elfs | Entries tagged with buddhism

One thing you might encounter in Buddhist teaching is a lesson entitled The Ten Distractions. These distractions are experiences you will probably have during your meditation periods that are generally considered pleasurable or valuable, but are not the aim of Buddhism and so are considered "distractions." These distractions are:

Illumination that meditation is effective

Understanding how your mind works

Tranquility

Physical pleasure

Faith and confidence

Energy and vitality

Concentration and focus

Equanimity

Attachment

Only the last one is considered "bad" by Buddhists, because it's the anchor with which the others ensnare you. Once you become attached to any of these states, you're going to fail in your goal of reaching the state of Insight and Enlightenment which is the hallmark of Buddhist teaching.

I have this sneaking suspicion that Buddhism beyond Equanimity is a case of sunk cost, that is, you've spent so much time and energy in meditation, literally exploiting whatever neuroplasticity we have to grow new brain matter dedicated to the task of repeating and realizing the meditative experience, that once you've gotten that far you may as go the whole way, even if at some point you start to lose touch with what it means to be human in the first place. The Buddhist Insight stage seems so off-the-charts compared to the attachments that I have to wonder if it really has value. Who assigns that value? Well, other Buddhists who have spent years chasing it, a self-referential loop of sunk costs.

The Dalai Lama has a well-established place in the popular imagination, but I have to wonder if his grip on all of reality is, well, as strong as mine. His wokeness seems to leap entirely over addressing existing injustices and tackling iniquitous hierarchies into a pithy mass of "If we all thought like me, none of this would be a problem" aphorisms.

It's a common affliction, one that is either pathetic or unbelievably dangerous, depending upon how much power the believer has.

Current Mood: bitchy

It's really hard to meditate, especially do the breath meditation, when your head is completely stuffed, but while I'm thinking about meditating, I'm also thinking about the Buddhist teachings that go along with it. The other day, a friend who knew of my cold asked me how I was feeling. I said, "It's mostly done now. Just mopping up. T-cells fighting insurgent battles with resistent pockets of the virus hiding out on my larynx, mostly."

It's funny that I devolved to a military metaphor, but the more I think about it, the less funny it seems. One of the biggest steps in learning Buddhism is to embrace the moral teachings of Buddha, and the first moral teaching of Budda is "to abstain from being harmful to all living things."

How can you even begin to follow the First Precept when your very body is a constant, ongoing battlefield? Where the colony of cells with your DNA makes common cause with a host of microbes to fend off invaders, where the very distinction of host, guest, and interloper exists day in and day out?

When Buddha gave his teachings, we knew people got sick. Buddha advised us to harm "not even the mosquito," which is a hard thing to do after we learned about malaria, zika, and chikungaya! But now we know that illness itself is a battlefield in which living things die. As in the case of simply breathing, I wonder how science has muddied the waters of Buddhism's pure teachings.

Current Mood: thoughtful

"You must know what the breath is," the Buddha said. But what the breath is, is very different in our century than it was in his.

Buddhist meditation begins with learning how to breathe. Apparently, old Siddhartha Buddha could do this readily and without effort, but most people have to spend some time paying attention to all the little things that go into breathing, all the sensations that we've learned to take for granted, to ignore, to accept as mere signs that we're still breathing.

Breathing is one of the most remarkable of all our biological systems. It has to be fast; one breath is barely in our lungs for half a second, and in that time we have to swap out the oxygen for carbon dioxide just to keep living. It's under our control when we want, and it goes on automatically when we're not paying attention to it. Regulating it gives us expressive power in speech and the capability to dive deep underwater. Buddhism wants you to pay attention to its sensations while not trying to exert control over it— a fairly difficult exercise that can take weeks or months for most meditation practioners to master.

But in the Buddha's time, all that was known about breathing was about its sensations and our impressions of them. Prior to the discipline of microbiology, all we knew about breathing was the animal understanding we had of its necessity, our limited control over it, and that if we stopped bad things happened. It's that centrality to our lives, and the sheer amount of brain structure turned over to managing the demands of our bodies' oxygen levels while at the same time letting us control it to swim and speak, that makes breathing exercises and meditating on breathing so effective.

When I meditate, I have to avoid the mantra "Know what the breath is" because if I do that my hyperactive brain goes down a rabbithole of biology and neurology, because breathing "is" all these extra things we understand now about the low-level processes.

Current Mood: curious

In some lines of Buddhism, the jhanas are emotional events that a practicing meditator may experience along the way toward enlightenment. The usual description of them is in stages or, as we might say today, leveling up: you experience "The first jhana," and then the second, and so forth, until you attain the fourth, which most meditators agree is both the most interesting and the most dangerous— people can get "stuck" in the fourth and become highly delusional, convinced that they've attained mastery of themselves and maybe have found all manner of psychic powers or whatnot.

I'm suspicious of this description, because I'm suspicious of Maria Montessori and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Montessori taught that children go through three distinct and concrete stages, and while there's some overlap these stages more or less coincide to seven years of a child's life: 0 to 7, 7 to 14, 14 to 21, each of which is characterized by a set of concrete traits that a child is developing, and the choice of which traits gets trained and emphasized is the responsibility of the parents and teachers. Kubler-Ross taught the five stages of grief, and claimed that the dying patient went through them in a fairly linear fashion. (It was only afterward that we started applying the stages of grief to the survivors, and then to anyone experiencing the aftershock of some disaster other than the death of a loved one.)

Kubler-Ross's prescription is nonsense unsupported by the evidence. Montessori's stages of development have likewise not been vetted for any correspondence to reality other than anecdote, which puts both of them in the same category as the jhanas.

What the jhanas, Montessori and Kubler-Ross all have in common is a framework onto which those teaching and those experiencing the teaching can channel their energies into handling one thing at a time. Enough people can be convinced that Kubler-Ross's framework is "true" that they can channel their emotional energy into handling that one particular experience, be in anger or denial or bargaining. Enough children succeed and even thrive under Montessori's program (mostly, I suspect, due to the intensely attentive nature of the adults conducting the program) that parents can be convinced it's "true" and works for all children. And the jhanas are likewise useful enough that when the student experiences something like one the teacher can say, "Ah, that's close to a first-level jhana, here's what you can expect," and the student will search for those experiences and filter out everything else until the teacher says, "Now here's what you should look out for the second jhana..." and, even if the student has been experiencing those phenomena for some time, now that experience gets attention and the student starts to level up.

Current Mood: okay

I have a soft spot for Robert Wright, as he often seems to be a slightly better constructed but also angrier version of myself. His books The Moral Animal and Non-Zero were big and insightful; both argued that evolutionary complexity leads inevitably to both morality and economics (which he also suggests is a subcategory of moral thought), provided no stray asteroids or nuclear wars happen, and his case for both was strong and compelling, if also somewhat incomplete.

Why Buddhism is True, his new book, is thematically quite different, although he does tread similar evopsychological ground from time to time. Wright is a big fan of scientism: he wants scientific explanations or correlations for phenomena and here he gets into the weeds of neurobiology and modern psychology to explain why Buddha's insights were and are useful.

Wright starts off with a chapter on the illusion of reality, and talks about how the physical, squishy grey matter locked away inside your skull manufactures, moment by moment, a story about who you are and what you're doing. There's good evidence this is true. He writes that our brains, especially our emotional system, is exapted for an environment utterly unlike our modern world, and that food manufacturers, television producers, and nowadays social media networks seek to exploit the misalignement between what our technologies can do, and what our brains can handle, to create within us obsessions toward their brands of food, media, or games. Buddha, Wright explains, understood this a lot, and not only were his insights but his recommendations for how to deal with this maladaptive misalignment were and still are among the most useful.

Buddha diagnosed our problem as restlessness. The Four Noble Truths at the heart of Buddhism start with "You are a creature whose restlessness and dissatisfaction with your state makes you unhappy." Evolution comes to the same conclusion: we need to eat, and stay warm, and reproduce; a creature of satisfaction is unlikely to pursue these goals, and so is a failure. Our emotional system is designed make us pursue pleasures, the pleasure of each fading over time, making us restless for more.

Wright spends a lot of time on this sort of thing: correlations between classic Buddhist teachings and what the science actually says. The idea that there is no "self," but instead lots of little "selves" inside, the ones that distract us from our stated goals in pursuit of shorter-term pleasures, the ones that arise and cripple us with anxiety, and how these "modular subselves" will co-opt or organize to make us seemingly different people at different times, or in different places, or with different people.

The book makes a bit of a left turn about 2/3rds of the way through, when Wright starts talking about Nirvana, Enlightment, Emptiness, and so forth. He starts out by saying that you are not unhappy, you are the subject of all these selves about which you tell a story that presents "you" as a coherent whole. Wright even delves into how the story we tell ourselves and the story we tell others is different, but both are coherent; it's just that the one we tells others is modified with motivations that make us seem capable, trustworthy, and coherent. We might even believe both stories; after all, we make for lousy evolutionary replicators if we had high anxiety all the time.

Wright ends with a plea that others "take up the cushion," even though he's quite sure he's never going to get as far with it as many other meditators. The insights meditation gives us, to look at things as they are and not as we wish them to be, to step outside ourselves, and to just exercise the powers of concentration, are valuable; it also seems almost inevitable that with these insights comes a sense of compassion and wisdom that most people lack.

Wright's book is completely devoid of supernaturalism. There are no gods in his book, no demons, and no other dimensions to see. There's only this one, and Wright's conclusion is that we need better tools to see this one clearly, and Buddha came up with a damn fine, if sometimes exceedingly sharp, set of tools.

Wright's book won't convince you if you're unwilling to be convinced, any more than the combined strength of astronomy and geology won't convince a young earth creationist. But he makes a strong case for Buddhist, Stoics, and those sympathetic to the contemplative life, that the basic meditative toolkit, with at its heart the daily practice of meditating (with its sub-disciplines) to improve your concentration, assess your morality, and seek clarity, is probably one of the best you can find.

As I was writing this review, I was reminded that the notion that we always communicate a "better" version of ourselves to others, and the notion that there is no "self" inside, were both covered in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The first, that we communicate "better" versions of ourselves, is covered by The SNAFU Principle, and the second, that we have no "self," is covered when Hagbard asks George to figure out who's in change "in there," (pointing to George's head), and George imagines his mind as a house, searches from room to room, concluding "Nope. Nobody home."

"That's funny," Hagbard said. "Who's conducting the search?"

Current Mood: cheerful

I'm a practicing Stoic of the Modern school, although my meditative style is much more heavily invested in Buddhist traditions and I have more than a little attraction to the Secular Buddhist movement. Recently I've been reading Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True, and one thing he wrote that I really liked is an anology between the Buddhist notion of Mara and natural selection.

There's a ridiculous strain of thought in the less-educated corners of Christianity that somehow scientists worship Darwin. Evangelist Lee Summrall, who's widely published and widely read in Christian bookstores, is a typical example of the breed, so it's not just random internet wackos. But Wright's got a point: if scientists were to think of evolution as a conscious and creative force, they would have to conclude that is a nasty, capricious, and fairly horrific conscious force. Everything from the bit about the whole red in tooth and claw to the more subtle horrors of fungi that eat brains from the inside out. If we were to attribute motives to natural selection, would we happily accept cancer, Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy? Would we cheerfully embrace death itself at all?

And even more subtly, what we know about the human condition points to a pretty terrible outcome: our brains are constructed to deceive us, our emotions are hard-wired to be continually restless and unhappy, always in search of the safety and security of the tribe on the left, and the power and prestige of pulling ahead of the pack on the right.

Wright says that Buddhism is a toolkit for getting a grip on these impulses, for gaining insight into them and getting at least a little more control over them, for extending our free will just a little bit further than the few seconds every day where we actually exercise our will, and not just our habits and instincts. Because one way or another, the human condition is hard, and we need better tools for managing it.

Current Mood: awake

So, I have a question about Buddhism.

It's a given in the neurological and psychological sciences that we are fundamentally emotional beings. People whose emotional response centers have been damaged lose the ability to make decisions; they prevaricate back and forth between choices, never settling on one. The "modular" structure of our brains, the one that adjusts the knobs of our personalities (sometimes radically) in response to stimuli— hunger, exhaustion, desire, jealousy— is more or less a given. We also know that this varied, modular design is what gives rise to distraction: we aren't "in control" of our thoughts, for if we were, they wouldn't wander whenever we were bored. Buddha took this to a logical extreme: if your "self," whatever it is, can't command your thoughts to behave, then perhaps there is no "self" at all, only a phenomenal collective of thoughts and their organic origins that, having only one body, appears to be a whole human being to other human beings.

In the Buddha's view, all of civilization is a pantomime, and our evolutionary emotions dedicated to keeping us alive (fed, warmed, in a tribe where we can shine individually so long as we all keep the water running and the herd fed collectively) and getting us laid, are at the core of who and what we are. We suffer (the word is overused in Western Buddhism; Buddha meant something closer to a sense of perpetual anxiety and dissatisfaction, with 'suffering' as an extreme of the daily discomfort and alienation we experience) and we desire to alleviate that suffering through food, drink, sex, drugs, fame, power, and any number of tools.

Okay, all good. The technology (technology: "a collection of knowledge, methods, skills, and applications used in the production of goods and services toward human flourishing") Buddha gave us was the Three Meditations: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Insight— and in that order. The purpose of mindful meditation was to give us an insight into our own brains. After some mastery of concentration, we are to observe how it works, to monitor its behaviors, to tally and catalog whether our thoughs are to accomplishment, or anticipation, or rumination, or anxiety, and learn that each of those thoughts isn't the thinker. That we can observe this lack of self-mastery, this tendency for the mind to wander, and be mindful of who "we" are without having to regard every thought we're having as being part of our "selfhood."

Buddhism then asks you to go a bit deeper, and inquire about the observer. If none of those thoughts, about what you did yesterday, about what you might do tomorrow, about who might criticize you, and about who you might desire, are you, but clearly they're thoughts about things you want, or want to learn from, then what is doing the observing of these thoughts?

Dig deep enough, Buddha claimed, and you'll find that confident, concentrative, mindful "you" isn't really "you" at all, either; it's just another thought.

So let's turn this onto its neurological head: what emotion keeps you on the cushion? We are at our base emotional creatures. Buddha encouraged us to get a grip on those emotions, to marshall them. In this, Buddha and Zeno, the founder of Stocisim, found both the symptom of our problems and the solutions.

But what emotion drives a practicing Buddhist or Stoic to their daily meditations? What happens when you are finally satisfied with your Buddhist practice?

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Calibre, Even If

Buddhism is far & away the most rational religion but its very rationality should make us wary.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) October 17, 2017

Jeet Heer called that an "unpopular opinion." I think he's right.

I'm going to do some intellectual violence to Buddhism here, but in doing so I hope to open up a couple of pointers and maybe open up a discussion about a central tenant of Buddhism. Buddhism is basically an entirel religion built around one essential insight: you are not your thoughts, and your thoughts arise for reasons over which you have very little control.

That's it. The rest of Buddhism is an attempt to make sense of this insight, and to use it fruitfully. The technology for doing so is meditation. ("technology: the means and knowledge used to provide for human sustenance and comfort" — oh, if only!) And there are only three subdisciplines of meditation that you have to master in order to acheive Buddha's essential insight.

Concentration

The very first skill of Buddhism is being able to focus and control your thoughts on demand. This is the infamous Breath Meditation, the one that bores everyone and is the first major hurdle to overcome. This is the time when you spend first five, then ten, then twenty, then longer, concentrating only on a single thing: your breath, a candle flame, a mantra, a thought, a feeling. That's it. It's a discipline.

And for someone like me, with mild ADHD, it's been incredibly useful.

Mindfulness

The second skill is mindfulness. You can't even begin to practice mindfulness until done concentration for a while. Mindfulness starts with being able to recognize when your mind has wandered off from concentration. Over the weeks and months of concentration practice, you develop a sense of mindfulness about your own mind. There are two subdisciplines of mindfulness: external and internal.

External is easier: you become mindful of what's going on around you. You pay attention to the world, to everything around you, labeling every stimuli accurately but not considering anything else about it: not its origin, not its disposition. You can do it with your eyes open, even.

Internal starts out simply enough: meditating on physical states, like what temperature is your big toe, how much pressure is being exerted by your knees, what angle are you carrying your head at. Eventually, though, mindfulness moves to emotions: what does it feel like to feel sad, or angry? Where in your body do you carry stress? Where in your body do you feel happiness?

Between these two, you develop a sense of the transience of all these feelings. Thoughts happen to distract you, you are not entirely, or even mostly, in control of them. The best you can do is keep them marshalled.

Insight

Insight is the hardest of all. It builds off mindfulness. Insight is the realization that those feelings you're having aren't you. You've already developed a sense that your feelings aren't under your control. The distraction to get up and get a drink, or turn away from whatever you're working on to watch YouTube or hit Facebook, is terrible, but that distraction either is you or isn't you, and there's not a whole lot of in-between.

Even more importantly, the border between "you" and the "world" gets a little fuzzy. Sure, it seems to be your skin, but the world comes in through eyes, ears, your nose and mouth. Your skin and the world are in a constant negotiation about the temperatures and pressures to which you're subject, its comfort and its texture: is your skin "you," or is it doing something without your "self" making decisions?

Now the point of insight is to chip away, mindful moment by moment, that maybe there is nothing at all that is you. There's nothing you can point to that's "you" in a coherent sense. There's a version of you that's hungry, and cranky, and happy, and joyful, but none of those is in a real sense "you," an incontrovertible noun that represents you-ness.

The Buddhists claim that those who have had the full insight, the moment when all of sense of yourself has been extinguished and you've fully embraced the idea that there's no coherent "you," you become ineffably aware of the fragility of everyone else, and in doing so become more compassionate and wise, an arahat.

The science fictional view

"The Transporter Paradox," which asks who you are if you're disassembled in one place and reassembled in another, complete and accurate down to the last quark, is a classic of modern science. I've played with it myself. My robots talk a lot (too much, maybe) about negotating that barrier between themselves and the world, about the nature of thought, even about the way we come up with narratives to explain why we act in certain ways. My brain uploads find that giving up the body has its own suite of challenges, and many opt for simulated bodies to keep the level of stimuli familiar and comforting.

But the one thing that brain uploads also challenge is the idea of reifying time. In the current world, we have these lovely tools called "time traveling debuggers," which record the state of the program as its running, and allow programmers to view the program's memory state as a graph of use-over-time, looking for spikes and strange behaviors and bugs. If we reified someone's brain state in the same way, would that be the "self" she claims as her own? It would be more concrete, it would wrap the Buddhist objections about "impermanence" in a malleable, permanent representation. It would, in fact, challenge Buddhism to treat time as a phenomenon that is part of, and not distinct from, the three-dimensional representation of the body.

On the other hand, it would also definitely reify the way "you" and "your world" are inseparable; just as a time travelling debugger makes no sense without both a program to run and a computer to run it on, a consciousness running on any substrate, be it meat or metal, requires a context in which to exist. So in one sense, we've found a thought experiment that solidifies one sense in which Buddhism's insights about human nature might not be true, and one in which they are even more true. "Impermanence" is itself an illusory effect of any one human being's inability to perceive more than a singular instant of time. And yet, "selfhood" itself becomes something without any independent existence at all; your "self" doesn't exist except as an illusion, like a seam of silver in the great mines of spacetime that can't be extracted without destroying both.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Bedouin, Straight to the Heart

While the mainstream press is still still touting mindfulness as an essential tool for your kit, there's been a very welcome wave of pushback that's dedicated to letting much of the air out of the mindfulness convoy's tires.

The loudest voices are those that claim that mindfulness strips the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness of its ethical foundations, simply adapting mindfulness as a way of calming the employees, making them more efficientr employees, and essentially co-opting what has been an essential spiritual practice into a tool of avarice.

But I suspect the recent spate of "it doesn't work" / "it's not cost effective" / "the science isn't there" articles is actually led by a counter-concern: mindfulness is most attractive to the most energetic of employees, the ones who are constantly sparking off new ideas and new projects. The biggest fear our corporate masters have is that sati will translate, as the Buddhists contend it does, into karuna: that is, that mindfulness will lead those who practice it best into the realization that most capitalism is bullshit.

The pro-mindfullness folks want employees to have just enough mindfulness to be more diligent and detail-oriented at their work, but they're deathly afraid that in the process their employees will develop compassion and an awareness of the transience of all things, and ultimately leae their corporate positions for something more fulfilling. The threat of actual mindfulness to the Gordon Geckos of the world is not to be understated.

Current Mood: meditative
Current Music: Desolation, Addicted to Industrial
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1602622.html

I've often wondered if C.S. Lewis didn't read just a bit too much Buddhist literature in his time. The Great Divorce is one of those books that reads like a Buddhist tract. It starts with a premise of universalism, if not a reincarnate one: We all awaken in the Hell we deserve, and there we are given one (or more) chances to make it into Heaven. The unnamed narrator accompanies a party on an expedition to the edge of Heaven, where he witnesses several people make (and fail) the attempt to acheive a Christian notion of Grace.

But every example is one of those things that makes a Buddhist smile. In every example, the person failing to reach grace does so because of his or her attachment to something. More to the point, that attachment causes great suffering! Lewis manages to circle back to a Christian viewpoint with his emphasis that every attachment is associated with another person in each seeker's narrative: it is not that we are attached to things, but that we are attached to (and suffer by) our refusal to see other individuals as people rather than things. (Which, in the current discourse, immediately brings to mind Mad Max: Fury Road and its underlying theme that women, indeed all human beings, are not things to be used by the powerful, but other souls worthy of respect and compassion.) Most of the seekers in The Great Divorce simply cannot forgive or reconcile their feelings with their beliefs that some other agent has the responsibility to "see it his (or her) way."

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Aftermath #3, Aes Dana
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1579670.html

One day, the Buddha visited a village to teach. As he sat and people gathered around him, an angry man walked into the circle and began to curse the Buddha. He called the Buddha a thief and a liar and a great many rude words.

The Buddha just smiled at the man. Finally, exhausted, the man left.

"Why did you say nothing?" said one of his disciples.

"If a man brings you a gift and you refuse to accept, who leaves with the gift?" the Buddha asked.