Greetings, Friendlies.:) “It’s just a theory. It doesn’t have anything to do with my practice.” Some of us have been taught that theory—anything intellectual really—is disruptive to dhammic path-ing. Theory, we have been told, actively hinders liberation. But that take, “theory is not good for practice” is itself a theory and it shapes our practice. […]
Tag: atomic essay
Greetings, Friendlies. :) For some Dhamma folk, discussions of “brain hemispheres” and “neural algorithms” elicits an instant—perhaps bodily—contraction. The resistance seems to come from a belief that the richness of human experience, the sacredness of being, is being reduced to mere mechanism. But that view is itself reductionist: “Either I must throw off the knowledge […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) When Martine Batchelor mentioned this book, I remember a feeling of sinking. Sadness. Disappointment. Martine asked: how can this book exist? [2] How can “mindfulness”, a term so central to dhamma, be married to something violent? We could shrug off the question, dismiss it. “Different people define words differently.” But why? And […]
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Imposter Syndrome in Dhamma Discourse
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist says that as the quantity of human knowledge explodes, “experts” find themselves expert on less and less. For those of us non-experts who dare approach a subject: the price may be that one is always at best an interested outsider, at worst an interloper condemned […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) As an extension on last week’s OG-awakening-as-recorded-in-the-Suttanipata, I’d like to highlight a sliver from Rob Burbea’s 2019 “Stream Entry – Conceptions, Value and Realisation“. [1] Burbea describes the entire body of Gotama’s teachings as “set within the cosmology of rebirth”. He invites us to suspend our current operating frame and submit, in […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) With all this talk of awakening, I should probably check with the OG; what do the suttas have to say about Gotama’s awakening? [1] I was surprised not to find a definitive list of all the mentions of G’s awakening in the Sutta and/or Vinaya Piṭaka. If you know of such a […]
Greetings, Friendlies. Shall we play a little What If? Hypothetically. We could then say that Watts’ mystic, an awakened being, is one who has become fully aware of, who dwells in, McGilchrist’s Right Hemisphere “context”, Right Hemisphere “view”. I mean… what if??? With friendliness!
Greetings, Friendlies! In The Tao of Philosophy [1] Watts says, “People, who by various methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called ‘a mystical experience,’ or what the Buddhists call bodhi, an awakening. …they discover that the real deep, deep self, that which you really are fundamentally and forever, is the […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist says that one explanation of why hemisphere lateralization arose is the evolutionary advantage to a single organism having two types of attention. One attention is focused, capable of discerning objects from their background, breaking things into parts. This attention dwells in the left hemisphere. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Alan Watts differentiates between what he calls “spotlight” and “floodlight” attention (he sometimes uses the terms “awareness” or “consciousness”. Standardizing to “attention” for now). Spotlight attention, just like it sounds, is a narrow beam of intense attention. It picks things out. You can imagine standing in a dark room using a bright, […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Writing this series I was reminded of a quote from Kitaro Nishida (which I got from Leigh Brasington and he thinks it’s from the book The Nothingness Beyond God but I haven’t gotten a copy from the library yet, so check your facts). Pure experience is the beginning of Zen. It is […]
Greetings, Friendlies! (Parts 1, 2, 3.) The sense I have, and I could be very wrong about this, is that between Watts and Buddhadāsa we have a range encompassing all the other versions of awakening I’ve heard. In Ingram’s list, for example, the Psychological Models and the Nothing to Do Schools fall into Buddhadāsa’s range. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1, Part 2.) Quick refresh: we are looking at subjective experiences of awakening. Last time Alan Watts’ This is It. This time Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone. Buddhadāsa speaks of a “Nibbāna instinct”, a drive egging us to find relief from the irritation of craving and aversion. [1] I think B […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) We ended the Pile of Provisional Positions with a hypothesis that Gotama’s awakening had neurological correlates, specifically a shift from Left-Hemisphere-Dominant-Experience to Right-Hemisphere-Dominant-Experience. That’s great, and, it leans a little objective. What about the subjective experience of awakening? I don’t know how it goes for other folk, but for me, the first […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) They say that the best way to learn is to teach. Perhaps. But what do we get from teaching? And are there alternatives? I’d say that the most important thing we get from teaching is learning to refine our ideas. We root around and gather up the vague hints and notions lurking […]
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Tiny Book Club
Greetings, Friendlies! For years I’ve threatened to host a book club bringing Dhamma folks together to read non-Dhamma books. Particularly CogScience-y books. The dream is manifest. Behold: Tiny Book Club! Just two people, just one book. For the first iteration kalyana-Darrell and I will read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, a substantial tome […]
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 […]
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! 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. :) 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 […]
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: And there we are. Your thoughts? Other questions/concerns?
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). […]
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 […]
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