Let's Get Radical?
Friday February 19, 2010
I don’t often listen to the news at the moment, nor do I spend a great deal of time reading the newspapers. There are, after all, other things to read – and if I want to make any headway with the wonderful Dream of the Red Chamber, I need to focus my attention a bit more.
Nevertheless, on occasion I do catch a bit of the evening news reports if I happen to be in the kitchen cooking at the right time, and when I do – partly because I listen to it less, and therefore I’m not so habituated to it – what often strikes me is the sheer oddness of the language used not only by those in the media, but also by those who speak to them. One particular oddness that crops up again and again, and that seems to me to raise some interesting questions, is the recurrent idea of “radical” change. No new initiative, it seems, can be introduced without it promising such change, no media pundit can resit saying that we live in rapidly changing times and thus we need to find radical responses to the radically different circumstances in which we find ourselves.
What strikes me about this language is that we are, perhaps, not very good at thinking about change. Western thought, in particular, seems to be very wedded to an idea of stasis as the fundamental condition of things. OK, we think to ourselves, so things change and they move: but only if they are pushed. And in this picture, what needs to be accounted for is not why things stay the same (for a while), but why things change. This is not the case across the board in Western thought – for example, Lucretius’s physics is predicated on a model that sees stability as a kind of local and temporary condition, and that sees motion as a more general picture – but it does seem to be the general picture.
One of the things that has always attracted me to Buddhist thought is the recognition of impermanence, which turns this pretty much on its head. This recognition is much more than a recognition of the fact that the span of our life is limited, that the cake we have in the morning may well be gobbled up by the evening, and so on (what the Tibetans call “coarse” impermanence); it is also a recognition that things are in constant moment-by-moment transformation (what the Tibetans talk about as “subtle” impermanence). It has to be said that if we respond to impermanence only on the first level, then it seems a fairly bleak idea; but if we take into account subtle impermanence, the moment-by-moment arising and passing-away, then the world comes alive again, it begins to buzz and hum with a kind of liveliness. And there is something that I find wonderfully quickening and enlivening in the thought of subtle impermanence. The fact that things are subtly impermanent requires a kind of subtleness of response, a nuanced approach to the things of this world.
If change is seen as the background against which we must make sense of temporary stability, rather than stasis the background against which we must make sense of change, then the world begins to look rather different. The question becomes not how can we change things?, as if things themselves needed a bit of a shove for them to change at all, but how can we respond to and participate in the changeability of things?
When I listen to political rhetoric about radical change, I can’t help thinking that there is an odd – and mistaken – idea of what change actually involves. It seems to me that this rhetoric is rooted in a view that for anything to change in the world needs a kind of dramatic intervention, a deus ex machina, that breaks with how things currently are; and this seems a view that is profoundly uncomfortable with both stability and change. I am uneasy with the dramatic register of this rhetoric. It isn’t just that I’m unconvinced that “radical” change is what the world needs or that I’m unconvinced that seeing the world as “radically” different from before is particularly useful; it’s more that I can’t help thinking that this language may obscure the deeper and broader conditions that underlie the changeability of things, and may therefore cloud our judgement so that we are no longer able to see – insofar as we are capable of directing the multitudinous changing things of which we are a part – how it might be possible to direct change more to the benefit of ourselves and of others.
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Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is...
Friday January 29, 2010
OK, so I’ve written about this before, but I’m still not sure that I’ve got to the bottom of it, so at the risk of repeating myself I’m going to have another stab at it. Or, at least, at reframing, once again, the question that has been recently haunting me.
As regular visitors will know, I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what some folks call the cognitive unconscious. My cognitive unconscious is not some terrible area of inner darkness where, unbeknownst to me, lurk various childhood repressions and Oedipal shenanigans, but instead the large chunk of my mental processing, as a living creature going about its business in the world, that goes on unbeknownst to what I call “me”. Despite the claims of some that Buddhist meditation is a sure-fire way of finding out about our inner world, of mapping our internal geography, or of consciousness becoming transparent to itself, so to speak, there is increasing evidence that much of our functioning is, and forever will be, cognitively closed to us, at least from the point of view of first-person methods, whether meditative or otherwise. And this has interesting implications not just for how we see meditation, but for how we see ourselves.
Here, I think, things get rather interesting, because we tend to think that our minds are our own affairs, curious little empires for which we are the sole authoritative ambassadors. But if much of what takes place in our minds takes place in a fashion that is closed to us (and that may always be closed to us, which was the thrust of my previous post on the subject), then this does tend to erode this sense of self-certainty, and it tends to eat away at the authority that we often claim for ourselves. For there are a great many philosophical constructions of what it is to be a self, or an agent, or a perceiver, that simply do not fit with what we now know about the cognitive unconscious, with what we now know about how our minds work.
So this is what I’m still not sure I’ve got to the bottom of: what does this fact that most of my mind’s business is really not something I will ever have access to mean for the way that I conceive of myself? What does it mean for the sense I might have of being me? Because it seems to me that the more we know about how we actually function, the more this knowledge makes strange what we might otherwise take for granted in experience. And this is where the fun starts.
Something, as Bob once said, is happening here. But I don’t know what it is.
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A Viable Way
Friday January 15, 2010
The other day, I was browsing through the town library here in Leicester, and I decided to have a look through the shelves of books in Chinese, to see if I could find anything to give me a bit of reading practice. It was there that I stumbled across, How to Marry a Western Woman, a handy guide for the Chinese male; and although I’ve no plans to marry a Western woman just yet, I though that this would be worth a look given that I had fifteen minutes to spare. Because, after all, you never know… Anyway, as I was making my way through the book, I came across a passage in which several topics of conversation were suggested, just as ice breakers. And here I found the following interesting assertion: that one of the most popular questions amongst Westerners is this: “What do you want to be doing in ten years’ time?”
Now, I’m not sure whether this really is the killer chat-up line that the authors of the book might like to claim; but, anyway, this all got me thinking. Over a year back, when I was applying for university jobs, I found that almost inevitably I would be asked this question during the interview; and almost inevitably I found myself at a loss when it came to answering it. And part of the reason for this is that I have always had a strong sense of the contingency of things. The idea that the world just gets on with doing the same old thing (and that we ourselves remain the same), is possible only with a hearty dose of amnesia. The thing about the future is that it is fundamentally unforeseeable. That doesn’t mean that we cannot make plans, attend to the way things seem to be going, and so on. But it does mean that these plans need to be held rather lightly, that we should be cautious about fixing them in stone.
Recently I was reading a delightful essay by François Jullien called “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (see the link here – although sadly this is only accessible by members of subscribing institutions), which explores this question in the light of Chinese thought. Jullien’s essay ends with an exploration of the term dao (道) – often translated as “way” – as it appears in early Chinese thought. Whilst we are familiar with metaphors of paths in the West, Jullien’s claim is that in the Chinese context, this way is not a way that goes anywhere. What constitutes the way is not that it gets you to anywhere in particular, but that it is viable. Here is a short passage:
The way recommended by wisdom leads to nothing. No truth – revealed or discovered – constitutes its destination. As wisdom sees it, the essential quality of the way is that it is viable. It does not lead to any goal, but one can pass along it, one always can pass along it, so one can always move on (instead of becoming bogged down or finding one’s path blocked). It is a practicable way.
There is, I think, something in this. Seen from the point of view of philosophy, it suggests to me an approach to thinking recalls Calvino’s passage where he writes of words as a “perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety” (see his Six Memos for the Next Millennium
About ten years ago, a friend asked me what I wanted out of life. I said back then that what I wanted was to have interesting conversations. At the time, this seemed a strange thing to say, and even at the time I was not entirely sure what I meant. But, looking back, what I think I perhaps could have meant was not that I wanted to spend my days in hot debate about the Meaning of Life, but rather that my sense of a life well-lived is rooted not in an idea of some final destination, but rather in a kind of open-ended engagement with things and with others. Conversation, after all, is not really a means to an end, or only minimally so. It is not really a path anywhere, but it is a kind of attention to the changeability of things and to their unfolding. And there’s something attractive in the idea of a broadly conversational life, a life of this kind of engagement.
Glancing back over these few thoughts as they have unfolded, from cross-cultural conversational ice-breakers to Jullien’s viable way, to Calvino and back to the question of conversation, I’m not quite sure yet where it is that I’ve ended up. But then, that is not unrelated to the point I think I may be making: if, on setting out, I cannot be certain where I want to be at the end of scribbling a brief note that takes only an hour to write, then – as long as I attend to the viability of things – I’m content to leave the question of ten years’ time an open one.
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Ethics is like navigation... stories are like the sea.
Thursday November 26, 2009
Next Tuesday I am going down to London to launch my philosophy book, Finding Our Sea-Legs
The book is about ethics and storytelling (the big give-away is the subtitle – “Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories”). This is something that interests me from two angles. As a fabricator of tales and writer of fictions, I’m interested in the ethics of what I do; and as a philosopher fascinated by ethics, I can’t help noticing how, when it comes to ethics, we find ourselves again and again having recourse to storytelling. So the book explores two propositions. The first derives from Aristotle, and could be put like this: ethics is like navigation. The second proposition is one that I first came across in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, although it has a fairly long history at least in the Indian tradition, and it goes like this: stories are like the sea.
The argument of the book (or the story that I’m attempting to tell) takes place between these propositions. This is territory that I have explored to some extent in a post that I wrote here some time ago, and of course I don’t want to tell you the whole story, because I’d rather like it if you rushed out to buy the book; but perhaps I can say a bit more about one thing that interests me when it comes to this connection, and about my approach to stories.
Here I am also the making good of an old and as yet unfulfilled promise. In the earlier article, I suggested that the ethical force of a story lies not in some moral appended to the end of the tale, but rather in what Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling calls the “shudder of thought”. At the time I admitted that this idea was rather cryptic and would require some further exploration. But somehow, back then, I never quite got round to going back to this subject. Consider this an attempt, then, to fill that gap.
It seems to me that the temptation when looking at the relationship between stories and ethics is to see stories as somehow illustrative of ethics. Once a storytelling friend and I told a story at a Buddhist event. When we had finished, there was a tangible sense of… well, I’m not sure what of, but there was a tangible sense of something in the air, that kind of curious breathlessness that descends after the telling of a good story. But then master of ceremonies of the event cleared his throat and said, “So, what that story tells us is that we ought to…” And whilst what he said was well-intentioned, you could feel that curious breathlessness evaporate almost immediately as the story collapsed into a snappy little ethical maxim. Now, there is nothing wrong with snappy little ethical maxims; but I could not help feeling that in appending this particular maxim to this particular story, something was lost. It seems to me that this temptation to tack a moral on to the end of our stories (as in certain translations of the Jataka tales) is one that often seems to kill stories dead. Stories are more than ways of encoding moral propositions or exhortations.
Philosophers, too, often tend to see stories as somehow subordinate to a more deliberative mode of thinking. Even Paul Ricoeur – who appreciated narrative more than most – says that narrative is a preparatory stage for ethics. It clears the way so that the real work can begin. This is why Kierkegaard is important. His “shudder of thought” reminds us that stories cannot be contained so easily. The idea of the shudder of thought is one that arises in the middle of his discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Book of Genesis. The story is well known: God grants Abraham a son, Isaac; and then when the boy has grown, he asks Abraham to make a human sacrifice of him. Abraham, obedient to the last, takes Isaac on a pilgrimage up to Mount Moriah, prepares a sacrificial altar, binds the boy and puts him on the altar, lifts his knife… and then at the last moment an angel stays his hand. Now, I confess that I am not particularly interested in the theological ramifications that Kierkegaard sees in the bizarre and brutal story of Abraham and Isaac. But I am interested in the force of Kierkegaard’s insights into the nature of storytelling itself. What I think Kierkegaard is trying to do is to return us from a view of stories in which they are merely illustrative of ethics to something much more fundamental. The story he has chosen is useful for him because it simply cannot reasonably be taken as a story with a simple moral. And so because of this, it leaves us with a kind of shuddering that we cannot do away with. When we have no snappy little ethical maxims that can do away with the force of the story, we are left confronting this uncomfortable, peculiar shudder.
This shudder is, I think, the heart and soul of storytelling; and it is also what gives stories their ethical force. Stories are not just propositions in coded form, but they affect us, they act upon us in ways that we don’t quite understand. They act upon us physically, as flesh and blood beings, and not as philosophers bobbing around in the stratosphere of pure and heady reasoning. And because of this, I think that in many ways, although it is often maintained that stories are for the simple-of-mind, whilst philosophy is for real grown-up thinkers, the ethical demands that stories put upon us are greater than the ethical demands of ethical philosophy. After all, it is a relatively simple thing to debate the finer propositions of ethics. It is not hard to enumerate the thirty seven senses of the word ‘good’ according to its position in the sentence; neither are there any difficulties in pondering the mysteries of the categorical imperative, applying it to everyday evils such as lying, masturbation and selling one’s hair to wig-makers (all of which Kant believed to be entirely unacceptable forms of behaviour – even if performed at different times). Philosophers may hate to admit it, but philosophy is relatively easy. Talking about the good is a simple thing. The real challenge is how we actually respond to the needs of others, out there in the world, when we have left our armchairs. And perhaps it is here that stories can help, as a way of weaning us off our certainties, as a way of reminding us that it is because we are flesh and blood beings, who shudder and tremble, or who crave comfort and security, that ethics matters at all.
Image: Section of ‘Guanyin of the Tidal-Cave’, from Wikimedia Commons
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Sidling up to Things
Monday November 2, 2009
The last few weeks have been fearsomely busy, and so I have not had the chance to update thinkBuddha very much of late. It is not that there are not any thoughts flying around that I want to explore here; it is only that they are still mid-air, and that I need a bit of time to wait for them to settle, rather than chasing after them with a butterfly net and risking knocking over all the furniture. So I’m going to content myself with just mentioning one of the things that is currently aloft, and that is providing me with a lot to reflect on, without attempting to pin it down and look at it too closely.
Over the last year or so, I have been increasingly immersing myself in Chinese philosophy, as well as doing my best to learn Chinese, and this has all been enormously enriching. I have the sense that there are possibilities of thinking in all of this that could be enormously fruitful, although at the moment I confess that my knowledge is still rudimentary at best. Anyway, I am currently in the middle of François Jullien’s fascinating Detour and Access
As I have said, this is all very formative at the moment, but it occurs to me that there is something in this fluid, subtle, oblique approach to things. Of course, it is not the only way of going about things (Jullien points out that “Alongside the subtlety of detour, there is the jubliation of being explicit”, and reminds us that there is a benefit to direction as there is a benefit to indirection), but it is one that, in the West, we can tend to forget or to diminsh. And certainly my own sense of what is going on when I am trying to make sense of the world – whether through just getting on with my life, or through writing, or through meditating, or what have you – is that, very often, I’m not really directly orientating myself towards a particular goal (whilst I can see the value of near goals, I don’t really believe in big, metaphysical goals), but instead I’m more or less trying to sidle up to things. Or else I’m more or less trying to let things sidle up to me. When it comes to meditation, it has taken me years to realise the value of obliqueness, the way in which, if you sit for long enough, things eventually come and sit down next to you (unless it’s the cat, who just comes along and prods you continually with his paws and meows for breakfast). Sitting quietly doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows by itself. And, if you are lucky and you persist for long enough, even the cat eventually goes to sleep and leaves you in peace.
Anyway, this is just a brief update to let you know I haven’t gone away. When some of those various thoughts decide to alight, I’ll post again.
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On (Not) Debating the Existence of God
Sunday October 18, 2009
A couple of weeks back, I received an unexpected request. Would I be willing, the email asked, to participate in a University debate about the existence of God? Now, I should say that the existence of God is not a subject upon which I am in any way an expert. In fact, it is not something I think about very much at all. Nor, for that matter, is the non-existence of God. There are a lot of things – whether it’s time for a coffee, what the cat is up to, where I have left my glasses, and so on – that I think about far more than I think about God’s existence. So it did not seem to me that I was the best candidate for this debate. When I read the email more closely, however, I realised that the other candidate lined up for the debate was somebody who was not only very firmly convinced of God’s existence, but also who seemed very eager to convince others of this fact. And whilst for myself I can make neither head nor tail of talk of God and God’s existence, this is also simply not a subject about which I am greatly exercised. My own response to questions of God’s existence is more or less along the lines of “well, it doesn’t really seem from where I am standing to be a very plausible proposition,” but this is hardly good debate fodder. And, when it comes down to it, I have little desire to convince others that they should agree with me on this matter.
Even if I could have risen to the occasion, I am also aware that debates such as this can frequently be painful to witness. The email invitation was couched in distinctly military metaphors: the two debating parties or “opponents” would have “positions” that they would seek to “defend”, and the best argument would “win” the debate. This kind of warfare always seems to me to be a rather uncongenial approach to discussion (I have written before on this blog about the fear I have of the unpleasant things that lurk under our chairs as we talk to each other). And so, after a bit of thought, and a very pleasant exchange of emails, I turned the offer down. But this all got me thinking a bit about the heat that is currently generated by arguing over the existence (or not) of God. What, I wonder, are such debates actually for? What purpose do they serve?
One of the problems that I have – and perhaps this is a problem that many of the ungodly have – is that when people talk about God, I find it genuinely very hard indeed to make any sense of what it is that they are talking about. They talk with a clear passion about something that is clearly very important to them; but I just don’t see what they are getting at. My mind is – to use the term proposed by the philosopher Michael McGhee – not particularly dei-form. “It seems to me,” McGhee writes, “that ‘believers’ do not so much ‘believe that there is a God’ as think God. Their minds are God-shaped or ‘dei-form’ in the sense that their thinking is determined by theistic categories” (in Transformations of Mind
If we take the idea seriously that what is at issue is not belief so much as the God-shapedness of certain minds, then there may anyway be very limited value in debating propositions about god in an attempt to persuade others one way or the other. For each of us, I suspect, our own peculiar individual world-view is a messy, sprawling, socially and historically conditioned, contextually fashioned and refashioned, and – when it comes down to it – rather untidy (but shapely, in its way) thing. Ideas that are themselves as historically weighted and as slippery as the idea “god” are capable of doing all kinds of jobs within this big old sprawl that is our world-view. So it is really not a matter of us having a sheaf of axioms that we hold to and can debate (even if we are philosophers), but something much more complex. It is not surprising that few people are really persuaded by debates of this kind. There are probably relatively few who have listened with quiet attentiveness to Richard Dawkins (for example) and said, “Oh, good point, Richard, I’ll take off my dog-collar now”, or who have stumbled upon a sermon by Rowan Williams (once again, for example) and said “Hmmm… You’ve got something there, Rowan. My unbelieving days are behind me. I’m off to be baptised.” Of course these things might happen, very occasionally; but when looked at in the light of the heatedness of some of these debates, they happen with surprising infrequency.
Saint Anselm, an individual who (unlike me) was greatly exercised by the question of God’s existence, was also sensible enough to recognise that debates of this kind do not really serve to convert us one way or the other, at least in the main. “Credo ut intelligam”, he said: I believe that I may understand; the implicit suggestion here being that reason does not establish (or fail to establish) once and for all the question of God’s existence. Arguments about God are not a way of proving or disproving the question of his existence so much as a way of demonstrating that if one believes in God, then that belief is can be rationally defended, that it is in harmony with reason. And this is a whole other thing.
If certain forms of belief may be (who knows?) in harmony with reason, so may certain forms of unbelief. But what I think is more important than reason as an end in itself, is the question of what constitutes a life well-lived. This may involve an element of reasoning, of course (a life of committed unreason does not seem to be plausible as a candidate for a life well-lived); but reason alone is not a sufficient condition for such a life. And so, if this is the case as I believe it is, what I would like to see is less heat around the question of God’s existence. Those arguing against may, anyway, be always swimming against the tide: there seems to be increasing evidence that, given the kinds of minds that we have been bequeathed by our evolutionary heritage, we will always have a propensity towards belief in curious fictions like gods, imps, spirits, angels, ghosts, elves, trolls and the like. And so, whether or not the world is begodded, betrolled, beimped or bespirited, we may not be able to entirely outrun these curious beasts. So whilst I am not a believer in any of these entities, I would like to make what I think is the relatively modest (and empirical) suggestion that belief in any number of them is entirely consistent with the possibility of a life well-lived. But conversely, I also would also like to make the similarly modest (and similarly empirical) suggestion that non-belief in any or all of these entities is also entirely consistent with various other forms of life that one could legitimately claim to be well-lived.
This brings me, then, to the thing I most fear about these kinds of debates about god and godlessness: the implicit assertion that all too frequently emerges, on both sides, that there is only one form of life that is a life well-lived. This smacks, to me, not only of a lack of imaginative breadth, but also of a kind of dogmatism when it comes to thinking through what form of life might be best for us. The good life of which the philosophers and sages speak is not (I hope) a single thing.
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Mind in the Balance?
Sunday September 13, 2009
Over a decade ago now, whilst living up in Newcastle, I responded to an invitation to go along to Northumbria University where some post-graduate students were doing some work on meditation. From what I can remember, I had sit down on some cushions that were set up in a portacabin, and have a few electrodes glued to my head. Then I had to meditate for a short period, after which I simply had to sit quietly, the electrodes still glued in place. The research project, I think, was something to do with exploring not just the changes in brain-state brought on by meditation – something for which there is ample evidence – but also the extent to which these changes continue post-meditation. And whilst I would like to report that, half way through the experiment, one of the researchers turned to the other and cried out, “Good god, Perkins, it’s extraordinary! He’s off the scale!”, the reality was much more mundane. They simply took their readings, unglued me, gave me a cup of tea, and off I went. I never even found out what the results were.
Still, it was nice to have a small part to play in the growing field of research in the place where brain science meets Buddhist practices of meditation. I was reminded of my brief experience of life as a laboratory subject whilst reading B. Alan Wallace’s latest book, Mind in the Balance
Wallace’s book is divided into two parts. The first – Meditation: Where it Started and How it Got Here – gives a decidedly selective view of the history of contemplative traditions, moving from ancient Greece to the desert fathers of Christianity to the India of the Buddha’s day, whilst at the same time launching an assault on what Wallace takes to be the harms of scientific materialism. The second part of the book – Meditation in Theory and Practice – then alternates between chapters on “practice” where Wallace sketches out a particular form of meditation, and “theory”, in which he reflects upon this practice.
It rapidly becomes clear that there is a vigorous dualism at work in Wallace’s work. On the one hand, there is the world of contemplation, of ethics, of spiritual truths, of meaning; and on the other hand there is the deterministic material world of genetics, instinct and emotion. And, the argument goes, whilst the sciences are very good at understanding the latter world, they are not at all advanced when it comes to the understanding of the former world. It is here that Wallace sees the need for light from contemplative traditions (in particular the contemplative tradition with which he is most familiar, that of Tibetan Buddhism) to balance out the picture. We need, in other words, a kind of “inner science” to balance the outer science with which we are familiar. Without such an inner science, our understanding not only of ourselves, but also of the universe as a whole, will be stunted; and, not only this, we risk closing ourselves off to the very spiritual realities that we are so much in need of. The stakes, it seems, could not be higher. At the very end of the book, Wallace writes that “We are now poised for the greatest renaissance the world has seen, for the first time integrating the ancient and modern insights of the East and West. The time is ripe for humanity to take the next step in our spiritual evolution so that we can successfully rise to the challenges of today’s world and flourish in the world to come” (199).
There are innumerable problems with all of this. The first problem is that of the very partial approach that Wallace has taken to contemplative traditions. He weaves together strands of ancient Pythagoreanism, Tibetan Buddhism, selected Christian writers, and certain aspects of Hinduism, to construct a a set of “truths” revealed by the “great wisdom traditions of human civilization, including religion, philosophy, and science.” In the story that Wallace is telling, as far as I can discern it, the following things are true: that all the great contemplatives, more or less, experience the same kind of thing; that consciousness is a “deep space” in need of exploration; that consciousness is somehow fundamental to the nature of the universe – if anything, more fundamental than the “mere” material world; that consciousness is essentially unbounded by birth and death, and therefore there is such a thing as rebirth; and that our collective human welfare and happiness are dependent upon these realisations. However, this account does not pay any attention to differing accounts of contemplation and of experience that undermine the story that Wallace is telling. I am not sure, for example, that the idea of contemplation as a form of exploration of some inner “deep space” is one that makes a great deal of sense when seen in the light of the Chan and Zen traditions. This is a serious problem, because if the argument rests, as it seems to, on the commonality of the findings of contemplative practitioners, then this commonality needs to be well established for Wallace’s argument to be taken seriously. Not only this, but also whilst there may be an awful lot of interest to be said about the place where science, philosophy and practices of contemplation meet, the characterisation of science, philosophy and religion as convergent wisdom traditions seems to be one that at the outset seriously skews inquiry we are engaged in. As the argument unfolds, it becomes clear that this is a view that requires not only a partial view of history and a restrictive perspective upon the traditions in question, but also a sprinkling of magic courtesy of quantum physics, if it is to work at all.
The claims that Wallace makes about the efficacy of meditation in terms of brain plasticity, mental well-being and so forth, are today relatively well-attested – although, somewhat parenthetically, it may be that there is insufficient research into the potential harms of meditation. Nevertheless, whilst it is one thing to say that meditators are in general calmer, that their frontal cortices are more frisky, that they have less violent startle-reflexes, or that they are kinder to animals and small children, it is another thing entirely to say that the accounts they give about the ultimate nature of the universe – filtered through a long and complex religious tradition – should be taken at face value – even if we found that those accounts converged substantially, which I’m not at all sure that they do. And the metaphysical views of which Wallace is trying to persuade us are so extravagant that I cannot help feeling that he needs to work rather harder.
Let us take the example of the “Rainbow Body”, discussed towards the end of the book. This is said to be the culmination of the Tibetan Dzogchen practice, in which one’s body “allegedly dissolves into shimmering, multicoloured light at death.” This is an impressive party-trick if you can pull it off, but even more impressively, it can be done without dying at all, in which case, “All the atoms of the body vanish into the absolute space of phenomena, but one still retains the appearance of a physical body, which can be seen and touched by others.” Pretty neat, but the obvious response is this: show us the evidence. When it comes to the latter version – in which I am still alive – then this seems incapable of being tested. If I told you that all the atoms of my body had indeed vanished into the absolute space of phenomena (whatever that is), whilst to all appearances looking just like me – a bloke sitting somewhere in the East Midlands of England, typing whilst the cat snoozes on a beanbag – then I cannot see any way that this could be tested. For all I know, that cat could have pulled off the same trick. And if I can still be seen and touched, in what sense can it be said that my atoms have vanished. What is the light bouncing off? What are you touching? As all of this is, as far as I can see, incapable of being tested, we can leave it to one side. The other claim – that the body, at death, could actually dissolve into a rainbow, is something for which we could find some degree of concrete evidence, but unfortunately Wallace does not provide anything like this. He tells us that there are lots of cases of eyewitness reports, but there are eyewitness reports of everything from Elvis living down the road, to alien abductions, to milk-drinking statues of Ganesh, to angels in the shopping mall. It is simply not good enough to say that the reason that we do not accept such stories is “the ideological hegemony of materialism.” We don’t accept them, generally speaking, because they are implausible, and because insufficient evidence has been advanced. As a Buddhist friend was fond of muttering, when she heard people telling stories about auspicious events such as this, “Auspicious? Suspicious, more like!”
I may, of course, be wrong. But I can’t help thinking that, when it comes to exploring the possibilities for rich dialogue between contemplative traditions and the sciences, Wallace is barking up the wrong tree. For me, I suspect that the really productive dialogue will not come from some kind of a revolution in the sciences, an overthrowing of materialism, and a discovery that the Tibetan stories were right all along, but instead it will come about from a revolution in the way that we see ourselves in the light of the sciences. For it seems to me that, when we come to exploring the knotty questions of consciousness, we are hamstrung already by a kind of mysticism: the mysticism of our idea of an enduring self, the mysticism of our belief in free will, and the curious philosophical mysticism that posits ineffable qualia. And if we are going to proceed at all in these discussions, I suspect that we will do so not by adding mysticism to mysticism, and by the spinning of new fictions, fantasies and dreams about a separate and self-subsistent spiritual realm, but rather by the realisation that those things that we take to be realities are themselves fictions, fantasies and dreams.
Have your say! [7]
