Encephalon

You sound like one of them incorrigible critical thinkin' types, tryin' to stir everyone up with all kind of fancy thinkin' and intellectual honesty, perseverence, humility... yeah, I know what yer up to. Valuable Intellectual Traits Intellectual Humility: Having a consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one's native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one's viewpoint. Intellectual humility depends on recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. It does not imply spinelessness or submissiveness. It implies the lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations, of one's beliefs. Intellectual Courage: Having a consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing. This courage is connected with the recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading. To determine for ourselves which is which, we must not passively and uncritically "accept" what we have "learned." Intellectual courage comes into play here, because inevitably we will come to see some truth in some ideas considered dangerous and absurd, and distortion or falsity in some ideas strongly held in our social group. We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for non-conformity can be severe. Intellectual Empathy: Having a consciousness of the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, which requires the consciousness of our egocentric tendency to identify truth with our immediate perceptions of long-standing thought or belief. This trait correlates with the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. This trait also correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand. Intellectual Integrity: Recognition of the need to be true to one's own thinking; to be consistent in the intellectual standards one applies; to hold one's self to the same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one's antagonists; to practice what one advocates for others; and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one's own thought and action. Intellectual Perseverance: Having a consciousness of the need to use intellectual insights and truths in spite of difficulties, obstacles, and frustrations; firm adherence to rational principles despite the irrational opposition of others; a sense of the need to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight. Faith In Reason: Confidence that, in the long run, one's own higher interests and those of humankind at large will be best served by giving the freest play to reason, by encouraging people to come to their own conclusions by developing their own rational faculties; faith that, with proper encouragement and cultivation, people can learn to think for themselves, to form rational viewpoints, draw reasonable conclusions, think coherently and logically, persuade each other by reason and become reasonable persons, despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it. Fairmindedness: Having a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one's own feelings or vested interests, or the feelings or vested interests of one's friends, community or nation; implies adherence to intellectual standards without reference to one's own advantage or the advantage of one's group.

Forget Buddhism then. If the notion of a socially constructed identity is simply to alien to grasp with the language of Buddhism then pick up any work on contemporary psychology that is pertinent to the subject. Looking for scientific or logical evidence of 'no-self' or egolessness is absurd so I have to agree that you haven't found the nonexistent evidence. Hard evidence of a socially constructed identity is there for anyone who wants to look. Whether we "believe" it or not is immaterial. Have you done your own peer-reviewed independent research into the claims of enlightenment made by individuals? How would you even begin to quantify data? Are you even in a position to interpret the data? I'm certainly not. To the best of my knowledge, acts in concert with the Tao, a total freedom from egolessness that allows us to manifest wu wei, is really where the "action" is. You're looking for proof of this? Good luck.

I honestly find her treatment of what characterizes the psychological reality of an awakened state, freed from the delusions that egocentrism creates, a bold and brilliant move, even more so in that this work was a comparative analysis between systems theory and the buddhist doctrine of mutual causality, which are so elegantly reinforcing that the two together offer a potent explanatory power. The Buddhist doctrine of mutual causality is not Macy's. It is the intellectual wing of Buddha's teaching, set apart from the moral teachings that most people think of when they think of Buddhism. Her book was so extraordinarily well received by the contemporary world of Buddhist scholars that I can only conclude that I have misrepresented her work, either by omission of pertinent facts or faulty delivery. It's been a staple of mine for 20 years as I try to wrap my head around the mystical dimension of environmental awareness, which buddhism and Taoism both speak to with intensity. Might there be a more ambitious treatment of the subject? Please point me in the direction if you see it.

Part of the history of Buddhism is characterized by the transformations that occured as it swept through different cultures and countries. That it was subsumed by the samurai culture of Japan and later appealed to in WWII is testament that people will do what they will with a powerful idea. In a firefight, many Buddhists become Taoist warriors, attacking when necessary. I must admit that I was a little taken aback by HH Dalai Lama's comments. Given the history of Bin Laden, the early support he received by the US in his fight against the Soviets, and the fact that the murderous strike on 9/11 was payback for US imperialism in the Middle East, I can't help but think that HH is showing remarkable restraint by not alienating western nations with uncomfortable truths.

Perhaps you can humor me with your own feedback?

Clarity and concision? Surely you jest! My most recent post on Joanna Macy and the experience of no-self is one such attempt.

Debilitating fear is precisely the reason why I made the decision to put my buddhist practice on hold and take up Taoist cultivation practice (nei kung) four years ago. changing your mind - using your mind - is a prescription that is likely to succeed with those who have an abundance of will power and initiative, and that population is not typical. Changing your mind using your body? That's the prescription the Taoists and yogis have been recommending for centuries. Your path to healing is a somatic one. There ain't no way around it. Fear is conquered by grounding your physical self to the earth so you don't feel like you're constatnly falling off a skyscraper. I was stripped naked and whipped with a belt before I was 4. Then my mother remarried someone worse who took up the psychological speer to boot. I was a grossly disempowered alcoholic by the time I was 16 and stayed that way until I sobered up after I turned 21. If I knew then what I know now..? Get to the gym and get strong enough to deeply feel your body, practice nei kung to eliminate the fear and self-loathing. Honestly, it's really that simple.

Hello Blasto, Fist, I enjoyed this article. I have also decided that it is hypocritical of me to advocate love, compassion, and tolerance, and yet not be willing to listen to what you have to say, when clearly you have a great deal to say that is relevant and meaningful. Well, to be sure, its not me. I am merely passing along a message from a couple of authors I depend on for clarity. I wanted to address some things that came to mind while I was reading this article that I think might be interesting to pursue in relations to the self, especially since I think this is where the self discussion is going to continue. My first thought is about the origination of self. I understand that Buddhists and Taoists tend to believe that we originated from nothing and that we never fully understand that nothingness, emptiness, void, or whatever you choose to call it. It's a difficult concept to grasp because our ego doesnt much appreciate the experience of egolessness, which is why the delusion of separateness is more or less our default awareness, punctuated, if we are lucky, by brief glimpses of connectedness, unity, and deep empathy for and identification with the rest of creation. Our identity expands to include an ever-widening net of life on earth. That we can allow this insight to drop anchor in our daily awareness, at least intellectually, and cultivate our behavior in accordance with this insight, is the work of a lifetime. My question stems from biology though, the origination of ourselves as infants within the womb. From my limited knowledge of biology, my assumption is that we begin with the meeting of sperm and egg, and that from this we are born inside the mother. No one can remember back to this moment, at least as far as I know, so what I can take from this is that we are not truly the self we know now when we are first created, but rather that self comes later and essentially grows within the womb. Even after we are born we do not remember these first few years and this this is perplexing to me, since anyone that watches an infant clearly sees them as a person, their personality and essentially who they are is evident from the moment they leave the womb and join the rest of the world. My expectant wife had the gall to recommend that I take time out from my regular reading program and dive into Whats Going On in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot, Ph.D, a mother herself and a professor of neuroscience. It generally conflicts with what youve proposed in your preceding paragraph. Brain and mind, including personality, is not graven in stone upon birth but far more predicated on what happens outside the womb than we have originally believed. Please note that Im not trying to prove you wrong for the sake of making you feel inferior. This was news to me too. The second point I want to make is that every infant requires a few things to grow up into a relatively healthy adult early in their lives, the first two years to be exact. The most important being love and compassion. If a child is not able to bond with their mother, they will never be able to bond in a healthy way with anyone else for the rest of their lives. This tells me that the self, this aspect that we choose to see as an illusion, may in fact be quite real. The reasoning being simply that if you take an adult that hasn't properly bonded with their mother and try to explain anything that you just have, they will come away from the discussion completely perplexed and indifferent, in fact they may not even see the need for the discussion in the first place. Aaron, it is not my intention to single you out here but equivocation is given full throttle, not only in this forum but everywhere. I dont want to beat a dead horse but assigning a term multiple definitions is a recipe for communicative failure. Im glad you liked what Loy and Batchelor have said about the nature of the self, but they are not claiming that human beings are void of personality, individuality, identity, or temperament. They are claiming that the self is impermanent, a product of ever-changing contingencies that the human being is exposed to in the phenomenal world and that dharma practice itself is about cleansing one's perception through meditation and moral conduct. This forms the entire crux of the article. So from that I ask the question, if we cannot even remember these first moments, the moments when we are held and loved and cared for, yet they play such an important part in the nature of our existence, the way we view ourselves, what does that ultimately say about the idea that we do not exist, that the self is an illusion and that simply seeing through this illusion will allow us to accept the world as it is? If someone who suffered from severe neglect is unable to experience this, then can it honestly be said to be true? Isn't it worth exploring the idea that the mere ability to examine self requires that we must first become healthy selves? This question has already been answered. In an even broader sense, it's not the fact that we are unable to examine the self that limits this ability, but rather the ability to bond with other selves, to view other selves as being worthy of our attention, to have a good sense of our relation with the whole. It is only when we can do this that we ultimately see the worth of being free of anguish, because it is the knowledge of suffering that urges us to be free from suffering. One might say that one who has not bonded properly is perpetually suffering, hence the inability to understand or acknowledge the importance of being free of it. Sorry, Aaron, but I cant explicate that paragraph. I concur that bonding is essential, but I think your other points are predicated on this difficult subject of no-self, which I am beginning to think may be best defined herein as egolessness. I know I'm going on, but I have a point that I want to clarify. This seems to me to be an indication that, even though we come from nothing, we are not nothing and that is ultimately the reason why we cannot escape ourselves, even after understanding the illusion of self, that at our base we are intricately connected to our body and the way our minds develop through contact with others. In fact the conditioning that we decry is in fact necessary and needed, in order for us to truly evolve into beings that can see the ultimate need to escape self. If it is just an illusion one could say that we could simply put a child in a box with a water and food and they would develop as they should, but that's not what happens and any sane person would be completely horrified by that idea. Thats true. We must have a healthy ego before we learn how to make it work on our behalf. In order to tame the ego, My belief that self is real and concrete stems from our intimate need to bond with others, and I believe that the Buddha also saw this need ultimately, especially when it comes down to the eightfold path. It is through compassion that one becomes closer to others and it is only through compassion that one can ultimately understand the true nature of suffering and the true need to end that suffering. Hence the paradox seems to be, that only in becoming closer to others, do we ultimately understand the need to detach from others. Im with you up right up until you place an emphasis on detachment from others. I dont understand that point. Even more important, if the self is not completely defined in infancy, if it is only our interaction with the world that helps that to become defined, is it safe to say that the self may not be the product of the void, but rather the product of something that originally came from that void, that the conscious human being we are grows within us? If so where does that put us? I think this paragraph is also predicated on assumptions that may not hold. Anyways, I'm not sure where else to go with that, but I thought it was worth pointing out. I think it natural that we should need to reconceptualize our identity in the face of the radical proposition that our self is not the concrete, separate, and isolated phenomenon that the west has treated as fact since the beginning. We rightly demand to see a compelling vision of what we are in the absence of all that we call I. That seems fair enough. I think Dogen, a zen master born in 1200 AD. comes close. I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. He also writes - To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly. Or, to use a Ken Wilber term, we are holons, both wholes and parts occupying a point in an infinite chain extending in both directions. Ive found Joanna Macy the most helpful in helping me wrap my mind around the intimate psychological experience of this no-self. But thats for another post.

Thanks for that, you Irish meanie.

I have to say that I am obliged to accept your point as a legitimate view and would be grateful for the fruitful conversation that would ensue if we could tease out our differences in a harmonious way. Again, I belong to the agnostic camp of Buddhism and eschew all the metaphysical trappings that accreted to the original words centuries later. That being said, the parallels between early Buddhism and the conclusions of our own postmodern realization and the insights by the academic disciplines that inform if lead me to conclude that fundamental Buddhist doctrine is legitimate precisely because of its resonance with western findings, not because it is axiomatic. Would you disagree with the first noble truth, that life is anguish, difficult, existential despair, suffering, etc., or are we in agreement there with a green light ahead?

I'm very cautious about my consumption of original texts. Maybe I'm just lazy but I'm all too familiar with the human propensity, especially my own, to read erroneous meaning where it doesn't exist. So I guess I'd be in quite a quandary if I lived in an era preceding our own, where a prolific contingent of writers, both eastern and western, have rendered a gold mine of literature specifically for the western audience. Curiously enough, there's one title called "What the Buddha Taught" written especially for us gringoes. And since I fall clearly within the camp of agnostic Buddhism, which is where I believe all personal and scholarly investigation should begin before we start trying to unravel all the metaphysics that came centuries later, I have to stick with David Loy, Stephen Batchelor, Jack Kornfield and David Edwards. I am not an unimpeachable source, but I abundantly harvested their ideas for my thesis in Buddhist social theory.

The fountain analogy precipitated a small epiphany for me. If you want to dig more deeply into this I would highly recommend "Money Sex War Karma" by Loy. It's a lighter version of his earlier masterpieces that explains how our secular institutions of the modern world fill our hole with all manner of distractions. good catches there, K! PS - edited for failure to denote difference between K's dialogue and my own (in bold).

Whatya up to, Otis, using all them five dollar words, like "phenomonology" and what not? Slippery slope, my friend, soon you'll be talkin' all kind of civil rights, if it feels good do it, moral relativism and all that jazz, and pretty soon, before ya know it, the dogs are already loose and the genie is out of the bottle. Playin' with fire, son, playin' with fire.

We're not bringing "him" up anymore. Didn't you get the memo?

Thanks, my friend. I think what I really have going for me is that I waited until I was old enough to be a grandfather to have my first child, and that on the day of my daughter's birth I will have completed 4 years of steady nei kung practice. 'Twas the healthiest thing I ever did for myself or my family. Good luck with that, Steve!

I think that makes a lot of sense.

It's not easy asking the ego to imagine itself out of existence in order for some unfamiliar construct of an identity to come it and occupy that space. I'm just grateful for Loy and Batchelor, two western scholars who actually did the real work of deep infusion in the eastern traditions who have shared their insights with a western audience. We in the west need these people to guide us in this cross cultural path.

I'm partial to a study of the Three Marks of Existence, those being anatta (egolessness), annica (impermanance) and dukkha (suffering, or anguish, despair) in their original tripartite form, and then breaking it down after acquiring some understanding of their context and relationship. I didn't do this as a much younger student and it didn't work out so well. Although I don't subscribe to Pema Codron's lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, I really dig her writing, and the following link has a beautiful rendition of the 3 Marks. On your mark... get set... http://www.shambhala...three-marks.cfm Although I have to say that I am indebted to David Loy and Stephen Batchelor for their work on anatta in my other post

Your tantrums don't bother me, Aaron, although I have to say that any young person with such an appetite for unexamined assumptions and sweeping generalizations is not someone destined to inspire. If cutting edge theories of consciousness are anethema to you, which they evidently are, please feel free to contact the Mind and Life Institute and let the leading scientists in this field know that you've got it all figured out. After all, who in their right mind would ever doubt your exquisitely honed vapidity? http://www.mindandlife.org/

The point I was attempting to highlight in this post is captured by the first sentence italicized: "the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory." Tarnas' eco-friendly reputation would not does not sit well with hierarchical notions of human consciousness sitting upon a throne but neither is he denying that human consciousness performs the important function of global mind connected to the rest of the planetary nervous system.

I hope you don't take this personally or defensively but I feel that your unfortunate childhood exposure to the dark side of religion is training your investigation in the direction of healing your psychic wounds rather than examining religious phenomena for its own sake. The questions you ask are important ones but they are the same ones, over and over. Might I respectfully suggest you read the literature that speaks to your questions? We really can't expect other members to bare the burden of our own research. The End of Faith by Sam Harris A Buddhist History of the West by David Loy A History of God by Karen Armstrong Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

There is absolutism in every religious tradition, which is often more the product of absolutist practitioners than the doctrines themselves, as original teachings tend to accrete corrupted interpretations as the years and centuries tick by. I would have to agree with the likes of Sam Harris (The End of Faith) that the Abrahamic Traditions are far more prone to this than the wisdom traditions of east simply because of the nature of top-down authoritarian belief structures. Having said that, it's remarkable that the least absolutist religion, Buddhism (and there is lively debate about whether it is by definition a religion) is consistently held up in this forum as absolutist. If you've read even a fraction of the feedback you've been getting in response to your posts you should have gathered by now that the original teachings of the buddha were not metaphysical claims or commandments from Above; they were psychological tools for investigating inner experience and ending suffering. I don't understand why this simple point continues to be shrouded in mystery. There is ample evidence that original Buddhism was agnostic, humanistic, rational insofar as it did result in a common experience amongst the practitioners, and was not charitable to the Hindu metaphysical orthodoxy, or any orthodoxy, of its day. we are in the midst of a prolific academic study of buddhism and its remarkable consistency with postmodernism, modern psychology, and neuroscience. Einstein was totally on board. The literature is vast. There may come a point where the weight of evidence demonstrates that Buddhism, at least its agnostic stripe, is extremely relevent to modern crises above and beyond what other traditions offer from their Iron Age perspective. But yes, you will find an almost barbaric form of Buddhist metaphysics in here that will leave a stain on your computer table. It's just a possibility here, not an absolute, that your phenomenological investigation into your subjective experiences may be leaving you wide open for precisely the kind of feedback you don't want. Maybe the experiment in comparative radical subjectivity has run its course and we now have to mop up the floors, tie up some loose ends, and get down to some essential facts. Coming to terms with a dysfunctional religious upbringing is an essential step for many of us, but sooner or later a critical evaluation of the world's traditions will yield a lot of clarity.