“It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong," wrote Richard Feynman. But does curiosity end where awareness cuts off? Derek explores the positive and negative sides of the spiritual search, especially in light of the burgeoning eco-spiritual movement.
Show Notes
I’m “spiritual but not religious.” Here’s what that means for a physicist
How to hold onto a sense of wonder
‘Big Earth energy’: A new era of nature spirituality is here
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to this Conspirituality Brief.
I'm Derek Barris.
I also want to let you know that this Monday, June 26th, I will be at Powell's Books in downtown Portland in conversation with my good friend Mike Hall.
He's the director and producer of Betrayal at Attica on HBO, among many other documentaries and podcasts on NPR, PRI, and a wealth of other places.
And we will be in discussion about our new book, our meaning this podcast's, Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
Starts at 7 p.m., and I hope to see you there.
Alan Lightman was floating, alone, in a small boat off the coast of Maine.
Moonless and still, he laid down en route to his summer home, and he felt his body dissolve within minutes of taking to the water.
There was no longer any boat, nor any body.
As he tells it, I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were a part of them.
And the vast expanse of time, extending from the far distant past long before I was born, and then into the far distant future long after I would die, seemed compressed to a dot.
I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos, emerging with something far larger than myself.
After a time, I sat up and started the engine again.
I had no idea how long I'd been lying there looking up.
Now you might expect this passage in a spiritual text from an acolyte of a certain religion, but from a physicist?
Even while having this experience, Lightman still holds fast to the idea that everything in the universe is composed of atoms and molecules, not a mystic interlude humming between them.
Yet that doesn't stop him from having transcendent experiences.
In fact, he has a name for it.
Spiritual Materialism.
And I like that.
Now here's how he defines his view, quote, I realize that many people associate spirituality with an
all-powerful and all-knowing being that purposefully created the universe. I respect those beliefs,
although I do not share them.
I believe that spiritual experiences, as I have defined them, can be explained in terms of a
highly evolved brain, which in turn is rooted in material neurons, each of which is a special
arrangement of atoms and molecules.
Lightman isn't the only materialist with a transcendental bent.
The author Catherine May recently published her latest book.
It's called Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age.
Having no religious practice of her own, she still emerged from the pandemic, like so many of us, looking for connection.
Here she reads a passage describing what it felt like emerging from lockdowns, possibly expecting a similar world as the one she entered with.
I've lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling.
Without it, the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life.
I'm like lightning seeking earth.
Uneasy, I carry the prickle of potential energy in my limbs, ever deferred from the point of contact, the moment of release.
Instead, it gathers in me, massing like a storm that never comes.
I lack the language to even describe it, this vast, unsettled sense that I'm slipping over the glassy surface of things, afraid of what lurks beneath.
I need a better way to walk through this life.
I want to be enchanted again.
The only constant is change, goes the old maxim.
And never again shall a pre-Covid world exist.
That's something we all have to grapple with.
Though honestly, you can say that for every peak event.
There will never again be a pre-WWI world, or a WWII world, a pre-Vietnam War world, a pre-911, pre-Obama, pre-Trump world.
I for one am looking forward to a post-Elon Musk dominating social media conversations world.
If I'm lucky enough to see it in my lifetime.
But from what I can gather, Catherine May is agnostic at best.
Yet here she tells NPR's Rachel Martin her thoughts on the concept of God.
This huge word, this huge three-letter word, God, which I've never felt a connection with in any definition that I've been given.
And yet, as I've gone through life, I've also felt like there is something there that I can't define and that nobody else's definition does it for me.
And I begin to think that it's the The questing after that, that's the point of this, actually.
Like, rather than the knowing, rather than the certainty and the solidification of this idea, the thing that is most enlightening to me is that constant search for connection with this ineffable thing.
For me, I wouldn't even say being.
It's like a force that I sense sometimes.
Now, let's ask this.
If we discover that that force is the result of physiology meeting environment, would that be so bad?
Is it terrible if nothing extra in the form of an ineffable reality is involved?
I don't believe so, and it still doesn't change those feelings when I have them, and I have had them, and continue to have those feelings.
Two weeks ago, I took a light dose of psilocybin and walked through the beautiful rose garden outside of the Japanese gardens here in Portland.
One gram is a pretty functional dose for me, meaning I'm fine being out in public and communicating, yet I'm still capable of having a feeling of transcendence.
Which I did, when I paused for a moment and looked out over the multi-colored field of roses, with downtown Portland and beyond peeking out over those beautiful, giant trees.
The moment didn't last long.
I was with a group of friends, but even for those 30 seconds, just standing in the midst of so much life, breathing in the scent and sight of thousands of roses in bloom, I felt connected and relaxed and part of something greater.
Now, could I have felt that without microdosing mushrooms?
Sure.
I've felt similar sensations after meditation, as well as while randomly walking around on a nice summer day.
Does it dampen the experience if I attribute that feeling to bodily chemistry interacting with surroundings?
No, not at all.
In fact, in the moment, I don't think about that.
I simply enjoy the experience.
And while reflecting on the experience, I don't feel the need to cram in anything extra to it.
There have been plenty of things that were unexplainable that were later explained.
One thing we've discussed often on the podcast is miasma theory, and that was the notion that all disease comes from bad vapors in the air, and doing things like wearing certain types of cloth shirt fabrics can ward off plagues.
Miasma was the going theory for centuries, and it persisted throughout the bubonic plague.
It wasn't until germ theory was proven that we finally put miasma to rest.
Well, most of us.
As we've also covered, plenty of conspiritualists have returned Beauchamp's terrain theory into the spotlight.
In fact, just this week I saw Alex Zek sharing his HIV doesn't exist nonsense on Twitter again.
But thankfully, credible scientists don't fall for such garbage.
And just because it took humans a while to figure things out, that doesn't mean they're beyond the scope of understanding.
Perhaps one day we'll figure out whether or not consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, if it's explainable by the chemical interactions in our body.
I believe we will, given how many theories there are right now.
One example is V.S.
Ramachandran, who has conducted extensive research with patients suffering from apraxia, which is an inability to carry out skilled actions, akinetic mutism, which is patients who are unable to move or speak, alien hand syndrome, when a person's hand does things he or
she does not will them to do.
These are all real disorders that prompt unconscious behavior and also offer insights
into how consciousness is constructed. In fact, his work in blindsight, which is people suffering
from lesions in their striate cortex who can respond to visual stimulation that they cannot
consciously see, and his work is absolutely fascinating by the way, but this work highlights
how little we understand about the complex machinery encased in our skulls.
But I also understand why people don't gravitate toward this sort of research in understanding our relationship to the world or our daily experiences as we have them.
It's not exactly compelling to say, for example, that your decision-making processes occur in the supermarginal gyrus in the anterior cingulate, and therefore much of your reality is constructed by the decisions made in those brain regions and how they interface with the prefrontal cortex.
Yet based on Ramachandran's work, that's exactly what's going on.
Spiritual texts are written in poetry or prose, not clinical language.
So I don't expect people to get excited over scientific studies, though I do believe once you speak that or really any language, that text can actually be inspiring.
My real problem with spiritual language, and not the transcendent experiences but the language around it, isn't really what it doesn't reveal but what it often avoids.
So let's separate the transcendent experience from defining it later on.
I've done ayahuasca three times, and each time I felt like I wasn't in my body, or rather I couldn't tell the difference between where my body ended and the rest of the room and the people in it and the music began.
Something similar, though admittedly not as intense, occurred to me in great vinyasa classes.
I was part of everything, the movement, the music, the mat, the instructor, everyone around me.
And those experiences are really powerful.
And during flow states, everything else disappears, which makes sense given that research into flow has shown that the part of the brain responsible for the ego center gets turned off, or at least tamped down in certain situations.
So my contention with the broader spiritual community and language around it is this.
I was reading an article, and I've linked to it in the show notes, about how Earth energy is huge with the younger generation.
Now, a quarter of Americans are now religiously unaffiliated, and when you get to the age group of 18-29 year olds, it's 38%.
But in that age group, a whopping 73% says houses of worship could keep out of political matters.
And this is the same age group that's really getting into things like astrology and crystals and Reiki and shamanism.
So, on one level, sure, churches that are enjoying tax-free status should not endorse political candidates.
Some do, but I completely agree that they shouldn't.
But what we're discussing here isn't new, and it's something I've been critical of for decades.
This sort of lack of political engagement by those chasing peak experiences in transcendental states through spiritual practices.
Now again, a lot of the younger generation is really involved in climate change activism, for example, so this criticism isn't aimed at those sorts of movements.
What I'm talking about is this general vibe I get from some of the spiritual community, which is basically, leave me alone with all that political stuff.
I just want to do me.
And this is the goop theory, right?
The self-help, the self-always-me looking inward that is the real problem.
And this is, sadly, the conditions that led to the conspiritualist's swell in the first place.
I'm tired about worrying about all these society things.
I just want to feel better.
And on one level, I do get it.
My mental health isn't always the best doing all the research for this podcast.
Getting into ground wars by Anons on Twitter who yell at me because they still cling to the idea that vaccines cause autism is tiring.
Watching JP Sears do his thousandth trans bigotry video is fucking exhausting.
I have my own self-care routines, but I'm also aware that too much emphasis on me isn't really that healthy either.
I live in a society, one in which anti-democratic norms are being laid out as we speak, and tuning out of that reality in hope of getting to some spiritual state Isn't really that helpful.
I think sometimes people forget or aren't even aware of the fact that living in a democratic republic, as we do in America, has a set of privileges that come with it, and that if we don't protect them and pay attention to them, we can very easily lose them, therefore making the spiritual search that much harder because we have to worry about a whole host of other issues that we're seeing play out on a daily basis.
And don't get me wrong on the larger point, the connection we feel with one another and with nature is really important.
But I feel like so much of what I see passing for spirituality is really just an overinflated sense of self.
Being able to have transcended experiences is a bonus for inhabiting these bodies.
Thinking we're in any way a special animal lifted above all the others, that's where my radar goes off.
Humans are possibly the most destructive and violent animal ever born from this soil.
We collectively kill over 100 billion land animals every year and then forget about the oceans.
And that's either for food, or to expand our territory, or to mine those minerals in your phone in your pocket, or to fuel the car you're going to drive later.
And if you avoid all those things, cool.
I mean, we all make our decisions on how to live.
I think a number of people really put their spiritual principles to work for the good.
I'm not criticizing that, and I appreciate those people.
If you really believe something and follow through with it, that's great, even if I don't agree with it.
There's something honorable about living your beliefs.
But at times, thinking that because you live in such a way that others aren't living up to, that creates its own set of problems.
I've never come across a benevolent authoritarian in my life, and religions and spiritual practices can, at their worst, breed an inordinate amount of prejudice and bigotry.
Now at its best, eco-spirituality makes a lot of sense.
Honoring the environment and the natural forces of our planet is a wonderful means of connection.
I recently booked my first vacation since before the pandemic, and my wife and I plan on doing just that, getting off the grid a bit, offline, and enjoying nature.
As one person commented in the Nature Spirituality article that I'm referencing, quote, with nature there is something coming back to you.
These things are alive, and connecting with them can energize you.
I mean, it's pretty basic, but given how far away from this connection we've grown, I understand the usefulness of that reminder.
And I don't view that in any way contradictory to atheism.
In a sense, this is all nature that we're surrounded by.
Even the technologies we use come from natural sources, albeit we do have a knack for altering chemistry and creating novel compounds from it.
In some ways, you can connect anything to a spiritual practice, and that can be done in such a way without needing an unexplainable intervention.
I would argue we have our hands full with everything around us as it is without needing to add anything extra into the mix or to worry much about what can't be explained.
Sometimes, as the old adage goes, a mountain is just a mountain, so enjoy it.
So, spiritual materialists.
Sadly, materialism—and this isn't desiring material things, but believing that nothing exists beyond matter—it's a slur in spiritual circles, and that's too bad given how much is left to learn about who we are and the world around us.
To me, curiosity isn't stopping where awareness ends, but continuing to seek.
Kind of like how Catherine May framed it a few minutes ago.
As the physicist and wonderful orator Richard Feynman once said, the thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting.
The part that doesn't go according to what you expected.
Now should you think he's advocating for mysticism?
A few pages later he writes in his essay, and his essay is called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
He continues, It's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
And that's a good summation of what I dislike most about certain spiritual adherents.
The idea that their mysticism is doctrine.
I'm open to pretty much any and all claims, but the burden of proof must remain with the one who's making that claim.
And if the claim is, we'll never know, my response is always, let's see.
So, in summation of all this, I'll leave you with a quote from V.S.
Ramachandran that I turn back often just to read because it really captures the beauty of the process of investigation.
It's from his exceptional book, The Telltale Brain, A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human, and it is my atheist guide to spirituality.
There is a widespread fear among scholars in the humanities and arts that science may someday take over their discipline and deprive them of employment, a syndrome I have dubbed Neuron Envy.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our appreciation of Shakespeare is not diminished by the existence of a universal grammar or Chomskyan deep structure underlying all languages.
Nor should the diamond you are about to give your lover lose its radiance or romance if you tell her that it is made of carbon and was forged in the bowels of the Earth when the solar system was born.
