cognitive dissonance

Lately I have had several opportunities to consider, chew on, dwell on and debate the idea of cognitive dissonance.

“People tend to seek consistency in their beliefs and perceptions. So what happens when one of our beliefs conflicts with another previously held belief? The term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the feelings of discomfort that result from holding two conflicting beliefs. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.”

The first time I had a chance to dwell on it was when I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast about religion, cults and how maybe there is some cult that believes that aliens are coming for them and so they have to meet the arriving space ship at the top of this mountain at a specific time on a specific day and when that moment arrives and all of them are up there waiting and (of course) the fucking space ship never comes…

Instead of all going, fuck this, there obviously never was a space ship, they aren’t coming for us, this was all a load of bullshit…they go back to the drawing board, say, “We obviously miscalculated, the spaceship will come (insert date, think of anything from the end of the world dates, the Mayan calendar fiasco, whatever) and we will be frikken ready!”

Instead of throwing the towel in, the lot of them go out there and get more new members and prep for another date!

This unwillingness to just face reality, like “Dude, your theory is full of shit” its like they fight even harder to continue to believe in what they do.

Examples of this can be dug from anything around us. Like someone being born of a virgin, or rising from the dead, or parting a sea, or flying to another town without a plane or a craft of any kind…or simpler, like in the simple things we get sucked into on a daily basis that we wish to believe in even though they defy logic or science.

A lot of the time, if we can just be honest with ourselves and accept that something is merely a means to an end, then well, the world wouldn’t be so complicated, but its hard to just know you are doing something wrong for the right reason or doing something right for the wrong reason, or whatever, really…think of all those little things you have come across in your life where you know it doesn’t sit well with you.

Recently I came across something about “Transcendental Meditation (TM)” and I could have sworn, somewhere, I had heard that Sam Harris, one of the leading atheists out there, the godhead of atheism if you will, was into TM. He’s a neuroscientist…and well, he’s a super educated and intelligent guy who can throw very coherent sentences together when debating with lunatics while still maintaining his cool. So I thought, hmm, this thing about a free intro to TM came up on my FB feed, its near me, let me go check it out!

Well, let me tell you about how I spent 1.5 hours of my time last week and walked away well and truly fucking angry.

I wasn’t angry at the little old chinese lady who was introducing me to it, not really, nor was I angry about the fact I rocked up there. I think I was angry at myself, really, for not having done my homework, for having been too lazy to actually read up more before I went to this thing purely on the promises it offered of a good nights sleep, reducing stress, curing ADHD (that would be a bonus!) or even depression…I was sat there, an hour in, right somewhere between the point where the little old lady had busted out the framed print of one of their Maharishi guys and before she showed us the endorsement video that featured, of all people, Dr. Oz and Oprah! Sigh. I mean, it doesn’t get any more fucking Deepak Chopra than Dr. Oz and Oprah! I was pissed of at myself big time.

Apart from the fact that it had a fee of HKD6800 for what they called “a lifetime membership” to get “initiated” into TM (really, can’t anyone go about meditating? Why do you need to be initiated?) and also there was a part of this whole process of making you a master TM practitioner that involved a “thanksgiving” of some kind. Where “Oh, you don’t have to participate, its really more of a bare witness….” except that you are the one who has to bring the gift of flowers, the fruit and the white scarf that symbolizes pure consciousness! All this is then gifted to the framed print of a Maharishi, by the teacher (the little chinese lady) while thanks is given.

I see where my horror comes from.

I am an atheist who came from the Catholic Church and all its infinite ways…and for me, old school teachings from the old testament say “No idol worship” so even though I am not in an organized religion, I was just repulsed by this whole thing, and even though she (the little old lady) assured me there was “nothing religious” about it…I was like…who the fuck told YOU that??? You chant mantras, you are giving thanks to a poster…and you speak of all matter, all being, being pure consciousness and all life coming down to this well of pure consciousness.

Why the fuck can’t someone just teach me how to fucking meditate, how to find this place of calm and quiet, that ALL humans could benefit from, without greedily taking my money and shoving some religious bullshit down my throat?

She tried to get us to sign up at the end of the session, there were six of us, but I said, out loud, while feeling like a right douche, that “I have to think about this” and she said, “Why?” and I was like, “Well, the religious aspect doesn’t sit well with me, I would like to do more research on the matter” and she was like “Which part of it did you think was religious? Its not at all!”

*cough*

Sure lady, keep drinking the koolaid.

That doesn’t mean I am not going to keep searching for a way to gain the benefits of TM without going through this hocus pocus fucking cult-like initiation ritual and such. I believe the science behind meditation. I believe how the brain can benefit from this dipping inwards and quieting the mind. Its not magic, its science. But I don’t think I need to Ommmmm my way there or to give thanks at some altar while feeling majorly daft about the whole experience.

I went home and did a quick google, the homework I was angry at myself for not doing prior to going to that 1.5hour session in that quiet office somewhere in Wan Chai, and it turns out Sam Harris isn’t doing TM, he was talking of Vipassana. So Vipassana is meditation but its from a Buddhist branch of teaching, I think TM is from a hindu branch off. I have studied religion, any fucking branch off, in its early doors, is essentially a cult. Those Maharishi folks, they may be part of what we call New Religion or New New Religion, but somewhere at the beginning, just like with Christianity, they were a cult. Cult isn’t really a bad word per se, its just gotten to where people view it as something worse, but cult comes from the Latin word “cultus” which literally means “care”. Cicero defined religion (religio) as cultus deorum, “the cultivation of the gods.” Simply put, caring for the gods, giving due respect.

So if I KNOW that all religions are cults and pretty much all current religions started as cults and well, TM may well be a cult but what is so wrong with me just ignoring the bad bits and reaping the benefits of the good bits? The peace of mind, the curing ADHD, the no depression…? Well, cognitive dissonance. Thats why.

I can’t seem to just suck it up. I can’t drink the koolaid.

BUT…I am still trying to find a way I can get to the end principle without drinking the koolaid and that, my friends, needs patience and greater effort.

Sam Harris says that Vipassana may be the best bet because it has options of getting to learning how to meditate that aren’t religious or reek of cultish terminology, but yeah…I will find out for myself.

In so much as doing the leg work has now become my lifes mission, on pretty much every front of the surface of my life, I am meeting with an acquaintance of mine who I have been very fortunate to have met through cooking classes and social occasions…and well, she always seems like someone capable of stringing together very coherent thoughts and arguments. She’s an atheist and a meditation practitioner. She has been practicing Vipassana for 25 years after. I am gonna meet with her for lunch this week so I can pick her brain on the benefits she has seen in her life and maybe any tips on whether she thinks I can get to this state of purported meditative bliss without having to pay someone or subscribe to some form of cultism or religion.

A quick google on Vipassana in Hong Kong brings up this page that speaks of “Art of Living” and well, ages ago, I remember someone I used to read cards for (yes, yes, I was once into that, as you can see, I did not come around to my justified level of skepticism without having tried and tested most avenues of interest!) invited me to this “thing” she said would help change my life!

Anytime someone says shit like that I am already giving them the fucking side eye.

Sure, change my life…from the good or the just good to the way the fuck out there above average!

Stupendous, even!

Right….

Anyway, that thing she was talking about, it was this meditation session with a big group of other Indians, in a kind of meeting room of some kind, with some guru that all these people seated closest to were fawning over with these eyes that really saw no evil…and it was, you guessed it, this Art of Living thing…it was all about the breathing…and the breath…and about the joy and the happiness…and what not…and I was again, at the end of it, approached to see if I wanted to sign on the dotted line, join, whatever…and even back then…as I lost my faith in Christianity and dabbled in Buddhism and the occult, I was still like, “Fuck this shit, smells like a cult!”

All the promises of a better life…heck, a more immediate better life than Christianity and Islam can offer! I wasn’t falling for it! Not even at a time when I was maybe searching!

You know when people convert? When people give up one religion for another or go from being not religious to suddenly yapping in tongues and singing hallelujah? Its when they have a huge crisis in their life. When they suffer some sort of traumatic event and then they have this great relief come from this other thing, religion, God, call it what you may.

My mother, she converted to Christianity when she was 15. It was on her own accord, no one forced her, she just chose to. Her father had gambled all their homes away and they were living in this shitty 2 room place…and along came this opportunity for bible studies with this Baptist preacher. Not only was the church a place for her to escape the reality of her shabby 2 room home (a down grade from a real standalone house with a front and back yard) but it was also a place where she studied the bible in English, a language she was desperate to master anyway). So she converted…and years later, her older brother and sister also converted…but not until years later.

I would say, for me, I didn’t lose my faith overnight. Nothing catastrophic happened for me to lose my faith, I just did, all the way from questioning it when I was 4 years old and in boarding school…through to Sunday school, confession, communion wafers sticking to the roof of my mouth, shifting uncomfortably from knee to knee during extra long kneeling sessions…I learned everything I could about religion, about psychology and how the human mind sees the world, how we adapt, how we cope…and then I went on to complete a degree in Religion and Philosophy in my 30’s! All the while, I dabbled in this and that, believed this and that, saw nothing of the dualism I subscribed to and how contradictory it was to not believe that Jesus rose from the dead but to maybe kinda sorta believe in reincarnation.

I believed in soul mates…to some degree, I still romantically believe in it, but more so on a basis of how, if energy can neither be created from nothing nor destroyed to become nothing, if we all came from the one human…then well, we must have fractions of other humans out there that share a part of us…and this whole concept of the soul is a load of bullshit too, but yeah, like I said, its a romantic piece of bullshit that I am letting erode a little slower. Basically I don’t address it at all, lest that too slips through my fingers.

I used to think that being an atheist was a lonely business, but actually, the closer I get to understanding true atheism, the less lonely I feel and the more grounded I become. The more I am able to think about the greater good and whether or not I should recycle or donate money to a good cause. The more atheist I have become, the more generous I have become with my time and money. We are all here for a finite blip in this cosmic cycle…finite. There is no heaven above or a hell below. No tomorrow that will have us live forever in the arms of an eternal One. We just are. Here for the now, here for each other, here for humanity and for earthlings. That already sounds like a load of culty shit, doesn’t it! Lol.

Anyway, depression, overthinking, the mind spiraling round and round like a piece of junk that circles a drain, this played a huge hand in my awareness of self and in my reluctance to drink the koolaid.

One of my earliest memories was being in a boarding school run by nuns, I was about seven years old, I had something terrible happen, kids were picking on me and I knelt that night, in front of a statue of Mother Mary, you know, the virgin mother of Jesus, and I prayed for her to “take me away”. Basically, I prayed for her to put a word in, maybe to God, or you know, someone she knows high up in the holy food chain, to take me out! I prayed for her to kill me, put it simply.

I woke up the next day, nope, that prayer didn’t get answered.

It was a simple ask, and well, for a 7 year old, your prayers really are pretty simple…

But pretty early on I noticed that not everyone I went to boarding school with happened to go to church. Many didn’t have to bother with that at all, hindus, sikhs, muslims…lucky bastards!

Point is, how was it that I was going to be saved and these poor guys, my friends, were going to go to hell? And how is it that my Hindu friends had no problem with me being Christian and it was likely I would be fine in their heaven, just maybe on a different plane or some shit…or maybe instead of being born a Brahmin next life I would at least come back as a dog…point is…at least I was somewhere in there.

Anyway…you get where I am coming from…I learned early on, something ain’t right. And as I grew older and started seeing how Buddhism ain’t really a religion, “its more of a way of life” and such (don’t be fooled by that gimmick!) I was like, hey, let me check that out. Then I learned about the occult and astrology (not astronomy! FFS, thats way too scientific!) and dabbled away in everything from ESP to EFT…I was like, well, all this pseudoscience works…just as long as you ignore the cognitive dissonance.

Then as I studied more, read more about Islam, learned more about Judaism (mostly from dating a lost cause Hassid), and realizing Hinduism would never happen for me purely coz there were way too many gods in their pantheon. I finally ended up in the profession of finance…knee deep in the world where money is God. And let me tell you, it doesn’t get more godless and faithless than that, people. I quit that, after almost 5 years and went back to Uni to get a degree in…yep, Religion Philosophy!

Even as I studied at this pristine Jesuit university campus nestled in a green corner of Tokyo, I was amazed that much as I tried to return to church, coz I loved my professor, a man I lovingly called Father (coz, you know, he’s a priest) when everyone else called him Professor…and well, coz he was the one who wrote my recommendation letter to get into the university, mostly on his long standing relationship with my family, I just…I couldn’t reconcile how someone could be Jesuit and still love teaching Hinduism or Buddhism. I couldn’t wrap my head around how someone could teach about violence in religion and still be a baptist who goes to church…many of my professors, genuinely amazing men, although they knew for fact how dangerous religion is and how much damage it has caused in the world, they still continued to believe or to worship at a church and be part of a thriving community.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, boy I always envied the Jews for their community. I wanted to be part of something that big, something that exclusive…something that promised salvation. I never had even a part of what I witnessed Jews enjoying, not within Christianity, let me tell you that. And once I learned more about Hajj I kinda envied the muslims for having such a wikked opportunity to pilgrimage in the millions. Of course, once you learn more about the money making racket Hajj is, then you figure, meh, not so much, but the idea…the actual concept of being part of this global community of souls…being part of a ONE…its amazing.

These are all the things I worried would cause me great depression and loneliness if I were to give up the search for the divine. This all encompassing loneliness, greater than the aloneness I felt when I was depressed…the feeling of having been set adrift, not just from my fellow man, but from some all knowing, all seeing, divine entity I have never even met.

I suppose…thats why social media can become such a time suck, right?

It gives people this sense of connecting, being part of a One, being part of something greater…while at the same time feeding their insecurities or causing them to delve deeper into themselves. The thing that makes one person happy can be the seed of unhappiness in another. Its complicated, really, it is.

So yeah, on the idea of drinking the koolaid. I want to say, I have, many times, stumbled across pots, cups, entire gallon drums of koolaid, and each time, even if I have had a sip and possibly walked away feeling dopey or ill, I have never fully drunk the koolaid. And I feel, for many, once they are paid into a subscription, once they have paid into a plan of any kind…its only then that they begin to question whether or not what they have signed up for is just another snake oil or whether its the real deal. I think that time will tell on the many things I am currently assessing in my life. There is an element of cult is there, in plain sight, but I have to figure how much cognitive dissonance I am to ignore and just keep on trucking with in order to reap benefits.

What do I have to change, what has to change, in order for me to accept something as being a good thing, because unless I can see it as being a good thing all around, I cannot see it as something I can share freely with the world.

So for now, I am in a phase, if we were to call it that, where research, looking outwards and looking within, is my main focus and I hope to come out of this chrysalis of thought and have some serious insight to share. Until then…I remain, always and faithfully, free.