animitta

"without a mysterious cause"

Archives for July 2017

A map to here & now

tar brushed on asphalt country road

Welcome to the human condition. Here’s how we got here, & how Gotama frames the tasks1 for escaping it.

We are beings who know about death

Patterns that repeat mean survival; we humans are the most complex such pattern, so far as we know. Survival happens through constant dissatisfaction with what comes up in the flow of our experience. Crucially, our cognitive abilities provide superior survival for the species, at the price of knowing we will die as individuals. Our first task is to know this truth by clearly seeing how it arises in experience & how it creates suffering.

Everything changes; we constantly grasp for who we are

We are compelled to continuously adjust because we are wired to continuously feel “something is not right.” We crave for a place to rest in the chaotic flux, a sense pleasure or a viewpoint on who-what-why that will satisfy us. Since this cannot ever be found, there is dukkha, stress & suffering. Our second task is to study the mechanism of craving, whether for sense pleasure or perfect ideas, or wrong views. We strive to see the false sense of a static self constantly under threat, & the craving that creates this out of the impermanent flux of experience.

There is a way past suffering

Through development of concentration & insight, the possibility of cessation of dukkha, stress & suffering, emerges. Well before it is firmly established as a continuous equanimity toward the chaos of experience, we can glimpse the nature of freedom, nibbāna. Our third task is to use our study & meditation practice to cultivate the wholesome desire to further understand Gotama’s teachings, how they can increase our equanimity, expand & deepen nirodha, cessation of dukkha.

Gotama’s teachings as a path

We study the eight-fold path of correct view, wholesome action, wholesome livelihood, good effort, present-moment awareness, and steady concentration. Having studied it, we practice it. Having practiced it, we study it again with deeper appreciation. The wholesome benefits of joy & longer glimpses of freedom become a psychological flywheel of energy to continue. Altogether, this is our fourth task.

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1 Stephen Batchelor developed the idea of seeing what are traditionally called the Four Noble (or better, Ennobling) Truths as tasks rather than truths. This is my own articulation of that idea, however, so any faults here are mine.

Beyond self & history

 

From our self-created delusion of a privileged point of view, we cannot imagine how small a slice of all that is we inhabit with our minds.

Bubbling up from the quantum foam, weaving in the gossamer veil, the fabric of consciousness fluttering between body & world, our awareness floats through seas of spacetime. Dependently arisen, the complex wave-crests of consciousness sparkle; they effervesce among infinite possibilities: awareness, fear and self-focus riding like flotsam on the tsunami of coincidence.

Hardly begun, we think ourselves capable of, deserving of, immortality. We imagine forever, our toy concept dancing on the waves, perpetually moments from drowning in the tides of the eons.

Between the swell of chaos and the lull after cascades of random ripples, collapsing possibilities into the currents of experience, we float on meanings so fragile the merest cosmic breeze, a single uncharted comet or asteroid, could return them in a blink to the interstellar dust from which they arose in the blink before.

What hubris! What heart! What desperate bravado in the face of death!

Between the visions of something and nothing, every-thing and no-thing, we arrange our half-silvered mirrors, constructing the experiments we hope will prove our existence.

Could there be another way to imagine this? A more modest meaning, but one that we could, even in the shelter of a cold beaker, believe in?

What if it is just what it seems to be, illusions aside? Just a lucky throw of the cosmic dice, with no further meaning than double sixes or snake eyes?

If we can come to terms with that, then perhaps nothing else, no other cherished view, would matter. We could let go of humanist dreams, religious nightmares, the search for the quantum clockworks that we imagine would soothe us with an endless tick-tock.

Here in this moment, standing just now, looking east by north-east, what would we see? Looking through the crack between the doors of everything and nothing, could we let go of privilege? Riding the arising, the swell of imagined significance, could we continue to float calmly, knowing the trough of despond that will always follow? Could we let go our clinging to some matter, embrace that we exist only as the flotsam of inevitable complexity, the foaming crest of some strange attractor?

What if all that arises is the false essence made of imagination—what is fearful about that once it is truly admitted? Resigning ourselves to our ultimate ephemerality, what is left to fear? The soggy clump of meaning that we rest upon. The bubbles of seaweed logic. The jetsam of disproven experiments past. The liquor of some sweet darkness that still hangs over us like yesterday’s excesses. We cling to the worthless like a child’s remembered dream of a blanket.

You think perhaps this means that nothing really matters. But everything-and-nothing is not that simple. Through the crack between those doors vast possibilities await. Spacetime will continue to construct itself from probability. The tempting illusions of cause and effect will not cease, but we do not have to believe there is nothing else. Wholesome deeds will still make us feel good. Having a positive effect on the future does not change simply because that future is not “forever.” The rise and fall can bring either joy or fear; it is the knowing that makes the difference.

What if the selves whose sharp edges every moment seem so cruel are not really needed? Their intentions, their effects, roll on through space and time like the molecules of water in the waves, rising and falling, marching in the greater army of waves unimaginable, beyond the curve of the horizon we stare at in wonder.

Me and you, the latest bubbles in the froth. Everything we imagine to be ours comes from some passionate couplings of waves from what seems, from here, like the past, colliding in hope of some future bliss. Suppose we do find out how it all works; then what would we do? Take our boat apart in mid-ocean, and reconstruct it? Why?

Between our loci of awareness and the all that surrounds them, there is the suffering, the circle of ripples going out and coming back in all dimensions. Yesterday, today, tomorrow—rings in the water. All the thoughts, glances and words, welling up from the sources of energies and emerging proto-particles, photons and electrons, organic synchronies swimming out of darkness, molecules begetting organelles, then cells, and so on. Endless conversations among coincidences, until, at last, thought emerges, and immediately confuses itself, tangling up like filament floating in the tides. Such a charming trap; we believe it, because disbelieving simply doesn’t occur to us as an option.

But it is an option.

What there is between “existence” and “non-existence,” between clinging to the eternal & fearing the death of meaning, is a path, a way of disentangling, a way of patiently turning the knots over and over until we see how to loosen them. Pulling doesn’t work. Trying without knowing only pulls them tighter.

It’s like learning to float on your back in the salty swell. There is the essential nature of trust. There is the feeling of cool air across your face, the fear of the unknown deep below. You cannot look behind you where the waves feel as if they are pulling you. You can only just be there, neither drowning nor flying, both living and dying all at once, being no one in particular, being kind to all who float by, singing your song of trust, not wanting to be or wanting not to be, not admitting the question has importance even; this is the ultimate nobility of mind.

Your song will float across the waves, bringing joy to all who hear it, bringing courage.

 

Doubt: not sure what this is; middle way

broken sticks on blue sand

We do not need a belief system built on any absolute certainty. Insight, developed through study & practice, allows us to balance between the need for “eternal” & the fear of nothingless or meaninglessness.

There is the feeling, “Not at all sure.”

Is this doubt? I have no doubt about Gotama’s teachings. I have no doubt about the nature of the world, to the extent I understand that. There may be doubt about my abilities, my discipline; some self-judgments about that.

For example, why should I do this website? “What makes me think I’m so important?…” Perhaps this is the sign that what I have chosen is a worthy goal—or not.

I can sit here as long as you can, doubt. This is a practice, too.

Does anyone want this? Does anyone value a pragmatic approach that does not assume a universe with benevolent intentions towards humans (or life, for that matter)? If it really is a cold dark place, and we are completely on our own, shouldn’t we see that clearly, acknowledge it, and do our best to carry on in spite of that? Isn’t it time to grow up and let go of the fantasy of parental rescue? “This body will die.”

If the heat death of the universe arrives, and “all that we have done” is to do our best to help each other, were we wrong to do that, because there is nothing further?

Balanced between “everything exists” and “nothing exists”—between irrational hope & morbid despair—there is the watching of experience arising and passing away. Some may think this sounds just as bleak as the darkness between worlds. But perhaps that is the point. The feeling of bleakness is actually attachment to “nothing exists” (abhava-taṅhā). In fact, there is only this experience arising. But if we cling to it, or imagine a benevolent source for all of it, then we cling to “everything exists,” the eternal. It is not a case, as Gotama teaches about the intellect, of a logical exclusion—that one of the extremes must be “true,” whatever that would mean.

Any conclusion “this is true,” feels better than “I don’t know.” But the idea that the idea(!) can end the feeling (“I don’t know”) is fundamentally flawed. The idea “This must be true, & only this,” is unstable by its very nature as a process in the mind; the teacup mind never stop swirling, & the tea leaves never settle. Ideas are always partly made of feelings, so ideas alone cannot banish feelings. Looking inside, we can see that a feeling of uncertainty is still there. Ideas of “true” just become layers on top of the wounded feeling. Soon we have layers of idea-bandages soaked through with feeling-wound-blood. Still no peace.

Our tradition of logic, and the “excluded middle,”—“It must be either A or B; there is no inbetween”—which serves so well as a tool in the right circumstances, ends up being a trap when applied to ultimate questions about human existence. It becomes Wittgenstein’s fly bottle, a transparent trap from which there is no escape without understanding, a trap made of language in the shape of ideas. We take it so much for granted that it is invisible.

Gotama tells us to see that it is not real. We see this by actually examining our experience. We see that experience arises, but that each aspect of it that appears independent actually depends on many other aspects. We see that all experience arises, but is impermanent. We see experience passing away, but yet we cannot say “there is nothing,” because there is always something else arising! So neither “everything exists” nor “nothing exists” is really what we see when we look closely and carefully at our experience. Nothing lasts, but experience does not cease from arising.1 It is a flux, and everything that we take to be who we are is part of that flux. We can pick out and communicate about, for convenience, the aspects of experience that we identify with, but there is no one aspect that is “me,” that does not depend on the rest of experience for its temporary feeling of “existence.” To think about this in the abstract can lead to terror, or at least unease. But these are just more experiences arising, questions like “who am I, who was I, who will I be?” These thoughts and feelings arise and pass away like the rest of experience. By training ourselves to abide in present-moment awareness, observing and not getting caught up in the flux of experience, the power of such thoughts and feelings is diminished. We can actually live our lives more fully in the here and now—which is the only place we can actually live, the only perspective, point of view, that can exist for us in any case. As in the tale of Milarepa, we have to put our head in the mouth of the demon; then it will disappear.

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1 This is a very freely done description of what Gotama says to Kaccāna, who asked about “right view”, which is the starting point for the ennobling eighfold path. Kaccānagottasuttaṃ, Saṃyutta Nikāya ii.16-17.

Gotama dissolves himself in Dhamma

“dhammaṃ passati, so maṃ passati. yo maṃ passati, so dhammaṃ passati”

“One who sees the Dhamma sees me; one who sees me sees the Dhamma”

—Saṃyutta Nikāya 3.120

Throughout his teachings, Gotama urges us to see clearly how experience unfolds in the moment, how it blossoms from the seeds of conditions that come from the past interacting with conditions arising in the present. It is not a question of just “be here now” (much as I like Ram Dass’s concise reminder). Gotama wants us to see here now. When we see clearly this unfolding, we understand that there is no reason to assume a someone behind it all. We are inside a process, looking out, but the we & the looking are all just the process. This is not a denial of reality, just another way of understanding it. A more helpful way, in the sense that this process perspective removes the tendency to get stuck on the perception of sensations, emotions, people, & ideas. That stuckness, that friction between a perception of some self & other arisings, is exactly the nature of dukkha: suffering & stress.

Within this present-moment awareness of arising & passing away, the sense of a solid self dissolves, even though the elements that created the illusion remain. You can see the constellation as a bear, or you can see that it is just a group of stars: real stars, imagined bear. It is, as several suttas record, like seeing the artifice of the magician’s trick: we see that her props are real, but the illusion itself is not what it appears to be.

So it should not be surprising that Gotama can say that there is no difference between understanding—clearly seeing—himself & seeing both his teachings and seeing the Dhamma (the process he describes). You cannot see one without seeing the other. He is simply the manifestation of the arising of a being who comprehends & teaches the way things actually are, the way the trick works, including how it causes suffering. He is also, of course, a living example of what the end of dukkha looks like: that this is possible, that a free, realized being, too, is part of the Dhamma, the way things are. It is possible to be that wise, that compassionate, that saturated with equanimity.

It also demonstrates, for me at least, that while his understanding is extraordinary, it is something that a human being can achieve. He himself (as opposed to some others after him) does not claim to have anything other than human origins. He does, of course, indicate that the nature of his achievement takes him, after the fact, outside the ordinary definition of “human,” while clearly indicating that this is a case of rising above, & that it is available to others (if not necessarily everyone currently living).1 He compares himself to the lotus flower that has earthly origins, growing in mud & water, but rising above them. Not a deva, or a human being, but “unsmeared by water, unsmeared by the world…I’m awake.”2

We can also see this when, just before his parinibbāna, he says that the Dhamma itself will succeed him as the best teacher. He says this despite the fact that many of his disciples have achieved freedom for themselves, & that he often praises them for their superior abilities as teachers of the Dhamma & as living examples of the teachings. He clearly saw the dangers of becoming attached to a particular person, or to put it another way, a particular manifestation of the Dhamma in the form of a person. This would be a potential distraction from the work of clearly seeing the Dhamma for onself—which is the only method of achieving freedom. While “faith“—or as I find it more helpful to translate saddha, “trust”—in a teacher is certainly useful, freedom must be achieved by the individual, from the inside out; it cannot be imposed from the outside.

So by stating this equivalence between seeing him & seeing the Dhamma, Gotama makes it plain that freedom is a possibility for those who can work to achieve it. It is in the nature of reality that this is possible; he has discovered it (another metaphorical complex he uses), but he did not create it. He created ways of teaching how to see it, teaching how to achieve it: That is his unique contribution.

The complete humanness of Gotama is important because it makes his accomplishment more achievable for the rest of us. It reminds us that the Dhamma is something inherent in the nature of our experience, if only we can learn to see it unfolding. This is equalivalent, for me, to the idea of grace in other traditions: It is an aspect of nature that is always there, always available, no matter what events have come before. As long as there are beings with the nature of desire, who have—as humans do—some potential to overcome that desire, then the path is open. As long as we have the Dhamma—in the sense of the teachings themselves—we can follow the path. This is a key idea in relation to a pragmatic approach to human existence in a universe that offers no human-focused beneficence outside of other, somewhat unreliable, human beings. It is pragmatic because human beings through their wholesome actions create the new field of kamma for all those with whom they come in contact; this can then spread in a geometric ratio through other beings. Together this creates new opportunities for future beings to embrace the teachings, & compound the growth of wholesomeness. Indeed, the history of human beings, for all its horrors, does show growth in wholesomeness, & this mechanism explains how. These continuously emerging opportunities for growth correspond to what those in the Christian tradition call “grace,” but without the need for a diety to explain it.

The citation above, about the equivalence of the Buddha & the Dhamma, has an interesting context. The Buddha is visiting a disciple who is gravely ill, Vakkali. Asked by the Buddha if he has any regrets, Vakkali says that he had long wanted to travel to see the Buddha in person, but was too ill to do so. Gotama says to him, “Why would you want to see this foul body?” The quote above follows. It is not this body that matters, but the teachings & the Dhamma they describe. Later after leaving Vakkali, the Buddha sends him a message that his impending death “will not be a bad one.” Vakkali responds by demonstrating that he understands the teaching on the five aggregates, that for example form is impermanent, and is not self. He has no doubt about this; he is not perplexed about it. He is able to die in peace.3

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1 Aṅguttara Nikāya 4.36, Doṇa Sutta

2 Transl. by Ajahn Thanissaro http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.036.than.html

3 In fact, Vakkali, who was in extreme pain, takes his own life, to spare himself pain. But that is another subject, too big to cover here.

Kamma & the role of metaphor

sun & trees reflected in mudpuddle

The focus of kamma should be that actions have consequences in all futures, including the remaining future of this very life, and the futures of all beings who will come after us. We must understand both the benefits of a such a future orientation in this life and in future lives, and we must come to understand the true nature of beings (limited boundaries, which are dependent on specific times and spaces), so that we can see that there is no difference between effects now, in this life, & effects on future lives (which will not be “ours” simply because there is no “you“ or “me” in the larger sense). 

We use metaphor to communicate meanings that can’t seem to be captured any other way:

“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

This is not a literal truth, but we understand Romeo’s feelings in a way that we otherwise never could. There is a very good set of arguments (by Lakoff and Johnson, e.g.) that all language is based on metaphorical comparisons; after all, how can we define or explain anything without comparing it to something else? But I will say more about that elsewhere.

Kamma, specifically, requires an understanding of the role of metaphor because taking rebirth literally is not required for understanding kamma and its role in liberation. I realize this will be seen as heretical by many devout Buddhists, but for those who cannot embrace a belief based on empircally unverified ideas, it is vital to have an equally strong and motivating reason to believe in ethical continuity, that is, the effect of actions through time. I want to submit that it is possible to hold one’s actions as having effects after the breaking up of one’s physical body, without believing that one specific individual in the future will inherit all the fruits of one’s actions in this life. That is, the “three lives” interpretation of kamma is not necessary for Gotama’s teachings to have their soteriological effects in this life.

This interpretation is part of the cultural legacy of Iron Age India, when natural history or science did not have the tools now available to us. It is part of the Indian view of cosmology that existed well before Gotama’s time. As he did with many existing cultural views, he repurposed the fatalistic Indian view of rebirth, which limited one’s free will to achieving change only through playing one’s social role well enough to achieve a better rebirth (meaning, in that culture, a higher social station, or caste) in a future life.

Gotama saw that ethics could transform us, & improve our experience, in the current life, teaching that one could change one’s fate to a happier one “in this very life” (dhamme parinibbāyanti).1 I believe he was saying, in effect, “The ethical part of this is the key part. Ethics does not arise because of the fact that lives follow upon lives; it is how the choices made now affect future lives—all future lives. Once you see directly in experience the true nature of the self, this will become obvious to you. It is not some self that moves from life to life, but consequences of actions, of unwholesome desires. That is all that is important to know & see.”

For me, this is very important for motivation. Since my twenty-first-century scientifically educated mind cannot embrace the traditional three-lives interpretation of dependent arising and rebirth, I must search elsewhere for a way to integrate sīla, ethics, study and practice. I can do this through seeing in direct experience how Gotama’s teachings can make changes in how I encounter and react to the world of experience. Since I am continually becoming a new being in each moment (or changing the state of my neural networks, if you prefer a neuroplastic understanding of the idea), I do not have to wait until the next life to change my state (or my traits, as the jargon has it). I combine this with the understanding of the self as a temporary or illusionary set of boundaries within the larger flow of consciousness among all beings, including of course all human beings.

Looking behind me in time, I see all the actions, the ethical behavior, that has surely created much of who I am; this includes my own behavior, as well as that of all those who have known me or influenced me in some way; it spreads out beyond that in geometrically increasing ripples of influence to all those who influenced the ones who in turn influenced me. I am not proposing here anything that extends beyond empirically testable kinds of psychological and social influence, as well as the loops of influences created by physical developments (the invention of a new technology, for example) that grow from human psychology and social developments and then in turn influence the minds of future beings.

There is plenty of possibility and power in these ripples and loops of influence to explain my individual eccentricities as well as those of every other human being. Consider, as a light-hearted example, the relationship between humans and cats, from domestication (of humans by cats, of course) through cat videos on the internet. However you might want to qualify the nature of this set of influences, it’s there, and it has considerable power (whether for good or evil I leave up to you; personally I like cats, but perhaps they have arranged things that way). The multiplication effects of all the cultural developments over millennia are easy to imagine in the power of their influence, if not in all their details. We are not really unique in the sense that we imagine (otherwise internet dating sites wouldn’t work…).

Imagine going through a typical day, for instance, and the more subtle aspects of your interactions with other beings, not to mention the obvious ones like intimate partners, co-workers, people you encounter in stores and so on, let alone the vast ghostly corridors of social media and other virtual encounters. In the physical world, there is body language, brief glances of semi-recognition and approval, words with unconcious content—what are popularly known as “micro” psychological effects—all of which have their cumulative impact. We are just beginning to understand the amount of influence these have, and how these might work. They can be positive, negative, neutral or some combination. We leave vast wakes of these ripples in inter-being psychology behind us, constantly. It seems obvious that they exist, and that they are extremely complex (probably ultimately unfathomable in complete detail).

For a long time after beginning to understand and practice Gotama’s teachings, I sat uncomfortably with the traditional views about kamma. Their importance to the role of ethics, the nature of the self, and the potential for progress on the soteriological path was clear. But the lack of a mechanism for carrying the effects, or fruits (phalla), from one life to the next, caused a great deal of cognitive dissonance for me. The longer I have considered the issue, however, the more it has become clear to me that it is not really an issue, if the factors I have just tried to describe are considered.

Gotama himself was typically cautious in his use of language to describe what is going on as kamma moves from life to life. He talks about future beings in the singular sense, but he is also very clear on what this does not mean with regard to kamma. It does not mean the consciousness of an individual survives death.2 It does not mean the personality, as such, survives (this would directly contradict the teachings on non-self, anattā, & self-view, sakkaya diṭṭhi, that latter of which must be left behind to reach liberation). It is not the aggregates (form, feeling or sensation, perception, dispositions, and consciousness).

The most specific word that Gotama uses, when questioned closely about what it is that actually moves from life to life, is craving (taṅhā)3. This seems to fit precisely into the picture I have painted above about the ripples and loops of influence that continually flow among the experiences of beings, both directly and as embodied in their inventions, institutions, and so on. The more deeply I study and practice, the more I consider it, the less effort it takes to imagine that this is exactly how it works. We must let go of our cherished, egocentric notions of who and what we are, to grasp it. We must see that even though we cannot understand it on the mundane level, there will be beings in the future, and they will feel the effects of actions in the present, just as we now feel the effects of actions taken in the past.

Is this not perfectly clear? Do we not either suffer or enjoy the results of what our parents, friends, acquaintences, cultures, nations, governments, technologies, and so on, have done in the past? Can we map the specific acts of kamma by individuals in the past to specific individuals in the present? Not usually. But is this really the important part of this issue? It is, ultimately, the most trivial part; in fact, the deeper one’s understanding of the nature of the individual, the more trivial it becomes, until at some point it simply disappears into the background of seeing yathābhūta, things “as they have come to be.”

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1 In “Sakka’s Question,” SN 35, for example.

2 Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta, MN 38, & Kutūhalasālā Sutta, SN 44, e.g.

3 See Saṃyutta Nikāya 44.9

kamma past & future, intention, a little “free will” = a lot

 

Those who have heard only a little about Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies & religions may have the idea that “karma,” in the sense of a cosmically ordained fate, is central to these belief systems. The reality is more complicated, even though some people who follow some of these belief systems do take this view. But such beliefs are only one way to understand the natural truths beneath these ancient language games. There is a way that does not require abandoning natural science or adopting rigid simplifications of cultures past.

 

Some science & materialist philosophies say that we cannot have “free will.” Since everything derives from the physical laws, everything built up from them is determined; even the random factors are ordered by the laws of probability. We can play the odds, like good gamblers learn to do, but in the end, the House—natural law—always wins.[1]

Most people are deeply uncomfortable with that. There are many ways it is expressed, but they all come down to “It isn’t really that way because we really don’t want it to be that way because then we don’t know how moral philosophy would work & people would just run amock.” But these approaches run out of chips before the House does. No matter what you may say, our cells know it, our gut knows it, & our irrational actions prove it—we know this. The path that starts by declaring philosophical free will, & therefore moral necessity (& any moral or social theories you may build on top), is a dead end—in all senses.

So what to do?

Gotama realized trying to derive a useful way of being from this kind of discursive thinking is useless. He saw that what we actually have to work with is a razor-thin moment in the flux of experience to turn one way or the other. Free-swimming microscopic cells move toward food or away from pain, toward light or away from darkness; natural laws & probabilities have created them & largely determined their activity, generally. But still they move toward survival, as best they can.

This does not look much like what us self-focused, proud humans would call “free will.” But Gotama understood how the moment of intention could become the fulcrum, and training in his practices could be the lever; together they can shift our existential problem.

In brief moments of decision, if we are seeing clearly enough to break down the flux of experience, & see through the illusion of a solid self, we can see how our intentions have been conditioned toward short-term pleasures & turn toward the deeper pleasure of equanimity.

This is not complete freedom—the broadest, unqualified philosophical free will—but it doesn’t need to be. The object is to relieve dukkha, suffering & stress, nothing more—& nothing less. We leave a mass of philosophical & material problems behind, because in terms of relieving dukkha they are not the issue, except as far as believing they are the issue is part of the problem. (We could also argue that all the other philosophical, moral, and social theories have happiness, the end of suffering, as their goals as well. They are just more roundabout.)

Before Gotama’s teachings, kamma, which literally means “action,” was seen in ancient Indian thought as a combination of duty & therefore fate. Only by faithfully performing the correct rituals could we extract a degree of contentment with our lot. The correctness required of the rituals was so exact that special consultants, brahmins, were needed to ensure they were precisely performed. Whatever misfortune came later would be caused by some slight error, which could be as small as a less-then-perfect pronounciation of a single word during the ritual. In effect, the point of rituals like this is to repeat with excruciating detail, whatever was perceived to have worked in the past in hopes it will have the same “effect” in the present (even though there was no real cause & effect relationship in the past). This helped humans live with a world even more out of any individual’s control than ours.

Gotama took the language games that had arisen around these ways of thinking & gave them new, ethical meanings. By understanding how our experience in the moment unfolds, we can use the slight leverage of intention in the moment to improve the quality of that experience now & in the future. Through training, understanding, & practice, we could learn to turn toward the wholesome, away from the unwholesome, & perfect our ability to relate to experience without suffering & stress, dukkha. He saw that the brief moment of intention could have enormous leverage for improving our experience. We could avoid unconscious conflict with our natural benevolence & suffering as a result. We could see that our painful thoughts are not who we are, & therefore avoid the likelihood that they will recur in the future.

Rather than accepting our flawed sense of self & our unskillful thoughts as fate, or mindlessly repeating the past, he offered the ability to change our habits, & improve the future—including the very next moment. This is a far-reaching change in understanding. It takes a seemingly tiny amount of limited freedom, the flash of the smallest span of awareness, & gives it the power to change the way we experience the world. By seeing our conditioned responses as coming from the past, & either continuously reinforced or overcome in each moment, he shows us the connection between this moment & the future: Rather than ruminating about an unchangeable past or fearing a doomed, uncertain future, find the leverage in this very moment.

This ethical perspective connects our actions with our relationships to other beings as well as ourselves; it harmonizes with Gotama’s understanding of the true nature of the self, as a changing process rather than a solid something. Rather than a solid self that experiences the world, he saw an experience of apparent self arising, dependent on micro-moments of unconscious & semi-conscious conditioning. He saw that we can alter our interpretations of these constellations of reactivity over time. Seeing the patterns clearly is the secret to escaping them.

As the false notion of a self fades, we can see this web of ethical actions flowing through time, interacting with both determined & random events as described by natural laws. We can perceive the illusions of separate persons arising out of the flux of these actions, rather than solid persons within a world of experiences.

On the scale of individual human psychology, this becomes the cycle between the world—individual-seeming whorls of consciousness—& their respective unconscious patterns. Ethical effects (phalla, or “fruit”) appear as lawful results of this process, subject to the natural laws of physics & probability working on the upwelling of randomness. There need not be a centrally administered cosmic accounting system; cause & effect suffice to explain everything to the extent possible. There is determinism, arising out of randomness in lawful ways determined by probabilities. But that is not the whole story, & not binding on individual decisions, in the same sense that the laws of probability do not determine that the coin will come up heads next time: only the likelihood. Human actions, involving complex cycles of cause & effect with feedback loops, are both regular & predictable in some ways, & irrational & bizarre in others. But there is a scale in the flux of experience where a small turn toward the wholesome (meaning a behavior that does not cause psychological suffering) can lead us to a worthwhile freedom.

This is not grand free will, or a concession granted by an otherwise omnipotent & benevolent diety. It’s the human-scale version of a single cell going right instead of left. The trick is to admit our limits & work with them skillfully.

This is how Gotama saw the point of leverage in relation to dukkha, suffering & stress—the “thorn in the heart”. In each moment, intention (volition, or willed action, cetanā) can be seen, & because of training & understanding, a wiser course can be chosen. So key was this understanding for Gotama that he redefined kamma, to be the same as cetanā, rather than its common meaning at the time, “action” or “fate.” In other words, see that the pulse of mental flux, the flash of intuitive choice, is trainable, not fated. Training & setting up the intention of freedom in a split second of experience, we have grace & power. Like a great athlete, whose physical & mental training allow the game to slow down for her, the seemingly miraculous can be accomplished. We can be free—as free as we need to be.

pubbe cāhaṃ bhikkhave etarahi ca
dukkhañceva paññapemi dukkhassa ca nirodhaṃ

“Formerly & now, monks, all I teach is
suffering & the end of suffering”

—Alagaddūpama Sutta MN 22

[1]: There’s recent mathematical analysis based on information theory to show “causal emergence”, that is, a causal agent independent of underlying physics. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20170601/ (https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20170601/) But this may still something our feeling of free will finds uncomfortable.