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~

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications

This is a new feature for the TWW Blog with the hope of adding a little more coherence to the line up.  Under the title of “Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications” I will be outlining my pet peeves about Buddhism’s “coming to the West.”  Being aware of the processes of accommodation, acclimation, and acculturation that occur in transplanting Buddha Dharma into another culture is my primary concern.  The Buddha Dharma is the teaching of how mind awakens.  This awakening is not bound to any particular culture and is universally available to and inherent within each and every single person and living being. 

One of the most important factors in Buddhism’s arrival in the West is the necessity of disentangling the cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma from those aspects that are the common denominator of the human mind, i.e., the Buddha aspects. This happens whenever Buddhism enters a new cultural context.  It happened whenever and wherever Buddhism spread beyond the region where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, actually walked as a living, breathing, spiritual mendicant, e.g., into the areas now known as Southern India, Northwestern India, Southeast Asia, Ancient Gandhara, Centeral Asia. China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The core problem is that we mostly do not know what is cultural and what is mind. As Buddhism spread throughout the regions of Asia, there was a general cultural communication that facilitated the transplanting of Buddha Dharma without a head on collision of cultural themes.  For example, Buddhism moves relatively easily into a culture that has either an animistic-shamanistic or pluralistic-pantheistic approach, because it can either become one more view among others in a panoply of perspective, or can integrate the perspective of the mind’s awakening within the preexisting metaphors of awakening in a shamanistic cultural matrix. 

But Buddhism has more difficulty in cultures that worship and idolize an anthropomorphic monotheistic hegemonic God, such as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It is therefore historically significant that Buddhism is now able to come to the West, only after the West has had its own form of “Enlightenment” wherein the Dharma of Science has been able to free its own culture from the dogmatic rule of an anthropomorphic God.    

This current historical condition now presents problems of its own for Buddha Dharma coming to the West, as now practitioners of Buddha Dharma must take advantage of the cultural space created between the old precincts dominated by the God-religion and the new fields of the scientific worldview, while at the same time addressing the concerns of each.  Buddhism’s finding its place in the West between the polarization of an other-worldly God religion and a worldly science is analogous to Buddhism’s finding its place in China between the preexisting forms of Taoism and Confucianism. 

Part of the difficulty will be for Buddha Dharma to simultaneously shed the Indian, Chinese Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultural encrustations, yet remember and retain Buddha Dharma itself.  As we wash off the cultural accretions, this of course presents us with the paradigmatic conundrum of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.   As just one example, we can see in the West that some adherents to a materialistic scientific worldview misperceive karma and rebirth as merely cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma that can be jettisoned.  But as I see it, we have in the scientific field of psychology the common denominator of the study of the psyche with which Buddha Dharma can ally itself to show us that in the scientific study of mind, every single human culture that has existed has some form of teaching about karma and rebirth, e.g., the Christian teaching of “you reap what you sow.”  

For instance, in 1939 Carl G. Jung wrote an essay titled "Concerning Rebirth" recognizing that the concept of rebirth has various aspects and outlining five categories of rebirth as psychological forms that the archetype of rebirth manifests itself.  Jung points out that rebirth is not a materialistically measurable phenomenon, it can't be weighed or photographed, but it is a "purely psychic reality." Jung said,

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss--without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1, Par. 207.]

 

Therefore by recognizing the role of psychology we can scientifically determine that karma and rebirth are not merely cultural notions to be discarded but are archetypes of the universal collective unconscious that is the foundation of all cultures, and both karma and rebirth can be scientifically and personally studied today, with the 2500 year history of such Buddhist study providing insights for us today .    

For this series, the heading “Caveats” will warn about and point out the problems in sentences and ideas that I come across in English speaking texts, usually describing the Buddha Dharma erroneously, giving false impressions, causing confusion, or generally mistaking or misstating something about the Buddha Dharma.

The heading “Corrections” will attempt the brief restatement from my perspective to correct what was written.

The heading “Clarifications” will articulate the reasons for announcing the caveat and making the correction.

It should go without saying that I’m not writing from a position of a particular orthodoxy, but from a particular perspective.  The point is not that these corrections are intended to establish objective dogmatic views that everyone must adhere to, but that they reveal the “truth of perspective” itself, which is a central aspect of the core teachings of the Buddha Dharma, i.e., having an “Aligned View” is the first of the folds of the Eightfold Path that is basic to Buddhism.     

Here, the Buddha Dharma view we are centrally aligning with is the One Vehicle. This mind-only perspective “stands on zero” as the nondual teaching of emptiness (sunyata) and manifests Buddha Nature as the coming and going of thusness (Tathagata) for the great matter of bringing people to hear of, learn about, and enter into the Buddha’s seeing and knowing in order to alleviate the imbalance and off-centeredness (dukkha) that inevitably arises with self-consciousness and causes the general distress and dissatisfaction inherent in our lives that leads to our greed, hatred, delusions and the whole plethora of vexations, and ultimately to our killing, harming, stealing, lying, and generally bad behaviors towards each other.   

My initial anticipation is that many of first blogs of the series will circle around the areas of confusion between the One Vehicle and the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha themes of Buddha Dharma as understood by scholastics in the West. 

This page will act as the introduction and table of contents for the blogs posted in this series, as well as a preview of blogs I hope to include.  The posted blogs can also be found by clicking on the “CCC” link in the list of Labels on the side of the pages.

If you have any suggestions or pet peeves of your own about how Buddha Dharma is being accommodated and acculturated in the West, please let me know in the comments.

_/|\_

Gregory

Posts in this series:

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications: The meaning of ‘ Mind-only’

Anticipated Topics for Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications:

~ Manas, the 7^th Consciousness
~ Alayavijnana, the 8th Consciousness
~ Mind Only (citta-matra), Consciousness Only (vijnana-matra), and Notification Only (vijnapti-matra)
~ Lankavatara Sutra, The Sutra of Going Down to Lanka
~ Zen and Zen Samadhi
~ Samatha Vipassyana and Samadhi Prajna
~ Tendai Shikan and Zen Shikantaza
~ Five Types of Zen

Who Has Ears to Hear?: the Psychology of Political Dehumanization

Conflict and adversity are inherent in living a life.  This is one of the general applications of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.  Not only does this truth act as the entry to understanding our personal life, it is also a key to understanding our national political life.  In fact, modern Republicanism uses this truth as its currency in trade by encouraging a certain reaction to this truth via the means of both concealing its source by projecting its contents onto objects and objectifying, i.e., dehumanizing, people, and by capitalizing its hidden value by keeping its source in the psyche unconscious. 

Regardless of whether it is called theocracy, plutocracy, or democracy, all political power derives from “the people.”  But this power arises directly from, and as, configurations of the individual and group psyche, not as external structures of physical reality.  The people, as a tribe or nation, will coalesce around those unconscious patterns of political relationships that bring them the most conscious sense of security and hope, without having an inkling that the true source of their political behavior arises from their own psyche.

 

As Carl G. Jung wrote, "The psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual continues to do it, the nation will do likewise. Only a change in the attitude of the individual can initiate a change in the psychology of the nation. The great problems of humanity were never yet solved by general laws, but only through regeneration of the attitudes of individuals. If ever there was a time when self-reflection was the absolutely necessary and only right thing, it is now, in our present catastrophic epoch. Yet whoever reflects upon himself is bound to strike upon the frontiers of the unconscious, which contains what above all else he needs to know."  (From the preface to the first edition of "The Psychology of the Unconscious" in Volume 7 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung.)  These comments stated in 1916 in the midst of what we now call World War I, are as germane today as they were one hundred years ago as our public failure of self-reflection seems to once again be on the upsurge.

Humanity in general, nations and individuals in particular, are still largely psychically immature and psychologically ignorant.  We ignore what goes on within us by our fascination with what goes on around us, but it is this very immaturity in regards to our own mind, demonstrated by that very ignorance in failing to see the causal connections of our political life based on our inner life, that leads to the exacerbation of life’s normal adversities into outright social and political catastrophes.

Who has ears to hear? We so get caught up in the propagandistic sloganeering and the simplifications of projections that we childishly just listen in fascination or revulsion to the stories being told, instead of actually listening to the telling of the story.  To understand the level of childish regression in our current political environment we just need to listen to the rhetoric.  The easiest entry to evaluating the immaturity of political discourse is to listen to how the politician’s opponents are described.  Does the politician dehumanize those people who are categorized and labeled as the adversary?   (By the term “politicians,” I include both the politician on the stage and the class of “owners” behind them for whom they are mere spokespeople.)

A first step in the process of political manipulation of the people’s general psychic ignorance is the personification of our normal adversity into an adversary.  All life entails suffering, stress, conflict, and adversity.  This fundamental truth can lead us to mature inquiry into its foundational conditions, thereby ultimately leading us to awakening, or we can be led into dependence on our childish fears and desires to be saved from such adversity. The first step in manipulating the people for political purposes is to shape and steer our normal concern with this “truth of adversity” into psychic channels that externalize and objectify our unease and offers the hope of overcoming it by the projection of adversity onto “an adversary.”  Once an adversary is identified and the blame for our adversity is personified thereby, the consciousness of adversity in the social psyche can have a sense of hope in its desire to vanquish “the adversary,” however described. 

In order to allow the unconscious contents to be unconsciously projected (rather than consciously integrated) to capitalize on their political potential, the next step is to dehumanize “the adversary.”  Here is where the question, “Who has ears to hear?” becomes centrally relevant. It is reasonable and normal, even though immature, to personify our adversities onto adversaries. This is not a function that is immediately strange or odd to the conscious psyche.  However, the process of dehumanization is literally strange and odd, and its very existence is what tells us that unconscious archetypal forces are at work in the political life of the people.  That the people "allow" their public imagination to be so manipulated as to conceive of other people as essentially non-human flies in the face of rational behavior, yet it occurs so frequently that it is seldom publically questioned. The lack of public awareness and discourse on political dehumanization is evidence of the unconscious influences coming to the fore in the collective psyche. 

Dehumanization appears in several ways, most frequently as the imagination of demonization, animalization, or medicalization.  Examples of demonization include calling the political opponent a “a devil,” "a demon," “evil” or “immoral”; of animalization include such name-calling as “cockroaches,”, “apes,” “dogs,” “snakes,” etc.; and for medicalization there are terms for people as “a cancer,” “germs,” or “tumors” on society.  It is here that we must have the courage to insist on the integrity of our public consciousness and ask ourselves, our friends, our neighbors, and our fellow citizens, “Who has ears to hear?” when we hear these terms of dehumanization used in public political discourse, whether on the political stage or the pulpit.  Without the individual’s courage to confront this form of political projection, no society will ever mature to a level of psychological health in dealing with adversity.   

This is not the end of the question, but it is certainly the first step in questioning. When we in the USA listen to the usual Republican (and occasional Democratic) discourse that first blames an adversary for social adversity and then dehumanizes that adversary, we can know for ourselves that an unconscious psychic phenomenon is taking place within the public psyche and is being capitalized upon for the political purpose at hand.  That is, there can be a mature political discussion about the sources of social adversity, as well as an attempt to explain certain causal conditions for that adversity, by pointing out the people who may bear responsibility for that adversity without any dehumanization entering the discussion.  But when we hear metaphors, images, or symbols of dehumanization enter into the rhetoric of “the adversary,” then we can certainly hear that unconscious psychic contents are being stirred up to overpower a mature discussion by the use of childish imagination based on fear and longing for safety.  Who has ears to hear?   

Reincarnation and karma: Buddhism, Christianity, and Science..

Here's my response to an interesting blog over at Pathos by the Christian blogger Christian Piatt titled "Do Buddhism and Quantum Theory Support the Idea of Original Sin?"  Mr. Piatt shares his ruminations about original sin and reincarnation from a Christian perspective as they were stimulated by an NPR radio program  "talking about the philosophy behind the doctrine of reincarnation." (He doesn't say which program it was but it might have been Radiolab's program "After Life.") 

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Interesting to eavesdrop on the inner musings of a Christian grappling with the big picture of reincarnation/rebirth. As a Buddhist it is just now self-evident to me in the way that gravity has become self-evident after Newton put together the conceptual framework that allowed the new idea to be "perceived."

1. It is important to know that the Buddhist frame for karma-rebirth is not the same as other religious views of rebirth, such as the classical Hindu, the Albigensian or Rosicrucian Christian, Egyptian, Neoplatonist, etc. So, as you note, modern physics is catching up to Buddha’s view of reincarnation without individual entity, soul, or self. But in the Buddhist view this also means no universal soul or self as well.

2. As it stems from the first, the idea of karma-reincarnation is as complex and nuanced as genetics and understanding the genome, or understanding global weather patterns and climate change. We “understand” plate tectonics, but can’t predict an earthquake or volcano. We “understand” weather but can’t predict the formation of hurricanes or tornadoes and can’t foretell how the jet stream will modulate. Likewise, we can “understand” karma in a general way, but can’t predict how it will be formed in new rebirths in a specific space-time reference.

3. Karma and rebirth have absolutely nothing to do with morality or “learning from my past lives.” So the idea that memory should be there so we can learn from our past lives is an erroneous assumption. Karma means action, and the law of karma is no more “moral” than the laws of thermodynamics. When we put a hand into a flame, it hurts or worse depending on how long the hand is in the flame. We don’t say the flame is evil or that it was an immoral act or that the pain and blistering are “retribution” for our “sin” of putting our hand too close to the flame. Likewise, karma has nothing to do with the concept of “sin”, though unfortunately the idea of karma is too often translated into Western parlance using such ideas as sin or moralization.

4. The selflessness of karma and rebirth are very difficult for beginners and those attached to the idea of a self to realize. For example, take the idea “So when we die, there’s really no need any more for the ‘self’ to continue.” That represents a Western view of rebirth, because in the Buddhist view the statement is based on the false assumption that there was a self to begin with in this life. The idea of a self, is just that, an idea, an image, i.e., a self-image. Our mental processes are creating selfie images constantly and stringing them together by means of memory and this concatenation of self images is put together and called my self. But outside the mental image, there is no objective self. So since there is no self in this life, there is no self that is reborn in another life.

5. So what is reborn that warrants the prefix “re”? In the Buddhist context we can say it is the Dharmakaya, the body of reality, if we want to use religious terminology or to be poetical we simply say it is the ocean that is reborn as the wave. In the physics context we could say it is energy that is reborn. In the Christian context we can say it is God that is reborn. Every birth is the rebirth of that which is. But there is more, because there is the identity factor that connects one birth to another. And in the Buddhist context this identity factor is what creates the illusion of a self or soul passing from life to life. In our modern context of physics, we see this selfless continuity between lives in the field of wave dynamics. When a wave travels through the ocean there is no physical “thing” that is moving across the face of the waters. At any one location on the surface, such as indicated by a log or a duck, we see the object merely go up and down as the wave passes horizontally. The wave is not a “thing” at all, but the pattern of force traveling through the water creating the image of a wave. Likewise, a single life constitutes an up and down motion on the surface of the water but over “time” the up and down motions of the surface create the image of a wave traveling through the ocean, and this wave is just a force, not a thing. Thus, our rebirths are the expressions of the karmic forces that have been created and thus there is continuity without any soul, self, or entity passing from one life to another. What is reborn is just the karmic force or influence, not a thing. There is connectivity, but no “tissue,” other than what we might call God, Energy, Reality, Dharmakaya, Tathagata, Suchness, etc.

6. The burden of our forebears that we bear today is exactly right as one important dimension of the meaning of karmic fruit. We reap what we have sown and that sowing is both on the physical dimensions of earthly continuity and on the mental dimensions of continuity, but for us who live in the dimension of earthly continuity, it is more than enough to realize that our actions today will definitely bear the fruits of their development in the future generations. We are necessarily bound to those fruits as they take shape in and through the forces of space-time.

7. The idea of “sin” is very important to confront, as it is the very idea of sin that maintains sin as an influence in law of karma. This is an extremely nuanced philosophical truth that is easily and readily misunderstood by philosophical beginners and people who believe in the literalization and objectification of evil. In Buddhism, the basic “sin” is ignorance. It is the primal ignorance that creates the separation from reality that is the source of all good and evil, i.e., the source of sin. In Christian myth this is represented in the story of eating from the tree of knowledge. This myth is alive in each of us, first as our own consciousness develops form the moment of birth to our self-consciousness, and also moment to moment in our current self-consciousness. It is our own sense of separation from God (to use the Christian terminology) at any and every moment that is the continuity of eating from the tree of knowledge and is the sin of the present moment. The original sin of the separation of self and other is at the root of all suffering. Knowledge rests upon the bifurcation of our perceptions so that we can perceive reality though a frame of reference. However, the simple polarizations of perception, such as high-low, left-right, large-small, become confused with the other simple polarizations such as pain and pleasure to form complex polarizations such good and evil, and then we become self-deluded about the ontological reality of the complex polarizations because these complex bifurcations become the basis for our mentally constructed self, our self-image of our self consciousness and the separation from the “other.” Thus, the original sin is believing in the reality of our individual self as separate from others as well as separate from total reality because we have based that self on our frame of reference that includes the complex polarization of good-evil. In Zen we have a saying, that the True Good is the Good that transcends, or is not subject to, good and evil. In other words, the True God is the God that transcends the deluded dichotomy of God and Devil.

8. The idea that nirvana and heaven or analogous is correct. But suffice it to say, in both Buddhism and in Christianity both nirvana and heaven are grossly distorted and misunderstood by people who have only a superficial realization of Buddhism and Christianity, which unfortunately, means most of the people who “believe in” these religions without actually practicing and awakening to them.
Lastly, for now, the importance of understanding that all theories “are fabrications of human imagination” can not be overstated. In Buddhism, this is stated as the “mind-only” teaching of the One Mind. All views, perspectives, and constructs of consciousness are only manifestations of mind. This is not the philosophical notion of idealism, but a psychological recognition that there is no way to bootstrap ourselves out of our psyche. The very idea of a “physical world” is an idea of our psychology. This fundamental realization is so disorienting that most people flee from it in confusion or fear. It is much safer for our the stability and fixation of our self-image to believe in the stability and fixation of a physical world. However, as noted in the post, even the most sacred ideas of the physical sciences “simply break down on both infinitely large and infinitely small scales.” This is because the simple bifurcation of large-small breaks down when taken to its own ends. In fact, all oppositions and bifurcations break down when taken to their extreme ends, and this is one of the ways we can learn that the bifurcation and opposition is itself a construct of the psyche and a manifestation of mind.

Buddha Dharma Comes to the West

Thinking about Buddha Dharma coming to the West.

The Buddhism of the West, that eventually becomes identifiable as such, will be as different from the Buddhism of the “Far East” (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean Buddhism), Tibetan Buddhism, and Theravada Buddhism as they are different from the Buddhism of India before the 8^th century.  Personally, I push against the trends that currently go under the labels of “naturalizing” or “modernizing” Buddhism because it tends to be too one sided leaning towards the materialism of the West.   

Western Buddhism will have to acclimate and accommodate to certain Western perspectives as well as appropriate certain Western language terminology and frames, and this will mean bridging the language and cultural divides with appropriate imagery and symbolic language.  Thus, Buddhism will need to use the language of both science and the religions of the Levant, in order to relate to Western cultures.  

The problem with much of the “modernization of Buddhism” approach is that it is appropriating the wrong parts of modernization. That is, instead of relating to the cutting edge of 21^st century physics, general relativity, quantum theory, and string theory, it is just adopting a materialist inspired scientific framework of the 19^th century.  In its attempts to be modern and remove the “superstition” from Buddhism, this “naturalization of Buddhism” movement has actually adopted the worst of the denatured materialistic psychology of the 20^th century that has removed mind and psyche, and all depth, from psychology as just neuroscience and genetics.

Likewise, there is not much evidence of the necessary bridging of language memes with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in Buddhism’s coming to the West.  For example, Buddhism needs to unashamedly use the word “God," but in a Buddhist sense as a synonym for such Buddhist terminology as tathagata, sunyata, or dharmakaya. This is like the appropriation of the word Tao (the Way) when Buddhism came to China.  We need to tell the followers of the Abrahamic religions, “Yes, there is God, but it is not what you think.”  God is inconceivable, and if one conceives of or has a concept of God, then that is really the basic sin of ignorance as a human being.  

In this sense, John Lennon was right when he said “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” but it is the sense that our concepts of God are the concepts by which we measure or pain, i.e., measuring our understanding of Buddhism’s First Noble Truth that Life entails suffering.   To the extent that Lennon was singing “there is no God” he was wrong, but to the extent that he was singing to remind us that our concepts of God are not what God is, then he was absolutely correct.  This is actually what the mystics of Christianity, Judaism and Islam have said all along, but Buddhists need to speak of God in such a direct manner that reminds them of the mystic truths of their own religions in order for Buddhism to convince them that Buddhism’s not having an anthropomorphic God is not anti-religious.

For the transplantation of Buddha Dharma to the West, Buddhism needs to take up wholeheartedly such Western terms as “God,” “mind,” and “reality” and repurpose them within Buddhism’s frame of reference to accommodate itself to Western Culture.

 

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.

 

It's more complicated than that.

This is a response to the essay "Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World" (reproduced below) which I received as a Portside selected story.

The materialist fantacizing by Michael Shermer would merely be humurous if it weren't so sad. The dehumanizing aspects of the materialist frame of cognitive neuroscience are overlooked to our detriment. When looked at closely, both are true: the emperor has no clothes and Mr. Shermer has not explained "why" people believe in visible agents that control the world.

Patternicity is not as Shermer says just "the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise." First, that statement assumes a one-sided position that the "noise" of the universe--that is, the entire soup of energy, both the seen and unseen energy emitted from the sun and bouncing off the energy fields we call matter, the atmospheric waves washing into our ear canals, and the energy collisions of our own material field with other fields, i.e., all of that in which we swim-- is "meaningless." The materialist view is based on the posited assumption, the presumption, that "out there" the noise is meaningless and "in here" the patterns imagine meaning.

But that division of reality into "meaninful patterns" on the one hand and "meaningless noise" on the other is already far far down the trail of pattern recognition. When that conjunction is conceived as unbridgable across a materialist divide it is an example of what I call "schizopolarity": the division of reality into unreconcilible opposites. Here the opposites of "meaningful and meaningless" on the one hand and "pattern and noise" on the other hand become associated in a fixed pattern and that fixation of those two patterns in a relationship that associates the two poles, i.e., meaningfulness and patternicity on the one hand and meaninglessness and noise on the other, become materialized into a belief system of neuroscience every bit as "invisible" as any supernatural agent.

Second, patternicity is not just a "human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise" it is the tendency of the universe to form itself into patterns. Patternicity is absolutely fundamental to human conscoiusness. There is no feeling, sensation, perception, thought, memory, or consciousness without the patternicity of the universe: whether it is expressed in the patterns of the solar systtem, in the patterns of a watermelon sliced in half, or the patterns in our own imaginings of agenticity. The assertion that noise is meaningless and patterns are only "found" in human imagination is an assertion of faith. It is equally valid to assert that patterns emerge with the essence of noise and are not dependent on "human tendencies" at all.

It is actually the illusions of "agenticity" applied to patternicity that creates the hubris of the cognitive neuroscientist to assume that patternicity is only a human tendency and not a fundamental tendency of the universe. The very pattern inherent in the conception voiced by Shermer that "we make two types of errors:" a type I error and a type II error, is itself a type III error, that is, schizopolarity, the division of the world of our experience into irreconcilable dualities. It is this type III error that is the supporting framework upholding the litealization of "agenticity"--whether the "agent" is perceived in the projective transference of agenticity envisioned as an intelligent designer or negatively perceived in the crypto-agenticity in the cognitive neuroscientist's denial of intelligent design. Between the two extremes of imagining that there must be a God as an intelligent designer or, if not that, then, only a random meaningless universe, there is the reconciliation of the universe as an inteligent design without any need for a "designer" to exist behind the scenes.

When we can see the inherent intelligent design of the universe, without either the childish reliance on the parental imagination of the agenticity of a designer or the faux-mature nihilistic trappings of the denial of the inherent design itself, then we are closest to the patternicity of our own humanity.

Gregory Wonderwheel, M.A.

Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World

A Skeptic's take on souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens and other invisible powers that be

By Michael Shermer
From the June 2009 Scientific American Magazine
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of "patternicity," which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind--the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others--we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call "agenticity": the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as "the one" with almost messianic powers who will save us.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer's sweater, believing that "evil" is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers's cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor's personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.

"Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies and entities operating in the world," Hood explains. "More important, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense."

We are natural-born supernaturalists.

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