Category Archives: Middle Way Philosophy

The mystical flip

Buddhism, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion, spirituality,

‘Mysticism’ is for me a term with many positive connotations: though I know that there are some (primarily secularists) for whom it is a term of disparagement. I see it as primarily an attitude that recognises mystery, and thus the extent of our uncertainty and ignorance, very often in the sphere of religion and very often supported by states of temporary integration such as the Buddhist dhyana. I’ve written about the positive qualities of mysticism in a previous blog post, but here I want to focus on a problematic feature that has often accompanied it, and perhaps contributed to the negative views that some have formed. I call this problematic feature the ‘mystical flip’, and I’ve encountered it particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, and related emptiness and non-duality type talk, but I’ve been surprised recently also to find it in a Christian context, reading Thomas Merton.

The mystical flip seems to start with refined and subtle experiences, perhaps in contemplation or meditation, where people dwell much more fully than usual in right-hemisphere dominated openness. If you want to know why this kind of state is right-hemisphere dominated, watch this TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor: Bolte Taylor effectively describes a mystical experience that is created by the disabling of her left hemisphere. In this state, we lose the goal-orientation and the belief in linguistic representation that is characteristic of left hemisphere dominance. If they’re not accompanied by the disabling features of a stroke, such experiences can be helpful temporary integrated experiences. However, at some point they must finish, and we must go back to left hemisphere dominance.

In our normal mode, what do we make of this? Well, many people seem to immediately draw the conclusion that they’ve seen a higher ‘truth’. In this higher state there are no goals and no linguistic representations. Nevertheless, of course, back in the normal state there are goals and representations. pancake-tossWhen talking about what they regard as mystical truths, then, the mystics claim that in some ultimate state there are no goals and representations, but when talking normally they flip back to admitting that normally, in the ‘conventional’ state, there are. This, then, is the mystical flip. Other terms for it, in various traditions, could be Nagarjuna’s Two Truths doctrine, or the divine versus human view, or the Spinozan ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ (from the standpoint of eternity) versus the standpoint of time.

The Buddhist Diamond Sutra is a good example of a text that consists almost entirely of constant mystical flips. Here is one example:

Subhuti, do not say that the Tathagata [Buddha] conceives the idea: I must set forth a teaching. For if anyone says the Tathagata sets forth a teaching he really slanders Buddha and is unable to say what I teach. As to any Truth-declaring system, Truth is undeclarable, so “an enunciation of Truth” is just the name given to it.  (21)

At one and the same time, such texts constantly insist that they have the truth from one perspective and that they do not from another, but there is rarely, if ever, any attempt to bridge the gap between the two perspectives.

Here is another example I discovered recently in Thomas Merton:

We are plagued today with the heritage of that Cartesian self-awareness, which assumed that the empirical ego is the starting point of an infallible intellectual progress to truth and spirit, more and more refined, abstract, and immaterial…. But in actual fact, Hui Neng says, there is no attainment, and therefore to busy oneself about seeking a “way” to attainment is pure self-deception. Zen is not “attained” by mirror-wiping meditation but by self-forgetfulness in the existential present of life here and now. (Mystics and Zen Masters, 25-6)

Merton here does the mystical flip not so much in terms of ‘truth’ as in terms of ‘self’, being apparently unable to engage with any third alternative between self-obsession and self-forgetfulness.

Of course, I’d rather that people were able to do the mystical flip than that they were just stuck on one side of it or the other. But it is, at best, a transitional stage in recognising and applying the Middle Way, and it certainly seems to me like a big mistake to identify texts, however hallowed, that merely do mystical flips as ones that tell us anything much about the Middle Way. The Middle Way is how you stop doing mystical flips, or at least slow them down or limit them. It requires you to reframe the ways you are talking about ‘absolute’ and ‘conventional’ perspectives so as to avoid getting into such a false duality in the first place.

The key ways I would suggest that we can avoid mystical flips amount to the five principles of Middle Way Philosophy as I identified them in an earlier post and in the first six of my introductory video series. Scepticism, the first principle, tells us why both absolute and conventional positions are uncertain, whatever experiences they may appeal to. Provisionality tells us how we can practically cultivate an attitude that doesn’t identify entirely with either the absolute or the conventional positions. Incrementality suggests ways of breaking down the absolute dualities involved and re-conceptualising them as increments. Agnosticism confirms us in our determination not to be sucked into either of the absolute sets of assumptions. Integration relates these to a process whereby we unite divided beliefs and energies in our experience rather than merely taking the side of one against the other.

In terms of the brain hemispheres, the Middle Way doesn’t just involve flipping from one dominance to the other, but rather using the right hemisphere perspective to inform and integrate the conceptual and goal-driven world of the left. Any spiritual perspective that simply leaves out the left hemisphere is inadequate to the vast majority of our experience and thus unable to transform it positively. But right-hemisphere experience can help us recognise the limitations of any particular set of goals and representations we may have grown accustomed to.

There is no need at all for anyone to get stuck at the stage of doing mystical flips. But unfortunately they seem to be very much reinforced by traditional authority in many traditions, as well as by the perception that there is no alternative. If we can avoid mystical flips we might also manage to avoid ethical flips (between absolute and relative positions) or scientific flips (between absolute belief in scientific results and disparaging science for its fallibility). There is an alternative.

 

Archetypes for science

Jung, Middle Way Philosophy, Science, ,

To talk of an archetype is just to talk of a basic, universal psychological function that we can either project or take responsibility for as part of ourselves. Religion, art, and myth are of course rife with archetypes, but there’s no reason to assume they stop there. Archetypes can be found in every field of human experience. So why not science?

I’ve been thinking recently a bit more about what scientific archetypes might be like. Since scientists and other supporters of science are people, we can expect the same four basic archetypal functions in them as in anyone else, but they are likely to take a rather different outward form, because scientific culture makes such a point of avoiding ‘subjective’ stories (unless they are the object of scientific investigation themselves). So scientific archetypes are likely to avoid traditional forms, but (since they are based on the human mental constitution) nevertheless emerge.projection-of-truth

If scientists don’t acknowledge their own stories, that creates a new danger of projection, where the stories are simply played out in the ‘objective world’ without recognition that they are a result of the biases and assumptions of the scientist. The fact that much scientific ‘rationality’ depends on procedures to eliminate bias that are followed at a group level, rather than just individual thinking, increases that danger. So I thought it might be helpful to try to identify some scientific archetypes to look out for. This can also provide another way of distinguishing science from scientism. Scientific method itself is entirely compatible with acknowledging the biases represented by these archetypes, but scientism is equivalent to projecting these archetypes outwards without acknowledgement (particularly the final one).

So I’m going to base my suggestions for scientific archetypes on the four basic archetypes I’ve described elsewhere: for example in my 2014 talk, and book Middle Way Philosophy 3. These are the hero, the shadow, anima/animus, and the God archetype (which Jung also called the self).

The hero is the archetype of the ego, representing our idealisation of what we can achieve in the form we identify with at the moment. I recently discussed the hero in another blog. We identify with the heroes in stories because they are striving for goals in the face of difficulties just as we are, and we feel their triumph as they achieve them. So, who is the hero in science? Well, the scientist of course. Maybe it’s Galileo whom we identify with as a martyr for the cause, or Einstein as the genius who overcomes the doubters. The scientific hero may slay the dragons of ignorance, or perhaps of pseudoscience, religion or irrationality, to win the fabled Nobel prize and carry it home in triumph. The scientific hero is projected when you really think that someone else is like that and you really believe in their goals 100%, or perhaps that you yourself are such a hero. Such an archetype can be integrated when you recognise that figures like Einstein can be inspiring, but they’re also complex, and that the desire to slay those particular dragons is based on limited assumptions that may need further examination.

The shadow is the archetype of evil, based on what we reject. The Shadow is often identified with Satan or other evil figures, but can be projected onto someone we hate, who then gets a whole host of shadowy attributes given too them. For example, the boss frustrates you in your current project, so you fantasise that he is nasty in every respect, not realising that he actually goes home and has a wonderful relationship with his children. The shadow for science has already been mentioned as the target for the hero: probably pseudoscience, religion, a rival theory, or whatever is understood as standing in the way of science. For example, you may have identified one way in which you think homeopathy is mistaken, but you then project that evil ignorance onto every other aspect of homeopathy. That means that when examining it you will be heavily subject to confirmation bias that makes you interpret positive or neutral information negatively. To integrate that archetype and avoid projection, you would need to recognise that although some specific beliefs held by those you reject may be unhelpful, you can separate the overall shadow from the figure you reject, who will be much more complex and multifaceted.

The anima/animus is the archetype of the attractive other, which most commonly takes a form sexually opposite to the one you identify with. Falling in love is a common indicator of a projection of the anima or animus: usually with a person, but it could also happen, say, with a place, a subject, a book, or an animal. You believe it to be wonderful precisely because it has qualities you lack yourself, and as a result you fail to see that you could develop more of those qualities in yourself rather than seeking them elsewhere. A scientific anima/animus could be an attraction for something perceived as non-scientific, perhaps even irrational. Thus scientists can be observed not only falling in love with non-scientists of the opposite sex, but also going in for escapist fantasy, or even adopting a religious or new-agey view precisely because it doesn’t fit their normal requirement of scientific rationality. The projection of the archetype depends on that blindness to the incompatibility of the two worlds, because you don’t want to have to make the effort of being rational all the time. To integrate that archetype, though, you’d have to admit the incompatibility and find an overarching understanding that could contain both your scientific self and your fantasising self. In the process you might loosen your assumptions about what ‘rationality’ is and how humans can make use of it.

The God archetype is the big one, that I find those with a scientific worldview are least likely to acknowledge, obsessed as they are likely to be with the ‘existence’ or otherwise of God. The God archetype is a foretaste of a state of integration, also variously called the self, or the wise old man or woman. If you project the God archetype, you believe that there is a God (or a person) beyond yourself who has the energy, wisdom, positivity and awareness that you’d normally attribute to an integrated person – but, in the case of God, to an infinite degree. You might also project that archetype onto a guru, a Buddha, a wizard, a healer, a teacher etc, or even onto yourself if you start to believe that you are perfectly integrated. If you integrate that archetype, though, you recognise that it is your own integration your dealing with, that integration is always a work in progress, and that the people you may be projecting it onto are imperfect.

I have already written a blog that touches on the God archetype in science when I wrote about idealised figures of truth. Truth is one of two major concepts that I think scientists are likely to project the God archetype onto, the other being Nature. Compared to the imaginative richness of  religious representations of God, of course, scientific concepts of truth or nature are likely to be rather dry and abstract, and not often given an imaginative form such as a personification. Nevertheless, it seems clear that some scientists routinely project an absolute truth or nature, either by believing that their theories are ‘true’ and that they know ‘laws of nature’, or that, even if they haven’t achieved it yet, truth and nature are achievable and scientific theory is capable of describing them. Thus they project a quality that depends on their actions, attitudes and procedures (objectivity) onto the universe itself.

Just as with God, there is no harm at all in having truth or nature as archetypes representing your goals. As such they can be highly meaningful. However, if you assume that the object of your efforts really exists out there, you make a similar basic mistake to those who believe in a supernatural God or a perfect lover. To integrate such projections, we need to separate out the archetypal symbol and recognise it as such, but refrain from projecting it onto the people or things in the world around us, or even the world as a whole.

Of course, it’s not just scientists who may be subject to the scientific versions of unintegrated archetypes. They may increasingly just be products of the scientific worldview as it is also adopted by others. As a group, scientists are also probably more likely to detect these kinds of projections than most other people. So I don’t want to be read as having a special go at scientists, only as pointing out that they are subject to exactly the same processes as everyone else, and it would be rather surprising if they were exempt. Reflecting on the presence of these archetypes might also help to discourage the more naïve versions of scientism in which the scientifically-influenced make metaphysical assumptions that they believe are justified by scientific results.

Picture: composite of projector with ‘Truth’ sculpture by Lefebre

Heroic Agnosticism

Jung, Middle Way Philosophy, Myth, Religion, Science, , ,

There seems to be a basic misapprehension, shared by traditional religion and Romantic narrative alike, that the absolutists are the heroes. Heroes stick up for what they believe in, regardless of what fate throws at them. They continue with the quest – across the oceans, deserts, and arctic wastes – they slay the monsters, and in the end they get their reward. Or, even if the hero does not get all he desires, his beliefs are at least upheld, even if he has to die for them, for the martyr too is a hero. It’s stirring stuff, constantly reinforced for us by Hollywood, by heroic literature, even by religion.

Who could question such a narrative? Nobody should underestimate the difficulties. But one of Jung’s visions in the Red Book confronts us with their full pain.

I was with a youth in high mountains. It was before daybreak, the Eastern sky was already light. Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound. We knew that our mortal enemy was coming. We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him. Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead. He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding. As he came round the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain. thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down. But after this, I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. (p.161)Siegfrieds_deathJung is slaying, not a literal hero, but the archetype of the hero within himself. The belief that the hero will always succeed against the conditions, and that his desires and beliefs are intrinsically right according to some assumed cosmic law, is one that we may implicitly indulge every time we get caught up in the hero story. Not only do we absolutise the hero himself, but we may also identify ourselves with him. But if we are to recognise the limitations of this reassuring fantasy, we have to be able to recognise that the hero may be wrong in his assumptions. To recognise this may feel extremely painful, and the death of the hero symbolises this pain. The myths provide us with this death story as well as with the achievements of the hero, giving us the resources of meaning to be able to recognise it, but we may still have to go through that shock of dis-identification.

Jung identifies the death of the hero with the archetypal role of Christ, whose crucifixion plays a similar role: showing us that our absolutised idea of a human God must die so as to lead us on to an engagement with God that is no longer based solely on human projection. Jung puts it this way:

I must say that the God could not come into being before the hero had been slain. The hero as we understand him has become an enemy of the God, since the hero is perfection. The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no-one is perfect, we need the Gods. The Gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the Gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection. (p.171)

‘The Gods’ here are symbolic of our own wider recognition – of the limitations of our current egoistic view of ourselves and of our greater potential as more integrated beings. We do not attain perfection merely by imitating, because the model we imitate may have worked in the conditions it was produced but is unlikely to work in the very different conditions of our own lives. Only integrated creativity will do, and that requires us to let go of our identification with all heroic models of imitation.

Strangely enough, though, there seems to be an even greater heroism involved in this process. What could be more heroic, itself, than killing the hero? But if we reduce this to another model of imitation, an absolute set of beliefs about how the world is and how we should act in it, then we will find this new heroism just as limiting in the end, and find ourselves in a cycle of endlessly killing new heroes. The killing of the hero needs to be accompanied by the further development of integration in experience so that we come to rely positively on that rather than on absolute beliefs about the hero. Our heroism needs to become agnostic, but such heroism can be seen, not as abandoning heroism, but as finding a deeper and more adequate form of it.

I have often been puzzled by the way that agnosticism is frequently portrayed in popular discourse, as the very opposite of heroic. As Richard Dawkins describes agnostics (quoting a preacher with approval): “Namby-pamby, weak-tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters” (The God Delusion, p.69). The assumption here seems to be that agnostics dare not attempt the heroism of belief, whereas I want to suggest that on the contrary, agnostics are even more heroic than the heroes caught up in their righteous assumptions. The dogmatic hero carries on against adversity in the certain feeling that God or the universe is on his side. The agnostic hero, on the other hand, has to manage without such delusory certainties, managing only with hope and embodied confidence. Nothing can be taken as determined about her success in the goals she takes up, and even those goals themselves have to be taken as provisional ones. The greatest hero ventures into the lands of uncertainty, and rather than just slaying the monsters, has the courage to question her own monstrous projections.

It is upsetting to find people like Richard Dawkins failing to recognise the heroism of agnosticism, when that very heroism is so central to science. The scientist always has to proceed in conditions of uncertainty, unless she constructs deluded assumptions of naturalistic ‘truth’ where none are available to us. The use of scientific method is distinguished for its heroic agnosticism. But this heroic agnosticism can also be a distinguishing feature of the very ‘religion’ that Dawkins so despises. The mystics, too, proceed on the basis of a faith that grows from their experience of what they call God, and have to slay their own heroic certainties in order to plunge into the cloud of unknowing. Religious believers and scientists alike may have to slay their own heroes on order to go on to a deeper recognition of human potential.

Picture: The death of Siegfried (public domain)

Is dogma adaptive?

History, Middle Way Philosophy, Science, , ,

Why do human beings so often get stuck in fixed beliefs that are no longer adequate to the situation? Why do we have metaphysics at all? This is a question I have been considering for a while, not in expectation of ultimate answers, but particularly thinking in terms of the model offered by evolutionary adaptation. Whilst I don’t think evolutionary theory can explain everything, and there are disputable variations within it, it does seem to provide a good explanation of some key conditions. In evolutionary terms, then, human dogma must have some sort of adaptive value. Yet central to my thesis in Middle Way Philosophy is the idea that metaphysics and dogmatism are maladaptive – not in purely evolutionary terms, but certainly in terms that should have some sort of relationship to evolutionary theory. How can I account for this tension?Evolution_1

I have been stimulated in thinking about this recently by reading The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. First published in 1991, but I suspect since then largely ignored by a scientific and philosophical world whose models it seriously challenges, this extremely interesting book is one of the few I have come across that explicitly uses the Middle Way in a way that is directly applied to modern scientific and philosophical debates. It does so in relation to both cognitive science and biology, which it juxtaposes with some direct bits of traditional Buddhist material about conditionality. Though the Buddhist bits are treated in an uncritical way somewhat at variance with the extremely thoughtful use of scientific models, the result is nevertheless well worth a read. However, I’m not focused here on fully reviewing this book, more with pulling out a few useful elements.

One of the sections I found interesting in this book is concerned with the whole question of what adaptivity consists in. An unreflective approach to adaptivity by a scientific cognitivist is likely to make two major assumptions, both of which are questionable:

  • That ‘adaptation’ by either an individual organism or a species occurs against an environmental background that is understood in isolation from the organism’s adaptation
  • That ‘adaptation’ should be understood in terms of optimal fitness. The optimally fit organism will survive better than the less fit one.

Both of these assumptions involve the idea that scientific theory just represents a state of affairs ‘out there’, rather than fully taking into account the complex and indeterminate relationship between models, actions and feedback as an organism not only responds to the world it encounters, but also shapes that world. The scientific observer similarly shapes the world of theory in the process of creating the theory. Adaptation, then, cannot just consist in fitting into an environment well, but also changing mental models of that environment and the environment itself. This adaptation also cannot just be a matter of finding one possible optimally ‘fit’ solution. There a lots of possible solutions, and evolutionary pressures may well operate much more negatively just by weeding out the grossly unfit, leaving both the highly adapted and the mediocre to reproduce and flourish. Genetic variation is often apparently random and results in changes that are evolutionarily neutral, or the side effects of complex interplays of genes may result in helpful adaptations being accompanied by maladaptations.

Varela, Thompson and Rosch give a good analogy for this. Imagine that a man goes to buy a suit. If we think only in terms of optimal fitness, he will just go to a bespoke tailor and get the ideal suit that completely fits him, in the ideal style that fits the social conditions. However, anyone who has ever bought a suit will know that it’s more complex than this. Bespoke suits are very expensive, so we are more likely to go to a department store and buy a ready-made cheaper suit in more or less our size, that more or less suits us. The suit that the man buys (given that he is not rich enough to buy a bespoke suit) will be sub-optimal, one of a number of possible solutions in a situation of complex economic, social and corporeal conditions. He could have bought any of a number of possible suits, and he ended up with one that was OK. The authors suggest that evolutionary adaptation is much more like this than like bespoke tailoring.

So, to return to the question I started with: how might dogma be adaptive? I would suggest, because it was, and still is, one of a number of suboptimal solutions that more or less fitted an environment. The kind of environment that it sub-optimally fits is one dominated by group consciousness. A group of hunters in pursuit of deer, or even a group of footballers on a team, do not want too much innovation: above all they want loyalty and reliability. So this kind of situation creates pressures towards fixed models of our environment, because this model will reliably correspond with that of our fellows. Metaphysics is born – first in predominantly religious and political forms that help to maintain the power of leaders, then later in negative forms such as scientism, that help to maintain group loyalty even in a group that is theoretically devoted to rigorous investigation.

However, at the same time, there is another kind of sub-optimal adaptation in human history. Original thinkers who are prepared to create different models may also sometimes have their day. They may, for example, recognise an impending climatic catastrophe or the likely loss of a food source and prompt their society to make effective preparations for it. Later on, they may be Aristotles or Galileos or Einsteins, offering a new model that differs greatly from what preceded them. These people also benefit their societies, so societies that at least tolerate them, and sometimes listen to them, are more likely to be successful in the long run.

So far in human history, though, I would hypothesise, it is the first kind of sub-optimal adaptation that has had the upper hand. The faster the environment changes, though, and the more we contribute to changing it through innovation, the harder it becomes for the metaphysical world view to be effective. There have been times in the past – such as the Buddha’s India or Ancient Greece – where individuals have been able to come to the fore and challenge group-consciousness, and where the balance and integration between brain hemispheres (as tracked by Iain McGilchrist) improved. We may also be in such a position now, where it is flexible individual thinking capable of defying metaphysical assumptions that is most needed so that we can address rapidly changing conditions. Flexible, integrated thinking does not result in ideal solutions, but it does improve what we have, and may be crucial to our survival.

This is a repost, originally posted on the Middle Way Philosophy blog on  ⋅ 2 Comments on the original post.

Picture: Evolution 1 by Latvian (Wikimedia Commons) CCSA.

Authenticity

What is authenticity? How can the individual make judgements that are their own responsibility and not over-influenced by the power of others? This quality, much discussed by existentialist thinkers like Sartre, is closely related to integration and the Middle Way, and is discussed in a new introductory video. Please see this page to view the video.