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We are, as evolved animals, highly driven by our desire to survive. And that desire relates directly to why we want to reduce or eliminate ambiguity.  We want to know what’s going on.  Because ‘knowing’ means we are more likely to survive.  And that was deeply significant back in harsher evolutionary times.

We are evolutionarily driven to ‘know’.  We are driven to think that we have, or can obtain, actionable answers to the questions that confront us.  

But, if we look at our real situation in this existence, that desire is a heavy, if not an impossible, load to carry.  

The fact is that we are recently evolved semi-smart biological monkey-like creatures who have only existed, as we are now, for about 200,000 years.  

And the planet has been around for nearly 3.5 billion years.  

And this universe has been around for approximately 13 billion years old.

So, we’ve just barely arrived here in this existence and we find ourselves, with our limited minds, gazing out at an existences which is vastly more complex than we are even remotely capable of understanding.  

And yet, here we are, driven by our biological survival urges to try and understand it all and come up with actionable answers.

It would be quite funny, except for the fact that we take ourselves so seriously.

—–

My friend, I admire your incessant yearning to ‘understand’.  But I do not think it is within our possible grasp to be able to come to any final answers about the mysteries around us.

As an illustration of our inadequacy consider how often we employ the simplistic ‘Either-Or’ logic tool.  

How often do we try to divide and conquer the world around us with it?  

We say, ‘It is either this or it is that.’  

We say, ‘It is either Dual or it is Non-Dual.’  

We say, ‘We either have Absolute Free-Will or everything is Deterministic and we have no agency at all.’

Instead, the reality around us is much better understood by seeing it through the Both/And lens.

It isn’t this or that – it is both.  It is all moving, together, seamlessly (as John Troy likes to say).  

It is only our limited human minds that feel the need to break existence into separate nameable pieces in order to try to make sense of it.

So, we strain and we struggle to solve the big questions about existence and Free-Will and Duality and such things because our evolutionary heritage makes us anxious when we feel that we do not understand.  

Not understanding the situation in earlier evolutionary times was often a death sentence.

We want simple, actionable answers and we think that if we have them, then peace will descend upon us and life will be good.

But it is impossible.

There’s a lot we can understand.  But ‘everything’ is not among them.   

And, no matter how much we do understand, ‘everything’ will not be among them.

Accepting this reality gives us an entirely new way of proceeding.

Know that the more you understand, the more you will be able to understand how little you know.

Know that the more you understand about yourself and existence, the greater peace you will experience.   But the peace will not come from having final answers.  It will come from a deep acceptance of the fact that there is no end to the road.

Think of yourself as a frame moving forward through time.   New things occur everyday and they enter your frame as experiences and new understandings.  Everyday, if you pull the summation lever down, you will have a new ‘best’ idea of what you understand up until now.  

But know that it will be new and different sum again tomorrow.  There is no end to it.  Going with this and saying ‘yes’ to it is the best way – because it is a reflection of how things are.  Things are, from our very limited POV, always growing, expanding, changing and evolving.  The urge to come up with final answers is NOT our friend.  It is driven by evolutionary fear.

If you live or if you die.  If you never understand another new thing or if you understand 10,000 new things, it doesn’t matter to existence.  It just is.  The only one who cares is you.   And the only thing you have of any real value is the time you still have left between this moment and when you die.  

Don’t decide how it is, open yourself to new understandings, move into future and into experiences that get more and more interesting as you go and give up thinking it has to ‘do’ something, mean something, achieve something or anything else.  It just is as it is.  Say ‘yes’ to it and enjoy it.

Agency

The idea that we do not have agency is a hard one to pick apart. Especially, when we’ve heard that the universe is all one thing and that the deterministic laws of the universe apply everywhere.

But, it isn’t so.

Sometimes energy, when it is in excess, can be used to build up organization and structure faster than the Second Law can tear it down. Life, itself, is a clear example of this. And we are not short of energy here on Earth where it rains down from our sun.

In general, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that energy will dissipate as we work towards the heat death of the universe. But in specific situations, for a time, the reverse can happen, locally. To see this in action, consider the case of self-replicating molecules, which are very specific and rare arrangements of matter. Self-replicating molecules can avoid the degradation’s of the Second Law if they do these things:

• Harvest the energy necessary to drive the reaction
• Access the materials necessary build the new replicant
• Remain in the necessary environment conditions such as temperature and pH

Once the self-replication process starts, it continues indefinitely; so long as the required conditions continue to be met. Self-Replicating Molecules were the first crack in the edifice of Determinism. I.e., the fact that self-replicating molecules can avoid the degradation of the Second Law and thus maintain ordered structures; insulated from deterministic forces. Once self-replication is underway, it is not a static thing which just repeats itself over and over.

Rather, competition among the replicants, changing conditions and selection processes will naturally occur among the replicators. And it is during these events that significant changes and improvements can occur. And these changes and improvements, in turn, can open up new, additional possibility spaces.

The net effect of these processes of change is a constant improvement of function. I.e., the replicants get better at withstanding the degradation’s of the Second Law. This is an example of Non-Fragility. I.e., a process that does not merely withstand shocks but actually improves because of them.

The early self-replicating molecules are strongly thought to have evolved into biology as we know it today. The causal link seem obvious because biological life-forms are just more complex forms of self-replicators. Exactly how self-replicating molecules transitioned to become biological self-replicators is not known. Nick Lane, a British Biochemist, has written some excellent books which speculate about the possible transition pathways from self-replicating molecules to the earliest cellular life forms. Take a look if you’d like to delve deeper into this topic.

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Question
and
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58999183-transformer

From here forward in this essay, we are going to take it as a given that biological self-replication evolved from the earlier molecular self-replication. So all references hereinafter to replication or self-replication will now be biological references.

What we’ve described about self-replication doesn’t seem particularly complicated. But the significance of this emergent property is simply impossible to over emphasize.

It is the core mechanism of all biological evolution and life. And so long as energy, materials and suitable conditions remain available, replication will continue.

But the most significant advances in self-replication come about, in general, through increased complexity.

Why?

Because additional complexity often serves as the spawning ground for new capabilities. And new capabilities, by their very nature, open up new possibility spaces of their own.

Consider the fish that learned to breath and crawled out of the sea to find the empty continents waiting. The feathered dinosaurs that learned to fly and found untouched aerial niches waiting to exploit. And the animals which developed warm bloodedness and found new territories and climates to occupy. Increasing complexity and the opening of new possibility spaces go inevitably together.

Here’s an image depicting the advance of self-replicating biological life forms over the past 3.5 billion years. Consider all the niches and possibility spaces that were opened over this time. And consider also that all this occurred because a small self-replicating molecule, came together by chance long ago and used excess energy to insulate itself from the inanimate degradation’s of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/tree_of_life/tree-of-life_2000.png

The chart clearly shows that animate nature has figured how to get around the degradation’s of The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

As life spread and opened up new niches and became more and more complex, the competition among life forms for energy, resources and optimal conditions became ever more intense. We humans are animals and we are arguably the most complex creatures on the planet.

Let’s focus on the animal branches of the tree of life and follow along. Early on animals evolved to have three types of cells. Inner cells, which form the food passage (the gut), outer cells, which separate the animal from the outside world (the skin) and specialized nervous system cells which are responsible for collecting and transmitting information throughout the animal.

Animals move. And thus their external situations changes frequently. Therefore, having information about the external environment obviously has survival value. And this is what animal nervous systems evolved to do.

As animal life evolved from worms > fish > amphibians > reptiles > birds > animals, their problem solving abilities and strategies can be seen to be improving and much of this was due to their nervous system advances.

They advanced through a whole series of new and more complex adaptations; including reactions, instincts, memory, developing the several senses, creating an internal mental model of the external reality, emotions, reasoning, homeostatic mechanisms and many other capabilities.

Each of these new capabilities improved on what proceeded them. And each was added as an overlay to the previous solutions; rather than replacing them. This is an important distinction, so hang onto it.

One very important thing that was increasing was intelligence. Intelligence is what we call an animal’s ever increasing ability to solve harder and harder problems so it can survive and to propagate. The increase in intelligence and nervous system capabilities went hand-in-hand.

Problem solving in the beginning was pretty simply. See food, go get it. See danger, run away. But soon things got more complicated and meta decisions became necessary.

What if you see food and danger at the same time? Remember the jokes about asking a computer an impossible question and watching it grind to a halt as it tried to answer the question?

Animals with simple instinctual reactions would have faced that problem. And so, meta processing would have evolved to deal with it.

And then there’s the idea that as problems of survival get harder and harder to predict, the optimal solution strategies have to get more and more generalized to keep up.

Consider that if you don’t know where a threat is coming from, it does you little good to have a set of stock instinctual responses to draw from. It is far better, to evaluate the situation without preconceptions and then form an appropriate response as a result of the evaluation.

Rudimentary forms of awareness would have been appearing as these adaptations unfolded.

Awareness is, functionally, a meta-level mental space in which new and unexpected situations are evaluated.

Picture awareness as making use of previous mental capabilities. It draws on memory to retrieve the past in order to predict the future. It observes the internal mental models of the external reality held in the mind. It employs reasoning to consider the relationships between causes and effects. In short, it draws on as many of other capabilities as are appropriate in order to make an appropriate high level decision.

But awareness doesn’t know it is aware. It is just looking outwards.

Self-awareness appears when the mind’s memory model of external reality is improved to include a representation of ‘me’; the viewer of the model.

A model which now contains ‘me’, the viewer, is more functional than one which does not. As an adaptation, an awareness that is aware of itself isn’t just a bit more powerful. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful (and problematic) evolutionary adaptations that have ever occurred.

At every step along the way, from the simplest self-replicating molecule until the self-aware ‘you’ which sits there reading this sentence, the degradation’s of the Second Law of Thermodynamics have been held off by an ever greater array of sophisticated evolutionary adaptations which began as increasingly sophisticated variations in inorganic chemistry and advanced until they transitioned into the simplest forms of biological life.

And then, once expressing themselves as biology, these adaptations advanced again from bacteria thorough the entire tree of life until they attained the level of self-aware minds able to regard their own awareness and existence.

So, where is agency in all of this, you say?

It is all Agency writ large.

Agency: Intentional actions undertaken for the express purpose of allowing the entity performing the actions to survive. This is local agency. Agency concerned about the replicating unit. But agency none-the-less.

Perhaps, you are thinking that it is all still mechanical? Just the result of neurons firing as they have been long-trained to do and no one is really at home deciding anything?

Here are three very short stories to consider:

1. Your finger touches a hot stove. The pain signals travel from the finger to the spinal cord. And signals are immediately returned from the spinal cord directing the arm muscles to move your finger away. The pain signals also move up the spinal cord into the brain. And the subjective experience of the brain is to believe that it ordered the finger to move.
   
2. You feel a tinge of hunger and you turn and look at the cookie on the plate beside you. You feel that you want it and reach out to take it. The hunger signals arose from far down in your old brain and was experienced in your awareness. The decision to take the cookie feels like it was your brain’s decision. But scientist tell us that they can see the decision firing in your neurons well before you think you’ve decided to take the cookie. Regardless, your experience is that you were aware of and orchestrated the entire thing; from the recognition of hunger, to the decision that you wanted it and then onto the movement to take it.
   
3. You have a bus schedule in your hand. You know you need to be in Pasadena by 2:30 pm. You study the table to see when you’ll need to leave home in order to catch the bus that will get you there a bit before 2:30 pm. As you work all this out and decide which bus to take, there are no anticipatory neural firings in play. Indeed, how could any of the systems outside of your awareness know what to do? Perhaps, some will fire at the end of your decision-making process when the decision is filed in your memory by processes below your awareness.

In the first story, older parts of your nervous system have acted to move your finger from the source of danger, Your conscious awareness believes it orchestrated the process but clearly this is an illusion.

In the second, your brain definitely felt that it played a significant part in the play but preemptive neural firings probably played the larger part in the cookie’s demise.

And, finally, in the last story, it is clear that the bus schedule is only going to get worked out by your agency considering, investigating and understanding the problem. And then deciding on a solution. Where is there any room on all of this for preemptive neural firings to help?

We humans like to think things are ‘this way or that’. We favor a simple ‘either-or’ constructions.

But reality isn’t necessarily like that. In fact reality is under no obligations to make itself simple enough for us to understand it.

Reality tends to favor a ‘both/and’ approach where things are all moving together in an incomprehensibly complex dance.

Agency has been with us in a slowly morphing form from the very first self-replicating molecules until we held the bus schedule in our hand.

And when self-awareness finally dawned for us, agency was finally able to see itself.

The issue of preemptive neural firings has come up a lot when folks talk about agency. If we can see preemptive neural firings then agency is not really happening, they say.

Well, this assumes that we are just self-aware beings. But we are much more than that.

We are everything that happened in the three stories – not just the self-aware being that dominates the last story.

It was said that “self-awareness may be the most powerful (and problematic) evolutionary adaptation that has ever occurred.” This was referring to a huge blind spot in us.

The aware mind and the self-aware mind are simply newer adaptations layered atop all that went before. They are not replacements.

Have you ever thought that it is us, the thinkers, who tend to insist that things have to be ‘this way’ or ‘that way’?

It is undeniable that everything is part of the one. But it is equally undeniable that the one manifests as the many.

Our tendency to make things ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ draws us into feeling we have to choose. It is uncomfortable that it should be both at once.

The relevance of ‘the many’ is, perhaps, that we could not be having the conversation if only the unity was manifest.

Because our awareness of the one-ness generally comes long after our ‘impossible to avoid immersion’ in the many, we then tend to think that the later realization is the better or more profound one.

People have discovered (via drugs, meditation or just serendipity) that there is a state of thoughtlessness that can merge them into the one-ness.

Some of these folks think that the one-ness is far superior. And they spend the rest of their lives seeking to end any and all engagements with thought.

I don’t think so. They both exist. Two sides of the same coin. When I need my mind, I turn it on. When nothing is pressing me to figure it out, I shut it off. Both states are mine at will. I assign neither the superior roll.

So, all that you said about Dream States leaves me feeling that you’ve decided that only the one-ness is real and the many is simply illusion.

I liked what you said about “…the mind gets identified as the dreamt character….”. So true. Here in the world of the many, we do tend to believe we are a unique and special “I”. We believe in a personal self. And this personal self defends itself with the ego.

All that can be dropped as clarity comes. And what remains, in the many, is a biological thing, a bit of the existence, that is aware and looking out.

If I had any small criticism about all that you wrote here, it would be to avoid the Either-Or trap. It is all true – both sides, both views. Don’t get too lost in the idea that it is all a meaningless dream. Avoid trying to see it as one way or the other. Flow into and out of all points of view.

You have a beautiful mind and POV. The way forward is always to embrace more and more – even as we understand less and less. As soon as someone drives a stake into the ground and says, “This is it”, step away. The road is endless and ever deepens.

My objection to the mystical is not an absolute thing. Not a black or white thing. Given my increasing perception that all of existence is a mystery, it would be quite disingenuous of me to say what is within and without the fold.

And, in truth, there’s a lot in my life and subjective perceptions that I would call mystical.

My objection isn’t that the mystical doesn’t exist. My objection is that once a person integrates mystical elements into the fabric of their explanations and understandings of their life and existence, their feet quickly lift off from the ground.

Try to see my POV by looking through this lens:

I avoid all beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes. I do this on the theory that all of these are, in essence, simply ways of me trying to negotiate, shape, negate or pretend that the qualities of naked reality are anything other than just what they are. Imagine now that I am quite successful at avoiding all of that. Does this mean nothing mystical happens in my life?

No, far from it.Many things continue to happen in my life that seem quite mysterious and mystical to me. But I do not build my understandings and explanations upon them. I do not build dependencies upon them. I do not engage in ‘quid-pro-quo’ reasoning about them.They just are part of the mystery of existence I experience without judgement.

Imagine two men: One man is good because he believes that if he is good, he will get rewards in this life or in heaven. The other is good simply because he believes that doing good is right in-and-of-itself and needs no other reason or justification for doing it.

Perhaps my point is beginning to come clear?

I eschew the beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes because they all seem like negotiations with an implacable reality that has no notion of negotiation. And I avoid incorporating any of my mystical experiences into the fabric of my explanations and understandings of my life because I do not want to engage in quid-pro-quo reasoning about them. I just want to see existence as clearly as I can and to do what I do because I think it is right in-and-of-itself.

I trust, or I bet my life (very much the same thing, I think), that everything else will take care of itself. And I trust, that if I eschew any sort of negotiations via beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes, then I am optimizing my ability to see ‘what is’ with greater and greater clarity. And I harbor no preconceptions about where this deeper and deeper seeing will take me. Because holding any preconception takes me back into the loop of confusion that arises when we engage in beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes.

Having said all of that, I will repeat what you’ve often heard me say. “I am one of the luckiest people I have ever known in my life and I have no idea why this is so.” Nor do I wonder or allow myself to conjecture why it is so. It just is. It just is what it is and I give deep thanks everyday that I am so blessed.

I truly feel that my life is blessed and I feel great joy that I have this perception. It is a central wellspring in my life. Tomorrow, it may all change. So be it. I just want to see it ‘as it is’ without any negotiating crutches and without any quid-pro-quo reasoning about why it is.

I engage in no reasoning that involves mystical elements. They are mystical. And, by definition, I think that places them beyond reason.

Rather, I focus on the illusions that block me from seeing more clearly. I focus on identifying my beliefs and understanding why, psychologically, I might emotionally prefer to hold such beliefs – rather than choosing to just see things as they are.

My rationality is not designed to quash the mystical from my life. It is designed to see the truth of how things are, as much as I can. And, if the mystical continues to bless me, then that is sweet.

You kidded me about if there is or is not a “God”?

I have no idea. And I don’t think I’m going to ever going to be capable of deciding such a thing either – except by faith. And that takes me back, again, into the beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes loop.

I’ve got no business in that loop if I want to see clearly. The unknowable fact of whether there is or there is not a God, simply doesn’t come into my concerns.

I have to confess that I do not see the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. And I haven’t a hope of doing so.

But then I’m not claiming to. That was never the point.

Our experiences and our narratives, are a moving frame; a frame that is advancing through time. A frame in which the contents inevitably change as experiences are experienced and as understandings develop, deepen or are transcended.

As the saying goes, no one can put their foot into the same river twice.

Consider:

Many of us who, have looked at a bias held by another, will have thought, ‘This person is being partially blinded by this bias.’ I.e., they are not seeing the world around them as clearly as they might.

I’ve told the story several times about walking into a psych lecture in university. The subject was Freud’s Defense Mechanisms. 45 minutes later, I walked out and saw a changed world around me.

Experiences and insights inevitably push at us to absorb them. After all, we live in an existence wherein change is said to be the only constant. Change presses upon us; whether we open our arms to it or not.

Change changes us. The contents of our moving frame changes. What we are experiencing changes because the contents of our frame have changed.

And, yes, our experience is all still undoubtedly subjective.

There is no question of pulling the curtain away and seeing the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. That was never the point.

But the person who transcends a partially blinding bias will see what is there to be seen more clearly without the distortion.

And thus it is with all beliefs, religions, biases, opinions, hopes and fears; to name a few of our sources of distortion.

Each distortion we diminish lets us see a bit more clearly. Each moves us some immeasurable distance closer to the unobtainable ultimate. Each new thing we learn changes the contents of the frame and alters the view.

If the mutability of the moving frame that our experiences arise from is grasped, then the possibility of influencing what the frame is fed can be conceived.

Choosing to try to diminish all the beliefs, opinions, biases, hopes and fears from within a frame seems likely to increasingly clarify the frame’s perception of the reality around it.

It is a road that promises new vistas for the frame without ever a hint of a promise of the road’s end.

After trying many other things, I’ve found that this is the thing that I find the most intriguing.

This ‘need’ for meaning in our lives shapes so very much of how we perceive the world.

The first thing I would say about this is that for the vast majority of the human race, I would never consider trying to deny them the sustenance of believing that there is a meaning for their life.

But for those few of us out here in the hinterlands thrashing in the bushes, I’d say that we should consider why we humans feel such a thirst for meaning.

We are as clearly the product of the evolution that shaped us.

We are, at this late stage of evolution on this planet, intelligent self-aware creatures.

And the evolution, that we are the products of, has honed us, and the survival of all creatures, upon our ability to reliably detect and understand what is going on around us in the environment; as the optimum way to ensure survival and propagation.

So, we are hard-wired to incessantly try to understand what we are seeing when we look out at the world.

And it is from this trying to understand that arises a terrible cognitive dissonance.

Having manifested self-awareness and the inevitable and concurrent sense of personhood that accompanies self-awareness, the observation that we appear to just live and then die deeply offends our sense of personhood, presence and continuity.

“I am, and I can see that I am, and then … I’m not?” Why, why, why?

Even today, with all of our biological knowledge, the central point of Dawkins’ book, “The Selfish Gene”, eludes us.

“You mean it is not all about me and my sense of persistent personhood?”

In the deeper stages of Zen Buddhism, and other meditative and introspective practices, it is often seen that our egos and our sense of personhood are illusions.

Everything is change. We come, things happen and we go. So it is.

Only the illusionary sense of personhood, and the associated automatically arising defensive barrier, the ego, resist the simple evidence of our transience.

So, in the face of this terrible cognitive dissonance, we dream up religions to ‘explain’ things and to comfort ourselves that our person-hoods are not really just transient patterns.

The book, “The Worm at the Core”, by Sheldon Solomon discusses all of this quite nicely.

If our need for ‘meaning’ drives us to construct religions that we believe in to comfort ourselves, then I can only group this phenomenon into the same basket with the other distortions which stand between us and increased clarity.