What Happened to the Unconscious?

The first half of the 20^th century brought into the light of Western consciousness the great discovery of the unconscious.  The great initial pioneer Sigmund Freud, followed by the even greater explorer and surveyor Carl G. Jung, showed the world the actual workings of the unconscious in our conscious lives, from the most individually mundane effects, such as our tics and foibles, to the most collective inundations of our collective consciousness in war and mass phenomenon such as fascism, communism, and commercialism.

Then after the most compelling and complete demonstration of the overcoming of collective rationality by the irrationality of the collective unconscious from WWI to the culmination that was World War II, Western collective consciousness reacted by closing down and shutting away the very acknowledgement of the unconscious.  Western psychology turned to rationalism in hope of explaining the irrational, and the unconscious was driven out of psychology, with “psychology” being redefined without the unconscious element as “behaviorism,” “cognitive studies,” ”neuro-psychology” “evolutionary psychology,” etc.  This is an utter and complete failure, because the totality of the psyche includes both the conscious and the unconscious, and any attempt to rationally explain the irrational aspects of the unconscious by ignoring the unconscious is set up for failure.    

The rationalist delusion of the previous 70 years has forced the psychology of the unconscious underground.  And as Jung noted over and over again, when an important part of our psychic reality is submerged, it always and inevitably comes back to overwhelm us in ways we find problematic.  The denied elements of our personal unconscious, the complexes, reappear as disturbances in our body or mental functions, as somatic symptoms or psychic disturbances such as hauntings or obsessions.  The denied elements of our collective unconscious, the archetypes, reappear in stark polarized contrasts as “demons,” “daimons,” or “divinities,” as social contagions resulting in genocide, occupation, and apartheid, as social mass movements for weal or woe seeming to appear overnight, etc.

No matter how much people may try, there is no exclusively rational explanation for the election of Donald Trump as president, because it is an expression of the repressed unconscious factors that created a “faith” mentality in the people who voted for him. The rationality of consciousness (organized as it is around the ego complex) can never deal with faith, because the best that rationality can offer can never touch the unconscious basis of faith.  Rationally can only call “faith” a form of nonsense, i.e. irrational, and then believe it has taken care of the matter.

In analyzing the problem of the rationalist critique of faith without reference to the unconscious, Jung wrote in “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity”:  “Naturally, it never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with their object. They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes then that it is and always has been primarily a question of irrational psychic phenomena.” (p. 153 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)  It is the denial of a basic recognition of the collective psychic phenomena at work in the Trump election that befuddles all attempts by the political and social pundits to explain it.

We have seen over and over again interviews with “Trump followers” who deny the basis facts of Trump and instead project onto Trump a faithful expectation that he will eventually fulfill their desires for a better government.  This is an act of faith of the deepest feelings. The factual historical personality is obscured behind the projections of the unconscious looking for an appropriate screen upon which to projects its symbols.  When faith is at work for a “higher cause,” it is invariably the archetype of the totality of the person, i.e., the individual’s wholeness, attempting to find its way into consciousness.   The psychic phenomena of a person who feels cut off, separated, and estranged from both themselves and their society stimulates their collective unconscious to respond by insinuating the archetype of their self-realization of their fundamental totality into their personal consciousness.  This is experienced directly and irrationally, and even the person’s own rationalizations used to explain it come after the fact.

The recognition of the unconscious opens a door to the confusing and terrifying emotions, imaginings, and thoughts of our inner life that most people are more than happy to close immediately. The anti-Trump voter as well as the Trump voter are equally eager to pretend there are no psychic phenomena at play here, and it is all just a matter of rational analysis and discussion to determine the facts. But the abrupt and widespread appearance of the social meme of “fake news” in conjunction with the “Trump-era” shows the archetypal influence behind Trump’s meteoric rise in politics. The label “fake news” is telling us to our faces that the collective social forces we are dealing with are irrational psychic forces working on the level of symbols not facts. Itr is not a question of which media outlet is or is not dealing in “fake news,” because at bottom, they all are in their own ways.  The New York Times has its particular way of presenting “fake news” just like FOX News has its own way of presenting “fake news.” The common denominator of all fake news is its failure to address its contextual prejudices supporting its perspective, and this is due to the failure to acknowledge the unconscious psychic phenomena at work in the presentation of the news.   

The completeness which the archetype of our own wholeness seeks is not something that can tamed or determined by our conscious ego.  Our conscious ego seeks our wholeness from within the bifurcated environment of consciousness, and therefore can only conceive of wholeness and totality as “perfection.”  But real wholeness and totality must necessarily include our nocturnal side, the very aspects of ourselves that we have shunned or exiled.   Thus when we consciously open ourselves to a search for our wholeness, we are faced with the problem of suffering and “evil” in the world and in ourselves as intimately expressed by our own shadow side.  People who long for such wholeness, but have no personal guide who has experienced the journey, are confused by the necessity to confront the world of suffering directly and personally as the gateway to inner unity. They think they can find the perfection of wholeness without facing suffering.  In his extensive monograph “Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self,” Jung notes:

“To strive after teleiosis in the sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. This striving is so powerful, even, that it can turn into a passion that draws everything into its service. Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the archetype fulfills its own completeness, and this is a τελείωσις (teleiosis) of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious strivings, in accord with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect— τελειόι--as also your heavenly father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.”(p. 69 Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part II.) 

When we seek the wholeness of ourselves, we are usually drawn by affinity to a living archetypal symbol of that wholeness such as the Buddha or the Christ.  If we follow the Buddha we must begin the journey with the First Noble Truth of Suffering, and if we follow the Christ we must begin with identification with the Passion (i.e., suffering) and crucifixion of the Christ.  The Taoist archetypal symbol of wholeness, the Taiji  is not anthropomorphic, but its containment of the opposites of yin and yang, dark and light, within the circle of completeness confronts the follower directly with the necessity of dealing with their own dark side if wholeness is to be realized.  Ultimately there is no way to wholeness except through the confrontation and integration of suffering and the shadow side of ourselves. We can’t become complete by running away from suffering.

It is the archetypal unconscious impetus to seek completeness being perverted by the conscious prejudice against suffering that leads to the illusion we can become perfect by getting rid of the “bad things of life.” This psychic phenomenon is exactly expressed in the Trump voters’ resonance with the symbol of “draining the swamp” projected onto government.  Those who would be personally perfect and then project this desire onto the social screen desire a perfect government. Their own sense of imperfection, as a being personally filled with swamp creatures within their own inner world, is projected outward onto the government as a swamp needing to be drained.  The psychic dimension of this projection is evidenced by the denial of the Trump voters who literally can not see that Trump has brought more “swamp creatures” into his government than any previous president. This self-blinding in consciousness is a primary symptom of the archetype’s unconscious influence. 

Trump is the manifested expression of our denial of the unconscious. The so-called anti-Trump resistance is also an expression of our denial of the unconscious as shown by its psychic contagion of a new Mc Carthyite “red scare” anti-Russian hysteria.  Because the anti-Trump forces can not acknowledge either the conscious or unconscious psychic forces behind Trump’s popularity, they project their dissociated psychic contents, with the sense of “evil,” onto an available target like “Russia,” so that they no longer care for the facts to be proven before they are certain of their conclusions. Their certainty before the determination of any evidence and their eager grasping at any straw or suggestion of “collusion” without a verification demonstrate conclusively the unconscious influences. 

So what happened to the unconscious?  It seems that humankind’s struggle with its own dark side in WWII was so traumatic that our collective consciousness revolted against itself and drove out the messenger that offered the only hope of understanding what had happened because merely trying to understand was too terrible. Using the terminology of rationalism, the study of the unconscious was tarred and feathered as “mystical” or, to use a more technical term, “woo woo.”  .  This kind of over-rationalization and sloganeering literalization by the perspective of materialism shows the unconscious influence in the repression itself.   Materialism became the new religion of science and dogmatically repressed the scientific study of psychic phenomenon from the psychological perspective.  Only the materialist perspective was officially allowed in the post-war study of the psyche within the major educational institutions funded by commercial and military interests.   

Psychology deals with the facts of mental contents. The fact that the idea or symbol exists as a psychic phenomenon is the truth that psychology studies. Thus the fact of the idea or symbol of a God (or the Buddhist Dharmakaya of Taoist Taiji) as the symbol of our own desire for wholeness, and the incarnation or birth of that symbol as a person who manifests that wholeness in human form (e.g., Christ, Buddha, or Immortal), is the rightful object of the study of psychology, and this is not a question of neurons firing or the literal historical objectification of the symbol in any particular individual. It is not the individual but the archetypal symbol projected onto the individual that allows the historical person to be honored or worshipped far beyond the historical death of the individual, precisely because the archetypal aspect is collective not individual.. 

As Jung said, “It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and commons sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal overwhelming forces.” (p. 15 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)    The impersonal overwhelming forces of the collective unconscious that brought Trump to the presidency must be studied and understood or we make a fatal mistake in regard to the human psyche as well as to our society and culture. .

~end~

A response to James Ford’s Blog on Modernist Buddhism

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James Ford’s take on Modernist Buddhism seems to present a noble hope for an integration of Buddhism with a Western world view that is just doomed to failure, because it attempts to straddle a divide that cannot be straddled.  Buddhism can accommodate itself to science but not to the religion of scientific materialism, because scientific materialism is a belief system that should not be confused with the activity of science.  

The label “Modernist Buddhism” is about as useless as the label Modernist Art. The adjective provides no descriptive content and only detracts and demeans the noun being modified.  The complete failure of the term is shown by the suggestion that Thich Nhat Hanh and Tenzin Gyatso, the 14^th Dalai Lama, could be considered as such within its penumbra. 

No, karma and rebirth are not “an explanation for human hurt” any more than gravity is an explanation for the art of Jackson Pollack.  Buddhism’s response to the question of original sin is the chain of causation, in which ignorance about our own true nature is the key link, not a projected anthropomorphic creator who is the cause.   The Three Marks are about the marks of conditioned things, not about our own true nature of awakening which is unconditioned.  Things don’t “exist within their moments,” unless those moments are seen as a dream. Because moments don’t exist either, both the “thing” and the “moment” only appear as a dream. 

To believe that one can “capture the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha of history,” is a delusion that rests upon the failure to fully digest the meaning of the Three Marks.  Historical materialism was not created by modernists, but has been a central problem of human consciousness since the dawn of history.  Both historical anthropomorphism and historical materialism are cognitive illnesses resting on the mental activities of reification and literalization. 

The literalizations of rebirths is the problem, but the denial of rebirth is not the solution, deliteralization is.  That people believe there is an entity that is reborn is the problem, not rebirth.  You, the reader, are the living proof of rebirth, whether or not you know it to be so.  Do you remember your first day out of your mother’s womb? Just because you don’t remember your first day of breath does not mean it never happened.   The “entity” that you are today is not the “entity” of your first day. Not a single cell remains. Yet through the magic of memory you have crafted a reification of identity that you believe is reborn from day to day.  Don’t let memory fool you, the no-self that is reborn from day to day is the no-self that is reborn from life to life.   Rebirth is not merely a motivational ploy, it is a fact of the universe that won’t go away by ignoring it, any more than the laws of physics will cease when people don’t pay attention to them.

If the books Buddhism Without Beliefs to After Buddhism are the standard of Modernist Buddhism, then the Buddha Dharma is in good shape because those books show how their author is not really interested in Buddha Dharma, and is only interested in his own views.  However, one could say that readers are in deep trouble when they read those books and are mistakenly lead to believe they are learning about Buddhism.  Here is where the label Modernist Buddhism becomes a negation of actual Buddhism.

I recently saw and heard Richard Wright at my local independent bookstore Copperfield's Books in Sebastopol, CA, during his book tour for Why Buddhism is True and while he may be entertaining to people who have no knowledge of Buddhism, and he does give a credible outline of some of the basic ideas in Buddha Dharma, overall, his attempt to wed Buddhism with modernist scientific materialism is an utter failure.  His portrayal of the scientific view is filled with the anthropomorphic creationist jargon of what is oxymoronically called “evolutionary psychology.” For example he says that "natural selection has designed us" and "natural selection has created ur minds" and "the way we are wired."   

That Modernist Buddhists “do not believe in a literal rebirth” is not the problem with Modernist Buddhism.  As I noted above, the belief in a literal entity being reborn is the problem for which the Buddha provided the medicine. But Modernist Buddhists want to throw out the baby of rebirth with the dirty water of literalizing. The Modernist Buddhist believes in the birth of the literal person in this life, but not in the rebirth of the deliteralized currents of the life streams that make up the karmic seeds and perfumes.  The whining about karma and rebirth by Modernist Buddhists only shows their lack of scientific inquiry.  The presumption that karma and rebirth are merely superstitious supernaturalism is held with religious fervor as a doctrinal tenet.  

From whatever perspective, if karma and rebirth are denied, then that stream is not in the Buddha Dharma watershed. This is because the unique perspective on karma and rebirth is an essential part and parcel of the greatest discovery of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. The story is that under the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha realized the Three Direct Knowings:  The first was that of his past lives and the past lives of all beings. The second was of the laws of karma. The third was that he was free of all obstacles and released from attachments.

There is absolutely nothing in the discovery of the Buddhist view of karma and rebirth that is contrary to or incompatible with modern science. To suggest otherwise only shows that the suggestor has a warped and perverted view of science. Saying karma and rebirth are silly because there is no good theory for their application is just like a time when a person said that gravity is silly because there is no good theory or “proof” of its existence (i.e. before Newton). Likewise it is like a time when we said that people’s characteristics were transferred by the blood, before anyone knew of DNA. Karma and the rebirth of karmic characteristics are vastly more complex and difficult to describe and analyze than DNA or the laws of physics, but those laws of karma exist just the same whether or not we have the language to scientifically describe them with accuracy, just like the laws of physics existed before they were adequately described.
When a person has a genuine kensho experience, then the vision of karma and of rebirth as  characteristics conditioned by karma become intuitively clear, even while the scientific language for it is lacking. In my view, this could even be used as a litmus test for genuine, or at least genuinely profound, kensho. That is, an intuitive knowing of rebirth and the laws of karma.  There may be something like a genuine kensho, even it if is shallow, that does not touch the knowing of karma and rebirth, but that should not be used as confirmation for a genuinely adequate kensho, and a person should not be encouraged to use such a shallow kensho, if indeed it is a real kensho, as the measurement for the truth of karma and rebirth.  .
Yet, even with a deeply profound kensho, because the person lives within a social context, they are reduced to using concrete metaphors and imagery for describing it. Yes, the concrete imagery is susceptible to literalization and a falling back into pre-Buddhist paradigms for expressing the understanding of karma and rebirth in which a “person” or “soul” is discussed as transmigrating. But if this type of language is used by a Buddhist, it is a Buddhist using non-Buddhist terminology and thus causing confusion.
The great discovery of the Buddha was that karma and rebirth function absent the need to hypothesize a “person” or “soul.” It is not until modern physics and science that we are now in the position to begin a scientific study of the karma and rebirth phenomenon. The traditional Buddhist view, as expressed in the Lankavatara Sutra uses the image of the wave and the ocean. Karma is the wave action and what is reborn is the ocean itself, not an individual person or soul. Thus, we can see that the “modern” Buddhist can and should accept that karma and rebirth are pre-scientific descriptions of laws that are similar to wave formations, the ambiguity of analyzing light as a wave or a particle, etc.

The notion that “We are birthed out of the conditions of existence, live, and then as we die, it all falls apart. There is no extra or after for most modernist Buddhists.” is a result of not being able to deal with the ambiguity of the “wavicle” phenomenon of karma and rebirth. If a person says, “it is all too confusing for me, so I won’t make an opinion about karma and rebirth”, then that is not at all problematic to me. However, if someone says, “based on my limited view I assert there is no karma or rebirth, there is no extra or continuation of life” then to me, that person is not a Buddhist, even though, they may be friendly to Buddha Dharma otherwise.  

Likewise, a focus on “ethics and purpose” in Buddhism is well and good, but severely limited. Zen master Guefeng Zongmi listed five levels of profundity in Buddhism from shallow to deep, and “ethics and purpose” are teachings found in the two shallowest levels. The question “I wish I were happier” is in the shallowest level, and “why is there so much suffering” is found in the second shallowest level.  This means that they are questions common to all levels of Buddhism, as the surface levels of the ocean are common to the entire ocean. But sticking to “ethics and purpose” in such a way is like telling an oceanographer to only study the sea to a depth of 36 inches. Sure you will map the perimeter of the ocean’s shoreline that way, but you will overlook the depths entirely.   

Framing the question as one of “human flourishing” is exactly the kind of commercialization of the self-help genre that is selling nowadays.  Human flourishing has been the perennial project of all spiritual projects since humans became self-reflective. In this context, the fact that the idea of rebirth is swimming against the tide of contemporary materialism is one of its chief arguments for being a medicine of our modernist ailment and materialism disease.  The roll that materialist naturalism plays in the disease of our culture is exactly what the medicine of Buddha Dharma is well placed to cure.  By adhering to the disease and denaturing Buddhism into a materialist naturalism only perverts Buddhism. It is the appropriation of the medicine by the disease, not the cure of the disease by the medicine.

The idea that “consciousness can be fully accounted for by reducing it to material processes” is anathema to Buddhism. This is not Buddhism.  This is the materialism that removes the psyche from psychology, usurps the word psychology for what is actually physiology, and then presents this perversion as science.  

Let me say this plain and simple: any person, in the West or the East,  who truly believes that our best knowledge of the world is achieved by analyzing phenomena as the outcome of processes of physical causation; posits that there’s no world behind or beyond the material world of physics, chemistry, and biology; and believes  that consciousness can be fully accounted for by reducing it to material processes JUST IS NOT A BUDDHIST. They may be an artificially Buddhist flavored modernist, but they are not an actual Buddhist.  Today, Buddhists do not capitulate themselves to the “modern sense of the world” any more than they did to the then modern sense of the world in the past centuries and millennia ago.   To capitulate to the conventional sense of the world is just not Buddhism.  Yes, one must accommodate one’s views in public to a certain extent if it seems that an Emperor would chop off our head for stating the truth that challenges that conventional truth.  So to the extent that modern materialists would chop off the heads of Buddhists who go against the materialist sense of the world, then it behooves Buddhists to somewhat go along to get along. 

The idea that modernists need a “glue” to hold together traditional Buddhist ethics because they are shaped by modern materialist culture is just another way of saying modernists want to appropriate Buddhism to suit their own purposes.  Aristotle had some good ideas, but his concept of the dilemma is at the root of everything that is wrong with modernist materialism.  Aristotle said that life can be examined as physics and as metaphysics, i.e., that which is not physics. That was good. But he then formulated the concept of the dilemma which states that a proposition is either true or false.    When Aristotle’s concept of the dilemma became directed at his own outline of inquiring about the universe as physics and metaphysics, the materialists in favor of physics said their side was true and the other side, the metaphysics, was false. Thus Aristotle’s eudaimonia became, in the hands of the materialists, both one sided and narrow minded as merely a flourishing of their materialist perspective.  

The project of Buddhism is to transplant itself into the West, not to transplant Aristotle into Buddhism.  The “endpoint” of Buddhist practice has NEVER been about “ending rebirth,” except to the extent as envisioned by the shallowest surface understanding of Buddhism by those who are attached to their view of the person as an entity.  The endpoint of Buddhism has always been awakening, as the title Buddha means an “awakened one.” 

To formulate the endpoint of Western or Modernist Buddhism as “living the best kind of life one possibly can” is like saying the endpoint of one’s vacation is to have a well functioning car.  This is a reinterpretation of the Buddhist awakening that trivializes its scope and depth. Labeling it “eudaimonic enlightenment” is just a fancy name for genetically modified enlightenment. This is clear by the need to immediately provide the warning that Aristotle’s virtues are not Buddhist virtues. And there is a whole lot more to the Buddhist wisdom of prajna and jnana than mere insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and the absence of self-nature. 

So while one may be sympathetic with Modernist Buddhism, it is not Modernist Buddhism to accept the presence of Tathagatagarbha in the human heart-mind. So while I agree that the wisdom of the Mahayana Mahaparinivara Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra, the Diamond Cutter Sutra, and the Treatise on the Mahayana Awakening of Faith are absolutely congruent with the foundations of Zen awakening, the awareness of the exact identity of the causal world and awakening, that is, of delusion and enlightenment, is something that completely blows up modern materialism, not something that affirms materialism.

James Ford arrives at a destination with a panoramic view of Zen and the Heart Sutra. But it is only with a rationalizing sleight of hand that the Heart Sutra or any other Mahayana Sutras, as well as many if not most of the Suttas of the Pali Canon, can be made consistent with the materialist Buddhist Modernism.  In other words, it is no defense of Modernist Buddhism to describe a Buddhism that burns away the materialist superstructure yet pretends there is no inconsistency. 

To say “things are real but they are temporary” is another toy rattle to give to a crying child that has no greater or lesser degree of fact than to say “you are reborn from one life to another.”  Once awakening, even by the names kensho or satori, is acknowledged, we have left the precincts of Modernist Buddhism, and I don’t think it does anyone any good to pretend otherwise.  An admonition that any emergent Modernist Buddhism must take awakening into account is doomed to failure exactly because materialism cannot coexist with awakening.  

<<<>>>

Some links in Ford’s original post:

A critical Examination of the Agnostic Buddhism of StephenBatchelor

by Marjorie L. Silverman

Why Secular Buddhism is Not True

by sujato.

BuddhistModernism

by Justin Whitaker

A MoreEnlightened Way of Being, The entrance of Buddhist ethics into the modern world 

By Seth Zuiho Segall

More on the Conspiracy to Create an Unnatural Buddhism

Here's a spot-on blog in Tricycle from Lama Jampa Thaye described as "a scholar, author, and meditation master from the UK, trained in both the Karma Kagyu and Sakya traditions of Tibetan Buddhism." We Are Not Kind Machines: A Radical Rejection of Scientific Buddhism

 

This is welcomed push back to the widening conspiracy of the so-called "naturalizing Buddhism" movement that sees itself as the White Knight rescuing Buddha Dharma from superstition and supernaturalism.

 

Lama Jampa opens with the observation:

Science seems omnipresent in the modern world, and its explanatory force and benefits are hard to deny. Indeed, its success has even led some, including a number of well-regarded figures in the contemporary Buddhist world, to argue that the dharma itself must be made more “scientific” if it is to survive.

What this is responding to is the false thinking that (1) the Buddha Dharma needs protection to survive, and (2) that somehow making Buddha Dharma more scientific is the path to its survival. Both points are wrong. The question "on the ground," so to speak, is not about survival but about transplantation and acculturation. It is a given that as the Buddha Dharma comes to "the West" to be transplanted here, there must be some kind of acculturation of conceptualization so that people in the West can have the conceptual bridges to understand what the Buddha Dharma is talking about. Building the conceptual bridges is what is called the "accommodation" phase by Peter D. Hershock in his book Chan Buddhism .

 

Hershock points out that every culture has its generalized worldview and every worldview is based on polarizations which characterize the contours of the natural tensions in that society. To become transplanted and acculturated, the Buddha Dharma must address the particular and specific features of each cultural configuration with which it comes into contact.  For example, ideas about what is a person and what is death are central themes and axes of polarization in every culture, but the ideas are polarized in specific configurations somewhat differently in each culture.

 

To Hershock the process of assimilation is a two way street, the Buddha Dharma brings changes to the culture and the culture brings changes to how the Buddha Dharma is conceptualized.  The process of assimilation and acculturation takes place in two phases of accommodation and advocacy. Hershock notes that he is not proposing the two phases are strictly linear, but may be occurring simultaneously or in rhythm.  I would point out that as a precondition phase we can speak of the initial introduction phase before either accommodation or advocacy has occurred.

 

The accommodation phase requires that the strangeness of the worldview of the Buddha Dharma be made familiar in some basic ways so that the worldview of the new context can relate.  In this way, the Buddha Dharma accommodates itself to the indigenous cultural framework.  A past example of this was when the Buddha Dharma came to China, the word Tao was taken up and used as a bridge to explain certain features of the Buddha Dharma.  Some people mistake this aspect of accommodation, where the Buddha Dharma is accommodating itself to indigenous concepts, as being "influenced by" those concepts. In this way it is often said that Buddhism in China was "influenced by" Taoism. However, this is not actually the case. The use of the indigenous cultural terminology and frameworks does not mean that the Buddha Dharma has changed, because the Buddha Dharma is not dependent or established on words or cultural concepts. 

 

The second phase is the advocacy phase which begins after some measure of accommodation has occurred.  In the advocacy phase the now somewhat accommodated and familiarized concepts are reviewed with an eye to how they are actually distinguishable from the indigenous conceptual frame.  Using the example of the Tao in China, the goal is to show how the Buddha Dharma view of the Tao is distinguishable from the indigenous view of the Tao.

 

Here in the West we have two competing frameworks of worldview, religion (primarily Christian) and science.  So it is not at all unusual for the propagation of Buddha Dharma to begin by accommodating itself to these two worldviews.  This is analogous to the Buddha Dharma coming to China and having to accommodate itself to the two competing worldviews of Taoism and Confucianism. This puts us in the middle between the two contending worldviews where if we are perceived as being too close to one framework then the other framework will write off the Buddha Dharma with the same critique that it uses against the other.

 

For instance, followers of the Buddha Dharma, when speaking to Christians, may use the word God to explain that the Buddha Dharma does recognize a transcendent awareness. But in the advocacy phase, it is made clear that the Buddha Dharma does not look at God with an anthropomorphic eye. Then with a bit more accommodation we can explain that the Buddha Dharma conception of God is more like the Christian mystics' view of God as the infinite Godhead, or source of all reality, etc. Then with another turn at advocacy the conception of God is related to the Buddha Dharma conceptions of emptiness, Dharmakaya, True Suchness, etc. Likewise, in accommodating to the Christian idea of life after death, the Buddha Dharma says, "Yes there is life after death," but then in the advocacy phase, the Buddha Dharma distinguishes what it means by life after death as a cyclic process involving karma and rebirth and not the eternal cul-de-sac of either heaven or hell. This is a lively process, but if the life is removed then the propagation devolves into mere propaganda. 

 

Similarly, in the West we who are followers of the Buddha Dharma must accommodate to the framework of the worldview of science.  It is when trying to accommodate to the polarized framing of the scientific worldview that we are seeing the "naturalizing of Buddhism" idea come to the forefront.  However, followers of the Buddha Dharma need to be most vigilant at this point in order to remain centered in the Buddha Dharma for the purpose of accommodation and not become co-opted by the scientific worldview and lose touch with the Buddha Dharma. Lama Jampa's blog post is on this concern.

 

Too many people, even some who have more than a passing introduction to Buddha Dharma, have become confused and conflate the Science Dharma with the Buddha Dharma.  In both Dharmas, there is reason, inquiry, a basic acknowledgement of the value of empirical experience, but how these polarized issues are dealt with is importantly distinguished. The Buddhists who are involved in the so-called naturalization movement are lost in the accommodation phase and have lost sight of the advocacy phase. The naturalization movement has two general proponents, those who are advocates of science and those who are Buddhists. The advocates of science are not interested in the Buddha Dharma per se, and instead they want to incorporate Buddhism into a subservient branch of science. It is from this point of view that the naturalization movement wants to alter Buddha Dharma to meet its own criteria. Followers of the Buddha Dharma need to be most aware of this. It is for this reason that Lama Jampa  writes,

 

While science itself is not dangerous to the dharma, the appeal for a “scientific Buddhism,” an insistence that Buddhism must accord with the materialist propositions often paired with scientism, most definitely is. Such a Buddhism is not the dharma.

 

The followers of the Buddha Dharma who think that they are helping the Buddha Dharma be transplanted to the West by being co-opted into the naturalization movement are simply being duped and pulled away from the Buddha Dharma. Many, if not most of them, do not understand what is transpiring in the Science Dharma itself and do not perceive the fight about materialism that is taking place among the followers of the Science Dharma.  Instead of aligning themselves with the materialists wing of the Science Dharma, the followers of the Buddha Dharma who want to engage in the legitimate accommodation with the Science Dharma must do so with full understanding of the polarizations and the framework of those polarizations that are within the Science Dharma itself, and chief of these is the question of materialism. 

 

Materialism affects (infects?) both science and religion.  Both scientism and creationism are materialist.  Buddha Dharma is not materialist. In the accommodation phase, Buddha Dharma must speak to both religion and science in terms that are not materialistic in order to speak in their own terms to those who are within the religious and scientific worldviews without being materialistic.   In the field of religion this means speaking to the contemplative practitioners of religion and not buying into the materialistic doctrines of religion. In the field of science this means speaking to those who value the scientific method of inquiry and hypothesis and not buying into the materialistic doctrines of the philosophy of science, or those of pseudo-science.   

 

One example is the subject of Lama Jampa's blog: the neuro-science of meditation.  To study meditation from the perspective of measuring brain activity is a science that is usurped by materialistic view of the psyche that only sees mind as physical brain activity.

 

Lama Jampa writes,

 

Now, it may very well be that brain activity changes during meditation. But it's difficult to see how knowing this could contribute anything significant to the process of dissolving the twin obscurations of disturbing emotions and nescience, a dissolution that alone brings about enlightenment. Would, for instance, Jetsun Milarepa have achieved decisive realization more swiftly if he had possessed a knowledge of neurology? The plain unvarnished truth is that while a variety of physical effects—from the modification of pulse rate to altered frequency of brain waves—may accompany meditation, these effects are not the source of the experience of the meditating mind any more than a lessening of indigestion.

 

 

 

This paragraph makes a point that is very important. It is the essential difference between neuro-physiological science and psychological science. Today, we have mostly lost this distinction and mistake neuro-physiological science as if it is psychological science, which it is definitely not. The physical sciences may approach the physical world and study it, but that is not the same thing as approaching and scientifically studying the psychological world. Those who have lost this distinction I would put into the camp of scientism. I have nothing directly against neuro-physiological science in itself, except that it has usurped the field of psychological science by calling neuro-physiology the real psychology and denigrating real psychology by calling it "subjective" or even worse, such as "mysticism."

I take Lama Jampa to be saying that the study of brain activity should not be confused with the study of the psychological activity of mind. To view the world as if the brain is the ground for explaining the world is the physiological leaning view that is all too often stained by materialism.  To view the world as if the mind is the ground for explaining the world is the psychological view. Brain activity is an objectification of mind activity. To the extent that the objectification of mind activity is taken literally and mind is being explained by the activity of brain physiology, then to that extent the view is materialistic. Objectification is to mind what literalization and materialization is to the practice of the Buddha Dharma, i.e. false thinking about mind.

 

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.