Critique of Pragmatic Dharma #3

I feel the need to begin this post with a brief remark about my intentions. To my mind, critique is a high form of respect; it is a sincere dialog with a person and his or her ideas. Pragmatic Dharma (PD) has provoked a great deal of personal thought and exploration for me, which has been quite valuable. It is in this spirit that I write these posts.

In my last two posts, I wrote about the ways that I see PD as based upon an impoverished view of the mind and about the philosophical basis for a more compelling understanding of the mental. In this, my last post, on PD, I would like to discuss the theory of transformation inherent in the movement, or at least my limited understanding of it.

From what I learned in Ingram’s recent appearance on the Imperfect Buddha podcast, the end result (at least for Ingram himself) of his ‘enlightenment’ has been that he no longer experiences himself as an agent in a specific sense: the ‘doer, knower, controller’ has disappeared entirely. This, he claims, has taken place through repeated progression through ‘four paths,’ each of which is compromised by 16 stages of insight that must be traversed and which culminates in the experience of ‘cessation,’ when conscious experience disappears entirely. I would like to address two questions here: (1) how the experience of cessation is understood to transform the mind and (2) what it might mean to no longer experience yourself as the ‘doer, knower, controller’.

Beginning with the first question, members of the PD movement seem to regard cessation as a “transformational object” (Bollas, 1987), an experience that will alter self-experience to a remarkable degree, akin to a mother soothing a young child in acute distress, transforming his agony into relaxation and delight. In this sense, it acquires a religious aspect, as a purported experience of salvation that will free one from the pain of the ‘three characteristics’ (suffering, impermanence, and not-self). The cessation experience is, similarly, cast as a ‘peak experience,’ a euphoric state that is typically achieved after a great deal of effort and commitment to a system of practice and thought. It is, finally, understood as an event that leads to lasting transformation of the mind itself.

But how is it, exactly, that a cessation experience could lead to lasting transformation of the mind? If it did, surely it would happen through an incremental learning process, something that took place over a long period of time and through repeated iterations, accompanied by a deep understanding of of the meaning of the event. Indeed, at least one astute Buddhist teacher has written that it is not the experience of cessation that is important but the understanding that the experience promotes (Burbea, 2014). Certainly the experience of cessation reveals that experience, and the self-as-agent in particular, is constructed in some sense, but it hardly seems necessary to go through 16 stages of insight to realize that, even in a deeply experiential way. That said, I am not sure that this revelation carries all of the implications that members of the PD movement seem to feel that it does.

I have often encountered the idea that “because experience is constructed, we can deconstruct it and the re-construct it differently.” This is certainly true in a trivial sense: it’s possible for us to shift the ways that our minds are making meaning, to some degree, over time. Yet I also feel that much of the dialogue I have encountered fails to acknowledge the limits of reconstruction (that is, constraints on meaning). This, ultimately, is a defense against mourning the losses and disappointments inherent in life. It is, I would suggest, through such mourning that the mind grows stronger.

Consider Ingram’s (paraphrased) comment, “A smell of a rose is just a bunch of chemicals. It’s not real.” (He makes similar comments about a number of other phenomena, such as the color blue.) Since the phenomena we experience aren’t ‘real,’ we can reconstruct them in any way we want. (Impressively, Ingram seems to have cultivated a capacity for concentration that renders his perception remarkably pliable, which he describes as ‘magic.’ What is magic, though, if not a fantasy of omnipotence in which the world yields to one’s control.) No matter how compelling this idea feels, I suspect that most of us have an intuition that there are profound limits on the meanings that we can make, that they are constrained by the material and the social. [1]

Let’s now turn to the second question: what might it mean for the ‘agency, doer, controller’ – the self-as-agent model – to be eliminated?

The self-as-agent model refers to an internal representation of ourselves – ‘me’ – that stands in various relations to (representations of) objects in the outside world and is capable of having an impact upon them. How does this internal representation develop? According to Stern (1985), around the second or third month of the infant’s life, she begins to experience herself as an agent. What he means by agency is a sense of authorship of one’s own actions and nonauthorship of the actions of others. This is one of four experiences that form an organized sense of a core self in the early months of life. The experience of agency can be broken down into three invariants of experience: (1) the sense of volition that precedes a motor act, (2) the proprioceptive feedback that does or does not occur during the act, and (3) the predictability of the consequences that follow the act. In other words, the infant begins to develop an internal model – a core sense of self – that reflects her capacity to move about in the world, to ‘do’ movement. Benjamin (1990) has written about how this sense of agency expands to the relational domain as the baby learns that she can make her mother smile. We can imagine how this self-as-agent model expands further throughout the child’s development to capture her expanding sense of agency in a wide variety of contexts.

Now, Ingram seems to be claiming that he no longer has a conscious experience of himself as an agent, as someone who is initiating action in the sense just described, but rather that experience arises ‘on its own’ and then disappears, only to re-emerge again in the next moment. I find it entirely believable that it’s possible to establish a meditative state in which this, phenomenologically, seems to be the case. I have experienced this myself. That does not mean that the representation has been eliminated from my mind, though. On the contrary, it has only become latent, occluded by aspects of my conscious experience that have become more compelling. This is how defense mechanisms work, for example: I simply do not look at, or allow myself to put into words, something that troubles me, instead focusing my attention that is less disturbing.

I am skeptical that this model of agency has been eliminated from the mind entirely. If it had, how would the person manage to get around in the world, to understand, for example, that if I initiate a certain physical action, a given consequence will result? That self-as-agent model originated for a purpose, after all. It may be that conscious awareness of the model has been suppressed, but I suspect that the model is still very much in place. Ingram describes himself as ‘sometimes arrogant.’ What would it mean to be arrogant if not that the self-as-agent model carries a certain valence, that of the self as more powerful than, in fact, it is? To uproot the self-as-agent model from the mind entirely would, I think, render an individual entirely incompetent to function in the world.

[1] Interestingly, Ingram describes himself as ‘hypomanic.’ I understand mania, in part, as an erasure of difference, a profound relativizing of distinctions and an undoing of loss.

References

Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7S, 33 – 46.

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. London: Free Association Books.

Burbea, R. (2014). Seeing that frees: Meditations on emptiness and dependent arising. Devon: Hermes Amara Publications.

Stern, D.N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.