Well, friendlies, we made it. Congratulations. :))) Over the past 27(ish) posts we’ve looked at the Classical View of Humanity, the Interpreter Module, Avijjā, Simple Knowing, Skillfulness, Reactivity, Fabrication, Implicit Bias, Hemisphere Specialization, and the Goal of the Practice. The “Survival Series for Kids” authors would be proud of us, I think. Not that we’re […]
Category: Discourse
Greetings, Friendlies. :) It is my understanding reading the suttas that all this bhāvanā stuff, this eightfold path stuff, does in fact have a goal. Awakening. Bodhi-pattī. I have not, however, found a satisfyingly simple answer to the question, “What is awakening?” Some will say this is because there is not a satisfyingly simple answer […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Hemisphere Specialization. The idea that the left and right brain hemispheres have different structural and functional roles, and that these differences are manifest in our lived experience. You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before: “artists are right-brained, analysts are left-brained”. That’s actually not accurate, that artists are right-brained and analysts are […]
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PPP, Part 24, Avijjā Revisited
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Just before the PPP, I wrote about Avijjā (mis-understanding) as the polestar of practice and offered an interpretation of the term. Though the general shape is the same I’d like to offer today’s, maybe more nuanced(?), understanding: First: the concept of Avijjā is empty. How we understand it at any point depends […]
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PPP, Part 23, Implicit Bias
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Is a post on Implicit Bias superfluous? (Is opening a blog post with a rhetorical question superfluous?) Everyone knows what Implicit Bias is. And it’s clear how it ties in with the interpreter module and the construction of human experience. Right? I dunno. There was a time when I wouldn’t have used […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Recently a friend was expressing… shall we say… “dissatisfaction” regarding “events” taking place in Washington DC. I empathize. My friend lamented, “There’s nothing we can do.” I disagree. And in the spirit of Silly T-shirt Friday, would like to highlight some do-good merch. Many of us in the dhamma take a more […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Last time I TMI’d you with the Angry-Femme Interpreter Module. Thanks for holding that. :) Re-mixing the same with the Reactivity and Threefold Training stuff from Part 19. The angry-feminist view has been known to cause a ruckus. Even when not manifesting behaviorally, it can lead to a lot of internal dukkha. Hypervigilance, […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Last time we looked at how the Interpreter Module (IM) uses not just individual pieces of information but also views and narratives when constructing the world. My IM wears some pretty thick angry-feminist goggles. And fair enough. I’m 5’4 (162cm), small framed, and for many decades, kind of adorable. I’ve worked in construction, […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) All experience is preceded by the Interpreter ModuleLed by the Interpreter ModuleMade by the Interpreter Module#FakeBuddhaQuotes Imagine: you have volunteered for a scientific study. You arrive at the lab and the affable experimenter explains they are studying social interactions. They would like to apply theatrical makeup to your right cheek, in such […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Could it be that Skillfulness, at least in some part, is an overcoming of reactivity? “Reactivity” is not a translation of a Pāli word, so less concern about heresy; was Stephen Batchelor the first to use it in a dhammic sense? Dunno. It might be useful at times to differentiate between neuro-biological reactivity […]
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PPP, Part 18, On Skillfulness
Greetings, Friendlies. :) I currently prefer translating “kusala” as “skillful”. That’s fine. Inoffensive. Secular. But what, I wondered, do I actually mean when I say “skillful”? [1] Let’s start with a little semiotic premise in case Stephen Batchelor ever reads this (jokes! I have jokes!): words in common language do not have absolute definitions. That’s […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) I notice I’ve started using the word “Fabricating”, which I inherited from Rob Burbea. I think (though I’m not certain) he’s talking about the fact of our minds fabricating/constructing experience, from the grossest levels of full-blown papanca all the way down to the subtlest levels of subconscious conceptualizing. And I think this […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Following on from our description of Simple Knowing… In The Social Brain (and in Who’s In Charge?) Gazzaniga recounts an experience illustrating the interpreter module doing its thing on top of basic sensory input. We might say Saṅkhāra-ing/Fabrication in action. Remember how, for Split-Brain Patients, you can present information to one hemisphere […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In some dhamma traditions a type of bhavana (cultivation/meditation) is practiced that goes by names like Bare Attention, Open Awareness, Choiceless Awareness. Presently I prefer Christina Feldman’s “Simple Knowing”. From her book Mindfulness: a way of attending where no judgment or narrative is added to the experience of the moment. A thought […]
I’ll be giving another class report 06JAN, 1000 Pacific. Would love to have you. :
Greetings, Friendlies! Though enormously enthusiastic about the idea of an Interpreter Module, there are plenty of unanswered questions. I present these as-is, as placeholders and acknowledgment of the current state of my understanding: The biggest objection is personal: having read one chapter of one book (and glanced at a few pieces in the literature), I […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) What happens if we take the Interpreter Module, Avijjā (as mis-understanding how our minds work), and Saṅkhāra (as “principle of construction“), and puzzle-piece them together? At least one arrangement gives us an Interpreter Module which is receiving information that is, at best, limited and conditioned, at worst, inaccurate or grossly incomplete (Avijjā). […]
In February John Peacock wrote a powerful article, originally published in Tricycle (re-published with permission on SecularBuddhistNetwork) titled “The Elephant in the Dharma Hall”. (If you’ve not read, may I recommend?) The illustration is by Robert Neubecker and I thought it would make an amazing t-shirt. Neither Neubecker nor Peacock responded to the recommendation. ;)
Greetings, Friendlies. :) I will be assistant-teaching online with Leigh Brasington in January. He doesn’t like the hindrance talk so passed it on to me. Thought it would be useful to give a practice talk, and I’d love for anyone and everyone to attend. I’m particularly looking for feedback: when did your eyes glaze over, […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) I hope it’s clear how far the interpreter module would take us from the Classical View of Humanity. We are working with an emergent property, a consciousness-of. Various modules/functions of the brain are doing their processing and then, as Gazzaniga says in Who’s in Charge?, “[competing] for attention and the winner emerges […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Last time we pointed out that the Interpreter module is only as good as the data it receives. A hugely important thing it does not receive is meta-data about the incoming information. Michael Gazzaniga in Who’s in Charge: “The interpreter receives the results of the computations of a multitude of modules. It […]
Greetings, Friendlies, The thing about the Interpreter Module, it’s only as good as its inputs. As Gazzaniga says in Who’s In Charge, the interpreter can be hijacked. Remember back from PPP 4, Cool Avijjā Examples, the patients who did not recognize themselves in a mirror (Mirrored-Self Mis-identification)? The proposal here is that there is some […]
Greetings, Friendlies! I am so excited to be writing this post. Remember a gazillion years ago when I proposed the PPP series? It was this concept, Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Module, that was the spark that lit the whole thing off. And now I finally get to tell you about it. :))) We had the classic question […]
Brain Modularity and Consciousness Of. In Who’s In Charge, Gazzaniga says there is no gatekeeper to conscious experience. It’s just a plethora of subsystems, “modules”, competing for consciousness. So. Many. Questions. The classic question: if modular consciousness-of, why this sense of continuity? This sense of a single-unified-continuous-self experiencing a stream of phenomena over time? What’s […]
Greetings, Friendlies! In Part 8 we considered the modularity of brain organization. So what? Well, at the 50,000 foot level, if avijjā resides primarily in not understanding the kind of beings we are, then understanding brain function is a movement towards less avijjā. But let’s zoom from 50,000 to, say, 20,000 feet and ask again, […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Taking a moment to articulate how I am understanding/using the words “brain” and “mind”. In this format I try to use the word “brain” to specifically speak about the organ of the brain. The 1.3kg mass of tissue housed inside the skull. “Mind”, on the other hand, is more loosey goosey. It […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Coming off the highs of irreverent pāli translations, we descend into the doldrums of cognitive explication. (Not for me. I LUV this stuff. But I get that it’s not for eveyone.) So. Modular Brains. This concept came up previously in the “Viññāṇa/Consciousness Of” post. But respecting our PPP Methodology it is here broken […]
Greetings, Friendlies! One more round in Make-Believe Land before returning to complete faith and reverence. (Maybe.) An hour into that fateful saṅkhāra talk I asked something to the effect: “I get confused when people say: that’s a sankhāra, also, that’s a sankhāra, and that other thing. Also a saṅkhāra. Listening to this talk, I’m wondering, […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Continuing from last time in our Neighborhood of Make-Believe… Akincano Weber began that Saṅkhāra talk: The word “karoti” means “making”. “Saṅkharoti” means “making things together”, means compounding things, forming things, processing things with each other. …the noun saṅkhāra is applied to basically three aspects of a dynamic sequence. [1] It is applied to […]
Perhaps. If it is the case that one’s understanding is demonstrated through clarity of instruction… then it may be we are in some trouble regarding the concept of Saṅkhāra. A particularly good example of a recurrent phenomenon: a 2022 retreat with Akincano Weber and John Peacock on Dependent Origination [1], the Saṅkhāra talk. Sixty-four minutes […]
