am finding that my application to this principle as strictly as I have done has often been a mistake. In fact, honesty can often be a form of violence towards someone else, as we all need our illusions to keep us happy. One of my illusions has been that I am a particularly honest and forthright person, although I'm not sure if that is true or not.

Meandering Reality.

I have spent a lot of time questioning myself, my beliefs, what is right and how things are in the last year or so. I have sometimes got to the point where I have questioned whether even the process by which I think is a good one, whether the attempt at cold-hearted objectivity and logical thought is actually a useful method to use. My foundations have shuddered, but then I come across someone who is clearly brilliant, speaks with a smiling face, and independently says pretty much all the things that I say (except with more authority, clarity and with a smashing white beard). This is enormously comforting, and confirms in myself that it is OK to continue with the process that seems largely inherent in me anyway. This person is Dan Dennett.

One of the things that Dennett points out to people is that what we think we know and perceive about reality, what we are conscious of as reality, is actually a cobbled together model from partial information. People say all the time that they believe things because they experienced them, and the sensation was so strong that they know it was true. Dennett puts forward the case that actually, people are wildly mistaken about what they perceive, how they think, and how their brains process reality. I really recommend watching this, taking 24 minutes.

For me the understanding that what we see as reality, who we are, and what we believe is muddled, imprecise and dependent on an imperfect system is much easier to arrive at than most people. This because my brain changes it's basic perceptions all the time. A week ago I was sitting in the same place, dressed in the same clothes, having imbibed the same amount of beer, and experiencing one of the greater moments of existential joy that I have ever felt. Existence was good, better than good. To have nerves was a wonder. This week I am in the experience of doom, distracting myself from the collapse of sobbing tears by writing this blog post.

The difference between the two times is simply a matter of a few words and the change in a number of ratios of chemicals in my brain. When you are someone who is fundamentally a different someone on a regular basis, your ability to understand that what many people think of as consciousness (an unchanging you, experiencing a steady reality) is flatly bunk is greatly enhanced. The truth is that you really have very little idea of what happened in your past, your memories are entirely suspect. Furthermore, what you are experiencing right now is just a non-designed system's slapdash attempt to give you a good enough sense of what is going on to eat, avoid danger and procreate with something appropriate.

An "effective" dose of LSD is somewhere between 100 and 500 micrograms, while the average weight of the human brain is 6000 grams. So a change of .01% of your brain structure can have the effect of an acid trip, in which our concept of reality is distorted enormously to the point that we see things that aren't there, and even where our basic concepts break down. Personally I have experienced a moment in which I was convinced that I was in a moment of time from which branches of time and experience spread out in different directions. For me, at that time, the reality of time was non-linear.

The truth is that you have probably have very little concept at all of how your own mind works, that what you do is mostly based on habituation of neurons to consistent stimuli. Reality exists, but our individual, singular experience of it is just a model produced in a muddled place that is the consequence of pure survival and without any trace of design whatsoever.

However, humanity is such a marvelous thing that in groups we can turn our undeniable intellect to finding out what is going on. Just as an individual ant is as intelligent as a bacteria but a colony of ants is an organism capable of warfare and architecture and animal husbandry, an individual person is a wandering piece of guesswork but science is an incredibly powerful searchlight on the true nature of reality. You will always know more about what you experience than anyone else, but as it stands, a cognitive neuro-scientist knows more about how and why you experience things than you do.

This is an enormous comfort to me in times of trouble. Now that I have some concept that my mind changes, and why it changes, I can recognize in myself the processes that are occurring and know that what I feel right now is temporary, and only one version of reality. I would also say that even now, at this moment, I would accept the consequence of the magic of last week for the hardship of this grey weight today. I am one of the music-makers, the dreamers of the dreams, and there is a price to be paid for that.