Metaphysics?

The term “metaphysics” seems to make many writers on what might broadly be called secular spirituality nervous: “Metaphysics is a distraction. By ‘metaphysics’ I mean that which is beyond physics… ideas that can’t be experienced here and now in the world and that we can’t know directly.” (Lambert); “Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that… there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness.” (Harris) “I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism…” (Wright)

Now, I’ve no wish to take issue with writers such as Lenorë Lambert, Sam Harris or Robert Wright, and I have quoted their work often enough here and elsewhere. I recognise as clearly as any of them the difficulty, described so well both by Wright and by Susan Blackmore, of a Western person encountering an elaborate, occasionally almost baroque, system of theologies, demonologies, geographies of life, death, and aeons of rebirth, prevalent especially in parts of the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions.

But I will keep on using the term “the ground of being”, and if that doesn’t sound metaphysical I’m not sure what does. It’s a term if not coined, then certainly made familiar by Paul Tillich. Tillich describes the ground of being as not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction, as “Being-itself” – which always reminds me of Meister Eckhart’s use of the term Istigkeit, “isness“.

For me, this isness is precisely that which can be known directly in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart, that can catch the breath and fill the eyes with tears. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains a kind of lodestone in my own unknowing of being and nothingness.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is not in fact to worry too much about explanations, and certainly not about ideas, but just to practice, and to be true to what we find there.

#AldousHuxley #contemplation #contemplative #EmiliaFogelklou #experience #LenorëLambert #metaphysics #RobertWright #SamHarris #SusanBlackmore

Looking for a language

All contemplative traditions seek, in one way or another, to look past the shifting pattern of thoughts and emotions which we take to to be ourselves, and to know directly that which is unthinkable, and is.

But thinking is what we always do, if only to find some way of pointing out the ineffable, of showing others the beginning of the way to this unconditioned treasure. But it is always difficult, and painfully easily misunderstood, as contemplatives have long found to their cost in their dealings with religious authorities.

I think the reason why most contemplatives are in fact allied with some religion or another may be that, not only do we ourselves find the way to our own contemplative practice within a religious tradition, but within that tradition we find a path that others have walked, a thread others have followed, and a language with which to talk, and more importantly to think, about contemplation and its purpose. In many traditions contemplative practice is seen and experienced as a form of prayer, which comes with its own questions, and its own ways to think and talk about them.

One of the difficulties with treading a secular contemplative path is that these frameworks of tradition and language fall away. This is of course a great freedom, but it is easier perhaps to see what it is a freedom from than it is to see what it may be a freedom to, because of the sheer difficulty we have in finding new words for that which is beyond words, and in looking for ways to understand what we have perceived directly.

Happily, in most cases, bereft of a traditional Buddhist, Christian, or whatever language for contemplative experience, with all its baggage of doctrine and metaphysics, some have turned to Western philosophy, or to neuroscience, for paradigms. Those who are trained in these fields, Susan Blackmore, for instance, or Sam Harris, have made contributions that I for one find useful to say the least. Others, like Stephen Batchelor, seem to work more nearly by pruning the language of an existing tradition to express a secular practice, repossessing well-tried (in Batchelor’s case Buddhist) words to chart a secular path.

I am very late to the game. My four decades, more or less, of broadly Christian contemplative practice have left me missing their rich tradition of expression, and the depth of thought and teaching that underpins that tradition in both the Eastern and Western church, and in the great body of writing that predates the Great Schism of 1054, and, come to that, in the Quaker way since the 17th century in England.

I am finding it hard, as readers of this blog may have noticed, to pick up an alternative framework in which to think and write about practice and experience. I don’t have an alternative expert language, like the philosophers and the students of consciousness, and yet there is a sense that my own stream, my own practice and its fruits, has not gone astray so much as found a deeper bed on its way to the sea. The question is, how to talk about it?

#contemplation #contemplative #experience #faith #language #practice #religion #SamHarris #StephenBatchelor #SusanBlackmore #theWay

Ain’t superstitious

In the old Willie Dixon song, he claims not to be, but believes the signs anyway: “Well, I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail…”

Stevie Wonder has a different take: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…”

Sam Harris writes, “Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die.” The same thing, perhaps, applies to metaphysics.

Metaphysics can be a slippery word these days. “Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.” (Wikipedia) But Harris (ibid.) lists it along with mythology and sectarian dogma.

While it is true that probably all religions are filled with mythology and sectarian dogma, they do not all approach metaphysics like magic – and it seems to me, from experience, that metaphysics, at some level, is inseparable from the contemplative life.

[W]hen we look closely, we can’t find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. These are both deeply counterintuitive outcomes, and this is where the mystery of consciousness starts bumping up against other mysteries of the universe.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all. When we view our own experience of consciousness as being “along for the ride,” we suddenly find it easier to imagine that other systems are accompanied by consciousness as well. It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism. If the various behaviors of animals can be accompanied by consciousness, why not the reaction of plants to light—or the spin of electrons, for that matter? Perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. It sounds crazy, but … it’s worth posing the question.

Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Sam Harris again,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion

Things that seem very strange at first glimpse (like Willie Dixon’s black cat) may turn out on closer examination to make an uncommon degree of sense. Annaka Harris (op cit.) quotes a personal communication from Rebecca Goldstein to the effect that, “[c]onsciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.”

If matter is, as it seems, fundamental to existence, or at least to the material universe, and if it is in some way intrinsically conscious, then Paul Tillich’s conception of God as “ground of being” (being-itself rather than a supreme being among, or above, other beings – as the apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides (Acts 17:28), “[f]or in him we live and move and have our being”) seems inescapable. Only, as Tillich himself suggests, we may then have to give up using the word “God”.

There is, it seems, no way to “fall out of” being. If being itself entails consciousness, then even to say that individual consciousness ceases at death is, to say the least, problematic. And in any case, our conventional sense of an individual self is an illusion, as contemplatives throughout history have discovered. It is only a fiction of convenience, a way for the mind to locate itself, for a moment, in the body of which it is aware. (See Susan Blackmore’s wonderful book Seeing Myself for the correspondence of contemplative and neuroscientific insights here.)

It ain’t necessary to be superstitious: the belief in things we don’t understand turns out to be a mistake. There is enough wonder in what is.

#AnnakaHarris #awareness #contemplative #PaulTillich #practice #RebeccaGoldstein #SamHarris #StPaul #StevieWonder #SusanBlackmore #unknowing #WillieDixon

Am I conscious now?

Susan Blackmore (Zen and the Art of Consciousness) asks the question, as a kind of koan, “Am I conscious now?”

It’s a good question. Am I? Have I been?

We must all be familiar with the sensation of listening to a favourite piece of music, and suddenly realising we’ve missed the best bit – the key change we love, the beginning of the bridge, whatever it is. We’ve been listening out for it, anticipating it, but when it comes our mind has wandered off into some fantasy, some memory, or a bird passing the window has caught our attention, and it is gone. Where? Were we aware of it?

Or we are meditating, paying attention to what is happening now, and we become aware (Blackmore uses this example herself, but I have had the identical experience many times) of a sound in the street outside. How long has it been going on? When we notice it, it has not just begun. And yet when we notice it, we are aware that we were aware of it already. It’s been going on for several seconds, quite distinctly, but we didn’t exactly notice. Now we do, and we remember, if that’s the right word, that it was happening already. Were we conscious then?

Here we are. For a moment, our whole attention is on now. Oh, the delicious freshness of it! We’re not remembering: we’re hearing it, feeling it, now! All that is, is now. There is nothing else. What else could there be?

Blackmore mentions Daniel Dennett’s objection to Cartesian dualism (which roughly states that there’s an I, sitting in here looking at a that, which is out there somewhere). But where is this I? There’s nowhere in the physical brain that could correspond to an I, no locus of consciousness, nor is there anywhere an incorporeal self (soul) could plug into the soggy assemblage of neurons between our ears. Dennett suggests rather that consciousness consists of “multiple drafts”. Blackmore writes (ibid.) “Dennett describes the self as a ‘benign user illusion’, and replaces the theatre with his theory of ‘multiple drafts’. According to this theory, the brain processes events in multiple ways, all in parallel and in different versions. None of the drafts is ‘in consciousness’ or ‘outside consciousness’; they appear so only when the system is probed in some way, such as by provoking a response or asking a question. Only then is one of the many drafts taken as what the person must have been conscious of. This is why he claims that ‘There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes.’”

This makes more sense. Perhaps the light of attention picks out one or another draft, falls on one or another as the object of attention. But whose attention? Another draft’s attention? It’s all very puzzling.

But that moment. Now! That moment. There there is no sense of a shifting light of attention. There is only now. It has all come together in an instant, literally. This instant, now!

Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps there is something here not susceptible of analysis. The bright instant is itself, represents no thing. It seems to rest in the ground of being directly, an isness that is only itself. Perhaps it is only light.

#awareness #contemplative #DanielDennett #illumination #isness #practice #SusanBlackmore #unknowing

Atheism and contemplation

As I suggested yesterday, there will be those who feel that these words don’t sit comfortably with only a conjunction between them, but that isn’t what I wanted to write about.

Contemplative practice is, though patently a spiritual activity, not necessarily a religious one. Many contemplatives, especially within the Abrahamic religions, have lost their good name, their freedom, and sometimes their lives – witness Meister Eckhart and Mansur Al-Hallaj, for instance. Even religions founded on contemplative insights, like Buddhism, all too often regarded the practice itself as best confined to those under monastic vows.

Susan Blackmore (a patron, incidentally, of Humanists UK) has this to say:

So I looked very hard into what it’s like to be me and I found no answer. The very thing that the science of consciousness is trying to explain, disintegrated on closer inspection.

When I stare into the face of arising experiences, I find that the whole idea of there being a me, a ‘what it’s like to be me now’, and a stream of experiences I am having, falls apart.

It falls apart, first, because there is no persisting me to ask about. Whenever I look for one, there seems to be a me, but these selves are fleeting and temporary. They arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. In any self-reflective moment I can say that I am experiencing this, or that, but with every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it. A moment later that is gone and a different self, with a different perspective, pops up. When not reflecting on self, it is impossible to say whether there is anyone experiencing anything or not.

It falls apart, second, because there is no theatre of the mind in which conscious experiences happen. Experience, when examined closely, is not the show on our personal stage that the illusion has us imagine. Sensations, perceptions and thoughts come and go, sometimes in sequences but often in parallel. They are ephemeral scraps, lasting only so long as they are held in play, not unified and organised, not happening in definite times and places, not happening in order for a continuing observer. It is impossible to say which ones are, or were, ‘in consciousness’ and which not.

This is a contemplative insight par excellence. Blackmore herself came to it, as the title of the book from which these paragraphs are borrowed, Zen and the Art of Consciousness, suggests, through years of practice.

For many of us, the beginnings of insights like Susan Blackmore’s come occasionally in rare moments of stillness, lost in nature or confronted with great art. But they are generally fleeting, and attempts to note them down all too often are found incomprehensible when we look at them later. Blackmore again:

Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness.

More difficult may be to find a practice distinct from a religious one which is yet coherent and durable. Susan Blackmore seems to have ended up with something very similar to traditional Rinzai Zen kōan practice; I have found myself with one nearly indistinguishable from Sōtō Zen shikantaza. But there are many others, from various Buddhist traditions, from Advaita Vedanta, from Christian centering prayer, that can provide us with a framework of practice that is not inextricable from its mythic or metaphysical background. What matters is keeping on.

#atheism #awakening #consciousness #contemplative #MansurAlHallaj #MeisterEckhart #practice #religion #SusanBlackmore

Atheism and consciousness

What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

(Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction)

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.

(Wikipedia)

Confronted with the luminous intricacies of being human, it is easy to see why dualism is so attractive to us. It not only allows us to ignore the issue of how brains might produce consciousness – in this view they don’t, not directly at least – but a separate, detachable, immaterial self can transcend a finite human life span, go off on out-of-body adventures, communicate mind-to-mind, and all manner of other handy things. But what could it be, this supernatural plug-in person? Of what could it be constituted, and by whom or what? How could the data connection function between it and the physical brain? These questions are at least as hard as trying to understand how that brain might give rise to subjective experience – much harder perhaps, it seems to me.

We know from tragic cases of brain injury, disease, and surgical intervention just how profoundly consciousness, and the sense of self, are affected by gross changes to the physical structure of the brain (Blackmore,  ibid., pp. 25ff.). It seems obvious to me then, as a layman, that my own subjectivity is, after all, a result – however subtle – of electrochemical processes within my own nervous system, and that when those processes cease, as they will when I die, so that subjectivity will cease also.

But this is not a crude oversimplification, nor a bad thing in itself. It is just how things are, to the best of our understanding. The human brain is a structure of mind-boggling intricacy (it is estimated that there are around 86 billion neurons in the average brain, each neuron of which connects to about 1,000 others). It seems to me entirely feasible that the human personality and consciousness could arise from such vast computing power. But how this comes about remains, still, the mystery.

I take it to be axiomatic, therefore, that our notions of meaning, morality, and value presuppose the actuality of consciousness (or its loss) somewhere. If anyone has a conception of meaning, morality, and value that has nothing to do with the experience of conscious beings, in this world or in a world to come, I have yet to hear of it. And it would seem that such a conception of value could hold no interest for anyone, by definition, because it would be guaranteed to be outside the experience of every conscious being, now and in the future.

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious beliefs, but it does offer a deep foundation for a contemplative life. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

(Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion)

This is one of the things that contemplative practice so clearly demonstrates: all that we know, or feel, or perceive, takes place in consciousness. In choiceless awareness all things can be seen directly to arise in consciousness: the rising and falling of my chest, the warm cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees behind the garden, an idea for a blog post, the grumble of a bus leaving the stop outside the gate, the ache in my knee. All these and more appear in consciousness – where else could they appear? – and my only connection with them is in that appearing. Even the ones that affect me directly, like the breeze through the open window, that is beginning to cool as evening comes on, I only know about as their effects on me – my cooling skin – appear in my awareness.

To remain still, not seeking or holding, within the bright field of awareness, the isness of all that arises in my mind is not other than the isness of things in themselves: the open ground in which things arise, and pass.

#consciousness #contemplative #death #illumination #philosophy #practice #SamHarris #stillness #SusanBlackmore #Wikipedia

Humanism and spirituality

It is all too easy to find arguments that spirituality is too compromised a word to be used in the context of any discussion of humanism, or indeed atheism. As Marilyn Mason writes,

To sum up, “spiritual” and “spirituality” almost always require explanation if they are to communicate clearly, and so I think that it would be better to abandon them altogether, and leave them to the religious. If we are really talking about emotions or emotional development or emotional literacy, or aesthetic awareness or experiences, or love of nature or humanity, or love and goodness, or hope, why just not say so?

On the other hand, many would argue that spirituality is far too useful a word to be discarded merely because it has uncomfortable associations for some people. Jeremy Rodell:

Even if we accept that Humanists have a “spiritual dimension”, it can still be argued that we shouldn’t use the word “spiritual” because of its religious connotations and lack of clear definition.

The snag is that no other word will do as well if we want to communicate what we mean. Terms such as emotion, aesthetic awareness, love of nature, or simply love, goodness or hope simply don’t do the job. Just because it’s used for everything from the experiences of Catholic nuns to New Age gurus, doesn’t mean it’s off-limits to us. In fact atheists are uniquely positioned to understand that all of these people are really talking about the same thing, but they interpret it through the filter of their (to us irrational) beliefs. We shouldn’t allow the religious to ban a useful word from our vocabulary.

André Comte-Sponville believes that it is vital to reclaim the word:

Spirituality is far too important a matter to be left to fundamentalists. Tolerance is far too precious a possession to be confused with indifference or laxity. Nothing could be worse than letting ourselves be deadlocked into a confrontation between the fanaticism of some – no matter what religion they lay claim to – and the nihilism of others. Far better to combat both, without either conflating them or falling into their respective traps. The name of this combat is the separation of church and state. It remains for atheists to invent the spirituality that goes with it…

Atheists have as much spirit as everyone else; why would they be less interested in spiritual life?

The purpose of this blog is, as its subtitle suggests, to discuss contemplative spirituality and practice, so you would expect me to come down on the side of retaining such a useful word. But there is a more important reason to be writing this post, I think.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted here often before, writes:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

Later in the same book, he continues:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Susan Blackmore (an atheist and patron of Humanists UK) has written an excellent little book, Consciousness, A Very Short Introduction, where she puts her finger on precisely the point at issue here:

What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

This is the question which underlies all my own searching, and while I am delighted to leave the neuroscience to the professionals – like Blackmore and Harris – those of us who have devoted a large part of our lives to contemplative practice need to offer our small contributions, from the inside, as it were. It is not only relevant, I think, to contribute our moments of vastness and wonder, but to bear witness to the daily process of insight that our steady work entails.

Earlier this year I wrote,

Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it…

The practice of choiceless awareness… that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either…

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow… that someone is prepared to do this, and perhaps to ‘fess up to doing it on a regular basis. Maybe someone has to…

#AndréComteSponville #atheism #consciousness #contemplative #JeremyRodell #language #MarylinMason #philosophy #SamHarris #SusanBlackmore

A window on what is

I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

#AldousHuxley #contemplative #DanielDennett #DonaldHoffman #ErwinSchrödinger #hesychasm #nembutsu #practice #SusanBlackmore #Tao #ThomasMetzinger #unknowing #Wikipedia

Secular or supernatural?

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the word “spirituality” can seem a slippery one. For some, spirituality necessarily implies the supernatural, and our imagined relations with that realm, for good or ill. For others (myself included) it “centers on the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live'”. (Wikipedia: Spirituality)

Secular spirituality is the adherence to a spiritual philosophy without adherence to a religion. Secular spirituality emphasizes the inner peace of the individual, rather than a relationship with the divine. Secular spirituality is made up of the search for meaning outside of a religious institution; it considers one’s relationship with the self, others, nature, and whatever else one considers to be the ultimate. Often, the goal of secular spirituality is living happily and/or helping others.

According to the American philosopher Robert C. Solomon, “spirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.” [Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life]

(Wikipedia: Secular Spirituality)

So what is the supernatural, and what is wrong with seeking to establish – or recognise – relations with it? The supernatural is generally taken to imply a realm or system transcending material nature, the locale of some kind or kinds of divine, magical, or ghostly entities; revealing, or thought to reveal, some power beyond scientific or natural comprehension. There is, it seems to me, little or no evidence for such a sphere. (Susan Blackmore discusses this at length in Seeing Myself : What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind, chapters 2 and 15 especially.) But spirituality is another matter. The search for meaning, and, in contemplative practice, the direct experience of that meaning, is perhaps the most important thing I have encountered. For the umpteenth time here, I think I need to quote Sam Harris’ brilliant summary:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

The eagle-eyed among my readers will have already spotted the slightly edited strapline to this blog’s title: “Secular contemplative spirituality…” It just seemed time to make that clear.

#atheism #contemplative #humanism #RobertCSolomon #SamHarris #secularism #supernatural #SusanBlackmore #Wikipedia

Threads

This question is proving interesting, and difficult. I resolve to pursue it night and day. I have a go – asking myself from time to time, in the midst of ordinary life, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’

As I get used to the exercise, the response settles down to a pattern. I usually find several things; several candidates for things I might have been conscious of a moment ago. Sounds are the easiest bet. They hang on. They take time. When I light upon them, they always seem to have been going on for some time, and it feels as though I have been conscious of them. There is the sound of the cars outside in the distance. There’s the ticking of the clock. There’s the beating of my own heart. And then – oh goodness me – how could I have ignored that. There’s my breath. Surely I have been watching my breath, haven’t I?

Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness

I’m sure that, in a sense, this is a familiar enough experience for most of us: to suddenly become aware, in the midst of practice, especially, of an ongoing sound – a clock chiming, a cat purring (both examples from Blackmore’s book) – coupled with the realisation that it has been going on for some time already. But when? When did we become aware? At the first stroke of the clock? Or when we noticed it, say at four strokes? If it was the former, why hadn’t it been the focus of the conscious mind? If the latter, what was going on before we noticed?

There is no answer, says [Daniel] Dennett. There is simply no way in which one could ever tell. Looking inside the brain won’t tell you, for the signals were being processed in the relevant bits of brain whichever way you describe it, and asking the person won’t tell you because she doesn’t know either. So it’s a difference that makes no difference. And what should we do with a difference that makes no difference? Forget it; accept that there is no answer to the question ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’ Can that really be right? …

[W]hen I look, I can find at least one, and often many, threads of things that I might have been conscious of a moment ago but which seem to have had no connection with each other. Who then was conscious of them? Surely someone was because they have that quality of having been listened to, having been stared at, having been felt or smelt or tasted – by someone. Was it me? Unless there were several mes at once, then no. Or is it that I am split up in reverse; that going backwards I can find lots of routes to the past? This is how it seems. Threads is the right word. From any point – from any now – I can look back and find these myriad threads. They feel perfectly real. They feel as though I was listening to that blackbird’s song, that drone of traffic, that distant hammering somewhere up the hill, the purring cat beside me. But each one has this peculiar quality…

I can go round and round, starting with the middle of the view out there, working in carefully towards myself in the centre, and there I find only the same old view, to start all over again. How did that happen? I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. It’s a familiar enough trick, but easily forgotten. Look for the viewing self and find only the view. I am, it seems, the world I see.

Blackmore, ibid.

That, of course, is the crux of all this, the unimaginable but undeniable Istigkeit that we always try not to see: there is no self remembering, no inner seamstress patterning the threads. There is the living loveliness of just what is, nothing more. What is arises of itself, comes to be because that is what it is. Light strikes the water, sparkling instants. Mind perceives. Thoughts think themselves. Everything is as it is, acts according to itself. What else could it be? There is only what is, clear and pure as a raindrop on the window of – what? – mind? Only what is. That is all there is.

#awakening #awareness #consciousness #contemplative #DanielDennett #SusanBlackmore