Sidebar/Content

Sacred—sublime—letting go

July 12, 2017

Letting go: There is no sublime except that

If you cling to anything—anything at all—you will suffer. This is central to Gotama’s teaching. The goal, nibbāna, is not a place or even a single mind-state, but a way of being that continuously lets go of conditioned reactivity:

anissito ca viharati

na ca kiñci loke upādiyati

“dwelling independently

not clinging to anything in this world”¹

Clinging falls into two categories: sense desires and views. It’s important at the outset to remind ourselves of the empirical observations Gotama made that led him to see dukkha and its causes clearly, known as ti-lakkhaṇa, “the three characteristics.” Everything changes, continuously; there are no exceptions (impermanence, anicca). If you believe that you have found an exception, you are simply not looking carefully enough, closely enough. Impermanence is the first of the ti-lakkhaṇa, the three characteristics of experience. The fact that change is continuous, universal, and unavoidable, means that there cannot be any such thing as a permanent self, a something to which this change is occuring (the doctrine of non-self, anattā); there is only an ever-flowing process. But our nature is to assume, from the cellular level on up, that there is such an entity (even when we intellectually know otherwise). Because our needs have objects—I need x—the illusory separate subject, “I,” comes into being. These two characteristics, change and non-self (annica, anattā), ordinarily lead to the continuous arising of the third characteristic, dukkha: dissatisfaction, stress, suffering. Needs continuously arise, in reaction to sensations (sense desires, either wanting or not-wanting) or to ideas (fixed views that seem to explain the world to us); the suffering, stressful “I” continuously arises in its wake.

Can we have an idea, such as “the sublime” (to use Stephen Batchelor’s favorite word for it), the sacred, within the language game that Gotama proposed for alleviating our existential dilemma? Or does that violate Gotama’s understanding that we must stay in the middle space between eternalism and nihilism, or find ourselves clinging to some idea or feeling, leading sooner or later to stress or suffering?

We seem to crave beauty, which should already be a warning sign, since craving (taṅhā, literally “thirst”) leads to clinging (upādāna), which leads to dukkha. This is the Romantics’ path, and interestingly, it was their desire to fill this need without resort to the Christian (or any other) idea of God that led them to elevate beauty, art, & nature, to the role of the sacred. Consciously or unconsciously, in our times Dharma teachers use this strategy, often with abandon. It is not an accident that the last thing you hear in a Dharma talk is often a quote from a poem or a prose soliloquy about nature; this makes sure no one in the audience who holds a deep need to feel that someone is in charge, or everything is going to be alright in the end, leaves the room feeling downhearted. Beauty, the epitome of order, has been linked to the divine, the ethical, and all good things, since at least pre-Socratic Greek thought (Pythagoras & his linking of beauty with mathematics, mainly proportions, for example). But in the senses just indicated, it is something conspicuously absent from Gotama’s teaching in the sense of something admirable or valuable. Indeed, sense pleasures & fixed views—including taking beauty as an absolute good—are among the chief categories of what to avoid becoming enchanted with.

Beauty then becomes just another way to avoid working with the inevitable. I’m sorry to have to put it this way, but from the point of view of all of us who aren’t liberated, this individual experience doesn’t end well: We will die. There is no doubt about it. You can work through your feelings about this now, or wait for your deathbed, but there is no third choice that comes without suffering & stress. Clinging to ideas about sunsets and what might be beyond them—not an option that avoids dukkha.

So we need some way of dealing with the need for “the sacred” (put your favorite God subsitute here) that is not an answer, but a continuous question of maintaining equilibrium with this need, a question that can still be on our lips as we utter our last words. No problem, right?

But those are the unavoidable criteria; otherwise, we are simply moving the chairs of suffering around on the deck of the existential Titanic. We’re still going down in the end; the band may be playing an inspiring romantic tune, but the waters will close around us. The great steel shell of our ship of ideas, poems, rationalizations and cheerful images will not help us. You’re probably ready to stop reading now, but hang in there; I hope to come to some answers.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the criteria we need to satisfy if we are to avoid Gotama’s predictions of suffering:

We cannot cling to anything, meaning a sense desire (to feel warm and safe, for example, at all times) or a view (“God will welcome me into heaven”)
We cannot veer toward either eternalism (“something, somewhere, lasts forever, and I’m a part of it”) or nihilism (“nothing matters, and that’s the end of it; end of story, just stop worrying about it”)

Other caveats come to mind:

Our “sacred” should not be used as a way of conveniently explaining away the random, or the unpleasant (the death of the innocent, for example)
Gotama teaches us that what we need is not knowing some cosmic truth, as such, but a way of working with our experience moment to moment: It is a skill we can learn

This means that our resolution of “the sacred need” can work in that context; we can resolve the feelings of needing the sacred as they arise, and the fact of impermanence assures us that all such feelings will pass away. We need to understand the causes and conditions that lead to the arising of these feelings, & avoid identifying with them (creating a sense of “I”). If we can do this, we have our existential strategy & tactics worked out, and we do not need to craft an intellectual or an emotional solution beyond that. We do not need to be able to prove our premises to someone else, as such (although we could offer our strategy as a guideline to someone else for creating their own approach). This approach is self-reinforcing over time, as the urge to identify with what arises is replaced by the habit of letting go; suffering decreases.

One way of thinking about this that might be helpful is noted by the physicist and writer Sean Carroll, who carefully distinguishes between “awe” and “wonder”:

“Awe makes you think about being so impressed with the world, that you don’t know what to do. You let it wash over you. Wonder is a connotation, a feeling that this is amazing and I want to understand it better.”²

I think this is key, since “awe” here could be associated with the Romantic response. Rather than giving in to a desire for a feeling that we can become addicted to, letting it “wash over” us whenever existential dread arises, we can “wonder” about the feeling, investigate the causes and conditions in our experience that lead to its arising, see these as impermanent, let go of them, and return ourselves to equipoise. We don’t need to try to float in warm fuzzy feelings or pat ideas that will eventually let us down. We don’t need to try to name, tie down, & solidify some permanent source of the feeling, in hopes that this will save us from fear of death. We can, to borrow Kalupahana’s phrasing in translating the Pali word saṅkhāra, try “desolidfying the dispositions.”³ Our inclination to feel in need of the sacred or the sublime can be seen for the wanting, grasping & clinging that it is. We can let go of it, rather than indulging in wanting it, which simply conditions us to run down the same dead-end street in the future.

As this way of working with experience deepens, I think it is possible to see the need for the sacred or the sublime as a response to certain causes and conditions (compassion for the world, grief, and so on), rather than a solid need in and of itself. We want an answer (a powerful benevolent diety or a promise of future bliss would be nice). But resorting to such tactics only leads to such needs arising again in the future; rather than uprooting the defilements (āsavakkhaya-ñāṇa, literally “knowledge of the ending of the defilements”) to use Gotama’s language, we nourish the toxic weeds and push the problem back toward our deathbeds again. Do you want to overcome your fear of death, or live with conscious or subconscious fear for the rest of your life? To me, this is the definition of a no-brainer. As my teacher Anālayo reminds us, “Death is a part of life.”

Is it possible to experience beauty without clinging? Do we have to swear off Romantic art of all types? Maybe not, but it takes a lot of practice to avoid reinforcing unhelpful responses to feelings of existential crisis. Those feelings are more common at all scales of our experience than we often acknowledge, in my experience. Should we therefore avoid beauty? Unfortunately beauty is unavoidable. It is a conditioned response to see it (rūpa, literally “form,” is the word in Pāli) and be attracted to it. Ironically, the deepening of practice in Gotama’s teaching only seems to heighten one’s sense of this. This is in fact the source of the idea, I think, in later Buddhist traditions (notably Zen) of the aesthetic expression of Dharma. One can see beauty in a blade of grass; welcome back to the Romantic era! As we begin to see through the grosser forms of beauty (forms that arouse sexual attraction, for example), subtler ones appear in the same space in our minds. That space you see just ahead that looks so familiar: that’s the God hole.

Anything that fits the God hole is bound to provoke attachment. Only a process, such as clearly seeing our experience as dependently arisen, can dissolve the need that creates the hole, & can remove our disposition to reattach ourselves to beauty as a cure for dukkha. As Kalupahana notes about dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda):

“…the difficulty in perceiving and understanding dependence is due not to any mystery regarding the principle itself but to people’s love of mystery. The search for mystery, the hidden something (kiñci), is looked upon as a major cause of anxiety and frustration (dukkha). Therefore the one who does not look for any mystery (akiñcana), and who perceives things ‘as they have come to be’ (yathābhūta), is said to enjoy peace of mind that elevates him intellectually as well as morally. This explains the characterization of dependent arising as peaceful (santa) and lofty (panīta).”⁴

The goal is an experience of “the signless” (animitta), that is, not grasping & clinging to any of our conditioned mental reactions, perceptions, & so on, to the world of senses & thoughts that arises. This sounds impractical, not possible in the way we normally interact with the world, but remember that “the world” for Gotama meant contacts with the six senses (with mind being the sixth). These contacts continue to happen, but they no longer creating clinging—we do not think of these unconscious reactions as optional, but with training, they can be.

This is the solution to the false feeling that is used to fill the God hole; it avoids the need for the Romantic notion, the starry sky; even with the very Romantic-sounding “orginal mind” that is “radiant” in the early texts, the ”radiance” goes away at the time of liberation: Sean Carroll’s wondering reaches its conclusion, and experience (not some metaphysics) is known, seen clearly. There is a mind that does not get caught up. Here is Ajahn Thanissaro:

“The ‘original mind’ means the original mind of the round in which the mind finds itself spinning around and about, as in the Buddha’s saying, ‘Monks, the original mind is radiant’—notice that—’but because of the admixture of defilements’ or ‘because of the defilements that come passing through, it becomes darkened.’

“The original mind here refers to the origin of suppositions, not to the origin of purity. The Buddha uses the term ‘pabhassaraṁ—pabhassaram-idaṁ cittaṁ bhikkhave’—which means radiant. It doesn’t mean pure. The way he puts it is absolutely right. There is no way you can fault it. Had he said that the original mind is pure, you could immediately take issue: ‘If the mind is pure, why is it born? Those who have purified their minds are never reborn. If the mind is already pure, why purify it?’ … Meditators will see clearly for themselves the moment the mind passes from radiance to mental release: Radiance will no longer appear. Right here is the point where meditators clearly know this…” ⁵

We feel that we need a kind of beauty transcendant enough to take the place of diety, parental benevolence, the consolation of religion, to cope with the human condition—some purity at the heart of the universe. But Gotama warns us that such a thing is not to be found. Therefore it is a question of removing our conditioned reactions, the defilements, & seeing the way things are—there is absence of defilements, but no purity or beauty. What is impossible to convey in words is that this way of seeing doesn’t have the suffering, the dukkha, that we fear. The giving up of the need is also the dissolution of the fear.

While Gotama clearly intended the idea of dependent origination to provide an alternative to the “eternal self” of the Brahmans⁶, some part of us actually wants mystery, and thus seeks more nebulous ideas like “the sublime” to satiate that want.

But the impulse toward art, or at least the language people use to talk about the value or purpose of art, often valorizes the mystery, “the darkness” or the unconscious, as restoring something lost, rather than letting it go, as Gotama advises. As the writer Kathryn Harrison puts it:

“There’s huge redemption in the fact that there is a world that is dark, or opaque, to conscious life. The realm of darkness that heals and restores, and allows memory to bind up, provides the present with a kind of solace that is almost holy. … A realm that God inhabits.”⁷

But solace in Gotama’s understanding does not come from trying to restore what has been lost, rather from seeing the way in which what was lost never existed in the sense we thought, and that what arises now is a different experience, with memory as part of its cause. Rather than trying to restore something, we can see more clearly the creation of our current experience and let it go before it strengthens into the dukkha of longing for an unrecoverable past experience, or hoping for some particular future experience.

In the Kaccānagotta Sutta, Gotama reminds us we must find the middle path between eternalism and nihilism; using our direct understanding of dependent arising enables us to see our experience created in the moment, not relying on anything previously existing and not creating anything permanent. We have to balance between knowing and not-knowing, seeing the contingency of all things, without needing to resolve our feelings into some thing but to see them as among the innumberable arisings of our experience. But what we need is “the consolation of no consolation,”⁸ since our relentless exploration of material reality through science & technology will erode all dreams of spiritual consolation faster than we can create them. We can translate the Pāli word saddha as “faith” if we like, linking it to Christian connotations of consolation, but Gotama knew such inclinations were in vain, only delaying the experience of dukkha until a time when the pressure was too great to support that faith through shear will, desparately wanting to believe the unbelieveable. Impermanence is not to be denied or wished away. Translating saddha as “trust,” as in “trust in the teachings of Gotama,” provides a sturdier answer. Because it does not rely on any unseen, believed-in-without-evidence realities, but the skill of understanding our experience in this moment (including the experience of feeling the need for solace). It does not require a continuous act of will to maintain it. Rather than continuing to hold up a heavy object, we can put the burden down and move on.

The sacred, then, would be replaced by the experience of true freedom.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 22

² Sean Carroll, “Maybe You’re Not an Atheist—Maybe You’re a Naturalist Like Sean Carroll”

³Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy

⁴Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy

⁵from course materials prepared by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Spring 2016

⁶Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy

⁷Kathryn Harrison, interview with Joe Fassler in The Atlantic, April 18, 2016

⁸Pema Chodron, from The Places That Scare You (Shambhala Publications)

Seven ways of thinking about Gotama’s teachings

July 12, 2017

closeup of queen-anne's lace bud

These seven topics I find to be most important for understanding the distinction between the core of Gotama’s teachings on one hand, & the cultural context & language in which they have been handed down to us on the other. These descriptions are not meant to be either critical of other approaches or comprehensive, but only to suggest new language to explore. From these points of departure, I find, we can make our way through all of his insights & advice.

Middle way: paṭiccasamuppāda, dependent arising

Thoughts are just one aspect of experience. There are not who you are. They are valuable tools, but nothing more than that. If you think that thoughts themselves deserve special status, make sure you look at the process that they arise from.

Careful thought can be helpful, but it is very easy to get trapped in unhelpful views, metaphysics & other complex ideas. We get drunk or high on some cosmic notion that seems to explain everything. We try to tie down the profound, but get tangled in knots of nonsense. Gotama’s response to this is difficult to capture succinctly. He said that the right way to understand is to see that everything we experience—including ideas—depends on many other things. This is not meant to be an idea to be accepted; it describes what can be directly seen by a still & otherwise prepared mind.

When we look closely at our experience, we see sights, sounds & ideas arising, then passing away. We can look as closely as we like at an idea, but like the layers of an onion, we search in vain for its center, the something that it is without reference to something else. How can we explain any word or idea without using other words or ideas?¹ Everything depends on its context for understanding. We get attached to an idea like “eternal” or convinced that “everything is meaningless” even as we ponder that this statement itself has…”meaning”! Seeing directly that our experience is an endless flux of arising & passing away, we try to label this or tie that down. We try to use it to explain experience to ourselves, to soothe our anxiety, to ward off the fear of death, to know what to do. But the best we can do is find our balance while riding this flux, not grasping after elusive ideas but training ourselves to remain calm amidst the chaos. This is Gotama’s method of avoiding the traps of philosophy, if you will.² The more we understand the other aspects of his teachings, the clearer this truth becomes.

Nature of person: what comes before who

We are obsessed with who we are. The real issus is, what are we? Once we use trained introspection to see what we are, the notion of who we are becomes irrelevant in terms of human suffering (dukkha) & freedom from suffering.

Gotama saw that to understand the human problem, we must start with the basic experience of human existence. Searching for some ”essence” only leads to suffering. We have evolved to have needs that serve only the pattern of physical survival (& thus reproduction), not our true happiness. In fact, we are literally wired to be unhappy (what’s known as Gotama’s first ennobling truth, about dukkha, suffering & stress.) We must look calmly & closely at our needs for sense pleasures & collections of charming ideas, & see that these needs are not what we are. The dull, throbbing ache of “Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?” can be relieved by clearly seeing what we are & what we are not. True happiness & a sense of what to do flow naturally from this clear seeing, which requires practiced concentration, calm, & insight.

Person of Buddha: Gotama

“The Buddha” was not a god. That’s a good thing. He was a uniquely wise being. That’s more useful than being a god, actually.

It is a natural human tendency to deify someone whose insights & accomplishments put them so far beyond our ordinary experience as human beings. But Gotama specifically denied he was a god; he saw the idea of gods-as-a-source-of-solace as just something else that would ultimately disappoint us & cause suffering. It is inspiring & instructive to know that he was extraordinary, but human—extra-ordinarily human, you might say. That he was human means that ordinary humans can follow his teachings with success, transcending our given, suffering human experience.

Kamma: history of habits

Without training, we become victims of our past, repeating painful habits. We can train ourselves to break free of this. Knowing that we can do this is the ultimate human consolation.

Kamma, or karma, is frequently misunderstood as a primitive, fatalistic belief or as a vague wishful substitute for a just & benevolent force beyond human understanding. But it can be explained most usefully as a vast matrix of habits that flows throughout the history of sentient beings. It is the effect of human actions from the past on our situation right now, in the very moment you are reading this. It does not include everything that affects what happens; some things happen by chance, unrelated to what we do. To understand kamma as Gotama described it, we must invert the historical telescope: We look through the big lens of understanding, making it into a microscope to examine our experience in the moment, with the help of Gotama’s brilliant tools of analysis. Seeing how our suffering arises each moment because of our bad habits of understanding what we are, we suddenly understand how our individual sufferings right now become compounded into the “mass of suffering” that afflicts humans & all the sentient beings we live with. We see a vast river of tears & sorrow flowing through time, & also how to cross that flood to freedom.

Sīla: training for true happiness

It may seem discouraging that freedom requires personal discipline & effort. But consider: This means freedom is available to all of us. It does not require miracles, only sincere effort.

Sīla is sometimes thought of as the same as ethics or morality in wisdom traditions. While it is indeed a set of recommendations on how to behave, there’s an important distinction. Gotama’s sīla is not as a set of “thou shalts” that magically guarantee salvation in some future heaven. This sīla shows how behaviors that conflict with our natural human benevolence distract us from clearly seeing how psychological suffering & stress arise in our experience. It shows how it interferes with deeper training that can allow us to see our experience in the moment quickly & clearly enough to avoid suffering & stress for ourselves & others. (This is why sīla is a key part of preliminary training, allowing for deeper training later.) It is the process of learning through training how our behavior causes us suffering when it conflicts with our basic human benevolence. It is the equivalent of an athlete getting her body in shape for more sophisticated training in her chosen sport. Our sport is life. If we are not strong & flexible, trained for the endurance we need to maintain keen attention to everything in our experience, all the time, we cannot win against the opponent: our unconscious desires & delusions. We cannot afford to fall into the ordinary traps of thoughtlessly harming of others, selfishly taking, being mindlessly driven by sexual urges to harm others, pointlessly lying, & distracting ourselves with intoxicants that make us foolish. If we step onto the playing field with these disadvantages, we will never win true happiness.

Pragmatism: it has to work here & now

Everything about Gotama’s teachings is practical. It works just like other processes you know about that are practical. You learn to be a carpenter. You learn to play a musical instrument. You practice & become skilled at a sport, a skill of any kind. There is no mystical secret. “Come & see.” Start whenever you like. Whenever you can.

Gotama said “What I have always taught about is just stress & suffering & how to end them.”³ All his teachings support that goal. There is nothing extra in his teachings beyond that. This phrase is like a touchstone, a key to all his other teachings. If you cannot understand a particular teaching in terms of how it relates to ending dukkha, then it is time to ponder it further. If a teaching seems to lead to breathless cosmic statements, magical beliefs, or romantic notions, consider that you have missed the point. This pragmatic approach is what makes Gotama’s teachings capable of being rearticulated for use in our current day & age. It is vital to understand the pragmatic meaning of each of his teachings, to separate them from culture & superstition. This is what makes them useable here & now without cognitive dissonance in our era of advanced natural science & pervasive technology.

“Sacred”: growing up; getting over it

The nature of things, as they really are, is not friendly. Death is not friendly. Denying this is a sure route to suffering. All the traditional ways of ignoring this reality end at the same spot. We must turn & face the monster of mortality. Change is our enemy as long as we deny it; but we can seek to understand it instead.

We are by nature frightened beings. This helps us to survive, of course. We would prefer to live forever, but we know both consciously & in a deep subconscious layer of instinct that this body will die. The simmering terror of this drives our cultures, our personal illusions about who & what we are, & all of the horrific human actions that we lump together as “evil.” Our minds desparately want a theory to unify all the thoughts & feelings we have stitched together in our vain attempt to cool down the terror. We invent something we call “sacred” to fill this need, a constellation imagined as we search the night sky for benevolence & meaning in the universe. But these inventions only succeed in distracting us & avoiding the necessary confrontation with the terror. It is like the monster that forever chases us in our nightmares. Only by turning & confronting it can we truly escape. Gotama realizes this, & his teachings are built on training ourselves to turn against the nightmare monster & vanquish it.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹This truism of postmodern thought is actually quite old. More importantly, Gotama offers techniques for seeing it directly in experience, rather than accepting it as a discursive thought.

²Here Gotama anticipates Wittgenstein’s understanding of language, but again, as part of a pragmatic method rather than a purely philosophical statement.

³This is my translation of Alagaddūpama Sutta MN 22:

Pubbe cāhaṃ, bhikkhave, etarahi ca dukkhañceva paññāpemi, dukkhassa ca nirodhaṃ

What is sacred?

July 12, 2017

Did you kiss the dog you love

When you were a little child?

Will you lay in the arms of

Some sweet reverie a while?

—Jim White, “A Town Called Amen”

When we “hold this sacred,” what do we mean?

We put it above all else. We create a kind of purity that should not be spoiled; it is a moral issue, since it is behavior—ours or others’—that might spoil it. Underneath this, though, is the lurking knowledge of our mortality. We hold something sacred because we want to use it as a talisman, a charm, a protection against the ultimate impermanence, our own death. Because of this, the sacred becomes both vital & fragile, in danger, in need of defense. We will likely visit some form of violence (social &/or physical) on those who violate it. If it is not held pure, then its magical efficacy is in doubt. It can no longer protect us. This is why maintaining it becomes literally a matter of life and death, something people are ready to die for or kill for.

While this interlocking set of ideas is relatively easy to spot in established wisdom traditions, some version of it pops up in even the most contemporary habits of thought. When Ray Kurzweil assures us that we will be able to upload our minds to a computer, and thus achieve immortality, it takes the form of the idea that digital technologies will save us. It is the conviction (demonstrably false¹) that the mind is an information processor that is being held sacred, as part of the idea that science itself is sacred; its self-correcting design is the token of its deity; its ability to produce “truth” (about the material world) is held inviolable; its superiority to any other way of approaching the human existential situation is held sacred and defended at any cost.

In contemporary Buddhism in the West, the notion that there is something “sacred” survives in various forms. As more and more scientific evidence emerges that the teachings of Gotama have measurable physical and psychological benefits, the need to defend something beyond (or beneath or above) those mundane truths seems to become stronger. I once heard one of the leading lights of the Western mindfulness movement urge a group of people who support one of its institutions to make sure to preserve “the sacred, whatever that may mean.”² The lack of specificity in that statement, and in many other discussions I have witnessed or become aware of, seems to highlight that this is a felt need rather than a well-defined idea of the sacred. When interrogated, this need shapes itself into something like Romanticism, “interconnectedness,”³ Vedanta teachings of nondualism, nature worship, art, and so on, depending on whom you ask. Many Buddhists feel that they need something sacred; but Gotama would call this craving & clinging, a kind of bhava-upādāna, clinging to becoming or being, or to a view about the eternal.

But ultimately most traditional wisdom systems and the current empirical/scientific hegemony work in the same ontological way: First, establish what exists, and by inference what does not exist. This becomes “Truth.” Based on this Truth, one elaborates systems of deciding what is the best course of action in any given situation. The initial rationalizations for certain feelings & needs become codified into a set of spiritual laws & ethical norms. Because this is linked back to some version of “the sacred,” we feel we have achieved the greatest possible solidity for the foundation of the fortress that defends against thoughts of our mortality.

For reasons that I will elaborate, I do not think this is how Gotama thought about it. His empirical, phenomenological pragmatism takes a completely different approach to the human existential problem, one that, properly understood, avoids the cognitive dissonance between a materialistic, scientific culture and the human nature that fears death and clings to the sacred.

The fortresses of most wisdom traditions, as practised, are in fact built on the shifting sands of cognitive dissonance. Our existence is a flux, and somewhere deep inside, we know this. No intellectual construct, no pile of information, facts, “knowledge,” or sacred rituals can change that. Subtly, constantly, quietly but insistently, we hear the voice of impermanence speaking to us: “This body will die,” it says, like the dark, minor-key tone of the breeze in the trees as a storm approaches. Like the deep gray transparency of an overcast afternoon, it is a question and an answer all in one. The question repeats, and the answer is always the same. We make our raft from scraps of various sacred rituals, well-worn ideas, the memories of our parents’ warm embrace, the childlike wonder like a worn piece of old blanket kept at the bottom of a pocket. But all around us, as far as the eye can see, out to the end of the circle of imagination that moves with us wherever we go, is the endless empty sea. Deep in our hearts, no matter what beliefs we profess, we know the truth.

That is our existential truth; that is why we create the sacred.

The purpose of these essays is to offer another way of relating to these thoughts and feelings, one that does not build a fortress on top of cognitive dissonance, on needing something to exist eternally or be sacred in the way I have described. Preserving, reconstituting or tweaking some existing understanding and articulation of “sacred” won’t work in our empirical, materialistic age. The power of cognitive dissonance is too strong, and resisting that pull while clinging to old beliefs tends to cause very bad behavior by human beings, even those who may have all the appearances of being deeply spiritual and advanced in their understanding.⁴

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
¹ See for example The Empty Brain

²Jon Kabat-Zinn at BCBS donor event July 9, 2016

³This term is frequently conflated with paṭiccasamuppāda, dependent arising, which is a completely different idea, one of Gotama’s diagnostic tools for seeing the origins of suffering, whereas “interconnectedness” is a Romantic idea in which pity for suffering beings is mistaken for karunā, compassion.

⁴For example, Buddhists in Burma (e.g., Sayadaw U Pandita & others speaking disparagingly about Muslims), Thailand & Sri Lanka have spoken & acted in uninspiring ways that seem in conflict with their nominal spiritual stature.

Why should we do the right thing?

July 12, 2017

closeup of purple flowers

We all implicitly accept some idea of right & wrong. Siddattha Gotama’s teachings harmonize with emerging understandings of evolution that explain why we feel these ideas are correct in ways that are hard to articulate.

Here is a transcendent irony: Morality seems to have arisen from the most basic kind of “self-ish-ness.” (Talking about Gotama’s teaching involves subtle uses of the loaded English word “self,” so I have broken it down here in an attempt to unload it.) As Robert Wright and others have written about the evolutionary origins of morality note, our sense of how to treat other humans comes from the development of unconscious patterns of feeling and thinking about our relatives, those who carry our DNA. We don’t decide to favor our relatives; we have been conditioned to favor them by evolution, as certain ways of thinking & feeling toward relatives caused our DNA to be passed along. As we grew from family groups to tribes to cities to nation states, our moral programming (conditioning, if you prefer) evolved as well. So have the cultural expressions—moral codes, ethnic truths, dietary laws, irrational beliefs—that have arisen on top of it. While this matrix of ideas may be hard to swallow without knowing more, the arguments are very persuasive. (Read Wright’s The Moral Animal; it is a mind-expanding book.)

The ironies here are many-faceted. From the individual and immediate family, unconscious (in the sense of not knowing their true origins) moral feelings spread to the tribal group, since those who fit smoothly into such group life were more likely to survive in a hostile primitive landscape. From there they expanded through cultural habits to include larger collections of people, outside the family group, such as city-sized cultural groups, nation states, & so on. With each expansion, there is some lessening of the strength of feelings, & other changes perhaps; we still feel differently about our family than those who aren’t family. But to some extent, this matrix of feeling-thought extends to include all human beings, although the hierarchy that starts with family still remains. Imagine you stumble into a situation where you and a fellow human—a stranger—are both threatened by a threatening wild animal. Unless you know the other person to be a dire enemy, you probably have some instinctual feeling to work together so that you both survive—as opposed to siding with the animal.

Many people assume—because our cultures encourage us to assume—that morality comes from religion, or has been given to us by some deity, or is simply “the way we do it” in our culture. It comes to be seen as something that exists as an ideal floating in space, a unquestionable given. But it seems certain that this is simply the way cultures create a language game that explains the feelings and thoughts we already have. Cultures compete to survive by strenghtening these mental habits, & the cycle of survival goes on.

How ironic! Our tenderest feelings—even our occasional feelings of compassion & mercy for people we may find detestable in many ways—have their origins in a kind of self-preservation, from our genes’ point of view.

As the philosopher David Hume understood, that morality first involves feelings—“passions,” to use his word—not thoughts, per se. Making rules & systems out of our moral feelings is a rational habit that comes after the origins of morality. So the common understanding that some god creates rules, which inspire humans to act in certain ways, with the promise of eternal reward, is simply a language game that seeks to explain why we feel & act the way we do.

But the evolutionary origin also explains why we don’t always act according to moral rules. Morality is a deep, mostly unconscious set of motivations, & our emotions, & the more basic habits of mind beneath them—greed, hatred, not understanding what we really are—can overwhelm our moral sentiments in the moment. Then, as the unconscious moral inclinations flood back into consciousness, we feel guilty. In the evolutionary sense, we feel as if we have harmed a family member, even if we have harmed someone we don’t know, even an enemy. These feelings are so strong that when cultures want people to fight in armies, they must systematically overcome the natural feelings through brute psychological training &/or propaganda that dehumanizes the enemy.

I note all of this as a way of clearing the table, if you will, of all the usual thought patterns about why we might want to “do the right thing.” It is one more irony that even understanding all of what I have presented here, we might want to act in certain ways that seem purely for the benefit of others, when what we actually seek is benefit for ourselves (our DNA). This, too, is encoded in many cultures & wisdom traditions—“Do unto others…”. But I believe Gotama’s understanding, his language game, if you will, captures it in a way that harmonizes most closely with the evolutionary origins & subconscious realities of how morality affects our experience in the moment, & our capacity for true happiness.

In a final irony, Gotama’s way of understanding benefits everyone in the larger social matrix as well, in ways that are uniquely fitted to our new, unavoidably global, cultural matrix. To avoid destroying ourselves, we need to find ways to strengthen that global matrix, rather than retreating to older, smaller cultural groups & their inflexible moral codes. To conquer the terror of our death-fears, whose unconscious energy tightens those old codes until they are dangerously rigid, we need a new language game that can embrace the entire history of human morality, from its evolutionary origins to its current cultural forms. Gotama provides us with the tools we need to do this.

Most hopefully, he does this by helping us to see for ourselves that behaving unselfishly is the best way to create true happiness for our-selves. He uses the energy of our unconscious moral passions to help us break out of the hedonic cycle & move toward deeper happiness.

How does it work?

The key to doing this involves approaching the issue from the right point of view, which means the right scale of experience. This allows us to see directly in our experience how moral feelings arise. We can directly experience precisely how our moral passions are feelings, & not the conscious acting through of the moral code of a particular culture. Such externally given moral codes would be one aspect of what Gotama would call “views,” diṭṭhi: discursive thoughts that say “this is true; everything else is false.” These views are problematic even if they were created with the best of intentions. Cultures change. The specific context of a situation will have factors that could not be anticipated. Languages have limits & require reinterpretation in new circumstances. Untamed, our moral passions can be like a live grenade.

But above all, doing all the ratiocination of moral codes & cultural habits means that we have pulled the mind away from the details of immediate experience into the airy realm of discursive thought, removed from the direct experience of our moral instincts. We are now operating at the relatively massive scale of complex ideas, with layers of abstraction between the mind & present-moment awareness. At this remove, for example, we cannot clearly see how a matrix of bodily sensations, reactions to random pleasant or unpleasant thoughts, or fixed perceptions of people or past events, has captured the mind & already pushed it toward anger, revenge, & so on. Our equilibrium quickly loses out as soon as the scale of our experience moves from the exact semi-conscious conditioning that is actually arising now, into dramas half-remembered from the past or imagined for the future.

This is not a recommendation to ignore obvious needs for protecting one’s physical well-being from threats or otherwise ignoring common sense. It is recognizing that we are best equipped to do this if we remain grounded & balanced so that we can take action that will be compassionate toward the current & future happiness of everyone involved, including us. While that sounds complex, it is actually achievable through sharp focus on the precise scale of moment-to-moment awareness. This is equivalent to the flow achieved by athletes & musicians in performance, for example. The key is not to become distracted by mental activity & anything in the environment that is not critical to correct action. As martial artist Bruce Lee would say, “be like water.” It does not mean to be without passion; it means not to be robotically, unconsciously controlled by it.

The fact that even in Gotama’s teaching we find higher-level descriptions of moral guidelines (“undertake the training not to harm living beings”) should be understood from a different perspective. This is training: to be able to instinctively act correctly in the moment, you must move your body & mind in imitation of ideal behaviour, so that you begin to know what it feels like in the body & mind. (As Mr. Miyagi would say, “Wax on, wax off.”) This preliminary training allows you, along with training the attention, to correctly understand (sampajaññā, “clearly seeing”) experience in the moment. By gaining the ability to react precisely to rapid mental activity, we can operate at the time-scale of real experience in everyday life. To “do the right thing,” we must be able to act at the speed of mental experience it the instant moral feeling emerges from the evolutionary subconscious. There is no time for discursive thought; the second baseman does not have time to think about the ground ball coming at him at 100 miles per hour; the guitar player must move the fingers of both her hands with exquisite precision over the run of sixteenth notes; if she were to stop to think, all would be lost. How can they do this? Practice.

Some might worry that this leads to “mere” moral relativism. But this misses the point. The results in terms of behaviour don’t look obviously different from moral codes in other wisdom traditions. The training precepts recommended by Gotama could be summarized as “dont’ kill, don’t steal, don’t rape, don’t lie, don’t get drunk because you’ll probably do something you’ll regret.” The difference is how this works in the larger context of the teachings. Without understanding the true nature of what we are, for example, we are liable to get stuck in mental calculations, ethical arithmetic, & so on. We will remain trapped in Wittgenstein’s “fly bottle” of philosophical abstraction. We will also lose touch with the moral feelings in the moment which wordlessly inform us of what tends toward our true happiness in the future, “for a long time to come,” as Gotama puts it. This is the viseral truth beneath the often cynically dismissed admonition, “do the right thing.” It is simple to describe, if hard to do: But hard in the same way any as any human skill: watching the second-baseman’s seemingly effortless skill at snaring the ground ball, or the breathless admiration we feel when hearing the magical sounds as the musician’s fingers blur across the fretboard. Both seem nearly impossible to the untrained; the actions seem transcendent. But it is just the logical result of practice.

These ways of skillfully reacting to our experience of the world in the moment have many rewards. There is less psychological suffering here & now. There is more flexibility in resolving social issues, both in small groups & in larger political contexts. Ethical conduct becomes, ironically, rewarding to us as individuals for its own sake, as well as benefitting others, rather than feeling like the lead weight of “should” that we carry in hope of some divine future reward. Rigid cultural habits & unreliable mythologies are seen as artifacts from history.

Gotama is the “unexcelled trainer of those fit to be trained.” If you want to develop the skill of deep happiness, if you want to play the music of freedom from stress & suffering, he has the method. Is it easy? No. But why would you expect something this valuable would be easy? You want to escape from the terror of death. You want to live each moment fully, to leave regret behind, to find true peace. If someone told you that was easy, why would you believe them? But difficult & impossible are not the same thing, either. There are rewards all along the way. The key to getting past the imposing size of the problem is once again scale, because there is nothing in Gotama’s teaching that we do not do in this very moment. It is always just this unfolding, here & now. Wherever we are, the next step is always right in front of us.

Sample Post With Image Aligned Left

November 1, 2016

Heres a sample caption, with a sample image aligned left. — Here's a sample caption with an image aligned left.

This is an example of a WordPress post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like.

This is an example of a WordPress post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind. This is an example of a WordPress post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like.

Sample Post With Image Aligned Right

November 1, 2016

Here's a sample caption with a sample image aligned right. — Here's a sample caption with an image aligned right.

This is an example of a WordPress post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like.