Unmasking the nature of reality

[A Christian friend recently asked me, "What is it that you believe now?" Tough question to give a short answer to. I could say, "I believe I am everything that exists, experiencing a state of separation from the full magnitude of what I am." Or I could say, "The universe is holographic in nature, like the Star Trek holodeck or The Matrix." I've tried those kinds of answers and I've seen eyebrows raise in an expression of bewilderment that seems to communicate, "How on earth did Darryl go from believing in Christ to this bizarre nonsense?" For what it's worth, I'm going to try and guide you step by step into my headspace.]

What is the true underlying nature of reality? What is my place in it? Does my life have meaning, or am I a cosmic accident? Are the answers to these questions found in religion, or is science where the real enlightenment lies? Is it even possible to know? What chance do I have of finding out? And where the hell do I even begin?

The first step is a willingness to unlearn what you’ve been taught, or more appropriately, what you’ve been conditioned to believe all your life. With hundreds of belief systems on Earth, the chances of you inheriting the right one, by virtue of geographical placement, are miniscule. If you were born in America, is Christianity true by virtue of the number of people around you who believe in it, or the number of times its ideas are repeated to you? If you were born in Iraq, is Islam true for the same reasons? Look around the world and you will find countless differing religions, each one confident of its superiority over all others, one generation indoctrinating the next. The thing that so few people dare to do is to step outside of the zeitgeist – the spirit of the age. But it’s what you have to do if you want to discover the real truth. No belief should ever be so sacred that we are not permitted to look critically at it and assess its worth.

The zeitgeist is not only religious in nature, but also infiltrates the arena of science. Science is concerned with what is definable and measurable. It’s all about weighing evidence and making rational deductions. When there is no evidence for something, it will not become a scientific fact. That is why science has little or nothing to say about ideas like God, or the soul, or the afterlife. And that’s fair. Those things seem to be outside the scope of measurement. I would guess this is why many scientists are atheists. They have decided that if there is no evidence for something, then they have no business believing in it. But therein lies the trap. Absence of proof is not necessarily proof of absence. And although science prides itself on making no assumptions, the entire discipline hangs on one colossal assumption – that the physical universe is the cornerstone from which we do our thinking. Matter is what matters. But if we’re willing to look closely at the presuppositions that shape our thinking, we might discover that we’ve been making deductions using the wrong set of presuppositions – that we have been unwary victims of the zeitgeist. One of the most important things I figured out was that the proper starting point for rational thought is not observation of the physical universe; first and foremost, it is observation of our own self-awareness, as I will attempt to show.

Having unlearned (or at least temporarily shelved) everything taught or imposed upon me by science and religion, I begin with the knowledge that I am a conscious being. I am self-aware. Let’s not even assume that I am a body. First and foremost, I am self-awareness. It appears that I have eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Five senses in total, allowing me to receive information from outside of myself. But already I’m making too many assumptions. Do I really see with my eyes? No. On closer inspection, my eyes receive information, convert it into electrical signals, and pass these to the visual cortex at the back of my brain. I see with my visual cortex, experiencing a bright world of colour and motion inside the absolute darkness of my skull, which no actual light can penetrate. If I pick up a pencil, I feel the pressure of it in my fingers. But I don’t, really. The nerves in my fingers transmit signals back to my brain, and my brain tells me that my fingers are touching something. Meanwhile, my eyes relay signals to my brain, showing me visual information about the object I’m touching. The principle to remember here is that you cannot get beyond your brain in order to prove the existence of the physical world. All the information is second hand.

Perhaps you think it should be taken as a given that the physical universe exists, by virtue of the rich and repetitive nature of our perceptions. But let’s remember that every night in bed we experience a five-sense environment in our dreams. Dreams are so lifelike that we usually believe them to be real for the duration of their experience, yet they have no physical substance. When we are awake and when we are dreaming, it is our consciousness that does the perceiving, not our physical senses. In truth, when we awake, we simply have no way of knowing whether we are connecting to a real physical universe, or merely a longer dream – one whose rules are more concrete, perhaps because it is a dream-world held together by the collective unconscious of the all those who share it. Either paradigm is possible, and neither provable.

We are perceivers and we can never get past our perceptions to discover the actuality of the universe. You can look out of the window and say, “The grass is green.” Are you sure? Did you ever consider that a cat or a lizard might see the grass in a different manner, since the structure of their eyes are quite different from a human’s. What right have I to say, “The universe really is the way I see it,” when I am perceiving the universe through the machinery of my body. Consider the bat, which is almost blind and much more reliant on a form of radar. Or the dog, who experiences an exotic realm of smells that we humans can barely imagine. Bodies are biological machines that perceive the universe in differing ways. The grass is only green when the body-machine interprets the data it receives in a certain manner.

We cannot be certain what the actuality of the universe is; we can only see it through our own particular lens. We can’t even know that the universe is genuinely physical in nature. Consider the analogy of the modern videogame. We can take part in adventures across city-sized maps, with amazingly detailed roads, buildings, and countless nooks and crannies for exploration. We can make our game character turn his head in any direction and watch the real-world laws of geometry playing out in two-dimensional space on the flatness of our television screens, beaming out texture, light and shadow. Once, I had a moment of clarity when I stood on a hillside, gazing down through the trees at a lake and a castle on the opposite side (in a game, that is). It was a picturesque scene, and in the real world it might have made me reach for my camera. And I thought, “No one else has stood on this precise spot and looked down the hill at this exact angle. Not even the game’s creators. The game is just too vast.” It struck me as profound that something so artistic – something that was just for me in this moment – could spring to life from nothing more than a rapid series of mathematical equations being processed inside my computer. In videogames we experience an interactive world of sight, sound and touch – a limited but spectacularly detailed facsimile of the physical world. The big question, then, is this: if we mere mortals are able to create this 3D experience inside a computer, have we any business assuming that our universe is truly 3D in its deepest essence, in its actuality? The three-dimensionality of a videogame is nothing more than binary ones and zeros flowing through electrical circuits, and yet the laws of physics in a game are as solid and dependable as the laws of physics in the real world. A game’s vistas, although not nearly as detailed as the real world, use the same mathematics of geometry, the same understanding of light and shadow. Put simply: the universe is made of mathematics.

Some people simply will not enter into this manner of thinking, because it seems repugnant that the universe should be telling us fibs about itself. But this is exactly what has already happened and continues to happen. Without any knowledge of astronomy and geometry, we started off believing the Earth was flat. Why? Because our experience told us it was flat. The human form is so tiny in relation to the magnitude of the Earth that we have no conscious awareness of moving over a curved surface as we go from place to place. Only when we started getting our heads around geometry, and noticing things like how the stars travel up the sky as we move towards them, could we begin to deduce that we were sitting on a big ball. When a cat sees its reflection in a mirror for the first time, it thinks it is looking at another cat, one that mimics its every move – until it learns to see through the lie. We’ve invented the hologram – images that stand out from their photographic paper screaming, “I have substance!” Yet wave your hand through one and there’s nothing there. The key question is whether you want to trust your experience or try to see the bigger picture.

The universe lies until you figure out the lies. Its purpose is not to tell you its innermost secrets. Its purpose is to provide consciousness with an experience. It is up to us to probe its nature, except most of us have been doing so from the wrong standpoint. We’ve assumed that it’s all real, when that realness – that three-dimensionality – may be nothing more than a stream of data, a matrix, a frequency to which our consciousness is tuned. Is Betelgeuse six hundred light-years away from Earth, or is it sitting right next to us, just another point on the data stream?

You may ask, “What difference does it make which view I take? Life is the same either way.” On the contrary, life is vastly different. If we use the physical universe as the cornerstone of our rational thinking, we can easily lose sight of the importance of our own self-awareness. When you look in at yourself from the outside, through the eyes of science, and you begin to understand the brain, the tendency is to explain away your own consciousness in purely physical terms – as if your consciousness is little more than a computer program performing a task. And yes, there is something very computer-like about our minds. All creatures, humans included, possess behaviour patterns: appetite, sexuality, testosterone, predatory instincts, maternal and paternal inclinations, etc. These things, and more, make us predictable to a certain extent. Similarly, a computer programmer can create an autonomous game character, imbue him with behaviour patterns, and place him into the game environment, where he will interact with it and behave as if he is self-aware. However, you would never say that such a character is genuinely self-aware. And yet you know that you are, in a manner that transcends any form of artificial intelligence. Science has never distinguished mind from self-awareness. The two are not the same. Mind is a brain-based faculty used by self-awareness. Science has fundamentally lost touch with the wonder of consciousness that we all experience. It has no place for such a thing because it cannot seem to grasp it and measure it. “No,” says science, “you cannot be immaterial consciousness interfacing with a brain. You’re just a brain.” And yet, where is this thing called self-awareness on any map of the brain? Nowhere to be found.

If you start from the deeper standpoint of using self-awareness as the cornerstone of your thinking, you end up with a vastly different perspective on the universe. For a start, the one thing you can be sure of is that you exist. As Rene Descarte said, “I think, therefore I am.” Everything else is under suspicion, because everything else is a perception. What this means is, if you want to believe in a physical universe, you have to take it on trust. If you want to believe it’s all a matrix, you have to take it on trust. In this predicament, what do you do with the scientific approach, when you suddenly realise you can’t use it to get anywhere? My answer to that is you use an almost forgotten little thing called intuition.

What do you sense the truth to be? The two most fundamental questions you should ask yourself are “What am I?” and “Where I am?” In my experience, asking those questions starts you on a wonderful journey of self-discovery that brings an end all to the bewilderment of living in the zeitgeist. For the scientifically minded person, the understanding that consciousness transcends matter opens up the genuine possibility of life after death and the mystery of whether our physical birth was really the beginning of our life. For the religious among us, it presents spirituality free from imposed dogmas that must never be questioned. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

(I recommend watching the following documentary for an easy-to-understand visual look at the nature of reality.)

Sex, porn, and the mind games played on children

[This is my second attempt at an essay on pornography. I’ve done this complete rewrite because (a) I felt the first essay was too way too long, (b) the practical side of it was in danger of being lost amid my spiritual meanderings, and (c) I’ve since had some fresh insights. To those who would criticise me for the essay below, please bear in mind that it doesn’t benefit me in the slightest to be this frank or transparent. The issues facing young people are very real, regardless of how jaw-dropping it might seem to those who have lived more sheltered lives. I say what I say only because I think it is helpful.]

Statistics at Family Safe Media state that the average age of exposure to pornography is eleven years. Take note, that’s the average age, not the lowest. It means that for every person who first encounters pornography at fourteen, there’s another who encounters it at eight. 90% of eight- to sixteen-year-olds say they have viewed pornography online, most while doing homework. 80% of fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds admit to having multiple exposures to hardcore pornography.

These statistics would have been radically different when I was growing up, for one prime reason: there was no such thing as the internet. Today, it’s quite common for parents to naively grant their children unrestricted internet access, often in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and this is clearly why the stats say what they say.

The topic of pornography is so unpleasant for some people that they feel it should be hushed up and never spoken of. On the opposite end of the spectrum there are those who enjoy pornography and feel there is no problem with it whatsoever. And others will settle for a stance somewhere in between. It strikes me that any worthwhile opinion on the morality of pornography should not be based on something as diverse as personal taste, or on a set of values that we’ve merely inherited without question from our family, social circle, or religion. Any worthwhile morality is based on considering the consequences of our actions for ourselves and others. So, I will be asking the question: what are the consequences of exposure to pornography?

There is a mind game that’s commonly played upon children today (being a guy, I’m speaking only for the guys here). You turn twelve or thirteen and your sexuality starts to awaken. On the one side you’ve got religion telling you that lust is a sin, so right away you’re associating your sexual desires with something shameful. But your sexuality is so powerful that you just can’t help these thoughts. The need for release leads you to discover masturbation, and before you know it, you’re a junkie to your own little in-built bio-chemical drug dealer. And you secretly indulge yourself, perhaps with the sense of some divine disapproval. Opposite religion, you’ve got the arena of pornography, readily accessible with a couple of clicks on your home computer. It’s calling out, “Come on in. The water’s fine.” And you’re curious, as any kid would be. Except it’s not just bare breasts and curvaceous bottoms that catch your attention. Quite by accident, you discover … kinkier stuff; stuff that gives you greater excitement, but feels that much more wrong; stuff that you don’t want anyone else to know you’re enjoying. After some struggling, you find an equilibrium of sorts. Sexual attraction draws you to pornography; fear of perversity lets it go so far and no further; need and guilt become uncomfortable bed partners, forever nudging each other. And life goes on, while you feel powerless and ashamed and bewildered. That is the situation that faces a typical modern pubescent teenage boy.

Christians in particular are eager to overcome the problem of addiction to pornography, but unfortunately it is often done from a polarised standpoint. The big mistake Christianity makes is to replace the addiction with impossible standards of behaviour, where it is seen as sinful to allow a single sexual thought to enter your head. This view is based entirely on a misinterpretation of something Jesus said in Matthew 5:28. “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Jesus was speaking specifically to married men with wives of their own. This is clear because he used the word “adultery.” If this had been a message intended for all, he would have said “fornication.” Also, notice it was a rebuke about actual intent towards real living, breathing women, not about our fantasy life. In a situation where you’re totally turned on by a girl, and an opportunity presents itself to have sex but you choose not to, that is the difference between so-called “lust” and the lust Jesus was talking about. Sexual attraction and intent are two different things. He was not criticising people for feeling sexual attraction to others; he was criticising people for the intent of mind that says, “I will have her.” Sexual attraction, in and of itself, is good. Yet Christianity often uses what Jesus said to bind Christians to impossible psychological goals. Impossible, because we are wired for sex. I mean, in a perfect sinless world, is a man supposed to experience his first ever erection on his marriage night? “Aargh! What’s happening to me!” It’s ridiculous. I’m sorry, but the “sex is dirty” attitudes that permeate Christianity have got to go. And nobody suffers more than Christian young people.

If you put aside for a moment everything you were taught or conditioned to believe about sex and just look at it for what it is, the truth is fairly obvious. Sex is nature’s way of making sure the human race continues. And nature’s method is really quite crude, if we’re honest. We can romanticise all we want, but nature is basically saying, “I am gonna make this the tastiest dish you ever had, so that you’ve no choice but to eat it.” If it were left up to free will alone, the population would be drastically smaller. As it is, nature constantly nags us to reproduce, whether we want to or not. Most people would never dream of injecting heroin into their veins, but nature uses exactly the same chemical pleasure principle to get us to do what it wants. Of course, we’re more than merely stimulus-response machines. We do have free will, however strongly it is influenced. We can choose what desires to fulfil and which to deny (although nagging nature always insists on making the latter uncomfortable for us).

Of course, there’s more to sex than just procreation, as anyone who has experienced sexual intimacy knows. Sexual intimacy allows you to connect with another person in a deep and fulfilling way. I hesitate to spiritualise it, but it is something way beyond a mere bodily exchange of fluids. In a relationship of this kind, you can feel so connected to another person that the unexpected ending of the partnership can be a devastating blow that takes years to recover from. In naturalistic terms, this bond occurs so that children are born into a stable family. I don’t place any mystical significance whatsoever to being “in love,” or finding “the one,” nor do I think that people who choose to be single are necessarily leading a less than fulfilled life. I simply suggest that the “sex, love and babies” package deal is what nature intended.

In times past, we had a natural, workable relationship with our own sexuality. We weren’t constantly being stimulated day in and day out. We simply hit puberty, chased members of the opposite sex until we found mutual attraction, fell in love, hooked up, and started a family. In other words, we did what we were designed to do. But something happened to affect that balanced situation. It began with the invention of the camera, reached fever pitch with the advent of the mass media, and reached critical mass with the internet. Sex is simply everywhere nowadays. You turn on the TV and the advertisements are using sex to sell anything from cars to toothbrushes. After 9.00 p.m. things are really allowed to get steamy and you might catch an erotic programme, or an unexpected sex scene in a mainstream movie. But the internet is where the real action is. A flashing cursor underneath the word “Google” and a switched-on curiosity is just one small step away from an explosion of pornographic photos and videos.

This is where I notice the first real, tangible problem with porn. The invention of pornography is to the human what the invention of the electric light-bulb was to the moth. There are a few theories about why moths head towards lights. One is that they use the moon as a means of navigating. Without going into detail, suffice it to say we’ve all had the experience of switching on the bathroom light at night and seeing a confused moth flapping against the glass in a persistent but futile attempt to come in. Life was easier and less confusing for the moth before the invention of the light-bulb. His instinct tells him, “It’s the moon. Go that-a-way.” Smack! And his tiny little brain can’t comprehend the fact that he’s not in the open fields any more; he’s in the big city and it’s wall-to-wall with misdirection. He sees the moon everywhere, but can’t understand it’s not the moon.

Porn is exactly the same kind of misdirection. Sexuality was designed to produce children whilst rooting you in a deeply satisfying bond of love with another human being. Porn simply can’t fulfil what your sexuality was designed for. As such, disappointment and unfulfillment are built into it. The potential of human sexuality for love and creation is reduced to a lonely, loveless orgasm, repeated ad infinitum.

Pornography captivates men because women captivate men. Women are supposed to. But women are not on tap in the way that porn is. It is so easy for your entire sexual attention to be consumed by pornography, to the point where you give up on pursuing real relationships, settling instead for a substitute. Like the moth, we no longer see the moon because we’ve been mesmerised by the electric lights. The challenging question (which is impossible to answer, but worth thinking about) is this: how many people are alone who would otherwise be in fulfilling sexual relationships if not for the misdirection of pornography?

What of the actual content of pornography? This is where it gets difficult to talk about because it’s often not pretty, and people can feel soiled by the mere verbalisation of sexual ideas they have never before heard of. Pornography is not (as is sometimes claimed) a celebration of female beauty. Pornography is designed to tap into something quite bizarre and difficult to explain about human sexuality: the ease with which it can be perverted.

Interest in pornography often starts out as innocent curiosity about the opposite sex. The trouble is, you can’t easily control what you encounter, and you can’t always predict your own reaction to it. Maybe all you’re looking for are some nice pictures of some celebrity or other posing with her kit off, but sooner or later, you’re going to come across something a little naughtier that invokes a sense of excitement because it’s forbidden. I’ll give you a fairly tame example, one that isn’t even considered porn. Several years ago, a pop duo called t.A.T.u. emerged from Russia, consisting of two teenage girls who were apparently lesbian lovers (likely just a marketing tactic). In the music video for one of their songs, they kissed each other sensuously while dressed in school uniforms. Not only were the girls lesbians, they were schoolgirl lesbians – the forbiddenness of same-sex relationships and the forbiddenness of slightly underage sex. Neither of these details were by accident; the marketing people behind the band knew exactly what they were doing, just like pornographers know exactly what they’re doing.

Since pornography is unfulfilling by its nature, it acts like a drug that over time requires ever greater stimulation to work. As best I understand it, pornography seems to encourage us to mix sexual desire with negative emotions in order to get a bigger hit. On one end of the scale this is illustrated by porn featuring two people doing something a bit naughty. On the other end it’s women being degraded and abused in horrible ways. If a person new to pornography was immediately shown the nasty stuff, he might run a mile from it. But give him exposure by degrees and it’s another story. When what you’re looking at becomes more mundane and unexciting the more you are exposed to it, the quest for greater stimulation leads to ever darker forms of pornography.

How do you discern what’s normal from what’s perverse? Is it all subjective? I would suggest one simple rule: if you find yourself enjoying the thought of doing something to a woman that you wouldn’t dream of doing to her in a real life relationship context, then you’re perverting your sexuality. The choice is yours, of course. If you want, you can go down that road, but accept the consequences. You can embrace the dichotomy of treating women with respect in public whilst privately wishing you lived in a world where you could do all sorts of things to them without consequence to them and yourself. That’s not the kind of person I want to be.

It’s also worth asking the question, what turns a man into a rapist or a child molester? The sinister mentalities of such people don’t spring into existence from out of nowhere, as if they were one day suddenly possessed by the devil. I think the ongoing indulgence in pornography plays a key part in the lives of people who end up committing sexual crimes against others. You can’t feed your dark side and expect it not to grow.

The crux of my whole objection to pornography is this: porn changes you. If you think you can navigate those waters safely, think again. There’s an adult DVD website that features its own chart of top-selling pornographic movies, and at any time the list will consist of titles featuring all kinds of perverse sexual practices. These are not DVDs stocked to cater for a minority of men with particular fetishes. These are the top sellers! This is clear evidence that the more you indulge in pornography, the further you will slip towards liking the really nasty stuff.

If there’s any doubt about the truth of what I’m saying, there’s one experience you can have that will clear it up. And that is to fall in love with someone, or even to simply recall what it once felt like to be in love with someone. The kind of sexual thoughts you have towards this person are so different from the things you gravitate towards in front of your computer screen. Being in love makes the scales fall from your eyes, bringing the two opposing views of sexuality into sharp focus and showing how utterly different they are, and how horrific one of them is.

When you understand what you’re dealing with, it provides greatest motivation for staying away from pornography. Be wise.

Autographed books to aid Alzheimer’s Society

My book reviewing buddy Mick Halpin has accumulated quite a few autographed novels over the years, with an emphasis on Irish crime authors. He’s currently auctioning them on eBay and donating the proceeds to the Alzheimer’s Society. Check it out …

[ Link ]

The religious pulse of the planet

I’ve just finished watching an excellent documentary series on TV called Around the World in 80 Faiths. Anglican minister Peter Owen Jones took a year off from his parish to travel around the world and to, as he puts is, “Take the religious pulse of the planet.”

If I were still a Christian, I would have been shocked by his willingness to participate in some of the rituals. He did everything from drinking ayahuasca in a Brazilian rainforest to joining in naked at an urban witchcraft ceremony. As an ex-Christian, I have no judgement whatsoever to make on the man. In fact, his willingness to participate made it all the more fascinating.

The documentary looked at the major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, various branches of these, cults, and other little known faiths.

I came away from the series with the realisation that you could end up as anything, depending on nothing more than where you were lucky or unlucky enough to be born. I finally started to appreciate what people mean when they dismiss Christianity with words like “Everybody has their own beliefs.” When you have an appreciation of the sheer diversity of religions on Earth, and the sheer commitment that all these people have to their own way being the true way, you start to see how incredibly tiny your own religious experience is in comparison to the experiences of others.

I feel a sense of sadness that the world is in this state of diversity, because if the idea of objective truth has any validity, then something somewhere is true. Of course, as soon as I say that, all of those religions are raising their hands claiming, “It’s us!”

Sadly, religions seem happy to survive and advance by presenting only a single version of reality to the young (indoctrination) and encouraging the herd mentality in all (social conditioning). Some also back that up with terror tactics – viewing life in an alternative way results in immediate damnation. Rarely does the subject of evidence come up.

If I’ve learned one thing from the mammoth task of finding the real truth in the haystack of religion, it’s the sheer improbability of finding it. And that, for me, means that I simply cannot take religion seriously.

You pick your religion (although usually it’s picked for you) and you bet your life on it. You hope that your way is the true way, and that your faith will see you safely through the mystery of death into the arms of God (or to your next life, or whatever).

I refuse to be indoctrinated and conditioned. I refuse to assume that the religion of my birthplace is the one true way. I cannot take seriously any threats of judgement without some serious weight of evidence to back it up.

The cure for religious indoctrination and conditioning is to reclaim your right to think your own thoughts – to always ask the question “Why?” when you don’t understand or don’t agree, and to never let yourself be guided by so-called “truths” dictated by nothing more than strength of numbers. Only then will your thoughts and decisions be your own, and only then will you have a hope in hell of discovering any genuine truth.