The Unconscious in Buddha Dharma

            As we in the West are discovering the teachings of Buddha Dharma about mind and consciousness, we are confronted with the necessity of rediscovering our own repressed traditions of the study of the psyche, consciousness, and the unconscious.

Western explorers of the psyche discovered the unconscious in the 19^th century.  The Buddhist explorers of mind, through their deep meditation, discovered the unconscious over two thousand years ago.  Since then, the Buddhist admonition to “turn the light around and shine it on yourselves,” as stated by Linji in the 9^th century (or “take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward on your self,” as Dogen restated it in the 12th century, or “to personally turn around to face inward” as Hakuin restated it in the 18^th century) is the direction to study the unconscious by introspection.  In Buddhism, the unconscious is called the storehouse- or treasury-consciousness (Skt. alayavijnana) and the fruit of this introspective study was the Mahayana Sutras.    

In the 20^th century Carl G. Jung explored the unconscious more than any other psychologist. He identified two layers or poles of the unconscious, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious (the later he also called the impersonal, transpersonal, or universal features of the unconscious). [CW 7, §§ 102, 103, 445, & 452. See note.]  The first layer consists of those elements, features, or aspects of the unconscious that are acquired during one’s own lifetime and experience.  Jung emphasized that the deeper layer of the collective psyche is inherited, and he called this the region of the archetypal contents where these “primordial images are the most ancient and the most universal ‘thought-forms’ of humanity.” [CW 7, §§ 104.]  In Buddhist terminology (using agricultural metaphors of the time, as we would use computer metaphors for the mind today), the personal features are those seeds (Skt. bija) of the storehouse consciousness that are “planted” (continuing the cultivation metaphor) during one’s lifetime, and the impersonal features in the storehouse are the seeds placed there “from past lives” as immeasurable in number as the grains of sands of the Ganges river.   

Jung found that the personal unconscious contains all the material that was once conscious, e.g., memories, repressed material, subliminal sense perceptions, etc., while the collective unconscious contains “all the material which has not yet reached the threshold of consciousness.”  [CW 7, §§204 & 441.]  These structural elements of the deepest unconscious are the archetypes. They are psychic structures that are just as inherited, as impersonal, and as collective as the physical structures of our bodies, e.g., our bilateral symmetry,  our circulatory, skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems, etc..  As our individual bodies are unique expressions of these universal forms, so to are our individual consciousnesses unique expressions of the universal forms of mind.

In the Five Skandhas, one of the Buddhist’s schematic representations of mind, the structures of the unconscious are called the first four skandhas with consciousness designated the Fifth Skandha.  Early Buddhism through such schematics of mind as the Five Skandhas and the Eighteen Dhatus tacitly recognized that there is an unconscious dimension to mind, but it was the later Ekayana/Mahayana development of the schematic representation of the Eight Consciousnesses that made the unconscious explicit in Buddhism with the eighth storehouse consciousness as the storehouse of all the seeds that are present in mind either as submerged or as not yet conscious. Jung’s reference to inherited primordial “universal thought-forms” corresponds directly with samskara, the Fourth Skandha, which is often translated as “mental formations.”

A primary problem we have to face directly in Western culture, as we meet, accommodate, appropriate, and acculturate the Buddha Dharma, is this question of the unconscious, because in Western culture, as it is dominated by the scientism dogma stating that only the physical exists, the mind does not exist, and “the psychic” has had its relation to mind stripped away and is considered as nothing more than superstitious supernaturalism or hallucinatory imagination.  

The fact is that the study of the psyche is the study of mind “from the inside” while the study of neurophysiology is the study of mind “from the outside” as a brain.   The West is deeply confused about this distinction.  The two approaches to mind are not the same, and while there is value in correlating the discoveries made from each perspective in this field of study, the study from the outside can never and will never replace the need or importance of the study from the inside.  This study “from the inside” is exactly what Buddhism calls “turning the light around and shining it inward on ourselves” and points directly to the appeal that Buddhism has in the West for those who long to escape the domination of the field of the study of mind by the physicalist dogmas of physicists and other practitioners of the physical sciences.  

[Note: Jung quotes from The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung, Vol. 7. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. ]

[Edited 3/11/17]

Connected blogs:
Zen is the Art of Imagination

The Value of Meditation as Implosion

We humans are very enamored of explosions.  We flock to displays of fireworks and to films with explosions. We spend billions on building better bombs and then finding ways to test them on or off the battlefield, and sometimes it seems we create a war just to have battlefield to test the next generation of exploding devices.  Most interesting to me personally, is that we have enshrined the explosion at the core--in the inner sanctum sanctorum--of our materialistic post-anthropomorphic creation myth of science and call it “the Big Bang.”

As I see it, our deep connection to explosion comes from the first stirrings of our sensory consciousness when we came into the world with the explosive force of birth and our senses met with the explosions of sound and color, sensations of heat and cold, being moved around in gravity defying positions, etc. Then, to make sense of this explosion of the senses, we sort through the dust storm of sensory data with a slow building explosion of mental distinctions and discriminations that separate, associate, and identify colors, sounds, touches, tastes, smells that becomes a mental explosion of the categorization of things. 

However, because we see the universe as the expression of an elemental explosion, as well as seeing our own consciousness as the most intimate explosion of awareness, we miss something equally as vital: for every explosion there is an implosion.   Because we are enchanted by the explosions of the senses that we perceive, we usually completely overlook that the perceptions are based on the actual fact of implosion: we receive sensory data,  Our usual conception of being a being in a skin bag looking out upon the external universe betrays the actual experience that our senses never “leave” our skin bag, and our “perceptions” never leave the mind.  We naively imagine in our materialistic construction of our worldview, that our senses go out of our body, that we see out into the world, but if we are able to see-through the enchantment of the sensory explosions, then we can note such insight as the fact that “light” is said to “enter” the eye and tickle the nerve cells in the retina that in turn tickle other neurons that they are connected to, which in turn tickle more neurons, until an explosion of neuronal waves of fireworks are swirling around within the grey matter of the brain that explodes in awareness of the outside universe.  But here’s the rub, in this materialistic worldview, this “outside universe” of physical matter is never actually “outside,” because it is completely contained in the grey matter as a mental construction or reflection of what has been imploded into the brain.  If we pay attention, we are forced to confront the idea that the universe is not exploding but is actually the implosion of how it all is received by our specialized sensory patches of skin to be recreated as the world within.

Here’s where Zen comes to the soteriological rescue.  In Zen meditation we “turn the light around” or “take the backward step” of awareness, so that from our usual looking outward at an evolving world, we turn to notice and be aware of this imploding nature of the universe. The technical Sanskrit term for this is asraya-paravrtti, “to turn around at the basis.”   Though it doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, this can be called “involution” in contradistinction to the usual view of “evolution.”  This training in asraya-paravrtti, as the turning around or involution of awareness to its own source, has been derisively called “contemplating one’s belly button” by people who don’t know any better and place great value in, and rest their self worth on, the outward show of explosions. 

There are many values of training and practice in sitting meditation (zazen), but the essential value is not in developing explosive force, but in the discovery of the implosive basis of awareness. While we are enamored and enchanted by explosions, we are also entangled by them in our relationships and killed by them in our interactions. The explosions of emotions are destructive to our personal as well as international relationships. We send drones to explode our perceived enemies and yet we refuse to acknowledge to ourselves as a people that we can’t really accomplish that goal without also exploding innocent bystanders. Likewise, this paradigm of international drama is also played our in our personal relationships, in relations of domestic violence where children become traumatized innocent bystanders, in our social and financial relations where people are forced to live in poverty, homeless, and without adequate health care, all because we are basing our social worldview on the perspective of people as beings who have exploded apart into separate entities competing with each other for the finite commodities of the. 

What sitting meditation reveals to us is that this worldview, of an exploding universe expanding into separate units flying apart from each other, is a myth, a false vision of what is actually happening right here and now.  This universe is also an imploding universe, condensing into mutual reflections of itself, revealing the absolute connectedness and unification of the universe, with our own mind and being seamlessly joined to each and every other node of awareness.  

Consciousness is not just the exploding evolution of awareness, it is equally the imploding involution of awareness. The value of meditation as implosion is that it opens us to the realization that awareness is only made possible by both its expansion and contraction, its explosion and implosion, and that this activity of expansion and contraction is the activity of the unified mind. This is why the toroid is the best simple model of conscious awareness as it represents both the exploding and imploding activities of awareness that form the shape of consciousness.*  The sitting meditation of Zen Buddhism, with its elegant simplicity, is the most effective way to come to terms, directly and personally, with this mutually expanding and contracting universe of awareness that we call mind.

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[Note *:  For the development of a more complex and comprehensive model for consciousness, elaborating from a simple toroidal model to a multi-faceted Mobius bottle model, see “Zen Theory: An Exploration of Space, Time, and Consciousness via the Cycle of Change Between Binary Opposites.” by Kigen William Ekeson available at his Zen Theory blog.]. 

 

 

 

 

Karma and Rebirth Revisited - Part Two

Continued from Part One.
~
As Buddhism comes to the West, it cannot be stated emphatically enough, that a paradigm shift is necessary to understand karma and rebirth, because from the modern materialistic perspective of secular scientism karma and rebirth seem like supernatural mysticism or superstition and from the modern materialistic perspective of the Abrahamic religions karma and rebirth seem like amoral ungodly atheism. On the one hand, we have to give up our attachment to the idea that only what is tangible is real; and on the other hand we have to give up our attachment to the idea that what is revealed by God written in a sacred text is literally real.  The core problem with the so-called secular Buddhist movement is that the participants do not want to acknowledge the necessity for this paradigm shift, of needing to change their perspective about what is real, and to inquire deeply with determination and vigor into the foundations and the fountainhead of our own mind.

Here are some commonly asked questions by people trying to understand karma and rebirth from within the secular modernist perspective.

Question: By virtue of what feature(s), attribute(s) or quality(s) is karma to be distinguished from ordinary, goal-directed behavior?

 

Reply:  Karma basically (most simply, directly) means action, activity, acts, i.e., the shared meaning element of actions, deeds, behavior, conduct, etc.   So the question should be restated as “what distinguishes karma from ordinary, goal-directed karma?  The reply is nothing, other than that ordinary goal-directed karma is a subset of the general category karma.  The two adjectives “ordinary” and “goal-directed” limit the subset and exclude the karmas that are both extraordinary and non-goal-directed karma.  In other words, the question established four categories of karma, (1) karma that is ordinary but not goal-directed, (2) goal-directed but not ordinary, (3) both ordinary and goal-directed, and (4) neither ordinary nor goal-directed.  Whatever features, attributes, or qualities that are defined for the terms “ordinary” and “goal-directed” are the features, attributes, or qualities that distinguish these categories of karma.

Q.: In what medium do the effects (fruits) of karma propagate?

R.: Mind is the medium.  From the point of view of the thinking consciousness (mano-vijnana) which fabricates and establishes the concept of medium, the propagation of waves requires a medium in which the wave formation propagates.  The Lankavatara Sutra uses the simile of the ocean and the wave.  When the karma wave is propagated, the mind is symbolized by the ocean, and it is the ocean that is reborn with the wave propagation, not an individual entity.   But while this image is a useful tool, is should not to be over-utilized or stretched too far as a metaphor.  We can also consider the wave formations of light and how they propagate through empty space with no apparent medium.  For a long time scientists assumed that there had to be a medium for light wave propagation and they came up with ideas like ether. But then living with paradox became possible in physics, so now we have the wave-particle duality, or wavicle, for understanding light wave propagation without a medium.  Sometimes light appears and acts like a wave propagating through a medium and sometimes light appears and acts like a particle traveling through empty space.   Likewise, the mind is often compared with empty space with karma appearing to act like a wave through a medium (like the ocean) or like a particle (seed, bija) propagating in space without a medium.  Either seen as the ocean medium or as space, it is mind where karma propagates.     

Q.: What is it, exactly, that connects me to particular persons no longer living and not yet born?

R.: There is no connection to someone “not yet born,” because there is no one “not yet born” except in the constructed imagination with a reality of the category of a unicorn or a rabbit with horns.   The connection to a particular karmic stream of actions of the past is what is called in the present “identity.”  This is the same as what connects us to the particular baby we were at birth when all of the cells of the body of that infant have died and been replaced by new cells, so that physically we are not the same accumulation of molecules and cells, but a stream of molecules and cells that are knit together by our “identity.”  Identity is what is called the volitional aspect of karma.  Karma is created by the identity that attaches to an action. If we have an action without any volitional identity attached to it, then the action does not create karma.  The non-karmic action may have an effect on the physical level, as when someone bumps our elbow and we spill some coffee, but the arm’s activity would not propagate karma. However, our identity-conditioned action upon experiencing the spilled coffee, such as getting angry at being bumped, would be a karma propagating activity, exactly because our identity would be conditioning our emotive action in that case.

Q.: If it is some form of mental causation that connects “lives,” how does it continue after the dissolution of the current brain?

R.:  Mind’s capacity for consciousness is conditioned by brain conditions, but mind is not identical with brain.  The brain is the main physical organ of the central nervous system, but our mind is not our central nervous system.  For example, our spectrum of hearing is limited compared to dogs, so our mind is conditioned by the sensory organ and the central nervous system differently than dogs are conditioned. But the mind still hears within that conditioned limitation.  The mind is what hears, not the brain.   

This is one of the most important points of trying to translate the law of karma into the worldview of modern science which has a basis of materialism.  Much of modern physics, because of the integrity of the adventurous minority of genuine scientists. has slowly chipped away at the bias and prejudicial idea of matter.  Matter was first seen as composed of the four primary elements of earth, water, fire, air. Then the elements were seen as molecular compounds. Then the compounds were seen again as chemical elements. But then the elemental structure was reviewed and revisioned, and in a way re-simplified, into just three primary elements: electrons, protons, and neutrons. And then the world broke open again to reveal the confusing plethora of sub-atomic particles.  Se now we have a view of “matter” in which there is mostly space with tiny swirls and whirlpools of energy force-fields strung together to create the illusion of stuff and matter.

As the Wikipedia article says, “Wave–particle duality is the fact that every elementary particle or quantic entity exhibits the properties of not only particles, but also waves. It addresses the inability of the classical concepts "particle" or "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects.” 

Trying to understand karma from what is a “classical” concept of matter and materialism is bound to fail, just like trying to understand physical matter using classical concepts is bound to fail.  We have to acknowledge that while karma may be discussed by analogy to physical processes, such as “seeds” in the storehouse-consciousness (alaya-vijnana) or waves in the ocean, karma is not a physical process, it is a mind activity.  In Western parlance we would say that karma is a “psychic activity” using the psychological sophistication of Carl G. Jung.  But due to the extreme prejudices and unrelenting oppression of the physical view of reality, psychic activity has been given a bad name, Jung has been defamed as a mystic, the study of the mind and psychology itself has had all the mind and psyche driven out of it by the false views of physical neurology that equates the mind and psyche with the physical brain, etc. 

Buddha’s enlightenment is not a physical event, it is a psychological event, i.e., a psychic activity.  Buddhist sages and bodhisattva-caryas have used physical analogies as skillful means to try to teach and communicate what awakening is, but it remains essentially a psychic event, not a physical event subject to direct objective measurement with a ruler.  There is the modern attempt by so-called self-described secular Buddhists to remove all psychic activity from Buddhism, just has scientific modernity has attempted to remove all psychic activity from the world. But in the end, this is just a denial of the unconscious mind which buries certain psychic actions (karmas) which only come back to haunt us with the fruits of that denial.

The modern secular Buddhist, such as Robert Scharf and Stephen Batchelor, wants us to believe that only the perceptions of the five senses are real and that there is no point to speaking of "experience" in the context of karma and rebirth since we can't see it, hear it, touch it, etc.  The basic problem with this approach is that it is not Buddhist, it is secular, because Buddha Dharma accepts reality of the 6^th sense of thinking, the 7^th level of consciousness and the unconscious level of the 8^th consciousness.  Or in the framework of the Five Skandhas, Buddha Dharma accepts the un-conscious levels of the first four skandhas in relation to the 5th skandha of consciousness.

 

The best Western bridge that I have found to understanding the required paradigm shift from the materialistic secular frame of reference limited by the 5 sense perceptions to the Buddhist frame of reference is the work of Carl Jung.  In the quote that follows, Jung uses the term “sense perception” to indicate the frame of reference of the 5 senses.  Jung’s psychology is based on the view that there is more to heaven and earth than what is perceived by the 5 senses.  For this Jung has been called a mystic.  But from this truly psychological view, that is, a view of the reality of mind, it is the idea that only the 5 senses show us what is real that is the "vulgar notion" and belief. 

Here is the opening paragraph (par. 206) of section 2 “The Psychology of Rebirth” of Carl Jung’s paper “Concerning Rebirth” found in Volume 9, Part I, of The Collected Works titled The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.  

 

“Rebirth is not a process that we can in any way observe.  We can neither measure nor weigh not photograph it.  It is entirely beyond sense perception.  We have to do here with a purely psychic reality, which is transmitted to us only indirectly through personal statements.  One speaks of rebirth, one professes rebirth; one is filled with rebirth.  This we accept as sufficiently real.  We are not concerned here with the question: is rebirth a tangible process of some sort?  We have to be content with its psychic reality. I hasten to add that I am not alluding to the vulgar notion that anything ‘psychic’ is either nothing at all or at best even more tenuous than a gas.  Quite the contrary; I am of the opinion that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life.  Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts; of civilization and of its destroyer, war.  All this is at first psychic and indivisible.  So long as it is ‘merely’ psychic it cannot be experienced by the senses, but is nonetheless indisputably real.  The mere fact that people talk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means that a store of psychic experiences designated by that term must actually exist.  What these experiences are like we can only infer from the statements that have been made about them.  So, if we want to find out what rebirth really is, we must turn to history in order to ascertain what ‘rebirth’ has been understood to mean.”

We can see here that Jung discovered the paradigm shift needed to understand Buddha Dharma and called it "psychology."  The statement "the psyche is the mother of all human facts" calls forth the mind-only (citta-matra) perspective of the Lankavatara Suta's view that all things are "only the manifestations of one's own mind" (自心現量).   Jung's "store of psychic experiences" directly calls forth the storehouse-consciousness (alayavijnana).  Because Jung dared to challenge the paradigm of secular science's prejudice for the tangible he was tarred as a mystic, and the discoveries of his analytical psychology, as well as the psyche itself, have been pushed aside by the materialist secularism of the physical sciences masquerading as psychology.  But when Jung was on his deathbed, he was reading Zen master Hsu Yun's talks on the Eight Consciousnesses in Charles Luk's Chan and Zen Teachings: First Series, and he asked his secretary to write Luk and report "He was enthusiastic... When he read what Hsu Yun said, he sometimes felt as if he himself could have said exactly this! It was just it." (From a letter dated September 12, 1961.)

Jung was still a man of his time, so to maintain his empirical objectivity, he recommended the study of history to learn what has been understood about rebirth.  In turning to history, Jung's methodology was a cross-cultural and cross-historical approach to determine and identify the shared meaning elements among the plethora of manifestations of myth, folklore, legends, fairy tales, prophetic visions, dreams, etc. that have gripped the imaginations of people throughout history.  In this way he could arrive at an empirical conclusion (as a scientific hypothesis) of the unobservable intangible aspects of psychic reality.  However, this is only half of the story, the half that is available for the researcher from the "outside."  The other half is what is available to the researcher from the "inside," that is by direct experience through the practice of meditation or other psychic practices such as what Jung called "active imagination" or even hypnotherapy. 

However, we have to be forewarned and aware that what is a directly experienced psychic reality must still be analyzed and subjected to evaluation.  That is, we don't always come to the correct conclusions about our own experiences and need to understand how we can delude ourselves. The primary example of this in relation to rebirth is the concept of a self.  We have direct experience of our own life and come to the erroneous conclusion that we are an individual self, a separate soul. Rather than being seen through for the illusion that it is by a direct experience of rebirth, this mistaken notion of a soul actually can be reinforced by past life memories that may be accessed through meditation or trance states such as hypnosis.  Thus, the Buddha's great discovery of the reality of the non-soul, no-self, perspective was applied to the then current ideas about karma and rebirth, not to say that the psychic reality of karma and rebirth was false, but to clarify that the psychic reality of karma and rebirth does occur, but not within the context of our mistaken notions of a self or soul.

 
To be continued...

Review of TED Talk by Materialist Philosopher Stephen Cave

This is a review of the TED Talk by Stephen Cave titled

The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death

Sadly, this is one of the worst TED talks I’ve heard.  Perhaps my expectations are too high.

Mr. Cave focuses on “bias,” yet as a philosopher he shows bias too, but apparently unconsciously.  His bias is that there is no truth to be found in the “four” typical immortality stories that he has identified.  He shows his bias because he is a scientific philosopher, not a psychologist. The psychologist views these kinds of archetypal stories as myths, and takes their commonalities as telling us something true about our own psyches, not just fake fairy tales to be thrown out or left behind. Yes, we grow out of the literal belief in these kinds of stories, but we should be growing into discovering the truth that these stories are pointing us toward if our growth is to be anything remotely identifiable as maturation. 

 

For example, the sad philosopher Mr. Cave ignores what the essence of the “elixir” story is all about. He should read Carl G. Jung to know that there is an archetype of the “elixir” for the reason that there is an actual elixir in the human psyche (the heart-mind) that can lead us to understanding life and death and thus transcending death. In alchemy, "the One that dieth not" is the homo philosohicus, the One, who is the tincture or elixir of life.  Only the young child, the naive, and the uninitiated would imagine the elixir of life, the elixir vitae,  to be something only literally composed of physical molecules.  Always, the physical properties are merely the anchoring attributes for the transcendent qualities of the elixir.  In one instance it was said that the elixir was to be made from the "prime matter" that is taken from a single tree that "grows on the surface of the ocean as plants grow on the surface of the earth." Only a fool would think that this was speaking of an actual tree.  In our modern alienated view of reality we would call the physical aspects a metaphor.  However, in the premodern view, the metaphor was the actual living psychic property of the physical aspect.  So in the previous example, the alchemist knew that "the single tree" was an image of oneness to be sought growing "on the surface the ocean" of the mind's true reality.  Philosopher Cave seems to have the bias of scientific materialism that “the mind,” the psyche, is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain.

Elsewhere on his recent TED Blog titled "The immortality bias: Further reading on the 4 stories we tell ourselves about death," Mr. Cave has written about the “soul” story in this way:  

 

"Buddhism has a similar belief in reincarnation — the movement of the soul from one body to another — although it confusingly also teaches that there is no permanent soul or self."

That comment shows a woeful lack of knowledge (i.e., ignorance) about the Buddha Dharma. There is nothing confusing about teaching there is no permanent soul or self in rebirth because the Buddha Dharma does NOT teach anything remotely like "the movement of the soul from one body to another."  The Buddha acknowledged that reincarnation occurs as a law of nature, but radically transformed the naive understanding of a "soul" to point to the fact that there is no separate or individual "soul" that transmigrates even when there is the appearance of one. That is, the Buddha does not deny the naive "appearance" of a soul, but the Buddha says when we inquire deeply into the appearance of a soul we will see that it is a construct of our imagination. Still, the Buddha teaches that karma is relentless, regardless of the imaginary character of the soul, and that what is reborn is not consciousness but the mind. The arising and disappearing of consciousness is what appears to the ignorant as birth and death, but it is the activity of the unborn and undying mind of innermost thusness.

What is reborn is only the effects of the karmic waves. Modern physics would call this the noninterference of waves, as when there are countless electromagnetic waves coursing through a room but our cell phone picks up one frequency stream without any interference by all the others. The idea of a "soul" is the illusion of a standing wave formation formed by all the karmic waves from countless previous lives. We take the temporary appearance of a standing wave formation to be the "person" and then we assume that the "person" possesses something that is behind the appearance that is a "soul." That assumption is an unnecessary wish for the eternity of the "person." In fact, the true eternity is the constancy of the appearance of impermanent and transient waves. In other words, what is reborn in the wave formation of a single life is the ocean itself, not some thing called a "soul."

Mr. Cave’s conclusion is that “We believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death.” This is really just a statement about the bias of belief, not about the stories themselves.  When we are afraid, we are confused by what we call "belief." But when we become free from our fear, then we see the stories in a new light having nothing to do with belief.  Mr. Cave would have us ignore the truth of the stories under this new light and simply forget and ignore them altogether. He reasons we can give up our childish belief in them by giving up our fear of death. That is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and not philosophical at all.  Yes, we can find the way to no longer be afraid of death, but that has nothing to do with necessarily giving up these stories, only giving up the idea of a literal belief in them.

Mr. Cave has the personal bias that we are limited to “the one life we have.”  He says, “just as book is bounded by its covers by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death.”  He says the characters in a book don't worry about who wrote the book or what the world is outside of the book covers, so neither should we worry about what is outside of birth and death.  Sadly, he does not explore why or how he has this king of biased belief in the face of considering death.  Instead Mr. Cave would have up put aside the very consideration of death and simply adopt the view that since we will never “experience” death that we need not consider it.  He tells us don’t think about death and just enjoy life while we have it.  Certainly, there are some people like Mr. Cave who will find some kind of solace in sticking their head into the sand.

 

Mr. Cave says that we merely need to see how “the fear of death is not rational,” and then we will see how that irrational fear brings out our biases. In this we can see the confusion that Mr. Cave has about the role of rationality in life based on his own bias in the face of death. With his story, he has constructed an elaborate rational edifice, not to defeat death by a story of immortality but to defeat death by a story of why we should ignore death.  He doesn’t see that by ignoring death we only drive the archetype of death into the unconscious where it will come back to haunt us in so many ways.

If we want to find the truest story, we should tell the story that shows how all the stories are true given their presumptive perspectives. That is, we need a story that includes all of the other stories, without claiming that any particular one or all the others are totally false, because the apparent differences in all the stories are just because they are about other parts of the elephant in the room: death.

The Opiate of Logical Speculation

Response to “Buddhism as the Opiate of the(downwardly-mobile) Middle Class: The Case of Thanissaro Bhikkhu”

 

This is an interesting blog that seems based on nothing but the writer’s fantasy of Buddhism, not even on emptiness. But because the blog is titled “Speculative Non-Buddhism”  that is not surprising.  This is definitely “non-Buddhism.” And as for the “speculation,” in the Buddha Dharma speculation is the sine qua non of false thinking.

 

To say, “for [Thanissaro Bhikkhu], Buddhism is exactly the same as Vedanta or Jainism at its core,” is next to defamation and has no evidentiary support. Also saying “Unlike most x-buddhist teachers” implies that Ajaan Geoff is an “x-buddhist teacher” when he is not either an “ex-buddhist” nor an “ex-teacher.” Of course in one sense, Buddha Dharma teaches the One Vehicle in which all vehicles, even the Vehicles of Humans and Devas such as Vedanta or Jainism, have the same basis because all things (dharmas) are nothing but manifestations of mind. However, Buddha Dharma does not ever take the position as a positive assertion “that we are moving closer to permanently rejoining the perfect eternal atman, escaping the trap of this world once and for all” except in a very limited way as a very temporary expedient means for “crying and scared children” who are lost in the cul-de-sac of nihilism.

Specifically, this blog is guilty of misrepresentation of Ajaan Geoff’s teachings.  It is just a plain misrepresentation to say, “In his essay ‘No-self or Not-self?’ he makes it clear that his understanding of the teaching of anatta is that there is, in fact, an eternal soul, but that nothing that is part of our time-space continuum is part of that soul, and so we must learn not to be attached to anything in this samsaric world.”  That essay says no such thing. I invite all the readers to see for themselves by opening the link to the essay itself and searching for every reference to the word “soul.”

 

Tom Pepper's blog makes the fundamental mistake that non-Buddhists often make by equating the use of the word “mind” with the use of the word “self” or “soul.”  For example, nowhere in the excerpt of Ajaan’s use of the word “mind” does the word “core” appear, yet it is asserted that Ajaan is talking about a “core mind” as an eternal self or soul sort of thing, when he never said such a thing. There is just the assumption being read into Ajaan’s words that is not there in the meaning of the words. This rhetorical trick is useful for the writer, but is just plainly fallacious. Likewise the author does not understand what the term “unconditioned mind” means and imagines it to mean an “eternal and unchanging” "core mind" kind of thing. This kind of confusion is a symptom of the illness of logical speculation.

I can’t find anything in this blog that credibly represents either the teaching of Ajaan Geoff or the Buddha Dharma.  Believing this kind of logical speculation to be anything but false thining is the real opiate to be avoided.

Post Script: After writing the above I discovered that I was misreading the meaning of "x-buddhist teacher" to mean "ex-buddhist teacher."  After looking more at the blog, I see that the contributors of the "Speculative Non-Buddhist" blog use the term "x-buddhist" in a derogatory manner to mean their judgmental and speculative view of the real Buddha Dharma as a teaching of falsehoods and hallucinations. They believe that their "non-buddhism" which they speculate about is the real Buddha Dharma and that what they call "x-buddhism" is phony Buddha Dharma, even though it is what is taught by the actual certified teachers of Buddha Dharma.

The Materialist Hegemony in the Psychology of Religion

A recent Salon article by Frans de Waal titled  Militant atheism has become a religion 

 is interesting and provocative. The subtitle used to inform us of the basic premise states, "Prominent non-believers have become as dogmatic as those they deride -- and become rich on the lecture circuit."

 

 

The science that looks at the material world as physical stuff really can say nothing about religion. Religion arises from and in the mind, not the material world.The science that looks at mind or psyche is called psychology. Psychology can speak about religion but unfortunately, today the materialist scientists have exerted a hegemony over psychology and usurped psychology in the name of neurophysiology. 

 

For example, de Waal writes,

 

Neo-atheists keep pitting the two against each other, however. Their audiences pee in their pants with delight when the flat-earth canard gets trotted out. This is not to say, however, that religious narratives are much better. They, too, play fast and loose with the facts. In Puebla, D’Souza featured near-death experiences as scientific proof of the afterlife. After a brush with death, some patients report having floated outside of their bodies or having entered a tunnel of light. This surely seems bizarre, but D’Souza failed to bring up new neuroscience of a small brain area known as the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). This area gathers information from many senses (visual, tactile, and vestibular) to construct a single image of our body and its place in the environment. Normally, this image is nicely coherent across all senses, so that we know who and where we are. The body image is disturbed, however, as soon as the TPJ is damaged or stimulated with electrodes. Scientists can deliberately make people feel that they are hovering above their own body or looking down on it, or have them perceive a copy of themselves sitting next to them, like a shadow (“I looked younger and fresher than I do now. My double smiled at me in a friendly way”). Together with the hallucinogenic qualities of anesthetic drugs and the effects of oxygen depletion on the brain, science is getting close to a materialist explanation of near-death experiences.

Explaining the psyche as merely brain functioning is the hall mark of materialist science and here de Waal is actually proud of his materialism.  This face off between materialist science and materialist religious views is what makes for the unbridgable gulf between the two points of view on the opposite ends of the materialist spectrum.

 

The genuine psychology that takes mind as both the basis of observation and the field to be observed --and not the physical world as the basis-- are the streams of psychology that flow from Carl G. Jung analytical psychology of the archetypes.  "God" as an archetypal image of the psyche is the analytical starting point of a genuine scientific look at religion.  So far, I have not heard Hitchens (RIP), Harris, or Dawkins (and neither does de Waal) acknowledge this necessary starting point for any scientific analysis of religion. Instead, the professional atheists simply deny the existence of God as a physical fact and ignore the existence of God the archetype as a psychical fact.  For example, materialist scientists don't understand Jung's psychology and think the archetypes are merely metaphors and not actual autonomous psychic organs that are every bit as necessary and every bit as autonomous in their functioning as the physical organs of the body like the heart, stomach, and liver.

 
As a Buddhist practitioner, I see Buddhism as a religious psychology and as a psychological religion.  Buddha was a man who did not deny the Gods and did not worship them either. He was known as "the teacher of Gods and Humans" so show that his awakening was something that can be taught to both the religious and the nonreligious. When the Lankavatara Sutra states that all manifestations are nothing but mind, it is stating the psychological basis of Buddhism. The analysis of the 8 conscousnesses and the 5 skandhas are analytical and psychological views of the structure and function of consciousness.

So far professional atheists like Dawkins say they don't know enough about Buddha Dharma to have an opinion about it, but until they learn about their own Western heritige of analytical psychology of the archetypes, they won't be able to understand the Buddha Dharma much less the Christian, Moslem, and Hebrew religous eachings.

Buddha doesn't teach materialism.

Someone wrote: Science is not intrinsically materialistic. It's intrinsically skeptical. ... Opinion polls show that a substantial number of American scientists, perhaps a majority, have religious beliefs.  I have objected to the term "scientific materialism," which suggests some theory of materialism.

I think that science is intrinsically and inherently materialistic by definition.

Science is based on the assumption and theory of matter and materialism.

Materialism, the philosophical theory that regards matter and its motions as constituting the universe, and all phenomena, including those of mind, as due to material agencies.

Matter, as distinct from mind and spirit, is a broad word that applies to anything perceived, or known to be occupying space.

In Buddha Dharma, as articulated in the Lankavatara Sutra, the Sanskrit for "materialist" and "materialism" is lokayata which literally means "limited to the world."

Red Pine wrote: The Sanskrit for ‘materialist’ is lokayata. This term included all those whose approach to knowledge was based on knowledge gained from the five senses. (Note 128, p. 202.)

Because science deliberately limits itself to the five senses perceiving an external world, it is by definition materialism, and by definition is not what Buddha articulated.

That is not to say that Buddha Dharma is incompatible with science, only that the materialist basis of science should never be confused Buddha Dharma as it all too frequently is confused. Buddha Dharma is based on the personal realization that all manifested phenomena are only mind, and this is called the personal realization of noble knowing/knowledge (aryajnana) or Buddha knowing/knowledge (buddhajnana)

For example, in Zen especially, we see the confusion of materialism and Buddha Dharma in the raw examples of every day life such as “a cup of tea” or “hitting the floor” or “raising the stick” or “the plum blossom” used as examples of suchness. But without the personal realization of suchness, the person who has not the realization has only the sensory experience of “a cup of tea” or “hitting the floor” or “raising the stick” or “the plum blossom” and thinks of these as “things” (i.e., dharmas) and mistakes the experience of the thing-as-a-sensory-object for the realization of the thing as the manifestation of suchness.

To view things as external to our mind is called the “externalist ways” (外道).

Externalism. of or pertaining to the world of things, considered as independent of the perceiving mind: external world.

To mistake a thing in the sense being a thing-as-a-sensory-object, i.e., an external thing, is the practical meaning of materialism. Materialism comes in very many varieties and some of them are very subtle and sound like “immaterialsm,” but they are still materialism. In section LXXIII of the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha tells Mahamati unequivocally, “I do not articulate materialism.” The Buddha goes on to tell Mahamati about a previous encounter with a materialist Brahman (世論婆羅門). It is an amusing story. The internally quoted matter is quoted directly from the Lankavatara.

The materialist Brahman approaches the Buddha and rudely without seeking permission to question and without waiting he rudely calls the Buddha by his family name “Gautama” and asks, “Is everything actually created?”

The Buddha replied declaring, “Brahman, that everything is actually created is the initial materialism.”

The other then asked, “Is everything not actually created?”

The Buddha said, “That everything is not actually created is the second materialism.”

The Brahman starts a rapid fire succession of questions about permanency, impermanency, birth, and no birth and the Buddha replies, “That’s six materialisms.” A few more such questions and the Buddha says, “That’s eleven materialisms.” the Brahman keeps asking philosophical questions, and the Buddha keeps saying “that’s also materialism,” and then the Buddha says, “As long as there are mental outflows erroneously reckoning on the external dusts (i.e., sensory data), in all cases it is materialism.”

The Brahman in exasperation then asked, “Rather, there is that which is not materialism isn’t there? For the propositions of every one of the externalist ways, I correctly articulate every kind of flavor of phrasing, causes and conditions, parables, and rhetorical embellishments.”

The Buddha declared, “Brahman, there is that which is neither your possession, nor doing, nor propositions, nor articulations. nor is it not articulating every kind of flavor of phrasing, nor is it not causes, metaphors, and rhetorical embellishments.”

The Brahman declared, “What is the position that is not materialism and neither not a proposition, nor not articulating?”

And the Buddha declared, “Brahman, there is the non-materialism that your various externalist ways are not able to know, because they use the means of external natures, untruths, antithetical conceptions, deceptive reckonings, and attachments. I designate not giving birth to antithetical conceptions and the complete realization that existence and nonexistence are nothing but the manifestations of one’s own mind. By not giving birth to antithetical conceptualizations and not receiving external dusts, the antithetical conceptualizations are forever stopped. This is called non-materialism. This is my Dharma, and not what you have!
“Brahman, to articulate in outline: their consciousness supposes coming, supposes going, supposes death, supposes birth, supposes ease, supposes suffering, supposes the submerged, supposes the visible, supposes contacts, supposes attachments to every kind of characteristics, supposes harmonious continuity, supposes reception, or supposes attachments to causes and reckonings. So, Brahman, that which compares to this position is your position of materialism and is not what I have.”

To clarify how materialism is used, Red Pine includes a note from old Chinese commentary:

Red Pine wrote: In his commentary, T’ung-jun notes, “The stance of those who understand the way of truth of self-existence is firm. They teach materialism all day, yet it is not materialism. Meanwhile, the stance of those who don’t understand is unstable. They teach what is not materialism all day, yet it turns out to be materialism. (Note 135, p. 204.)

The truth of “self-existence” means the truth of one’s own nature, the ultimate truth of svabhava, the third of the three own-natures (trisvabhava). This important note shows us that when the Buddha and Zen teachers point to a flower, hit the floor, comment on the sound of the rain, etc., it may seem like they are teaching materialism, but in fact this is not a teaching of materialism and is actually the teaching there is nothing but the manifestations of one’s own mind. But, when the non-Buddhists speak of non-materialism such as energy, space, gods, heavens, spiritual matters, etc., they still believe in an external reality and external things so they are in fact teaching materialism.

A gatha on mind.

At Zen Forum International, someone posted the following verse:

Practise is observing your mind again and again,
not interpreting phenomenal appearances,
for whatever appears is mind itself.

I responded:

I see it a little differently. Here's my gatha:

In my practice, again and again I fail to find a mind to observe,
and I am frequently interpreting phenomenal appearances;
for whatever appears is the discrimination of mind,
not mind itself.

_/|\_

The Five Aggregates of Personality

The Five Grasping Aggregates are sometimes called The Five Bundles of Personality.

Buddhism teaches that our personality or selfhood is a psycho-physical phenomenon made of a mosaic of many pieces of awareness. The "pieces" of our personality are cataloged into five broad categories which in Sanskrit (Skt.) are called "skandas" and may be translated as "aggregates," "collections," or "bundles." Like sorting the many tiles of a mosaic of many hues, shades, tints, and patterns into five boxes based on their primary colors, the five aggregates group the many and varied elements of personality into the five basic bundles that result in our consciousness of who we are.

The categories of the five aggregates are (1) Forms (Skt. rupa), (2) Feelings (Skt. vedana), (3) Perceptions (Skt. sanjna), (4) Complexes (Skt. samskara ), and (5) Consciousnesses (Skt. vijnana). These categories are not literally distinct, rather they are intimately connected in the composition of our personality so should be thought of as distinct in the manner that our body's physiological systems (e.g., circulatory, nervous, muscular, skeletal, etc.) are identifiably distinct but interdependently and inextricably connected.

Modern science is mapping the brain's bio-electrical functioning and is confirming this classical Buddhist analysis derived from direct experiential studies in the practice of Buddhist meditation. The language of Buddhist devotion is religious and faith-based, but the language of Buddhist analysis is essentially and primarily psychological or phenomenological. It is an analysis of human experience and awareness itself, not an analysis of the physical world. As such the mapping of the mind by ancient Buddhism is the experiential equivalent of the mapping of the brain by modern neuroscience.

The five aggregates can be studied in sequence as they develop into or result in consciousness, but such a linear developmental sequence should be considered only for conventional purposes in relating to the physicality or physiology of brain functioning. Consciousness is a multidimensional feedback process so in actual functioning one's unconscious awareness (like the firings of the synapses) is moving between all the five aggregates and their specific elements at all levels and in very complex and complicated patterns.

The first aggregate of FORMS refers to the six sense organs or receptors along with the six sense objects or stimuli as well as the four physical elements. These are the five sense organs of the eye, ear, nose, lounge, and body plus the sixth sense organ the mind. The six sense objects are five physical sensations of our mind that are projected into the world and taken as literal objects, i.e., sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touchings, plus the mental sensations of intuitions. These twelve taken together are called the entrances (Skt. ayapana) as they are the entrances to consciousness. In brain physiology Forms relates to the sensory receptors of the nervous system as well as to the sensory areas of the brain such as the visual cortex and the auditory system.

The second aggregate of FEELINGS refers to the feelings that are evoked by the Forms. The feelings are either positive, negative, or neutral. For example, when the form of fire is experienced when it is a certain distance it is neutral, when it provides comforting warmth it is pleasant, but when it comes into contact with the skin and burns it is painful. Feelings are thus attractive, aversive, or indifferent. The complexity of Feelings can exist in degrees such as a simple attraction of curiosity to complex desires such as love. Similarly the negative Feelings can range from simple rejection, to distaste to disgust and hate.

The third aggregate of PERCEPTIONS are the mental images that arise when the Forms and Feelings become combined in the mind by association. Forms plus Feelings equal Perceptions. Cognition-cognates, identification-identity, conception-concepts, etc. are all within the aggregate of Perceptions. Pattern development and recognition (represented in the temporal lobes) is central to the Perceptions as is spacial representation of the world (represented in the parietal lobes). When we sense the features of a face and experience the feelings associated with the face we can then image or perceive the identity of the face. For example, the features of a certain woman's face (color and shapes of the eyes, mouth, nose, hair, etc.) plus the feelings of dependence, love, gratitude, etc. for her combine and result in our recognition of her as mom. In the brain disorder called the Capgras Delusion certain Forms are physiologically disconnected to their associated Feelings and as a result the person loses the normal Perception function. Instead of recognizing the image of "mother," the person sees mom's features but does not experience the feelings of love associated with those features, and so arrives at the "perception" that the woman looks like mom but is in fact an imposter.

The fourth aggregate is the COMPLEXES and refers to the actions or functionality of the mind. The Sanskrit term samskara can be literally translated as "with-do," "co-act," or "com-motion." This bundle is not easily labeled because it includes a very broad range of mental functioning which are virtually all psychic actions. It is sometimes labeled impulses or reactions but this loses the other sense of functioning which is the will or volition. Also there are the habits or habitual formations and the automatic reflexes. All motivations and emotions which have arisen through combination of the Forms, Feelings, and Perceptions are also part of this aggravate. The psychological complexes are the structural correlates of the this aggregate. The commotions of the mind can be experienced as chaotic insurrections of impulses or as sublime emotions. As reactions to Perceptions enfolding Forms and Feelings, the Complexes can be habitual and fixed in beneficial or detrimental complexes, patterned but flexible, or spontaneous.

The fifth aggregate of CONSCIOUSNESSES is the fruit of awareness in which all the aggregates become knowable. The Consciousnesses are the comprehension and understanding resulting from the interplay and reflection of the aggregates. Discernment and discrimination are hallmarks of the Consciousnesses. The eight Consciousnesses are the five arising from the five senses, the sixth arising from thought, the seventh arising from fundamental discrimination, and the eighth which is the non-arising Consciousness which Western psychology calls the Unconscious.

The five aggregates are also called the five grasping aggregates because with the fifth aggregate of Consciousnesses the grasping of attachment to various elements of all of the aggregates arises and creates a total conglomeration which in Buddhism is called the suffering of selfhood. The five aggregates together create the whole comprehension of oneself including a body image, an identity, hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations, etc.

The phantom limb phenomenon of is an example of how the Forms and Feelings equal a Perception of a limb leading to the Complexes of developed habits, motivations, and emotions associated with the limb and a resulting Consciousness of the limb. When the limb is removed, the Consciousness of the limb is not necessarily removed due to the mental attachments (i.e., synaptic mapping in memory) of the limb which then create Perceptions of physical sensations where none exist. The phantom limb phenomenon is actually only one example of the complete modeling overlay of the aggregates that is going on continuously within our body-mind but "underneath" our conscious awareness because of the physical body acting as the formal screen upon which the modeling is projected.

When Buddhism says there is no objective world, it is saying that there is nothing that is external to this modeling/mapping functionality of consciousness of which we can be aware as data. It is saying that the "objective" world is identical with the "subjective" world and the polarity of the two is actually wholly unified whether we know it or not. When Buddhism says there is no self, it is saying are complete unity whether we know it or not, that there is no inherent individual identity or entity separate from the mapping/modeling functionality of consciousness which attempts to compartmentalize awareness but can't, except in a karmic dream.

But that nothing is not nothing. The non-objective world is also a way of saying that Buddha Essence is universally all living beings and therefore no map is capable of charting the total reality: that complete existence beyond concepts of origination or annihilation of existence which can't be grasped by such concepts as subject, object, self, other, etc. The essence of nothing means the presence of living beings. If living beings had some constant, material, or uniform basis for their being then they could not be. Without nothingness there would only be dead beings playing with maps and getting lost on the dark roads.

Meditation is the way the mind handles and releases its attachments to the aggregates and to the dualities which are the cement binding the aggregated attachments. Mental liberation from suffering, i.e., the freedom from passion (in the sense of the original Latin), is realized by releasing the mind from the attachments related to the five aggregates and living with the aggregates as selfless expressions of impermanence. This release is called the realization of Emptiness or the Void.

As the Heart Sutra says:

"Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form.
Form is not different from Emptiness; Emptiness is not different from Form.
Form is identically Emptiness; Emptiness is identically Form.
Feelings, Perceptions, Complexes, and Conscousinesses are also like this."