Tag: buddhism

Alan Watts on the perils and pitfalls for Westerners of attempting to follow Eastern spiritual paths

 

In this talk, Alan Watts explains the cultural presuppositions underpinning Taoism, Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, and consequently some of the problems and contradictions often linked to their adoption by Westerners. Essentially, his argument is that these systems are designed to achieve liberation from specific forms of cultural conditioning; for those who do not share those forms of cultural conditioning, they make considerably less sense, especially if not appropriately reinterpreted. It is particularly problematic when Westerners simultaneously attempt to adopt the cultural framework of reference as part of the practice, given that the practice is designed to liberate from that very cultural framework. Watts argues that esoteric forms of these religions were essentially conceived to protect them against social forces that otherwise would have repressed them, and that the esotericism is therefore epiphenomenal. He points out that any effort to supersede the ego which is driven by the ego, which is the case of any allegiance to a given doctrinal path, is doomed to failure. These are important insights.

I would disagree with him on two points: reincarnation is a widespread belief even in the West (surveys show upwards of 20% adherence). It also characterizes, in one form or another, many pre-agricultural societies. In my opinion, it has a phenomenological underpinning. I also don’t understand his claim that the thought of either Jung or Freud was shaped in any significant way by social Darwinism or Hegelianism. Nevertheless, I certainly do agree that there is a risk for those in the West who are attracted to Eastern religions to get caught up in exotic epiphenomena, mistaking these for essential features and essentially trading one set of religious rituals for another.

However, even within their own cultural context, we should be very careful not uncritically to suppose that these practices actually are efficacious. Mostly they are not even meant to be. Any religion has its mystical core simply because mysticism has been constrained to express itself in the language of the dominant surrounding religious culture. This core may inspire us and reward study, but it’s essentially the sedimentary residue of experience in other times and places; it is certainly no substitute for our own direct experience of the divine.

Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

 

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy  – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être”

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

Why I am not a Buddhist

Buddha17For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

 

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”

Ennui

On his excellent blog, my friend (teacher?) Dirk Liesenfeld recently posted an article discussing (in German of course) a question that we probably all have asked ourselves – what happens once you reach enlightenment?

As a child I asked myself a similar question – doesn’t heaven sound really boring? Of course that’s actually a bit of a different question since here we are talking not about individual life perpetuated after death, but about continued life before death when all striving is nonetheless over. Still these questions have in common that they both cast doubt on how hard one should try to attain salvation and, in particular, is there any great rush?

Dirk describes us two scenarios. One leads to physical death and/or insanity (that one is particularly unappealing), the other to living in an almost unnoticed state of bliss, as pure love. Statistically the former case seems to predominate – though that may of course just be because the latter cases make a lot less noise. You get crazy, he says, in particular when the whirlwind of enlightenment tears up the roots of your humanity. There is nothing wrong with that craziness, per se, but it must seem unattractive to a potential disciple and certainly it seems a bit of a waste that someone who could share so much with the world doesn’t end up doing so. Though whether the world has the slightest interest in listening is, of course, another question.

The problem I have is that to feel estranged from daily life really doesn’t require one to be enlightened. It doesn’t even require one ever to have experienced tantra or any other authentic spiritual experience. It requires no more than a certain sensitivity to the complete madness and cruelty that surrounds us and its shocking juxtaposition to what is truly of value and beautiful. One of the main obstacles to spiritual growth must be, surely, the unbearableness of that shocking realization of human suffering, Weltschmerz. How much of it, indeed, can one person bear without going crazy?

In the world I know, the one I know in my heart I mean, all things are sacred. The joy that we experience in contact with others and with the world around us is beyond words. People love each other. No one would hurt a child. And this is not some idle utopia, nor even confined to tantra workshops, it is a part of my daily reality.

A much greater part, though, is spent being painfully reminded of how much the few positive things I can bring into the world are massively outweighed by the brutality of the established order. That’s both depressing and a major weight around my shoulders. It seems likely that this great mass of deadly inertia affects me negatively much more than I affect it positively.

Although I do not think my views are exceptionally odd or unnatural, I do find it very difficult to make any connection with the way most people think. It tires and bores me to have to listen to their stereotypes, prejudices and hatefulness. It tires and bores me to have to explain that, no, I don’t think like that and, yes, life is quite fine without such ludicrous baggage around my neck (or is it, in fact? for it is also rather lonely).

My partner and I organized, once, a party in lingerie. Half of our friends were so shocked by the very idea of this that they haven’t spoken to us since (and that’s the ones we dared to invite – of course there were plenty who never even got onto the guest list). Of those who did come, some were convinced we intended an orgy. Others, a few, came and had fun. But not one has tried anything similar, and most have not even invited us back to anything at all.

Personally, I simply didn’t and still don’t get what the issue could be. Isn’t that just fun? And as for any sex occurring – isn’t that both very unlikely and not a big deal? So what exactly is going on? Why do the most varied people suddenly gang up against me whenever I want to be just, well, normal, honest, natural? And why is it so hard to find anyone else on the same wavelength?

I have frankly no answer to this question. The only thing I can say is that if even the slightest authenticity is so difficult for the world around me to bear, there seems little point in settling for half measures.