Part one: Culture riff
I'm listening to Why Buddhism Is True. He uses an objective scientific language to justy a secular Buddhism. He feels it is OK to take what works for Americans, not unlike colonialists who took resources from the third world, except this is the spiritual life and nobody is having anything taken from them. I don't mean to be so dismissive, I want to hear thoughts and experience from everywhere. But I am dismissing my qualms about reading this book.
In some ways I'm scared, because he's obviously just sharing his journey, without close contact with a teacher, or even community. He doesn't speak about a community of writer friends or editors or even people he hangs out with or meditates with. He goes to a meditation retreat, and basically is there by himself. How much can we figure out by ourselves without being modified by others?
Full disclosure. I really like Stephen Batchelor. I'm not afraid of being called a secular Buddhist. I think rebirth is true because people are born every day and it's not necessarily a personality, it's just birth, not really rebirth, but if you combine personality, circumstances, you could get a reincarnation of someone. I don't know and I'm open to the idea that it's like a candle flame passing from one wick to another. That's doesn't seem right because babies don't really seem to have anything, but OK. I'm willing to believe the Tulkus of Tibetan tradition all have the similar experience of having a fairly prescribed life, a concentration of teaching resources are put upon them, and their lifestyle leads to a certain kind of being. Whether it's literally true or not, the Tulku experience is going to be almost like a reincarnation or someone because they create the similar upbringings. Tibetans would not like their literal system to be contextualized like that, maybe. But if you're intellectually honest, you might not necessarily feel the same way about the sort of postulated assumptions and things you can verify. The belief in reincarnation is a cultural assumption, where as Godel's theorem is a mathematical proof. I can see the attractiveness and respect other's cultural assumptions without feeling obligated to think exactly the same way.
I read a lot of hate about secular Buddhism, how wrong headed it is, but the tradition that criticizes doesn't have explicit communication as a hallmark, so they won't really defend it in public. What you're missing out with secular Buddhism is unspeakable, behind closed doors. Maybe they are the same thing, just different personalities, who knows. I sometimes think the debate is silly, it's not a debate about real things, more a dislike of personalities, history and culture.
Infact the open source Buddhism versus the whispered tradition might be the difference between shamanism and mysticism and objective explicit knowledge. I could see teachers feeling a quiver in their being when asked to justify certain things in public. They can't, they're assumptions. Assumptions are important and useful and there's nothing wrong with making assumptions. For someone to ask, "why should I adopt these set of assumptions?" is something the secular Buddhists are saying. People can feel anger at that question if that is what arises, right? As long and you're polite, what you do when you feel anger is everything. Can you channel it for the good? Can you use your wrathful energy properly?
The opposite side is kind of like sports people who say you can't talk about losing, that will jinx it. Imagining the possibility of losing and failure in sports will perhaps mess with an athlete, but fans don't have to concentrate with a winning attitude for the team to win. Infact inebriation and socializing seems more important to the fan. To imagine you need to focus to be a fan is to open up the door to being a fan, because you imagine yourself, you project yourself onto a team. You're there with them, even though it's a passive observation. You can't jinx the players on the field, you can only really just add your voice cheering, for whatever that is worth.
In a similar way the guru model of Vajrayana Buddhism is to not explicitly speak aloud. You speak differently to every person you talk to. It doesn't make good reading because there are often keys to unlocking Tantric texts that are only given out when a student is ready. Texts are supported in community. There is a kind of guarding of the tradition. It makes it precious and sacred.
The idea is to parse out teachings when the student is ready. The idea that westerners have spiritual indigestion because they are taking in too many rich foods, makes sense. A gradual and regulated approach. Maybe it's a fantasy of being exactly fed the right things in the spiritual life, but it could also be exactly the kindness articulated with the ideas of generosity in Buddhism. This line of thinking would also be against teaching perfection of wisdom at the start because it is a higher teaching and can also lead to ethical nihilism instead of spiritual transcendence in the wrong hands, in unready hands.
Shamanism is the cool guy who doesn't want to talk about how to be cool. It is the movie Hitch (2005), they want to guard their knowledge because that is what gives them power, but they also want to live off their insights.
As the information age opens up knowledge to all people, there are some people that get really twisted up because they are isolated and don't have life experience to take things the right way, weigh them against other things and generally take things in proportion. Nothing is tailored to where they are at. That is why you get people going onto Reddit and saying they're having a really hard time "giving up attachments". The whole area and way of speaking about attachments is wrongheaded. The fruit of the practice is to let go of unhealthy commitments through insight. In Triratna that kind of way of talking is banished because it's unhelpful, the cart before the horse, grabbing the firebrand by the wrong end. This is one of the things that might lead to a guru approach. Many lone dog Buddhists will eventually quit because they can't get untwisted. They can't get the support they need to point them in the right direction, or even worse, they don't receive the help offered because they are not receptive.
The fantasy is that you can be oriented by someone else, and then you won't have to make too many course corrections. But what practicing in isolation has taught me, after a foundation in sangha with others, is that making your own course corrections is a vital part of the spiritual life. You're the best person to do that, most of the time.
No extreme is ever the way, neither lone dogging it, nor subservient following. We need a mixture of self reliance and support.
The Buddha went to two teachers to learn all they could teach. At a crucial point he went off on his own. And then after hanging with the the 5 ascetics, he even left them! They were mad when he left, they felt betrayed, they might have acted like a cult and not let him return. Somehow they felt he'd done something, so they gave him a chance, and he taught Kondanna the path. Thus the teachings were born, the teachings could be shared, they were not too personal, it wasn't an idiosyncratic result. You can be taught how to become enlightened.
There's a lot missing in the Pali Canon because it's not a transcript. It's what the monks chanted for hundreds of years before the words were written down, and it's come to us 2500 years later, in translation.
In 2022, they just corrected the idea that Chaucer was a rapist, by unsealing records in a salt mine in Cheshire from the 14th century. In 2012 they found Richard the 3rd body! He died in 1485! Today they're finding all kinds of amazing transcripts in Gundhara. Buddhist archaeology is finding amazing things every day it seems, recently they found a unexpected statue. Receding waters exposed underwater statues.
The Buddha died roughly around 483 BCE. Going that far back into the mist of time, so much is lost. What we have is amazing but hard to read because it's made for chanting and not a transcription. Now we have generalizations about decades, and decade playlists and discussions about trends in generations. It's hard to imagine back into time like this. Lineage is the faith dream of connection back to the Buddha.
The fantasy of lineage helps the Buddhist. My lineage goes back to the Buddha so it's the one true path. I get a lot of anger when I shatter that illusion. Like rebirth, it's an assumption of a group, one you need to be inside that group, but is obviously just an assumption when you're outside the group. Talking about it as an assumption is hidden knowledge, to be in the group you have to forbid exploring that question, because exposing it as an assumption devalues it. Some things must be unspoken.
This is why, in a way, we'll never transcend the cultic aspect of American politics. There are crucial ways in which people don't want to know things. My conservative Baptist relatives aren't interesting in challenging or even looking at the assumptions of their tribe. They are as true as living and breathing in the tribe. The tribe chooses a leader. The leader is to be followed and can't really be questioned. There is order and no fuzzy questions. I'm sure it's not as bleak as I present it, I love my relatives, and they may have a superior way of being that I have.
Figuring things out in the tribe, inside the embedded but unexamined assumptions is what being in a sangha is, in part. You can't join the sangha until you agree to the rules of joining. You don't get teachings unless you do the proper dance with the teacher. If so-and-so isn't your guru and teacher, then you have no business in sharing the fruits of that group. The group may appear to be open and welcoming and even intellectually honest, but you must get inside to get the deeper truths and support. Everyone wants support, everyone needs support. It's the price of admission to the group. That is one take on sangha.
There's a kind of rugged individualism, and I don't think Sangharakshita appreciated this aspect of the American Transcendental movement. The writings are awful, so maybe that is what his distaste was for. They're trying to create a very authentic and complex sounding way of talking that is free from the hegemony of Puritanism by replacing it with nature and classical education, which is a deeper foundation than the (then) new theology of Puritanism. Schisms, sects, blasphemy are all just brand making and living making, with hyperbole and bombastic theology. It's the fight against chaos. What is a spiritual community if you can't be sure they all have the right beliefs?
The individual rejects the call to have to think certain ways, and it's the traditionalists in Buddhism that push the secular Buddhists away. You have to think this way about rebirth or you're not a Buddhist. Right view is their justification for that way of being. They won't even explicitly say it because examining it in the light of day would mean it was objective and could be examined.
Robert Wright is writing this book about his experience, without a teacher and sangha guiding him, is exactly what the Buddhists inside traditional sangha will warn you against. You're going to go off the rails all by yourself. See how he goes wrong?! They never explicitly say how, nevermind that detail.
To the extent he does go off the rails is going to be explicit and something objective you can discuss, but in discussing it, you've already stepped outside the sangha. You're self reliant. Discussions inside the sangha are not shared. There are million spiritual communities all around the world privately discussing things all the time.
People talk about information bubbles, I can only tolerate so much conservative oriented political talk because it just does not compute. I don't share the assumptions, and it's too jamming to always be trying to articulate why I don't share those assumptions. One of the problems of democracy is it's profounding destabilizing to constantly be debating assumptions. We need common ground.
We're getting better at tolerating the disorientations of others, but I would argue that is at the heart of rejecting multiculturalism. Nobody is going to convince someone else to have a different personality. Everyone emphasizes both aspects of each party, but the major emphasis, is what makes the political party. In a way it's so confusing because I believe, in the abstract, many of the principles of republicans, I would just not exercise them that way, in those cases, for those decisions.
In the same confusing way that secular Buddhism and open source Buddhism is in conflict with traditional Buddhism, because our spiritual life is profoundly subjective. In the age of information, that can be quite annoying. We're not sure how to take subjective knowledge. "True for you" isn't really how we like our truths, we tend to prefer them universal and objective. We fancy all of ours are universal and objective.
Because I have a daughter that asks questions I have a lot of weird knowledge at the moment. Some sharks lay eggs inside themselves and then they hatch inside the mother, and then they give birth to the shark later.
The deepest well into the earth was 8km (5 miles) and cost $100 million dollars.
We know the algorithm setting rent prices in NYC, that are counter intuitively raising rents during a near recession, and people leaving the city because of high rents. It comes from the company RealPage from Texas and is called YieldStar (source). (End of random "knowledge".)
Humanity was always asking what are the right assumptions and what do we really need to know? What should we teach children? Read, writing and arithmetic hasn't really been improved on. Religion takes on a portion of these questions. Science has stolen some of them, made it smaller, and maybe put it in it's right place as an assumption for personal psychology. Philosophy, public and objective, have taken some more. Analytical philosophy is boring, I like continental philosophy, that includes literature.
My grandfather asked me when I told him I was an atheist, "how will you know what is right and wrong?" Sure, adopting a boiler plate platform of ethics can simplify things, but still the ten precepts are really quite vague in a way, and don't really settle any problems. Utilitarianism is either simple enough to use in every case, or is so needlessly complicated that it is no longer useful for the everyman.
The Vietnam War broke American society. The metaphysical threat of the domino theory was too abstract and perhaps wrongheaded. It opened things up for examination and questioning of assumptions. It was a profoundly difficult time that makes some people cling to tradition because of a profound feeling of disorder. My grandfather threw my mother's Bob Dylan record out the window. I have the feeling my grandfather had in those days, in our present times. Things seem out of whack. Two men in road rages shot each other's daughters (People). What the fuck is going on?
Now the metaphysical threat is climate change, and the right is denying that as the threat. One side sees disharmony in racism and culture wars, the other side sees disharmony in lack of traditionalism. Meanwhile the Alaskan crabs have left an area because of climate change.
In that opening up, in a time of profound chaos and disillusionment, was a flourishing of art and a willingness to allow in foreign influences like Buddhism. What are these times disillusioning us from?
In some ways Biden is the FDR of our times, passing sweeping legislation to the shagrin of people who only want government for police and military, to reinforce the order that is increasingly unfair. There's a lot of, "off with their heads," talk, and anger at challenged assumptions.
The reason the 20's won't be like the 60's/70's is that conservatives have power now, and the left hasn't seized control yet, but the swing is coming. That's why the right is increasingly cheating in elections, questioning elections they don't like.
Democracy can also have people voting for the end of democracy, in a bizarre twist. Unlike the 70's education isn't cheap, the American dream isn't being fostered by veterans who want a more calm stable life after surviving the depression and a just war. Populist politicians are gaming the information age by lying and appealing to a nefarious culture war. The information age has come to white supremacists and anti-democratic forces. Income disparity is widening the middle class has disappeared. So what is the society we're losing that we cling to? It's already gone and it never existed.
An untethered, untaught writer sharing his tales out of sangha, with backup in scientific writings, will stir up a lot of people, though mostly the best response to something you don't like is to just ignore it. Don't read it. Keep it moving.
Even sports results are surprising. Braves lost to the Phillies in the 2022 MLB playoffs? Nobody saw that coming. A huge argument about the national soccer team is about the coach trusting players he's found success with in the past, and players that are clearly in better form and are outplaying them directly, like Brandon Vazquez running past Aaron Long to score the winning goal for Cincinnati to beat Unhealthy Energy Drink sponsored team. Aaron Long is on the USA team and roundly criticized. Brandon Vazquez isn't on the team and had an amazing season. People who care about the national team are pulling out their hair because the coach has been hired by his brother, and that would be fine if he were a great coach, but he's a hugely controversial coach, and everyone is second guessing his choices. Sports drama is a nice diversion from real life drama where fathers shoot each other's daughter in road rage (People).
So that is why Robert Wright's book is so dangerous, different, interesting and confusing, for me at least.
Some people want heresy trials in Burma, want these entrenchings of tradition, enforced belief. If some secular American journalist can trumpet the virtues of Buddhism, and speak about his experiences beyond the reach of traditional Buddhist courts, what else can happen?
With a penchant for action, the republicans are busing immigrants to progressive cities. Forget asking the question "how should these people be distributed in our country?" Just distribute them to other people. They can't appeal to a federal policy because they don't like the federal government, despite all the money they get from them.
Leonard Cohen poem from Book of Longing:
(The poem represents proprietary attitude in a teacher, not open source, a sort of exclusive relationship.)
Part 2
Wright does actually talk about his teachers at IMS in Barre Massachusetts, and he does quote fellow meditators. I honestly really like this book, it reminds me of an article I once wrote about teaching mindfulness in a women's prison.
That people are offended by this book, well, I don't think they really read it. But was that just a story I concocted in my head? I went back and read the old reddit posts from 3 years ago. It came out 5 years ago. Hardly anything negative. 5 years ago. Not much negative. Why was I so afraid of this book. They even talk about the resistance to the book.
My friend who's retired only listens to books now. I like listening because I feel like I need to train my auditory skills. And when you space out, it keeps reading, where as when I space out reading, I just put the book down or reread what I missed. Maybe that's why I'm not reading as much any more. Anyway, audio books are another interesting tool in this changing world we live in.
Also note, I really liked Wright's book on Evolutionary Psychology, The Moral Animal. (I don't think he makes up his titles.)
I don't think research can prove to me what I already know that meditation, sangha, Dharma study, devotion and ethics are right for me. But nonetheless see research below. I'll add on anything I find to this post.
Links on research:
Natural high: “New research from the University of Utah finds that a mindfulness meditation practice can produce a healthy altered state of consciousness in the treatment of individuals with addictive behaviors."
(Published 2nd draft 10/16, edited 3rd draft 10/17/22 11am, 4th draft (part 2): 10/18) Last edited 4/4/23.
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