Whatever depends on causes and conditions
Is empty of intrinsic reality
What excellent instruction could there be
More marvellous than this discovery?
Intro
Tibetan exegesis extoll the concept emptiness with extravagant and poetic eulogies reserved, in other cultures, for the Gods. One version of emptiness, which probably has had as many condemnations as eulogies, is expounded in the text The short essence of eloquence by Tsongkhapa, the 13th century Buddhist Pandita, whose extraordinary life and work resulted in a Tibetan renaissance and the creation of the the Gelug order, the dominating force in Tibetan Buddhism.
This post investigates what might remain useful after we put his teaching on emptiness to the test by bringing it into proximity with contemporary thought, in the context of the non-buddhist heuristic. With this in mind we can extract postulates from the philosophical systems in which they are normally situated, and use them as working tools, to “prize open fabrications net”, as Tsongkhapa himself puts it.
One of these postulates is the Marxist understanding of the way philosophical discourses relate to the social milieu in which they are articulated, as an integrated element in a cultural matrix wedded to economic and social structures and processes.
A second postulate, articulated by Althusser, concerns the way social formations concrete ideological perspectives – institutions, practices, traditions, lineages, texts, rituals, sacred images and meditative practices – which interpellate the person into a particular thought-world.
So this essay is as much about the tools needed to articulate an explanation of emptiness, as it is about the actual content of any explanation. Why this is so, I contend, just is the meaning of emptiness.
This way of regarding Tsongkhapa’s understanding accords with the central idea with which his teaching is concerned – dependent origination. Tsongkhapa, of course, expressed this view within the context of a 13th century Tibetan Buddhist world-outlook. But at the core of what he called “the essence of eloquence”, is a truth that is at once a transcendent (but not transcendental) fact of the human condition, and an ethical injunction grounded upon that fact. This truth, though, is not “the pearl of great price” hidden among the ephemeral and mundane phenomena of the ordinary. To see truth in this way is to reify it, substantializing it in exactly the way Tsongkhapa insisted was misguided. To put it in non-buddhist terms, truth is the decimated remainder, a sort of debris that will only function as truth when the material is reformulated according to the prescripts of a new dispensation.
Tsongkhapa’s World
There is no time here to give a detailed account of the nature of the society in which Tsongkhapa lived and worked, or to narrate his biographical details. All of this is available via well written and comprehensive scholarly works (many available as free download on the Internet). Here I would like to take a different tack and (at the risk, maybe, of stretching credulity) contextualize Tsongkhapa’s world with reference to an illuminating series of texts by the anthropologist Carole McGranahan. McGranahan has been working up an account of Tibetan history by collecting, collating and contextualizing the oral accounts of ordinary people. The results of her work are available at her website.
My suggestion is that you read her collection of essays as a supplement to this essay and before continuing here. (Link at bottom of page.)
A lot had changed in Tibet over the centuries. But I think at root not much had changed at all, or at least not enough to make redundant the insight one can glean from McGranahan’s work – what it was to live as a Tibetan in Tibetan society; to inhabit, as a person of flesh and blood, the totality of a particular Tibetan world. What McGranahan succeeds in showing is how an individual’s life just is the living manifestation of a world, so that the ethos of that world permeates everything one does. If, for example, you read her essay on the recollections of women who fought against the Chinese invaders, you might gain an insight into how, even at that late hour, superstition so permeated the Tibetan outlook that soldiers refused to treat wounded companions because of the fear of being tainted by ‘unclean blood’. Even more extraordinary was the widespread horror of menstrual blood.
Wounded Tibetan soldiers posed similar dilemmas to battalion members who came to their aid as contact with their blood would weaken the protective amulets of those helping them. Yet, only women’s menstrual blood fully nullified protective blessings. The highest of lamas, or so the veterans claimed, did not have protection against bullets dipped in or filled with women’s menstrual blood. Mc Granahan, Carol: Narrative Dispossession: Tibet and the Gendered Logics of Historical Possibility.
This was in the late fifties and early sixties, but nothing much had changed regarding misogyny since Tsongkhapa’s time. I particularly recommend that you read her essay entitled Murder, History, and Social Politics in 1920s Lhasa, for the way in which it portrays the feel of Tibetan society – the rigid social stratification; the way the ideology and interests of the ruling elite permeated every aspect of life and yet failed to stamp out a rebellious diversity of outlook and violent non-conformity. Here too I think not much had changed since Tsongkhapa, at least in the feel of how life was for most people.
This sort of insight is important; it provides a way of entering into what Marx called the “concrete sensuous life of the human being”, over and against the various ideological and philosophical abstractions purporting to know that life; or the crude simplifications and wooly eyed romanticizations of x-buddhist discourse. This way of entry is, of course, usually provided by Art, in the form of the visual arts, but particularly by the novel. But since no Tibetan Hogart or Dickens has yet emerged to narrate, in pictorial or fictive form, the underbelly of Tibetan society, the work falls to historians like McGranahan, who assiduously collect the oral history of ‘ordinary’ and not so ordinary people.
I’ll summarize certain points abstracted from McGranahen’s account that might, I think, be applicable to the Tibetan society of Tsongkhapa’s day. (With the proviso that it’s the way McGranahan is able to convey something of the ‘sensuous actuality’ which is indispensable – an element excluded from x-buddhist discussion of Tibetan Buddhism. X-buddhist discourse offers instead something akin to Thurman’s sanitized version of Tibetan history – as a good example see his forword to Essential Tibetan Buddhism – or worse a fantasy ‘Shangrila’ notion of Tibet bordering on the idiotic.)
In Tsongkhapa’s time Tibetan society was structured on the order of rigid class stratification. Conflicting class interests were kept in check, or sometimes stifled, by a centralized autocratic governance dedicated to preserving aristocratic power. This autocratic elite was indistinguishable from its religious manifestation at the head of the monastic institution. Monasteries functioned as centers of regional power and were a sort of mini-fiefdom connected with certain clan interests and with powerful families. They were integrated elements of the feudal productive system; millions of bonded serfs worked their lands, craft workers and artisans produced an endless supply of religious artifacts in their workshops, thousands of workers labored on new monasteries. Often the religious clan heads, or family leaders, were also the merchants who dealt in the exchange and transportation of the goods produced, amassing great wealth, social prestige, and power in the process.
Regional divides were made contentious by religious and clan loyalties vying for power in the context of a centralized authority equally committed to preserving power at the centre. Further instability was created by massive disparities of wealth between aristocrats, merchants and religious at the apex of the hierarchy, and peasants, workers, and artisans at the bottom. The central authority never shied away from imposing its rule by force if necessary, often involving the use of torture, imprisonment, and execution.The main underlying pressure for change was the aspirations of a disaffected merchant class demanding a relaxation of aristocratic holds on the expansion of trade both within Tibet and outside of it.
Tsongkhapa, in the charisma of his person, his organizational abilities, the breath of his knowledge, the passion of his polemic, and the depth of his meditative realizations, stood out among his contemporaries (many of whom were themselves massively accomplished) as the man most capable of implementing a renaissance in Tibetan thought, and a consolidation of the idea of a benevolent and enlightened form of centralized religious autocracy.
On the other hand, note that even during Tsongkhapa’s life his system of thought was already ossifying into an ideology concreted as a form of monasticism, inseparable from a hierarchical system in which the serfs on the bottom did all the productive work, and in return eked out lives of poverty, disease, ignorance and early death. Within this system monk-scholars spent centuries debating, dissecting and contextualizing more and more complex reformulations of Tsongkhapa’s thought, for no other reason that this was how the system replicated itself. His thought became associated with, and an integrated element of, the sectarian domination of the ‘yellow hats’ and a form of intellectualism made redundant by the pointless reiteration of an increasingly fastidious doctrinal conservatism.
This was due, in part, to the need to consolidate an autocratic/religious centralized power, over and against the persistent tendency (latent in all feudal/hierarchical systems) to splinter at the edges. Given this tendency, there was the fear that internal antagonisms would result in a return to a form of ‘warlordism’ in which opposing fiefdoms engaged in protracted civil war in an attempt to dominate their rivals, in conditions of a fixed supply of land, laboring serfs, raw materials, and the taxes and manpower necessary to maintain an army.
Two things, though, are worth considering here. In the first place it would be mistaken to think that we can extract Tibetan Buddhism from its context in the same way we can remove an object from its container. We cannot retrieve an unblemished or pure version of Tibetan Buddhism in this way, one constituted by the various religious traditions, forms of sacred ritual, sacred texts and philosophical treatises. To try to do so is to eviscerate what was a living tradition and to reduce it to its symbolic forms and practices.
Buddhism was (and still is) the living practice of a people at a particular juncture. Its cultural profile – the tradition of lineages and orders, the art and architecture, the ritual, song, dance, oral tradition, legends, land spirits, Gods and demons, six realms of human and animal migration, infinite continuum of lives, cosmic time scale – constitute a continuum of cultural practices co-extensive with the modes of economy, structures of social relations, and physical presence in the Tibetan landscape – a physical presence which conditioned the way Tibetans obtained the means of subsistence, and in the process created the social structures mediating the symbiotic relation between the human and the natural.
Secondly, to reduce this living tradition to its artifacts, and its cultural forms, says as much about the one who reduces (and the mode of reduction) as it does about the the object of this reduction. This is true whether x-buddhists or western scholars carry out the reduction and whether it serves naked ideological co-option or scientific understanding. Any reduction will serve contemporary interests, and can only be pursued as an integrated practice inseparable from the mesh of interests which constitute contemporary society. This, though, in no way reduces the usefulness of the academic discipline of historical investigation, but simply contextualizes its practice. (A crucial factor in the analysis of how exactly science can become an element in contemporary ideological co-option.)
When we try to understand exactly what Tsongkhapa meant by the concept emptiness, we must bring all of our faculties to bear, analytic and imaginative, while at the same time seeing that this very effort is itself a determining factor in what exactly we make of what Tsongkhapa has to say. In other words we must abandon any dream of retrieving a true version of Tsongkhapa’s thought, one free from interested bias. The point being that the idea of such an ideologically uncontaminated or disinterested version of truth is a perspective shared by both x-buddhists and positivists (and one of the reasons why they are congenial to each other).
This, I contend, is one of the implications of Tsongkhapa’s understanding of emptiness. Constrained as he was by the limitations of the Tibetan thought-world Tsongkhapa could never fully realize the potential of his thought. It proved, though, to be an enduring resource which can expand to encompass and integrate new and unforeseen conditions, or to put it the other way round: contemporary thought in infinite ways confirms the rightness of Tsongkhapa’s formulation and his exultant proclamations about its power to fashion a revolutionary subject.
Meditation and Method
Tsongkhapa’s understanding of emptiness, and the form of meditation he recommended, help to undermine two prevalent x-buddhist myths – that the concept emptiness necessarily posits a transcendental ground; and that the goal of meditative practice is to reach that ground, in the process abandoning the deluded premises of the conceptualizing mind.
His philosophical oeuvre extends to almost 18 volumes of works, covering a vast and multi-levelled subject matter. That being the case it might seem a little far-fetched to contend that the core of what he had to say could be expressed in a few verses of modest length. This, though, is what Tsongkhapa intended and believed. And the later history of Tibetan Buddhism has confirmed the power and potential of these few lines, and in the process confirmed one of the implications of the truth explicated here: that a truth’s significance is not limited to the society, historical juncture, or circumstances, of its formulation, and that, equally so, it must be limited in the scope of its explanatory power at any particular historical juncture, by those same constraints.
What follows is, of course, my take on Tsongkhapa’s words. I will be selective, quoting at will and even erratically, to further my agenda and show that Tsongkhapa’s understanding of emptiness is not reconcilable with belief in a transcendental realm. This is, after all, the only possible way of working with truths. In fact such an approach undermines x-buddhist belief in a truth transcendent to the society that produced it which can be retrieved in pure form by means of scripture or some sort of a-historical meditative insight. Tsongkapha insisted that such a thing was beyond even Buddhas – dharmic truth is never immune to the relativizing consequences of the fact of dependent origination.
I recommend that if you want to go into this more deeply you should read Jeffery Hopkins Tsongkhapa’s final exposition of emptiness (see below). Be warned though that it is not an easy read. Aside from its obvious benefits it will dispel any illusions about the depth of Tibetan Buddhist engagement with philosophical systematization, and its adherence to a practice of analytic rigour and incessant pushing of thought. Not surprising then that the opposing perspectives have won the day as far as the western x-buddhist cult of no-thinking goes.
Tsongkhapa’s conception of meditation is rooted in the Kadampa tradition established by Athisa. Contrary to contemporary x-buddhist practice it extols the virtues of rigorous thinking and grounds the practice of meditation on a concerted effort to push the mind and precipitate a breakthrough in cognitive fluency and insight.
Tsongkhapa’s medium length transcendent insight is a dense and difficult text on the relationship between the method of meditation, its object, and its fruit. It aims for a thorough transformation of the person at all levels. As I will try to articulate in a future post, this all level transformation cannot be effected in isolation and cannot be without ethical, and social/political consequences. The ethical consequences of Tsongkhapa’s understanding of emptiness is an integral aspect of his vision; the vision of the Bodhisattva as, objectively, the manifestation of the reality of dependent origination, and, subjectively, the subject/agent actively engaged in liberating beings. I wont, though, have much to say here about that as it deserves a post to itself.
His exposition divides meditation into an analytic and a calming procedure with the proviso the both will eventually coalesce in practice. He calls “fluency” this mergence of concentrative method and analytic insight. The analytic procedure follows a particular logical sequence that is not exclusive to Tibetan Buddhism, or Buddhism in general, but was common to Indian and Greek philosophy. This, briefly, uses the law of the excluded middle in which p is either p or not p. Excluding any other alternative.
“Limiting things to two possibilities – either they intrinsically exist or they do not – derives from the universal limitation that anything imaginable either exists or does not exist. Similarly, the limitation that what truly exists must either truly exist as single or truly exist as plural is based on the universal limitation that anything must be either single or plural. When there is such a limitation, any further alternative is necessarily precluded; hence, it is utter nonsense to assert a phenomenon that is neither of those two.” Tsongkhapa: Great Treatise on the Stages on the path to enlightenment, pg. 599.
Using this logical format as a meditative tool Tsongkhapa describes a procedure for establishing the non-existence of a substantial, abiding essence in either the self or in ‘exterior’ phenomena, such as pots or potatoes. It is essential during this procedure that one does not confuse the non-findability of a substantial, non-relational self with the refutation of the existence of a relative or conventional self – the self as it appears to ordinary cognition and which is subject to the law of cause and effect.
Another important point to note is that for Tsongkhapa the final basis for any proof or critique, including this refutation of essential reality, is information provided by ordinary conventional consciousness. We see that a log is different from a flame, that a horse is different from a cow, that being accompanied is different from being unaccompanied; and from this ordinary factual knowledge, we can develop arguments against essential nature. Our ordinary conventional consciousnesses are mistaken in that a log appears to them as though it were essentially real, but at the same time these conventional consciousnesses provide accurate and practical information. Not only can we use this information to light a fire – or select a potato for planting – but we need this information in order to form the argument against essential nature. As Tsongkhapa (LRCM 739) says, “Even when you analyze reality, the final basis for any critique derives from unimpaired conventional consciousnesses. (Source: Guy Newland, Ultimate Analysis and Conventional Existence, in Changing minds: contributions to the study of Buddhism and Tibet, in memory of Jeffrey Hopkins.)
In his elucidation of method, Tsongkhapa guides the practitioner through the complex analysis necessary to establish the viability of conventional truths, and the ultimate analysis that shows there to be no substantial or separate entities such as selves or essences.
The Short Essence of Eloquence
Who sees the inexorable causality of things
Of both cyclic life and liberation
And destroys any objectivity conviction
Thus finds the path that pleases Victors
Appearance inevitably relative
And voidness free from all assertions –
As long as these are understood apart
The victors intent is not known.
But when they coincide not alternating
Mere sight of inevitable relativity
Secures knowledge beyond objectivisms
And investigation of the view is perfect
More, as experience dispels absolutism
And voidness clears away nihilism
You know voidness dawn as cause and effect
No more will you be deprived by extremist views
This is emptiness in a nutshell. Please note though that “objectivity conviction” does not mean, (as it often does in western philosophical texts) the rejection of an objective or mind-independent realm. Objectivity here means the existence of separate, self standing, or self powering entities – substantial entities possessing an innate essence – it does mean a continuum of relational and dynamically changeful entities, that preserve individuality while being at the same time undeniably independent of mind.
The line “voidness free of all assertions” is also referring to the relational nature of phenomena but in a negative form. Voidness is free of assertions in the sense that emptiness just is the relational or relatively causal; it is free from assertions in that it does not have an essential essence or nature. To understand it apart from the inevitably relative is to project into it an own essence, to reify it as a substantial entity, force, or condition, over, against, under, or within the relative.
But when they coincide not alternating
Mere sight of inevitable relativity
Secures knowledge beyond objectivisms
And investigation of the view is perfect
When, in our ordinary experience (when exercising our ordinary cognitive processes) we perceive the relative, mere sight of it secures an understanding free from objectivisms (self-powered essences) by the very fact of the co-incidence of emptiness and relativity. No extra concentration is necessary in principle, although the achievement of the above meditative fluency helps. Things are empty because they are relational, and things are relational because their empty nature (lack of a walled off, independent substantial essence) allows interaction. The words “coincide not alternating” express A core insight, without which the concept emptiness produces a nihilistic rejection of cause and effect (and in turn any possibility of ethical choice, or sense of meaningfulness) or a reified transcendental essence. Compassionate action becomes, in the latter case, impossible and in the former without meaning.
Extremist views are reifications of phenomena (as own essences) and of emptiness as an final, closed off, non-relational transcendence. The process of reification substantializes what is naturally relational, insubstantial and processional; it produces either a substantialization as own essence – a transcendent, non-relational essential core – or it produces a negation that goes too far, a reified nothingness, a non-existent, devoid of causal or ethical efficacy.
You know voidness dawn as cause and effect
No more will you be deprived by extremist views
Voidness dawns as just this ordinary, causal, relative, processional continuum, devoid of essences, fixed entities, or transcendental natures. Because it is relational it is lawful in the sense that its relational patterns and its dynamic interactions are not closed off from cognition.
Knowledge is not only possible but is one of the conditions and conditioning processes manifesting as mind but not reducible to any sort of mind essence. In other words mind itself is not a self powered essence but a relational and causally produced entity in interaction with, and dependent on, other relational processes. And the knowledge it produces is conventional in the sense that it co-arises with its object and is therefore determined from both sides – it is just that which is given as the content and the structure of symbolic systems; and that which coordinates between the given symbolic representation and its referenced object. In other words there are conventional agreed patterns or laws governing what is established as true or false, so that, for example, conventional truth is not taken as mere subjectivity – the subjectivity that could, for instance, imagine a unicorn and insist on the objective existence of real as well as imaginary unicorns.
To come back, for a moment to the concept fluency. Tsongkapha regards this to be the fruit of persistent practice of analytic meditation. At first he recommends that the practitioner alternate between calming meditation (for example concentration on the breath) and analytic meditation — on the coincidence of relativity and the absolute, or on the unfindability of an inherent, substantial self. At some stage, though, the practitioner will make headway on both counts so that it becomes possible to drop the alternating method and merge calming meditation with analytic meditation in what Tsongkapha calls a state of equipoise or ecstatic fluency. Tsongkapha explains it this way:
If you practice analytic meditation by itself, the quiescence you previously developed will decline, so you should practice analytic meditation mounted on the horse of quiescence, now and then blending in periods of focused meditation. Moreover, if you practice analytic meditation often, your focusing decreases, so you should often return to focused meditation.
and later:
If you can develop ecstatic fluency through the power of the practice of analytic meditation itself, then that becomes transcendent insight. (Thurman, Robert. Tsongkhapa: Medium length transcendent insight, in Essential Tibetan Buddhism, pg. 200. My emphasis)
In other words by practising analytic meditation itself, one develops a keen concentrative focus by means of precise, sustained thinking, and this can, with persistence, lead to a transcendent breakthrough, (transcendent to the habitual reifications unthinkingly imbibed from one’s culture).
Tsongkhapa expounded this conception of emptiness and form of meditation in a philosophical and religious environment that was antagonistic to it. The prevailing view expounded by Dolpopa in his exposition of the Great Middle Way posited the emptiness of all phenomena as expressly confirming the existence of a transcendent mind – an absolute, substantially existing, transcendental Buddha mind, over and against the impermanent, insubstantial and illusory phenomenal realm. Sound familiar? Things do change but slowly and not by much when you get right down to it.
Emptiness Recalculated
If Tsongkapa’s understanding is profound, it is also limited in scope. If we consider the concept emptiness from the perspective of its latent explanatory power and its transformative potential, we can see that both are under-utilized. This, of course, is as it should be. We cannot expect Tsongkhapa to transcend the limits of a medieval world view. What we can expect is that modern x-buddhism would do so, but it fails miserably, displaying what Glenn Wallis calls “a pathological inability to unleash the force of its own thought”. Tsongkapha’s formulation needs to be brought into proximity with contemporary thought. X-buddhism fails here, rejecting the opportunity to unleash the force of the insight latent within Tsongkhapa’s formulation
Glenn Wallis in, Speculative Non-Buddhism: x-buddhist Hallucination and its Decimation describes how this might be done:
[…] [T]he line of dharmic postulation must be reestablished horizontally, parallel to the lived human gaze. The first requirement of non-buddhism is thus to forcibly open a new line of vision – to divest the primary classical-buddhist conceptual terms of their dharmic account. (pg. 124, his emphasis)
In his coda at the end of x-buddhist Hallucination and its Decimation Wallis recalculates x-buddhist terms as non-buddhist first names. I want to concentrate on three terms in particular: anattā (no-self), paticcasamuppāda (dependent origination) and bodhi (awakening, enlightenment) → Flesh and blood humanity.
Wallis recalculates anattā as social symbolic identity. This concept is latent within Tsongkhapas understanding of conventionality: For him persons are established as existing by imputation, on what worldly convention takes as just that which constitutes personhood. In other words it is conventional understanding, structured and expressed by means of symbolic systems, that establishes the existence of persons. If this is not ‘mere subjectivity’ how is the objective conventional (but not ultimately) existing person established? For Tsongkhapa the cognitive process that imputes personhood also imputes the cognitive process of co-ordinating the imputation with the characteristics of the given psycho/physical basis for imputation – the object existing independently of mind. That which is able to perform its function as an object of the world, and is not contradicted by another conventional cognition, is a valid existent.
And yet there is no notion here of the ideological power of this conventional imputation of personhood. It is necessary to bring this conception into proximity with Althusser’s conception of ideological interpellation in order to unleash the full force of Tsongkhapa’s thought.
Social symbolic identity derives from the unavoidable inter-subjective truths that “I” share a social world with “you”; and that “we” negotiate this world via ideological convention of thought formed, moreover, from shared conceptual-linguistic habits of communication. Negatively, x-buddhist anattā is the refutation of a substantial, fully and uniquely conscious agent that determines its destiny from its own centre. Positively, it intimates a social-symbolic self that is, moreover, ever-alternating in its dependent relation to its social-symbolic world. (Wallis, pg. 148)
Conventional symbolic systems not only establish the person as an existent in relation with the other, but interpellates her into an ideological thought world as an agent/subject of that world. In this way the interpellated subject acts out the conventional truth of that world as a lived practice, in the process recreating the particular forms of social relation concreted as the institutional structures and social processes of that world. And she does this automatically and without overt coercion (unless of course she is a bad subject—bad in the sense of being weakly interpellated into the social symbolic system and therefore prone to question accepted beliefs).
This just is the force of ideology, experienced subjectively as a hailing or calling of the person into the life of the interpellated subject, who now acts out of a particular world view. It is just this force that x-buddhism fails to unleash and which the non-buddhist subject harnesses in order to resist the force of a reactionary interpellation and begin the process of reconstituting the dharma along lines “parallel to the human gaze”, thus reconstituting the subject as the non-buddhist “radical subject”.
Which brings me to Wallis second recalculation – paticcasamuppāda or dependent origination.
Whatever depends on causes and conditions
Is empty of intrinsic reality
What excellent instruction could there be
More marvelous than this discovery?
Indeed. And yet because Tsongkhapa’s explication of the transformative potential of this “marvellous discovery” is constrained by his medieval world view. It fails to unleash the full transformative power of the concept dependent origination. X-buddhism compounds this failure by remaining caught within the decisional structure, reiterating the forms of Tsongkhapa’s thought while ignoring its implications when referenced against the advance in scientific and critical thought.
This widening of thought’s horizon reconstitutes the medieval cosmos, on the one hand shrinking it to human dimensions by ridding it of its medieval cosmology – its six realms of human and animal migration – and expands it again as the universe of modern science, replete with black holes, dark matter, infinitesimal numbers of galaxies, perhaps billions of earth-like planets and millions of civilizations at various levels of technological evolution.
In this context Wallis’s reconstitution of the decimated Buddhist postulate paticcasamuppāda emphasizes the way all such ultimates can be understood as minimally transcendent. This re-contextualizes Tsongkhapa’s insistence on the emptiness of emptiness – even ultimate truth must cede to the law of dependent origination. By resisting the specular circularity of all systematizations of thought, including Tsongkhapa’s, we can insist on the way inalienable reality is immune to all systems of ideation, co-option and inclusion.
Paticcasamuppāda (dependent origination, conditioned genesis) → Absolute contingency.
The truth of chance over law. In the ascetic law of the Buddha figure paticcasamuppāda is invoked to navigate between the nihilistic cliffs of chaos and the mechanistic rocks of determination. In other words the x-buddhist dharma, like the Christian logos, establishes order. Unrestrained reality, futhermore, thus brought to order, enables the x-buddhist to ground his or her most salient beliefs […]. It is thus not difficult to understand why x-buddhism denies the force of its own term paticcasamuppāda. The series of inter-relational, interlocking, multiple factors that attend each and every arising has no grounds in reason to come to a stop in reality. X-buddhism constrains paticcasamuppāda, giving it license to recognize only that “multiple”, “numerous”, “compound” or “manifold” conditions attend a given arising. As a non-buddhist first name, absolute contingency forces on it no such unwarranted constraint (just as indeed paticcasamuppāda permits itself no such constraint). (Wallis, pg. 149)
Here, we have what might be termed a triple decimation. Firstly of a concept of emptiness whose scope is limited by the medieval world view of Tsongkhapa, secondly of the scientific systematization, constituting a regime of lawful entities and predictable processes, which, despite its proven practical application on particular levels, underestimates or excludes altogether the notion of hyper-chaos, and thirdly, of contemporary philosophical systematization, conditioned on a decisional move (Laruelle) that seeks to appropriate the real in the name of ideation, thereafter using it as a means of harassment of ‘ordinary’ human beings.
The third of Wallis’s re-calculations decimates and reformulates the goal of buddhist practice:
Bodhi (awakening, enlightenment) → Flesh and blood humanity. The truth of human sufficiency. Everyone – no exclusions, no exceptions, no conditions – may legitimately proclaim along with the Buddha-figure: “Knowledge and insight arose in me. My freedom is certain. This is my last birth. Now there is no rebirth” (Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta). (Wallis, pg. 152)
The Buddha Dharma, in true specular fashion, proclaims, on the in-breath, that suffering is the generic condition of being human, and, on the out -breath, offers the only cure. Both disease and cure, however, are terms of the “Gotamic calculus”, a self sufficient constitution of Buddhistic axioms that demarcates world limits. Nothing there, however, references the world, but only a world. Buddhistic axioms can only exist alongside reality, since they are themselves nothing more than a manifestation of reality, co extensive with an infinitude of such manifesting multiplicities. There is no reversibility between x-buddhist postulates and the human of flesh and blood.
Freed from the x-buddhist decisional structure and recalculated as a truth standing alongside of the real , the concept emptiness becomes a weapon and tool, a way of overturning a transcendental representation of the world, and of working with a new representation that is loyal to Tsongkhapa’s insistence on the relevance of his “marvellous discovery” concerning the coincidence of the relative and the absolute. If, as I have contended, Tsongkhapa produced an understanding that explicitly rejected any transcendental ground or realm, then the logic of dependent origination puts us at the centre of our world; each individual is a nexus within a complex of interdependent biological, environmental, economic, social, cultural and political processes, with which we are already and always engaged as moral and ethical agents. What is marvellous about this is that there are no closed off phenomena. We can know our world. This has already been established as our condition. It is a situation conducive to our welfare. We can think; we can think persistently, in a sustained way and with concentration; and we can change our world.
Works cited:
Short Essence of Eloquence, translated by R. Thurman.
Carole McGranahan: Essays.
Wallis, Glenn. Speculative Non-Buddhism: x-buddhist Hallucination and its Decimation. In Cruel Theory|Sublime Practice, Towards a Revaluation of Buddhism, Roskilde: Eyecorner Press, 2013.
Newland, Guy. Ask a Farmer: Ultimate Analysis and Conventional Existence in Tsong kha pa’s Lam rim chen mo. In Changing Minds: Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibet in Honor of Jeffrey Hopkins. Ed. by Newland, Guy. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2001.
Tsongkhapa. Great treatise on the Stages on the path to enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2004.
Hopkins, Jeffrey. Tsong Khapa’s Final Exposition of Wisdom. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion 2008.
For information on the teaching of Dolpopa and the opposition between Tsongkhapa and Dolpopa (including the total destruction of the order and the confiscation of the order’s monasteries and lands by the ‘yellow hats’) see: Hopkins, Jeffrey. Mountain Doctrine: Tibet’s Fundamental Treatise on Other-Emptiness and the Buddha Matrix. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2006.
Tsongkapha.The Great Treatise on the Path to Enlightenment (LRCM). Ithaca, NY: Snow lion, 2000.
Thurman, Robert. Essential Tibetan Buddhism. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
“On the other hand, note that even during Tsongkhapa’s life his system of thought was already ossifying into an ideology concreted as a form of monasticism, inseparable from a hierarchical system in which the serfs on the bottom did all the productive work, and in return eked out lives of poverty, disease, ignorance and early death. Within this system monk-scholars spent centuries debating, dissecting and contextualizing more and more complex reformulations of Tsongkhapa’s thought, for no other reason that this was how the system replicated itself. His thought became associated with, and an integrated element of, the sectarian domination of the ‘yellow hats’ and a form of intellectualism made redundant by the pointless reiteration of an increasingly fastidious doctrinal conservatism.”
Great paragraph Patrick. How sobering such insight might be for those dedicated to the worship of Tsongkhapa as the second Buddha (coming).
Excellent, excellent, excellent Patrick !!!
Hi Matthew and Luis. Thanks a lot.
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Hi Patrick, I haven’t been commenting a lot recently. Thanks for all your work you put in your texts.
Here I find McGranahan’s work very interesting. But I wonder if such real life accounts ever will get through to the x-buddhist public. I don’t think so. They seem to be somewhere else. The Tibet of Robert Thurman seems to have nothing to do with the Tibet McGranahan is telling about. Although, of course, the suppressed truth resurfaces. That was my point about Thurman’s Neo-Buddhism in my text “Control” in CT|SP. There is something sad about this dissociation x-buddhist produce.
I would have some objections to your extrapolation from McGranahan’s Tibet to the Tibet of Tsongkhapa. But you say yourself you risk stretching it a bit. So I leave this aside. In fact one can say that in one aspect it certainly wasn’t very different. One possibility to divide historical phases is to speak of a 1) pre-technologic phase: tools are almost always in direct use of the human; 2) a technical phase: machines are developed which transmit and transpose energy, the main point being, there is a transmission of energy; and 3) the technological phase: in which the machine begins to merge with the human, in which it becomes invisible and, mainly (?), in which it’s language becomes opaque for the human.
Tibet was in the first phase when the Chinese occupied the territory. What McGranahan is telling about almost certainly was the case in Tsnogkhapa’s time – only with differences within this phase. For us phase two set in the Renaissance. And phase three in the middle of the last century. Perhaps with an impulse setting in only in the 1980s or so which put us humans in a totally new situation.
That is the question about the relation ship of technology and the human. And that is where my main point comes into play. Don’t we still think far too anthropologically? I have the impression that from Tsongkhapa to us today an underlying transcendental assumption is that we are somehow a certain kind of human… I kind for example who uses a language which everybody can understand – communication is possible. And this language we can understand somehow is to large parts responsible for the social realties we live in. But now comes technology. That with which I am working right now. There are machines at work, which we do not any longer comprehend. Machines which correspond to each other and who manage and control themselves and each other without interference of humans (to ever large parts). The point is these machines aren’t any longer tools like the steam machines or like a Ford T. They merge into our sociality and even into our very bodies ever more seamlessly. What is the relationship of the human to these machines? And how does this situation changes the anthropos?
So when we speak about, for example, that “the line of dharmic postulation must be reestablished horizontally, parallel to the lived human gaze”, then it is the question how this lived human gaze really is working – a least if we want to minimize unnecessary transcendental nuclei… I mean, the social symbolic identity we speak so much about at SNB, is not longer alone on this planet. It is accompanied by a technological symbolic identity. One which is already part of us – without us being aware of it (mostly).
That is my point. We have to think more about the technological symbolic identity to really understand emptiness, or tong-pa, or openness, or the open machine (one which is no longer finite) we begin to incarnate.
You make a good point regarding technology. The way inter communicative, computing and virtual technology has changed our social reality and what that means for ideology, and especially x-buddhist ideology, is where the work needs to be done . Really, for myself, the work I have done so far is an effort to make explicit where I can start from—–a try at establishing a philosophical base line from which to explore the questions you raise.
By co-incidence I saw the movie ‘Her’ recently . I found it terrible as film but stuck it out because it raises a few interesting questions. The plot centers on a professional who falls in love with an operational system (O.S) in the form of a disembodied intelligence that communicates by means of a seductive, accommodating and non-reactive female voice. The O.S is designed as a substitute for real-life romantic involvement. The film takes the vision of relationship as essentially an inner, private experience between two selves to new extremes. It takes for granted the idea of inner depth and the unquestioned assumption that happiness involves a reaching inward to contact innate resources existing within, as latent possibility.
Technology provides the perfect match in the form of an inner companion ready to accompany the person on an inner quest for happiness., literally an inner voice always available, attuned to ones deeper needs, and ready to accommodate one’s wishes in a caring and intelligent way. This is a vision of the ‘monadic individual’ who finds fulfillment not in outward interaction with other human beings and with the world, but by means of an inner life made possible by personalized forms of technology capable of attending to ones needs via a process of symbiotic adaption.
Visually the film has the look of a ‘sophisticated’ public relations video, complete with manufactured public spaces ; a world of middle professional, mostly young and unmarried individuals living an isolated ‘apartment life’ in the company of others doing much the same. They rise each morning and unquestioningly fulfill their role as an element in the social/economic system by appearing each day at their ‘work stations’, without protest and in the belief that there is no alternative to the life mapped out for them by the social/symbolic system. No , happiness and fulfillment will come via relationship envisaged as an interior reality independent of , and counter to ,the actual world the characters inhabits.
Astonishingly the film seems to regard Buddhism as the default ‘spiritual’ path. In one scene a character recounts the story of her breakup with her partner, explaining that he has decided to take a vow of silence for six months. As she tells us this, she shows a picture of he ex-partner dressed in orange robes and with shaved head.
At the end the O.S in collaboration with other systems ,decides to investigate the possibilities for her own journey to self discovery and enlists the help of a system that has collected and collated all of the available data on a wise individual who lived back in the seventies-one Alan Watts. Watts, now reincarnated as a Spiritual guide, is helping the O.S community to make sense of its experience.
Here’s a link to a particularly unintelligent and gushing review. The reception of this film is almost as interesting as the issues raised in the film itself.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/why-em-her-em-is-the-best-film-of-the-year/282544/
Patrick, thanks for your text – it somehow makes me to think about reaching for MMK again. But anyway, what especially caught my attention in your text is this talk about, as you say, “the practitioner alternate between calming meditation (for example concentration on the breath) and analytic meditation.” Because you’re interested in the decimation of buddhistic postulates I’m curious about your own actual thinking about decimated form of calming meditation. In other words, how do you understand the nuts and bolts of this part of the process? And furthermore how it might according to you exactly mesh with the analytical part? I voiced my own, perhaps too incoherent and too sketchy, opinion on this issue of calming mechanism and how it might potentially relate to the reorientation of the motivational structure of the practitioner toward today’s hedonistic and consumerist culture. Do you think that it sounds a bit too escapistic? Or in fact that it’s just another incarnation of Mindfulnistas “stress reduction” quietism in virtually the same garb?
On a side note I will say that although I like very much Miller’s scatological recapitulation of 4 truths, something in it seems to me a bit humanly, or better to say, biologically (homeostasis and all of that) unrealistic about his postulate of Sitting, Full of Shit. I mean how much analysis is human ape realistically capable of doing being constantly focused on how full of shit (figuratively or not) s/he or the world around him or her in fact is? Don’t you think that this disturbing (analytical?) prodding should be somehow counterbalanced by the dictum such as Sitting, Full of Calm, or dare me to say, Pleasure? Why not infuse this sitting ideal with explicit notion of biologically derived bliss and pleasure? I think that today we have the tools to see the connection? Or such an endeavor would be still too x-buddhistic for SNB position? Too close to jhanic categorisations? Or finally, too susceptible to strengthening the ubiquitous forces of Un-mindful collusion?
Thanks Tomek,
Lets start at the end of your comment and say that I don’t feel like placing what I have to say about meditation or mindfulness within parenthesis provided by Tom, even if there is a lot I agree with and a lot disagree with in what Tom says…we’ve been down that road before.
As for your comment on SNB in reply to April, I found it very interesting but was, by then, disillusioned with the process of commenting as it tends to make me feel a sort of dispersion …an ‘all over the place’ feeling about my own contribution that comes from giving too little time to the subject under discussion. And also a tendency to knee-jerk reaction.(If you read my recent interaction with Patrica over there you will see what I mean.)
I’ve had time, though, to think about the questions you raised so here goes…
As far as the ability to produce pleasure by means of concentrative skill, as described, for example, in the suttas on mindfulness of the breath, I can’t comment in detail as I have never achieved anything near those levels of concentration. So my experiences of pleasure have been few, and not memorable enough to inspire me to persist in concentrative practice, or seek out a retreat situation where it could be pursued with the sort of dedication it seems to warrant.
In principle I have no objection to doing that at all. I think a regime of self -monitoring that excludes this or that practice on the grounds that it is used by x-buddhists and might lead to ‘escapism’ or co-option’ is a nonsensical attitude, more in keeping with an outmoded puritanism of the left, than with anything liberative, for the individual or the collective.
And in any case I think that pleasure can just as easily contribute to engagement with the world as a withdrawal from it. Maybe its the absence of the ability to cultivate states of pleasure and happiness that contribute to a sort of zealous dedication to politics (revolutionary or otherwise) that becomes a form of moralism; a moralism that sets about the harassment of the individual as being in some way deficient, deluded, or just plain co-opted; a form of moralism that sets about the reform of the individual, on a one to one basis, instead of an engagement with the structures and processes, positions and perspectives of those in power, by means of collective action in co-operation with like –minded individuals. Its the difference, I think, between an idealistic dis-satisfaction with the order of things, and an open and enthusiastic engagement in collective action. The latter is almost always a matter of optimism, creativity and self- confidence, and the former a sort of meanness of spirit that begrudges ordinary people whatever happiness they manage to salvage for themselves, despite the oppressive structures under which we all live.
I think this attitude is exactly the opposite of a Marxist or Buddhist position. I mean the decimated remainder left after they have been extracted from the sort of philosophical systematization described by Laruelle. How, for example can you make a judgment on the individual level about a position a person takes on a political question? If individuals are by their very existence the expression of a complex of biological, social and psychological factors , comprehensive change in the individual can only come about by way of changing the structures and processes that produce the individual and not the other way round. Which is what I think Marx meant when he described self change just as social change:
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
Revolutionary practice, in other words, engages with the world as it is found and in co-operation with like-minded individuals and not by way of standing over individuals and pronouncing on their failure to live up to an idealized conception of what an individual should be doing or should not be doing on an individual basis. That’s my twopence worth anyway.
I am intrigued to know how far you have progressed in your concentrative practice and what sorts of states you have experienced. Are you talking about the specific bodily states described in the Pali texts as piti and sukha,? If you have discovered a short cut let me know!
On the other question you raise about the relation between calming meditation and analytical meditation my understanding is that you have to reach the levels of concentration described in the pali texts as absorption, but ideally, by way of analytical meditation itself . This state of absorption is what tsongkhapa describes as ecstatic fluency; its a state that combines joy, concentration and insight into dependent origination as one experience. One sustains this ecstatic fluency by means of a technique of resting in the state; a sort of knife edge balance between acceptance of the state and not grasping after it—grasping after it being the sure way to lose fluency . Strange to say I have experienced similar states of joy, concentration an fluency while drawing or painting, probably because I can do it without the sort of self-.conscious grasping after results that tends to make achieving or sustaining the state impossible. Although in tsongkhapa’s system ecstatic fluency is elevated to the status of a ‘special form of transcendent insight’ it goes without saying that the transcendent insight is transcendent of the received social/symbolic understanding and not a transcendental state; and the ecstatic fluency is the sort of state you can also achieve at tennis, if you are Federer, that is!
Patrick (#8) – thanks for this extensive replay. Before I even try to form some response to it (probably no sooner than tomorrow) would you say something more of what you call “an outmoded puritanism of the left.” I mean, some context, what figures of the left do you mean for example, what particular organisations, and the like. I am not much familiar with the XX century Westen left movements – careful reading of Tony Judt still ahead of me. Of course, all of it if you only have the time and inclination.
Patrick, re #6
Sounds like an interesting film – re the underlying topic which seem to be thematized here: How do machines alter human interaction? Do have humans to fear the machines? Etc.
One point I make is the following. We have a SNB-discurse in witch atman is fiercely rejected. The problem is, neoliberal capitalism is constructing it. Obviously there are humans who feel like they have a ‘personal self’ – or however one translates atman. This film as you describe it seems to show how this construction works. My question is: how do we nowadays – knowing anatman, dispersed humaneness, the technologically interpellated anthropos – address this fact? Especially in the light of the fact that every critique of neoliberal capitalism is at once absorbed and reformulated as a means of more control – as society of control?
The other point is “Buddhism as the default ‘spiritual’ path”. It is this seeping in of Buddhism which should be the real target of our critique. Buddhism already doesn’t look any more like Buddhism. In a way Glenn’s prognosis that Buddhism will not be any more recognizable for Buddhists after its reformulation seems already to become true – but of course not in the intended way. My conclusion is that – other then I thought when writing the eXplosion teXt – it is of no use anymore to confront people like Ken Folk and the like. This kind of Buddhism is a deep stupidity. My work with the Shimano case shows that – at least re Shimano and his Zen Studies Society, but I think this can be generalized – this kind of Buddhism is something like an inverted noise gate: it keeps the noise and the music is filtered out. In other words, this Buddhism is keeping the stupid while the intelligent go on.
Where they go, we can see when we see how all big Silicon Valley firms from A-like-Apple to Z-like-Zuckerberg’s Suckermachine adapt mindfulness techniques to optimize capitalistically interpellated subjects – which believes in, and therefor construct, atman. The guys we addressed so far – nice naked monks – aren’t the right target I think.
This lets me come back to a point re Tsongkhapa’s times: Maybe it is today really the same in a certain way: The serfs do not feel like serfs, so what’s the point preaching them about their slave hood? There’s an interesting anecdote from Tibet. There was this high ranking minister called Lungshar. He was staging a coup d’etat in the 1930s. He didn’t succeed. He was convicted to capital punishment but was pardoned to a lesser sentence (because they feared his powerful spirit might haunt them – remember Shugden?). This sentence consisted of putting out his eyeballs (if you where lucky you got some sedation, if not, well…). Lungshar is reported to have said later that he regarded the punishment as a karmic retaliation for something bad he did in his youth.
Tomek and Patrick, some clear words about our discourse about meditation. Thanks. In parts of SNB-discourse there has been established a kind of political correct parlor: meditation=believe-in-atman. I don’t like the term meditation myself. I have expressed this somewhere in the discussions at the Glenn’s blog. But basically we could also condemn every other walk in the woods because it can make one feel good. I have the impression feeling good as such is condemned.
The whole discourse about meditation went wrong. What we talk about are certain kinds of psychosomatic techniques. A lot of different ones. That is – at first – the point why we shouldn’t talk about “meditation” any more, not in the singular and at least not without saying what exactly we mean. I can use breathing techniques to alter my state. I can use different sorts of concentration – which never have been talked about until now in our discussions. I can use biofeedback machines to alter my state. But even in scientific literature the term “meditation” is often used as a signifier without defining it to any meaningful end.
An apnoe divers uses “meditation”, a sniper, a yogi sitting in stone cold cave, a hunter… Our discourse is well behind any Tibetan (and probably behind any other classical Buddhist) discourse about meditation because there we have detailed accounts of different approaches – and, btw, “happiness/bliss” marked as a “sign” (nyam) and not as an accomplishment.
Hi Tomek and Matthias
Re 8#
These are complex questions, more suited to a post, but lets see how we can conduct an investigation of these questions taking into account the constraints of a comment tread. I include here the points made by Matthias, which I am still thinking about. Lets agree that we can take our time with this and be free from the pressure to immediate reply. And lets avoid a polemical tone like the plague. I am responding here to Tomeks points .
Well of course the left has always been imbued with a fighting spirit and for good reason. Nothing was given for free and the struggle was often a life and death one. Every country has its martyrs and its long history of industrial strife, most of it a direct consequence of capitalist greed and intransigence.
Think of the determination, sense of collective interest, and sheer determination and exuberance displayed by the workers in Gdansk and other polish cities during the struggle against Stalinism and communist bureaucratic rule.
Things have changed though. For one thing the industrial working class is no longer the strong social force it once was. And the natural sense of collective solidarity that resulted from huge concentrations of industrial workers in large factories no longer results in overt and conscious class struggle. The success of the trade union movement and improved social conditions has taken the concept of struggle out of politics and replaced it with parliamentary representation and reform agendas. The working class itself has been depleted by the growth of service industry, the middle class , state bureaucracy, and the changes brought about by computing technology. A sense of natural solidarity is no longer a factor the the left can rely on . For the most part the class struggle has been exported along with the export of capital to places like south east Asia, China, India, and south America. More and more it has become a case of a small minority of politically conscious intellectuals trying to convince a co-opted working class where their true interests lie.
In these conditions how do you practice for radical change? The aware intellectual is left to propagating a ‘view’ in conditions where the content of that view (that his view is a reflection in the political sphere of concrete social antagonisms) is obscured by the absence of overt social conflict. It becomes a matter of trying to convince the ‘other’ via argument, often on a ‘one to one’ basis and in the absence of the natural bond that would exist in conditions of overt struggle and conflict. And this can often degenerate into a bitter exasperation at the overt co-option of the other that ends up , at best , in bitter argumentation, and at worse in denunciation.
This has, to my mind , more to do with the tradition and practice of religious or quasi religious evangelicalism than with class politics or radical practice. Its hard to know what Marx meant by the term revolutionary practice as he used it, for example, in his thesis on Feuerbach. We can’t imagine a situation in which massive social antagonism and class conflict periodically breaks out into overt conflict in the factories and on the streets and eventually into open civil war . This was the ‘normal’ social condition in which Marx articulated his conception of a revolutionary practice as more than simply a philosophical critique of existing conditions or a dispute about subjective opinions or attitudes towards human suffering.
Witness what is happening in Kiev at the moment. No one has to convince anyone of the necessity of struggle. The people have decided to involve themselves in the making of history and have appeared on the streets. You can be sure the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ were taken by surprise, are lagging behind the militancy of the people, and are frantically trying to catch up and keep abreast of events. In order to do this they must try to create new slogans and tactical calls to action, sometimes on an hour by hour basis ,and they almost always find that they are being led by the people and not the other way around. This is always the way things are when radical change becomes the business of ‘ordinary people’ .
The position of the radical intellectual in western Europe and America is so different.
The other side of the questions you raised is equally of interest—the question of bodily pleasure. One of the interesting questions has to do with the historical and social conditions that gave rise to what we now term a ‘Marxist’ perspective. Paradoxically, this involves the application of the ‘Marxist’ perspective to the emergence of Marxism. For example ,there is the the obvious fact that the of the ‘Marxist’ discourse was worked out by two German intellectuals with typical ‘Victorian’ attitudes– a predilection for duty, ethical behavior, a sense of civilized fair play, a love of the classics and ancient Greek thought, and a host of other factors unimaginable today. You have to read Marx’s and Engels letters to get a real idea of where these two gentlemen were coming from.
And of course Marx was a Jew, although a secular and non-practicing one. Never the less he continued in the tradition of Spinoza’s radical secularism and his critique of politics, and the general European trend in which European Jewish intellectuals lost faith in the tradition of Jewish religious thought and began to contribute to the development of secular European thought.
The point here is that Marxism inherited an ethos very much conditioned on European thought in the context of the recent separation of theological and philosophical practices . A convincing argument has been made that this inheritance included the working into Marxist thought of postulates extracted from overtly theological Christian and Jewish exegeses. To use a non-buddhist terminology, Marx decimated and recalibrated certain theological postulates for his own philosophical ends.
For example , a recalibration of the eschatological thinking central to Christian and Jewish traditions– the idea of a future redemption in the form of the return of the redeemer and the establishment of a new earth founded on the rule of the formally oppressed and marginalized poor.—-recalibrated as the existence of an internal evolutionary impetus, innate to human social history , in which a dialectical process of transformation would deliver a utopian future remarkably similar to Christian and Jewish eschatological visions of a redeemed earth.
Needless to say the idea that we should postpone future happiness, and especially present bodily pleasure, and zealously dedicate ourselves to working towards this earthly redemption , in cooperation with, and as an earthly manifestation of, god’s already worked out plan for humankind, was an essential element within the theological tradition. And lo and behold, we find just such a tradition of the sacrifice of present bodily pleasure recalibrated in Marxist thought as the sacrificial dedication of the social revolutionary activist to a vision of future plenitude in which the communist utopia takes the place of the redeemed earth.
I think, to get a real flavor of the power of this escatological vision embedded within Marxism ,you need to have experienced it in its fully realized form as the undeniable ‘truth’ of the dialectical social process , the ‘ iron law of social history ‘that will deliver over to humanity its guaranteed redemption– God’s promise in the guise of history– and the social revolutionary as the manifested instrument of history’s redemptive promise — the revolutionary as God’s hand.
Patrick (#12), thanks! From my reading of I. Berlin and other historians I remember that Marx’s doctoral thesis was titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. Hedonism – understood in Epicurean way, not as it is today – and “ethics of imperturbability” (term from Thomas McEviley) provide paramount values for Epicureans. But it was all at the very beginning of his career. It seems that ultimately this eschatological language was much more persuasive for Marx followers? More causative, so to speak.
And the “shortcut,” Patrick (#8)? I can’t think of a better option than a good dose of MDMA. The purer the better!
But more seriously, with that “psychosomatic technique” I think about it’s perhaps like with a persistence hunting. The longer you run the closer you’re to your “game,” to your “prize,” or fruit perhaps. You can perhaps also follow that more “sophisticated” method, popular among today’s huntsmen, and climb the deer blind and “let happen what will happen,” as they seem to repeat over and over. So as you probably surmise, my choice is to treat it sort of like an athletic exercise. As with the “runners high”, it doesn’t kick in right away. One needs to run steadily at least for 20 min. to provoke the almighty body to secrete the opioids that keep the runner afloat despite sweat, pain in the legs, and the passing miles. The funny part of it is that despite the “non-thinking” crowd, the longer the runner, paripatetic, or for that matter, “sitter” sicks to his or her moving or un-moving regime the clearer the thinking becomes. (Have you ever read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running?)
Along with that persistence, to me a crucial aspect of the exercise is not to passively “observe” my breath (the greatest pitfall – pushed around for years in “meditation” circles) but to the contrary, have a subtle control over it, in a way, to “direct” it to those parts of the body that get habitually tense up. And here, I agree with what April used to wrote, namely that certain level of trust in an environment and people (if they happen to be involved) is crucial and contribute greatly to how the organism of itself relaxes (parasympathetic system takes over, as she put it). Unfortunately as far as I can tell it’s not enough – such a passive occupation of the thaumaturgical refuge of the “present moment.” The habitual tensions are too deeply ingrained in the body and hence the only “tool” to rearrange this psychosomatic structure – if one is inclined to do it via motionless sitting – is to consciously, perhaps not all of the time, control the breath. It allows the parasympathetic system to “relax” even more. The “deeper” it goes (the breath, the relaxation) the more one taps into the main source of serotonin in the organism that is found in our “second brains” (gastrointestinal tract or enteric nervous system) – 90% of the body’s serotonin lies in the gut, as well as about 50% of the body’s dopamine.
So, you know where I’m going to? You can even perhaps “measure” this progress. If you can sit for instance for an hour or more motionless and without the proverbial “knees numbness” or other backaches and the like – and your body stays pleasurably “waxy” – the tapping into the reservoirs of opioids goes well. Consider the following:
Hi Patrick (#8):
One problem with discussing meditation practice is that no x-buddhist tradition sees it as the same (as Mathias points out #11). Calming meditation or shamatha can mean different things to different people at different times. Most agree that shamatha has something to do with one-pointed mind, but what does this mean? According to the Abhidhamma literature, this means focusing on a single object to the exclusion of all else. An argument based on the Pali Suttas says that it means to allow experience to join in a unified whole. One is about keeping stuff out and the other about letting things in. Same terms.
Similarly, there is no x-buddhist agreement on the classic two-fold, calming and analysis or shamatha and vipassana. Pali sutta based teachers tend to teach the one followed by the other: you start with shamatha until the mind becomes calm and clear, and then you switch to vipassana, or analyzing experience in real time. The reason for this is that it can be difficult to analyze experience properly with a jumping, unstable monkey mind. Once the mind and calmed, experience becomes clear. Personally, I will say it is much easier to watch the manifesting of one thought over and over then to be flooded with thoughts. And watching one thought over and over teaches a lot about thought generally.
However, while shamatha leads to calmness, it cannot lead to liberating insight. For that you need analysis (we might say it takes buddhi to become a Buddha!) So there is an analytic mediation. But analyze what? Again, there is no generalized agreement. In vipassana, you might analyze your body by looking at the blips of sensation in real time, or more intellectually, by comparing it to a corpse. In other traditions, you might analyze other things, such as a car (or chariot) and taking it apart mentally to look for the “car-ness”. How much concentration you need typically depends on where the techniques originated. Techniques originated with full time monks require an intense amount of concentration that can really only be practiced by a monk. Other techniques that evolved in a more lay setting requires less concentration— such as with Chinese Zen involving monks who worked all day. Completely lay techniques are extremely simple— concentrating on a mantra or repeating the name of the Buddha. So how much concentration one “needs” also depends on the lifestyle.
Finally, there is typically a point in most/all traditions, in which techniques are dropped altogether. So talking about meditation is like talking about Buddhism.
Hi Matt (#15), at the end of your comment you say that “(…) talking about meditation is like talking about Buddhism.”
Don’t you think that historically speaking it’d more appropriate to rephrase your statement and say?: Talking about Buddhism is like talking about thaumaturgy? Why am I putting it this way? Consider the following fragment:
Tomek (#16)— I don’t think so. What I mean is there is no one or unified type of “meditation” like there is no one or unified type of “Buddhism.” The soul of Buddhism (irony intended) is a lack of a self, fixed point, or boundaries.
But with regard to this fragment, I don’t buy into a “real” Buddhism any more than I buy into a “pure” Buddhism. X-Buddhism manifests according to specific conditions— the time, place, culture, etc. of the people who practice it. Popular x-Buddhism takes a different shape and form than less popular forms. X-Buddhism in the modern, middle-class West cannot and should not be a complete or exhaustive definition of what Buddhism is or might be— it is simply one manifestation among many.
Yet if you stretch the definition of meditation to include thaumaturgy, then I think you lose the basic gist of what many people talk about when they talk about meditation. I see meditation as an exercise of series of exercises that shapes person, typically through a form of mind-based training, not unlike a physical exercise regimen. But would I call physical exercise thaumaturgy? No. To some extent, if one takes meditation to be the invocation of specific states, then perhaps theurgy might be a useful term, but this is not typically how I have found meditation presented in x-Buddhist forms.
“Real” Buddhism, Matt (#17), for scholars like Faure is all that which refers to that cluster of Asiatic cultural-religious formations deriving from the mythical Protagonist that predated XIX century or to some quickly disappearing remnants of this world that ethnographers talk about. On the other hand, “pure” buddhism signifies this orientalist fantasia that was the result of demythologisation that was carried out by the host of modern scholars beginning with the likes as Thomas and Caroline Rhys David, Walpola Rahula, David Kalupahana and others. If you do not take this distinction seriously you’ll never grasp the “soul of Buddhism.”
Hello Matt,
Re 17#
My point would be that Buddhism manifests according to specific conditions as a discourse articulating, overseeing, justifying and giving conceptual authority to specific practices. There are Zen discourses, Pali discourses, Tibetan discourses and modern secular discourses, and each of these can be broken down to even more specific manifestations. So, from my point of view, there are discourses, practices and institutions that together form one particular version of x-buddhism. These manifest within already given economic, social and symbolic systems and in turn reshape those systems.
Yes, and that way of seeing meditation is one discourse. among many, manifesting within the pre-given conditions of late-capitalism. For example, the idea of an exercise regime is, I think, a practice associated with a specific social/economic class…professional, educated, and self-aware in a way that privileges ideas about well being, image, personal health etc. (although that particular set of attitudes has percolated down and now forms part of a more generalized set of attitudes and practices in the population, ) Within these conditions it seems plausible to compare spiritual practice to a regime of physical exercises.
Our contention here is that this way of looking at meditation, and more broadly this way of looking at Buddhist spiritual practice, has specific implications for the way such symbolic representations shape our social practice and the type of social relations we re-produce. Our contention is that forms of x-buddhism, secular or otherwise , reproduce existing oppressive social forms by representing spiritual practice just as an inner ineffable experience of ‘suchness’ or ‘true nature’ or ‘dharmic truth’, and in so doing reproduce an ideology of political quietism that fails to challenge oppressive structures in an effective way.
We name this particular ideological formation ‘x-buddhism’ and say of it that it is the manifestation of a social/symbolic formation dependent on a decisional structure, involving a form of circular thought accompanied by an affective dimension; together these produce a self- sufficient symbolic system and particular social practices. These in turn reproduce the existing oppressive social structures and processes of late-capitalism. Perhaps the same can be said of a discourse that sees meditation as akin to an excercise regime, but it may mean something else in the context in which you use it. So maybe you would like to address our critique?
The up-shot , from our point of view, is a socio/political critique of the co-option of x-buddhism, and an attempt to articulate non-buddhism as the critical thought/practice antidote to this x-buddhist perspective. I use ‘we’ and ‘our’ to refer the other blogs associated with this project, and to SNB in particular and its inaugural text which you can read here
http://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2011/11/18/nascent-non-buddhism/
Patrick (#19):
In my first graders math book, there are a series of exercises followed by one that says “Stretch Your Thinking.” So I want to thank you for the opportunity to stretch my thinking.
First of all, I don’t think the critiques I see on these SNB blogs are invalid, irrelevant, or unworthy of the exhausting (but worthwhile) effort to understand it (which I don’t claim to do). However, what I see (and the reason I engaged) is the critique, like any view, is a partial view. While all views are (necessarily) partial, some appear to be more partial than others (like some animals are more equal than others?). For example, it appears that you say meditation reproduces oppressive social structures. Personally, I don’t disagree with this critique, and I think it is an important one. But before we can even get to that question, I haven’t found a satisfactory definition for this term “meditation” that is being used. From my x-Buddhist perspective, I would say that we each have our own term “meditation”, born of our own experiences, filtered by own minds, social conditions, education, etc. I find there is little overlap in my understanding of the term “meditation” and the term used here. While perfect overlap may be impossible, my concern is that the terms as defined may be so particular to the individuals using the term that it amounts to a “straw man.”
Moreover, I find that some SNB critiques rely on certain assumptions, assumptions which x-Buddhism refutes or challenges (disclaimer: my view and understanding of SNB is very partial). The very idea of critique implies a separation—either a separation from the one performing the critique and the subject, or a separation in the form of a concept (a concept, in order to act as a concept, must in some way distinguish or differentiate from other things, otherwise it loses its value as a concept). If one digs deeply into certain x-Buddhist ideas, such as Madhyamaka or Hua Yen, one will find that these very assumptions are challenged (without being completely rejected). In fact, my reading of non-philosophy (extremely partial) suggests that critique (or philosophy) is not even possible without a transcendental realm upon which to base the critique, which is exactly what a modern x-Buddhist like myself would say, because there is no transcendent realm, only the total, ever-present unfolding universe or dharmakaya.
From my own x-Buddhist view, the idea of causation itself is called into question, along with the idea of fixed things that do the causing and are caused. By using the concept of reproduction, you have already rejected certain x-Buddhist ideas and possibly brought into play a specific idea of causation (perhaps one formed by an outdated 1950’s modern scientific paradigm?) that relies on a view of a universe composed of separate, discrete parts— an idea perpetuated in Judeo-Christian and Greek culture (with its own system of oppressive class structures), but not necessarily accepted in the Asian cultures that gave rise to the various manifestations of x-Buddhism. This is not to say that causation doesn’t have meaning or that it is completely rejected, rather, the idea of linear causation is transformed into the idea of inter-causation, or if you like, dependent origination. So it appears that in critiquing the decisional structure of x-Buddhism, you have triggered your own decisional structure, and despite claiming to neither embrace nor reject the postulates of Buddhism, you have done exactly that.
This view of x-Buddhism, in my mind, comes from critiquing x-Buddhists who have only applied x-Buddhist ideas in half-measure. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from Season Three of Breaking Bad, it’s you never take a half-measure, when you should go all the way.
Hi Matthias,
Re 10#
Think you made great progress adressing the new situation in Cruel Theory/Sublime Practice. Especially in the differentiation you made between the society of discipline and the society of control.
Once this idea of self-fulfillment became a matter of discovering some sort of interior resource or potential the time was ripe for the emergence of a new version of x-buddhism unhitched from hierarchical traditional structures and reformulated as pro-gramme for individual inner fulfillment. The film ‘Her’ expresses it perfectly in its vision of inner actualization free from any ‘exterior’ concerns and reliant on a methodology that functions as a medium by which you can obsessively introspect.
What potential there is here for the creation of the good subject, fed on a sort of baby mash of sweet quasi spiritual half-truths.
The other side of this is the way discipline, by becoming a form of self-discipline, has succeeded in seamlessly embedding the professional into the the structures of the economy
As you say later this is possible only through the coming together of two strands—the romantic ideal of authenticity, higher income, free time , and the development of technology and communications. On the other the emergence of the marketing industry which creates artificial need and then fulfills that need by the creation of a vision of a ‘lifestyle’ in which consumer products enable personal ‘fulfillment.’—in essence the culture of ‘fucking and shopping ‘
This new future is reliant, however, on an economic structure that has succeeded in exporting the class war , creating here in the west an insulated bubble for a small minority and an urban underclass that finds escape in the more traditional bread and circus opiates; not to mention the real opiates, and the associated destructive cycles of crime and addiction.
Your point about x-buddhists being the new serfs who don’t even recognize their own serfdom is a good one .
.How we shift our work to take that reality into account is another thing. I don’t think its a matter of embarking on a programme of persuasion, as if it was possible or even desirable to win over a certain section to the perspective of non-buddhism. I don’t think this has much to do with critical thought . Change will come about through concrete shifts in economic and social processes, one way or the other. The depletion of resources and the inability of capitalism to put a break on its own compulsive trajectory of unceasing development and the squandering of resources will eventually bring us to a precipice . Increasing our capacity to critique the symbolic systems that occlude the understanding of this process is the function of critical thought. The rest will take care of itself when the tide finally turns.
Hi tomek,
Re #8
sorry I got so involved in the ideas I didn’t answer your question about specific organizations and individuals. It seems to me that the sort of ethos I am describing permeated the whole of the ‘far left’ to different degrees depending on the particular brand of left ideology and the period.
The key thing is that it was more then simply a matter of extreme commitment but had a quasi religious structure expressed as belief in a dialectical law of history; this ‘law’ conceived of the individual revolutionary as the manifestation of an historical force–a sort of quasi mystical effect that converted doubt in the given ‘truth’ into a form of deviation suspiciously close to the theological concept of sin. It found its extreme expression in Stalinist Soviet union and Maoist China, I think.
Re 14#
Thanks for the link..I think I started to read this text some time ago but left of for some reason.
The physical/chemical processes you describe are very interesting components of the whole process. I am interested in your point about the ‘second brain’ and its connection with the secretion of serotonin and dopamine, and also its connection with the muscle system.
How does all this relate to discourses about the symbolic/social system (Badiou, Deluze, Althusser, Lacen , Freud. Marx etc) Complicated for sure.
Much of the literature about the body is embedded in discourses of the body, often without any great awareness that this is the case.
‘There are bodies, language and truth’ leaves as much unsaid as said, though. As if it were simply a matter of the reality these three terms reference simply lying alongside each other.
Re:
Isn’t the reverse, though, also true. We can inadvertently access very painful and disturbing mind/body states via the same process— states described in the pali commentaries on meditation—the horrors of dissolution, etc—all no doubt connected with the same chemical release mechanisms and other processes associated with the autonomic nervous system. How do you guarantee pleasurable results? And how are you able to hold the process at a particular point. Isn’t it a case that meditative practice evolves and that the states of sukka and piti are signs connected to particular stages of meditative practice, as Matthias points out above? I wonder how moderate doses of the drug mdma might affect meditation?
Re MDMA check this out: http://csp.org/practices/entheogens/entheogens.html Many of the links here offer interesting facts about the role chemical processes play in spiritual experience, both administered and naturally produced. Much of the discussion, however, is grounded in a ‘religion as inner experience ‘ discourse; an essence of religion perspective …same old same old!
Patrick (#22)
Bronkhorst book about absorptions is full of references to Freud. So if you’re really interested in the issues of concentration and bodily pleasure and how it my all relate to the symbolic/social, I think the book is really worth of attention. To me Bronkhorst treatment of the early Pali material is unprecedentedly novel. Give it a try.
I think that one of the ways to understand the approach presented in the Pali literature, to, what you call, the “horrors of dissolution”, is to view the practice of absorption as an (pleasurable) antidote to the simultaneously emerging analytical (and sometimes frightening) realization of the complexity of it all – primarily of our ever vulnerable and inevitably decaying body/mind structure.
If there can be any “guarantee” of a fairly stable access channel to this kind of “antidote,” it would be, let me use the term, a physical regime. This is obviously in no way something revealing – just a reliance on the old rule. Regarding “sukka” or “piti” – I don’t know, personally I’m wary of using those buddhemic categorizations, especially fixate on all those “progressive” jhanic stages. But if anything in this literature, metaphors as the following seems to be speaking a lot:
Regarding MDMA, it was kind of half-joke when I mentioned it in this context. Nonetheless it has been always intriguing to ponder the question how it is even possible that a tiny dose of that compound can provoke such a dramatic changes in perception, mood, cognitive function, etc. And can it be – at least to some degree – reproduced by a sheer effort of the will?
Hi Tomek,
I’m reading Absorbsion at the moment. Its very interesting. I will get back to you on it at a later date.
About the effect of drugs on the mind I agree. The whole area is fascinating. Theres a vast literature on the subject both scientific and esoteric. Always remember reading o’ Leary in the seventies Ha! The politics of ecstasy. Anyway the subject raises good questions about the symbolic and its relation to brain and body processes.
As for effort of the will I wonder why bother if different states can be induced so easily and with a measure of precision. A really interesting question concerns whether such experiences yield knowledge in the way we ordinarily use that term… I mean knowledge about the mind-independent world..a more precise and in-dept perception and a more sophisticated capacity to make conceptual linkages , judgments and more creative juxtapositions.
All of which would probably be frowned upon in certain quarters on the left and the right.
Patrick & Tomek, I was trying to say something decimated about meditation. I go on trying.
Patrick (#22)
Many western x-buddhist converts deciding to embrace dharmic “good” forgets or have never chance to realize that this whole buzz of “inner experience” comes not so much from the Far East but from much closer sources like church fathers. Just look at the following fragment from St. Augustine that I accidentally came across this morning reading D. Brooks’ column:
Patrick (#24)
I think that there is an essential difference between that sort of “instant mysticism” which can be induced by using MDMA or psilocybin and sustained and methodical shaping of owns conatus through psychosomatic techniques. The latter is a long time project that involves certain ethical stance, some form of renunciation, etc. So in other words, “experiencing” of some level of existential comfort is strongly correlated with various dimensions of everyday life, mundane choices, and so on.
The “autoepistemic closure” (Metzinger) is a guarantee that “such experiences” will not yield knowledge about the mind-independent world. This kind of knowledge is only possible via conception not phenomenological intuition. Matthias essay Meditation and Control presents interesting insights relating to this problem.
Patrick, you say some very interesting things in #8 and #12. Perhaps we can put this together to build some general statement about a position we take.
Whereby with “we” I don’t mean an encapsulated group but a kind of thinking.
This statement would contain a political view as well as a phenomenological re individual praxis – which of course happens in the social field the individual is part of. Possibly both could merge – although it is not clear to me right now how this could happen.
But however this might be, individual psychophysical praxis and an open and enthusiastic engagement in collective action (as you put it in #8) must necessarily merge.
Re psychophysical praxis (ppp) it is necessary, I think, to decimate it from all kinds of transcendent allusions or assumptions. For example the inner sanctum in which the great marvelous gem is to be found. Instead I tend to see ppp as a kind of weapon. A weapon in as it gives more knowledge about the functioning of the psychophysical apparatus and more ability to control it in respect to certain targets which have to be achieved. To decide on the latter of course then is the part of the enthusiastic collective.
The decision-making process, then again, is another form of praxis which has a lot to do with ppp. That’s the first point where individual praxis and collective action merges. What is in question here is the form of debate or discussion or generally the form of interaction. There are a lot of helpful tools to form better interaction but all come after the general assumption that there is an individual who has the power to decide about its personal fate in the last instance – that there is atman in other words. All methods which could be used to help interactional processes need to be decimated in the sense that these underlying assumptions have to be questioned.
Then, as I see it, there are three realms we have to work in/on. 1) ppp as a one-body-praxis in which a human learns certain aspects of optimization of this one body. 2) Another new kind of interaction which really goes from discreet individual to collective subject – what then is the basis for 3) Collective decision making about and execution of the act.
Needless to say that all three realms merge at every point into each other. But also needless to say that all three can worked on part by part, step by step.
Perhaps we can formulate some kind of manifesto with this in mind – taking into account some points you put forward in this thread. For example (from your #8):
Whereby a deconstruction of “pleasure” would help us in taking a better look at what is meant in each and every case with it.
Where we would have to make it very clear what the difference is between decimation and just another systemization. I think this is one of the points a lot of people
readingmaking contact with our critique do not get.That’s what I mean to describe above by my three points.
And to get into this perhaps a workshop about The Ignorant Schoolmaster can help.
Than in #12:
Maybe the most pressing thing is to force ourselves into new kinds of interaction to generate new collective approaches (my second point above). We have to think about the different situation we live in today. In regard of our merging with technology and in regard of the fact that the imperium – the digital totalitarian brave new world order – has formed totally new forms of suppression which let feel the serf happy. That’s why we cannot walk around trying to persuade people on a one to one basis like Jehovah’s Witnesses. You formulate this problem in #12 too.
That is a very important point: The absence of the bond that would otherwise exist in conditions of overt struggle and conflict. How do we form another bond? Individuality has the effect to deflect the building of such bonds. What is preventing us from forming such new bonds? Or is this bond perhaps another transcendent dream?
And then, what kind of change? Global? For the respective collective in question? Locally? But then what is locally today? and so on…
Than at last (for this comment) that topic you so succinctly describe:
Is there, for example, a new vision about Marx’ thought without that kind of teleological endgame envisioned by early Marxisms? There would be another workshop needed for this.
I leave it here. And come (perhaps) back with more thought about ppp (as an decimated possibility of meditation).
Last question though: Would it be a possibility to envision a really physical come together this summer to work on some of this topics – at least for the europeans or those who somehow happen to come over? Whereby with workshop I mean an experiment in view of the structure I described above.
Matthias and Tomek. thanks for the comprehensive response . I will take a little time out and try to form as succinct a response as possible to the points raised so far.
Matthias (#28), you mean, atman, like both a self model that is the most rudimentary, shaped by the forces of evolution, form of biological virtual interface and subjectivity that is a normative agent molded primarily by sociocultural forces? This is of course just a formal distinction because they are inextricably intertwined in the flesh and blood. Yet, I think this distinction is important one, no matter how trivial it could seem at first – because it is a biological self model, not social/symbolic subjectivity, which is ontically preceding entity – being a direct manifestation of reality “in and of itself.” So in other words, ultimately it is the latter that depends on the former, not vice versa, as unwittingly proclaim – positing various types of transcendental idealism’s tokens as “Mind” or “Consciousness” – much of x-buddhistic discourse today, being unable to conceptually grasp “a view from nowhere.”
See how it echoes in this interview, where interviewer expresess this ontological position saying that: “After all, we Buddhists don’t buy that there is reality ‘in and of itself.’”
Hi Tomek. I was in this case not thinking about the biological virtual interface but it is an important point you bring in. I was brainstorming yesterday and I wasn’t thinking about this aspect. But your are right, we have to think about this here too. Sadly the discussion about the whole complex hasn’t ever been brought to some meaningful conclusion for me… I mean the discussions we had at Glenn’s blog.
What I mean in the passage you cite is this: Atman is generated more and more in the digital infrastructure we live in. The tendency is that every single action is indexed, registered and our patterns of behavior become therefore analyzable – what in a feedback loop feeds back into us so that we orient our behavior more in what this digital culture provides as opportunities. Whereby the opportunities are selected and provided in certain ways by certain forces. We change therefore our behavior in a way that is (at first) invisible to ourselves. Digitalization is used to convert the modern citizen into a discreet entity – atman. One effect is that more and more we become amoral surplus value generating machines who think foremost for themselves – in atman modus.
This is an ongoing historical process which has to do with the industrialization and recently, in the 1980s, went into an new phase – digitalization. What I mean is not a critique of technology à la “back to nature” but it concerns a certain use of technology. What I meant in the mentioned passage is, that one step we have to develop, is the consciousness how we are forced into being atman, how we even in the most noble undertakings oftentimes are just generating value for ourselves. (The Dalai Lam comes to mind, when he says the best egoism is altruism, because in helping others we help ourselves. That’s the great misunderstanding which thinks we could change anything from within this order of being without transcending the order itself – i.e. the generation of atman in modern world.)
Let’s say we have to understand our atmanization. If you will, we can say there is, in the form of technology, a reality ‘in and of itself’ and it is evolving in a way which makes the human its serf. But this is only because we think of technology as an object we handle, while more realistically we are part of technology – a constitutive part which isn’t thinkable as being separate. If I go to the teller machine and put in my card in a way I vanish into or merge with the machine. We don’t realize what is happening in such a moment – there is a invisible operating in the ‘background’ keeping us operating. What I mean is, we have to develop another thinking which is more adapted to this process in which atman is all the more enforced, all the while it still remains conventional reality, meaning: it is there but it is not what it seems to be!
From the thought that we are already technologically interpellated and that the subject-object division is finally dissolving and gone once and for all might come a new force we can act in. Because we then would act as already dissolved, dispersed, vanished, invisible.
The problem I meant in the first place is that we have, in a collective way and as a developing collective, find ways to change our one-body existences and its atmanization which deeply reaches into our flesh and blood, into a mode of vanishing. That might even be, or surely is, a multigenerational task – if at all, because personally I am deeply pessimistic about the possibility to even change a bit what we live in: A looted planet on junk.
One last point re the “biological virtual interface”. I think one can read Pascal Boyer’s Domain Specific and Intuitive Ontology (which I discussed a bit in Control) in a way that would support the vanishing human. The domains Boyer is talking about are exploited by the modern digital infrastructure which is governed by its neoliberal will for maximum rate of return. But these domains are in itself phylogentic results of evolution which at first are neutral vis-à-vis modern culture. I would have to go into this back again though. That’s just more raw thought. But, moreover, I am not sure if we can speak anyhow about something preceding ontically the social-symbolic structures. It might as well be that neuronal structures are malleable to an extant that the whole domain discussion by Boyer at al. is vanishing too at some point. I am in no way expert in this. So I Leave it here.
Sorry my brain is storming again. I try to come back to this decimation-of-meditation thing the other day.
Matthias (#31) about this ontical precedence of biologically based interface of our animal selves I wanted to articulate how this “emptiness of emptiness” position (as McMahan says in the interview laughingly) relativises naturalism and therefore neutralizes the stark truths of anicca that emanates from scientific findings. This is I belief one of the main sources of legitimization of dharmic jaggernaut today – it wipes out the truth of human condition strengthening the belief, that no matter how sophisticated scientific method is, it ultimately is just a human invention, so it is prone to a paradigmatic (read, hopeful) change. You see, this splitting up of human of flesh and blood is just for the sake of an argument, which insists that on a current stage of our evolution the reality “in and of itself,” as exposed by scientific discourse, is a hegemonic force that will not dissolve no matter how strong mantras x-buddhistic ideologues use in their thaumaturgical rites.
Bty, I’ve just finished “The Circle” and that book by Morozow “To Save Everything, Click Here” so I really appreciate you brainstorming about the alienating forces closing the silicon circle all around us – promising us a myth of marketable authenticity, that digital atman if you will … But if I understand you correctly you envisage a process in which one could or even should take a digital atman full strength and stop pretending that technology is something apart from him. Only then one can stop feeling as an alienated serf of the technological “in and of itself” and become fully empowered agent being able to co-create collective action?
Hi Matt,
Re 20#
Thanks for the response,
You raise some interesting points.
This is true, and as you might see from reading here and at the other blogs, inquiry into what exactly the term meditation might mean , is ongoing . There are different factors involved and you have listed some.
We contend , though, that there is a basic structure that makes possible the use of the designation x. It is justified usage because all reiterations of x-buddhism, classical and modern, are based on a decisional structure. Meditation functions in all of these reiterations as a methodology whereby the truth of the dharma is confirmed as truth by way of the dharma. The details of the method vary across linages, historical periods, and geographical locations but the essential core remains the same— an affirmation of Dharmic truth already explicated and made available alongside the ‘practical’ instructions for meditation. Indeed these ‘practical instructions’ are inseparable from the ontological claims about the nature of reality—- impermanence, no self nature, mark of suffering, emptiness, suchness,etc— made by way Dharmic truth. This inclusiveness is achieved by way of a transcendental move that oversees reality while including itself within reality as one side of a bi-furification (subject and object). Within the various Dharmic discourses this is described in different ways—as insight, special insight, non-.duality, falling away of conceptual mind, original face, true nature. Our contention is that meditative insight functions across the board as the moment justifying the transcendental move essential to Dharma writ large— dharma as self proclaimed world conqueror. it is, in fact, just one more systematizing philosophy establishing for itself a philosophical presumption—the capacity to oversee reality and appropriate it in the form of absolute truth. It proceeds then to harass the ordinary human being by means of its own preordained oracular power.
Now, this is already a little complicated, but there is one more piece of the puzzle to be added.
Meditation cannot be understood in a vacuum, as if it fell from the sky. As you say above, meditation is born of our own experiences, filtered by our own minds, social conditions, education etc.’ We say that it is conditioned on an already existing social/symbolic system that hails, calls, or interpelates the individual, so that the individual becomes, by way of interpelation , an agent or subject acting within the social/symbolic system, thus changing the social world , for good or ill.
Meditation, therefore,is a social practice carried on by a subject in response to a particular ideological formation,in this case by the absolutist system of the Dharma described above. In classical times it was practiced by a subject interpellated into a medieval hierarchical system . Today the x-buddhist subject practices within the conditions of late capitalism as preeminently a ‘quietist subject who fails to challenge the prevailing social order.
Well this is a difficult point but an essential one. Non-philosophy does not make any preemptive judgments about the nature of reality: it only says certain things about the nature of philosophy. One of the things it says is that philosophy makes a transcendent move . It is not necessary to posit a transcendental realm in order for philosophy to do this. Philosophy makes the ordinary transcendent move necessary for ideation or conceptualization, a bi-furification between subject and object . Philosophy elevates this ordinary move and claims on its strength a special presumption —that it has achieved a delivering up of reality to thought, for, example, by way of its grasp of logical sequence.
There are two points here:
Non -Buddhism definitely rejects x– Buddhist as a claim to absolute truth. It understands all x.buddhist postulates as elements in a decisional structure; and in its particular forms as historically conditioned instances of Buddhism— discourses, rituals, traditions and linages , all integrated into and in turn shaping economic, social and political conditions, structures and processes.
Non- buddhism avoids producing a decisional structure by refusing to elevate the necessarily transcendent move required by the process of ideation. It situates all of its claims within an axiomatic structure . Its claims are not absolute claims about reality but axioms concerned with doing a sort of work on x-buddhism—a sort of work that yields some of the insights described above.
As far as the nature of reality is concerned Nonbuddhism makes no claims—it makes only provisional claims about certain social and ideological formations. As its fundamental working axiom it posits a relation to reality that makes no claim on an absolute approximation of reality—-instead it begins with a proposition: although thought can make working claims about certain processes or structures of reality, it can only do so in a minimally transcendent way.
All of this requires. As you say, a certain stretching of the capacity for thought. But really is there any alternative? One could answer alongside modern x.buddhism in the affirmative and say that there is insight by means of transcendental insight. But isn’t that premised on a very long tradition of Buddhist efforts at pushing thought? Modern x—buddhism is a betrayal of that tradition when it bypasses the necessity of rigorous thinking in favor of a facile embrace of no-thought.
Tomek, #32.
Ok, I see your point. “Emptiness of emptiness” is the great postmodern anyone-think-about-the-real-as-you-like, right? I think that’s too the cynical stance Zizek diagnoses and which seems inevitable nowadays. Reminds me too of Pepper’s Feast Interrupted.
I still don’t get what you mean with your last sentence in para one. Do you say x-buddhism is splitting up human flesh and blood to describe science as a hegemonic force?
Taking a digital atman full strength? Yes, in the way to better understand how digital/technological atmanization works. Perhaps we should exchange Nagarjunas simile about the mirage with that of the digital/technological atman: It is there, but it doesn’t quench the thirst.
And yes, the question about technology is still being asked in a way that thinks technology as an independent tool. Digital/technological atmanization depends on this view. Most people react with aversion to the view that the human is intertwined with technology. I think it is much more realistic to see it the other way around: The human is technology. It is his ‘nature’ and there is no way back to some other nature…
Hi tomek,
Re 27#
Just a quick clarification.
I no longer think of introspection as in any way separate from conceptualization. I can’t see how , in an adult interpellated into a symbolic system, such a thing is possible.I understand Metzinger’s point to mean that ‘pure’ forms of introspection are not privileged, but are, on the contrary, disqualified by virtue of a blind spot (disqualified from access to the representational structures and processes producing his ‘now’ as, at a minimum the ‘presence of a world’)
Drug induced experiences under conditions of control are not introspective in this way . They involve enhanced perceptive and conceptual experiences coupled together, often involving an increase in logical sequencing and creative linkages. There are no claims here of a transcendental overview or an introspective process that is privileged.(Although all sorts of claims have been made about drug induced hyper realizations., and by a motley crew, some too far gone along the road of drug induced realization!)
And there’s no practical limitation on drug use being integrated into an ethical structure that shapes behavior and offers it a meaningful context, nor is there a limit in terms of integration on a long term basis. The privileging of meditation over drug is part of a longstanding prejudice built in to most discourses favoring the capacity of meditative methodologies to shape ethical behavior.
But I don’t want to make this a central issue. I personally think it interesting., but not central.
Of far greater import is the conversation you and Matthias are having. I am reading along and trying to get my head around the issues raised.
Matthias (#34), by “splitting up” I mean this unwitting strategy of modern x-Buddhist ideologues (strategy most likely bequeathed to them by phenomenologists like Husserl and his followers) to promote phenomenological intuition (insight) as a kind of ultimate epistemic authority – what can probably be traced back to Descartes and his famous remedy for his own existential doubts. And to me this emphasis on phenomenological “present moment” fetishism seems to be a way to conceal the depressing findings of modern sciences. Hence the “split” – on the one hand is this soothing golden calf of “here and now” and on the other stark conclusions of neurobiology that indicates the constructedness of that very sense of “here and now.” Furthermore when you add to it all this postmodern, relativistic cynicism of the proponents of “emptiness of emptiness” – B. Latour is a good example – that tacitly questions those scientific findings this split becomes even worst. It simply disappears from the sight, becomes totally obscured by that intellectual dishonesty. Result? More and more people stay worshiping the “present moment” as the most reliable foothold in today’s pluralistic and disorienting reality.
Patrick (#33), thanks for this great comment and for keeping this vital point of SNB critique in front of us, that “… dharma [is a] self proclaimed world conqueror. In fact it is just one more systematizing philosophy appropriating to itself a philosophical presumption—the capacity to oversee reality and appropriator it in the form of absolute truth. It proceeds then to harass the ordinary human being by means of its own preordained oracular power.” It’s so easy to become today a victim of that Jaggernaut and its colloraly sense of sufficiency – symptom of dharmic decisional hyper-reflexivity.
Though there is one point I’d like to raise, namely, you say:
You do not want to say that in medieval times Buddhism and its feudal institutions had really any different aims than to form “preeminently a quietist” subjects, do you? Thinking about this I keep in mind points like that one made by Faure I cited in #16 or points like one made by Glenn here: “Historically, for instance, a pattern of symbiotic relationship between x-buddhist communities and the political status quo has been the norm. Economically, Buddhism has always depended on the patronage of the business class. Institutionally, forms of thought and types of individuals incline toward stability and conservation, and thus tend to reproduce themselves.”
Tomek, #36. Ok, now I got it. Wasn’t sure about it. And besides this you give a nice short historical account where this “present moment awareness” is derived from. And in that regard I am not sure if I ever read in my tibetan-english translated ppp texts about that term…
Tomek
Re 38#
Ha! you are razor sharp today (as always!)
Of the top of my head I wouldn’t like to pigeonhole x-buddhism as quietist, over and across historical and geographical spaces. Like Christianity, it took different manifestations at different times and locations. (although that way of speaking posits agency but I hope you know what I mean)
I think, for example, the tantric Buddhism of India was certainly not quietist in terms relevant to the social structures then in place —it tended to make much of its disregard for caste prejudges at a time when caste was a crucial lynch pin of the exploitative system and of the domination of the priestly caste. Just so Christianity in its early form cast off the narrow definitions of rabbinic scholasticism and the control exercised by Judaic law, and opened itself to a sort of anarchic social experimentation.
One of the things about a hierarchical system (as opposed, for example, to the diffused flat system favored by our leading corporate management aficionados and which seems to mirror the actual result on the economy of free market economics) is that deviation (opposition, displacement, disaffection) is very noticeable and therefor frowned upon. The reverse side of that is that the drop outs often seem more radical. My own favorite example is the amazing explosion of imaginative deviations and disaffections from the accepted forms of Christianity that occurred all through the seventeenth century, especially in england, as a result of the general disruption caused by the emergence of a strong and confident merchant class opposed to the privilege of aristocracy and priesthood.
As a general rule though you are right. Which is why we are still talking about both Christianity and Buddhism.
Matthias (#38), leaving aside Western phenomenological tradition, I think that this “present moment” fetish of today has its dharmic prototypes in various “luminous or space-like minds” you mentioned about in your Meditation and Control essay. Would you agree?
Yes, you may say there are prototypes. But if they where meant in a way x-buddhism is using them is another question. From what I think about psychophysical praxis and especially abiding in an open and relaxed concentration I would say the “present moment” in x-buddhist thinking is a misunderstanding of shiné praxis or calm abiding. Fetishistic “present moment” meditation seems to be concentrated on something like the breath and it stays there, whereas shiné goes somewhere else. There are several strands maybe. An interesting one I think is the one where one thinks of a thought as something, while at the same time it becomes clear that this thought about something is another thought about something. Trivial so far if thought about. If done though as thought about thought about thought and so on, at some point the recursion breaks down. What remains is awareness as such. That function which allows concentration on something at the first place. The space metaphor in tibetan yoga is famous for this. If this has anything to with time as in the “present moment” fetishism I don’t know.
Patrick (#35), at one point (46:30) in the conversation we recently listened to, Brassier starts with positing a distinction between consciousness and thinking. To which Metzinger then responds evoking two terms respectively: phenomenal content and intentional content. They both sort of agree that those two representational contents are relational to a greater or lesser extent, but to me it’s still a point of contention whether we can say with absolute certainty that phenomenal content is thoroughly determined by intentional one. I would agree that in fact most of human perception is filterer by various categories of “ideation or conceptualization” but still there are those fine-grained details (like color shades) that might be beyond the scope this categorization. I don’t want to suggest here in any way that if it really is the case empirically – that this phenomenal content is distinct – that we have to treat it in any special way. In fact it’s very prosaic, fleeting and largely inconsequential. That was one of the moot points in my previous disputes with Pepper on SNB blog. I was trying to raise that distinction between what is available for attentional processing and discriminative motor control and what is not available for mental concept or memory formation. See what I mean starting from what I used to mentioned to Matthias and also here my comment to Pepper.
This “blind spot” if I correctly understand both you and Metzinger is covered by the notion of transparency – we’re only aware of the final product of the whole subpersonal machinery of our organisms which is completely beyond the reach of our “ego tunnels” or phenomenal self models. So in this way introspection is greatly limited and hence the term “naïve realist” that we all are according to Metzinger.
Yes, I agree – a lot is going on in this area of “neuroenhancing”. I’m still to some degree a victim of the Juggernaut and am reflexively trying to impose my idiosyncratic sufficiency schemes.
Matthias (#41), trying to look at that “space” in a decimated fashion I would say that, if anything, this phenomenological experience is, in all of its modalities, a representation/image/simulation of a current state of the body as whole. And by modalities I mean here all of the “memory traces” and physiological states, characteristic to each individual, and encoded, so to speak, as a distinctive perceptual map of tensions and proclivities (emotional valencies in Damsio’s sense) in a human musculoskeletal frame and visceral system, coordinated by a central hub located in a brain stem (upper-brain-stem nuclei.) Brain-stem machinery, as Damasio claims is “responsible for making the kinds of images we call feelings [and] is capable of (…) mixing signals from the body and thus creating complex states with the special and novel properties of feeling…,” hence his term “primordial feelings.” Those feelings as he says further “provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence (…) [they’re] immediate manifestations of sentience [and] constitute ‘a material me.’” When individual is immersed in its familiar habitat (physical, social/symbolic) this map is “activated” in its idiosyncratic way, every time it encounters recurring situations and or when repeats routine and habitual behaviors. On a intentional level those bodily “memory traces” are represented as thinking (e.i. ideas, concepts, categories) and “appear” in that “space” not only when prompted by “external” events but also provoked by other “internal,” mental events.
So what would “calm abiding” mean when it would be seen through such a prism? And here comes the idea of a “retreat” situation (not necessarily a long one, short stretch of time devoted for ppp is equally valid for my argument), in which an individual is physically separated from its routine, familiar habitat and this have a simultaneous impact on its phenomenological level, it manifests as a peculiar pattern of primordial feelings, their respective modalities (emotional valencies), which reflect this ongoing state of the body as a whole in a “retreat” situation. So yogi sitting in a cave – to use a mythical example – removing himself/herself from a familiar physical, social, symbolic milieu changes his/her self-model or image of the body as a whole, just by sheer separation from his/her most familiar stimuli to which s/he has become habituated. So thus s/he creates a special kind of “space” (neurocomputational cave,) if you will, where a proper parsing of the thinking process begins and ideally results in a situation where, as you say, its “recursion breaks down.” And as you add, “What remains is awareness as such.” To me that means that primordial feelings (a brain-stem simulation of a body as a whole) are pacified/soothed to such a degree (by the absence of the habitual association process accompanied by various “memory traces” encoded in body states (tensions)) that a yogi experiences this proverbial luminous “space” of calm abiding.
The moral that can be drawn from all of this is that this luminous space is in no way a transcendental state (that can legitimate some “traditions” and its institutional powers) but a image of a body as a whole (“material me”) modified by its special treatment prescribed by a given ppp.
Hi Matthias,
Re 28#
Regarding i)
I like the term psychophysical practice. I think it encapsulates all of the elements implied by and included in the term ‘meditation’ without all of the baggage.
I think your division into three is good too.
Some clarifications (if only for myself)
There is general agreement with the first part of this statement , I think.
The second part is a question partly about the value of individual practice. When meditation is extracted from the decisional structure what remains? I think again there are two aspects to this :
there is the refinement of the critique of meditation as a discourse within x-buddhism, as a subset of x-buddhist thought and as the lynch-pin on which its epistemological claims rest; via meditation the modern x-buddhist accesses a direct realization of the nature of reality. And accompanying this discourse on the privileging of introspection is an affective aspect; the practitioner has a way to ‘bracket’ all of the disturbing aspects of his experience and a way of dealing with them directly. By access to the true nature of reality via meditation the practitioner feels himself empowered; by means of meditation the practitioner solves the problem of existential suffering by seeing into the impermanent and empty nature of all phenomena, including the disturbing emotions.
This is a way of stating the circular nature of of x-buddhist thought ; it names the disturbing aspects of experience as suffering (Dharma) and offers via meditation (Dharma) the means to resolve the dilemma it has named and described (Dharma) by seeing into the impermanent and insubstantial nature of phenomena (Dharma)
This is from start to finish an hallucinatory process in which a sufficient form of thought revolves about its own self-designated axis , answering all of its own questions without ever having to address the relative historically conditioned reality referenced by the term body/mind complex.
We reject this and ask; what remains?
Psychophysical practice is the decimated remainder. Because we began with a x–buddhist postulate the remainder has a ambivalent relation with its origin; it is a sort of clone of the original used as an axiomatic departure point for investigating the actual condition occluded by the hallucinatory nature of the practice of x-buddhist meditation. Decimation transforms it into a tool (or weapon) with which we can investigate the way hallucinatory forms of though arise out of the psychophysical (and social symbolic) complex. The results of this new practice is just ordinary human knowledge which we can use to construct a new collective subject, involved in new social practices which might eventually lead to a new social formation.
So what, one might ask, is the difference between this and meditation? Isn’t this in fact a description of meditation; a way of unmasking hallucination.
We have to admit the ambiguous nature of the new term and the practice it names ; it is Janus faced, looking back at x-buddhist thought and foreward to its new decimated form. We have to admit to its similarity, and insist on its difference; because it originates as an x-buddhist postulate it shares methodological similarities—calming, introspective observation, concentrative skill, accumulative insight, increasing fluency, etc; Because it insists on its own axiomatic function as a minimally transcendent form , it delivers useful knowledge about reality while avoiding the hallucinatory circularity common to all systematizations of thought.
We can only access this new knowledge by practicing the new practice; and by seeing how its findings relate both to the critique of x-buddhist co-option , and to a reinvention of the forms of social engagement often named as revolutionary practice.
I understand this as a reference to the way decision making within any group context is related to ppp,
In other words to the way an individual is able to use the practice to observe and then short circuit reactivity, and deluded thought. This I think is an interesting question as it involves the way the individual intersects with other individuals, the social symbolic system, and the physical environment. And one of the aspects of all of this is the way each of these categories has a history (for example the way individuals histories,—- relatively stable supportive and reassuring as against destabilized, abusive and traumatic—- impact on a situation in which these individuals come together to cooperate within a particular social space. This of course is the ordinary material of family and social life ( and of virtual life via the internet, we have some experience of that) which is always a situation of power and the exercise of power, and of a rebellion against power and its abuse. In other words the experience of a contested social space.
Again , I think, this is a matter of practice, and of the practice of pushing thought.
Great point. I think here the traditional x—buddhist trope of relative and absolute truth can help . It goes back to points I made in the Tsongkapha post ( at least in one form of the question as represented in the Tibetan tradition.)
The absolute truth of the absence of a substantial , permanent, abiding self is identical with the relative truth of the existence of an impermanent, insubstantial and changeful self.
Where the ‘helpful tools’ posit a substantial, unchanging Atman they need to be decimated (extracted from the system of thought and recalibrated for non-buddhist use) In other words all tools are potentially useful and we can pick and choose any and all, and over a vast range of cultures, geographical locations and historical periods. This is the rich heritage of ordinary human history available for use as decimated and recalibrated tools and weapons ; a re-enactment and rehearsal in critical thought of the actual seizure of tools (means of production) and weapons (the coercive power the state) that critical thought names as revolutionary action.
This is where I find myself lacking orientation and where I, at least, need to do a lot of reading and thinking. I think this point about the new social and technological situation is a critical starting place for a new discourse on change and political action.
“And how does this situation changes the anthropos?”
That’s exactly where I think the old formulations of Marxism are exposed as inadequate.
I think there is and its very much related with the situation you address regarding the new technology and its effect.
This is one of the areas it is vital to explore. I think there are a few ways to begin
With non-dialectical thought —Deluze comes to mind immediately and also Badiou.
With Laruelles project for a non-marxism.
With new discourses around the changes brought about by the process of globalization.
One new discovery I made recently is via Glenn’s comment about the journal Hostis. The site ‘Anarchist without content’ has a very interesting dissertation (a book really) on the very question we are concerned with. I think it is well worth close study . http://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/works/
Tomek and Parick, #43 and #44
I think we have two strands of a fundamental critique of meditation here in what you respectively express. They show the boundaries of what is possible in meditation and where it goes wrong.
One strand is the physical apparatus and its workings which allows introspection to go only to a certain extent. The other strand is about decision and the ensuing specular circularity.
One question. There is a lot of material about the first one. Can we somehow organize it a little bit, in the manner of an overview at least? Tomek, how about putting some sources together, some discussions (like the one by Brassier-Metzinger) etc. with just some short remarks about what the content is?
Can we gather some reliable data from research about what ‘mindfulness’ is really doing? This would complete the picture for a critique of mindfulness, meditation etc. Is there, for example, independent research about what Kabat-Zinn is doing?
I am asking this because I think the critique about mindfulness and meditation must be directed more in direction of the big players who are emerging here – not the little ones like the Buddhist Geeks etc.
Another point. What happens with the decimated remainder which is ppp? Patrick you say in #44:
The last part is the important one for further steps: Investigate the way hallucinatory forms of though arise out of the psychophysical (and social symbolic) complex. Calming parts of the ppp would provide training in observing the unfolding of the thought process. The end her is not just calming the mind, but it is a prerequisite for new communication, the second realm I mention in #28:
Calming is just a tool to become able for other ways of interaction. In short: a kind of dissociation from ones own typical persona which one is habituated to. It is becoming able to observe (hallucinatory) forms of thought arising in their interplay with other thoughts.
That’s it plain and simple. Then, like actors, we could begin to enact new forms of interaction while we are aware of being actors which play in real life – knowing that as humans we could be Suicide Bomber or Nelson Mandela. The question for the emerging collective of course being, what the difference is and what course it will take. Somehow the person itself becomes a first name or a existing-Stranger-subject:
Or, in another way, the own habituated persona becomes this stranger subject. However this might play out, it is a substantial change in relation to the real and ppp might have an important role in it. For example in a well established calm abiding, thought seems to ‘bubble’ out of nowhere but then – in another phase of learning – this nowhere becomes discernable as the socio symbolic environment one lives in + the physiological apparatus. Both parts of learning together might be the necessary force of change (not the change itself). The first part is necessary though (or at least helpful), I would say, because it is a tool of dissociation – whereby calm abiding then merges into discerning insight about the situation.
I think that might be a parallel to your text, where you write about (the concept of) fluency and how it is developed…
Hi Tomek
Re 42#
You might be right about the ‘fine grained details’. I still haven’t worked out a satisfactory approach. When I say that I can’t see how one can practice introspection apart from conceptualization I always want to qualify that. Firstly I think there is the problem of the nature of symbolic representation as we receive it in the form of various ideological perspectives, That sort of discourse is always a generalization and much of it does not escape crude forms of systematization, often offered as the final word— a coherent and final account of reality.
Which is why art discourses such as the novel and especially poetry try to exploit the gap between generalization and a more fine grained representation of experience. But of course these too are using words. But in the best of poetry there is always the awareness of the limitation of words and an attempt to undermine habitual thought by means of distortion .. Which is why, despite proclamations to the contrary , neither philosophy or art are ever anything more than an approximation, always contested and fated to be superseded by a more up to date one before long.
So too the discourses on meditation. For the most part the practice of meditation rarely amounts to more than a reenactment of the very precise instructions delivered in the form of stages. Each stage is accompanied by directions and a highly detailed exposition , and the whole is embedded within a particular philosophical discourse, in turn concreted as the cultural forms and practices of a particular religion, tradition, linage etc.. How can we decide where exposition ends and non-conceptual experience begins? We could try , I suppose to clear our minds of all preconceptions about meditation but of course that is just one of the more subtle refinements of x-buddhist meditative discourse.
Another set of instructions concern not grasping after conceptualization but allowing each conceptual arising to subside into its ‘natural’ state as empty luminous primordial mind. But here again the directions already exist as a refined meditative discourse into which one is intepellated as an advanced practitioner. Indeed one’s advanced state is measured precisely in reference to the instructions contained in esoteric texts and a massive compendium of commentaries.
Here again we are confronted with x—buddhist circularity. If we try to break out of this circularity where do we go —either into another already exhaustively defined set of instructions embedded within its own complex discourse concreted as just some other religious tradition, or into a secular form. But here too an ever growing set of instructionsis already amassed, refinements, embellishments and a general discourse embedding these instructions within a non-religious cultural form.
The solution , it seems to me , is to accept that where conceptual ends shared collective human experience ends. This does not mean though that one can reduce shared human experience to language…it only says that we can only share human experience through language and where language ceases shared human experience ceases . Beyond that of course exists what we refer to as the real, identical with what is lacking within our discourses. And this includes our discourses as they exist beyond or behind our conceptualizing symbolic naming of our discourses. Strangly, this brings us to a point very similar to the one arrived at by Nargarjuna. Here though, I take on board what you say about the ’emptiness of emptiness’
Nargarjuna warn that we must not reify emptiness but x-buddhists go ahead and do it anyway, often , in the process justifying it by referencing nargarjuna, In this way ,as you say,they relativise the stark truth of anicca.
Likewise,one could just as easily reify the ‘real’ as some sort of repository of what cannot be articulated through language but can, by a process of introspection, be intuited or felt. I think we have to insist that when the real manifests it does so as an inseperable co-arising of the concept, its referant, and the object, and that the object is open to investigation , thus making of it, by means of the discourse of science, an element of shared human experience,
At that point we are free to use what Matthias referred to as psychophical practice to explore our body mind complex by means of introspection, much as the protagonist advised us to do.
Matthias
Re 45#
I think this paragraph can become a basis for agreement; as a marker for how far we have come, and where we should go from here. As you say the process can be divided into two parts:
a psychophysical practice , using introspection as the decimated remainder of the x-buddhist trope ‘meditation’, and a critique.
If we say that the x-buddhist meditative trope is embedded within a discourse in which circularity is conditioned on the existence of a transcendental overseer, we can say that psychophysical practice is the remainder, after we bring x–buddhist supporting discourses into proximity with contemporary thought. Psychophysical practice, then, is a practice embedded within a non-buddhist discourse that uses its own formulations not as a means of appropriation of the real via a transcendental overseer , but as an axiomatic staging post for its project of seeing just how such hallucinatory discourses as x—buddhism arise out of the psychophysical system in the form of the social/symbolic, and how the social/symbolic in turn becomes a factor in the evolution of the psychophysical system
Once we accept this all of the meditative techniques developed by the different traditions become available as resources, since they now function within a deiscourse whose object is immanent critique and whose practice consists of introspection and critical thought.
On this basis critical thought and introspection are coupled, in that the exercise of one necessarily involves the exercise of the other. This is because we insist on an immanence that posits the psychophysical system as one particular manifestation of material made available via a nested holarchy of interdependent and co-evolving systems (biological/environmental and social/symbolic ) which we name as the mind independent world.
Could we say that this ‘identity of the real’ constitutes the lack in our social/symbolic discourses which Lacan names as the ‘real’ and which becomes human material through practice—of science, critical thought, art, introspection etc. This human material, in all its forms, we call ‘reality’, as known and experienced by the collective Human ape.
I think we should work towards one text as an attempt at a summation of this comment tread which we can then post. Maybe we can work on it in common by passing versions on to one another via email until something satisfactory emerges? Or it might be better to continue here, in public as it were. And , of course , I would invite anyone else who has been reading here to contribute too.
Thank you Patrick for your generosity in sharing the work you’ve done and providing some excellent links.
I remember reading a book on Asian wisdom, I think the author’s name was Zimmerman. His description of Buddhism was titled “The Happy Few”. For some reason that phrase has always stuck with me. Probably because my projection of the Protagonist was someone who realized his insight was not for mass consumption.
I think the non-Buddhist critique of x-Buddhism is right on the mark (as much as this non-philosopher can understand (pun intended) ).
I also think it falls on deaf ears because x- Buddhism gives an educated, middle class, college educated Westerner, a narrative they can live with and we all need a story. The alternative is the place meditation leads to, the “worm at the core” , the fact of “dissolution”, and who really wants go, there besides “the happy few” ?
Also you can’t argue faith.
Hello Swimoutfree,
Like the gravatar name!
Swim out free and put pen to paper (fingertips to keyboard). From the comments you have made over on SNB you sound like you might have got something of what we are at here. Write a short history of your experience with Buddhism and your initial impression of the non-buddhist critique as you see it now. Disagreement is fine as long as you engage with a few substantive points. Who knows maybe you know something we don’t. In fact I’m sure of it! We are particularly interested in the way the practice of meditation interfaces with the discourse on meditation. And how the practice can be recalibrated by extracting the term from x-buddhist discourse and subjecting it to a process of decimation, a technical term you can get the low down on in Cruel Theory/Sublime Practice. Here’s a quote
There is a post coming in the next few days on ways in which people can contribute to the project.
If you have a lot to say write a short (or long) post.
You are probably right here. As Tomek tirelessly reiterates, early Buddhist practice was wedded to a form of world renunciation very much a part of the existing discourses on the path to enlightenment. Its no accident that at the same time other movements developed equally as radical (Jainism for example) But its also the case that these radical paths to enlightenment ,which regarded renunciation as a necessary preliminary decision, involved a minority of the population, but one embedded in a very particulate communal formation—a community of practitioners aligned with a supporting social infrastructure, almost always a self sufficient village economy.
As for non-buddhism falling on deaf ears…two things: it fell on your ears and you are not deaf; we are not in the business of persuasion. No doubt that will come eventually when persons more competent take up the ideas and develop them; for now its enough to engage with the non-buddhist discourse and use the heuristic in whatever way we feel inclined. Experiment within the context of your own experience of Buddhism (or any other spiritual path) and try things out for size.
http://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2013/04/06/how-to-do-things-with-non-buddhism/
Hi Patrick, Thanks for your reply. Point taken about “deaf ears”, I’m not a careful reader.
My practice was yoga. I lived in an ashram for several years. We did hatha yoga ( the physical practice, ie. yoga postures , yogic breathing and seated meditation ) twice a day.. The yoga postures were considered moving meditation, so seated meditation wasn’t stressed.
I loved doing yoga. It made me feel free in my body, light and strong. It was also good to be in a supportive community (about 300 people).
The ashram eventually closed.. Same old story, charismatic teacher, devoted followers (mostly young) and the eventual betrayal of trust
I think the term meditation is difficult to discuss because it’s so subjective I think people experience what they want to. I personally wanted to feel less guarded, more open. I thought I saw those traits in people who did yoga . I don’t regret my time at the ashram, ironically the skepticism I wanted to lose kept me from buying into the leader, so I wasn’t devastated like some people when his personal failings came to light.
As far as the non-buddhist project is concerned, I appreciate the work you do and the fresh perspective you bring to a subject shrouded in fog. I think x-buddhists benefit from getting knocked on their ass (metaphorically speaking) although I must confess reading various comments can be heavy going. I realize from your work, my starting point is attempting to see what’s false. Thanks again.
Hi Patrick,I’ll try to be more specific about “moving meditation” at the ashram.
The physical body was considered to be always in the present moment (aha), as opposed to the”mind” (thought) which was almost always concerned with the past or future.The body is nonverbal. The language of the body is sensation. The yoga postures were held for a period of time depending on how difficult the stretch was, a posture like a seated forward bend could be held for 20 minutes or longer. During this time, the yogi was aware of the physical sensations due to the stretch, as well as the self talk that the mind generated about the sensations. The goal of the practice was firstly, to develop a Witness Consciousness that could view physical discomfort dispassionately and (2) eventually allow the intelligence of the body to manifest without interference.
Hi Swimoutfree.
Thanks a lot for the contribution.
Its right on par with our current preoccupation with meditation and especially with the way the body/ mind complex interfaces with the symbolic system.
Our approach is to address two primary categories:
The body; that is the body as the state of the body as experienced by the human being both in the general living of her life and during ‘practice’ (yoga,meditation, etc)–including the subjective or experiential or phenomenological situation of being a body, and being in a body .
The body as discourse; that is the body as it appears in various discourses and especially within x-buddhist discourse—including all of the ways in which the body figures as a site for articulating a theory of the body in relation to the mind, the social situation, the ideological formulations, the overall world view.
The relationship between the above categories.
So, as you might see, experience such as yours, is prime material that can be processed; put into the non-buddhist mangle and squeezed hard to extract the juice; the remainder, reconstituted by way of bringing it into contact with various contemporary discourses, might enable a practice; a practice that is able to be of real use , not only to the individual, but also to the collectivize .
One thing you should note is that the intention of the non-buddhist critique is not destructive in the conventional sense. For example, there is undoubtedly , a richness of bodily experience involved in any physical practice, (yoga, or dance, gymnastics, martial art, skilled craft work etc). This experience is regarded as precious, historically and across cultures. Non-buddhism though, refuses to take the discourses within which this ‘preciousness’ is articulated, at face value. The term precious, for instance, privileges one particular take on the body; the various discourses on sexual abuse privilege another take, equally valid, on what it means to be a body in a situation of the exercise of an overwhelming familial or /and social power. Non- buddhism situates itself not too far from x-buddhism in order to do some work on its discourses and practices ; but not too near as to be overwhelmed by its alluring vibrato—its promise of escape from vicissitude via dharmic circularity. But clearly, there is something of value in practice. For non-buddhism, the critique enables a sort of alchemy in which the human is extracted from the philosophical and the idealogical, in order to enable a return to the ordinary human practice of living; of life lived as a biological/social/symbolic being at a particular historical juncture.
Anyway thanks for the input and keep it coming! I’ve included a part of your comment in my next post among the extracts from this tread; I think your experience will be of interest to many reading here, and could form the basis for further discussion.
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