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 […]
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. :) 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! Last time we looked at some rather extraordinary examples of avijjā, of not understanding how our minds work. This time I’d like to share a case that struck me quite strongly, precisely because it was so much closer to home than the others. This case covered a former Johns Hopkins (JHU) student. She […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Following on from Pile of Provisional Positions 3, about the Classical View of Humanity, and the idea of Avijjā as not understanding how our minds work… In the two semesters I studied Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins, the course that most blew my mind (and this is a high bar) was Cognitive Neuropsychology. […]
What I see as the fundamental problem, and what I am most interested in working on, is that we humans do not understand the kind of beings we are.
Greetings, Friendlies. :) For your consideration: what about translating Avijjā as “Mis-understanding”? “Ignorance” seems a little pejorative, “confusion” a little apathetic. Mis-understanding may sound odd at first, but in dhamma circles we do something similar when we speak of dis-ease. We are not speaking of illness, we are speaking of _not being at ease_. In […]
Dharma PhD podcast Episode 5, hit the airwaves this morning. Yay! Come and have a listen while Co-host and I talk about John Peacock’s “Buddhism Before the Theravada, Part 4”. We talk about how, in Buddhist traditions (and maybe our own psychological traditions?) human experience is playing out on a backdrop of misunderstanding how our […]
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