animitta

"without a mysterious cause"

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ritual

Ritual performs a key function in cultures to overcome cognitive dissonance among beliefs (especially in the sacred) used in terror management. (For example, believing in a being that created & protects one, & will ensure eternal life.) Other functions include community affirming support for others in life events such as births, weddings, & funerals, & preserving peace through social justice (laws & court systems) & political systems (rule of law, elections, government structures). Support for various kinds of training have also been ritualized (e.g., fasting, renunciation of other kinds). Here ritual blends with spiritual practice & training.

In Western Buddhism, rituals from other cultures are frequently adopted without cultural context & therefore without complete understanding of their meaning. As a result, they are sometimes mistaken for the sacred, or consciously used as a substitute for it by those instructing others, in either intentionally or unintentionally misleading ways. Music is often involved in ritual; some have said that rock concerts are a kind of social ritual in the contemporary West.1 The annual Burning Man event comes to mind; sci-tech-mat provides its sacred elements, including promises of tech-enabled eternal life. Sporting events seem to play a similar role, & can be blended with other cultural elements, especially nationalism. In these ways, they form parts of terror management matrix of ideas.

cognitive dissonance • culture • sacred • sangha • terror management

  1. See Becker, Escape from Evil, p 14. ↩

sacred

Conscious or unconscious belief in something transcendent, as a psychological buffer against existential fear, is part of human nature. It is usually a benevolent deity, or an impersonal force acting like one. In Gotama’s teachings, nibbāna, the state of permanent, equanimous disenchantment with our anxieties & fears, plays a similar role. In this context, “anxieties & fears” includes both “good” experiences that will go away as well as “bad” experiences that could happen at any time.

Ideas about sacredness are a key facet of many cultures, all trying to manage the terror of being a human—fear of death. We share these ideas with our group, our cultural-racial identity, religion, & so on; sharing these ideas makes them feel stronger to us. Believing that our group is special, different; others may die, but our group will live on (in heaven, in group memory, through great shared accomplishments) becomes very attractive. Studies have shown that the larger our group, the greater its ability to overcome the mental discomfort of believing in something (like an afterlife) that is difficult to prove. (This psychological conflict is called cognitive dissonance.)

Gotama understands that overcoming fear of death requires a new way to understand what we are. We can train ourselves to experience the world in a way that does not seek to strengthen a fragile sense of individual self. We can continuously let go of that illusion (eliminating cognitive dissonance) by removing its cause.

dissonance • dukkha • three characteristics • terror management

sangha

Institutionalized religions always go bad. They make religions easier to co-opt by large cultural & political forces, rather than remaining tools for the growth of wisdom. They emphasize culture above understanding of practice & growth in wisdom. They encourage hierarchy beyond what is needed, inevitably creating rigid orthodoxy & elevating individuals to seductive levels of power. Like any bureaucracy, they inevitably confuse the institution itself with its original goal; they protect structures & the individual people who benefit from them, corrupting their whole reason for being. (Buddhist religious institutions are no exception to this.)

The internet means communities no longer necessarily need to serve as holders of doctrine, the “rules” for the community. By exposing small communities to a wide variety of interpretations, communications technologies can help avoid rigid orthodoxy. A small, local sangha can focus on social & emotional support. It can govern itself by consensus. Digital technologies, wisely used, hold the promise of a decentralized wisdom practice that allows for variety of expression & understanding. This is what Vincent Horn has called a “meta-sangha”.1 Local sanghas can provide enough community (as local village groups always have).

  1. Meta-Sanghas, by Vincent Horn, on Medium.↩

sati

“Mindfulness,” the translation of Pāli sāti, is a crucial skill for following Gotama’s teachings. Key suttas such as the Satipaṭṭhāna give detailed instructions for practicing to develop this skill, best described by contemporary teacher John Peacock as “remembering to pay attention.” Seeing our experience clearly as it arises is the main goal; we must develop the muscle of attention needed to see experience at the right scale. Some skill in sāti allows us to begin to see the characteristics of our experience: impermanence of mental phenomena, absence of any unchanging self, & the resulting suffering. We see how the mind constructs experience from pleasant or unpleasant sensation (vedana) through habits that color our reactivity, & leading to tangles of thoughts, feelings & worries.

Unfortunately, in popular culture, “mindfulness” has come to mean simply using breath awareness to calm down. The Pāli word for that is samatha, “calming.” Sāti is much more than that; it is a balancing factor when the mind is either too energetic or too calm for concentration.1 For Gotama, “correct mindfulness” (sammā sāti) also includes the roles of ethics & intention. It is too often presented without these & other important parts of Gotama’s ideas & practices.

free will • kamma • practice • scale • sīla

    1. See the many texts on satipaṭṭhāna, bojjhaṅgā ↩

scale

Gotama’s method is training to observe our experience clearly, so that we can see the characteristics of impermanence (constant change), not-self (seeing experience & our naïve view of self), & dukkha (suffering & stress). Without training, the mind does not observe at the right scale to see this. We are wired to assume the scale of a self, an abstraction bigger than the smallest parts of experience. We identify with the body, feelings, & thoughts as a whole; together these become a solid something in conflict with the world. Mindfully observing experience, we see something quite different: a continuous storm-surge of sensations, likings & not-likings, fragments of memory, emotions & thoughts—a chaotic, frantic process of making a story out of it all. It’s not a lack of objective reality, but our lack of ability to know clearly what is really going on. We train to see at a different scale of experience—millisecond mental events, the pieces that create the kaleidoscope of self-concept. This provides the right perspective, the right scale, for seeing dukkha (suffering & stress) arise. Seeing this, we can release our experience from enchantment with the larger scale of self, of individual life & death, of ideas & collections of interlocking ideas. Ultimately, the mind trained by Gotama’s teachings can transcend scale. We no longer think of any scale as the scale that is “right.”

practice • three characteristics • sati

sci-tech-mat

Science, technology & increasingly abundant material goods have created a common global culture in which this trinity—“sci-tech-mat” for short—serves the terror management roles formerly played by religion. Beyond merely distracting us from our fear of existing as mortal beings who know we are going to die, ideas built on science & technology have been extended to what look remarkably like traditional religions. This includes possibilities of afterlives, immortality, or at least something headed in that direction. For “eternal life” we cling to advances in medical technology. For “heaven” we put our hopes in the “cloud,” meaning storing some imaginary essence of who we are in a future digital, electronic eternity. Unfortunately none of these can extinguish the underlying existential fear, & they all suffer from the same cognitive dissonance as traditional religions, since they ask us to take something on faith based on insufficient evidence. They are just more failed efforts at terror management. Gotama’s method involves learning to let go of unwholesome feelings, fears, & runaway ideas about our inevitable death, rather than creating newer & equally unhelpful ones.

culture • religion • sacred • terror management