Two new introductory videos are now available on pages on the site: The Middle Way and Science and How Western Philosophy lost its way. These follow on from the first set of introductory videos (the ones on basic themes that are just numbered 1, 2, 3 etc.), and are probably best viewed after you have seen the first set, so that’s why I am numbering them 1c, 2a etc. (Robert)
I have now produced two more short introductory videos: ‘The Middle Way and Buddhism’ and ‘The Middle Way and Christianity’. This has also led me to think about the rather different approaches I took to each religion, and to want to write up here some explanation of that difference. Before I explore the differences, though, it’s probably better if you see the videos. I will embed them here. (Also please note that if you are reading this without any prior exploration of Middle Way Philosophy, it would also be better to view the general introduction first before these).
One thing you will readily notice about the two videos is that in relation to Buddhism I emphasise the distinction between the Middle Way and Buddhism, whilst in Christianity I emphasise the relationship between the Middle Way and Christianity. This is only intended to challenge what I perceive to be the overwhelmingly common assumptions in each case: that Buddhism somehow owns the Middle Way (even that the Middle Way Philosophy is ‘really Buddhism’) on the one hand, and that Christianity has nothing to do with the Middle Way on the other. Of course, it would be equally possible to emphasise the relationship between Buddhism and the Middle Way, or the ways that the dominant interpretation of Christianity is antipathetic to the Middle Way: but treatments of both are common enough.
Of course, the cases made for both are equally dependent on a wider argument I want to make about tradition. Traditions do not have essences (or if they do, we have no way of determining them), any more than people do. (For more about tradition please see this video.) If we expect to be able to take the positive, integrable aspects of ourselves and choose to dwell on those and develop them rather than the negative, absolutizing parts of ourselves, we should extend the same courtesy both to others and to other traditions, rather than defining them absolutely in terms of things we reject. Some individuals can be psychopathic, utterly repressing all sympathy for anything other than their dominant egoistic goals, and larger groups or traditions can also sometimes exhibit such psychopathic features (think of Daesh). But we should be extremely cautious about attaching any such labels to an extremely diverse, millennia-long tradition. These traditions are part of people’s identities and need to be acknowledged and worked with, though of course they will contain both helpful and unhelpful elements.
I think it is equally important, whatever tradition one may be working with, to acknowledge the Middle Way as something separate, that stands apart from tradition, and indeed as something more important than tradition. That is not a rejection of tradition, but it is a way of avoiding being confined by it. Any Buddhists or Christians who can take this attitude are very welcome in the Middle Way Society, and one of the society’s founding values is that universality.
On the other hand, approaching both Buddhism and Christianity in terms of the Middle Way is not a vague universalism either. The aim is to be quite precise about what the Middle Way is (even though our understanding of it is of course always developing) and to use the Middle Way as a tool for resolving conflicts between traditions. Religions are not essentially all one: what is or can be one is the recognisable features of good judgement in relation to them. By agreeing about how we will judge our different traditions and situations, we can at the same time acknowledge a great diversity of specific religious symbol and practice, and yet co-operate in the wider process of understanding and practising the Middle Way. Then diversity becomes a strength, not a weakness, providing a variety of possible models for different situations. It also becomes a key way of resolving conflict. If we were to all admit that we do not have final access to God or any other absolute, and train ourselves in relying on experience, what grounds of conflict would remain? It is absolutes that collide in conflict, not experiences.
For anyone interested in more detail about the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity, here is a paper I wrote in 2008 called Should Western Buddhists be Christians? Western Buddhists were the target audience for this paper, though it might also possibly be of interest to Christians.
At present I am not intending to produce further videos for other religions. Buddhism and Christianity are both religions that I have direct experience of, but in other cases (such as Islam) my knowledge is largely academic, and it would be much better to leave it to others with more direct experience to explore their meaning in relation to the Middle Way. You can already find such material on this site about the Jewish Middle Way, written by Susan Averbach.
Picture: Buddha with hidden cross on the back: Chris 73/ Wikimedia CCSA 4.0
I’ve now completed a series of six introductory videos, trying to put the key points of Middle Way Philosophy as simply, briefly and graphically as possible. This has been an interesting challenge, not just to my video-making skills, but also in identifying the key principles which are both basic and distinctive of the Middle Way as I have interpreted it: i.e. in universal terms that are not merely taken from the Buddhist tradition, not dependent on authoritative or metaphysical claims, and applicable to every judgement in our experience, from the most humdrum to the most elevated. It’s with these criteria in mind that I arrived at these 5 principles, which I thought it would be worth writing a bit about here.
The five principles offer a breakdown of what the Middle Way most basically involves and requires, and are as follows:
They are first presented together in the introductory video:
Each of these five principles then becomes the subject of an introductory video in itself. I won’t embed them all here, but you will find them all on the menu above if you hover over ‘Media’ then ‘Middle Way Philosophy Introductory Videos’. All of these videos are 10 minutes or less.
These principles are a basic stripping-down of what Middle Way Philosophy distinctively involves, and they are also aspects of the Middle Way that I generally find absent in other sources about the Middle Way, such as the Buddhist Tradition. Each of them implies and requires the others, so they are interdependent. The Middle Way is the avoidance of positive or negative absolutisation in each judgement. Scepticism tells us why that our basic position is uncertainty and thus why we should avoid ‘truths’ or claims to certainty. Provisionality is the practice of being open to new information in our judgements instead, and incrementality involves recognising that our judgements can be justified when they are a matter of degree rather than absolute. Agnosticism is a further implication of the Middle Way because we need to make an effort to be even-handed in our treatment of absolute beliefs. Integration, lastly but probably most importantly, shows the positive psychological impact of following the Middle Way in resolving both internal and external conflict.
These 5 Principles have to leave an awful lot out, some of which I’ve previously thought to be indispensable. But the process of communicating a synthetic philosophy, I’m discovering, is one of murdering your darlings (as creative writers graphically call it) – letting go of what one previously thought indispensable for the sake of the value and impact of the form one is communicating in. In the videos there is no discussion of embodied meaning, archetypes, science, ethics, religion, objectivity, beauty, authority… and a whole host of other things. However, I do intend to make further videos that will thematically branch out from these basic ones to encompass these other important things. In the videos I have also stripped out any acknowledgement of sources and inspirations, virtually all justificatory argument, and virtually all discussion of the implications. All of these, in the end, can be just clutter if they stop the basic points from coming across.
Lists do seem to be useful to people as portable summaries and aids to memory, which is why there are so many lists in Buddhism. I think this is the right sort of list. It is a kind of unpacking list (as opposed to a packing list) – a list that unpacks basic components from the Middle Way. It’s not a list of ‘truths’: it could be seen as a list of practices, but its focus is judgement. It’s not about what we know, but how we distinctively go about claiming to believe it.
A new 10 minute introductory video to Middle Way Philosophy has been posted on YouTube and on this page. There is also a follow-up introduction to Scepticism on this page.
At last, rather longer after the event than anticipated, Barry and I have now finished editing and adding pictures to the 12 talks and discussions recorded on the 2014 Summer Retreat. These were on the general themes of the Middle Way and cognitive biases, and all the talks included some discussion of fallacies and cognitive biases and how we can practically avoid them. The most recent one of these to be completed is Middle Way Practice. For a complete list and links to the pages on this site where the talks are 
embedded see this page: the talks include ones on attention, self and ego, responsibility, authority, groups, and time (as well as the one you can see here, with its extra furry participants). Alternatively, you can access the series through a YouTube playlist.
I’d like to thank Barry for his help with the editing, and everyone else who was present on the 2014 retreat for their contributions to the discussions. I won’t name them all because they don’t all want to be named, but some of the names are mentioned on individual videos.