The Good and the Pleasant

In the Upanishad "Katha," which I have just read, we learn

"The good is one thing; the pleasant is another. The two, differing in their ends, both prompt to action. Blessed are they that choose the good; they that choose the pleasant miss the goal. Both the good and the pleasant present themselves to men. The wise, having examined both, distinguish the one from the other. The wise prefer the good to the pleasant; the foolish, driven by fleshly desires, prefer the pleasant to the good."

"Is this true?" I 've been thinking to myself on subway travels throughout the city. Is there a good and a pleasant? Yea, the answer has come back to me. It seems that our animal desires, when not tied to a higher purpose or goal, do not often lead to any experience that truly makes us grow as humans. Of course, because they are actions that are connected to our most base impulses, so how can they make us grow? That being said, how about actions that are not base, how about actions such as sitting around a watching television? Again, mostly the pleasant? What is good about watching much of the television out there? Of course, here we also have the component that on some level we are learning about our universe, our cultures, our world. This is often a tiny component, but it is still there.

But, there is a scale here. I must say that this world seems more complex than black and white. Those things , those activities and actions that we could consider completely "good," coming from peace I would say, and bringing peace, coming from knowledge and bringing forth knowledge are small. It is a goal to reach. Yet, from my vantage point I wonder how my world would look without the pleasant. Without travel, without trying various foods and music. All these things, from the vantage point of the awakened mind, would no doubt seem simply pleasant. But, these experiences can also open doorways in one's mind and heart that lead to higher places. This can obviously be a crutch, but I also wonder if the good must be exclusionary of the pleasant.

Does one who lives his or her life in pursuit of the good, automatically abandon the pleasant, or just focus on the good and renounce the goals of the plesant? The wise prefer the good to the pleasant, claims the Upanishad. Perhaps this means that the wise still enjoy some things that are merely pleasant, but would not sacrifice the good to experience them. I have a ways to go even in this respect. However, the enjoyment of the good is always deeper and more meaningful than the pleasant.

Am I being too generous to the pleasant? Maybe. But still, the world is one of enormous complexity and depth. It seems odd that the awakened mind and heart would not find this of interest and joy even if they did not pursue it. But perhaps the reason I say this is because I am still in Plato's cave and can not fathom what it truly means to awaken.

Wudu

Working as a public school teacher and trying to balance personal time, project time, hang time, etc. is a very difficult task and the whole shebang so to speak can seem as stressful as the actual work itself. Being a practitoner in a Sufi group, I follow the Islamic act of purifcation before prayers, known as wudu. In this act, one washes several extremities with water in order to enter into a purified state for praying to God. In Islamic teaching there is a heavy emphasis on the use of this act to remove polluted acts and pollution from the body. Sufi teachings often discuss purifying the mind as the higher meaning in this act. But today I found it purifying in a different way, that of setting up a boundary between relative time and ultimate time, or we might say between all that takes place in those two different time periods. Like the ringing of a meditation bell, the washing becomes a clarion call to remove oneself from the confusion and stress of relative time and enter into a place where those elements are only mere plays in the culturally-conditioned mind. I also rang my meditation bell today as I entered into a meager but peaceful couple minutes of stillness. The bell chimed a shift, collapsing all relative reality into a stream of one note, one taste. The thoughts that danced on that note arose and collapsed as simply shadows. Now, I feel a knot in my stomach again. Time for cleansing once more.

The Plank Scale and the Afterlife

A fairly recent article on how the Planck scale may relate to consciousness and the afterlife I felt would be an excellent first post for this blog. One interesting facet of discussing the afterlife, as with many other components of spirituality in a post-modern age in the West is that we can now discuss whether or not such a reality exists separate from the question of whether or not God exists. Certainly, it is now quite easy to not believe in God but believe in the continued existence of the soul or whatever word we wish to use. However, we still run into the same problems for belief; lack of evidence and belief based more on ancient texts and wishful thinking as opposed to concrete indicators. Still, absence of evidence, as Huston Smith has said, is not the same thing as evidence of absence.

Most talk in the very small group of researchers who are looking into afterlife experiences focus on reincarnation or near-death experiences. But one interesting idea discussed in the June 2007 issue of Discover comes from researchers Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose who put forth the idea that consciousness results from quantum-level processes that occur in microtubules in brain cells. At this level, the Planck scale, we are now at a level that is almost unthinkably tiney. Hameroff noted, that it is possible that when the brain stops:

“quantum information at the Planck scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of functional unit, maybe indefinitely. If the patient is revived, the information gets picked back up again.”

This notion of some continued survival of consciousness that is not the soul per se, nor something we could put our fingers on during waking consciousness appears to have the most in common with certain Buddhist concepts of the afterlife. According to Penrose, all consciousness may have been established at the moment of the Big Bang. As such, the deepest level of our consciousness, according to this hypothesis, is the same thing that connects us to the rest of the universe and each other. We might tie it to what is called pure awareness. in some mystical traditions. On a relative level, this individual consciousness might reincarnate, Hameroff notes in that:

“maybe it gets picked back up again by someone someday.”

It is certainly an interesting notion where science and predominately Buddhist understandings of the nature of consciousness and the afterlife merge. Such a continued consciousness is hard to imagine, butit makes more sense to me than some sort of continued existence in a very human-like heaven or hell-like realm unless we grant that this Planck-level consciousness can also at some level do what our brains do and, as some Sufis might say, experience such realms of afterlife as another dream, just as our relative existence on Earth is a dream.

What would be most interesting to me is whether such a Planck-level “container” of consciousness is malleable or not. In other words, if this hypothesis was somehow proven to have merit, would this field of consciousness be different in someone who had lived a peaceful, meditative life as opposed to someone who did not. In other words, would our capacity for peace and goodness in this life make a difference in a post-life awareness? There seems to be good reasons to suggest that being at peace on many levels makes day-to-day-life far more rich. However, certainly if we were to know that our continued post-life awareness would be enhanced by meditation and spiritual practice, it would add another level of reasons to pursue such activities. Another questions would be from the perspective of a non-dualist who may ask is this Plankc-level of consciousness the subtle awareness that permeates everything and has nothing individulistic about it, or would it be somehow still relative to the ultimate "One."