New Space

This blog is now considered closed. It will remain up, but I will not be updating it any more.

You can now find me here.

Finding One’s Own Past Blameworthy

There are times when life is busy, lived forwards with a view to the future that drives out any consciousness of the past. Sometimes it is just the opposite and things slow down and we live in quiet days that give us space to reflect. In such moments, if there is no imagined, sought-after future ready to fascinate our attention, then the mind is free to cast backwards through our personal histories and we can relive the past. This is often thought a bad thing, perhaps unconsciously regarded as suitable only for the elderly and the severely ill – that is, for those who haven’t any future to look forward to. That way lies only nostalgia, that unseemly retreat into what may never have been and which, in any case, certainly never may be again. Why, after all, would someone with more road left ahead than behind concern herself with what has been left behind?

It is an inevitability, of course, that thoughts of the past will arise in the present. We should try our best not to torture ourselves with them, but they come naturally and, just as naturally, they go. And while it is true the retreat to nostalgia can drain life of something in the present, it can also provide much comfort if the present moment is one of misfortune. Really, this is not better or worse than living with one’s mind fixed to the future, it is only cultural biases that make it seem so. After all, both hope and despair are future-oriented emotions, reactions to merely imagined circumstances – the least that may be said of rumination upon the past is that it is, ostensibly, about what has actually happened.

This is to understate the value of contemplating our own journeys, however. For when we imagine the future we always do so on our terms: “I will be as I am, but better, richer, stronger, wittier, more beautiful, charming, and intelligent, of more subtle and refined tastes, my every project will come to fruition…” Or, alternatively, “every possible misfortune will be visited upon me: I shall lose my youthful beauty, my mind will decline, my body will go to fat, I will lose my home, business, and family…” Both versions project our assessments of ourselves and our lives as we find them into an imaginal realm that reality does not and cannot push back against. But when we look back upon the past, we also do so on our terms – and sometimes what we can see is ugly.

(I am, of course, thinking about myself here.)

We should be glad if we look back and see misbehaviour – e.g. that our dissembling was transparent, our sense of entitlement delusional, our manipulations odious. It’s not that we are or ought to be glad that we behaved poorly or that we hurt people and lost friends, rather, we are glad because we now know that such behaviour is bad and that we should not act in such a way. We should be glad because we see that, although we didn’t meet our current standards for behaviour, those standards are there now and better than they were.

Coming Back to the Cushion, Gunning for Stream-Entry

I never really stopped meditating, per se, I just wound up doing less of it, less frequently than I had done in the past. I got busy with other things and tired from the increasingly hectic pace of work – to the point where now, for now, I’m always on-call for the company. It’s hard to make / take the time to sit when you get home tired and the phone rings every half hour with some issue needing your attention (or kids, kids could be bad for it too), but over the past couple months I’ve been ramping up my sitting time and ignoring the phone more assiduously (having figured out that they’ll figure it out). And as, and as much as, the monkey-mind settles down, my motivation to practise increases.

Once upon a time, I was determined to make it to stream-entry (Theravada Buddhist talk for the first stage of enlightenment). At some point, I’m not sure when exactly, it went away. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that instead of the desire going away, it was more that the goal seemed out-of-reach, sort of like dreams of stardom are for many people. The sort of case where it is not so much that one wouldn’t love to be famous, or that one wouldn’t immediately give up ordinary life if fame descended upon her in some form, but more like the acknowledgement and acceptance that life probably just won’t allow her that experience: discouragement. Just so, I became discouraged that awakening is an experience that I could experience.

But lately – and I don’t know whether it’s the increased cushion-time, having just made it through a difficult moment for the family, re-reading old books that make it seem doable, or just knowing that my work situation is going to become both less intense and allow me lots of time to dedicate to practising – the goal has seemed so achievable. So I’m shooting for that – I’m shooting for stream-entry.

So, Starting Again…

It’s been much, much too long.

I hit that point in the lifecycle where it was just work-work-work-work-work. Which is fine (we all have to make it in this world) but it drained me out. Sometimes the idea would get in my head that I would like to write a thing and then… I would realize that there was nothing that I wanted to say at all.

But I’m changing life circumstances and hopefully this dried-up-well situation will come around of its own – or maybe not and I finally toast this blog entirely.

Alive and With A New Project

Well, more than a year since my last post and now I’m back.  Clearly, I’m not to be relied upon for blogable entertainment.  The thing is that I simply ran out of steam in the worst possible way – there was just nothing that seemed like it needed to be said.  Also, I got a new position at work.  Also, maybe some other things I don’t think I’ll tell the whole world about.  In any case, so it was, so it is.

But I have of late decided that there is something that would be interesting to do.  Interesting to me at least, hopefully interesting to others as well.  Indeed, I think it would be even more interesting if I were able to get some participation from others for this little project.  So if anyone out there is reading this and thinking that it sounds like it might be a fun thing to do, please give me a shout.

The short version of the project is this: methodically undertake a particular course of meditative practise and philosophical/psychological investigation and make a daily record of my own progress/outcomes (including my failures, of course) in order to try and effectively design a course of study to efficiently get people to a condition of ‘xxx’[1].  Enlist other interested parties (*cough* ‘guinea pigs *cough*) willing to engage in the program in order to properly evaluate its effectiveness and make tweaks… so if anyone out there is reading this and thinking that it sounds like it might be a fun thing to do, please give me a shout!

What is the background on this?  Well, I had just returned (this was two weeks ago) from a very fruitful retreat and I was giving a friend of mine (who I consider to have been very successful in this ‘xxx’ business[2]) the run-down on the retreat.  This led into a conversation about just why it is that there are so many Buddhists and yet so few Buddhas, so many advaita vedantins and so few… whatever you might call them.  There were a few reasons we batted about, but poor instruction struck us both as an important one.  Indeed, I think that this is particularly important because there is both a ‘stupid’ way to go about practise and a ‘smart’ way – and I have been very stupid.  I no longer want to be stupid and I would like to see others be less stupid as well.

Also, there are so many other practices that I think could be of value but which I’ve never investigated or investigated in any methodical way.  Hopefully, putting up a record and comparing my own experience with those of others will make a difference!

So, the logs begin tomorrow (though I’ve already sort-of chosen the plan of action and started yesterday) and the supplementary posts will follow.

Endnotes:

[1] This is to be defined later on.  Needless to say, I have a particular idea of what this means and this is based upon thought and practise that took place over the course of my internet absence for which I will have to fill in the details.

[2] Again, don’t panic!  I’m definitely not saying anything too outlandish about him, as you’ll all see when I get around to finally putting forward something that I consider to be a workable and realistic notion of what fills in the space marked ‘xxx’.

Been a while…

So, I’ve been absent from blogging for, oh, about a month now. The reason is simply that I’ve had nothing at all to say.  Or, to be more correct, I’ve had nothing to say that wasn’t stupid sounding, even to myself.  Also, work is picking up for me (and might be even more, should I happen to be chosen for a better position I’ve put in for) and I’ve also been getting out of the house at night more frequently.  Turns out that when you’re a shut-in you’ve got more time for things like: writing.  Also, I made the terrible mistake of reading some completely immature and hilarious fiction.  John Dies at the End (he doesn’t – he dies at the beginning!) and its sequel, This Book is Full of  Spiders: Seriously dude, don’t touch it.  A pair of comedy/horror novels about what would  happen if two complete slacker-idiots had to save the world.

So yes, that’s what happened.  Turns out that sometimes we haven’t the time for everything that we want to fit in.  Oh well, at least I’m still getting a bunch of daily page hits because people are looking for “enso pictures” on the internet.  Somehow the pic on my blog wound up third-place on Google image searches for ‘enso’.  Funny world we live in.

Hopefully I’ll be having some more content up soon, but then again, I might remain mostly stupid for the forseeable future.  It’s hard to say.

Despite My Previous Anti-Christian Assertions…

A Google search on christian buddhism brought me to this and this and this.  There’s both a lot of relief and negativity in evidence in the comments to these articles.  Personally, I understand both sides of the equation.

I don’t think it’s possible actually to be a 50/50 Christian-Buddhist or Buddhist-Christian, even if you are one of the mystical sorts of Christians.  Fundamentally, Buddhists and Christians differ pretty strongly in respect to that which is of transcendental concern and the differences between the two families of views cannot really be papered over.  Buddhism generally denies a metaphysical ground or source, which denial marks a huge non-starter for anything that reasonably could be categorized as ‘Christian’.  Having said that, however, there are some Buddhist sects that view the ultimate reality as being Mind (huge contentious discussion, I know, but let’s not get into it now) and so actually approximate something like the theism that they are doctrinally required to reject – even so, their ultimate reality of Mind is worlds apart from the God of Christianity, even in His more mystical articulations.  For instance, the Buddhists’ ubiquitous Mind/Awareness/etc. remains decidedly impersonal, while even the mystical Christians’ God has elements of volition, personality, etc. (granted, of distinctly different kind than those of humans).  These are particularly sticky problems and cannot simply be brushed under the rug.

Stained glass Padmasambhava (click to embiggen).
Source: http://www.yulokod.ca/limited_edition-2.htm

Moreover, there is obviously a lot of hurt that motivates the negative comments on these posts.  People who perhaps had bad experiences with Christianity or its representatives but who retained their spiritual hunger (which is being fed by Buddhism) would, quite naturally, view the entire religion with a jaundiced eye (indeed, most atheists are of this sort too).  Then there are those who simply have great distaste for what is familiar or a mild-to-extreme valuing of what is foreign, whatever the genesis of these feelings (see la wik: cultural cringe, oikophobia, xenophily, xenocentrism).  To such people, any attempt to forge a synthesis or bring Jesus into Buddhism pushes all the wrong buttons – Buddhism was supposed to be their escape from all that.

And then, of course, there are fervent, fundamentalist convert Buddhists as well (Namdrol of E-Sangha comes to mind).

Tibetan-ish Jesus in Gethsemane (click to embiggen).
Source: http://indigenousjesus.blogspot.ca/2012/04/gethsemane.html

But the negative comments seemed also to be missing the point of what the author was getting at, which really wasn’t that Christianity and Buddhism ought to merge into some perfect synthesis of the two.  Rather, his point (which I thought was fairly obvious) is that as Westerners we will have some degree of resonance with the morals, myths, and cultural containers (e.g. art, architecture, music) of our heritage and that this is something that Buddhism will have to accommodate itself to if it is truly to become rooted in Western soil.  I fully agree with that thesis even though I, raised in an atheist household, do not and never did believe Jesus to be God or any of the other stuff that goes with Christian belief.  Still, as an archetype of forgiveness and compassion, Jesus speaks far more powerfully to me than Tara and John the Baptist may speak to some Westerners as a more appropriate meditational figure for purification than Vajrasattva.  Nor does the process necessarily need be entirely about Christianity, either.  I have elsewhere expressed some interest in buddhizing Halloween (which I have been meaning to do a follow-up on).  And the Grim Reaper surely must be capable of being put to meditational use?

I love this so much, my print looks awesome on the wall (click to embiggen).
Source: http://www.etsy.com/listing/66376822/gothic-macabre-art-print-the-grim-reaper

The ironic thing about this is that both certain Western xenophiles and Asian cultural conservatives will fight tooth and nail against such a process taking place, even though it is exactly the same process (insofar as history does not repeat, it rhymes) as the synthesis of pre-Buddhist Tibetan folk-religion with Buddhism or of Kwan-Yin’s transformation from goddess to Bodhisattva.

My Conversation With Kenneth Folk

Today I had the good fortune of spending several hours shooting the breeze with Kenneth Folk. He just happened to be in town and was game to have lunch with me and a fellow dharma geek (though lunch got long). If I had had the presence of mind to think ahead, I probably would’ve made a point of taking mental notes, but (alas and alack) I did not!  But it was a most fascinating and enlightening (ha!) conversation, ranging from fMRI studies of meditators’ brains, to meta-models of enlightenment, to our individual practices (thanks for the advice, Kenneth!) and much else besides.  It’s not every day that an opportunity like that crops up.  I haven’t much to say about it right now – I need to give time to my subconscious to grind away until something good comes out of it – but I think this will provide fodder for this space, in any case.

 

EDIT: I posted this before I was finished, so I added a little more.

Arguing Idealisms: Epistemological

I have been having a whole bunch of fun thinking about idealism lately (and then immediately putting on my unoriginal theologian’s hat) [1].  Of course, there is a raft of meanings that people attach to the term idealist and obviously I can’t be meaning all meanings all the time, so I will only be speaking here about those that I find particularly compelling.  First, there is epistemological idealism, a family of views [2] that concerns itself with the contents of experience and which asserts that we cannot know objects in a mind-independent way (how this washes out is somewhat different for each theorist).  Then there is ontological idealism, which makes the much stronger assertion that reality is, in one way or another, at base fundamentally mental, not material.  I am going to present, across an indeterminate number of posts, some arguments for each that I have cooked-up myself.  I make no claim that these arguments are original to the history of philosophy – I wouldn’t know because during my undergraduate degree idealism wasn’t a big topic of discussion, due to too much worrying about free will in light of the obvious fact (?!) of causal determinism – but at least they are my own.  On, then, to…

Epistemic Idealism:

Of the two, epistemological idealism (henceforth: EI) is by far the easier to argue for and is actually, I have found, a quite common, if very much implicitly held, belief among scientifically literate people (and others besides) [3].  To put my cards on the table, I take EI very seriously – I haven’t encountered an argument yet that seriously threatened idealist skepticism of knowledge about the external world.  Although I may deal with such criticisms in some future post, at present I am interested in presenting my own reasons for accepting EI.  As such, I present the following argument:

Say I have two apples (yum!) and I want to know what colour they are.  No problem, I just look at them – “oh, one is red and one is green” – and that would count as sufficient evidence for most people that one of the apples is red and the other is green.  They could repeat the experiment and confirm my results.  If there was a large enough group of people, however, there would inevitably be a few colour blind people who would insist that “there are two green apples and what the heck is this ‘red’ thing you people are always on about?”  They would be doing the same experiment and actually getting different results.

A simulation of how the colour sighted and the colour blind would see the apples.

We cannot merely dismiss the colour blind as being wrong about the colour of the apples simply because there are fewer of them – after all, if we were in a hypothetical colour sighted minority we wouldn’t accept that red doesn’t exist simply because most everyone else couldn’t recognize it.  So what becomes obvious is that we have a problem, which is that the apples seem to be differently coloured (red and green) only within certain frames of reference (i.e. those including organisms with perceptual apparati like that of colour sighted human beings), while they are identically coloured within other frames of reference (e.g. those of colour blind human beings).  With this recognition it becomes easy to imagine further frames of reference in which the apples seem to be multi-coloured, or to have no colour at all, or even to be visually absent (e.g. worms don’t have eyes).

Still, the question stands: what colour(s) are the apples?  What is obvious is that we cannot answer the question by piling up a list of the apples’ seemings-to-be across the complete set of possible and actual frames of reference for the apples.  That such a piling-up of seemings will bring us closer to the facts of the matter is difficult to believe, particularly since in only a trivial number will they even have colour, let alone be red and/or green [4].  What we want to know is what colour the apples are independent of how they seem – that is, what colour are they from no frame of reference?  Unfortunately, this is impossible to answer.

For example, we might try to resolve the issue by use of science.  We know that our perceptual apparatus works in particular ways and acknowledges different colours in response to certain wavelengths of light reflected from the surface of objects, so we could simply measure the reflectivity properties of the apples.  But if that is what we choose to do, although we would be learning something potentially interesting and useful about them, we nevertheless wouldn’t have ascertained what colour they are, merely something about their light-reflective properties.  Or we could measure the wavelength of the light reflected from the apples, but again we will not have identified what colour the apples are.  We could note what is going on in our nervous systems when the light reaches our eyes, but certainly whatever that research reveals would definitely not tell us anything about the apples!

This argument, while familiar to any who have spent much time learning about human perceptual systems, is still, however, one step away from full-blown EI.  I will now take us the rest of the way.

In a deeper sense, the question of what colour the apples are is incoherent.  Remembering that we cannot identify the colour(s) of the apples except from some frame of reference, for there to be the seeing of a red and a green apple requires the presence of both the apples and of a perceiver capable of the perception of red and green alike.  I can see both colours but colour blind people can’t, even if we are looking at the same objects.  The apples are able to cause different perceptions of colour in different organisms on the basis of those organisms’ perceptual faculties being of the sort that are capable, in conjunction with the right external causes, of producing ‘red’- and ‘green’-experiences.  Were there no such organisms, there would be no such thing as experiences of ‘red’ or ‘green’.  So to ask what colour the apples are from no frame of reference in particular is to ask what the non-experience of experiential qualities – as caused by some object(s) – must be like, which is an obvious non-starter.

The implication of this is that colour is not a property of the objects at all!  Rather, colour is a perceptual experience that may be said to have been caused along the lines explained above, so the very most we could say about the apples is that they have the property of being the sort of things that can cause ‘red’- or ‘green’-experiences (under the right conditions).  Now, the same holds true for all properties and all objects.  A challenge for the reader: identify even a single property of some object that is not relative to some particular frame of reference.  I believe that there is nothing – nothing – that may be posited as an observer-independent property of any perceived object whatsoever.  In fact, we do no not perceive objects at all – there are only our perceptions.  This is EI.

Endnotes:

[1] What can I say?  I was always kind of weird – definitely never much of an outdoors kid (sorry, Dad).

[2] Just assume from here on that I am speaking about families of views.  It’s too much work to provide an in-depth and subtle comparison between, say, Berkeley and Kant.  In addition, I would have to understand Kant.  Ha! :S

[3] Which brings me sharp jolts of Schadenfreude any time it becomes apparent.  The irony of my sciencey friends making idealist arguments about perception when the very thought of idealism itself is repellent to them… it’s just too delicious.

[4] I suppose one could say that God could clear it up, that if any frame of reference is objective, it’s his.  To  which I would respond: “what, does God have eyes?”

Anatta and Sunyata: Substantially Different Concepts?

(Did you get the joke?)

Perhaps someone out there with deeper knowledge of the doctrinal subtleties of this can help clear this up for me, but I have to admit that I’m hard pressed to find a big, hairy difference between the two.

Anatta can be interpreted strictly to mean that there is nothing whatsoever that arises in perception that is or is a property of a self, soul, me, etc.  This would be a completely accurate interpretation.  This is also exactly identical to the emptiness of ‘the self’.  So far, so good.  But if we allow a somewhat greater degree of freedom in interpretation, we could say that anatta also applies to all phenomena, not simply the putative self – all things are without their own self-nature (that is, there is nothing that is or is a property of a self of those objects).  How do we know this?  Anicca: if things had their own self-nature, they would not change, now would they?  Which is precisely the evidence brought out to support the supposedly different (and putatively superior) Mahayana doctrine of emptiness.

Now, of course, anatta is (almost?) always used in Theravada parlance to refer to one’s own self, soul, me, ‘I’ (etc.) as a matter of training.  Theravada theory and practice aims to  produce arahants through the clear perception of the emptiness of their own selves – it is not entirely clear whether it follows from this that arahants must therefore have overcome the misperception of inherent existence (or self) in external objects as well.  Regardless, this seems much less different than the sectarian cheerleaders for ‘higher’ yanas seem to suggest – it seems as though Theravadins do not talk about emptiness much because it’s not really relevant to their aims.  Does it boil down to this, or is there a real distinction that I’m missing here?