Introduction
A Vedanta teacher should always keep in mind that he or she is meant to relate to inquirers from the Self’s point of view, so I should not have been surprised to discover that many inquirers who have been listening…sometimes for years…reserve the right to exempt cherished opinions from inquiry, which inhibits their growth. Part of my surprise is due to my natural affection for seekers coupled with an age-related propensity to let sleeping dogs lie. You feel like you’ve fought the good fight for a very long time and should be permitted to smell the roses and watch grass grow. It was not meant to be; I got more than my fair share of flak.
The virus and the quarantine was a blessing; it permitted me to clean up a lot of small karmas that that had been crying for attention for years. Most people, however, didn’t take kindly to it. Reasonably content individuals became disturbed versions of their affable selves, societies worldwide became cranky and even inquirers, who one imagines would be above the fray, suffered disturbed minds. I made my thoughts known but when I was notified by YouTube that my comments on the virus and vaccines were not acceptable, I realized it was futile to expect their algorithm to understand the Self’s perspective so I let the issue slide.
Pandemics are tailor-made to stimulate inquiry and most savvy Vedanta people put it in the right place and dismissed it as not Self. Others felt otherwise and took up arms. Then the war came and somehow the virus and vaccines were no longer so important. It’s virtually impossible to argue for “real” war unless you’re a power-hungry dictator, but if you want to do the right thing for yourself spiritually you need to take up the sword and fight Self ignorance, which involves taking a stand in your highest self and laying to rest unexamined notions masquerading as truth. So this essay is another perhaps futile attempt to get the attention of those who fancy themselves to be objective yet exempt entrenched views from scrutiny.
CONspirituality
CONspirituality is not atheism or taking a stand against religion or spirituality. It is an emotion producing bias against including ALL biases as legitimate candidates for inquiry, particularly pet social and political views. It is a positive bias toward the perceived upside of a particular tendency…distrust…at the expense of its downside. Self-inquiry, which is applying the opposite thought, neutralizes both the upside and downside of specific proclivities and brings the mind to equilibrium.
Last week I presented an essay by an English woman who discovered something uncomfortable about herself. She realized that her elitist dislike of a particular group was a red herring that demanded a scapegoat…the “rich”… which woke her up to unacknowledged loathing and envy which in turn conflicted with her religious values. She saw that she was virtue signaling on the basis of her identification with the idea of “justice.” She believed that it’s unjust for rich people play golf while poor people don’t have a pots to piss in.
But does any particular cohort, in this case “the rich,” deserve our contempt? From the non-binary point of view, no, because justice isn’t real. Something is real if it can’t be dismissed, which is to say that it is always present and doesn’t change. Anything that is dependent and subject to change may seem to be real but it doesn’t provide a dependable foundation for one’s state of mind. Justice depends on the idea of injustice and doesn’t take the law of karma, which is a moral law, into account. If you are unaware that your only self is non-binary you will discover that you are riddled with biases. You will discover, as this woman does, that you are a prejudiced person who disrespects people who think differently from you. In any case she does the right thing and confronts her prejudices. Her inquiry in the form of an essay is provided below.
Here is the logical destructive sequence that happens when you don’t know what you really are. (1) Ignorance of your non-binary nature leads to (2) a sense of incompleteness and otherness, which causes (3) comparison, which morphs into (4) competition and conflict, which give rise to (5) frustration, anger and hatred, which eventually culminates in (7) war, internal, cultural or otherwise and (8) the breakdown your mind and, if enough individuals cling to their biases, the breakdown of society, which is not always desirable.
Hopefully the following comments will help you confront your shadow self.
Knowledge
We always start with knowledge since that is our primary value.
Knowledge, relative and absolute, is something that can’t be dismissed. It is always true and can be verified by direct experience or inference. Knowledge doesn’t come FROM the human mind, it comes TO the human mind. It is. It has always been. It is waiting to be uncovered.
Knowledge bubbles are generated when a person becomes focused and attached to a particular field of knowledge: physics, psychology, law, politics, art, sports, communication, ethics, and what not. They eventually burst because relative knowledge is defective as a vehicle for happiness. Once I discover the limitations of a particular branch of knowledge, I try to find satisfaction in another field. Once I get financial security, for instance, I may want to understand pleasure and love. Once I discover the limitation of pleasure seeking and/or romantic relationship love, I will definitely seek something else.
Finally, information, which is easily confused with knowledge, is time sensitive. It is also unreliable in terms of happiness. Beliefs and opinions are subjective events that are usually taken to be knowledge and are almost invariably the enemy of truth.
As long as I am encapsulated in a particular knowledge bubble, my growth as a human being will be compromised, because all parts of myself will work together only if I am a well-rounded person. Focus on a particular kind of knowledge, or a particular aspect of a particular kind of relative knowledge, may be helpful for survival but not for actualizing my full potential. So I must ask myself, “Am I only here to survive?”
Only steady concentration on “absolute” knowledge will actualize it. Absolute knowledge is simple knowledge of the unborn whole and complete self, which includes relative knowledge but renders the quest for relative knowledge obsolete. It is knowing that you are that because of which everything that exists is as good as known.
Particular information-events…ideas, beliefs, opinions, desires, emotions, thoughts, fantasies, and memories…may or may not refer to knowledge. Because they are time-sensitive, taking information-events for knowledge is always revealed to be a mistake in the fullness of time.
A knowledge bubble is caused by an innocent curiosity for a particular type of knowledge and generates a positive or negative bias as one investigates the knowledge field.
Echo Chambers
Echo chambers are the confirmation bias on steroids. I have a doubt about what I think and need others to validate it. They evolve because denial of my non-dual wholeness causes insecurity and low self-esteem. They are enemies of nuance, the antithesis of openness and the essence of duality, the belief that differences are real, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. They are the perfect environment for dull gullible people, secular or sacred, who need to think they are “right” and “smart.” Echo chambers develop around every conceivable kind of knowledge, mot to mention beliefs and opinions. They are the evidence of unacknowledged spiritual dissatisfaction and the number one enemy of growth.
An echo chamber is an obsessive dislike leading to distrust of people who are seemingly different from you or your tribe in a myriad of ways. It is a cult-like social group that aggressively and perversely grooms doubt under the aegis of certain knowledge. Evidence-contrary, it is hard and cold and humorless, not fragile like a bubble. Echo chambers are unsubstantiated beliefs, opinions and impulses based on an uncritical attachment to a pernicious emotional impurity – fear. And what is the fear? Being “wrong,” discovering that you are a fool. Ignorance, which is not solicited, makes fools of us all. Acknowledging and accepting one’s foolishness is the solid foundation on which successful inquiry is built.
On the surface it doesn’t make sense that individuals seek to reinforce negative emotions and cultivate relationships that buttress them. However, insecurity is born out of active denial of the benign nature of the reality and identification with the belief that life, a consciously designed entity, actively conspires to harm itself. Harm exists but only because the non-dual nature of the self is left undiscovered.
Unbeknownst to votaries of echo chambers, beliefs and opinions are unreal because they depend on their opposites for validation. If I believe that something is good for me I need to believe that something else is bad. That I prefer day to night depends on the undesirability of night. Caught in a twilight zone of knowledge and ignorance, I don’t realize that if something is bad, the goodness that negates it is also bad, since an effect is only seemingly, not actually different from its cause. If I don’t believe something is “bad” I won’t promote a “good” idea. It will be natural to me. What is natural only requires validation if my knowledge of my complete self is incomplete.
The fact that I need to promote or attack a particular idea means that I have an unconscious doubt about the truth of it. A rich person who claims that he or she is free of the need for money, and who promotes his or her method for gaining it, isn’t free of the need for money unless he or she grants free access to his or her means of money knowledge.
A living being is gender neutral and only becomes a man or woman when he or she thinks of the opposite gender. Plants and animals have sex organs and sex instruments but are genderless because they don’t think. When I am not identified as a man or a woman I am just a human being. Except in certain gender-related knowledge bubbles and echo chambers, most of our time is occupied by non-gender related thoughts.
Although it offers a stepping stone to our limitless non-binary identity, even the idea that I am a human being sets me apart from other living entities, animals and plants for instance. Not only that, but it subjects me to further delusion and, as we see, leads to the destruction of our habitat and peace of mind.
Conceit being what it is, I may imagine that human status confers “dominion over fish and fowl,” to quote the Bible, because I am “the roof and crown of things,” to quote Shakespeare. But I have dominion over nothing in so far as everything that I value, acquire and possess comes from the world, which is not created by me.
If I think that I am a creator I am a only a creator of one small thing, my idea of myself and the world. My creation is only seemingly useful for me and therefore “my” reality is subject to cancellation by “your” reality. That I care that insignificant others cancel me is only a testimony to my lack of self-confidence. I am not indifferent to the opinions of others because I claim ownership of my reality only because of the need to cancel “yours,” which creates doubt about mine, unless we are stuck in the same knowledge bubble or echo chamber.
Confronted with an opposing view, a person identified with a particular view immediately becomes fearful and may withdraw from or aggressively attack the person who holds it. When fear arises, he or she is unable to connect to the context…his or her gender neutral human identity…not to mention our limitless non-dual identity…because negative emotions command attention like no other. “If it bleeds it leads” is the holy grail of news organizations, whose success depends not only on providing useful and entertaining information but on carefully invoking and grooming fear.
Positive information is cheap and easy to acquire if you just open your eyes and look around, yet the media feels inclined to prominently peddle negative information. The takeaway close, the foundation of most marketing and personal relationships…”I will only love you if you do what I want”…is based on the universal zero-sum fear of missing out. FOMO is zero sum because the mind is denied its natural bliss when it is fear-oriented. The bliss because of which I wish to live another day in spite of many miseries, is the nature of the self so it is always available and it is begging to be uncovered.
I want an endless stream of happy thoughts because a mixture of happy and unhappy thoughts frustrate me. The idea that my happiness is held hostage by unhappiness is unacceptable. Unfortunately, I believe there is no way to control my mind…it spews forth what it wants irrespective of what I want…when methods for controlling the mind as old as the hills are available at no cost. Ironically, beliefs are zero-sum because knowledge is always present for those who have eyes to see. If I knew this fact I would abandon unworkable beliefs and opinions and convert the rest to hard and fast knowledge. Those who know don’t believe. That I am an incomplete inadequate entity is only a belief, which is only evidence of itself.
Both thought bubbles and echo chambers are unreal. When you enter an echo chamber, whose sole purpose is to cultivate negative emotions under the aegis of “reality” you are perversely taught by fear-oriented “authorities” that fear is smart, a message that makes you feel good. You enjoy echo chambers because your sense of agency, not to mention your sense of righteousness, gets a much needed boost. You think you are very intelligent and that nobody is going to pull the wool over your eyes, particularly the rich, but your happiness is simply the pleasure of joining a group of like-minded souls. Misery loves company.
When everyone in my echo chamber is angry, somehow my anger is justified, which is one of downsides of sloth, whose sole claim to fame is denial. That anger feels good is only due to the fact that my attention has been moved to the belief that I am nobody’s fool and/or the belief that anyone who doesn’t think like me is “wrong” or different. I can’t accept evidence that negates my belief or I will again become aware of my suffering, which is always unacceptable. I can’t tolerate differences because ignorance has separated me from the knowledge of my whole and complete self.
The echo chamber guru’s authority, secular or sacred, is not based on objective knowledge, only on the intensity of his or her fear sanitized by anger, which lends it the appearance of truth. Fear sets the mind adrift like an iceberg separated from a land mass and eventually the individual sees his or her good nature dissolve into an ocean of unhappiness.
Reality transcends duality, the belief in the reality of differences. To understand this fact in a practical way is to “enter the kingdom of heaven” to borrow a phrase from a well-known Biblical parable. Everyone knows that trying to point out the irrationality of fear as a helpful emotion to a normal person, not to mention a echo chamber denizen, is impossible. One can only keep one’s distance and love such people from afar. Because they are perversely irrational and deluded, echo chamber devotees migrate from one chamber to another when a particular obsession fails to deliver pleasure, as all thoughts and emotions eventually do. Sadly, in the process, they are denied the benefits of the innermost self’s dispassion which quarantines them from the benefit of common sense logic.
Only with reference to fantasy can a mindless contrarian maintain confidence in beliefs unsupported by common sense. Because the zero-sum binary reality is temporal, people irrationally believe in time. The past is unreal because it depends on two equally unreal ideas, the future and the present. Without the future where is the past? And where is the present without the past and the future?
Like an echo chamber, this kind of thinking imprisons me from womb to tomb. “The wrong side of history” is meant to prove that an opposing idea is false, but history refers to nothing other than memories, which don’t prove anything except themselves. If you think something is good or bad you need to know that the object to which these adjectives refer is value neutral, which is another definition of zero-sum. The zero-sum nature of reality is only a virtue for you when you know what it implies, which is freedom and non-dual love.
Is Vedanta a Knowledge Bubble?
Individuals caught in knowledge bubbles are not necessarily widely or wildly uninformed and may accept differing views backed by common sense logic, whereas echo chamber devotees are a hard sell. They usually only consider different views when they are laid low by personal tragedy, the loss of a loved one or the diagnosis of an incurable disease, for instance. And since they are suspicious by nature, it is difficult for an honest self-aware person to gain their trust. Basically, only saints have the patience to redeem them, in so far as they tend to be stubborn as mules.
Vedanta IS and IS NOT an Alternative View.
To negotiate modern society it is necessary to simplify and filter the type and amount of information and knowledge to which we are exposed. Knowledge bubbles, which are usually benign, become dangerous when they morph into echo chambers. Self-knowledge bubbles tend to be benign but can be dangerous because they may breed delusional self-confidence owing to the fact that incomplete self-knowledge due to faulty listening often leads to a premature belief that the incomplete self can’t be improved upon, which gives it free reign to do what it wants irrespective of the harm it generates. It can’t because it is not real, but in so far as I believe that the created me is inadequate, it is possible to develop a sense of adequacy by committing myself to unlocking and actualizing my potential with the help of a proven means of knowledge. Knowledge bubbles can be dismantled by practical experiments that reveal the adequacy of opposite points of view. Only Self-knowledge bubbles that are blessed with unbiased authorities are wholly benign.
Echo chambers (medical, dietary, financial, political, religious, spiritual, etc.) have rigorous selection criteria and use no-holds-barred tools to actively create distrust in their devotees. Members of the La Leche League distrust cow’s milk and mothers who “abuse” their babies with it. Cultlike leaders, secular and sacred, use manipulative code words to invoke latent childhood suspicions, fears and hatreds to please their biased minions and convert them into powerful social forces.
They derive their power because life is a complex, completely dependent zero sum organism dependent on death. It produces living entities and perversely instills them with a binding need to live and an ever-present knowledge of their own mortality. Because of modern life’s complexity every bit of knowledge and information depends on long chains of interconnected experts. A blog by C. Thi Nguyen entitled Escape the Echo Chamber says, “A climate scientist analysing core samples depends on the lab technician who runs the air-extraction machine, the engineers who made all those machines, the statisticians who developed the underlying methodology, and on and on.”
Trust
Trust, however, implies vulnerability which inspires fear, which Echo Chamber leaders manipulate and amplify to gain and maintain control. Rather than think independently, cult devotees who are usually spawned in dysfunctional households with authoritarian fathers and compliant mothers surrender their reason and place their trust in leaders who they believe have their best interests in mind. Cult leaders are experts in propaganda, the sole intention of which is to misinform devotees as to where to place their trust. While surrendering trust is natural and rational in so far as we don’t survive unless we trust our parents, continuing to trust others out of habit as we age, even those who love us, is irrational in so far as you can only depend on yourself for happiness.
One simple emphatic, understandable but unhelpful heuristic opinion informs the echo chamber phenomena, “Cover your butt; THEY are out to screw you.” In fact, dispassionate analysis proves that life, guided by a logical impersonal means of self-knowledge, is a trustworthy teacher because it is a benign zero-sum matrix, not a perpetual threat. While it is rare to find a trustworthy human without a self-serving agenda, it is definitely beneficial to trust the eternal cycle of life, which brings us here and thankfully removes us in a timely fashion.
The bold text is mine.
Jane Coaston – Opinion Piece
Let me be clear: I strenuously dislike golf. The sport began as a Scottish pastime. It was so popular that it was banned by the Scottish parliament in 1457 because too many people were distracted from preparing for war with England by the wonders of hitting balls with sticks over dunes.
The only time I attempted to play golf, I was in high school, and I chucked a club into a bush in rage. Golf is a sport that requires quiet, calm and carefully controlled movements. (sattva) That is not for me. I sometimes need to take dance breaks in the middle of performing normal tasks, and I had variations of “she talks too much and is very loud” written on many a childhood report card. Golf is a sport that is narrated in whispers. I do not whisper. (rajas)
And, truth be told, I have never been a huge fan of golfers, or golf culture, rife as it is with pastel polo shirts, pricey golf shoes and handshakes at the club over scotch. As a child, I understood that golfing was something a very specific group of people did. It is an expensive sport, after all, and the only people I knew who golfed were the people who would drive out to Hyde Park Golf and Country Club (which reportedly requires new members to pay a $55,000 initiation fee) in my hometown, Cincinnati. Or people who would hit the links when they vacationed in the Bahamas.
The Tell
Even though the sport is really not my thing I do wonder if I was irredeemably biased against it because of my not-altogether-kind feelings about the people I most frequently saw playing it.
Its association with the elite — In the United States, golf is, of course, the sport of presidents, Republican and Democrat alike — made the game a target of the socialist former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. In televised remarks in 2009, he railed against golf as “bourgeois,” and asked, “Can someone tell me, is this a sport of the people?” to which his audience responded with a vigorous “No!” Threatening to seize two major golf courses and use the land for housing, he seemed to argue that the very playing of golf while people endured poverty was offensive.
“That’s an injustice,” he said, “that someone should have the luxury of having I don’t know how many hectares to play golf and drink whiskey, and next door there’s misery and children dying when there are landslides.”
Chavez’s problem, or what he wanted people to believe was his problem, was that wealthy elites were thriving while others suffered. Obviously, there were issues with Chavez as a leader but I kind of see his point about golf.
Point the Finger at Yourself
And maybe that’s my problem. Because I also realize that golf was, and is, an easy scapegoat. (the Lamestream Media, for instance.) I’ve written before about the problem with the idea of “elites” — I think it’s often a straw man wielded by people who are elite themselves. And I think the way we talk about elites is complicated by simultaneous envy and loathing, aimed particularly at those who gain immense wealth. (It needn’t be immense wealth or even wealth. It can be envy of beauty, power, security, fame, etc.)
Still, it’s easy to be angry at the rich (read famous, beautiful, smart, successful, you-name-it people) because, as my colleague Farhad Manjoo argued in 2019, “At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts.”
My anger could be viewed as sensible by some — the overconcentration of wealth among the very few has not led to more income for the many. And I come from a faith tradition with a long history of lifting up the poor and repudiating those who do not use their wealth for good. “In the letters of the apostles” in the Bible, “frequent warnings are made about the perils of wealth and also of the way that elites can dismiss or persecute the poor,” Russell Moore, a theologian and the director of the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today, told me.
James, for instance, cautioned the landowners that God saw the way they mistreated their workers. And Paul wrote that the crucifixion reframed the nature of power itself. It is Easter weekend, after all, and on Good Friday, Christians remember that Christ died on a cross, next to criminals, while Roman soldiers gambled for his clothing.
But my faith also condemns the sin of envy, and as Moore reminded me, “One of the problems with envy is that it is quite easy to feel as though it is rooted in righteous indignation.” He said this is how the envy of wealth can disguise itself as virtue, allowing those who wish they were rich themselves to think that “they are standing against the love of money as the root of all kinds of evil.”
I don’t think my problem is wishing I were spectacularly rich, but I do think that my anger lies in old envies — about being a kid for whom golf was an unimaginable expense. (I might as well have suggested buying a yacht.) My feelings were never really about golf as a sport. They were about golf as a stand-in for the things I wanted to do, but couldn’t afford. What I see now is that my anger at the excesses of the wealthy — on the golf course or anywhere — does not ease the burdens of the poor, nor does my envy.
Virtue Signaling
It’s performative, almost as performative as joining a ritzy golf club that costs thousands of dollars a year. And to dismiss an entire class of people is the very definition of prejudice.
So while I do not wish to try playing golf again, I’m not going to let myself be prejudiced against golfers. The truth is that judging golfers doesn’t do anything to benefit the people I wish to help, and only serves to hurt me, the person holding the hate. I can do better. If not as a golfer, then as a person.