Here Lies The Heart: Mercedes de Acosta and Ramana Maharshi

Descended from the legendary Dukes of Alba, daughter in a wealthy Cuban family, Mercedes de Acosta was born in 1893 in New York, raised near Fifth Avenue, and had a beautiful sister Rita de Acosta who was a model for artists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. Married to painter Abram Poole, Mercedes was socialite, poet, playwright, Hollywood set and costume designer as well as script writer. She knew many of the greats of her day: Bessie Marbury, Rodin, Edith Wharton, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Elenora Duse, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Maxwell, and Krishnamurti. Near the end of her life, she met and befriended Andy Warhol, and introduced him to many of the people who would count in his career.

Consuelo (Hatmaker) Sides, whose husband had been the World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser, accompanied Mercedes on her passage to India. After arriving, de Acosta met former President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Margaret, a devotee at Sri Aurobindo's ashram.

Ramesh Balsekar's Snake Oil; Jean Klein's Antidote

Two pieces, one on brain science, the other on Neo-Adviata, are included together here as they are both topically related to the question of self.

Memes, Genes, and God

Memes, Genes, and God

Originally proposed in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, 1976, memes can be defined as any self-referential belief system with inherent instructions for its own propagation. As Dawkins explained, they can be "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. . . . . As [Dawkins'] colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up . . . 'Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically'."

Memes are analogues for genes, which is to say they are analogues for natural selection. The two may reinforce one another or come into competition. Celibacy is a meme but as a gene has no biological survival value, although culturally it may have such value. Priests or nuns transmit the meme to young boys or girls who are trying to make a life choice. Suppose the celibacy meme made better priests and nuns because they are not distracted by family duties. If this supposition is true, then celibacy does have better cultural survival value. On the other hand, a gene for celibacy almost by definition would not produce celibate offspring. Rather, no offspring would ensue from it.

Like genes, memes rest on one fundamental principle. All life evolves by varying survival abilities of replicating entities.

When we die we leave behind memes and genes. Of the two, our genes will be forgotten in three generations. Our child, maybe our grandchild, can bear a resemblance to us in face or musical talent, but our characteristics soon become negligible in succeeding generations. If we have memes such as Shakespeare's we become part of deathless literature. The same can be said for Einstein, Socrates, or Leonardo da Vinci.

Dawkins and other meme theorists regard religious memes as dangerous to human futurity. The idea of God is a particularly strong meme, and has persisted from before recorded history until the present day. It has extremely high survival value. According to Dawkins, its survival results from its psychological appeal. He says that it "provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. . . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture."

Here, Dawkins is bent by his Western understanding. Some, as in Christianity and Islam, claim to have the one true meme. It and it alone must be propagated at the risk of damnation by God. He doesn't understand that Buddhist memes make no claim to exclusivity and Hindu memes espouse tolerance.

When Dawkins says religious memes provide "a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence," he reveals a rather rudimentary understanding. Superficially plausible? Without Dawkins' intensive study, meditation, and effort, Buddha's teachings would not be immediately accessible to him because Buddha speaks of the quality of various experiences. Science tends to ignore the qualities of experiences and assumes all experience to be the same for its purposes. Once studied, pondered, and filtered through life experiences, the implications of Buddha's teachings open an entirely new way of seeing, one which reveals the flaws in conventional world views, particularly those which assume all experience is equal and only objective observation is necessary. Those views are superficial. (See the discussion of experience quality in Cartesian anxiety: Francisco Varela, 6 January.)

Dawkins would attach little or no credence to people such as Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, or medieval Germans, Meister Eckhart or Jacob Boem as they all spoke about what might be called the "God meme." The single interesting facet of their contribution has much to do with all memes, however.

Each of them, Nisargadatta, Maharshi, Eckhart, and Boem, said that human beings can reach a point when mimesis is realized as empty phenomena. That is, they observed that the mind replicates as its natural function, but that this replication can be seen through.

This implies that the "God meme" has a basis not in superstition, but in an intuitive, innate human recognition, a recognition that mimetics derives from the source of all memes. To determine that, of course, Dawkins and others must learn attitudes, mental skills and concentration currently unknown to them; they must stop theorizing and immerse themselves in an initially alien perspective in order to experience directly whether the "God meme" is superstition or not.

From memes to genes. Dawkins would have no problem if I said that individual organisms, "selfish" or not, reveal a compulsion to perpetuate their genes and that this compulsion is a dynamic of biological regularities not apparent in an isolated system. The dynamic cannot be described in terms of DNA biochemistry. In fact, no definitive explanation can be found in any isolated system. Yet we observe among organisms the selfish gene, as Dawkins calls it.

Would he have a problem if I replace "a compulsion to perpetuate their genes" with a phrase about a compulsion to seek God? The only difference between accepting one statement and rejecting the other is not logic but mind set.*
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* ". . . I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking simply as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind. . ." Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond

Meme theory is not a science, nor at present has much chance of becoming one, although it does provoke stimulating and lively discussion.

Free Will Illusion: Goswami, Balsekar, Benjamin Libet

The Illusion of Free Will: Physicist Amit Goswami, Sage Ramesh Balsekar, and Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet

Balsekar: [On free choice:] A personal awareness of that choice comes about 1/2 second later than a "readiness potentia" that appears in the brain wave, per brain surgeon Benjamin Libet. Thus there can be no free will, that most precious "possession" in the West. The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi said the same thing. You see the way I interpret it, in simple language, is this. In the ocean of consciousness there are possibilities. And quantum mechanics as I understand it, what is going to happen then is not really known. . . . And in that pool of consciousness which particular possibility becomes a fact, is not known. So if I say, "I have a thought," this means, as I understand it, what it really means is that thought has occurred half a second before I say, "it is my thought."

Goswami: That's right. That identity takes half a second to come about.

Balsekar: My interpretation as a layman is this . . . that a thought comes as one of the actualities from the pool of possibilities, and what comes from the pool of possibilities is outside my control, there is nothing I can do. And that thought arises, the brain reacts to that thought, and the reaction of the brain is what I choose to call my action, whereas it is not my reaction. It is a reaction of the brain to a thought that occurred a half-second earlier. Which I say is my thought!

Goswami: One can say that there is a choosing consciousness but certainly that's not the ego function.

Balsekar: Yes. Quite. So from the pool of consciousness, consciousness selects a particular thought.

Goswami: And that consciousness is what we variously call God, or the universal God.

Balsekar: On this particular thing, would you like to expand it? As it says, "the most prized possession of the West."

Goswami: I'd like to just make the Western view a little bit more palatable, by saying that the West does not make a complete mistake of this, because the very good thinkers of the West recognize that the action of free will is actually the action of surrender. There is action of free will by the human because human beings are separate from God, so the only way the only status the human being can have is to surrender to God's will. And there is no real distinction because there is only one world operating, so as soon as we learn to surrender then we are actually accepting free will.

Balsekar: So that means, what you are really surrendering is your concept of living . . . isn't it? What else do you have to surrender, what capital do you have to surrender to God from whom you have received everything? You have only the concept that you have free will to surrender. So that is why I often say, my only point is that nothing is in your control. Anything that happens is part of the impersonal functioning of the totality of consciousness, or the will of God.

Goswami: Libet is a very good neurophysiologist. He had done another experiment, related to the other experiment which shows clearly what you are saying. First of all, people are asked to will to raise their hand when they choose. So they will to raise their hand. Of course as indicated by the other experiment, half a second before they are willing, the experimenter looking at the EEG machine of course already knows that. But let me tell you. Then he said, "even after you become aware of your willing, try to see if you can stop yourself from raising your hand". So they did the experiment, and they found that when they were given the choice of negating the action, they could do it. So the conclusion is that the only little amount of escape hatch that consciousness retains in a state of identification with the ego is the ability to say no to a conditioned action. There is no free will there. We can stop ourselves even at that ego identification. More from The Online Bulletin of Science Within Consciousness
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My comments: Given that, as Libet's experiments suggest, the sense of conscious will is illusory, what then? His findings have implications for both belief in conscious will and for disbelief. Conditioning changes, depending on belief or disbelief. Belief in the sense begets one kind of conditioning; disbelief, another. Belief that one does have conscious will has brought about the conditions which provided for technological and political advances of the West. The essential point: even if conscious will is an illusion, belief or disbelief in conscious will has consequences conditioned by mind set toward the issue. These conditioned consequences shape individual lives and whole cultures.

Apart from illusions, the question of belief value arises. If something is judged as illusory, does that mean it is not valuable? It certainly had evolutionary survival value. If valuable in the context of human effects, illusion or not, it profits humanity.

The effects of Shakespeare or an elegant mathematical formula can be regarded as illusory. (Eastern thinkers would brush aside such effects as part of the dream called life. This is not the Western temperament. In his later years, Mark Twain was deeply troubled by questions of reality, exploring them in his works. In The Mysterious Stranger, the story's conclusion yields a Western, not Eastern, perspective. He wrote, Dream bigger dreams and better.)

Also note that Balsekar says that Consciousness chooses ("selects a particular thought"). No chooser, only the sense of choosing: this concept need not be fatalistic, but taken in the context of Balsekar's other writings it must be construed as fatalistic. Balsekar has said that his life has already been "chalked up."

But Quantum Theory indicates no fatalism in the universe. Rather, its evidence reveals indeterminism (Bohr) or determinism (Bohm), depending on the theorist, and this is an entirely different understanding. Nothing is already "chalked up." To use Balsekar's concept that Consciousness chooses, one can also infer that choice occurs in the moment, that nothing is predetermined. (See Daniel Dennett and choice machines, 8 January article above.)

Goswami points out that Libet's subjects can negate a hand's rising, "telling" it not to rise. This ability to negate an action is significant in that it accords with Eastern teachings, which stress attention to one's thoughts, deeds, and movements. Attention is taught as the only escape from ignorance. With attention, one can be alert to thought, deeds, and movements; by this alertness, he can stop their arisings and eventually decondition himself.

Goswami says this negation in Libet's subjects is not free will. Why is it not? If he means actions are not initiated and freely selected out of a field of opportunity, yes, he is correct. But it can still be considered a form of free will in that it either ratifies or vetoes an action arising in the sequence of conditioning. (As a term, free will has become too all-encompassing.)