One of the interesting things I'm discovering about trying to "think integral" is that it requires a certain acceptance of intellectual patience, for lack of a better word. The whole point is to try and look for and acknowledge and integrate the truth of as many different philosophies and disciplines as possible; to be as progressive and as inclusive and open-minded as possible. But the fact is that many (probably most) of the disciplines you try to integrate are unlikely to return the favor. More than likely you have to filter out a lot of intellectual snobbery, conservative exclusivity, xenophobic prejudice and the like to gather the nuggets of truth.
So case in point, the teacher of my meditation class has been a practicing Buddhist for 20+ years, but says he has essentially no knowledge of the teachings of any other tradition than his own. No other religions, no other flavours of Buddhism, not even any other Tibetan sects other than the Kadampa sect in which he studies. To me this seems like an astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity to say the least. As a side effect, while he sees his own tradition as very pure and "very white," (ouch! my inner green sure winced at that choice of wording!) he implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) casts dispersions on other practices. This tradition has worked for thousands of years, and it works for him. Great, but I'm amazed that its never occurred to him to wonder if there is any Dharma with a different pedigree. Plus there is a serious retro-romantic flavour to this sect as well. He started the class by discouraging the use of some of the 'new' meditative practices. (As I quietly ask The Controller to grant me access to Non-Seeking-Non-Grasping Mind. (: 0 ).
Anyway, it was an interesting class. We actually learned a meditation this week. Its a strange breathing exercise which, among other things, reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the "man with a tape recorder up his nose." It's supposed to be useful for settling the mind when it's addled, which I can believe, as it's relatively complicated and requires a bit of concentration just to keep track of which nostril you're supposed to breathe through at which time and breaking your exhalation into three equal parts and visualizing three channels going over your head and down your back, etc...
Just plunk that down in the tool chest and roll on to zazen tomorrow night.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Tar Baby
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
–"The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear" from Dune, by Frank Herbert
Sigh.
The waiting continues and the tension thickens. Avoiding the sticky tar baby in the briar patch is becoming progressively more difficult and more and more effort is required to maintain focus. Thin envelopes have, not unexpectedly, started to trickle into my inbox. It's a measure of the relative situations of the astronomy job market in the UK and the US that I was shortlisted for three of the six UK positions I applied for, but so far only one of the 17 or so US positions.
Part of the problem is that I'm aware of the fact that much bigger tar creatures are potentially looming ahead, and indeed not necessarily avoidable. This is of course nothing new really. Suffering is always looming isn't it? Certainly without Right Thought and Right View and Right Action, etc... The Crunch is always lurking somewhere.
Meditation does help some. Indeed I've taken to using it quite a bit to try and maintain focus and stay productive. Still it doesn't always work, particularly when I get tired. (And of course tired doesn't always imply sleepiness. If only! Ah well, perhaps this would be easier if I was more practiced. Or perhaps not. I guess the "right view" would be who cares?
Anyway, I'm looking at trying to join a weekly Zazen group as well as the meditation classes Sunshine & I have been taking (which, among other things, are surprisingly light on the actual meditation). Supplement, supplement, supplement. Sunshine went to the evening mass at the local baptist church this weekend. She seemed to sorta enjoy it. My aren't we becoming quite the dabblers? All in the name of "getting integral" right? Plus, neither of us can manage to put together much of a "body module" at the moment, so we might as well push on "contemplation." I'm sure some shadow work would be in order too, but resources are tight at the moment in just about every way imaginable. So we take it a bit at a time.
Man, this is a rambling entry. I didn't have much of a focus in mind. It's really just an activity to keep my brain occupied on the train home. I'm not nearly good enough that I can meditate on the Tube yet, and I'm a little concerned about what my 'self' might get up to if I just let it wander aimlessly at the moment.
I think I may be developing a taste for dub reggae. I downloaded a reggae collection from iTunes the other day called Jonny Greenwood is the Controller, which is a collection of music from the Trojan music label compiled by Radiohead's creative "multi-instrumentalist" Jonny Greenwood, who has turned himself into a sort of musical jack-of-all-trades. Anyway, he seems to have pretty good musical tastes.
Rather rainy day today, Of course it's February in England, what do I expect?
Random, random, random....
My stop is approaching...
It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Karma at Pooh Corner
Blogging on the train again.
Class was moved at the last minute tonight to a venue around the corner: Pooh Corner Kindergarten. The room is actually quite surprisingly large for central London; it's a converted church basement. (The ground floor seems to have been converted to some sort of NHS clinic. Anyway, the whole session was running about a half hour late due to the switch.
A smaller group than last week, but including the more interesting regulars. There's a guy with a voice that sounds rather like Russel Crowe. He has a bit of that air of barely civilized violence that comes across with him as well. Then there is the quiet Peruvian lady with the Borders bag. And, most entertainingly, the two ladies who remind me of a somewhat more wholesome version of the Ab Fab women; with yoga and meditation replacing the booze and fashion.
Tonight was about Karma, and I'm afraid I have to agree with Sunshine that this is probably not a perfect fit for us. Certainly I'm beginning to see that they are a little too heavy on the metaphysical literalism for my taste. I don't know if it's just these teachers, or their Kadmpa order, or maybe Tibetan Buddhism in general. Still, it's an interesting experience, and I'm perhaps becoming a little more forgiving of the overtly religious, at least in certain settings. I'm a bit skeptical of "karmic action at a distance" which is certainly how they were discussing it tonight, but I can perhaps see how to integrate much of the idea of karma without having to invoke anything too magic. Something running more along the lines of unkind practice leaving you susceptible to suffering. I think I could see that, but sickness now caused by bad deeds in the past seems harder for me to accept.
Class was moved at the last minute tonight to a venue around the corner: Pooh Corner Kindergarten. The room is actually quite surprisingly large for central London; it's a converted church basement. (The ground floor seems to have been converted to some sort of NHS clinic. Anyway, the whole session was running about a half hour late due to the switch.
A smaller group than last week, but including the more interesting regulars. There's a guy with a voice that sounds rather like Russel Crowe. He has a bit of that air of barely civilized violence that comes across with him as well. Then there is the quiet Peruvian lady with the Borders bag. And, most entertainingly, the two ladies who remind me of a somewhat more wholesome version of the Ab Fab women; with yoga and meditation replacing the booze and fashion.
Tonight was about Karma, and I'm afraid I have to agree with Sunshine that this is probably not a perfect fit for us. Certainly I'm beginning to see that they are a little too heavy on the metaphysical literalism for my taste. I don't know if it's just these teachers, or their Kadmpa order, or maybe Tibetan Buddhism in general. Still, it's an interesting experience, and I'm perhaps becoming a little more forgiving of the overtly religious, at least in certain settings. I'm a bit skeptical of "karmic action at a distance" which is certainly how they were discussing it tonight, but I can perhaps see how to integrate much of the idea of karma without having to invoke anything too magic. Something running more along the lines of unkind practice leaving you susceptible to suffering. I think I could see that, but sickness now caused by bad deeds in the past seems harder for me to accept.
Brian May
So apparently Brian May, better known as the guitarist for Queen, is back at Imperial College as a grad student to finish his PhD in Astrophysics. I'd heard this rumor a while ago, but now he's on the face board next to the staff mailboxes on the 10th floor. However I notice he's not listed in on department website nor do I think he's been assigned office space, and I somehow doubt he'll be doing much TA work. Still there are not many astrophysics groups/departments who get do count a genuine rock god amongst their number. I have no idea who he's working with as Peter says his old faculty advisor left years ago.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Dharma Train
Blogging on the tube again. Taking a late train back to Harrow after attending my second Buddhist meditation class. After each class there is a short informal chat over tea. Tonight, one of the topics of discussion was how to maintain these ideas in the harsh reality of the workplace, where people are much more likely to be harsh, angry, etc. Certainly I've had some experiences with this and hard as it is, I do think mindfulness helps. It's just not always easy to be mindful when the world is digging at you and goading you to contract.
My own source of contraction at the moment is fear. It continues to crop up as 'job season' moves from ripe to rot and I haven't yet been harvested. I really hate the process of applying for jobs. It really is exactly the sort of thing that is almost perfectly designed to shred the soul. First, there is the unavoidable statistical fact: most of the people in my position who have trained and worked for years to get a position in astronomy, don't. Most of us will run out at some point and run aground. There just aren't enough chairs and someone gets left behind. That leaving behind stings. It's hard not to take it personally. After all you are the product you were trying to sell and you were what they didn't want.
So you spend your time writing these applications, and spend your money to send them out, knowing that 90% won't even result in an interview. Then when you get shortlisted, it just ups the stakes. Now you feel like you have a shot, but you have to apply even harder. To succeed, you really have to see yourself in that position because if you don't, they won't either. But in that visualization attachment is so easy, which just makes it sting all the worse when they turn you down. It's the job that you thought you really might get that hurts the most when you don't.
Meanwhile the pressure is still there from all the other sources, and it's ever so easy to get lost in the craziness. It's so easy to contract into the fear, and the juggling act, and the rejection. And in that contraction come all the shadows projected from your fear into the world. You can see enemies and competition and missed opportunities everywhere. Staying positive and mindful in the midst of this is not easy.
I keep having to try and come back to probably the wisest thing that my thesis advisor Rob Fesen ever taught me (and he taught me quite a lot of really important things that I've only really come to appreciate many years later). Quite early in my career as a grad student at Dartmouth he told me that what we do is a privilege. It is a truly remarkable thing that we get supported to just look at the universe and think about it and tell people what we think we see. We don't produce anything pictures and the stories that go with those pictures. And that fascination with the cosmos is what pays my rent. But it's a privilege that doesn't come with any guarantees. So enjoy it while it lasts.
That's good advice. It's just hard to hold on to that wisdom when faced with the potential death of a lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. It hurts to lose something cherished. But focusing on the joy while it lasts for however long it lasts is really the only sensible answer. Anything else is just going to make you unhappy and won't change the outcome anyway. So keep the faith, where the faith is not hope for the future, but joy in the now. Enjoy it now, the future will come regardless. Enjoy that when it's the present.
My own source of contraction at the moment is fear. It continues to crop up as 'job season' moves from ripe to rot and I haven't yet been harvested. I really hate the process of applying for jobs. It really is exactly the sort of thing that is almost perfectly designed to shred the soul. First, there is the unavoidable statistical fact: most of the people in my position who have trained and worked for years to get a position in astronomy, don't. Most of us will run out at some point and run aground. There just aren't enough chairs and someone gets left behind. That leaving behind stings. It's hard not to take it personally. After all you are the product you were trying to sell and you were what they didn't want.
So you spend your time writing these applications, and spend your money to send them out, knowing that 90% won't even result in an interview. Then when you get shortlisted, it just ups the stakes. Now you feel like you have a shot, but you have to apply even harder. To succeed, you really have to see yourself in that position because if you don't, they won't either. But in that visualization attachment is so easy, which just makes it sting all the worse when they turn you down. It's the job that you thought you really might get that hurts the most when you don't.
Meanwhile the pressure is still there from all the other sources, and it's ever so easy to get lost in the craziness. It's so easy to contract into the fear, and the juggling act, and the rejection. And in that contraction come all the shadows projected from your fear into the world. You can see enemies and competition and missed opportunities everywhere. Staying positive and mindful in the midst of this is not easy.
I keep having to try and come back to probably the wisest thing that my thesis advisor Rob Fesen ever taught me (and he taught me quite a lot of really important things that I've only really come to appreciate many years later). Quite early in my career as a grad student at Dartmouth he told me that what we do is a privilege. It is a truly remarkable thing that we get supported to just look at the universe and think about it and tell people what we think we see. We don't produce anything pictures and the stories that go with those pictures. And that fascination with the cosmos is what pays my rent. But it's a privilege that doesn't come with any guarantees. So enjoy it while it lasts.
That's good advice. It's just hard to hold on to that wisdom when faced with the potential death of a lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. It hurts to lose something cherished. But focusing on the joy while it lasts for however long it lasts is really the only sensible answer. Anything else is just going to make you unhappy and won't change the outcome anyway. So keep the faith, where the faith is not hope for the future, but joy in the now. Enjoy it now, the future will come regardless. Enjoy that when it's the present.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Tallahassee Dreaming on Such a Winter's Day
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.
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.
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.
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