Fluidity and Thought
Tuesday January 6, 2009
The house I am living in at the moment has very curiously designed door handles. I do not know precisely what it is about these handles, but hardly a day goes past when I don’t find myself snagging shirts and jumpers and other assorted bits of clothing on these obstacles. In part, I am sure, it is a matter of the inelegance of my gait. If I moved with more skill, if I held myself with more poise, if I slipped through the house with the grace of Ruldoph Nureyev, then perhaps I could diminish the regularity of this perpetual snagging. Or, perhaps, were I more high-minded, I could practice a greater mindfulness when it comes to door handles; but of all the things in the world of which one can, at any one moment, be mindful, door handles come rather low on my list of favoured objects. So, as it is, I’m just getting used to the snags and holes, and the occasional spillages of coffee as my trajectory through the house is momentarily inhibited by protruding bits of metal. It wouldn’t be so bad if the door handles looked nice…
As with the body, so with the mind. I have been noticing recently how, as I go about my daily business, the mind finds itself getting snagged by passing thoughts, getting itself entangled, so that the fluidity of thought is as impeded as is the fluidity of physical movement by those wretched door handles. I have been noticing how my thoughts tend to petrify into fixed opinions and views, and when they do, not only do they lose their fluidity, but it also they seem to lose their close relationship with the world.
Recently I wrote in passing about the idea of two truths as one of those slippery ideas that, cropping up again and again throughout the Buddhist traditions, finds itself doing different kinds of work in different kinds of places. Here I want to look at one way in which this idea has been put to use, as this throws a little light, I think, upon this process whereby the mind finds itself getting snagged and snarled-up. This comes from the philosophical school designated by the term Sautrāntika, and – as is usual for this blog – I’m much more interested in mounting smash-and-grab raids to see what is useful to think with than in learned exegesis (there are plenty of learned exegetes out there, if you know where to look…) Anyway, in the Sautrāntika perspective, there is a distinction made between “conceptual” truths that are the objects of thoughts, and “nonconceptual” truths, that are the objects of direct perception. Conceptual truths are considered “permanent”, and nonconceptual truths are considered “impermanent”.
Now, before we got on to why this might matter, it is worth asking what on earth this might mean. Permanence, in this sense, is not to be equated with longevity and impermanence with brevity of existence. Instead, within this view something is said to be impermanent when it changes moment by moment – impermanence, that is to say, is the fluidity, the flux that Heraclitus spoke of when he supposedly said that one cannot step into the same river twice.1 Meanwhile permanence is a kind of stability by virtue of which things do not change moment by moment, but remain fixed.
A distinction is being made here between the thoughts we have about the world – which tend towards fixity or (if they must have some kind of dynamism) which tend to be continually recreated in their own image, and the flux of direct experience which, as we all know, is changing moment by moment, and is never stable. The frameworks of thought are the conventially true things, the quicksilver changes of experience are the ultimately true things.
What this does, I think, is rather interesting. Firstly, when in the Western traditions we think of what is ultimately true, we often think of something big and important and stable and unchanging, something that lurks behind or beyond the world, whether a God, or what Kant thought of as the conditions of the possibility of what-have-you, or laws, or principles. This Sautrāntika view not only turns this upside down (the ultimate truths are the very things that are impermanent!), but is also rather more homely and rather less grand. One way of reading it is as a call to empiricism and away from dreamy mysticism or from the wilder shores of speculation. It reminds us to pay attention to the fluidity, to recognise that when thoughts find themselves snagged it is because the thoughts themselves are not keeping up with the world, because they have become too fixed and rigid, because, useful as they are, they are in need of revision. To pay attention to ultimate truth is not to seek the hidden face of things, not to lay bare a secret that lurks behind the world, but to return to a closer attention to experience, to asking what is actually going on here?
And the point of making the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth in this way, I think, is this: we are perpetual storytellers, and the stories that we tell assist us through the world. But, as Jerome Bruner says somewhere, there is no greater tyrrany than that which arises when we become trapped within (or snagged upon) a single tale. Or, as Michel Serres writes, as judicious as an idea appears to be, it becomes monstrous when it rules alone.
Footnote:
1 Cratylus, incidentally, trumped Heraclitus by saying that you could not step into the same river once, in part, no doubt, because a step takes time, and if the river truly is in flux, then as one steps, one is not stepping into the same river at the beginning or at the end of one’s step. Nāgārjuna, just to push the boat out into this particular river a bit further, might trump Cratylus’s card by contending that there is nobody to step, whether into a river or anywhere else, nor is there anything to step into, nor, for that matter, is there any stepping to be done: Neither an entity nor a nonentity / Moves in any of the three ways / So motion, mover / and route are nonexistent. (Gar field, 1996
Image: Wikimedia Commons
New Year Greetings
Thursday January 1, 2009
Happy New Year to all thinkBuddha readers from Paris, where I’m celebrating with friends. This year, amongst other things, thinkBuddha turned three, I made the move from working as a wandering philosophy and writing teacher to a taking on a permanent university post, and I have found myself increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between understandings of the world drawn from the sciences and the question of human practice (for example here, here and here).
As usual, I have no idea where my changing preoccupations will take me, but I’m looking forward to seeing what comes to light in 2009. For the time being, however, I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has visited, read and contributed over the past twelve months. It has been a pleasure.
Have your say! [4]
Mystery
Saturday December 20, 2008
It is probably fairly clear by now, even if you have only glanced in passing at this blog, that I am not particularly mystically inclined. As Stephen Batchelor writes, “The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendental truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks.” Whilst I’m not sure that these days I would be quite as bold as Batchelor is about what the Buddha was or wasn’t like – the distances in time are too great, the records upon which we rely are too compromised – I’m in agreement with the spirit of this quote. Wisdom, as I have suggested before, is simply not the kind of thing that can be esoteric. There may be esoteric knowledge (for example, there are people who know a whole load about the social lives of naked mole rats, which by my standards, and by the standards of most people I know, seems pretty esoteric), but there is no esoteric wisdom.
But what do I mean by “wisdom”? The best definition of wisdom that I can find is that by Walter Benjamin, who talks in his essay The Storyteller about wisdom as “counsel woven into the fabric of real life”. Such counsel is, Benjamin writes, “less an answer
to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.” I love the story that Benjamin tells about the unfolding of story (or, what I would prefer, the multiple stories) of our lives, about how wisdom is the ability to put proposals about how these stories might continue. Such wisdom is both pays attention to that which is unfolding, and then has the ability to ask “what if…?”
The question “what if…?” is one that can lead us in unexpected directions, because it is a question that is rooted in the acknowledgment that we do not have complete knowledge of things, rooted, in a sense, in mystery. But there are mysteries and mysteries. One of the things that often strikes me about many of those things that are claimed to be mysteries – from the “mystery of Christmas” to many of the so-called mysteries of the East such as people who claim to go without food for months (yes, I’m looking at you, Ram Bomjon), levitating monks and yogis, rebirth and all the other implausible things that I find myself writing about from time to time here at thinkBuddha – is how utterly unmysterious they seem to be to those who hold to them. When your local UFO society says that they have seen mysterious lights in the sky, you know that they don’t really believe them to be mysterious at all, but that they believe them to be lights from spacecraft piloted by beings of higher intelligence from a distant galaxy, and that they very likely believe these same aliens to be involved in a protracted and somewhat unseemly experiments on human abductees… which is all rather specific. Or when Reverend Brimstone, your neighbourhood evangelical preacher recovers from an illness and proclaims it a mystery, you know once again there are quite specific beliefs about what has happened – in this case, that the good Reverend has been singled out by God, on account of the Good Work that he is doing, and cured by means of divine agency, so that he can get on with the job.
One of the things that I dislike about such so-called mysteries is that those who talk about them are, in the end, too damned certain about what precisely is happening. So certain, in fact, that they will refuse to consider all other explanations, whatever the evidence. And so, in the end, such mysteries seem curiously unmysterious, even on their own terms. I prefer other kinds of mysteries: the mysteries of how naked mole rats go about organising their social lives; the mysteries of how the mind goes about its business; the mysteries of precisely what kinds of strange creatures swim in the dark depths of the seas; the mysteries of the bubbling, bafflingly paradoxical soup of the subatomic world. I am not a scientist, but I love the methods by means of which the sciences investigate the world. I love the tentativeness, the genuine perplexity, the wonder. I love the fact that, to find out all those astonishing, genuinely astonishing, facts about naked mole rats, termites, blue whales and periodical cicadas, facts about distant galaxies and exoplanets and nebulae, countless individuals have spent their days lying on their bellies on the plains, bobbing on small boats on the surface of the seas, sitting waiting in forests and jungles, peering through telescopes and making subtle calculations with the kind of patience that would put most self-proclaimed yogis to shame. For here there are genuine mysteries, mysteries that are not rooted on a prior claim to knowledge, but are rooted in a prior commitment to investigation. In this way, at their best the sciences offer us proposals about the stories that are unfolding, and how these stories might be interpreted and continued, how they might be joined with other stories into fragile webs of knowledge. There is, I think, the possibility of wisdom here, as we follow the threads of mysteries that are vast and wide-ranging enough for a whole lifetime: paying attention, advancing proposals about the unfolding of the stories in progress, coming to know the world ever more closely and, in this knowledge, coming to appreciate the wonder of things, just as they are.
Image: Vlastní Dílo – Creative Commons ShareAlike
Have your say! [4]
The Fine Grain
Thursday December 18, 2008
It’s the fine grain of things that matters; and it is this that is the easiest to overlook. Philosophical ethics often busies itself with abstractions, with thought experiments involving runaway trains and cars stuck on the tracks and organ harvesting and unspeakably evil terrorists chuckling malignly over ticking bombs ; and it may be – who knows? – that such thought experiments have some value. But it is easy, when caught up in such abstractions and fictions, to forget that ethics requires, above all else, the close practice of attention to the fleeting, the momentary. The fine grain. As Aristotle writes, whilst theoretical wisdom is concerned with moving that which is general, when it comes to practical wisdom, to the question of how we are to act in the world, how we are to navigate, that which is particular matters.
Yet having said this, we cannot just stay with the fine grain. The mind loves – and, no doubt, needs – shortcuts. The world is simply too complex, there is too much information (and there is more of it streaming in all of the time) for us to become utterly absorbed in the fine grain. I remember on a meditation retreat years back just staring at a pear in a fruit bowl, suddenly aware of the astonishing vibrancy of the green, mottled fruit, the moment-by-moment revelation of its peariness, the particularity of the pear, the endless, multiple flows of experience. Such a relationship with the world, however, is all very well when you haven’t got work to be getting on with, but given that we do have work to be getting on with, it is no way to live the entirety of one’s life… Different mental states serve different ends. If we waited until all the data was in before we decided to act, then we would wait forever, and we still would not have acted.
So we need to judge. We need to make the best of it, and to act without having all the data in. Our judgements, even though they are not absolute and have no certain grounding, help us navigate. But judgement is a curious business, and it is easy for us to fall under the spell of our judgements, believing them to have more substance than they actually do. There’s a wonderful passage in the collection of essays by Michel Foucault published under the title of Ethics
It seems that [the 19th century painter] Courbet had a friend who used to wake up in the night yelling: “I want to judge, I want to judge.” It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgement is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps it’s one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible. [pg. 323]
The problem is not with judgement, but with the forgetting that our judgements are provisional. It is then that judgements become dogmas, in which we forget that they are contingent and fragile, that they are not final destinations, but merely staging-posts. To recognise that our judgements are provisional in this fashion, of course, is not a kind of relativism. It is not the case that we have to choose between absolute certainty, and an anything-goes relativistic free-for-all. Between these two abstract positions there is entirety of the vast territory in which we live and act. There are, that is to say, better and worse judgements; and the worst judgements, it seems to me, are often precisely those that are underpinned by the conviction of absolute certainty. Such judgements are bad not just ethically (although they may be), but also epistemologically. They are bad because once they are made, they seduce us into the conviction that we need no more information from the world, that we can close down our senses to the world.
So we return to the fine grain, testing our judgements against, asking if they are really true, if the story that we are telling is really supported by the evidence. To renounce such stories altogether is to renounce any useful thought or action; but to forget their provisional nature is to forget the world and the evidence of the world in favour of a fiction of the world.
Image: wikimedia commons
Have your say! [3]
Slippery truths
Wednesday December 10, 2008
When dealing with a set of traditions as extensive and long-lived as those within Buddhism, the same terms crop up again and again, doing different jobs at different times and in different places. This terminological slipperiness is something that can sow a great deal of confusion, because a term transplanted from one context can mean something entirely different in another context. But at the same time, slipperiness is, I like to think, sometimes something of a virtue, and there is nothing more dismal than dour philosophical attempts to pin down language, once and for all, to absolutely fixed, determinate meanings. Slipperiness, although it may vex certain kinds of philosopher, also ensures a kind of liveliness of thought that is, at best, decidedly bracing.
Of all the slippery concepts in the traditions of Buddhism, perhaps one of the slipperiest of all is that of the “two truths” – conventional truth and ultimate truth. This is a distinction that is sometimes made in a rather dull and clod-hopping fashion, but that has also at times led to some interesting philosophical perspectives. In its broadest form, it might be possible to suggest, this is a distinction that hinges upon the hunch that there is a difference between those things that are true, and things that are truly true; or, put another way, the hunch that there are many things that we say and think and believe about the world that, whilst not absolutely or ultimately true, are nevertheless not absolutely false, and have a degree of conventional truth.
A few days ago I heard that (after the kind of extensive faffing around that is common in academic publishing and that makes trade publishing look curiously sharp-witted and on the ball) my article on Mark Siderits’s excellent book Empty Persons
Siderits’s book is a book in two parts. In the first part, he looks at how the Abhidhammists – the early Buddhist philosophers – break down persons into more fundamental dhammas, or constituents of reality, claiming that whilst persons are only conventionally or apparently true things, dhammas are ultimately true things. Having mounted a defence of this kind of reductionist approach, Siderits goes on to use the Madhyamaka philosophers to call into question the idea that there are any ultimately true things at all, a position that he refers to (perhaps rather unfortunately) as “global anti-realism”. This position is not one that does away with truth altogether, leaving us in a relativistic morass, but rather one that does away with the idea that there is such a thing as ultimate truth.
Where might such giving up on the idea of ultimate truth lead us, other than mercifully delivering us from the clutches of the armies of loons who claim that they possess such a thing? I suspect, although I am conscious that I am making far too many steps here at once to satisfy the philosophers (but when are they, poor wee souls, ever satisfied?) that it leads, or can lead, to a kind of empiricism, or a modified empiricism in which we might come to value careful, systematic attention as the best possible means to understanding the world and ourselves, but an attention that is itself aware of its own limits, aware that our understandings have about them a kind perpetual provisionality.
For those who haven’t read Siderits’s book, it’s well worth getting hold of. And if you want to get a flavour of it, then the APA Newsletter for Fall 2006 has some interesting papers on it, and a response from Siderits as well (see the link here).
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Have your say! [3]
Rebirth? No. Rebecoming? Yes.
Wednesday December 3, 2008
If there is one thing that, above all else, eventually led to me ceasing to formally identify myself as being Buddhist it was the idea of rebirth. For many of my fellow Buddhists, this seemed to be either an axial belief, or else it seemed to be an unspoken assumption – of course there is such a thing as rebirth; but for me, the idea has never made any sense. And it felt decidedly odd to find myself in a community of folks for whom the idea that there was not such a thing as rebirth was considered a weird minority view. “You have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist,” some of my Buddhist friends used to assert, shaking their heads incredulously. Sometimes, the more zealous would try to convince me of the error of my ways through vigorous debate, debate in which I engaged only reluctantly before making my excuses and sloping off to get myself a cup of coffee. Sometimes they would try to convince me that I did, actually, believe in rebirth, but I just didn’t believe that I believed. At other times, they would simply shrug and move on.
In the end, I became weary with the fact that not believing in rebirth was even an issue. And I came to the not unhappy conclusion that perhaps many of my Buddhist friends were right: that perhaps (and I only say perhaps) one did have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist, and that rather than assuming a belief that seemed to me to be profoundly implausible, I should simply drop the Buddhist label, and with it give up on the argument.
Since then, rebirth is not something that I have mentioned here on thinkBuddha. Put it down to a weariness with years of arguing the case against. But more than three years after starting up this blog perhaps it is time at last to say a little about where I stand on the issue.
I have several problems with the idea of rebirth. The first is that that the Buddhist traditions have not managed to produced a coherent picture of what it actually involves. The views in Tibet are different from the views in Sri Lanka, and these are different from the views in Japan and China and so on. This wouldn’t be a problem were it not that rebirth is considered to be a fact and, not only this, that it is frequently claimed to be open to empirical investigation, at least by those who have enough meditative clout. Let us say – to follow one particular line of argument – that meditators are (to use Robert Thurman’s slightly flaky expression) psychonauts who are skilled with exploring the skeins that make up the self, and can trace these skeins back not just to childhood but beyond to previous lives, as the Buddha himself is said to have remembered previous lives. If this is the case (and leaving on one side the problems associated with this view), then two and a half thousand years of meditative practice should have led to an increasingly strong body of empirical evidence that could provide clear and unambiguous picture of the precise mechanisms of rebirth; but this is simply not the case. The various schools all hold to their various mechanisms and there has been no move towards a resolution of these discrepancies.
So the first problem is that of the disagreements and incoherencies in the Buddhist tradition. The second problem, at least for me, is one that I stumbled across in Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death
The third problem, however, is that of the absence of any plausible mechanism by means of which rebirth could come about. What exactly is the thing that is reborn? And how? And, crucially, is it the kind of thing that could matter to us? The Indian Dalit leader and Buddhist convert, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, set out a rigorously materialist view of rebirth in which the various elements of the body break down and become a part of other bodies; but this idea of rebirth (the “regeneration of matter”, Ambedkar says, and not the “rebirth of the soul”), although it is entirely consistent with a naturalistic view of the world, is not, I think, what my Buddhist friends were urging me to believe. (As an aside, I am not sure that belief is an act of will in this way, but I’ll let that pass…) Until we have a clear idea of what is reborn, an idea of how it might happen, and some supporting evidence, then there is no reason to accept rebirth.
So what of evidence? What evidence there is, alas, is slight. The most famous research is that of Ian Stevenson who published his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
- rebirth – the most favoured outcome for Buddhist readers, no doubt.
- the mind’s tendency to see order and pattern where there is none
- the suppleness and subtlety of our ability to weave stories
- delusion
- fraudulent behaviour
- the agency of my cat who is telepathically sending false beliefs to my brain in the hope that, once my brain becomes accustomed to accepting false beliefs at face value, I will be able to be induced to feed him at any time of day under the misapprehension that it is, in fact, his dinner time.
Suggestive evidence is that it depends very much upon the particular suggestibility of the one who confronts it. To start to draw up extravagant metaphysical conclusions (whether this is the conclusion that there is such a thing as rebirth, or the equally but no more implausible conclusion that my cat is beaming messages to me telepathically), we need more than suggestive evidence. We need compelling evidence, and are a long way from such evidence. Not only this, but as the idea of rebirth is so sketchily drawn, it is not even clear what it is that we are looking for evidence of.
It is no. 2 and no. 3 of the above that interest me the most: our mind’s ability to see order and pattern where there is none, and the suppleness and subtlety of our ability to weave stories. For the kind of evidence collected by Stevenson, coupled with the clear intention of finding evidence that supported the idea of rebirth, is strongly amenable to these kinds of inbuilt tendencies of the human mind. We are spinners of tales, weavers of plausible stories. The weaving of plausible stories is a literary skill – the forensic examination of a more recent rebirth-story on Skeptico gives an example of the kinds of processes that can make up such story-weaving. But the weaving of tales is not the same as the setting out of testable evidence. (For those who are interested in exploring the problems with Stevenson’s actual evidence, and looking at how his stories may have come to be woven, then I suggest having a look at the article on SkepDic.)
As a result of all of this, the idea of rebirth seems to me to be one that is not particularly worth holding on to. It is incoherently described in the various Buddhist contexts, there is no clear mechanism for it, and even the man who has argued for it most passionately has confessed that the evidence is not compelling.
But, having said all this, I’d still want to hold out for the usefulness of the idea of re- becoming as a naturalistic process. Here we are not talking about some entity “me” who is reborn again and again until I eventually get my act together and become enlightened (some hope!); instead we are talking about moving away from the idea of the self as a inward, separate thing, towards seeing that we are made up of multiple strands that stretch back and forward in time, that this exquisitely ordered jumble of genes and jostling memes is a slice carved out of the world, for convenience’s sake, and called, “me”, but that this “me” is a useful fiction, not to be taken too seriously. Not only this, but the processes predate “me” and will continue long after “I” am gone. Such a perspective is one that, I think, has the power to broaden our circle of concern, to remind us that it is not just a matter of “my” life, but that “I” am part of a bigger set of intertwined stories. The words we write and speak resonate long after we have gone, our actions have consequences, and those lead to further consequences, which in turn lead to further consequences. Our thoughts are not our own. They have a history. They have taken roost in our brains because they have found the roosting-place hospitable. Our characters, our personalities and our appetites are conditioned by those who went before us. And in recognising all of this, we can start to see that our own life is not the sole locus of value, but that there will be future beings after us, in the same way that there are other beings alongside us, and that we should bear in mind their welfare also.
Such a perspective is one that I find profoundly uplifting, if not a little disturbing. it is also one that requires little in the way of metaphysical extravagance. It does not offer us the personal comfort of immortality, but it reminds us that other things matter – some of them a great deal more – than our own brief lives. And it does not isolate us from the world as a self who needs eventual liberation (or a no-self who needs eventual liberation…), but instead brings us back to a realisation of how deeply and profoundly bound up we are within the world, a part of the world, and that we have never been separate.
Rebirth? No. Rebcoming? Yes.
Have your say! [29]
Virtuosi
Monday November 24, 2008
I was awake just after five this morning, whilst oustide it was still dark; and because I didn’t feel like sleeping any more, and had an early train to catch, I got up and went into the next door room where I sat down to meditate. It was probably the my most substantial period of meditation for weeks: given that I live in one town and work in another, I spend a lot of my time on the move, and this nomadism is not particularly suited to consistency when it comes to meditation practice. Anyway, I have long got used to the idea that, when it comes to meditation, I cut a fairly shambolic figure. No doubt I could be more self-disciplined, no doubt I could put in more hours on the cushions, no doubt I could make more effort when I do sit down to meditate: but, at the moment at least, I’m just lurching along in a half-baked fashion, and I’m pretty happy with this state of affairs.
When I first learned to meditate, over a decade and a half ago now, I sometimes fantasised that I might become some kind of meditative virtuoso, a Yehudi Menuhin of the meditation cushions. But even if, at various times, I have put a fair amount of time into my practice of meditation – on retreat, or during those periods in which I have developed and sustained a particular taste for meditation – I have not reached anything like virtuosity, nor (I suspect) will I ever do so.
I do think, incidentally, that there is such a thing as meditative virtuousity. If you put in the hours, and you put in the hours in the right way, then there are no doubt results. But the idea of becoming a virtuoso meditator is one that very quickly lost its lustre for me. Not because of the hours and hours of practice involved, but more because I became increasingly uncertain what this kind of virtuosity was for. There are plenty of Buddhist stories about meditative virtuosi who simply miss the point. I’ve written before, I think, about the charming tale of the sage Saraha who asked his wife for milk and radishes, and then went to meditate. Months or years later, he got up from his cushions and saw a plateful of wizened, rotten radishes and coagulated, dried-up milk. ‘What kind of a wife are you,’ he demanded of his long-suffering spouse (remember, folks, never marry a sage or a saint – it’s really far more trouble than it’s worth), ‘that you should serve me with rotten radishes and dried-up milk?’ His wife’s retort was to the point: ‘What kind of a sage are you that, after all that meditation, all you can think about is milk and radishes?’ And if there are lots of stories about Buddhist sages who, despite years of meditation, miss the point, there are also plenty of Buddhist stories about those without any virtuosity in meditation who get the point.
When I now think back to my early days as a meditator, it seems to me that, for a brief period at least, I had things back to front. Life, I used to think (and this is a confession, alas, so I feel a tinge of shame-facedness), was for meditation. But it seems to me now that exactly the opposite is true: meditation is for life. If sitting on your arse for years turns you into a humourless and tedious fuss-pot who frets over milk and radishes, it’s really not worth it. You’d be better off doing something else. Despite the current rush to find scientific evidence for the benefits of meditation, there is no reason to assume that meditation is always and unquestionably of benefit. It may well be that there are also potential harms – possible candidates for inclusion in the list might be: self-absorption; a growing inability to interact socially; the amplification of bizarre personal quirks and tics; over-sensitivity; preciousness; belief in one’s own inherent superiority; an increasingly disdainful attitude towards what some meditators like to call ‘everday life’…
At the very least, there is plenty of evidence that there is no necessary correlation between meditative virtuosity and virtuosity in living. There have been many skilled meditators who, when it comes to living, have again and again made a hash of things. The reason for this is perhaps relatively simple: if there are virtuosi in playing the violin and in the literary arts, if there are virtuosi of scientific understanding and of mathematics, if there are virtuosi in meditation and in philosophical subtlety, it may be that there simply are no virtuosi in the business of living, and there never have been. The task of living is too vast, our capacities are too limited, we are too much in the thrall of chance and uncertainty. We do as best we can.
So I’m not too repentent about my shambling meditative practice. It serves its purpose well enough for the time being. And if pressed to answer the question of what purpose it is that meditation actually does serve, I would have to say this: that in its attention to the strange and erratic functioning of the mind, it is one way of bringing home to me the fact that the dream of virtuosity in the business of living is just that: a dream.
Have your say! [5]
