animitta

"without a mysterious cause"

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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.

Kamma, upādāna & majjhimāpaṭipadā

flat snake on sand among fall leaves

The history of habit-clinging & the middle way

Mental suffering comes from unwholesome habits of thinking, not from some mysterious cause.

The gap between each beat in the rhythm of experience holds opportunity. We can see how the next beat will affect our habits, our ways of being in the world—or not.

We can choose to reinforce bad habits, or cultivate better ones. We can change the future likelihood of wholesome thoughts & feelings, or the opposite—which leads to more suffering, mental distress, in the future.

Our intentions in these moments are what make the difference. Gotama saw this as the answer to the human problem. Like the spiritual idea of grace, always available, he saw each moment’s turning as the beginning of the path to escape our fearful experience of the world. This is what’s meant by Gotama’s choice to redefine the Pāli word kamma (a.k.a. karma) as intention (cetana in Pāli)—as in, “my intention in this moment.” The culture of his day thought that we were fated by birth to play the role we were given in this life in hopes of a better rebirth. Gotama said we have a choice, that we could achieve freedom “in this very life.”

In each moment—whatever length a moment has—everything arises & everything passes away: imagine just that.

Existence & non-existence, “everything exists” & “nothing exists”, atthi and n’atthi, are merely the wave crests and troughs of delusional thought in our experience, as the tide passes us. Moments of awareness are blurry snapshots of this universal flux.

Gotama’s middle way of understanding (majjhimāpaṭipadā) the present-moment awareness of the flux, keeping unwholesome conditioning tranquilized, observes this movement of the mind, realizing that no part can be thought of as an essence. The signs (nimitta) of ordinary experience fade like shafts of sunlight cut off by clouds; the signless (animitta) appears. Detail in this landscape is useful for getting around, but only real in that pragmatic sense.

It is only knowing and seeing the process, not grasping some part of it, that is helpful. This knowing & seeing is a perspective, a trained way of experiencing. It observes precisely the process of which anicca, impermanence, and anattā, not-self, are the chief characteristics, and of which dukkha, for beings who are not free, is the result. Our stress & suffering begin with natural ignorance, inborn & ingrained as habit; that is part of the nature of this process. This ignorance of what is really going on, avijja, determines the very structure of our psycho-physical being, distorting our senses from simple sensations, to pleasant or unpleasant reactions to them, to perceptions of experience that we make into solid reference points, on to complex desires & aversions, delusions, & the seething oceans of thoughts and emotions above them. If the process of grasping these signs is left undisturbed, the cycle reinforces itself, each pulse strengthening the ignorance (not seeing how mental suffering is arising) that began the prior one. This is the monkey-trap of kamma, where our fist, grasping the fruit of experience, awaits the hunter, dukkha, who comes each moment to slay us. Letting go of the fruit, we could be free, but our untrained minds cannot see this, obscured by our desparate habits of clinging.

Craving, taṅhā, is the one phenomenon that Gotama specifically identifies as the mechanism that moves kamma through space & time, from the perspective of one experience of being to the next. The body does not survive death; neither does the personality, or the five aspects of our experience in form, pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feeling, perception, habitual inclinations, & various forms of consciousness. All those arise as a result of new cycles of ignorance, which were created by previous clinging. Craving, like a flame thrown through space and time1, ignites the process anew in the fuel of ignorance. New selves that suffer arise from the flames, phoenix-like, over and over, unless & until seeing things as they truly are, yathābhūtaṃ, snuffs out the cycle, quenches the flames. This is the true meaning of nibbāna, cooling. Note that no consciousness moves from life to life. Craving/clinging (upādāna), as expressed & held in all beings & other processes in the world, are sufficient to prolong greed, hatred & delusion through time. Basic human mechanisms, combined with this ongoing environment, suffice to create continuous dukkha for beings that are not free.

It is vitally important to us in our sci-tech-material culture, stripped of comforting mythologies and unseen dieties on which to transfer the imagined omnipotence of our parents, to understand and properly invest with power, the mechanism of clinging. Like the apparent strength & ultimate weakness of the nightmare demon, craving/clinging is the energy source that can be cut off, if only we see clearly & cultivate (bhavana) the strength to cut through it. The knowledge of the middle way, majjhimāpaṭpadā, can free our minds from all the false solutions to the problem of dukkha, suffering, that we try, the blind alleys we continually follow.

All our instincts, based in materiality, lead us to think the answer must be an object, whether it be a person, a drug, or an idea, that in itself will satisfy our needs. But our needs by their very nature are insatiable—that is the essence of craving/clinging, falling into the hedonic loop of insatiability.

The beauty of understanding the true energy mechanism of kamma, clinging, is that this understanding can exist comfortably in our sci-tech-material culture. Craving/clinging is like a contagious disease that we do not treat, & that we constantly pass along to everyone we encounter. In this way it spreads horizontally through the culture and vertically through time, as we sigh and give in to the hedonic cycle one more time, modeling this behaviour for our peers and all the world’s children. This inheritance from the mechanisms of evolutionary repetition spreads & succeeds down through time like a brilliantly successful fungus or bacteria, perfectly fitted to its ecological niche in the human psyche.

But evolution’s most subtle aspect also provides us with a solution. We think of the complexities that now exist as the result of evolution through passing time, increasing slowly through millennia. This is true, but the secret to understanding the evolutionary process is that each small mutation, if reproduced & successful, changes the game. Each layer of success for one phenomenon introduces a new aspect to the world, changing the environment for all subsequent events. Eons ago, the Earth’s atmosphere was poisonous to most life as we now know it. But some microorganisms’ mutation allowed it to thrive in a carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere was poisonous to others, by using solar energy to convert it to oxygen—photosynthesis. An entirely new environment arose (the carbon dioxide to oxygen shift).2

Our ability to cultivate concentration and calm, to slow & magnify our view of the nature of our experience (practice), & to understand our situation (study), are the results of evolutionary processes, blind & goalless beyond their success at replication. They created the trap of the hedonic cycle, but they also created the means to escape it. By developing concentration & insight, the ability to avoid the innate compulsion to see things as either existing or not existing, but as a flux, we can free our psycho-physical reactions to experience. We can learn not to take the bait. We can end the fire of clinging by letting go of the fuel of ignorance. The kamma that creates dukkha can be ended, saṃsāra transformed into nibbāna.

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1 The Buddha: “Just as a fire burns with sustenance and not without sustenance, even so I designate the rebirth of one who has sustenance and not of one without sustenance.”

Vacchagotta: “But, Master Gotama, at the moment a flame is being swept on by the wind and goes a far distance, what do you designate as its sustenance then?”

“Vaccha, when a flame is being swept on by the wind and goes a far distance, I designate it as wind-sustained, for the wind is its sustenance at that time.”

“And at the moment when a being sets this body aside and is not yet reborn in another body, what do you designate as its sustenance then?”

“Vaccha, when a being sets this body aside and is not yet reborn in another body, I designate it as craving-sustained, for craving is its sustenance at that time.”

— SN 44.9 (Thanissaro)

2 “Great Oxygenation Event”, Back In Time app

Looking nihilism in the face

spider on splinter, black background

What would it be like if nothing mattered? I don’t mean that there is no ordinary meaning in human life. Baseball is still baseball, and it is enjoyable to watch (if you ever felt that in the first place). But ultimately it has no meaning, beyond the enjoyment of players and spectators. After the heat death of the universe—or before that, if there are no humans remaining anywhere—baseball will have no meaning. There is no Platonic Baseball Hall of Fame, no Cooperstown lingering as a phantasm in the void if the sport becomes something only historical that no one plays anymore. (I plan to be dead by then.) That’s what I mean by “to matter.”

If this kind of relative meaning can exist without ultimate meaning, what is the meaning of “ultimate meaning”? If you cannot cash in your ultimate meaning today, for face value, what good is it? On the other hand, if you can cash in your meaning today, it must be relative meaning. How else do you establish its value? The contract lawyers of the universe have got you there. You have a coupon, a receipt, a promise, a piece of paper. That and $3 will get you from Alewife to Fenway Park on the “T.” But why would you want to go to heaven—maybe!—if you can go to Fenway Park today, for sure? OK, the beer is outrageously expensive at Fenway Park, but at least you can drink it today. There’s even a ballgame to watch while you drink it.

Not only will the future always be in the future, the meaning of the future will always be in the future, too.

But we want the meaning of the future to be negotiable in the present—hence “the sacred.” We want the “fact” that the future means something in an ultimate sense to change the meaning of this very moment. We want it, in fact, to provide the meaning for this moment, even though it (the future) doesn’t exist right now. These time things are tricky!

The implication of this is that we can’t locate meaning in the current time without reference to meaning in some future time, or in the eternal, whatever that means. It is “outside of time & space,” as is sometimes said. This seems to me just a fancy way of saying “not now.” There is a theory that we construct time and space as we go, that is, time & space are, as Gotama would say, “conditioned,” as opposed to the some popular notions of nibbāna as something eternal, “beyond space and time,” even though he clearly rejects the eternal.1 But Gotama was experiencing nibbāna, “the unconditioned,” while he lived, right in front of others. He was there, not beyond space and time. (There are, of course, elaborate Buddhist philosophical systems including three different emanations of the Buddha, only one of which could be seen, and so on; but these come off as mere convoluted ideas to justify various metaphysical views, which Gotama rejected.)

I am being facetious about things that some people hold very dearly and seriously; but I wish to make a point. Can you have your eternal future cake and eat it too? I don’t think so. In the flow of experience, we are always eating here and now; we are free—or not—here and now. We need to be able to see the fear of death clearly, so we can let it go & get on with living—here—now. The reason to contemplate death, as my teacher Anālayo reminds us, is because the only time we can live is here and now. And if we can master that skill of living, then eternity is optional. It is seen for what it is: just another very human idea.

The only meaning that matters is the one we are creating here & now. We’re either creating dukkha, stress & suffering, or not. We’re either reinforcing the habit of creating that dukkha, or we’re not. (There are subtle degrees in both cases, but they all tend one way or the other.) This is the meaning of Gotama’s teaching on dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda). The irony—& the glory—is that the only way to affect the meaning of future moments is the way we create meaning in present ones. This is a simple way of showing why we need training (study & meditation practice) to balance in the flux of experience—balance that frees us from both ideas of eternal ultimate meanings & the numb despair of meaninglessness.

So rather than ultimate meaning or no meaning we have this experience, here & now. This is why it is said that nibbāna and saṃsāra are the same. With training, you can look nihilism in the face & say “There is this sense, this idea of nihilism; see how it arises & passes.”

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1 Kaccānagotta Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya ii.16-17

Sacred, sublime, letting go (preliminaries)

pink wildflower bud closeup, soft focus

Why we must carefully avoid attachment to substitutes for God, beauty, & other symbols of the eternal: There’s nothing wrong with valuing beauty & benevolence in human experience, as long as we don’t deify, reify, or get attached. But we must understand why we crave them, & what the alternatives might be.

“He perceives gods as gods. Having perceived gods as gods, he conceives gods, he conceives (himself) in gods, he conceives (himself apart) from gods, he conceives gods to be ‘mine,’ he delights in gods. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say.”1

We crave order, stability, predictability. We want to believe in a benevolence that inheres in the nature of things. As we mature, we seek to transfer the answers to these needs and wants from our parents to some other source of safety. Our inborn ability to detect agency in the world, combined with these needs, has led to a common feature of human cultures, namely deities, “higher powers,” and so on. The amazing, historically rapid increase in our scientific and technical mastery of our physical environment —verging on terrifying—has had two consequences that bear directly on how we cope with the existential needs just described.

First, our ability to truly believe in the idea structures, metaphors, and language games created by our cultures prior to the last century or so have been severely compromised. The level of cognitive dissonance we must accept if we want to maintain such beliefs continues to rise steadily, with no end in sight. To put it bluntly, our old tricks for suppressing the fear of inevitable death don’t work any more. Some know this consciously, others—far worse for them & for us—only unconsciously.

Second, there have been, broadly speaking, two responses to this. The first is to double down on the beliefs, creating enormous pressure to compartmentalize the mind into everyday rational/pragmatic and irrational/magical-thinking sections; this is how you can have fundamentalists who use cell phones and fly on airplanes, and even use these to kill people who threaten the stability of their inherently unstable belief systems. The second category of response is to modify the language game, substituting more abstract, less literal ideas for the traditional cultural metaphors that simply extend or replace concrete notions of parents, order, beauty and benevolent deities. This thread goes back a long way in human culture, but has expanded beyond traditional religious systems, for example with the Romantic movement and its precursors that flowered at the end of the 19th century.

Many contemporary Buddhists in the West have either accepted traditional fundamentalist interpretations of Buddhist texts (cultural beliefs & practices associated with various traditions), or been swept up in this second category of responses, filtering & adapting their interpretations of Gotama’s teachings through the lens of Romantic tradition. Just as there is a reason that deities usually come in “mother” and “father” forms (including in later Buddhist traditions), there is a reason Romatic poetry figures prominently in many of the Dharma talks you hear these days. It is a way of appealing to both the fundamentalist & Romantic responses, without overtly committing to either one.

I submit that this is an unfortunate misunderstanding of what Gotama taught. Even when cleverly disguised as “the sublime”2, this approach carries with it the same increasing pressure of cognitive dissonance as the first response of fundamentalist doubling-down. It does not avoid dukkha, psychological suffering, but rather leads toward more of it. Moreover, I believe that Gotama, through his strategy of understanding the dependently arisen nature of experience, offers a pragmatic solution, when combined with meditative development of calm, concentration and insight. Seeing anattā clearly—experiencing the world without a sense of a fixed self—we can dissolve attachment to the need for a sense that human-focused order, beauty, and benevolence is part of nature. At the same time, the wholesome types of order, beauty and benevolence, cultivated by humans toward other beings, can be seen, and how they alleviate dukkha can be directly known.

That is the subject of the following essay.

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1 Mūlapariyāya Sutta, MN 1 (Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha.)

2 Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism