Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is...
Friday January 29, 2010
OK, so I’ve written about this before, but I’m still not sure that I’ve got to the bottom of it, so at the risk of repeating myself I’m going to have another stab at it. Or, at least, at reframing, once again, the question that has been recently haunting me.
As regular visitors will know, I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what some folks call the cognitive unconscious. My cognitive unconscious is not some terrible area of inner darkness where, unbeknownst to me, lurk various childhood repressions and Oedipal shenanigans, but instead the large chunk of my mental processing, as a living creature going about its business in the world, that goes on unbeknownst to what I call “me”. Despite the claims of some that Buddhist meditation is a sure-fire way of finding out about our inner world, of mapping our internal geography, or of consciousness becoming transparent to itself, so to speak, there is increasing evidence that much of our functioning is, and forever will be, cognitively closed to us, at least from the point of view of first-person methods, whether meditative or otherwise. And this has interesting implications not just for how we see meditation, but for how we see ourselves.
Here, I think, things get rather interesting, because we tend to think that our minds are our own affairs, curious little empires for which we are the sole authoritative ambassadors. But if much of what takes place in our minds takes place in a fashion that is closed to us (and that may always be closed to us, which was the thrust of my previous post on the subject), then this does tend to erode this sense of self-certainty, and it tends to eat away at the authority that we often claim for ourselves. For there are a great many philosophical constructions of what it is to be a self, or an agent, or a perceiver, that simply do not fit with what we now know about the cognitive unconscious, with what we now know about how our minds work.
So this is what I’m still not sure I’ve got to the bottom of: what does this fact that most of my mind’s business is really not something I will ever have access to mean for the way that I conceive of myself? What does it mean for the sense I might have of being me? Because it seems to me that the more we know about how we actually function, the more this knowledge makes strange what we might otherwise take for granted in experience. And this is where the fun starts.
Something, as Bob once said, is happening here. But I don’t know what it is.
Have your say! [8]
A Viable Way
Friday January 15, 2010
The other day, I was browsing through the town library here in Leicester, and I decided to have a look through the shelves of books in Chinese, to see if I could find anything to give me a bit of reading practice. It was there that I stumbled across, How to Marry a Western Woman, a handy guide for the Chinese male; and although I’ve no plans to marry a Western woman just yet, I though that this would be worth a look given that I had fifteen minutes to spare. Because, after all, you never know… Anyway, as I was making my way through the book, I came across a passage in which several topics of conversation were suggested, just as ice breakers. And here I found the following interesting assertion: that one of the most popular questions amongst Westerners is this: “What do you want to be doing in ten years’ time?”
Now, I’m not sure whether this really is the killer chat-up line that the authors of the book might like to claim; but, anyway, this all got me thinking. Over a year back, when I was applying for university jobs, I found that almost inevitably I would be asked this question during the interview; and almost inevitably I found myself at a loss when it came to answering it. And part of the reason for this is that I have always had a strong sense of the contingency of things. The idea that the world just gets on with doing the same old thing (and that we ourselves remain the same), is possible only with a hearty dose of amnesia. The thing about the future is that it is fundamentally unforeseeable. That doesn’t mean that we cannot make plans, attend to the way things seem to be going, and so on. But it does mean that these plans need to be held rather lightly, that we should be cautious about fixing them in stone.
Recently I was reading a delightful essay by François Jullien called “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (see the link here – although sadly this is only accessible by members of subscribing institutions), which explores this question in the light of Chinese thought. Jullien’s essay ends with an exploration of the term dao (道) – often translated as “way” – as it appears in early Chinese thought. Whilst we are familiar with metaphors of paths in the West, Jullien’s claim is that in the Chinese context, this way is not a way that goes anywhere. What constitutes the way is not that it gets you to anywhere in particular, but that it is viable. Here is a short passage:
The way recommended by wisdom leads to nothing. No truth – revealed or discovered – constitutes its destination. As wisdom sees it, the essential quality of the way is that it is viable. It does not lead to any goal, but one can pass along it, one always can pass along it, so one can always move on (instead of becoming bogged down or finding one’s path blocked). It is a practicable way.
There is, I think, something in this. Seen from the point of view of philosophy, it suggests to me an approach to thinking recalls Calvino’s passage where he writes of words as a “perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety” (see his Six Memos for the Next Millennium
About ten years ago, a friend asked me what I wanted out of life. I said back then that what I wanted was to have interesting conversations. At the time, this seemed a strange thing to say, and even at the time I was not entirely sure what I meant. But, looking back, what I think I perhaps could have meant was not that I wanted to spend my days in hot debate about the Meaning of Life, but rather that my sense of a life well-lived is rooted not in an idea of some final destination, but rather in a kind of open-ended engagement with things and with others. Conversation, after all, is not really a means to an end, or only minimally so. It is not really a path anywhere, but it is a kind of attention to the changeability of things and to their unfolding. And there’s something attractive in the idea of a broadly conversational life, a life of this kind of engagement.
Glancing back over these few thoughts as they have unfolded, from cross-cultural conversational ice-breakers to Jullien’s viable way, to Calvino and back to the question of conversation, I’m not quite sure yet where it is that I’ve ended up. But then, that is not unrelated to the point I think I may be making: if, on setting out, I cannot be certain where I want to be at the end of scribbling a brief note that takes only an hour to write, then – as long as I attend to the viability of things – I’m content to leave the question of ten years’ time an open one.
Have your say! [8]
Meditating and Knowing
Saturday January 2, 2010
Firstly, I should wish all visitors to thinkBuddha.org a happy New Year, if a little belatedly. Since I got back from retreat, I’ve had my head down working on the next philosophy book, and it has been good to have some time away from teaching, and a bit of the clarity that comes from meditation, to really get some thoughts on paper.
So for a few days, we were up before five in the morning and on our cushions for the first sit of the day. And when the sky started at last to lighten, the view from the window of the meditation room when I opened my eyes was – pleasingly – that of a bare branch against the sky, strikingly similar to the image at the head of this site. Anyway, the question that I was preoccupied with on this retreat was this: what kind of knowledge comes from meditation?
I should give some background to this question. I’ve been recently reading Paul Sheldon Davies’s book Subjects of the World: Darwin’s Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in nature
Now this is interesting in terms of meditation for sometimes it is suggested that in meditation one can experience the arising and the passing away of mental events directly, without any mediation, such that the mind becomes transparent to itself. And whilst something goes on in meditation – a settling down of the everyday noise, greater attunement to the various fizzes and pops and crackles of the mind going about its business – what interests me is the question of what degree of knowledge we can really hope for from meditation. What I want to know is this: how transparent? How inerrant is this knowledge that comes from meditation? Because I see no a priori reason to assume that this knowledge gained from meditation is any less subject to distortion, confabulation and “spin” than the daily, non-meditative chunterings of our mind. Or, to put it differently, if we can be wrong about things that seem convincing in daily life, can we also be wrong about things that seem convincing in meditation?
These questions might seem to be hard to answer; but at the same time, I think that it would be perfectly possible to design some cunning experiments to test whether the kind of first-person perspective that is claimed to arise from meditation is any more accurate than the first-person perspectives of our day-to-day lives. And even if we do not do the experiments in the meditation hall itself, it is said that there are those who are so well established in meditation that they can keep this kind of awareness up when they are not on the cushions, so we could test them in the lab whilst not engaged in meditation, and see if the have any less propensity to error. This might be a lot of fun. One could run the kinds of cunning experiments that researchers in psychology like to perform to see if there is a difference between what is actually going on, and first person accounts of what the subject thinks is going on (see Sue Blackmore’s website for some details on the experiments undertaken by Wegner, for example), but do these experiments on meditative virtuosos. And we might, of course, find that there is a difference in performance. But I suspect that we might find something else rather interesting: that these meditators were, like the rest of us, saddled with human minds that are largely opaque to themselves. If this was the case, then there would be interesting consequences, not least for how seriously we could take at least some of the claims made for meditation.
It may be, however, that there would be rather less than general enthusiasm at the idea of taking part in experiments such as this. A lot of the research into meditation tends to be into the benefits of meditation. Experiments aiming to explore the limits of meditation, rather than the spiffiness of meditation (although they might tell us some interesting things) might have a rather harder time attracting recruits.
Even if seasoned meditators, like the rest of us, have minds that are opaque to themselves, I do think that meditation as a method may still have some kind of important role in helping us to understand our minds, even if it is not a matter of bringing us direct knowledge of the mind’s inner workings. The role of meditation may be more negative than positive. For there are, broadly speaking, two different kinds of rhetoric when it comes to meditation in Buddhism. Very crudely put, on the one hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a path to inerrant, inner knowledge – meditation is a way of knowing our minds, of reaching certain knowledge, and on the other hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a means of overturning the things that we think we know, as a means of unknowing or not knowing. And I have a hunch – it is no more than that – that the second approach to meditation may have a really rather powerful role to play in the understanding of the mind. For many of our everyday concepts for dealing with the mind seem to me to be concepts that are rooted in complex metaphysical stories, stories that (as the Madhyamikas might like to say) tend to dissolve under analysis. Much of what I read on philosophical approaches to consciousness seems to be founded on a mass of false first-person “certainties”, certainties that some forms of meditation can call radically into question. Could it be that meditation could be a way of freeing us up from the myths that we spin about our minds (the myth of agency, the myth of some kind of inner, substantial self, and so on). I like to think of this not as a form of phenomenology (gaining data on what the mind is like) but as a form of unphenomenology (unpicking the assumptions that we have about what the mind is like, recognising that we don’t really know what we think we know). And perhaps in the space that is thereby created, we might be able to come to a quieter, more sober, more subtle and truer perspective on what it means to be a minded, embodied creature, here in the midst of the world.
Have your say! [10]
The Storm Before the Calm
Wednesday December 23, 2009
Later today I’m off on the first retreat I’ve been on for some time, at Satipanya in Shropshire, and I’m looking forward to a few days of meditation and reflection. So yesterday I was putting things in order ready for the departure, and this included sorting out the kind of backup solution for my desktop computer that I should have got round to ages ago.
The trouble with moving large chunks of data around, however, is that things can go wrong, and when my aging desktop wheezed a little too despairingly and then decided to go into a sulk half way through the most ticklish part of the operation, with only one third of what I needed on my external hard drive, I knew that I was not going to have the quiet evening of reading for which I had hoped.
And as computer sulks go, it has to be said that it was a fairly determined one. Several hours fiddling around with the Linux command line to coax my machine back to life was not exactly how I wanted to be spending the evening before my retreat. But at the same time, the knowledge that I was going on retreat the day after certainly moderated my frustration. And this, I think, is interesting: why should I have naturally found myself moderating my response with more care than usual prior to a retreat? The answer, I think, is because experience shows that anger, frustration and impatience have a long half-life: they don’t disappear overnight, their effects continue to resonate, and that if you give in to them, and then the following day head off to the wilds of Shropshire, then they follow you – and that does not make for particularly enjoyable meditation. But I also wondered last night, as I set my online backup running (just to be doubly safe) and went to bed, whether I would have been quite so careful if I was not going on retreat the following day. When you are meditating a lot, you notice the effects of these things more; but that does not mean that the effects are greater. In the hurly-burly of daily life, sometimes it may be all to easy to fail to notice the longer resonances and after-effects of earlier states of minds.
Anyway, everything is now backed up, last night I slept well, my bags are packed and it’s a beautiful morning of sunshine and frost. I’m off. See you all in a few days!
Have your say! [3]
Zoom!
Thursday December 17, 2009
Who’d have thought it? A monk on Mount Emei (literally, Mount Lofty Eyebrows) has been photographed zooming around his temple courtyard on a skateboard, and the pictures have been causing a great deal of consternation amongst the faithful – and, no doubt, a measure of glee amongst the unfaithful.
There’s a news article over here. On the scale of things, there are many worse ways of spending one’s time; and today’s shocking innovations can quickly become tomorrow’s traditions. All they need to do over there on Mount Emei is to turn up a hitherto unknown Buddhist text beginning with the words, “Thus have I heard. On one occasion, the Blessed One was on a skateboarding tour of Kosala…”, and the future of the practice is assured.
At the very least, it seems as if the traditional division of Buddhism into Mahayana and Hinayana will have to be revised. Buddhists, it seems, like to travel by means of great vehicles, by small vehicles and, erm… by very small vehicles.
Thanks to BuddhistEd for pointing me to this. The image of Mount Emei (that walkway would be fun on a skateboard…) comes from Wikimedia Commons
Have your say! [1]
Guest Blog at Legend Press
Monday December 14, 2009
Just a quick post, this one. I’ve just had a guest blog post published over with the lovely folks at Legend Press. The post says a little bit about how I came to write my philosophy book Finding Our Sea-Legs. Here’s an extract:
Sometimes reading philosophy can be like visiting a natural history museum – fascinating, compelling, thought-provoking, perhaps, but when it comes down to it, all the animals are stuffed. I like to think that Finding Our Sea-Legs is less like a taxidermist’s collection, and more like a zoo. Or, in keeping with the nautical theme, more like a zoo afloat, a raucous philosophical Noah’s Ark, populated by talking fish, philosophical woodpeckers, rutting buffalo and palmwine-stealing gods.
For the rest of the article, go to the Legend Press Website.
The Dramatic and the Bland
Thursday December 10, 2009
Once again, I have been finding myself thinking about drama, and about our obsession with drama. For it seems to me as if Western models of thought, of history, of ethics and even of ourselves are all, in one way or another, rooted in an essentially dramatic kind of thinking. Philosophy is the struggle of ideas; ethics is the drama of good’s triumph over evil; history is a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, either an upward march towards some ultimate goal, or an interminable decline into disarray; and we depict ourselves (perhaps) as protagonists in our own dramas (albeit dramas that will always be curiously incomplete, as we will have to flee the theatre the moment before the curtain falls on the final scene). When I watch my own thought processes unfolding, Ican see this tendency to give things dramatic form coming up again and again.
I have written before about my scepticism about this propensity for drama; but it was something I was reminded of again whilst reading François Jullien’s book, In Praise of Blandness
My own reading of this is that the notion of blandness might be a way of approaching things in which we sidestep our habitual attachment to drama. What happens to the taste of things when we refuse to see the world in terms of our habitual dramas? It is interesting, I think, to see meditation in the light of this notion of blandness. Often Westerners approaching meditation do so wanting big experiences, looking for some kind of story or plot or drama or revelation. But that was not what I found. Instead, I found something rather different. A stilling of stories and plots, and, yes, a kind of blandness. Along with this came something else, a kind of unease, the fear that, beneath the sound and the fury, beneath the clamour, beneath the stories that we weave, there might be nothing at all. “Does detachment really extinguish personality,” asks Jullien, “and does blandness render us numb?” This, after all, is old the criticism of certain approaches to Buddhist practice – they are anaesthetic in nature. In response to these questions, however, Jullien quotes the poet Su Dongpo, who records a dialogue with a Buddhist monk who wonders, after the subsiding of all dramas, what is left other than cold ashes. How can there be poetry, when the fires have gone out? The poet replies as follows:
If you want to perfect your poetic expression,
Do not reject encounters with calm and emptiness:
For calm brings the various movements to completion;
And emptiness embraces all possible worlds. (129)
The fear is that in the giving up of our habitual dramas, we are diminished. And in a sense, we are; but Su Dongpo suggests that we are also augmented. The world takes on a different aspect, and in losing our sense of our own dramas, other possible worlds begin to open up. There is poetry here, but it is not the poetry that we expect. It is not a poetry of high drama in which we play the heroic central role, but something quieter, something that is capable of bringing things to completion, or to a kind of fulness. As a meditator, it is good to remember this. Sometimes, when the dramas begin to subside, it can seem as if there is nothing there at all. It takes precisely this kind of attention to glimpse, there amid what seem to be cold ashes, a different kind of warmth, and a different kind of poetry. Jullien quotes the Tang dynasty poet, Sikong Tu.
Things rich in colour run out, dry up,
While things that are bland grow gradually richer.
This thought may be counter-intuitive to those hooked on drama; but experience, at least, seems to bear it out.
Have your say! [5]
