The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Philosophy

  • Ajata Vada

    A warning:

    I would probably only read this article if you are very committed to awakening. If not, it could be unnecessarily challenging for you. This teaching is about as radical as radical can get – and true spirituality is already pretty radical!

    I want to emphasise though that I do not know if this teaching is true, or if it is the full truth; however, I think something Jesus said is appropriate here if it is true:

    “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find, and when they find they will be disturbed, and when they are disturbed they will be astonished, and will reign over the All.”

    A bit over two years ago now, I came across a video from the nonduality teacher Tom Das called “The highest truth is Ajata”. Hmm, I thought. I’d been on the spiritual path for 11 years at this point, and had never heard that word. I respect Tom as a teacher so I watched the video. (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RTlr5GdZXc).

    It was radical. Like, really, really radical. World-ending radical.

    At first I was excited to hear it. My whole life had been focused on awakening for 11 years, and I was so frustrated with not making the “progress” I wanted. Not actually waking up. When I heard it, I thought to myself, “Okay, this is going to change things. This is big.”

    Ajata is a Sanskrit word which means “unborn”. “A” being the prefix “not” and “jata” being “born”. “Vada” means “view”. What this perspective states is that “there is no creation.” “Nothing ever happened.” The world is not just illusory, it never even appeared to exist!

    After my initial excitement of feeling like this could be a breakthrough for me, a bit of fear crept in. Quite a bit. “Well, this is just one teacher”, I said to myself; “he could be wrong.”

    In the following months and years however, I came across more and more teachers who were saying the same thing. Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Rupert Spira, A Course in Miracles, some awakened friends on Facebook. The evidence started to mount up.

    I wrote to Tom, initially, when the fear crept in.

    “Is it scary?” I said.

    “No, it’s not scary at all, Will. It’s heaven,” he said. “Ajata = total endless peace, love, and bliss.”

    Still, there were things I wanted in the world. I wanted a deep relationship with a partner. I wanted to write my book. Will that all disappear?

    I don’t know the answer to this question, and really, before I see the ultimate truth myself, what I think about it means absolutely nothing. Whether I believe or disbelieve in ajata is kind of irrelevant. The truth is the truth no matter what I think about it. It’s impossible to know what the coffee in Paris tastes like until travelling to Paris.

    This teaching would say that the world does not exist in any way, but only “God”, “the Absolute”, consciousness, beingness, the I Am exists.

    As Rupert Spira said once, “When the somethingness of the waking state starts to appear less and less like something, the nothingness of the deep sleep state starts to appear less and less like nothing.”

    There’s a tendency for the human mind to picture “nothing” as just an endless black void. But apparently that’s not what is experienced. This state is impossible for the mind to imagine, as I’ve been told. Only that it is everything we’ve always been searching for.

    One thing that makes me hesitate with this teaching is my teacher Isira. As best as I could tell, she was the most awake person I’d ever come across, and I remember her once mentioning the book, “The Disappearance of the Universe”, and dismissing the idea as not true. The world does exist, only our thoughts about it do not exist, she said.

    That was always my position on this matter until coming across the ajata teachings. But I still just don’t know. I can’t know until I experience the truth, whatever it is, for myself. All the philosophising in the world means nothing. Truth is experiential. Philosophy and spiritual teachings can lead you to water, but they can’t make you drink. At a certain point you have to dive in, even though you don’t know that it’s safe.

    This is why I think faith on the spiritual path is so important. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something without evidence, it just means that at a certain point you have to have trust and let go into the unknown.

    What are the benefits of this teaching though? Well, what do humans want more than anything? Eternal life and happiness. That is, apparently, what’s on offer with these teachings. What you truly are was never born and cannot die, and it is bliss. Eternal bliss as “God”. That is where the spiritual path ultimately leads. Yet people are running around picking up scraps of temporary happiness, mostly struggling. As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”

    There really is so much denial going on in humans. People, on the whole, are suffering a lot. Yet we often refuse to admit it to ourselves I think because we’re scared that there is no solution. That if we faced up to how unhappy we are we would just get stuck there and it would make it worse. People think the best they can hope for is brief periods of happiness interspersed amongst long periods of struggle.

    The spiritual path says there is a solution. And it’s better than we could imagine.

    Another benefit is that this teaching really removes your attachment to the world. Regardless of whether the world exists or not, our intense focus and fascination on the vicissitudes of life can distract us from discovering our true unchanging Self (capital S indicating the ultimate Self, not the individual self or ego). This teaching is a very powerful means for shifting our attention in that way.

    One thing I have noticed, however, with most people who advocate for the ajata teachings, is that they think the world = suffering, and that it can’t be any other way.

    While I think there is both light and dark in existence, and there will always be the full array of human emotion experienced, I don’t see it this way. I believe it is possible to create “Heaven on Earth”. Will it take a while? Yes, but I do believe it’s possible. And I do wonder whether there is an emotional avoidance inherent in the ajata teachings. Maybe if you see the world as inherently just suffering, you are more likely to reject it, and stay in this “absolute” state because it is “safer”.

    I don’t know if this is true, but it is a thought that I had. Adyashanti once said, “Don’t get stuck in enlightenment.” If you get stuck in enlightenment, the world will seemingly make you aware pretty quickly of your neglect of it.

    As I said, that’s just a possibility for me. I don’t know the truth of this yet. All I know is that I’m going to keep exploring until I find the highest truth myself. Until then, I leave you with this image:

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

    P.S. Something I’ve learnt a lot on the spiritual journey is to take the “middle way” approach. Buddha is credited with saying this, but in his case he meant it in terms of asceticism versus over-indulgence. The way I see it is that we should always plant ourselves firmly in the middle ground of any propositions and be open to the truth of each, if there is any. I’ve been surprised at how accurate the middle way generally is in this sense, and getting lost in extremes often indicates a blind spot. I don’t know if this is true of ajata, but it’s a possibility. Some teachers have often said the world is real and unreal at the same time. As I said, I will continue to investigate it either way, and even though it might take a while, I’ll get back to you with the results. 😉

  • Everything is Inside Your “Head”

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed over the last 8 years is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, which translates to “not two”.

    As you may have guessed by the name, this philosophy suggests that there is no such thing as separation – there are not “two things”. Everything, this philosophy suggests, is fundamentally the same. Made out of the same stuff. That stuff could be called consciousness. Pure awareness.

    A lot of people struggle with these ideas. The world around them seems so real and physical. It seems like there really is separation between things. But there’s a very simple way of showing that – even if the materialist paradigm of the universe is correct (which it isn’t 😉 ) – our direct experience can only ever be of pure consciousness and no separation.

    That is because, like the title of this post, everything you experience is actually inside your “head”. Now, even this isn’t true. Saying everything appears inside your head is making a concession to the materialist paradigm, where heads are real physical things themselves. And that’s not true. Your head, just like everything else, is just an appearance in and of consciousness.

    But for the sake of this post, I’ll make a concession to the materialist paradigm, in order to show that even if it is true, everything we experience is only, and can only ever be consciousness itself, without any separation.

    This is because of the way our brains work. A lot of people have an unconscious assumption that their eyes are portals that look out at the world. But this isn’t the way it works. Our eyes are receptors, which take in information, and transmit that information to our brain where images are produced. This is true for all our senses.

    Our eyes do not “look out” at the butterfly, they receive information which is then transferred to the vision processing area of the brain, where an image is produced (again, using the materialist paradigm).

    But if this is true, this means that everything you have ever experienced has been “inside your head”. There’s no room for the world to fit inside your head, so all you have ever experienced is your conscious representation of the world, never the actual physical world itself (which… there isn’t one 😉 ). There’s no room for space inside your head, therefore there’s no room for separation. Your brain just creates the perception of space and separation, but that isn’t your actual experience.

    Go outside at night and look up at the stars. Those stars are appearing inside your head. If the materialist paradigm is correct, your skull should be on the other side of those stars. Your whole world in fact, is surrounded by bone. Again, that is assuming the materialist paradigm is correct, which I maintain it isn’t, but it is still a useful example to show how the world we actually experience can only ever be pure consciousness without any separation.

    The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

    What the materialist paradigm suggests isn’t that the world you experience is real and physical, because we know it can’t be – it suggests that there is the world you experience, plus the real world beyond what we experience. An outside, external world in addition to the one we experience.

    You’re sitting there reading this on your phone or computer. That phone or computer is “inside your head”. The materialist paradigm suggests there is *another* real phone or computer that exists beyond the one in your direct experience. There has never been any direct evidence for this real external world, because how could there be? It is just an assumption we have made because things really seem physical and separate. But it’s just not the case.

    We are still living in an outdated physicalist paradigm though. We have taken the world at face value without really questioning its nature. A little bit of investigation reveals that the world is very different to how we thought it was.

    Some people might find these ideas challenging, and they are. Waking up to reality is challenging. It dismantles all our beliefs, and that can be destabilising. As Jesus said: “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will be astounded, and will reign over all.”

    It takes a little courage to wake up from the dream of mind.

    And remember, even your “head” is just in your head. 😉

    Much love,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Enlightenment is an Illusion Too

    Eternity is in love with the productions of time

    William Blake

    I had quite a deep realization a few days ago regarding the nature of “enlightenment”. That is, enlightenment never happens in the future.

    I had heard this type of teaching from many teachers in the past, but this time it struck me more deeply.

    Enlightenment is a useful word in one way because it suggests to us that there is a very different way of perceiving the world than the way most humans generally do.

    This is very useful because it’s true. There is a very different way to perceive the world.

    The word becomes a double-edged sword though, because it then suggests to people that enlightenment is an “event” that may happen to “me” in “the future”.

    This is where it becomes problematic, because the future doesn’t actually exist, it is just a collection of thoughts that occur in the present moment.

    We have learned from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity that the nature of time is very different to how we usually conceive of it. It fluctuates depending on the observer and their particular reference point.

    Time literally slows down as gravity increases. As an object increases its speed, time runs slower relative to objects moving slower. This was exemplified in the movie Interstellar, where, upon returning to Earth, the inhabitants there had aged significantly quicker than those who travelled at high speeds through space.

    Usually this effect is so small we don’t notice it. You need to be travelling very fast for it to become obvious. But it still exists in our world too. Walk from your room to the living room while someone is sitting on the couch watching TV. You have aged less in that time than the stationary person, only so minutely you haven’t noticed it.

    Of course, in our universe, nothing is ever truly “stationary” – the person sitting on the couch is spinning around the axis of the Earth at roughly 1,600 kilometres per hour at the equator, which is rotating around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres per hour, and our solar system is moving through our galaxy, which is moving through space itself. This is why Einstein’s theories were called “relativity” and not “absolutivity”. Everything is dependent upon the observer and their particular reference point in space-time.

    Do you live in an apartment block on the second floor? Because of the (very slightly) reduced gravitational field of Earth where you are, the people living below you age slower than you. Again, so minutely you can’t perceive it except with the most accurate clocks available. And don’t worry about trying to get the ground floor – to you it won’t seem as though you’ve aged quicker, time will appear to you as having gone on at the same rate. It will only be in comparison to the person living below that time will have appeared to go slower. A total mind-job I know.

    So, we have learned from Einstein’s equations that time is not a static construct, moving along at a fixed rate, but instead a perspective that changes relative to the person observing.

    At the very least, we have learned that time is not what we usually think it is.

    Many philosophers, and any enlightened person worth their salt, go further. They suggest time is not actually real at all, it is merely a construct created in the mind of the conscious observer in order to, in a sense, categorise our experiences.

    But there is no real evidence for it in our universe. As the scientist Robert Lanza stated, “you can’t put it in a bottle like milk.”

    The only evidence we think we have of it is that we have a memory – in the present moment – of something having been one way, and now being a different way, and we surmise that this supposed change that occurred has occurred in “time”.

    But as the Greek philosopher Parmenides once annoyingly said to a friend of his, “just because my hand was over here and now it’s over here doesn’t mean that anything has changed.”

    This is something that on initial inspection can sound completely ridiculous, but to illustrate this point, I’ll give an example philosophers often use as a model to explain this called the “block universe”. This is the type of universe many philosophers believe we live in (pictured below), where the past and the future both simultaneously exist as set constructs. From this perspective it’s easy to see how someone could claim that “nothing ever changes”.

    The block universe theory, where the past and future are set in stone and each slice of the block constitutes a present moment experience

    In my opinion the block universe is an incorrect model of our universe because quantum mechanics still leaves open every possible future state, and even, mind-bogglingly, past states, from the present moment. But it is a useful model to illustrate how it’s possible that time doesn’t actually exist as an independent entity, it is merely created from a perspective in the present moment.

    Have you ever experienced this thing you call “the future”? Have you even ever experienced this thing called “the past”? Or have you only ever experienced *thoughts* about these things in the present moment? Have you ever been anywhere else but the present? So why believe in something you have never experienced? In other words, why believe in something there is no evidence for?

    This is why enlightenment can never be an event that happens in the future. There is no real future, there is only now. Believing enlightenment may happen in the future will actually prevent you from waking up to the now, which is what enlightenment is.

    Enlightenment happens now or never. Because there is only now. Literally.

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Enlightenment, The Ultimate Perspective

    Yin Yang: An image that perfectly encapsulates the paradoxical “half-truth” nature of reality

    I’ve been mulling over the most recent article I wrote – “The Illusion of Free Will” for a couple of weeks now, and the thing is – I don’t really agree with it. At least, not fully.

    This is going to be an article where you don’t get any set, defined answers, so if you don’t like articles of that kind, skip over this one now.

    The question of whether humans – or any sentient being – has free will was one of the first big philosophical questions I ran into in my undergraduate science degree.

    At the time, I had an assumed belief that humans had free will, that we were ultimately responsible for the decisions we made, and should be held accountable for our actions. The more I looked into this belief, however, the less it seemed to make sense.

    In order to really explain my “position” on this, I’m going to have to get quite deep. Think ultimate nature of reality deep.

    I think the best way to do that is with a diagram. This will obviously be limited too, but it’s the best way I know how to convey my perspective.

    The Three Levels of Reality

    At the ultimate level, there’s the Source of all existence. The ultimate One. The Infinite reality.

    This is beyond the dualistic mind of humans. Beyond good and evil. Beyond right and wrong. Beyond this versus that.

    As the Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism states: “Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha” which translates to “Gone, gone, gone beyond, totally gone beyond.”

    Welcome to reality. This is the annihilation of the separate self. The ultimate perspective on reality. The eradication of distinction.

    Not everyone wants this. Even those on the spiritual path, not many of those truly want ultimate truth – they want to just make their lives a little better.

    That’s fine. Everyone has their path to walk, walk it freely as long as you choose!

    I think this is the path I have chosen, however. Do I know that for a fact? No. It’s quite possible to me that I could stop short of this so long as my life was enjoyable.

    There’s a part of me that feels I won’t be satisfied until I know the ultimate perspective however. Time will tell as far as that’s concerned.

    Which brings me to the point of this post, which is kind of a rebuttal against my last post.

    Even though ultimately everything is one, and ultimately everything comes from the same source, there is still simultaneously distinction. The Infinite reality can split itself up as much as it likes and still remain infinite.

    And that’s what humans are. A splitting off of infinity.

    Life is simultaneously all one and yet has distinctions within it.

    Which is where the question of free will, along with the existence of the self, becomes a bit blurry.

    Ultimately if there is only one and no separation, then obviously there can’t be any true free will or true separate self.

    But within that reality, there exist the *appearance* of distinction. And those appearances are still relevant. They still have their own unique makeup. Their distinct preferences.

    This is where, from my perspective, life becomes not a simple yes or no answer, but more like a three-layered answer.

    There’s the ultimate perspective. Then there’s the unique individuation. Then there’s the mental construct or ego level of identification.

    The third layer, the ego layer, is the one that I think is entirely illusory and that humankind would be much better off getting rid of entirely.

    But that still leaves the unique individuation level. The level where life is seen from the ultimate perspective but acknowledges the distinct manifestations of that ultimate one.

    And that’s where it could be said that “free will” is not an entirely erroneous concept.

    If a unique individuation has a desire, and the freedom to act upon that desire, then for all intents and purposes that could be said to be a free choice.

    The issue is not so much about answering a question definitively as it is about removing set belief systems.

    The belief in true free will is problematic, just as the belief in no free will is problematic. The question instead becomes “from what perspective are you asking that question?”

    Because the answer differs depending on what perspective you’re asking the question from.

    So, do we have free will? Yes and no. Does the self exist? Yes and no. Is this answer going to satisfy you? Yes and no.

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • The Illusion of Free Will

    Free will may be an illusion, but only because “you” are an illusion too

    Update: I don’t fully agree with everything I’ve written here, and I gave a different perspective in my next post: “Enlightenment, The Ultimate Perspective”

    During my undergraduate science degree, I became more and more interested in the big questions of life. What is the universe, how does it function, where does it all come from? I thought studying a science degree would be the best way to answer these questions. As I went along, however, I started to see that philosophy had just as crucial things to say in this matter as science did, so I became more interested in these matters as philosophical questions rather than just brute scientific “facts”.

    The first big philosophical question I ran into was the one of free will, which we examined in my class, “Evolution and Human Behaviour”. You see, the more you look into the notion of free will, the harder it becomes to defend it. At least the type of free will most people are referring to when they think about free will: that is, there was a choice or action to be made and they could have acted differently than they did. This idea I will term “true free will” – that we make independent decisions based solely on what we want to do free of any constraints. There is another type of free will – a “relative” level of free will which also needs to be discussed, but as you’ll see it doesn’t give you the type of free will most people believe they have.

    The first sledgehammer to my belief in free will came when we studied the famous Benjamin Libet experiments from the 1980s. In these experiments, Libet got people to do simple tasks – e.g. press one of two buttons or flex their wrists – and note the time they made the conscious decision to do so. While they were doing this they were hooked up to an EEG machine to record their brain activity. What Libet found was that he could predict, based on prior brain activity, what the person would do before they consciously made the decision to do it. This experiment has been repeated many times with different types of equipment, and the results all point the same way: in some cases what the person is going to do can be predicted a number of seconds prior to their conscious recognition of what they decided to do.

    This is a big one. If our brains essentially operate by the laws governing our universe, albeit with a little quantum uncertainty (though it’s very sketchy to try and sneak free will in here), then none of our thoughts, none of our actions, none of anything about us can actually be claimed to be a truly free choice.

    There are many ways to debunk the notion of true free will. There’s the laws of the universe argument stated above, there’s the gene-environment interaction which makes up literally everything we are in this moment, then there’s the more philosophical arguments, for example: you can’t choose what you desire, and your greatest desire will always win out (even if you try and trick the universe by doing something that is not your greatest desire to prove your own free will, that has then just become your greatest desire). Think about it: Have you ever done anything that was not your greatest desire unless you were forced to by someone else or by society’s expectations? When did you ever have two options in any moment, no matter how small it is, and went with the less desirable action. (If you think you can come up with one, let me know in the comments and I’ll explain why it was still, as far as you could tell in the moment, your greatest desire).

    Let me throw out a bone though. Even though I think the lack of true free will is true, there’s still a “relative” level of free will as I stated, which, while not giving people the true free will they want, at least doesn’t completely negate the relevance of choice and deliberation. Even though there’s no true free will, choices and actions should still be undertaken as though there is such a thing as choice. It’s sort of a yes and no answer to the question of free will. Yes, from an absolute view the notion of true free will is, I maintain, not just unlikely but an impossibility, but down here at the relative level choices and actions still matter and we shouldn’t just become lazy thinking, “there’s no free will so what’s the point of doing anything.” That’s becoming fatalistic and taking the idea that there’s no free will too absolutely. Even if there’s no true free will, it’s still important to deliberate over choices, weigh up the options, act in the best way you know how. But when it’s all said and done, don’t take any pride or any shame in the outcome. You did the best you could given the conditions you found yourself in. In fact, in every single moment you have always done the best you could for where you were at, even if the outcome was horrible.

    Now I will get down to the main reason I think true free will is an illusion. As many mystics and sages throughout the centuries have claimed, the self, or ego – the little homunculus pictured above, the little man or woman we think we have inside our heads thinking and making decisions – that itself is an illusion. In short, the self doesn’t exist. In reality, thoughts occur but there is no *thinker* in addition to the thoughts. Actions take place, but there’s no *actor* making them take place. Can you predict what your next thought will be, or do they just arise of their own accord? In order to predict what it would be, that would mean we would have to think the thoughts before we think them. Actions may appear to occur simultaneously with thought, e.g. a desire for coffee arises, then the thought, “I’ll go make some coffee”, and then the action of making coffee. Did you choose for the desire for coffee to arise, or did it just happen? And if there’s no other thoughts which say, “no I’ve had too much today I won’t make another one”, then coffee-making usually follows. All of these things can take place without there being a true thinker in addition to the thoughts or a true “do-er” in addition to the actions taking place.

    This is not just a spiritual claim, however. As the neuroscientist Sam Harris points out, there’s no special place in your brain for the “self” to reside. There’s just a whole bunch of sense data being interpreted by your brain which then post-hoc decides on the idea that there is a self here, separate and distinct from everything around it. Here is a video of Sam discussing this illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0 (7 minutes)

    There’s also a great and entertaining video by CollegeBinary on the philosophy of David Hume, who also came to the conclusion that the self is an illusion. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3QZ2Ko-FOg&t=89s (3 minutes)

    A lot of people find these ideas depressing – both the illusion of free will and the illusion of self – but it really shouldn’t be, there’s a much greater perspective to be gained when these illusions are seen through. As the nonduality or “enlightenment” teacher Gary Weber said at the beginning of his book “Happiness Beyond Thought”: “The bad news is you don’t exist; the good news is you’re everything.”

    This is what happens when you begin to “wake up”. When you begin to become “enlightened”. You begin to see through all the illusions your thoughts have created about the world and about yourself, and you see reality as it really is, rather than how human minds say it is.

    This is what spiritual awakening really boils down to: it is simply a case of mistaken identity. We have taken ourselves to be these bodies/minds when in actual fact what we are – what everything is – is consciousness. And there is no true separation. This is why Gary Weber said the good news is you’re everything.

    The American spiritual teacher Adyashanti put it another way (paraphrased): A lot of people don’t like this idea, they want to be in the driver’s seat. They think just sitting in the passenger seat watching everything would be boring. But that’s still clinging to the illusion of the self, just as a watcher. When you begin to realise, you are the steering wheel, you are the car, you are the scenery you’re passing by, you indeed are everything, it starts to become a lot more interesting.

    The illusion of free will isn’t just a fanciful philosophical idea to consider though, it has very real world implications. When you begin to see that people are not absolutely responsible for their actions, compassion arises. You see everyone as a product of their genes and environment, and realise – if *you* were born with their genes and grew up in their environment, you would be exactly the same as them and have lived their exact life.

    It also has profound implications for the notion of blame and punishment. From my perspective blame and punishment are antiquated notions which only still exist today because people believe in true free will and that people are solely responsible for their actions. The illusion of free will says they’re not. They are a product of their genes and their environment and their particular neurochemistry at the time they made any decisions. Which again, if you happened to be born with their genes and grew up in their environment, you would have made exactly the same choices they did. This isn’t to say people should not be put in jail for crimes – we need that in order to protect the public and act as a deterrent for others. But, I argue, we should stop short of blame and punishment. That is a misperception about the nature of reality.

    There’s a story I love about how an African tribe has songs for each member of their tribe, and when one of their members does something wrong, they don’t punish them, they gather around and sing their song to them to remind them of who they truly are. If people who commit heinous acts are treated with compassion and understanding and forgiveness, while obviously still needing to protect the public from them, I believe the rate of heinous acts would decrease dramatically. Often those who commit heinous acts are actually those who most need compassion and understanding.

    So what am I going to do now? Well, I’m going to have a cigarette. Why? Because I’ve had a very stressful year and I don’t yet have the willpower to quit. My desire for a cigarette outweighs my desire to quit smoking for the time being, as stupid as it is. I’m going to do my best to quit, but I won’t be able to until I’m able to. Until my desire to quit outweighs my desire to have a cigarette. Even though I know whatever happens could not have happened differently, I’m still going to try and exercise my “relative free will” and do my best to quit.

    For those who want to delve into these ideas more, here is Sam Harris giving a talk on his book “Free Will” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

    Thanks for reading, and as always,

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • What the Hell is Spirituality Anyway?

    After beginning my life in a very “rational” and “scientific” (or so I thought) way, when I was 25 my life changed in a big way: I suddenly realized I knew very little. I also realized there was a whole field of inquiry I had previously disregarded – that of “spirituality”.

    Spiritual is an interesting term. To me, it doesn’t really mean much, but you have to use some word to describe what we’re talking about, and if we changed it to a new word it would just ruin that word as well.

    Having been a science student at university, I was always interested in the biggest questions of life – What is it? How does it work? Where did it come from? – and I thought studying a science degree would be the best way to work these questions out. And don’t get me wrong: science is an incredibly powerful and indispensable method of inquiry for investigating how our universe *behaves*. But… it doesn’t exactly tell us what it *is*.

    There’s a very famous thought experiment (philosophers love to have these) by an Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson, called “Mary’s Room”. The short version of this thought experiment is: Imagine you have a girl, Mary, who is born into a black and white room, but she is an amazing scientist. The best scientist in the universe. She knows everything. Mary is like a little human God. But… she was born in a black and white room.

    The thought experiment is one of knowledge. In philosophical terms this is called epistemology, the study of knowledge – what is knowledge, and how do we know what we know?

    The thought experiment goes like this – if Mary knows everything in the universe, she knows all about colour. She knows all about the electromagnetic spectrum and photons and how the retinas in our eyes receive this information and transform it into electrical signals which are interpreted by our brains, thus producing the experience we know as “colour”. But again, Mary only lives in a black and white room. The thought experiment then poses the question: If Mary leaves the black and white room into the outside world and actually sees colour for the first time, does she learn anything new that she couldn’t have learnt from just studying the physical mechanics of light and nerve processing alone?

    In other words, is there anything about life that cannot simply be reduced to its physicality.

    The answer to me quite obviously is yes, she learns something new that she couldn’t have learnt if she hadn’t left the room. The thing she learnt was not based in physicality but in experience – what philosophers call “qualia” – the subjective, conscious experience of a phenomenon.

    This to me really gets to the heart of what the term “spirituality” is all about: What is our direct perception of life, what is our experience of life, when you take away all the mental labels and models our minds have placed over the top of everything.

    Say, for example, you’re eating an apple. You could say you’re eating an apple, but really there’s just this roundish, red, crunchy, delicious (if you like apples) blob of sensation in front of you. Now, obviously to communicate we need to use these labels. We can’t say “could you please hand me that roundish, red, crunchy, delicious blob of sensation on the table there?” It would be a great waste of time. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that all we ever really experience is the blob of sensations, never the actual “object” we call an apple.
    As Morpheus said to Neo in the Matrix:
    Neo: This… this isn’t real?
    Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

    The thing is, we live in the same universe that apple lives in, so this also applies to us, and the labels we use to describe ourselves are only labels for a collection of sense perceptions we have called our “self”. To me, this is the essence of what spirituality is really all about. It’s realizing that the labels we use to describe things are only labels, and they don’t get fundamentally to the actual nature of the thing we’re describing. In other words, things are not what we think they are, and we are also not what we think we are.

    Try this experiment:

    Without referring to your mind for information, and just look into your direct experience, ask yourself the question who or what are you? Your mind may say, “Oh my name’s Greg.” Yeah, but that’s just a name, a label given to you at birth, what were you before you were given that name? Or you might say, “I’m a landscaper!” Yeah, but that’s just your profession… if you changed jobs I’m pretty sure you’d still say you were you. So what exactly could you be if you really go deeply? Well, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you are your mind, but what is the mind? Just a collection of thoughts that come and go. What if you stop thinking? Are you still you then? So it needs to go even deeper than that. You might then start to touch upon that which is in you that never changes, that which is always there, the conscious witness of all your experience.

    There is a great video here with Eckhart Tolle guiding someone through this process (the section begins at 15:50) –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3CunRgjXBk&t=4s

    This is why enlightened master after enlightened master has always repeated the phrase: you are consciousness itself! And when you look deeply into all of your experience, you realise that everything you experience is actually made up of this consciousness: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste… the whole world, as far as our actual experience of it goes, is nothing but consciousness. And you are not a separate part of it, you are a collection of sensations, just like the apple.

    This might sound depressing to some, but really it is liberating – it means you are no longer tied to any of the mental identifications you had with yourself. All your previous thoughts about yourself, your faults, your struggles, is all just consciousness blobbing its way through existence. And when you start to let go of all those previous thoughts about yourself and the world that you had, and start going with the flow of your direct experience, without the mind getting in the way with its constant chatter, the blobs start to blob a whole lot better. The reason for this is because when you’re perceiving things more directly as they are, rather than through the filter of the mind with all of its preconceptions and belief systems about how you think they are, you are more directly in touch with what is really happening.

    In one way, spirituality is a very simple topic. It’s just a case of mistaken identity: we have mistaken ourselves to be the body or mind we perceive in front of us instead of seeing ourselves as consciousness, the witness of these bodies/minds. In another way though, we live in a very large and very complex world, so spirituality can also be a very large topic, and I’m not going to be able to cover everything in one blog post (especially because I don’t know anywhere near everything about it!), but essentially that’s what spirituality means to me – realizing that you really are one with the universe, and that, again, as far as our direct experience goes, the whole universe is made out of what we could call “consciousness”.

    It might sound like a big leap to say that just because our direct perception of life can only ever be consciousness that the universe must only be consciousness, but this position is also being backed up by modern physics as well, which, while confusing the hell out of almost every physicist in the world, points to the fact that the “physical” world we think we perceive is actually a construction that depends on the conscious observer of the event. That things are not things until they are witnessed by an observer! There’s a great video on this by someone on youtube called Inspiring Philosophy –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C5pq7W5yRM&t=225s. Now, I don’t agree with his religious conclusions at the end – I think he is making a leap in reasoning there that you can’t make, but it is still a great video up until that point.

    Probably the best physicist I have found today discussing this topic is a person called Robert Lanza. He was called by The New York Times one of the three most important scientists alive today, just to give you a bit of an idea of how good a scientist he is! He is a much better writer than speaker, and his book “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe” is a fantastic read and very accessible even for those unfamiliar with physics. But for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read a book, here he is at the Science and Nonduality conference giving a talk on this subject:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_F4nOKDSM&t=47s

    As I said, spirituality is also a very broad topic and covers a whole range of issues, but this is what it means to me in its most basic form, as a former science student and advocate of the scientific method (the method based on direct evidence!). I may make some more blog posts on the broader topic of spirituality in future but I think that’s all I have to say for now.

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

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