I’m currently re-reading all of Alan Watts’ books, so it was especially interesting to discover that Bruce Lee was also a devotee of him. The only biography of Lee that I’ve read is Bruce Thomas’ Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit, and a glance through the index reveals no mentions of Watts throughout the book. I suppose I’ll have to get a copy of John Little’s book as well.
alan watts
A Head-Tailed Cat
Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Slavery, universal and unquestioning religious faith, aristocratic government, disregard for the suffering of others: these are the very miserable grounds on which some of the major achievements of civilization in the past were built. Hence the thought: we cannot have those desirable things now, because we have got democracy, freedom of conscience, various kinds of equality (nearly), kindness and hygiene instead. If these really are the only options, then we do not have much choice.
The organic conception of civilization reinforces this view. It stresses the interconnectedness of everything that occurs in a particular society in a particular epoch. Therefore the achievements of a time and place are thought of as inescapably bound up with, and often produced by, the defects of the era. If the passage of time sees the removal of those defects it must also remove the possibility of parallel achievements.
According to this view the great public monuments of post-war Britain had to look like Milton Keynes and the Millennium Dome — because of democracy and a National Health Service and universal education and freedom of opinion. The seventeenth century could have as its greatest public monuments St Paul’s Cathedral and the other churches of Sir Christopher Wren because it has oligarchic aristocratic government, poor sanitation, short life expectancy, little freedom of opinion and little public education.
He doesn’t mention him by name, but this is obviously one of Nietzsche’s central themes. In fact, it’s one of the themes that most effectively resist appropriation by those who would turn him into some kind of bombastic life coach. Given his conscious defiance of “systematic” thinking, it’s always risky to identify what he “really” meant, but if you ask me — and even if you don’t, I’ll tell you anyway — I would say that Nietzsche was most concerned with culture, not individuals. Western liberal individualism was just more decadence as far as he was concerned. All his famous exhortations about the Übermensch were centered on the assumption that strong, healthy cultures would occasionally produce heroic individuals like a Beethoven or Goethe, whose artistic genius would redeem life for the rest of us, who are just here taking up space and doing the grunt work. This tendency didn’t go in reverse — heroic individuals did not regenerate weak, sickly cultures. Needless to say, he would have looked at our culture, seen a crass obsession with commerce, unhealthy individualism taken to the extremes of narcissism and solipsism, and a weak, neurotic concern with avoiding pain and injustice at all cost, and dismissed any further thoughts of cultural greatness with a disgusted wave of his hand. And yet, he might have said, for all your pride in your civilized harmlessness, you still have slave labor constructing your sports stadiums, and something very much like it building the technological gadgets which give your petty lives a semblance of meaning. You have no problem consigning countless millions of other sentient creatures to miserable lives and assembly-line deaths for the sake of your convenience. You can simply afford the luxury of removing cruelty from your immediate vicinity. Rationalist sleight-of-hand takes care of any uncomfortable remainders. Blood, you’re soaking in it. Always have been, always will be. The only question is whether you’re going to use it to produce transcendent greatness or self-loathing mediocrity.
However, we could employ the idea of civilization in a more hopeful way. We could see civilization as seeking to equal the best achievements of the past while disentangling them from the misfortunes upon which they once depended. The idea is that we could aim for the same level of civility, grandeur, grace and beauty, but without building on those obviously intolerable foundations.
Hopeful, indeed. Alan Watts used an odd-but-striking example that relates to this idea:
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head’s effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat.
The cat wasn’t born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer’s trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn’t see the whole cat at once.
This, in turn, was one of Watts’s central themes — the idea that “good” and “bad”, “desirable” and “undesirable” are like the head and tail of the cat: inseparable. We simply aren’t able to stand up and look over the fence to see the entire cat at once, so to speak. We can’t attain the god’s-eye perspective from which we could see that no matter how hard we try to eliminate bad, unpleasant things from the world and preserve only the good things, it can never happen. It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, like trying to figure out how the cat’s head “causes” the tail. To strain the metaphor further, our attempts to scrub the world clean of undesirable things would be like trying to separate the head and tail of a cat, only to have each head generate a new tail, and each tail develop a new head.
Somehow it appears that the cat mutated into a hydra. Well, no matter. The point is, the idea of “desirable” and “undesirable” as integers which can be increased or subtracted is one of the foundational myths of post-Enlightenment Western culture. You may say, “Well, I greatly prefer the ‘problems’ of a middle-class Westerner to those of a medieval peasant.” I wouldn’t disagree. But that’s still a value statement, not an objective fact. Likewise, it’s a value statement to say, “Well, I’m perfectly content with the way things are right now. They’re good enough. No need to risk unintended consequences by messing around with further attempts at optimization.” The point isn’t that we can’t ever agree on a way to live and coexist. The point is that any such consensus will likely have to leave our cherished rationality and objectivity behind.
Where There Are Rocks, Watch Out!
Or maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is “panpsychism”, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, “I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension.” But when it comes to grappling with the Hard Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop?
…The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.
This seems like a perfect place to link to this Existential Comic about Chalmers and panpsychism, while strongly recommending that you peruse the entire archives and read a new comic there every Monday.
Now, then, you’ve heard me several times before express provisional agreement with Spinoza’s brand of panpsychism, so this time, I’ll change it up a little and cite Alan Watts saying pretty much the same thing, that while we commonly think of human intelligence as some sort of alien phenomenon in the universe, stranded in cold isolation as if it were “dropped” here with no hope of rescue, it may be both more comforting and accurate to think of it growing out of the world in the same way that apples grow out of an apple tree. From this viewpoint, conscious thought is a latent characteristic of “dumb, brute” nature, not an absurd aberration. Pile up enough rocks and dirt in the right conditions for long enough, and they’ll start “peopling”. If that sounds uncomfortably teleological and religious for your taste, well, just keep in mind that if Spinoza had lived anywhere else in Europe besides the Netherlands, he would have probably been executed for the threat his ideas posed to institutional religion, rather than merely being excommunicated and shunned. Entertaining the notion that consciousness could be a fundamental aspect of existence itself doesn’t necessarily lead to a belief in gods, souls and holy scripture.
Trickster Makes this World
In the literary milieu where he is ignored more than despised, John Brockman is about as well known as the first three digits of the number Pi.
“This crowd sees everything through the lenses of culture and politics,” he says. “But an understanding of life, of the world, can only come through biology, through science.”
Ebola, stem cells, brain research—Who needs the new David Foster Wallace, the new Philip Roth?
“The great questions of the world concern scientific news,” says Brockman. “We are at the beginning of a revolution. And what we hear from the mainstream is: “Please make it go away.”
…As man slowly seems to turn into an algorithm, this is then a consequence of the cybernetic thinking that has influenced and sustained Brockman in the world.
I shared this article with Arthur as part of an ongoing conversation we’re having about scientism, reductionism, and the popular modern delusion that life is essentially a problem to be solved by means of the hard sciences. All of this is itself part of our intelligence-gathering operations as he and I formulate plans for a possible Winter Offensive against Less Wrong-style rationalism and its Saint-Simonian underpinnings. (By “he and I”, of course, I mean that “I” plan to cheer him on as “he” sallies forth to wage intellectual warfare for which I am sorely lacking in weaponry.) From there, you’ll never believe how the conversation turned to mythology, Alan Watts, and surprising confessions of faith in trickster deities!
(Am I doing this clickbait thing right?)
Andropovs and Brezhnevs of the Soul
When I read Marx, I thought that his key mistake was a negative view of utopia. That is, utopia is what happens automatically once you overthrow all of the people and structures who are preventing there from being utopia. Just get rid of the capitalists, and the World-Spirit will take care of the rest. The thought that ordinary, fallible, non-World-Spirit humans will have to build the post-revolution world brick by brick, and there’s no guarantee they will do any better than the pre-revolutionary humans who did the same, never seems to have occurred to him.
Kerouac was a staunch anti-Communist, but his beat philosophy seems to share the same wellspring. Once you get rid of all the shackles of society in your personal life – once you stop caring about all those squares who want you to have families and homes and careers and non-terrible friends – once you become a holy criminal who isn’t bound by the law or other people’s needs – then you’ll end up with some ecstatic visionary true self. Kerouac claimed he was Catholic, that he was in search of the Catholic God, and that he found Him – but all of his descriptions of such tend to be a couple of minutes of rapture upon seeing some especially pretty woman in a nightclub or some especially dingy San Francisco alley, followed by continuing to be a jerk who feels driven to travel across the country approximately seven zillion times for no reason.
Like the early Communists, who were always playing up every new factory that opened as the herald of the new age of plenty, in the beginning it’s easy to tell yourself your revolution is succeeding, that you are right on the brink of the new age. But at last come the Andropovs and Brezhnevs of the soul, the stagnation and despair and the going through the motions.
If you have any affection for Beatnik scripture in your heart, you might be offended by the brutally biased and uncharitable review Alexander gives On the Road here, but I thought this part made for an intriguing rest stop. That tends to be my opinion of Beat-style “liberation” as well — it comes off as compulsive, not joyful. As Camus said about the Marquis de Sade’s celebration of all things subversive and corrupting, it strikes one as “the fury of a man in chains”. It appeals to “the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style”, as Nietzsche put it. Boundaries must be demolished for daring to exist, until the boundaries of one’s own selfhood are added to the ruins. Alan Watts was specifically critical of this unenlightened rebelliousness in Kerouac in his essay Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen:
Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social criticism and “digging of the universe” such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac, who is always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.
When Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, “I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference” — the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say “To hell with it,” nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes.
…In the Dharma Bums, however, we are seeing Snyder through Kerouac’s eyes, and some distortions arise, because Kerouac’s own Buddhism is a true “Beat” Zen which confuses “anything goes” at the existential level with “anything goes” on the artistic and social levels.
Still, if you’d like to find a more sympathetic perspective on On the Road, here’s one at…The American Conservative.
Why So Serious?
What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly, but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as “self-organizing systems”?
This is not nearly as crazy as it might sound.
If work is what must be done in order to go on living, the proper activity of That-which-Is will obviously be play. Reality is what exists without effort, Blake’s energy which is eternal delight. I have suggested that hide-and-seek, or lost-and-found, is the fundamental form of play because, at root, being is vibration. It is a state of yes/no, solid/space, here/ there, positive/negative, come/go, inside/outside, symbolized in the fundamental up/down motion of the wave. Rhythm lies at the heart of play, and thus various rhythmic actions are the primordial forms of delight-birdsong, the chirping of crickets, the beating of hearts, the pulsation of laughter, the ecstatic loss of self in drumming and dancing, the sonorous vibrations of voices and strings and bells. Absorption in rhythm can go on and on until energy fails, for when we survey the various cultures of mankind it appears there is nothing men would rather do than be lost all night in rhythm.
Suit Yourself
It fell to famously casual Jose Mujica, the Uruguayan president, to tackle a subtler evil plaguing humankind: the business suit.
“We have to dress like English gentlemen!” exclaimed Mujica, clad in a rumpled white shirt. “That’s the suit that industrialization imposed on the world!”
“Even the Japanese had to abandon their kimonos to have prestige in the world,” he continued, gesturing forcefully and rapping a pen on the table to punctuate his words. “We all had to dress up like monkeys with ties.”
Preach it, my brutha. This reminded me of one English gentleman who went in the opposite direction. Alan Watts used to dress “properly” throughout much of his career as a writer and speaker, but eventually came to favor, along with many others in the counterculture, looser styles of clothing like the Japanese kimono. Monica Furlong related one anecdote:
On another evening he met them for dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand. He was wearing a turtle-necked shirt and sandals, and the doorman politely declined to let him in.
“You don’t like my wear?” asked Watts in amusement. He went back to the Charing Cross Hotel to change, and reappeared, still wearing his sandals, but in a necktie and jacket.
“Are you happy now I look like all the other undertakers?” he asked.
It’s a good thing I lack professional ambition, because I loathe formal wear. Life’s too short to spend so much of it in voluntary discomfort.
Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness
I don’t have any gospel of my own. Postwar, and the early pages of Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.
I’m also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not.
Having mocked him before over his XKCD-style agnosticism, I have to give credit where due. It’s nice to see someone thinking out loud, accepting uncertainty, and revisiting convictions.
I have a very vivid memory of a similar, well, conversion, if you want to call it that. Memorial Day, 1996. I had recently finished reading a book about World War 2; I’m mostly but not absolutely sure it was Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. Whatever the case, the sheer immensity of the horror and suffering across Europe as described in the book had deeply impressed itself on me, enough so that I entered into a period of, if not genuine depression, certainly existential malaise. I had never been a religious believer, but I had grown up surrounded by enough of the typical spiritual-not-religious worldview to have unthinkingly accepted some sort of vague “purpose” to it all, some “higher truth”, some way in which it all came out in the wash eventually. Soundgarden’s Down On The Upside had just been released days earlier, and I recall listening to the song “Applebite” on repeat for hours that morning, morbidly transfixed by the line “Grow and decay, grow and decay/it’s only forever.” The photo on the cover of the New York Times that morning was a black-and-white shot of two young blond girls in front of their home waving an American flag, which, along with the song, served as some sort of meditative anchor for all my brooding, nihilistic thoughts about the impossibility of any sort of cosmic meaning or justice in a universe that could passively observe the worst of what humans were capable of.
There was no epiphany that brought an end to it; over the next few years, I just eventually regained my psychological equilibrium, grew into the truth of that realization and wore it comfortably. My ability to believe in any sort of benevolent big scheme of things had been traumatized. I would eventually get to a point where I could relinquish it willingly, rather than feeling like it had been brutally stripped from me. I had to clearly see the utter lack of need for spiritual or religious beliefs, rather than have them argued or beaten out of me. For me, that came about through reading Alan Watts, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Water, the Universal Solvent
The trend to mindfulness would seem to signal mass recognition of the need to slow down and pay attention in a turbo-driven, reactive society. Yet its migration from ashram to boardroom is not without tensions. High-profile Buddhists are taking off the gloves, albeit thoughtfully; they say mindfulness is part of a continuum—one of the seven factors of enlightenment—not a self-help technique or “a path which can lead to bigger profits,” as the Financial Times put it. And long-time practioners worry that mindfulness repackaged as a quick fix or a commercial platform could in fact lead to mindlessness, and reinforce the very problems it’s trying to heal.
…Donald Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan, calls “secular Buddhism” an oxymoron: “Buddhism has always been a religion,” he says. “To see it as a way of life is a modern conceit that disparages the lives and religious practices of Buddhists over thousands of years.” The author of The Scientific Buddha, published in 2012, says belief that “mindfulness” is an ancient Buddhist practice is a fallacy: “There’s a cachet that comes from saying some ancient sage a millennium ago in India invented these things,” he says.
There’s an omnipresent tension between those who use religious teachings as a means of reinforcing an egocentric worldview and those who use them as challenges to it. Same as it ever was. I will note, though, that Alan Watts claimed Buddhism itself was a reinvention of existing traditions for the sake of particular needs:
Hinduism is not a religion, it is a culture. In this respect, it’s more like Judaism than Christianity, because a person is still recognizable as a Jew even though they don’t go to synagogue. Jewish people, coming from a long line of Jewish parents and ancestors who have been practicing Jews, still continue certain cultural ways of doing things, certain mannerisms and attitudes, so they are cultural Jews instead of religious Jews. Hinduism is the same sort of thing; it is a religious culture. Being a Hindu really involves living in India. Because of the difference of climate, of arts, crafts and technology, you cannot be a Hindu in the full sense in Japan or the United States.
Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. The Buddha was a reformer in the highest sense; someone who wants to go to the original form, or to re-form it for the needs of a certain time.
In panta rheism, such sectarian distinctions are irrelevant, of course. The headwaters are unimportant as meaning and truth can be found at any point along the river, wherever water flows.
Dream Dream, Filling Up an Idle Hour
A few weeks ago, as I was turning on the dishwasher before we left my place, she said something like, “Dishwashers are what’s wrong with the world.” Something about that sounded right. I asked her to explain.
“Life is composed of primarily mundane moments,” she says. “If we don’t learn to love these moments, we live a life of frustration and avoidance, always seeking ways to escape the mundane. Washing the dishes with patience and attention is a perfect opportunity to develop a love affair with simply existing. You might say it is the perfect mindfulness practice. To me, the dishwasher is the embodiment of our insatiable need, as a culture, to keep on running, running, running, trying to find something that was inside of us all along.”
We used to have to spend a lot more time and attention maintaining our basic possessions. Dishes had to be washed by hand, stoves had to be stoked, clothes had to be mended, and meals had to be prepared from scratch.
Little was automated or outsourced. All of these routine labors demanded our time, and also our presence and attention. It was normal to have to zoom in and slow down for much of our waking day. We had no choice but to respect that certain daily tasks could not be done without a willing, real-time investment of attention.
There’s some truth in that. Much of life is insignificant mundanity. I certainly prefer a life of relaxed, calm focus to one of frantic busy-ness. But still, I say — and not just because last month’s experience is still fresh in my mind — this strikes me as someone trying too hard. If you were inclined to be uncharitable, you could say it sounds a bit like spiritual one-upsmanship: “I appreciate housework on a deeper level than you do.” It sounds like what Alan Watts described, a hyper-conscious attempt to scrutinize every moment so as not to miss…some vague transcendant something-or-other.
In fact, I say that because I used to be the exact same way. I never had a dishwasher until I moved into this house several years ago. Back in my days of renting a house in the country, I stood at the sink thousands of times with my hands soaking in soap suds and my brain soaking in ideas from books about Buddhism and voluntary simplicity, taking quiet pride in how “mindful” I was being. Watching over my own shoulder, essentially, as if something profound would be revealed in how I scrubbed hardened pasta off a plate.
Like any activity performed deliberately and attentively, it could have a grounding, calming effect, sure. But that could apply to eating a bag of potato chips or picking your nose, too; there’s nothing sacred about chores, unless you’re still harboring the cobwebs of a Protestant work ethic in the corners of your psyche. And it could be argued that the most profound effect washing the dishes had on me was to fulfill my slightly control-freakish need to assert myself as master of my domain and put things in clean, efficient order, thus contributing to further alienation from the natural, messy, chaotic flow of life.
Humans seek out meta-levels of reality. It’s what we do. Perhaps it’s the definition of what it means to be human, to treat every action, every object, as a symbol of something else, as a link in an endless chain of contingent meaning. Seeking “deeper” meaning is an expression of that. Imagining a ceaseless state of love and acceptance which can be attained by concentrating one’s focus and will like a laser to burn through the veil of maya and perceive the pure truth behind is another expression of that. But there’s nothing more true or authentic about washing mass-produced utensils and plates in a sink with store-bought detergent and running water, as opposed to loading them up in the dishwasher, or lugging them down to the creek in a hand-built cart to scrub them with pine needles.
It may have particular benefits. It may contribute to you being a kinder, more thoughtful person. It may help you calm down after a stressful day. But if it doesn’t, you’re not necessarily doing it wrong, either. I don’t doubt that there are many people who feel most alive and perform at their optimal level in a frenetic environment and feel irritation and frustration when forced to move ponderously. I don’t relate to them, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of them, but I wouldn’t imply that they’re lacking some integral part of human nature, either. The contemplative sage is just one of many possible human permutations, by no means the ne plus ultra.
And daydreaming is just as integral a part of what it means to be human as anything else.
Atelosian
Aristotle first identified the problem. Suppose your life is made up of things you do for the sake of something else — you do A in order to get B, and you do B only to get C, and so on. Therefore A has no value in itself; its value lies in the B. But B has no value in itself: that value lies in the C. Perhaps we eventually encounter something — call it Z — that’s valuable for what it is in itself, and not for anything else. The grim alternative is that we encounter no such thing and satisfaction is always deferred, always just around the corner (indeed many would argue that this is the treadmill of consumerism). If our lives are to mean anything, there must be something that’s valuable for what it is in itself and not for anything else it might get you. This, in the parlance of philosophers, is called intrinsic value. Most obviously, we should be able to find intrinsic value in the other people in our lives. If we focus just on our activities — on what we do — then it is clear that it will not be found in work (in my sense above, of things we do for something else) but only in play. It is play, and not work, that gives value to our lives.
Alan Watts talked about this sort of thing a lot:
When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music, the playing itself is the point.
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that woods-moseying was my “purpose” in life. Of course, I could just as easily have named reading, blogging, watching soccer games or listening to music, too. Am I suggesting that everyone should be similarly lacking in worldly ambition? No, I’m saying that there is no “should” to begin with, no categorical imperative, no final destination toward which all our efforts are aimed. I’m saying that my conception of the good life involves activities which exist simply for their own sake, as reflecting pools, pools in which such progressivist, teleological delusions of ultimate purpose can drown.
One Repays a Teacher Badly If One Remains Only a Student
It’s a complex gotcha. On the one hand, he proves the sceptical core of Kumaré’s message: the guru they knew was nothing more than their own projections (albeit onto his own crafty dissimulation). The disenchantment, however, comes coupled with the palliative, even self-empowering message that they are therefore responsible for their own insights and transformations. But this only begs the question that Gandhi — in the film’s greatest conceptual error — refuses to ask: is the guru’s theatre of transformation sometimes necessary, even if it is a ruse?
A pragmatic look at spiritual leadership through the ages — of shamans with their legerdemain, tribal leaders with their initiation dramas, Zen masters with their anarchist tricks — would answer yes. One might invoke the placebo effect, but to identify the placebo as the ‘cause’ of transformation does not end the discussion. Or the spiritual tutelage. While the history of religions is of course dominated by an often pernicious authoritarianism, not to mention tremendous earnestness, there is also an undercurrent of crazy wisdom that understands enlightenment or transformation to occur in a zone of compassionate pranks, iconoclastic mirroring, and sacred irony.
…The chain-smoking 20th-century Hindu master Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj claimed, for example, that the true guru ‘will constantly bring you back to the fact of your inherent perfection and encourage you to seek within. He knows you need nothing, not even him, and is never tired of reminding you.’ Nisargadatta taught radical nondualism, which means that he took that ‘all is one’ stuff seriously enough to revel in the inevitable paradoxes rather that sweeping them under the feel-good carpet. Like many non-dual teachers — and Gandhi himself was raised partly with the nondual Vedanta — Nisargadatta also proclaimed that spiritual seeking itself is part of the problem, because searching outside yourself is ultimately alienating. So what does the spiritual teacher do in such a situation? Ironically, the ideal spiritual teacher must frustrate the operation of seeking itself, and somehow help dissolve the whole relationship into liberation.
In other words, how do you teach someone to outgrow their need to depend on a teacher? On what authority do you urge people to stop looking to authority figures for justification? Alan Watts addressed this topic, too:
There is a saying that “anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.” In exactly the same way, in the Buddhist culture, anybody who goes to a guru, a spiritual teacher, a Zen master, or whatever, ought to have his head examined. As the old Chinese master Tokusan put it, “If you ask any question, you get thirty blows from my stick. If you don’t ask any question, you get thirty blows just the same.” In other words, “What the hell are you doing here defining yourself as a student and me as a teacher?” You raise a problem when you do that, and in the Zen way of training, this problem is very clearly emphasized.
…This is the situation of everyone who feels that life is a problem to be solved. Whether you seek to solve that problem through psychoanalysis, integration, salvation, or buddhahood, you define yourself in a certain way when you see life as a problem to be solved.
The real desire that everybody brings to these teachers can be stated this way: “Teacher, I want to get one up on the universe. I feel I am a stranger in this world and that life is a problem. Having a body means that I am subject to disease and change and death. Having emotions and passions means that I am tormented by feelings I cannot help having, and yet it is not possible to act on those feelings without creating trouble. I feel trapped by this world and so I want to get the better of it. Is there some wise man around who is a master of life and who can teach me to cope with all this?” That is what everybody is looking for in a teacher: a savior who can show you how to cope with life. But the Zen teacher says, “I don’t have any answers.” Nobody believes that because he seems to be so confident when you look at him. You cannot believe that he has no answers, and yet the consistent teaching of Zen is that it has nothing to say and nothing to teach.
Rather than combining different materials to create something new, a sculptor sees the potential finished form contained within the raw material and chisels away all the excess that prevents it from being seen. Similarly, some forms of teaching involve removing the perceptual and conceptual excess rather than adding more layers of it.
Still Want That Mantra? Still Want to Know?
But it convinced me. After spending nearly two years studying Zen, Taoism and the works of Alan Watts, I think I genuinely achieved a sort of satori — a freedom from the inner weights and contradictions of ordinary life. When a student asked Watts what enlightenment felt like, he said if felt very ordinary — but like walking slightly in the air, an inch above the ground. And that is exactly how I felt — every day.
I don’t know how long the experience lasted. Perhaps as long as a year, perhaps even longer. All that time, Watts and the Zen idea were there in my head, informing my thoughts and actions. The background noise, the static of worry and gabble that informed my old life had disappeared. My head was clear. The philosophy entirely permeated me. My life was truly more joyful than it had ever been. Nothing bothered me. I felt full of energy and optimism.
Same here. Reading Watts didn’t make me feel like I had achieved some sort of esoteric understanding; it was more like realizing how many of the philosophical questions and dilemmas I was preoccupied with were actually incoherent to begin with. It was the “Aha!” moment when your mind latches onto what initially sounds like a vertiginous cacophony and recognizes a familiar melody or rhythm. I used to read about Buddhism and Taoism and wonder what enlightenment was—how would I know it if I found it? How would an enlightened person act in the world? The difference after reading Watts was that I just laughed at the very thought of such questions.
The Joy of Violent Movement Pulls You Under (Slight Return)
I really think you lot need to be a bit clearer about what the emotional content of your atheism is. You are the ones who claim to be acting on a mere lack, on a non-belief, but as absences go, contemporary atheism doesn’t half seem to involve some strong feelings. It isn’t all reading Lucretius, or thinking about the many forms most beautiful. For many of you, the point of atheism appears to be not the non-relationship with God but a live and hostile relationship with believers. It isn’t enough that you yourselves don’t believe: atheism permits a delicious self-righteous anger at those who do. The very existence of religion seems to be an affront, a liberty being taken, a scab you can’t help picking. People who don’t like stamp-collecting don’t have a special magazine called The Anti-Philatelist. But you do. You do the equivalent of hanging about in front of Stanley Gibbons to orate about the detestability of phosphor bands and perforations. The Belief section of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site – where you’d think that it wouldn’t be that surprising to find discussion of, you know, belief – is inhabited almost entirely by commenters waiting for someone to have the temerity to express a religious sentiment, whereupon they can be sprayed with scorn at fire-extinguisher pressure. It’s as if there is some transgressive little ripple of satisfaction which can only be obtained by uttering the words “sky fairy” or “zombie rabbi” where a real live Christian might hear them.
Jerry Coyne asks if we think this is accurate. I do, yeah. I’ve said recently, and will repeat here, that you see all the exact same group dynamics at play in a comment thread full of atheists as you do anywhere else on the Internet. A bunch of assholes, full of self-righteousness, snarking at their enemies and patting each other on the back for being so clever. It only seems different when you’re emotionally invested in it. Having the crest of Reason & Rationality emblazoned on your flag doesn’t change the fact that you are, well, just another group of people rallying around a flag and behaving accordingly.
It will be pointed out, rightly, that religion is hardly a quiet, private hobby like stamp collecting, and as such, it’s to be expected that people will have strong, normative opinions about it. And no doubt, people who act like assholes during religious arguments will tell themselves and others that the importance of the cause compels them to forego politeness. But though it may be a common conceit to believe otherwise, most of what people do on the Internet is not valuable. You’re not changing the world by commenting on blogs; you’re just hanging out with your friends. Your sarcastic jokes and remarks aren’t cumulatively adding up to progressive social change; you’re just showing off to win praise from the rest of the group. Pointing and denouncing might feel satisfying, but they’re not the same thing as activism. You’re just one more insignificant individual who takes pleasure from feeling justified in being mean and causing pain to someone from the out-group, especially if it raises your own status.
The striving for distinction keeps a constant eye on the next man and wants to know what his feelings are, but the empathy which this drive requires for its gratification is far from being harmless or sympathetic or kind. We want, rather, to perceive or divine how the next man outwardly or inwardly suffers from us, how he loses control over himself and surrenders to the impressions our hand or merely the sight of us makes upon him; and even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated him or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.
— Nietzsche
In other words, it can make us feel powerful to be even a little mean. The need to feel powerful is so ingrained in us that even professions of humility can become subtle means of self-promotion (“I’m less interested in one-upsmanship than you are”, as Alan Watts said). And even those of us who genuinely want to spread joy and benevolence get an ego-charge out of exerting a powerful effect on another person, on winning their admiration, on inspiring awe (or even a little fear), on mattering in an undeniable way. Most of what we do on blogs is a way of convincing ourselves and others that we matter, of elevating ourselves, and a quick and easy way to get that assurance is to knock someone else down.
Yes, yes, I know, of course they deserve it. You just might want to take note of the fact that almost everyone who acts hatefully or aggressively toward another claims that they’re only doing it for a higher cause, or in order to defend themselves or someone weaker. It seems to be a deeper truth about human psychology, no matter what the intellectual rationalizations—it doesn’t take much to get people to choose sides and start throwing rocks and making raids on the enemy’s territory. The hats and armbands and fight songs may change, but from a slightly removed vantage point, all of human history has been nothing but an increasingly sophisticated story of rock-throwing and territory-raiding. And no, I don’t believe that being an atheist means that we are somehow more aware of our subconscious, preverbal instincts and thus better able to keep them from taking us over—if anything, the smug satisfaction we take in our special status makes us complacent against them. Nor do I believe that those lizard brain urges, like the fabled dictatorship of the proletariat, will fade away once we’ve completely eliminated our enemies and achieved a mythical state of perfection.
If I Could Just Keep My Stupid Mind Together
But there’s another way to take this statement. And I honestly believe it’s the way most people would take it. They’d look at it and say, “Gosh. I’m not mindful enough. I’m not concentrated enough. Because when I look at a sunrise, I just shade my eyes so that I can get through this traffic jam on West Market Street without running over any of the kids from Our Lady of the Elms. Sunrises kind of annoy me. They give me a headache. I better get more concentrated and more mindful so that I can be more like Thich Nhat Hanh and let the beauty of the sunrise be revealed to me.”
In other words, the concept of “mindfulness” gets in the way of the sunrise. It becomes a big obstacle between what we think of as our self and what we think of as the sunrise. And we make our efforts to try to overcome the obstacle we’ve placed in our own way. Most of the time I hear or read the word “mindfulness” it sounds to me like an obstacle.
Pretty much all of our religions and our various self-help practices are based on the idea that what we are right now is not good enough. We then envision what “good enough” must be like and we make efforts to transform what we are right now into this image of ourselves as “good enough.” We invent in our minds an imaginary “mindful me” and then try to make ourselves into that. The problem with this kind of effort is right at its very root. We are setting up a habit of always judging ourselves as being not whatever it is we want to be.
Alan Watts said something similar about excessive self-awareness becoming more like paralyzing self-consciousness:
For feeling blocks action, and blocks itself as a form of action, when it gets caught in this same tendency to observe or feel itself indefinitely—as when, in the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy—so as to be sure not to miss anything.
“Mindfulness” to me only means setting aside time to allow the chattering monkeys of the mind to fade away on their own, but I take Brad’s point. It flatters our culturally inherited work ethic to see mindfulness as a reward to be achieved through devoted effort and delayed gratification. Meditation for those people is still an opportunity to flex the cerebellum, to be active and positive and in control, to keep pursuing the egocentric fantasy of being masters of their fate, captains of their souls.
When the Hoodoo Trance Takes Me, That’s the Way I Go
The problem I have with Ken Wilber, as well as others like him, is all about motivation. Ken Wilber seems to imply that his accomplishments indicate that his meditation is somehow qualitatively better than other peoples’ and that without such accomplishments “something is missing” as Brian my commenter asked. While I admit these accomplishments do indicate a commitment to something, I’m not sure it’s something I’m interested in committing to.To me, Wilber’s goal in meditation appears to be to get more advanced at it than anyone else in the world and to be known for having done so. It’s very competitive. This assumption appears to be borne out by the comment I received when I said that I thought Wilber’s trick with the brainwave machine looked phony.“Brad, just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean it’s fake,” said the commenter. True enough. Maybe he actually is going into Nirvikalpa Samadhi, whatever the blazes that is. It might not be a fake. But it’s the “just because you can’t do it” part that’s telling.Wilber may say he doesn’t intend people to take it this way. But that would be disingenuous. He knows full well people are going to take it this way. The message my commenter got is, “Ken Wilber is a better meditator than Brad Warner.” It’s the kind of message I’m sure most people take away from Wilber’s various demonstrations of power.If meditation is a competition, I don’t want to play that game. But it’s not. So I meditate.
I agree, and so did Alan Watts:
Influenced by the great Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, Watts argued that a determined struggle to achieve enlightenment was more likely to encourage an “ego-trip” than to break it down. Watts did meditate occasionally but not, he said, with the idea of attaining any goal, but only for the “joy of being quiet.”
I don’t even tell people I meditate anymore, because it’s just another word that carries too much baggage; before you know it, you’re arguing with votaries about “regulation” Zen cushions and comparing epiphanies in an “I see through the game of one-upsmanship more clearly than you do” sort of contest. I just like being alone, listening to music, and woolgathering. When I’m able to do it uninterrupted, my thoughts tend to streamline themselves of their own accord. Sitting, driving, or performing monotonous chores, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the music, the weather, the events going on in my life, and my thoughts all harmonize in such a way as to produce a profound sense of rightness. Call it whatever you want.