So I've been interviewing for a faculty job here in Tallahassee, and the weather has been rather chilly. Apparently this is unusual as all the locals are complaining about it as well. It's not any warmer here than it was in London. But at least the day is longer. It's nice to at least get a little sunlight.
The interview seems to be going reasonably well. At least I don't think I've said anything too stupid, and my talk seemed to come off OK. Its nice to interview at a place where someone is actively pulling for me. In principle they were pulling for me at Liverpool, but I don't know how committed any of the Liverpool folks really were to the idea of getting me up there. Peter certainly seems to be actively gunning for me and its nice to feel like I might be a bit of a front runner. Time will tell I guess, and time is going to be a bit slow. I probably won't hear anything until the end of Feb at the earliest.
The department is interesting. It's a huge physics department here with several interdisciplinary splinters. They all seem quite upbeat about building an Astrophysics group. I've also had about 6 different people tell me that the department is very 'collegiate'. Apparently it has become a part of the group mythology and is probably therefore a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. Even Peter has become a bit of an optimist. He'd probably be really happy if his wife wasn't making quite a bit of misery in his non-professional life.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Snow, Mist, Streams, Spirit and Shadow
It snowed in London last night! Or at least that's my perspective. Actually, looking out the window right now a bit after noon you can't really tell anymore, but when I left home at 7 AM this morning there was about an inch of slushy snow on the ground. Riding in on the tube this morning all the buildings had a lovely coat of snow. It snarled up the trains this morning though. I didn't get caught in it, but it's never a good sign when five or six lines are showing delays and partial closures!
Meanwhile, I finished reading Traleg Kyabgon's book The Essence of Buddhism last night. Yikes! I can't say that I'm all that much clearer on what the "essence" of Buddhism is. The book claims to be trying to present a historical overview of the various schools of (primarily Tibetan) Buddhism and it's practice and philosophy. I guess I got some sense of this, but an awful lot of the book seems like endless lists of various types or levels or stages of things, all labeled in sanskrit or tibetan (or both).
The book gives the impression that Buddhism is obsessed with counting things. We start, predictably enough with the "Four Noble Truths" and the "Eightfold Noble Path", but then we quickly get mired in lists of the 6 practices of this, and the seven limbs of that and the 10 stages of the other thing. Often these lists even break down into sublists. And very often there is no notion of meaning to any of this. It's just geography and place-names if you will.
The book is also very slippery on the distinction between 'reality' and 'metaphor', although it seems to make the point that there is a lot of disagreement about that in the various Buddhist schools. Apparently they all agree that 'Emptiness' is 'real'... whatever that means, but the rest seems to be a matter of discussion. Anyway, generally this book seems more confusing than helpful. My understanding of Buddhism is as misty as it was before I read the book... perhaps even more so.
I had a discussion with Sunshine last night about what sort of meaning, if any, I should be gleaning from this meditation business. It's quite a squishy question actually, particularly if you're trying to work from a post-metaphysical perspective.
It seems to me a rather dicy business to try and attach meaning to things in general, now that I think about it. In the physical sciences, we perform experiments (injunctions) and then try to fit the resulting data (experiences) into some sort of model for what is actually happening in "the real world." But "the real world" seems to be a somewhat naive and outdated concept, which is subject to some of the same kinds of metaphysical assertions that fill old-world religion, albeit working from a tenet of 'verification' rather than faith. The verification aspect is indeed an improvement on the truths of simple blind faith, but the metaphysical assertion slips in when we make a materialist claim about what it is that we've verified.
But from a post-metaphysical perspective, what we are doing in the physical sciences is not building models that explain what is happening in the real world. Rather, we are building models which describe the results of experiments and provide a framework for understanding the relationship between those experiments. But we're not actually describing the real world, because we have no access to it. Furthermore, quarks, (if they exist) no nothing of quantum field theory. Physics doesn't exist in the real world, it exists in our heads and in our textbooks, and in our culture. Newton and Einstein didn't change the way apples fell out of trees, they just invented new ways to think about apples and how they like to fall out of trees. The apple and the tree couldn't care less.
In fact, we can't even know for sure that they exist, or if they do what their 'true nature' is. We can take a group of physicists to an orchard and show them apples and trees, and then bring them together and have them discuss things. They will all likely agree that apples are red, or maybe green (depending on the orchard), that they grow on trees, that they can fall off the trees, etc. But what this means is that the experiment is repeatable. That the scientists are working from a sufficiently similar perspectives and that these injunctions do bring forth experiences that when coupled with the similar perspectives are coherent enough to build a common framework or story. But they might not all be able to agree that apples are tasty. If one is colorblind then he won't be able to say if the apples are red or green. And if you bring a bunch of zen monks and ask them what the true nature of the apples is they will agree that it's 'mu', or 'emptiness' or somesuch.
And thus we arrive at Wilber's Integral Post-Metaphysics. What is true are the perspective/injuction/experience combinations. That's what where we can have fruitful discussions. That's what is repeatable and testable. The 'reality' is that there are these injunctions that humans can perform to bring forth experiences and if these humans have sufficiently similar perspectives (in the full AQAL sense) then they can have a meaningful conversation.. They can build a framework in that shared perspective which places the injunction/experience in context with other such experiments, and they can even make predictions based on that framework. If the predictions prove true, (new injunctions performed, new experiences brought forth and found to be consistent with the framework of that perspective), then the framework (theory) is a good one (at least until a contradiction is found). He has integrated the postmodern observation that meaning or reality or perception is always context based. The meditators tell us that even the nature of our own true mind is hidden from us. "I think, I am" is still true, but "what I am" is a very different question and appears to be context dependent.
However, where we can get into trouble is trying to apply the framework outside the parameters that define it's existence. The framework is a creation of both the AQAL address of the injunction and those of it's creators. Where we cross the line is by using the framework to make assertions about the truth value of concepts which aren't subject to the same perspectives. Thus, Newtonian gravity predicts false things when applied to strong gravity fields, but that's just the simple case. Biology won't tell you anything about whether a dog has an eternal soul, and can't. The idea of a 'soul' doesn't exist in the worldspace of modern biology. It is entirely an entity of the mind, or at least it is as far as anyone can tell.
So if we get our sense of meaning for things and events from a complicated mess of culture, society, individual preference, developmental history, etc., this necessarily means that life on the leading edge of human development is going to be a fairly 'meaningless' existence. Or, at least, if you are going to study parts of the Kosmos from a sparsely populated perspective/subject combination, then you are going to have to do a lot of the hard work of supplying the meaning for yourself.
Frank Visser, in his "take on Wilber-5" complains that he liked the old ladder metaphor for transcendent evolution rather than the waves and streams metaphor what Wilber has adopted in his more recent writings. The reason is that he says that climbing a ladder is work and transcendence is hard work as well, and that the stream metaphor implies that you can just coast along and get to where you are. I think that maybe both metaphors are right, because I don't think transcendent growth is always hard. Lazarus is growing and developing by great leaps and bounds, and while it is physically hard, he isn't trying to grow up, he just is. I think at the beginning we really do get carried along in much of our transcendent evolution, at first by our physical body, by our genetic programming, and then by our culture and our environment.
For example, you have to be pretty divorced from society to grow up in a western culture and not at least have a partial cognitive understanding of the idea of biological evolution or Big Bang cosmology. Your religious beliefs may keep you from believing that these things are 'true', but you pretty much need to have been living under a rock not to have heard of them. Why do creationists want to abolish these ideas from schools? Because these ideas act to drag their children up the ladder of cognitive evolution into post-mythic regions, and then that sets up a potential internal conflict between their worldview and their religion.
To take a fundamentalist mythic-literal view on the Bible as God's absolute literal truth and still live in the modern world requires a sort of mental shell game. You have to rely on a carefully honed selective ignorance to ignore the fact that the same science that gives us evolution also gives us naval oranges and locust resistant corn. The same science that tells us the Earth is 4.6 billion years old also keeps our clocks running in sync. If you want to believe in a flat Earth, how do you explain jet-lag other than by pretending it doesn't exist? But this is just another example of misapplying frameworks isn't it? Christianity gets into trouble when in makes assertions about the reality of the physical universe, and particularly where those assertions are in conflict with right hand empirical science. And the reason is that verification is a fundamentally better methodology than pure faith and metaphysical assertion. You just have to be careful about what you are verifying.
So in that sense, Wilber's later metaphors of streams, and most recently a conveyer belt, seem fairly apt. However, once you reach the bulk-average level of your culture it stops pulling you up. In fact, then your cultural environment and background probably pull you down. Now transcendence is hard, because you have to start breaking ties with the very things that helped you up in the first place. Now your cultural truths become cultural baggage. You need to cut ties with your old culture and reach out to the new one at the next level. Worse, if you are relatively advanced, up at green or in the lower second-tier, then when you reach up to the next level, you find there's not much there to grab on to. As Wilber says, back at red and amber, the stream is like the grand canyon, but up at turquoise it's a trickle and not very far ahead people are drawing lines in the sand with sticks.
So, back to the conversation with Sunshine. Here I am, trying to operate on a second-tier turquoise-ish level, and understand what I'm doing with this meditation business. I'm trying to integrate it into my own framework. I have Ken Wilber's AQAL map, but as he himself would likely admit, it's a pretty empty map in itself. So where can I look for meaning? The ILP starter kit has lots of discussion of practice, but really not all that much of meaning. They tell me how to meditate, and indeed, it seems to work, or at least it's had interesting effects so far. But what am I to make of these effects, and where should I enquire?
(An observation: If nothing else, this meditation stuff seems to have kicked off a epistemological storm in my brain! Good grief these entries are getting long! And now back to our program... )
So, Sunshine told me last night that maybe I was asking the wrong person (her), and maybe I should be asking Big Mind, since I was so chummy with him. Well, there's a thought. Maybe some of the "meaning" comes from the experiences themselves. Certainly, at least in many of the so-called wisdom traditions Spirit is thought to have a consciousness that is Other and can be communed with. Maybe I'm confused because I haven't asked God what it's all about. But here I may run into difficulty, as I'm not really sure that I believe that God exists. In fact, I probably don't, and that tends to put a bit of a damper on the conversation.
When I wrote in my last entry that I asked questions of Big Mind and got the chatty answer "Nope", the answer was chatty because I was supplying both sides of the conversation. I had a first-person apprehension of Big Mind, emptiness, etc, but that was the point. It was first person. Spirit in the first person. I am Big Mind and so I just looked around, felt what Big Mind felt like, and decided that Big Mind didn't need anything. This was subjective, not intersubjective. It was a monologue with spirit.
It seems that I actually have a fair distrust of the idea of manifest second-person spirit. This idea of Deity is uncomfortable and even irritating and on many levels and for a variety of reasons. It is a much more difficult thing to accept than the idea of 3rd-person spirit. 3rd-person spirit is easy to accept, because it doesn't intrude on the ego. It's non-threatening. It's like The Force. "It surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the universe together" but it doesn't seem to mean much. It just becomes a name you give to acknowledge the beauty of the world.
And what about this notion of spirit in the first-person. Well, OK, now we are beginning to intrude on something potentially more alien. If you are going to start having apprehensions of 1st-person spirit then it is going to impinge on your reality more that 3rd-person spirit. If it's first-person then it must be directly accessible. But even that can be subsumed again by calling it metaphor mixed with altered states. Second-person spirit is the hardest to place into a materialist worldview, because it requires the sense of a conscious other. Still, one can potentially imagine psychological conditions that would produce such an illusion.
But see here where my thoughts habitually like to take me? Right to flatland. Straight to scientific materialism. My mind does not like to abide in the notion of Deity because it smacks too much of the amber level Christian mythos. Wilber's psychological model includes a spiritual developmental stream, and mine seems to be very orange, with perhaps a bit of green manifesting as poetic appreciation for spirit as an abstract idea. Worse, it seems like it's a somewhat pathological orange. The idea of spirituality is even embarrassing. It feels like gullibility.
Again and again the ego crops up as afraid of spirituality. I dislike the notion of 2nd-person Deity and the inevitable surrender that must come with it. I distrust religion, particularly dogmatic religion for both it's conservative negation of the individual, and it's ceding of moral authority to the collective. My ego fears rejection from my peers should I admit to an interest in spirit. This smacks rather of a developmental line disorder. My response to the concept of Deity seems out of proportion to the stimulus, and suggests that there is shadow at work here.
The orange "pressure cooker" that Wilber describes in Integral Spirituality certainly seems to have stuck me well and truly with an orange spirituality, i.e. a scientific materialist atheism which seems to be valiantly trying to struggle to a pluralistic green agnosticism. I can see a way up to green spirit at least, in the notion of the perpetually sliding contexts of postmodernism. The fact that reality is context driven means that God could quite effectively hide from sight simply because I have no context for seeing him. Thus the question of whether spirit 'exists' becomes unanswerable in any universal sense because the meaning of 'exist' and 'spirit' are context driven. The thing is I don't see the path out of that deeply agnostic perspective, at least not yet.
Hmm... and maybe that is the context I've been searching for right there. I can bring forth the experiences, but the meaning thereof seems to elude me. But how is it that zen describes emptiness? It is ungraspable. In the foreword to The Eye of Spirit, which I was reading today, when Jack Crittenden is describing Wilber's methodology of integrating via orienting generalizations, he says:
And what is the harm? If I am to truly seek an integral version of spirituality, it must, by that very definition fit into framework that respects the rest of my worldview. Why worry so much about whether the experience is grounded in 'reality' or is simply a 'mental exercise'. Is meaning any less if it is metaphor? Why do I feed the fear of the ego? Am I afraid of being naive? What is that but simply egotism and vanity? Why cling desperately to the rational? What is this attachment to a 'reality' that is demonstrably illusory and contextual. What is this fear of faith and surrender? Let go Luke! Jump! Jump! Take the leap because it doesn't matter either way anyway! If the world is without spirit then all I have to lose is pride, and that is nothing worth clinging to.
And so, I guess I will try. I will try to abandon this attachment to what is 'real'. I will let go of logic in this respect and let meaning find it's own path. Jeez... it's so very Zen, but there you are. Time to step off.
Meanwhile, I finished reading Traleg Kyabgon's book The Essence of Buddhism last night. Yikes! I can't say that I'm all that much clearer on what the "essence" of Buddhism is. The book claims to be trying to present a historical overview of the various schools of (primarily Tibetan) Buddhism and it's practice and philosophy. I guess I got some sense of this, but an awful lot of the book seems like endless lists of various types or levels or stages of things, all labeled in sanskrit or tibetan (or both).
The book gives the impression that Buddhism is obsessed with counting things. We start, predictably enough with the "Four Noble Truths" and the "Eightfold Noble Path", but then we quickly get mired in lists of the 6 practices of this, and the seven limbs of that and the 10 stages of the other thing. Often these lists even break down into sublists. And very often there is no notion of meaning to any of this. It's just geography and place-names if you will.
The book is also very slippery on the distinction between 'reality' and 'metaphor', although it seems to make the point that there is a lot of disagreement about that in the various Buddhist schools. Apparently they all agree that 'Emptiness' is 'real'... whatever that means, but the rest seems to be a matter of discussion. Anyway, generally this book seems more confusing than helpful. My understanding of Buddhism is as misty as it was before I read the book... perhaps even more so.
I had a discussion with Sunshine last night about what sort of meaning, if any, I should be gleaning from this meditation business. It's quite a squishy question actually, particularly if you're trying to work from a post-metaphysical perspective.
It seems to me a rather dicy business to try and attach meaning to things in general, now that I think about it. In the physical sciences, we perform experiments (injunctions) and then try to fit the resulting data (experiences) into some sort of model for what is actually happening in "the real world." But "the real world" seems to be a somewhat naive and outdated concept, which is subject to some of the same kinds of metaphysical assertions that fill old-world religion, albeit working from a tenet of 'verification' rather than faith. The verification aspect is indeed an improvement on the truths of simple blind faith, but the metaphysical assertion slips in when we make a materialist claim about what it is that we've verified.
But from a post-metaphysical perspective, what we are doing in the physical sciences is not building models that explain what is happening in the real world. Rather, we are building models which describe the results of experiments and provide a framework for understanding the relationship between those experiments. But we're not actually describing the real world, because we have no access to it. Furthermore, quarks, (if they exist) no nothing of quantum field theory. Physics doesn't exist in the real world, it exists in our heads and in our textbooks, and in our culture. Newton and Einstein didn't change the way apples fell out of trees, they just invented new ways to think about apples and how they like to fall out of trees. The apple and the tree couldn't care less.
In fact, we can't even know for sure that they exist, or if they do what their 'true nature' is. We can take a group of physicists to an orchard and show them apples and trees, and then bring them together and have them discuss things. They will all likely agree that apples are red, or maybe green (depending on the orchard), that they grow on trees, that they can fall off the trees, etc. But what this means is that the experiment is repeatable. That the scientists are working from a sufficiently similar perspectives and that these injunctions do bring forth experiences that when coupled with the similar perspectives are coherent enough to build a common framework or story. But they might not all be able to agree that apples are tasty. If one is colorblind then he won't be able to say if the apples are red or green. And if you bring a bunch of zen monks and ask them what the true nature of the apples is they will agree that it's 'mu', or 'emptiness' or somesuch.
And thus we arrive at Wilber's Integral Post-Metaphysics. What is true are the perspective/injuction/experience combinations. That's what where we can have fruitful discussions. That's what is repeatable and testable. The 'reality' is that there are these injunctions that humans can perform to bring forth experiences and if these humans have sufficiently similar perspectives (in the full AQAL sense) then they can have a meaningful conversation.. They can build a framework in that shared perspective which places the injunction/experience in context with other such experiments, and they can even make predictions based on that framework. If the predictions prove true, (new injunctions performed, new experiences brought forth and found to be consistent with the framework of that perspective), then the framework (theory) is a good one (at least until a contradiction is found). He has integrated the postmodern observation that meaning or reality or perception is always context based. The meditators tell us that even the nature of our own true mind is hidden from us. "I think, I am" is still true, but "what I am" is a very different question and appears to be context dependent.
However, where we can get into trouble is trying to apply the framework outside the parameters that define it's existence. The framework is a creation of both the AQAL address of the injunction and those of it's creators. Where we cross the line is by using the framework to make assertions about the truth value of concepts which aren't subject to the same perspectives. Thus, Newtonian gravity predicts false things when applied to strong gravity fields, but that's just the simple case. Biology won't tell you anything about whether a dog has an eternal soul, and can't. The idea of a 'soul' doesn't exist in the worldspace of modern biology. It is entirely an entity of the mind, or at least it is as far as anyone can tell.
So if we get our sense of meaning for things and events from a complicated mess of culture, society, individual preference, developmental history, etc., this necessarily means that life on the leading edge of human development is going to be a fairly 'meaningless' existence. Or, at least, if you are going to study parts of the Kosmos from a sparsely populated perspective/subject combination, then you are going to have to do a lot of the hard work of supplying the meaning for yourself.
Frank Visser, in his "take on Wilber-5" complains that he liked the old ladder metaphor for transcendent evolution rather than the waves and streams metaphor what Wilber has adopted in his more recent writings. The reason is that he says that climbing a ladder is work and transcendence is hard work as well, and that the stream metaphor implies that you can just coast along and get to where you are. I think that maybe both metaphors are right, because I don't think transcendent growth is always hard. Lazarus is growing and developing by great leaps and bounds, and while it is physically hard, he isn't trying to grow up, he just is. I think at the beginning we really do get carried along in much of our transcendent evolution, at first by our physical body, by our genetic programming, and then by our culture and our environment.
For example, you have to be pretty divorced from society to grow up in a western culture and not at least have a partial cognitive understanding of the idea of biological evolution or Big Bang cosmology. Your religious beliefs may keep you from believing that these things are 'true', but you pretty much need to have been living under a rock not to have heard of them. Why do creationists want to abolish these ideas from schools? Because these ideas act to drag their children up the ladder of cognitive evolution into post-mythic regions, and then that sets up a potential internal conflict between their worldview and their religion.
To take a fundamentalist mythic-literal view on the Bible as God's absolute literal truth and still live in the modern world requires a sort of mental shell game. You have to rely on a carefully honed selective ignorance to ignore the fact that the same science that gives us evolution also gives us naval oranges and locust resistant corn. The same science that tells us the Earth is 4.6 billion years old also keeps our clocks running in sync. If you want to believe in a flat Earth, how do you explain jet-lag other than by pretending it doesn't exist? But this is just another example of misapplying frameworks isn't it? Christianity gets into trouble when in makes assertions about the reality of the physical universe, and particularly where those assertions are in conflict with right hand empirical science. And the reason is that verification is a fundamentally better methodology than pure faith and metaphysical assertion. You just have to be careful about what you are verifying.
So in that sense, Wilber's later metaphors of streams, and most recently a conveyer belt, seem fairly apt. However, once you reach the bulk-average level of your culture it stops pulling you up. In fact, then your cultural environment and background probably pull you down. Now transcendence is hard, because you have to start breaking ties with the very things that helped you up in the first place. Now your cultural truths become cultural baggage. You need to cut ties with your old culture and reach out to the new one at the next level. Worse, if you are relatively advanced, up at green or in the lower second-tier, then when you reach up to the next level, you find there's not much there to grab on to. As Wilber says, back at red and amber, the stream is like the grand canyon, but up at turquoise it's a trickle and not very far ahead people are drawing lines in the sand with sticks.
So, back to the conversation with Sunshine. Here I am, trying to operate on a second-tier turquoise-ish level, and understand what I'm doing with this meditation business. I'm trying to integrate it into my own framework. I have Ken Wilber's AQAL map, but as he himself would likely admit, it's a pretty empty map in itself. So where can I look for meaning? The ILP starter kit has lots of discussion of practice, but really not all that much of meaning. They tell me how to meditate, and indeed, it seems to work, or at least it's had interesting effects so far. But what am I to make of these effects, and where should I enquire?
(An observation: If nothing else, this meditation stuff seems to have kicked off a epistemological storm in my brain! Good grief these entries are getting long! And now back to our program... )
So, Sunshine told me last night that maybe I was asking the wrong person (her), and maybe I should be asking Big Mind, since I was so chummy with him. Well, there's a thought. Maybe some of the "meaning" comes from the experiences themselves. Certainly, at least in many of the so-called wisdom traditions Spirit is thought to have a consciousness that is Other and can be communed with. Maybe I'm confused because I haven't asked God what it's all about. But here I may run into difficulty, as I'm not really sure that I believe that God exists. In fact, I probably don't, and that tends to put a bit of a damper on the conversation.
When I wrote in my last entry that I asked questions of Big Mind and got the chatty answer "Nope", the answer was chatty because I was supplying both sides of the conversation. I had a first-person apprehension of Big Mind, emptiness, etc, but that was the point. It was first person. Spirit in the first person. I am Big Mind and so I just looked around, felt what Big Mind felt like, and decided that Big Mind didn't need anything. This was subjective, not intersubjective. It was a monologue with spirit.
It seems that I actually have a fair distrust of the idea of manifest second-person spirit. This idea of Deity is uncomfortable and even irritating and on many levels and for a variety of reasons. It is a much more difficult thing to accept than the idea of 3rd-person spirit. 3rd-person spirit is easy to accept, because it doesn't intrude on the ego. It's non-threatening. It's like The Force. "It surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the universe together" but it doesn't seem to mean much. It just becomes a name you give to acknowledge the beauty of the world.
And what about this notion of spirit in the first-person. Well, OK, now we are beginning to intrude on something potentially more alien. If you are going to start having apprehensions of 1st-person spirit then it is going to impinge on your reality more that 3rd-person spirit. If it's first-person then it must be directly accessible. But even that can be subsumed again by calling it metaphor mixed with altered states. Second-person spirit is the hardest to place into a materialist worldview, because it requires the sense of a conscious other. Still, one can potentially imagine psychological conditions that would produce such an illusion.
But see here where my thoughts habitually like to take me? Right to flatland. Straight to scientific materialism. My mind does not like to abide in the notion of Deity because it smacks too much of the amber level Christian mythos. Wilber's psychological model includes a spiritual developmental stream, and mine seems to be very orange, with perhaps a bit of green manifesting as poetic appreciation for spirit as an abstract idea. Worse, it seems like it's a somewhat pathological orange. The idea of spirituality is even embarrassing. It feels like gullibility.
Again and again the ego crops up as afraid of spirituality. I dislike the notion of 2nd-person Deity and the inevitable surrender that must come with it. I distrust religion, particularly dogmatic religion for both it's conservative negation of the individual, and it's ceding of moral authority to the collective. My ego fears rejection from my peers should I admit to an interest in spirit. This smacks rather of a developmental line disorder. My response to the concept of Deity seems out of proportion to the stimulus, and suggests that there is shadow at work here.
The orange "pressure cooker" that Wilber describes in Integral Spirituality certainly seems to have stuck me well and truly with an orange spirituality, i.e. a scientific materialist atheism which seems to be valiantly trying to struggle to a pluralistic green agnosticism. I can see a way up to green spirit at least, in the notion of the perpetually sliding contexts of postmodernism. The fact that reality is context driven means that God could quite effectively hide from sight simply because I have no context for seeing him. Thus the question of whether spirit 'exists' becomes unanswerable in any universal sense because the meaning of 'exist' and 'spirit' are context driven. The thing is I don't see the path out of that deeply agnostic perspective, at least not yet.
Hmm... and maybe that is the context I've been searching for right there. I can bring forth the experiences, but the meaning thereof seems to elude me. But how is it that zen describes emptiness? It is ungraspable. In the foreword to The Eye of Spirit, which I was reading today, when Jack Crittenden is describing Wilber's methodology of integrating via orienting generalizations, he says:
In working with any field, Wilber simply backs up to a level of abstraction at which the various conflicting approaches actually agree with one another. Take, for example, the world's great religious traditions: Do they agree that Jesus is God? No. So we must jettison that. Do they all agree that there is a God? That depends on the meaning of "God." Do they all agree on God, if by "God" we mean a Spirit that is in many ways unqualifiable...So by this definition, the integral version of spirit is that mysterious something which we can get a hint of but can't really describe or know. Spirit is the mystery itself? Hmm... well... it is at least food for thought. The stuff of contemplation. Something to try.
Yes, that works as a generalization.
And what is the harm? If I am to truly seek an integral version of spirituality, it must, by that very definition fit into framework that respects the rest of my worldview. Why worry so much about whether the experience is grounded in 'reality' or is simply a 'mental exercise'. Is meaning any less if it is metaphor? Why do I feed the fear of the ego? Am I afraid of being naive? What is that but simply egotism and vanity? Why cling desperately to the rational? What is this attachment to a 'reality' that is demonstrably illusory and contextual. What is this fear of faith and surrender? Let go Luke! Jump! Jump! Take the leap because it doesn't matter either way anyway! If the world is without spirit then all I have to lose is pride, and that is nothing worth clinging to.
And so, I guess I will try. I will try to abandon this attachment to what is 'real'. I will let go of logic in this respect and let meaning find it's own path. Jeez... it's so very Zen, but there you are. Time to step off.
Monday, January 22, 2007
New Adventures in Big Mind
Whoa!
(or however that is supposed to be spelled).
OK. Typing pretty fast as well... it seems I'm a bit inspired.
Just finished a highly successful meditation session, and I'm still a bit buzzed. I actually feel quite good, and seriously awake and aware. Anyway, I feel like I need to be journaling these meditative experiences, at least while I'm still discovering. It really does seem to make the experiences more solid, otherwise I think they would tend to fade.
After Sunshine & Laz went to sleep tonight, I read a bit and looked at the FSU physics department website. I really do hope the interview goes well this weekend and next week. Technically my interview is next week, but I'm meeting people for dinner on Sunday, so really the process starts soon after I get there. It's a huge physics department at FSU, and it's a little bit daunting. Still, I need to be brave and have confidence in myself. And not say anything too stupid and then just hope for the best. Confidence, clear minded-ness, openness, joyful, insightful... these are the things that people look for right...
Anyway, that wound me up a bit. I read a bit of this Buddhism book I've been reading, (very dense and confusing book, but more on that some other time). About 9:30 I decided to head toward bed, but before sleeping I decided to try and do a bit of breathing meditation.
Now I have been searching for a good position to meditate in. At work I can just use my chair, which is OK, but not great. Finding a good position at home has been less easy. (We don't have the most comfortable home). Last night I came across the technique of sitting at the edge of the bed and putting pillows on the floor and then sitting cross-legged with my butt on the bed and my knees on the pillow in a vaguely lotus-esque position (but a lazy one without the leg contortions which my knees aren't up too.) So that worked reasonably well last nifht, but I was too tired to meditate much without falling asleep.
Tonight worked better. I started counting breaths to 10. As I settled in there were lots of thoughts and sensations cropping up, but I just tried to keep at it. I lost count a few times, but just restarted. I couldn't tell if it was doing much, but at the very least it's a pretty relaxing exercise, and a decent way to settle the mind before going to sleep. I started to get distracted by bodily discomforts, mostly muscle pain in my back and chest and neck from sitting in this weird position, but I just kept on counting through them or starting over if I got distracted. Then after a while my concentration slipped down just slightly as if I was starting to nod off. Indeed, that may have been just what happened. (Jeez, I over use parentheses! I've taken about 4 or 5 sentences out of parentheses already in this post!)
Anyway, as I slipped, I caught myself and restarted my counting, pushing up on my awareness to try and counter the sleepiness. But then I noticed that the counting suddenly seemed very easy. In fact, the thoughts and sensations that my 'monkey-mind' usually tried to hold on to had gone quiet. Perhaps the monkeymind thought I was already asleep. In any case, the counting exercise was now trivial. Even the slightly sore sensations of the sitting position seemed faint and distant, and I felt like I could just sit there counting for hours and hours and not exert any effort.
Well, something in my mind intuited that I'd arrived at a pretty centered and open state and that it might be an opportune time to try something more adventurous than simply counting. So, as I remembered most of the bits of the simpler version of Big Mind meditation I gave it a shot.
I first asked for the Controller, which is a voice I have had a bit of difficulty resonating with at times. That probably means something, and sitting here now, I wonder if it might be related to some classic issues I have with focus and decision making, and impulse control. Hmm... food for thought. Anyway, I tried to find the Controller and then having decided I was there, I thought I should investigate my Desire voice which, not surprisingly, was chattering away about the Florida job. So, i sat listening to that voice for a bit, just absorbing the story and listening compassionately and patiently and starting to feel things settle. Then I decided to go back to the Controller, and then (though I hadn't been planning on going to the non-dual side) I followed an impulse to ask for the Master.
Whoa!
Damn if it didn't work again!
I asked for the Master, and all of a sudden, a tingling sensation runs down my spine and my forearms and I suddenly feel very confident and powerful, as if my hands were charged with Earth-shaking energy. I was the Master and I could do anything. I was the über-controller. Whoa! Now, I'm not terribly comfortable with the Master (though I felt quite comfortable with myself at the time), so I decided to ask for Big Mind instead, which is a non-dual voice I am less wary of. So I asked for Big Mind and Big Mind showed up.
Well.... What can you say about Big Mind. Well it's big. And it's Empty. Yep. There you go. It's a big open black space. A gigantic silent space. I can only assume that this is the Emptiness that Buddhism is always banging on about. There it is.
The thing about Big Mind, is there's not a lot to say about it. I asked it a couple of questions because I suddenly remembered I was supposed to do so. So: "Is there any limit to You?" (Nope.) "Do you need anything?" (Nope.) "Is there anything you lack?" (Nope). Not very chatty Big Mind, but a pleasant enough place to visit I suppose.
I then asked for Big Heart and shifted. Now the tingles came back big time. Now I was floating in that big empty space that was Big Mind, but I was now a buzzing body of energy in that space. There wasn't the sense of gushing that burst from my chest the first time, but instead it was as if my body were a perfectly equilateral tetrahedron and buzzing inside with tingly energy. A really really quite lovely sensation.
I found I didn't really have any questions for Big Heart, so I just sat with it at glowed for a while. Indeed, I think I probably quite like Big Heart and could spend rather a long time hanging out there. Perhaps this is a taste of what the Traleg Kyabgon book I'm reading (The Essence of Buddhism) calls sambhogakaya, a state of blissfulness which manifests in a place called Akanistha, which is apparently not anywhere. Hard to say for sure, as Buddhism seems awfully vague sometimes, but it could be a description that fits.
So I sat with Big Heart for a while, and then decided I should head for home. I probably could have stayed longer if I'd tried, but I did feel my concentration start to waver slightly toward the end with Big Heart. So I packed it in and asked for the Integrated Free-Functioning Human Being. Quite a mouthful I know, but the Big Mind folks are big on winding up that way and I can see why. The IFFHB feels like a bridge back to the samsaric world. It's a voice that is connected to that non-dual world, but exists in our world. It's centered and compassionate and confident... etc... Probably it's something like the idealized Bodhisattva of traditional Buddhism. Anyway, it feels like it lives with a foot in both 'realities' and that's probably why it's a good exit from the Big Mind ride.
After being the IFFHB for a while, I returned to the breath and counted (Noting that my breath was loud... as if it had become quiet and shallow during my non-dual journey). After a couple of repetitions, I ended the session, feeling buzzed and with a strong inclination to write the experience down. And so here I am.
Actually, the process of describing sort of cerebral-izes the experience. It fixes it in the mind as a sort of abstract memory, but the sense of excitement has died down. I must say the excitement is a little distracting during the meditation. When first starts to work, there is a part of my brain freaking out, going "Holy shit! It's really working! Wow! Check it out." This voice is of course terribly non-dual, indeed, it's even a bit of a distraction from the breath. It takes a bit of effort to focus past it. Perhaps as the experience becomes more 'normal' this voice (lets call it Enthusiastic Incredulity) will calm down. 'Till then, I guess I'll just have to try and be mindful and pay it no mind.
(or however that is supposed to be spelled).
OK. Typing pretty fast as well... it seems I'm a bit inspired.
Just finished a highly successful meditation session, and I'm still a bit buzzed. I actually feel quite good, and seriously awake and aware. Anyway, I feel like I need to be journaling these meditative experiences, at least while I'm still discovering. It really does seem to make the experiences more solid, otherwise I think they would tend to fade.
After Sunshine & Laz went to sleep tonight, I read a bit and looked at the FSU physics department website. I really do hope the interview goes well this weekend and next week. Technically my interview is next week, but I'm meeting people for dinner on Sunday, so really the process starts soon after I get there. It's a huge physics department at FSU, and it's a little bit daunting. Still, I need to be brave and have confidence in myself. And not say anything too stupid and then just hope for the best. Confidence, clear minded-ness, openness, joyful, insightful... these are the things that people look for right...
Anyway, that wound me up a bit. I read a bit of this Buddhism book I've been reading, (very dense and confusing book, but more on that some other time). About 9:30 I decided to head toward bed, but before sleeping I decided to try and do a bit of breathing meditation.
Now I have been searching for a good position to meditate in. At work I can just use my chair, which is OK, but not great. Finding a good position at home has been less easy. (We don't have the most comfortable home). Last night I came across the technique of sitting at the edge of the bed and putting pillows on the floor and then sitting cross-legged with my butt on the bed and my knees on the pillow in a vaguely lotus-esque position (but a lazy one without the leg contortions which my knees aren't up too.) So that worked reasonably well last nifht, but I was too tired to meditate much without falling asleep.
Tonight worked better. I started counting breaths to 10. As I settled in there were lots of thoughts and sensations cropping up, but I just tried to keep at it. I lost count a few times, but just restarted. I couldn't tell if it was doing much, but at the very least it's a pretty relaxing exercise, and a decent way to settle the mind before going to sleep. I started to get distracted by bodily discomforts, mostly muscle pain in my back and chest and neck from sitting in this weird position, but I just kept on counting through them or starting over if I got distracted. Then after a while my concentration slipped down just slightly as if I was starting to nod off. Indeed, that may have been just what happened. (Jeez, I over use parentheses! I've taken about 4 or 5 sentences out of parentheses already in this post!)
Anyway, as I slipped, I caught myself and restarted my counting, pushing up on my awareness to try and counter the sleepiness. But then I noticed that the counting suddenly seemed very easy. In fact, the thoughts and sensations that my 'monkey-mind' usually tried to hold on to had gone quiet. Perhaps the monkeymind thought I was already asleep. In any case, the counting exercise was now trivial. Even the slightly sore sensations of the sitting position seemed faint and distant, and I felt like I could just sit there counting for hours and hours and not exert any effort.
Well, something in my mind intuited that I'd arrived at a pretty centered and open state and that it might be an opportune time to try something more adventurous than simply counting. So, as I remembered most of the bits of the simpler version of Big Mind meditation I gave it a shot.
I first asked for the Controller, which is a voice I have had a bit of difficulty resonating with at times. That probably means something, and sitting here now, I wonder if it might be related to some classic issues I have with focus and decision making, and impulse control. Hmm... food for thought. Anyway, I tried to find the Controller and then having decided I was there, I thought I should investigate my Desire voice which, not surprisingly, was chattering away about the Florida job. So, i sat listening to that voice for a bit, just absorbing the story and listening compassionately and patiently and starting to feel things settle. Then I decided to go back to the Controller, and then (though I hadn't been planning on going to the non-dual side) I followed an impulse to ask for the Master.
Whoa!
Damn if it didn't work again!
I asked for the Master, and all of a sudden, a tingling sensation runs down my spine and my forearms and I suddenly feel very confident and powerful, as if my hands were charged with Earth-shaking energy. I was the Master and I could do anything. I was the über-controller. Whoa! Now, I'm not terribly comfortable with the Master (though I felt quite comfortable with myself at the time), so I decided to ask for Big Mind instead, which is a non-dual voice I am less wary of. So I asked for Big Mind and Big Mind showed up.
Well.... What can you say about Big Mind. Well it's big. And it's Empty. Yep. There you go. It's a big open black space. A gigantic silent space. I can only assume that this is the Emptiness that Buddhism is always banging on about. There it is.
The thing about Big Mind, is there's not a lot to say about it. I asked it a couple of questions because I suddenly remembered I was supposed to do so. So: "Is there any limit to You?" (Nope.) "Do you need anything?" (Nope.) "Is there anything you lack?" (Nope). Not very chatty Big Mind, but a pleasant enough place to visit I suppose.
I then asked for Big Heart and shifted. Now the tingles came back big time. Now I was floating in that big empty space that was Big Mind, but I was now a buzzing body of energy in that space. There wasn't the sense of gushing that burst from my chest the first time, but instead it was as if my body were a perfectly equilateral tetrahedron and buzzing inside with tingly energy. A really really quite lovely sensation.
I found I didn't really have any questions for Big Heart, so I just sat with it at glowed for a while. Indeed, I think I probably quite like Big Heart and could spend rather a long time hanging out there. Perhaps this is a taste of what the Traleg Kyabgon book I'm reading (The Essence of Buddhism) calls sambhogakaya, a state of blissfulness which manifests in a place called Akanistha, which is apparently not anywhere. Hard to say for sure, as Buddhism seems awfully vague sometimes, but it could be a description that fits.
So I sat with Big Heart for a while, and then decided I should head for home. I probably could have stayed longer if I'd tried, but I did feel my concentration start to waver slightly toward the end with Big Heart. So I packed it in and asked for the Integrated Free-Functioning Human Being. Quite a mouthful I know, but the Big Mind folks are big on winding up that way and I can see why. The IFFHB feels like a bridge back to the samsaric world. It's a voice that is connected to that non-dual world, but exists in our world. It's centered and compassionate and confident... etc... Probably it's something like the idealized Bodhisattva of traditional Buddhism. Anyway, it feels like it lives with a foot in both 'realities' and that's probably why it's a good exit from the Big Mind ride.
After being the IFFHB for a while, I returned to the breath and counted (Noting that my breath was loud... as if it had become quiet and shallow during my non-dual journey). After a couple of repetitions, I ended the session, feeling buzzed and with a strong inclination to write the experience down. And so here I am.
Actually, the process of describing sort of cerebral-izes the experience. It fixes it in the mind as a sort of abstract memory, but the sense of excitement has died down. I must say the excitement is a little distracting during the meditation. When first starts to work, there is a part of my brain freaking out, going "Holy shit! It's really working! Wow! Check it out." This voice is of course terribly non-dual, indeed, it's even a bit of a distraction from the breath. It takes a bit of effort to focus past it. Perhaps as the experience becomes more 'normal' this voice (lets call it Enthusiastic Incredulity) will calm down. 'Till then, I guess I'll just have to try and be mindful and pay it no mind.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Looking with a Different Eye (An AQAL Exercise)
The last couple of posts have been pretty out there, so lets step back and give some equal time to my inner skeptic. Putting my undoubtedly naive newbie zen eye away for a minute lets look at things from a hard-assed materialist right-hand point of view for a moment and see what we can see.
OK, well... In an open-minded mood I sat down to try a form of guided meditation with very little expectation of seeing much action without a fair bit of practice. I was rather surprised to find that I felt something my "first time out", as it were. Now one hears that such things happen, indeed they can even supposedly happen spontaneously, but I certainly wasn't expecting it. Indeed, as I said, I approached it with relatively little expectation, and maybe that very openness was why it worked. I am now fairly convinced that I did have a genuine peak experience of some sort, and indeed perhaps even an 'aftershock' the next morning.
Now of course the question becomes what did it mean? What exactly was it that I experienced? Buddhism seems to have one answer, but as I suggested in my last post, I suspect that Theism would have a somewhat different answer. Furthermore, I can also think of at least a third perspective which would be a Materialist/Athiest perspective. So lets sit with that one for a bit and examine it. (As I borrow phraseology from Genpo Roshi... Good grief, I am a bit of a slang sponge...)
The materialist perspective would probably go something like this: the Brain is a biological information processing system. My mind is running a sort of operating system, and as such it is capable of being hacked. Meditation, like psychotherapy, is a set of methods for doing just that. Some meditation might be the biological equivalent of "clock chipping", making your conscious mind just a bit sharper and more efficient. Other techniques might be the equivalent of a virus. (Go read Snow Crash). So transcendental meditation is a set of techniques for hacking into the human operating system and triggering interesting effects. Like cheat codes or easter eggs embedded in software. If you know the trick, exciting and fun things can happen.
But the theist would say that it's a direct apprehension of God and the Buddhist might say something about the formless unmanifest which what my own self before I was born, or some such. The hard-assed materialist would come back quoting Occam's razor and suggest that his answer is the simplest, because it doesn't rely on invoking something from outside the real known world of "stuffs and things and things and stuffs." (Darn it, now I have a hankering for Parliament, and I'm pretty sure our ripped Parliament got lost when our disk crashed this summer.)
And now here is where I start to get into squishy territory. There was a time when I would have fully bought the materialist argument, but now I'm not so sure. As alien as Wilber's "Integral Post-Metaphysics" is, I can't really think of a reason why it's wrong, nor can I think of a satisfactory way to avoid something very much like it. The problem with the materialist argument is that it is steeped in what postmodernism calls "the myth of the given." It is based on the assumption that the 'everyday world' has some sort of absolute reality. But the problem is that Descartes demolished this quite effectively ages ago, and never succeeded in putting the world back together, at least not that I'd ever heard. The first half of his Meditation on First Philosophy really quite exquisitely establishes the postmodern idea that you really can't trust most of what your senses tell you. Indeed, he demolishes God and the entire universe all the way down to his own consciousness, where he gets stopped by that ever so important truth, "I think therefore I am", which is fundamentally the only thing that we can really ever know with any certainty. Something must be thinking about this problem in the first place. I might be a brain in a jar or plugged into "The Matrix", but I must exist in some form or other to think about it in the first place.
Now, Descartes didn't stop there and through some daft-ass verbal trickery he tries to patch it all back together, but I've never really bought it. Usually I just sorta shrugged and moved on. It's all well and good to say that I don't really know the real world exists, but it's not a very practical or useful philosophy is it? And so I fall back on a less robust but more practical philosophy of generally believing what I see unless I have some reason to be suspicious. There has always been that nagging annoyance that Descartes destroyed the world 400 years before I was born, but I mostly just shrugged and decided that the only practical answer was to go ahead and be naive for lack of a better solution.
Wilber's answer is that there is no real world, or at least if there is then we have no access to it anyway, so we might as well just forget about it. What there are are perspectives. We experience the world through injunctions which bring forth experiences which depend, at least in part, on what viewpoint we have while performing the injunction.
When I look at the world with my eyes, I see the sorts of things that eyes can see. But if I look at the world with an electron microscope, or my theoretical eye of quantum physics, it looks very different. Why do we not yet have a grand unified theory? Because we don't yet have a perspective that can merge the 'truths' of quantum field theory and general relativity. But even if we did, it wouldn't necessarily tell us everything. Relativity tells us that matter and energy are the same stuff. Matter is somehow colossally compacted frozen energy. But what does that mean? We have no direct human experience of that, just like we have no direct human experience of quantum uncertainty, so we have difficulty saying what it 'means'. We can make predictions from it and these are borne out with experimental tests to high accuracy, but what does it mean? Fundamentally, despite our ability to predict it's behavior, we still have no idea what the universe actually is, and indeed an 'absolute' answer to that question is very probably out of our grasp.
So where does this leave us? We can predict the behavior of the physical universe, but we don't know what it is. But what about the interior universe? What about what goes on in the mind. The extreme materialist viewpoint is that it doesn't exist, but of course it does. In fact, after Descartes, it's the only thing that we really know does, in fact, exist. And indeed, given that we don't know what the exterior universe means or is, either, why should we bias toward it being somehow more real at all? Why should it be more real to probe with my eyes than to probe with my mind? The answer is, I think, that it probably isn't. So what does my peak experience mean? Well, absolutely? Nothing. It has no absolute meaning whatsoever, or at least none that I'm ever likely to have access to. Just as with the exterior universe, all I am left with is perspective, and there are many available. And somehow, it is up to me to try and stitch together what ever sort of integrated truth I can glean from the available perspectives. This is where Wilber's "Integral Methodological Pluralism" comes in, and the trick is, that most of the quadrant's haven't weighed in yet with their perspectives, because the transpersonal is generally not welcome in academia.
So here I am, left at the cutting edge of human understanding, with a mind full of materialist skepticism, a healthy respect for postmodern plurality, and a heart that seems to resonate in interesting and unexpected ways when the mind is probed with the right hacks. I've started performing the injunctions, and I've started bringing forth the experiences, but the meaning has still to materialize. I've got lots of perspectives to explore, but many, perhaps most, are steeped in the ugly rhetoric of the ancient world, as I have bemoaned before. As Wilber points out in Integral Spirituality, spirituality has tended to get stuck at the blue/amber level and so here I am looking for something like a turquoise meaning and finding that it's pretty sketchy out here on the bleeding edge. I seem to be beta-testing spirituality. Actually, it's more like alpha testing. I'm pretty sure the functionality could still change.
And with that, dear reader, I leave you reassured that my inner geek is still alive and well.
OK, well... In an open-minded mood I sat down to try a form of guided meditation with very little expectation of seeing much action without a fair bit of practice. I was rather surprised to find that I felt something my "first time out", as it were. Now one hears that such things happen, indeed they can even supposedly happen spontaneously, but I certainly wasn't expecting it. Indeed, as I said, I approached it with relatively little expectation, and maybe that very openness was why it worked. I am now fairly convinced that I did have a genuine peak experience of some sort, and indeed perhaps even an 'aftershock' the next morning.
Now of course the question becomes what did it mean? What exactly was it that I experienced? Buddhism seems to have one answer, but as I suggested in my last post, I suspect that Theism would have a somewhat different answer. Furthermore, I can also think of at least a third perspective which would be a Materialist/Athiest perspective. So lets sit with that one for a bit and examine it. (As I borrow phraseology from Genpo Roshi... Good grief, I am a bit of a slang sponge...)
The materialist perspective would probably go something like this: the Brain is a biological information processing system. My mind is running a sort of operating system, and as such it is capable of being hacked. Meditation, like psychotherapy, is a set of methods for doing just that. Some meditation might be the biological equivalent of "clock chipping", making your conscious mind just a bit sharper and more efficient. Other techniques might be the equivalent of a virus. (Go read Snow Crash). So transcendental meditation is a set of techniques for hacking into the human operating system and triggering interesting effects. Like cheat codes or easter eggs embedded in software. If you know the trick, exciting and fun things can happen.
But the theist would say that it's a direct apprehension of God and the Buddhist might say something about the formless unmanifest which what my own self before I was born, or some such. The hard-assed materialist would come back quoting Occam's razor and suggest that his answer is the simplest, because it doesn't rely on invoking something from outside the real known world of "stuffs and things and things and stuffs." (Darn it, now I have a hankering for Parliament, and I'm pretty sure our ripped Parliament got lost when our disk crashed this summer.)
And now here is where I start to get into squishy territory. There was a time when I would have fully bought the materialist argument, but now I'm not so sure. As alien as Wilber's "Integral Post-Metaphysics" is, I can't really think of a reason why it's wrong, nor can I think of a satisfactory way to avoid something very much like it. The problem with the materialist argument is that it is steeped in what postmodernism calls "the myth of the given." It is based on the assumption that the 'everyday world' has some sort of absolute reality. But the problem is that Descartes demolished this quite effectively ages ago, and never succeeded in putting the world back together, at least not that I'd ever heard. The first half of his Meditation on First Philosophy really quite exquisitely establishes the postmodern idea that you really can't trust most of what your senses tell you. Indeed, he demolishes God and the entire universe all the way down to his own consciousness, where he gets stopped by that ever so important truth, "I think therefore I am", which is fundamentally the only thing that we can really ever know with any certainty. Something must be thinking about this problem in the first place. I might be a brain in a jar or plugged into "The Matrix", but I must exist in some form or other to think about it in the first place.
Now, Descartes didn't stop there and through some daft-ass verbal trickery he tries to patch it all back together, but I've never really bought it. Usually I just sorta shrugged and moved on. It's all well and good to say that I don't really know the real world exists, but it's not a very practical or useful philosophy is it? And so I fall back on a less robust but more practical philosophy of generally believing what I see unless I have some reason to be suspicious. There has always been that nagging annoyance that Descartes destroyed the world 400 years before I was born, but I mostly just shrugged and decided that the only practical answer was to go ahead and be naive for lack of a better solution.
Wilber's answer is that there is no real world, or at least if there is then we have no access to it anyway, so we might as well just forget about it. What there are are perspectives. We experience the world through injunctions which bring forth experiences which depend, at least in part, on what viewpoint we have while performing the injunction.
When I look at the world with my eyes, I see the sorts of things that eyes can see. But if I look at the world with an electron microscope, or my theoretical eye of quantum physics, it looks very different. Why do we not yet have a grand unified theory? Because we don't yet have a perspective that can merge the 'truths' of quantum field theory and general relativity. But even if we did, it wouldn't necessarily tell us everything. Relativity tells us that matter and energy are the same stuff. Matter is somehow colossally compacted frozen energy. But what does that mean? We have no direct human experience of that, just like we have no direct human experience of quantum uncertainty, so we have difficulty saying what it 'means'. We can make predictions from it and these are borne out with experimental tests to high accuracy, but what does it mean? Fundamentally, despite our ability to predict it's behavior, we still have no idea what the universe actually is, and indeed an 'absolute' answer to that question is very probably out of our grasp.
So where does this leave us? We can predict the behavior of the physical universe, but we don't know what it is. But what about the interior universe? What about what goes on in the mind. The extreme materialist viewpoint is that it doesn't exist, but of course it does. In fact, after Descartes, it's the only thing that we really know does, in fact, exist. And indeed, given that we don't know what the exterior universe means or is, either, why should we bias toward it being somehow more real at all? Why should it be more real to probe with my eyes than to probe with my mind? The answer is, I think, that it probably isn't. So what does my peak experience mean? Well, absolutely? Nothing. It has no absolute meaning whatsoever, or at least none that I'm ever likely to have access to. Just as with the exterior universe, all I am left with is perspective, and there are many available. And somehow, it is up to me to try and stitch together what ever sort of integrated truth I can glean from the available perspectives. This is where Wilber's "Integral Methodological Pluralism" comes in, and the trick is, that most of the quadrant's haven't weighed in yet with their perspectives, because the transpersonal is generally not welcome in academia.
So here I am, left at the cutting edge of human understanding, with a mind full of materialist skepticism, a healthy respect for postmodern plurality, and a heart that seems to resonate in interesting and unexpected ways when the mind is probed with the right hacks. I've started performing the injunctions, and I've started bringing forth the experiences, but the meaning has still to materialize. I've got lots of perspectives to explore, but many, perhaps most, are steeped in the ugly rhetoric of the ancient world, as I have bemoaned before. As Wilber points out in Integral Spirituality, spirituality has tended to get stuck at the blue/amber level and so here I am looking for something like a turquoise meaning and finding that it's pretty sketchy out here on the bleeding edge. I seem to be beta-testing spirituality. Actually, it's more like alpha testing. I'm pretty sure the functionality could still change.
And with that, dear reader, I leave you reassured that my inner geek is still alive and well.
Mahayana Buzzkill?
Maybe it was an after effect from my Big Mind experience the day before (see here)... Yesterday morning as I rode the Piccadilly line into work, I noticed that I was enormously pleased with people. I was just sitting there on the train and everyone in the carriage with me just seemed simply marvelous to me. So I just sat there with a sort of bemused half smile looking at each person and finding them all beautiful. There was no sense of preference either. Each person was clearly individual, some were obviously more fashionable (as many Londoners tend to be) or conventionally beautiful, but all of them, even the frumpy, grumpy and ugly seemed somehow equally lovely yesterday morning. It was really quite a pleasant feeling, though I had to exert some mental discipline and not just stare at people smiling, as I'm sure it would probably feel creepy to them.
So, arriving at South Kensington I found that the feeling persisted as I rode the escalators up to the surface and walked along the pedestrian subway toward the museums and Imperial College. I was floating along in a pleasantly warm perspective, enjoying everything I saw. It wasn't the sort of emotionally intense experience I'd had the day before, but more just a pleasingly satisfied feeling. Everything seemed just really nice, even the damp grey drippy English morning.
Then, near the exit to the Natural History museum, I passed the gentleman sitting on a produce crate selling The Big Issue in his usual spot. I've probably passed this man hundreds of times on my way to work and never bought a copy of the magazine from him, and yesterday was no different, but almost as soon as I passed him the bubble burst. The glow faded, the cold rainy morning air replaced it, and suddenly people were just people, the world was just the world, and the day was just another morning on the way to work. And I knew instantly, in my own mind, that the reason was that I had noticed this guy on his crate and just passed him by. Somewhere inside me I had felt an urge to give this man a couple of quid for his magazine, and I hadn't acted on it.
This makes me wonder a bit now about the Bodhisattva vow. If this episode yesterday is a typical byproduct of transcendentalism, then is the Bodhisattva phenomenon actually a compulsion? I think perhaps it is. Indeed, I've thought this intellectually in the past, but now perhaps I have a more direct apprehension of how this works. Perhaps the sort of meditative exercise I subjected myself to on Tuesday acts to condition our brains to notice and act on these generous impulses by making us aware of our emotional need to belong in the world as a part of the whole. Perhaps when we feel plugged into a loving universe and then fail to act on a generous impulse, it separates us from that feeling of goodwill. The discontinuity between the impulse and the action breaks the spell and the gestalt is broken. The stereogram collapses into its random dot components and the vision is lost. Since the vision was tied into an emotional need, or sense of well-being, or tickling the pleasure centers of the brain, or however you want to view it, the bubble bursting is a come-down.
Is this the origin of the idea of sin? There is a school of thought that says that Sin is separation or distance from God. If I was someone who had been brought up and lived in the context of a heavily mythic theological system with a strong second-person sense of deity, then I might indeed have interpreted the last couple of days as direct apprehensions of God in the second person reaching into my 'soul.' Then the sudden removal of that feeling might indeed have felt very much like a rejection. Like the rebuke of an angry parent or lover. I might have been very likely to feel that I had sinned and needed to seek redemption. As it is, it felt more like a gestalt switch to me.
I bought a copy of the Big Issue from this gentleman this morning. I wasn't feeling the same bubble this morning, but the sense of karmic cause and effect had already been instilled. Actually, I have a stronger impulse to buy him a cup of tea, but that is a rather more complicated intersubjective transaction, and I am still a bit of a coward in that respect. Still, perhaps the impulse will act as an agent of growth. We will see.
So, arriving at South Kensington I found that the feeling persisted as I rode the escalators up to the surface and walked along the pedestrian subway toward the museums and Imperial College. I was floating along in a pleasantly warm perspective, enjoying everything I saw. It wasn't the sort of emotionally intense experience I'd had the day before, but more just a pleasingly satisfied feeling. Everything seemed just really nice, even the damp grey drippy English morning.
Then, near the exit to the Natural History museum, I passed the gentleman sitting on a produce crate selling The Big Issue in his usual spot. I've probably passed this man hundreds of times on my way to work and never bought a copy of the magazine from him, and yesterday was no different, but almost as soon as I passed him the bubble burst. The glow faded, the cold rainy morning air replaced it, and suddenly people were just people, the world was just the world, and the day was just another morning on the way to work. And I knew instantly, in my own mind, that the reason was that I had noticed this guy on his crate and just passed him by. Somewhere inside me I had felt an urge to give this man a couple of quid for his magazine, and I hadn't acted on it.
This makes me wonder a bit now about the Bodhisattva vow. If this episode yesterday is a typical byproduct of transcendentalism, then is the Bodhisattva phenomenon actually a compulsion? I think perhaps it is. Indeed, I've thought this intellectually in the past, but now perhaps I have a more direct apprehension of how this works. Perhaps the sort of meditative exercise I subjected myself to on Tuesday acts to condition our brains to notice and act on these generous impulses by making us aware of our emotional need to belong in the world as a part of the whole. Perhaps when we feel plugged into a loving universe and then fail to act on a generous impulse, it separates us from that feeling of goodwill. The discontinuity between the impulse and the action breaks the spell and the gestalt is broken. The stereogram collapses into its random dot components and the vision is lost. Since the vision was tied into an emotional need, or sense of well-being, or tickling the pleasure centers of the brain, or however you want to view it, the bubble bursting is a come-down.
Is this the origin of the idea of sin? There is a school of thought that says that Sin is separation or distance from God. If I was someone who had been brought up and lived in the context of a heavily mythic theological system with a strong second-person sense of deity, then I might indeed have interpreted the last couple of days as direct apprehensions of God in the second person reaching into my 'soul.' Then the sudden removal of that feeling might indeed have felt very much like a rejection. Like the rebuke of an angry parent or lover. I might have been very likely to feel that I had sinned and needed to seek redemption. As it is, it felt more like a gestalt switch to me.
I bought a copy of the Big Issue from this gentleman this morning. I wasn't feeling the same bubble this morning, but the sense of karmic cause and effect had already been instilled. Actually, I have a stronger impulse to buy him a cup of tea, but that is a rather more complicated intersubjective transaction, and I am still a bit of a coward in that respect. Still, perhaps the impulse will act as an agent of growth. We will see.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Altered States and other Revelations
It's been a bit of strange day. Actually, it's been a weird week.
To begin with, phase shifting is very much harder with a baby. When we left Colorado last Tuesday, Laz was on a schedule where he woke up shortly before noon, which corresponds to about 7 PM here in London. In other words, he was nearly 180 degrees out of phase when we got back to our flat in Harrow. Add to that the fact that neither Sunshine nor I managed to get much sleep on the flight while Laz did and we have a rocky beginning already.
Now normally I try and get some sleep on the long haul and then stay up as long as I can, probably going to bed in the early evening. But you can't really explain this to a 1-year old, so instead we've been trying to wrap him forward by keeping him up as long as possible and then keeping him asleep as long as possible. This sorta works, but he's also got a bit of sleep intertia. Anyway, he's pushed over enough now that he's waking up a bit after midnight, which is at least a schedule that allows me to go to work during the day. But it is decidedly weird, since it effectively means that our days are backwards. We get the evening and then the sun comes up and I go to work. My inner clock is quite confused.
Meanwhile I'm applying for jobs... again. It's a bit weird though, as some of these positions I'm applying for are connected to people I already have working relationships with. So I'm writing weird impersonal cover letters to people I'd usually e-mail and call by their first names. It's ever so slightly twilight zone. Or maybe it's just the sleep schedule.
Or maybe its something else. Just before leaving Colorado I bought a bunch of Buddhism books, and so I've been slowly soaking in Zen for the past week or two as well. I started with The Eye Never Sleeps by Dennis Genpo Merzel, which is really quite lovely. It's a discussion of the Hsin Hsin Ming, an ancient Zen poem. Genpo Roshi's (his current title) discussion is really quite refreshingly modern. It's still inscrutably Zen, but what would you expect?
Anyway the Zen seems to be seeping in a bit. On the plane flight home we watched Hou Yuan Jia, (known to the western world as Jet Li's Fearless). Actually not a bad movie. "Kung Fu movies" have come a long way, and many of them are really quite beautiful now. Anyway, I found my brain getting snagged on the Buddhist undercurrent in the film, so the brain is definitely digesting some of this.
I've also been slowing sampling the ILP starter kit. The "Out of the Box ILP" is not terribly helpful, and their "body" modules seem a bit hokey to me. (At least the "1-minute modules" versions of them.) But the meditation CD seems like it might be more useful. Today I watched the first of the DVDs: Big Mind Meditation (again with Genpo Roshi). This was actually quite good. In fact, it might even have worked which kind of surprised me. Maybe it was the weird sleep schedule, or the 5th cup of tea today, or maybe it was an actual kensho experience, but much to my surprise, I actually felt something. Indeed, it even seemed to be the 'right' sort of something. It was a particularly strong resonance during the 'Big Heart' section, and corresponded very closely to the descriptions on the DVD, but (and this is the part that is hard to dismiss) I felt it prior to hearing the description. So its not just a simple implanted suggestion. Perhaps it was a more subtle effect, or perhaps it was an actual Subtle effect.
Sort of hard to describe actually. It was a gradually growing tingle... sort of similar to an orgasmic sensation but centered primarily in the upper chest. There was also a sensation of dizziness and a disconnection with the senses rather akin to the buzz of drunkenness. During the "Big Mind" portion of the meditation there was indeed a sense of free-flowing motion and boundlessness in my head. But with the transition to "Big Heart" this shifted to a much stronger sensation of gushing forth from my chest and a desire to (for lack of a better description) hug the world. (Yes, Ick, I know. It's like a Coke commercial!) Anyway, skeptical as I tend to be about these sort of things, I was surprised to find it actually seemed to be doing something. Certainly gives me something to ponder.
His Big Mind technique is kind of interesting. Instead of engaging the sort of typical breaking down the ego methodology, he actually employs the conscious intellect using a Voice Dialogue technique borrowed from psychotherapy. Maybe this is the Buddhism for Gearheads I was looking for. Certainly psychobabble is a lot easier for a modern to swallow than magical energy.
Finally, returning to more mundane reality, I got some weird mail in my slot. A manila envelope addressed to Dr. C L Gerardy, and with a strange return address from Jerusalem, but postmarked from Phoenix. Inside, a mad bunch of bible quotes and other strangeness, mostly from Revelations. Presumably just harmless madness from someone (though if I do suddenly come down with anthrax have someone check the envelope), but I do wonder what I did to rise to their attention. Ah well, it goes with the territory I suppose, but usually I get the crazy messages through e-mail. Here, someone actually spent a few bucks to post something to England. No explanation of course, just madness. Perhaps nutters should learn the art of the cover letter?
To begin with, phase shifting is very much harder with a baby. When we left Colorado last Tuesday, Laz was on a schedule where he woke up shortly before noon, which corresponds to about 7 PM here in London. In other words, he was nearly 180 degrees out of phase when we got back to our flat in Harrow. Add to that the fact that neither Sunshine nor I managed to get much sleep on the flight while Laz did and we have a rocky beginning already.
Now normally I try and get some sleep on the long haul and then stay up as long as I can, probably going to bed in the early evening. But you can't really explain this to a 1-year old, so instead we've been trying to wrap him forward by keeping him up as long as possible and then keeping him asleep as long as possible. This sorta works, but he's also got a bit of sleep intertia. Anyway, he's pushed over enough now that he's waking up a bit after midnight, which is at least a schedule that allows me to go to work during the day. But it is decidedly weird, since it effectively means that our days are backwards. We get the evening and then the sun comes up and I go to work. My inner clock is quite confused.
Meanwhile I'm applying for jobs... again. It's a bit weird though, as some of these positions I'm applying for are connected to people I already have working relationships with. So I'm writing weird impersonal cover letters to people I'd usually e-mail and call by their first names. It's ever so slightly twilight zone. Or maybe it's just the sleep schedule.
Or maybe its something else. Just before leaving Colorado I bought a bunch of Buddhism books, and so I've been slowly soaking in Zen for the past week or two as well. I started with The Eye Never Sleeps by Dennis Genpo Merzel, which is really quite lovely. It's a discussion of the Hsin Hsin Ming, an ancient Zen poem. Genpo Roshi's (his current title) discussion is really quite refreshingly modern. It's still inscrutably Zen, but what would you expect?
Anyway the Zen seems to be seeping in a bit. On the plane flight home we watched Hou Yuan Jia, (known to the western world as Jet Li's Fearless). Actually not a bad movie. "Kung Fu movies" have come a long way, and many of them are really quite beautiful now. Anyway, I found my brain getting snagged on the Buddhist undercurrent in the film, so the brain is definitely digesting some of this.
I've also been slowing sampling the ILP starter kit. The "Out of the Box ILP" is not terribly helpful, and their "body" modules seem a bit hokey to me. (At least the "1-minute modules" versions of them.) But the meditation CD seems like it might be more useful. Today I watched the first of the DVDs: Big Mind Meditation (again with Genpo Roshi). This was actually quite good. In fact, it might even have worked which kind of surprised me. Maybe it was the weird sleep schedule, or the 5th cup of tea today, or maybe it was an actual kensho experience, but much to my surprise, I actually felt something. Indeed, it even seemed to be the 'right' sort of something. It was a particularly strong resonance during the 'Big Heart' section, and corresponded very closely to the descriptions on the DVD, but (and this is the part that is hard to dismiss) I felt it prior to hearing the description. So its not just a simple implanted suggestion. Perhaps it was a more subtle effect, or perhaps it was an actual Subtle effect.
Sort of hard to describe actually. It was a gradually growing tingle... sort of similar to an orgasmic sensation but centered primarily in the upper chest. There was also a sensation of dizziness and a disconnection with the senses rather akin to the buzz of drunkenness. During the "Big Mind" portion of the meditation there was indeed a sense of free-flowing motion and boundlessness in my head. But with the transition to "Big Heart" this shifted to a much stronger sensation of gushing forth from my chest and a desire to (for lack of a better description) hug the world. (Yes, Ick, I know. It's like a Coke commercial!) Anyway, skeptical as I tend to be about these sort of things, I was surprised to find it actually seemed to be doing something. Certainly gives me something to ponder.
His Big Mind technique is kind of interesting. Instead of engaging the sort of typical breaking down the ego methodology, he actually employs the conscious intellect using a Voice Dialogue technique borrowed from psychotherapy. Maybe this is the Buddhism for Gearheads I was looking for. Certainly psychobabble is a lot easier for a modern to swallow than magical energy.
Finally, returning to more mundane reality, I got some weird mail in my slot. A manila envelope addressed to Dr. C L Gerardy, and with a strange return address from Jerusalem, but postmarked from Phoenix. Inside, a mad bunch of bible quotes and other strangeness, mostly from Revelations. Presumably just harmless madness from someone (though if I do suddenly come down with anthrax have someone check the envelope), but I do wonder what I did to rise to their attention. Ah well, it goes with the territory I suppose, but usually I get the crazy messages through e-mail. Here, someone actually spent a few bucks to post something to England. No explanation of course, just madness. Perhaps nutters should learn the art of the cover letter?
Monday, January 08, 2007
The Mind Just Googles
"Sex, Money and Power: The Bible Shows You How" (Michael H. Brown)
P.S. The actual book he wanted to recommend is "The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical" by Shane Claiborne
New Old Blog
Well, Blogger has updated their blogging engine with new stuff, so now I've "upgraded," though it remains to be seen if it is truly an improvement. First thing I had to do of course was get it working with the my local blogging client (ecto). The transition was not too bad, but one never knows with these things. Anyway, this is mostly just a quick post to make sure that things are still working.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Absolutely Alien
OK... So I've decided that Mere Christianity is so deeply flawed it doesn't really make any sense to continue this blow-by-blow. This first half of this book, which is supposed to be his intellectual argument for belief is just riddled with appallingly poor logic. At virtually every step he tends to make one of three fatal mistakes: (a) artificially narrowing the available options to just 2 or 3 possibilities, (b) proof by fiat, or (c) just introducing a new conclusion without any explanation at all.
Basically, his argument boils down to something like this: human beings have a notion of ethical behavior, therefore there must be a perfect moral force outside the universe which acts on us, and this is the Christian God who created all things. The bible tells us that there was this man called Jesus, who died to that God could forgive us for being human. Because the Bible says he claimed to be both humble and the son of God, he was either (a) the son of God, (b) he was crazy or (c) he was Satan. (Apparently (d) he never existed in the first place or (e) he was an earthly opportunist and con artist or (f) he was misquoted and appropriated by the organized church who was afraid of the message the God and Man are one, are not viable options). Lewis' solution to determining between these options?
Oh well...
There are a few sort of interesting ideas in the book here and there, but mostly this book is reinforcing my notion that Christianity is a bizarre cult full of people whose thought processes are utterly alien.
Basically, his argument boils down to something like this: human beings have a notion of ethical behavior, therefore there must be a perfect moral force outside the universe which acts on us, and this is the Christian God who created all things. The bible tells us that there was this man called Jesus, who died to that God could forgive us for being human. Because the Bible says he claimed to be both humble and the son of God, he was either (a) the son of God, (b) he was crazy or (c) he was Satan. (Apparently (d) he never existed in the first place or (e) he was an earthly opportunist and con artist or (f) he was misquoted and appropriated by the organized church who was afraid of the message the God and Man are one, are not viable options). Lewis' solution to determining between these options?
Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.A classic proof by "It's bloody obvious! What are you, some sort of moron?"
Oh well...
There are a few sort of interesting ideas in the book here and there, but mostly this book is reinforcing my notion that Christianity is a bizarre cult full of people whose thought processes are utterly alien.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Chapter 2: Still not doing well
Just a quick follow up. Having read chapter 2, Lewis is not doing much better. This chapter discusses "Some Objections" to his previous chapter. (I guess I'm not the only one then.) First, he tries to distinguish morality from 'instinct', which is all well and good. But then he confuses the issue by calling things like 'patriotism' and instinct. Interestingly, he then states that following these sort of drives as absolutes would lead to disaster, which again I'd agree with. But his argument that (pseudo)universal values systems (i.e. morals) are somehow other than these instincts (such as patriotism) are weak indeed, and effectively boil down to just a simple axiomatic statement, disguised underneath some frankly ill-advised metaphors.
We then get an argument that these universal morals are akin to mathematics, which he sees as an example of a taught human practice that is somehow more than a human creation. "But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something that human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked." Well, actually... yes... it is in a way. Math is precisely a construction of the human mind, and in fact has no reality outside of the human mind. Search the entire physical universe and you will nowhere find the square root of minus one. It is a construct that we have invented and only exists in our internal worldspaces (though both in the monological and dialogical cases.) Even simple things like "1" or "0" don't exist in the external physical world. The fact that we can talk about 1 something has to do with the fact that we translate our experiences into an internal model of the outside world, and back. But rocks and penguins don't know about integral calculus. By comparing morality with mathematics, Lewis actually undercuts his own argument.
Next we get the idea that since we can rank various moral systems against one another, then there must be some real absolute against which we compare. But again here he falls victim to his own assumptions. Yes, certainly I can rank different value systems, but the standard against which I compare will likely be my own beliefs. Thus the ranking is likely going to be different for depending on who does the ranking. There doesn't have to be a 'Real Morality', a moral absolute for ranking, just a local subjective one. Indeed postmodernism claims that that's just what we have: universal moral relativism.
What he's really feeling is that there is a moral progress, but its evolutionary, and I'm afraid that Christianity is not the end of evolution, but merely a step along the way. It was on the cutting edge of moral development 2000 years ago, but is, at the very least, 400 years out of date. That's why reading the Bible makes me uncomfortable; because it is described by much of the world as the source of moral absolutes, but the morality I find within is as barbaric to my 21st century sensibilities as say the Aztecs would be to most Christians. I must adamantly disagree with Lewis that I would happily sanction the murder of witches if I thought that they existed.
We then get an argument that these universal morals are akin to mathematics, which he sees as an example of a taught human practice that is somehow more than a human creation. "But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something that human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked." Well, actually... yes... it is in a way. Math is precisely a construction of the human mind, and in fact has no reality outside of the human mind. Search the entire physical universe and you will nowhere find the square root of minus one. It is a construct that we have invented and only exists in our internal worldspaces (though both in the monological and dialogical cases.) Even simple things like "1" or "0" don't exist in the external physical world. The fact that we can talk about 1 something has to do with the fact that we translate our experiences into an internal model of the outside world, and back. But rocks and penguins don't know about integral calculus. By comparing morality with mathematics, Lewis actually undercuts his own argument.
Next we get the idea that since we can rank various moral systems against one another, then there must be some real absolute against which we compare. But again here he falls victim to his own assumptions. Yes, certainly I can rank different value systems, but the standard against which I compare will likely be my own beliefs. Thus the ranking is likely going to be different for depending on who does the ranking. There doesn't have to be a 'Real Morality', a moral absolute for ranking, just a local subjective one. Indeed postmodernism claims that that's just what we have: universal moral relativism.
What he's really feeling is that there is a moral progress, but its evolutionary, and I'm afraid that Christianity is not the end of evolution, but merely a step along the way. It was on the cutting edge of moral development 2000 years ago, but is, at the very least, 400 years out of date. That's why reading the Bible makes me uncomfortable; because it is described by much of the world as the source of moral absolutes, but the morality I find within is as barbaric to my 21st century sensibilities as say the Aztecs would be to most Christians. I must adamantly disagree with Lewis that I would happily sanction the murder of witches if I thought that they existed.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Mere Metaphysics
I finally finished Ken Wilber's latest book Integral Spirituality last night. This was a very interesting and challenging book. Challenging both in terms of just trying to understand it, (it has some very subtle and tricky ideas and I'm certain that I didn't follow all of it), but also in terms of forcing me to think hard and perhaps a bit differently about quite a few things. His integral post-metaphysics idea is pretty challenging stuff, though I think that he may be ultimately right about it. It did seem at least a potential way forward from the death-blow to reality that postmodernism seemed to deal out. His view of reality is actually quite tricky and subtle, and I don't know how easy it would be to use in real life... but it may be the way forward anyway.
Anyway, so I've moved on to the book Jeremy gave me for christmas: C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Oh, dear. Well, let me just say that old Clive has his work cut out for him. Now, he is not helped by my natural reticence to believe in such things anyway, but I'm actually trying quite hard to keep an open viewpoint. After all, he must certainly have some 'truth' to impart. Besides I've managed to keep an open mind through Wilber's very alien ideas, (including the idea that I probably need to look a bit more closely at the spiritual dimension of things), so I think I'm up to the task here. The problem is that Wilber's is a tough act to follow, and furthermore, Integral Spirituality was in many ways pretty convincing about what a modern 21st century spirituality must contend with; what cognitive ideas a post post-modern philosophy must contend with, and lots of examples of how many fail.
So, with this setup I wade into Lewis' book, and, oh my, what a mess! I've only read the first chapter, but in those half-dozen pages he's already made a number of fatal mis-steps! This does not bode well. Still, I'll press on. I found my discussion with Jeremy quite an invigorating experience, and I am eager to continue to engage with him about his beliefs. In many ways we are, well not exactly opposites, as that implies a certain opposition, but certainly we are complements. He is developing a fairly deep spiritual practice, but of a very mythic-literal flavor, which contrasts with my trained skeptic. Perhaps there is something that we both can learn.
Now, what's wrong so far. Well... He starts by pointing out, in a fairly humorous manner, that there is a "law of human nature" which acts as a set of universal moral values. Further he claims that these are unchanged from culture to culture. In a post-postmodern world, however, such a statement just doesn't hold water. Our moral systems very much are shaped, at least in part by our cultural background. Furthermore, they are also shaped by our developmental level.
My morals, for example, are fostered very much by (amongst other things) my western, secular, a fairly 'green' background, a fair bit of cognitive development, a long time steeped in an academic scientific workplace, and a recent exposure to integral philosophy. As a result, I have some strong moral objections to the actions of George W. Bush and his administration, but I also believe that they are honestly doing what they see as the morally right thing. Of course morality a relative thing, (just like the rest of reality, or so Wilber would claim). You don't have to look very far to see that. Just watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and the BBC back-to-back. The moment you step outside your own culture and into somebody else's you are faced with alien values. Some may differ more than other's, but there are certainly different values. Furthermore, the limits of moral behavior depend on how far away your horizon of "us' vs "them". After all, you only need to behave 'humanely' to those you consider human. (Or from a more advanced viewpoint, your moral obligations to others depends on the extent to which you view them as deserving of your moral respect. Even pretty green values don't typically worry too much about insulting rocks.) So when when Lewis claims that "What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced?" Well, but the Nazis did believe they were doing the right thing! As objectionable as the holocaust is, those most responsible for it really did believe they were doing the right thing. Go read Mein Kampf if you don't think so. Now give him some slack from writing in the context of the Blitz, but in hindsight, he's just wrong here.
So, moral absolutes, at least as practiced by Human cultures are certainly not in evidence on this planet.
Of course Lewis also tends to argue from a viewpoint heavily steeped in "The Myth of the Given" and thus heavily metaphysical. The real world is just assumed to exist and to correspond to his beliefs: "unless Right is a real thing". Postmodernism would eat him alive for such a statement.
So, at the end of chapter 1, Lewis is 0 for 2.
Anyway, so I've moved on to the book Jeremy gave me for christmas: C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Oh, dear. Well, let me just say that old Clive has his work cut out for him. Now, he is not helped by my natural reticence to believe in such things anyway, but I'm actually trying quite hard to keep an open viewpoint. After all, he must certainly have some 'truth' to impart. Besides I've managed to keep an open mind through Wilber's very alien ideas, (including the idea that I probably need to look a bit more closely at the spiritual dimension of things), so I think I'm up to the task here. The problem is that Wilber's is a tough act to follow, and furthermore, Integral Spirituality was in many ways pretty convincing about what a modern 21st century spirituality must contend with; what cognitive ideas a post post-modern philosophy must contend with, and lots of examples of how many fail.
So, with this setup I wade into Lewis' book, and, oh my, what a mess! I've only read the first chapter, but in those half-dozen pages he's already made a number of fatal mis-steps! This does not bode well. Still, I'll press on. I found my discussion with Jeremy quite an invigorating experience, and I am eager to continue to engage with him about his beliefs. In many ways we are, well not exactly opposites, as that implies a certain opposition, but certainly we are complements. He is developing a fairly deep spiritual practice, but of a very mythic-literal flavor, which contrasts with my trained skeptic. Perhaps there is something that we both can learn.
Now, what's wrong so far. Well... He starts by pointing out, in a fairly humorous manner, that there is a "law of human nature" which acts as a set of universal moral values. Further he claims that these are unchanged from culture to culture. In a post-postmodern world, however, such a statement just doesn't hold water. Our moral systems very much are shaped, at least in part by our cultural background. Furthermore, they are also shaped by our developmental level.
My morals, for example, are fostered very much by (amongst other things) my western, secular, a fairly 'green' background, a fair bit of cognitive development, a long time steeped in an academic scientific workplace, and a recent exposure to integral philosophy. As a result, I have some strong moral objections to the actions of George W. Bush and his administration, but I also believe that they are honestly doing what they see as the morally right thing. Of course morality a relative thing, (just like the rest of reality, or so Wilber would claim). You don't have to look very far to see that. Just watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and the BBC back-to-back. The moment you step outside your own culture and into somebody else's you are faced with alien values. Some may differ more than other's, but there are certainly different values. Furthermore, the limits of moral behavior depend on how far away your horizon of "us' vs "them". After all, you only need to behave 'humanely' to those you consider human. (Or from a more advanced viewpoint, your moral obligations to others depends on the extent to which you view them as deserving of your moral respect. Even pretty green values don't typically worry too much about insulting rocks.) So when when Lewis claims that "What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced?" Well, but the Nazis did believe they were doing the right thing! As objectionable as the holocaust is, those most responsible for it really did believe they were doing the right thing. Go read Mein Kampf if you don't think so. Now give him some slack from writing in the context of the Blitz, but in hindsight, he's just wrong here.
So, moral absolutes, at least as practiced by Human cultures are certainly not in evidence on this planet.
Of course Lewis also tends to argue from a viewpoint heavily steeped in "The Myth of the Given" and thus heavily metaphysical. The real world is just assumed to exist and to correspond to his beliefs: "unless Right is a real thing". Postmodernism would eat him alive for such a statement.
So, at the end of chapter 1, Lewis is 0 for 2.
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