parlêtre

Daniel Ingram’s Response

with 15 comments

Daniel Ingram has generously written an extensive response to the first three posts on this blog. As I write these words, I haven’t yet read his response in its entirety. (It is 33 pages of single-spaced text, so no doubt contains much to be digested.) Over the next few days, I will give some thought about how to respond in a way that most constructively facilitates dialogue. In the meantime, please do share your thoughts in the comments section. It is my hope that we can continue to have an interesting conversation.

Daniel:

Dear Parlêtre,

First, numerous apologies with multiple facets:

I have spent perhaps 15 hours reading Speculate Non-Buddhist (SNB) materials over the past few days, resulting in conditioned meaning and response through as their socially and culturally conditioned words collide and interact with a lifetime of conditioned meaning making and psychologically conditioned largely unconscious contingent responses. If you, dear reader, are not familiar with that SNB material and some of the material out of which it arises, and so interpret this out of that intersubjective context, then many aspects of what follows are likely to be missed. So, please avoid quoting my response out of context and without those appropriate frames of meaning, as, like the SNB site itself, it is somewhat performative, comedic, and theatrical, though yet, as you will find, also takes it work seriously.

So influenced by that SNB material in my interpretation of immediate experience and the deeply human tendency to begin to rapidly adopt the speech patterns, reactions, and ethos of material to which they have recently been exposed, I nearly launched into an SNB-style critique, dreaming of SNB-style Romantic, Dramatic, Rhetorical postulates such as, “Non-Non-Buddhist Postulate#1: Some who have read my book demonstrate deficits in comprehension, context, and even basic counting, as demonstrated by their inability recognize any meditation technique or Training in it other than Noting as well as the extremely narrow context of meaning, frame, and function ascribed therein to that technique.”

However, using techniques of meaning and function from contemporary and modern psychology, a blended intuitive and formal analysis of the defense mechanisms demonstrated by that response arose, and, on further largely inscrutable reflection, and apparently moderating social goals through an appreciation of a rudimentary internalized system of an external decorum, and through largely inscrutable processes unavailable to immediate experience, I thought that would be a dick move, as you post with kindness and seem (at least to my conditioned read and meaning making of text devoid of vocal inflection and the additional interpersonal feedback that comes through gesture, vocal tone, visuals such as gaze and sweat, olfactory clues from odor, etc. which arise from those extremely valuable in-person interactions which create such differently flavored dialogues), to demonstrate a genuine wish to engage in a relatively polite dialogue for productive ends without an obvious wish to intentionally use reduction ad absurdum arguments to score rhetorical cheap points.

Using utilitarian breathing techniques learned in historical, social contexts in a past that yet appear to physiologically (and regardless of meaning making and context) to moderate vagal nerve function that then modulate cognitive processing in ways at once indescribable and yet functionally which might be described as “calming” (yet while maintaining a vigilant and guarded awareness that calming sympathetic responses habitually might lead to multiple SNB-designated system errors, such as a failure to rise up against the NeoLiberal Cabal through the delusion that collective problems might be solved purely by internal techniques, as well as a failure to honestly feel appropriate frustration at my hard work often being misinterpreted, mischaracterized, and misunderstood with such misunderstandings posted widely in public contexts feeding tribal echo chambers of meanings I consider semi-dysfunctional though understandable as ordinary humans try as best they can to find comfort, connection, and meaning for themselves), and thus conditioned through those and innumerable and incomprehensible other forces, this response arose.

Oh, wait, that’s sort of tedious, isn’t it? Perhaps you could do me the functional courtesy of realizing that when I do things like thank the countless people who helped MCTB1/2 to arise, or acknowledge explicitly that language artificially divides and reduces, or to exhort people to find frameworks and techniques that work for them in social contexts that work for them, or go on endlessly about the socially conditioning, roles, conventions, cultures, and designations that impede and also may support meditation practice and other practices, or present the Analogy of the Kazoo player (read that one? It is in the section on Equanimity, Chapter 30), I am demonstrating some functional knowledge of their underlying philosophical and psychological concepts without endlessly stating those underlying concepts. Otherwise, and to borrow from TA terminology, I feel Discounted along with the concomitant feelings that generally arise in such contexts, to be enumerated shortly.

The hallucinatorily impersonal web does seem to pathologically promote this sort of discounting writing, as I have noted pouring from my own fingers thousands of times, so God Help Us All as we try to do otherwise.

Interestingly, the term “discount”, which you will almost certainly know that we get from Berne, arose after he was rejected from psychoanalysis school leading to his being on the Margin (another SNB favorite) and thus coming up with something useful through his critique. May we do our best to not discount each other more than we need to in order to accomplish our functional points. May we provide appropriate strokes when such things serve a useful social purpose to engender sufficient oxytocin and serotonin to keep our audience sufficiently attentive and affable. Providing strokes is not my strong point either, a trait I share with many prone to swimming in the waters of critical dialogue, to please forgive this inadequacy of mine, and realize that I am consciously trying to do better.

Curiously, like the SNB kids, I also identify in some ways with being on the margin, as most of Western Buddhism doesn’t like the carefully laid out criticisms that I have leveled at much of what one finds there. So, it is ironic but perhaps predictable that we on the margins who engage in thoughtful criticism often spend more time criticizing each other than much larger, more worthy targets of far greater reach who are also less aligned with our mutually shared goals and aesthetics. As I often say, it is like Holland and Belgium feuding when, to outside observers, they often appear very similar. However, as it is very hard to get those whom we wish to criticize to even engage, our rage and frustration, unable to hit the most desired target, often get projected out at those close at hand, who, ironically, are often potential allies, at least on certain topics. Perhaps you are familiar with these concepts even though you aren’t writing it explicitly in your post? I will grant you that courtesy, even if I feel, perhaps erroneously, that you are not offering quite the same reciprocity.

I acknowledge your kind words that criticism and engagement is an honor, and I am grateful for that. I hope you will appreciate that I have returned the favor in extensive kind.

I obviously am doing to “willfully” commit the SNB sin of the Point by Point Response (a well-documented manifestation of chronic “Detail Fetish”, a condition apparently curable only by the death or severe brain damage of an externally designated “x-Buddhist”, so, given that my condition is known to be uncurable, I feel less visceral shame and more resignation about it than I might otherwise feel), which, thus decided, is also an intersubjective meaning created out of a collective experience.

First point, your nom de plume, “Parlêtre”, which appears carefully chosen, so worthy of comment. For those, such as myself, who are not well-studied in Lacan (another SNB sin of omission), I present this post of Final, Complete Truth revealed by the mysterious and inscrutable Great God Google, whose inner mechanisms I do not subjectively witness, nor whose Grand Causal Implications I can possibly fathom, and presented on a NeoLiberal social media site that I truly do not wish to promote by the helpful poster Alterites, with bracketed words added by me for those unfamiliar with this technical vocabulary:

“Lacan introduces parlêtre as a new word for the unconscious wrought from parle and être. This word shows that psychoanalysis had changed. Per Miller, the axiomatic change of Lacan theory is the devaluation of language in favour of lalangue [from The Free Dictionary “Language viewed as a system including vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of a particular community.”]–which is part of the mystery of the speaking body. Language for Lacan, is a construction established by linguists whereas lalangue is’ ‘a state of language where the aim is not one of communication – it is before grammar and structure, before the separation between words.’ ‘Lalangue demonstrates that in the signifier there are elements of jouissance [a difficult term you should just read about on Wikipedia or elsewhere despite what the end of the quote says, but, to do it severe injustice, has to do with pain] in the first place – that are not of meaning.’ ‘“there where it speaks it enjoys”. In this later teaching the signifier no longer mortifies but rather has an effect of jouissance. The first effect of language therefore is one of jouissance, there is no jouissance without a body’. ‘The speaking body is not solely jouissance or not only “telling”. An analyst, Anne Lysy states, “needs your body”. One must go to an analysis with a body. It is not possible via the internet.”

Regarding “your” anonymity, Parlêtre (though really it is an anonymity that might be more described as “ours”, or even “mine”, as presumably you know who you are at least in relative terms, where as I, and presumably “we” the readers, or at least some readers, do not), which, while I can respect, is a decision (both ordinary and Laruellian) that further cuts one off from the “Real”, the human, the transformational potential of Real people, with Real names, having more honest interactions, and being less limited and defined by decisions such as “psychoanalyst”. Yet, I suspect that, for Pragmatic reasons, such as professional or personal reasons, you chose to remain anonymous, thus violating a prescribed fixation on the Real through a decision based on a Problem, in this case a practical one. So, you demonstrate that you appear to understand the concept of practical decision, and thus, we have a basis of conversation about Pragmatic Dharma. This sort of thing obviously should go without saying, as you are clearly smart, capable, and functional, and work in a job where the meaning of words and their real-world implications are of paramount importance for living humans. Yes, I get that even saying this sort of thing is a Discount, and not much of a Stroke, and, in this, I apologize. Perhaps in the Great Feast of Knowledge, we can apply concepts and techniques from outside of PD and SNB, such as those from TA, in this case, and many others of Pragmatic Value.

You must also realize that, as a skilled textual critic, MCTB arose in a very specific social and temporal context. Specifically, and quoting from MCTB, and taking the risk of alienating you and derailing my entire argument right out of the gate, from the infamous Chapter 19:

“However, when some eight to ten students finally get a chance to meet with the teacher in a small group meeting, a brief chance to really learn what this teacher has to teach, what happens? Do they talk about their wholehearted attempts at following the careful and skillful instructions of the teacher? Strangely, this only seems to happen on rare occasions.

I was at one of these small group meetings where everyone was talking about their neurotic stuff. In a moment of feeling like I might be able to add something useful, I said in a loud and exasperated voice, “The breath! Is anyone trying to notice the breath?” They just looked at me like I was out of my mind and went back to whining about their psychological issues. Here was a roomful of otherwise accomplished adults who somehow had been functionally transformed into needy and pathetic children without any obvious ability to deal with their lives or follow very basic instructions. Beware of meditation cultures that consistently encourage this in people. It is a mark of something gone horribly wrong.”

So, you will see this Antithesis to the functional Thesis that Insight Practices were explicitly Psychology and had nothing to do with insight practice instructions. Thus, the book was explicitly and formally an attempt to counterbalance this trend.

Quoting from MCTB, Chapter 17, again making a point that I realize is hard to operationalize at all times, particularly in those who are relatively naïve regarding these topics:

“I have written this book with generic commentary on some broad meditation movements. However, any point I make in some attempt to counterbalance what I perceive to be generic imbalances may not apply to you. Such counterbalancing effort can cause further imbalances in you if you are substantially to the other end of things from the mainstream. For example, if I say something like, “Make tons of effort in meditation,” and you are already overpowering your practice, then you need to be able to figure out if my advice is targeted at you specifically, and, if not, take it in context and move on to other points. In other words, reach for balance and recognize that this book was written in a specific cultural context with specific assumptions that might not apply to you at all.”

Last apology before I get to your text: I really like capital letters, so, if these bother you, as they really seem to bother some people, I am s/Sorry.

As an aside, being moderately Dyslexic, it was challenging to keep writing out “Parlêtre” and trying to keep the letters in the right place. Something about that word just really plays to my cognitive dysfunctions in that regard. I wrote it once, and probably the first thirty times I typed it I had to go back up and see how I had typed it before. I probably should have just used “P:”.

Also, all quotes are from MCTB2, even if I state that I am quoting from MCTB, which could be ambiguous. Apologies for any confusion on that front.

Oh, yeah, this hog is over 20,000 words long, so there will be typos. Apologies to those thrown by these.

Parlêtre: Critique of Pragmatic Dharma #1

with one comment

I recently listened to a two-part conversation on the engaging Imperfect Buddha podcast with Daniel Ingram. The conversation, which was at times interesting and at others disappointing, provoked me to write a few reflections on the Pragmatic Dharma movement, a loosely knit collection of meditation teachers and practitioners that has emerged in recent years, perhaps beginning with Ingram’s book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.

Daniel: To trace Pragmatic Dharma to an origin in MCTB is to fail to appreciate that this merely one contingent part of a very long literary and in-person collective set of conversations of limited scope and ambiguous meaning stretching back through the Axial Age and into the twilight of human knowledge of our collective history. I can only imagine the rage that some others in the Pragmatic Dharma Movement, who do explicitly wish to claim to be the Definite Beginning and Genitor of it, are now experiencing: may their suffering be lessened to the degree that is possible.

Where did Pragmatic Dharma begin? Any designation of beginning is utterly arbitrary. Did it begin with Bill Hamilton? Did it begin with the teachers at IMS? Did it begin with any of the numerous monks who trained many of those who taught me? Did it begin with the arrival of the colonialists who deeply influenced many of those lineages? Did it begin with the Buddha who was trying to solve a practical problem through whatever means he could find? Did it begin with those who taught him, who were similarly applying whatever they could to address their own needs as they understood them and framed them in the cultural context of the time? Did it begin with the philosophers in the early Renaissance? Did it begin with Freud? Did it begin with Socrates and Plato? Did it begin with the first communicative grunts and symbols created by primitive humans hundreds of thousands of years ago? Did Pragmatism itself as pointed to by the immanent meaning of term and not reified in the abstraction of the term begin when protoplasmic life attained prototypical sensory apparatus and thus began to react to its environment following Skinnerian Operant Conditioning? Its origins are untraceable. Any decision about where and when Pragmatism begins is purely for the sake of discussion, but, in this case, and from this subjective point of view, it seems very strange to say it starts with MCTB. Is Pragmatism a formal philosophical frame or just what occurs in reactive systems that involve pain and pleasure? Even Pragmatism would say that such designations are often unpragmatic. Yet, if MCTB is where you wish to focus, that porous boundary may serve as a one of many loose constraints on the conversation, realizing that, to do so, will likely seriously piss off those whom I have at points called “friend” and “brother” in the most heartfelt meaning of those terms. So, this frame you request and boundary you draw that I will play along with regarding the Origin of Pragmatic Dharma comes at no small political and social cost to myself, costs I presume you are unaware of.

Thus, you bumble into this well of deep hurt and pain unawares of the personal history and struggles of this person on this side of the screen. In fact, some of the deepest and most ongoing emotional pain and social calamity I have ever felt and faced arises around and because of these very specific issues you now raise, just to frame this in terms that, as a psychoanalyst, you will likely functionally understand, and, as a human, will hopefully have some sympathetic and empathetic resonance with.

However, as you know, such feelings and stories, addressed directly and with full acknowledgement of them as feelings and stories in an appropriate healing context, provide opportunities for growth and catharsis: is this such an environment? You are under absolutely no obligation to provide one, as nobody is likely to be so foolish as to step into SNB land looking for such a thing, and, while not the SNB site, seems some functional equivalent to my emotional aspects.

Do I even have the capacity to recognize and properly embrace such an opportunity when it arises? I don’t honestly know. Will I instead disengage if the going gets too tough and sit in some blissful state as these unpleasant feelings dissipate in a cloud of exquisite jhana, dismissing the world of criticism as so much stupid noise from the cacophony of twitching meat sacks? Will you instead disengage and contract into some reaction formation due to the barrage of words that, if you are at all familiar with my style, you could have reasonably anticipated were about to arise from your post? Tune in next post, as we find out. (Humor used as Mature Coping Mechanism noted, I mean noticed, as I didn’t actually note “humor”, Mahasi-style., as that is clearly Kryptonite here, just sort of felt and then, through the barely-scrutable mystery that is cognition, recognized it as it occurred)

I recognize that this is not the relationship you likely intended, nor did you offer it, nor do I need to accept it even if you had, but such dynamics are potentially arising in the interaction that are clearly meta to any notion of individual subject, just as you are likely projecting at least somewhat and getting caught in the transference that naturally arises when one does something like author a book like I wrote and declare themselves awakened.

Similarly, as you know all too well, it would be nearly impossible for me dialoguing with a psychoanalyst to not bring my own transference to the table from diverse sources as absurd and inappropriate as, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,”, etc. Both of us will likely react with our own counter-transferences to those transferences. So long as we can try as best we can to be adults in this business, we might have a fighting chance to pull off what we both desire.

Further, rather than address your concerns to me in private, as is often done, you chose a public forum, so that context will severely alter and modulate the interaction that occurs, just as placing a microphone in someone’s face changes what they say or a camera what facial gestures they make. Your choice, but was it the best one? I don’t have any reasonable way to know the future, so I have no friggin’ idea or even know how to evaluate the question, as I can’t compare it to any actual alternative universe of occurrences. May what is happening be as for the best as it will be, which itself it about as absurd a statement as one can come up with, yet simultaneously a representation of a kind intention and aspiration. Fun, this fluid mind, isn’t it? May we all be nimble and conscious of our frames of words and actions, and embrace whatever power this lends, and use it to skillful ends.

From MCTB, from Chapter 55, Map Failure, which I will presume you either didn’t read or didn’t understand as I meant it:

“Hopefully, nobody reading this will miss the obvious point that rigorous dharma phenomenology is hardly a basis for a real friendship or for resolution of deep conflicts of identity and role.”

It even follows a convenient example that has caused me real, human tears.

How might one rewrite that to convince someone like yourself that it means what I mean it to mean? This question will be repeated throughout this post, as, while perhaps a few brave souls will have the time and interest to plod through this huge post, many more will likely read MCTB and future versions. As some who have read the second edition have noted, I am willing to attempt to listen to and incorporate fair, functional criticisms. In fact, as those few who know the deep history of MCTB going back to the 1990’s and the flame wars that happened when attempting to post about topics dear to my heart on various dharma forums available at the time know, it is very long, taxing dialogues like this one that ended up resulting in whole sections found in MCTB.

Parlêtre: My engagement with the movement has been twofold: (1) I read the book a number of years ago.

Daniel: I am presuming from your comments that you have done your due diligence and read the second edition of MCTB (MCTB2) and not the first one. I spent of literally thousands of hours over years and about $40,000 on editorial and other costs (much more than the first edition ever made) to try to correct imbalances in the first edition and to address some of these concerns. I did this while working more than full time in major emergency departments. If you still came away with these impressions after reading the second edition, then my very hard work has at least partially failed. A free version can be found at www.mctb.org and some Russian hacking sites who have ripped free .epub and .mobi editions, which you are welcome to download if you prefer those formats.

Parlêtre: and have engaged with its practices

Daniel: All of them? That’s impressive. As we go, we will see if that is really true. To what degree of accomplishment and to what functional utility? MCTB1 contains a wide range of practices, though flushed out to various degrees, and very intentionally refers readers to many more sources and practices, being admittedly woefully incomplete, as states in the first few pages of the book, MCTB2 contains many more techniques and admits the same deficits at its outset. How many of the counterbalancing source books that it recommends did you read and also practice from?

Parlêtre: and (2) as a practicing psychoanalyst, I have worked with several patients who are deeply engaged in meditation practice and have been able to observe the benefits they have derived from that engagement as well as the ways in which it has been problematic for them.

Daniel: As a practicing author, meditation teacher, meditation practitioner, and forum runner, I have observed the same.

Parlêtre: I begin with two questions about Pragmatic Dharma (henceforth, PD) as presented in Ingram’s book:

Daniel: Ok, that’s a serious problem, both in the Laruellian sense and in a very Practical sense. If you designate PD=MCTB, then it would be like stating Utilitarianism=Bimswaggle’s Textbook of Applied Physics, 2008 Edition (there is no such book that I know of, so using that as an example). The whole point of PD is to highly encourage people to find what works in the broadest possible terms, as framed by their own sense of goals, subjective criteria, and meanings, as well as to offer some very limited, specific techniques framed in extremely specific contexts and promised to produce extremely narrow but specific effects. I am literally having to wipe sweat off of my keyboard from the frustration that comes from having to explain this again and again, and probably many other complex emotions and socially conditioned feelings that result in physiological sympathetic and parasympathetic effects.

Parlêtre: what is its underlying theory of mind and (2) what is its theory of transformation?

Daniel: MCTB adopts various theories of mind as needed for very specific technical purposes, holding none of them as absolutes, and explicitly and specifically compares and contrasts a wide range of theories of mind both as a functional demonstration of the utility of being able to utilize many even apparently contradictory theories of mind and also to maintain the meta-perspective that allows us to choose these based on our goals. It also explicitly refers people to works, techniques, books, and other resources that demonstrate and expound on the practical applications of theories of mind not explicitly explained in in MCTB so as to try to avoid these sorts of constraining boxes and thinking found in this critique of MCTB. Again, it is hard to express how frustrating this is without you seeing my actual face, my furrowed brow, my tight lips, and feeling my actual energy in the room.

Parlêtre: The practice presented by PD

Daniel: Again, imagine if I said, “Psychology=Freud,” or, even worse, “Psychology=Pop Psychology”, and then based my critique of your life’s work based on that assumption, how would you react? How would that be a realistic basis for a conversation? Given that the initial premise of such a discussion would be so flawed, and so obviously flawed, how would you feel about that person’s understanding of psychology? To be honest, such feelings of frustration, disappointment, anger, sadness, malaise, resignation, grief, impotence, embarrassment, and many more hard to name but in that general family arise in this conversation. That the perception of them is highly unusual in some ways doesn’t at all preclude them from arising, as clarity is not about exclusion, as much as many in this business with to equate the two for reasons beyond me.

Should I give in to some paranoid tendencies that I inherit from an obvious close family source and think, “Ok, given that I explicitly state in many places in MCTB the exact opposite of how he is characterizing MCTB, is this not what he presents it as, and actually a disingenuous and deliberate attack of intentional distortion and mischaracterization?” Or, are those feelings justified, as it isn’t paranoia if they are actually out to get you? Is the concept of paranoia still operating functionally in those who have never heard the term “paranoia”? If I hadn’t ever heard a socially arisen term or its functional equivalents, could I still find a way to operationalize reactions to it? Are philosophies that answer this question, “No,” philosophies that aren’t engaged in some grand Discount of basic animal function?

If you had started, “I get that Pragmatic Dharma as a loosely defined movement is a broad movement that truly wishes to transcend its own limits, whatever those might be, to truly get to the dream of what works for the reader and practitioner, using whatever concepts, means, techniques, methods, social interactions, practices, and other resources to achieve those ends, and, in this, fundamentally represents a spirit of broad encouragement and empowerment,” then we would have started off on a similar footing, but we didn’t. We started with PD being largely reduced to Noting but totally ignoring the many carefully stated frames put in place in an elaborate and detailed attempt to explicitly deal with many of the problems you yourself raise, and so forgive me feeling what I am feeling as I try to help this conversation crawl out of that unfortunate pit.

Parlêtre:, derived from Mahasi-style meditation, involves directing attention to ‘sensate experience’ as it emerges form the ‘six sense doors’ (sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and consciousness) in ‘moment-to-moment experience.’ The emphasis on moment-to-moment experience, which can be traced to the notion of ‘momentary consciousness’ elaborated in the Abdhidharma literature, seems to suggest that experience emerges through the six sense doors in each moment, vanishes completely, and then re-emerges in the next moment.

Daniel: Ok, so the fact that you missed some of the key points about MCTB, namely that it frames problems in Three Trainings, and that the most narrowly defined training with the most specialized and narrow assumptions apply to the training in Wisdom, which is defined to a degree of specificity rarely found to try to avoid exactly those sorts of problems, this is extremely frustrating for me. I was tempted to start a massive quote-fest from MCTB2, but I will summarize: each of the Three Trainings has its scopes, frameworks, and underlying assumptions.

Parlêtre: My argument is that while this is certainly an interesting, even at times fruitful way of engaging with experience, it is a profoundly impoverished view of the mind.

Daniel: Forgive my Gen-X response: Duh! Truly, were one to adopt that extremely limited frame as one’s sole view of the mind, that would reduce one to a level of a mere automaton twitching out labels reducing the grand pageant of one’s life to seemingly trivially obvious labels. That you might have gotten that MCTB would think this would be the recommended sole way of conceptualizing the human life is a tragedy that I am at a loss to explain. It is such a warped fantasy that it is hard to take seriously, but I am doing my best.

Parlêtre: (I am certainly aware that there is extensive philosophical engagement with the concerns I am raising throughout the vast collection of Buddhist literature. It’s simply beyond my expertise to mobilize that literature in this critique.)

Daniel: However, you need look no further than MCTB, the work you claim to know so well and have practiced all the techniques in, for a great start.

Parlêtre: This impoverishment stems from the fact that this model of the mind privileges conscious experience while failing to acknowledge that the mind also has a latent (or depth, or unconscious) aspect.

Daniel: Yes! So true. Yet, that you failed to notice that MCTB talks about this at length is, again, extremely frustrating. Perhaps start by reading Part One, or even more specifically The Three Trainings Revisited. While I have resisted a strong desire to bury you in quotes, a restraint hopefully will appreciate, I offer this one:

“These frameworks can also be useful for looking at other common issues such as thoughts of past and future that people run into when they get into meditation. Confusion arises when these pieces of advice are applied outside the scope for which they were meant. When working on our ordinary lives, or within the scope of the first training, the content of our thoughts on past and future is very helpful, in fact necessary. Remembering the past is important, as, with experience, we generate a body of memory concerning what leads to what in this world. Being able to plan and consider our future is very important, as with our predictive ability we can use this to try to craft a well-lived life. However, when working on training in concentration, such thoughts are generally ignored or suppressed by deep concentration on another object. When doing insight practices, it doesn’t matter so much if thoughts of past or future arise, so long as we are not fascinated by their content, notice that the experiences of thoughts occur now, and notice the true nature of the individual sensations that make up those thoughts. It is common to hear of people trying to apply one piece of advice to a scope for which it was never intended, like trying to stop thinking when trying to deal with their daily life. This sort of practice would simply promote stupidity and dissociation, and there is already more than enough of that. In short, when evaluating or applying a piece of spiritual advice, make sure you understand the specific context for which it was intended.”

Reframing this in a different way, and presuming that one day I write MCTB3, how would you rephrase that so that section (and numerous other sections that I thought obsessively and repetitively made those same points) such that one, such as yourself, would better understand my meaning?

Parlêtre: Memory, a faculty of the mind, would seem to require that something persists between mind moments, though that something persists as a latent structure of the mind. Similarly, one of the primary functions of the mind is to make meaning of experience.

Daniel: Yes. Again, I could have chosen many quotes from MCTB2 to respond with, but I add this one, as it is a bit more personal, and thus, perhaps, a bit more Real, from Chapter 56, Wandering:

“Magickal work helped fill in the far other end of the developmental spectrum for me, being about meaning, symbols, and content. It was about feelings, desires, fears, empowerment, intuition, creativity, and the specifics of life. One of the shadow sides of relentless focus on vipassana, impermanence, suffering, and the like is that we can become so down on the life-giving side of the spiritual equation, and neglect meaning and content. So magick helped me begin to correct some of that imbalance. In magick, colors mattered. Words mattered. Archetypes mattered. Dreams mattered. Relationships mattered. Feelings mattered. It is not that the practices I had been doing or the tradition in which I had been practicing in necessarily devalued those aspects of life, but my interpretation of those traditions and practices did.

While all those aspects of life were clearly very relevant in a Buddhist context in which morality has been adequately understood and sufficiently cultivated prior to meditation, magick had this deep cultural resonance for me—the heroes of my youth were not Padmasambhava or Asian mythical creatures such as garudas and nagas, but Gandalf, elves, fairies, and dragons. Wands mean more to me than dorjes at some deep level, not that I don’t like a good dorje now and then. The Western magickal tradition could unlock forgotten places and play to deep heart-related areas that Buddhist symbolism just couldn’t do for me. I get goose bumps when I read Harry Potter. It is just the culture I grew up in. Someone growing up in a different culture would likely have different triggers for similar reactions. One day I think there will be a translation of tantra into Western iconography but, until then, I draw on the iconography and myths of both Eastern and Western traditions to meet my needs. For me, magick was like the deep end of psychotherapy for meditators plus a whole lot more. I got a lot out of it then and still do.”

Resorting to a bit of magickal/mythic language, territory that you, as a psychoanalyst, hopefully are at least a little bit comfortable with, as I write this I have felt that something moves through and animates me that was Summoned by your Challenge, some Dark Muse, some Avenging Angel, some Power that feels far greater than this small, twitching meatsack. It is a subjective and fanciful interpretation of a feeling, a feeling that lead me to write for six hours straight this morning in a Flow State without moving from my chair, noticing what time it was, drinking or even feeling hungry for breakfast, something that almost never happens. The hair on my arms has been standing straight up for a similar period of time. I feels chills in my body, yet I am not cold. I feel I could write this way for many more hours or even days. Many parts of MCTB were written in such a state.

Restating the problem in functional terms, and strongly fighting the feelings that would tempt far more condescending and caustic responses that Discount my relating of my own profound struggles and mistakes and turn the book instead into one that would seem to promote those sorts of difficulties, were I to rewrite this for a hypothetical MCTB3, how would you suggest I do that to demonstrate that I understand the points you are mentioning to one such as yourself who either hasn’t read what I consider the single greatest labor of love of my life or didn’t understand it as I meant it to be understood?

Parlêtre: Meaning is the recognition of a pattern, a linking of disparate elements.

Daniel: that is certainly one meaning of “meaning”.

Parlêtre: For this to happen, we must engage the faculty of memory.

Daniel: Yes, on this we agree. Wow, that took a long time, didn’t it. Feels pretty good on this end. Can we find more of that? This mammal likes it.

Parlêtre: Much of the meaning that we make involves recognizing patterns that emerge over time – not in a single mind moment but, rather, over spans of time that vary in length.

Daniel: Yes, said the person who is becoming frustrated with the condescension of explanation of basic brain function as if such points weren’t obvious to me.

Parlêtre: Let me give an example.

Daniel: [Picture what expressive emojis you might find here instead of words as you Partletre elaborates.]

Parlêtre: I’m with a friend and sensations emerge in my experience that I recognize to be ‘generosity.’

Warmth emerges in the area of my heart and thoughts about how I might behave for his benefit emerge in my moment-to-moment experience.

Daniel: Parlêtre, the psychoanalyst, demonstrates to another feeling human aware of some aspects of psychological theory and human experience his bodily and emotional awareness as well as the metacognition to relate to those through various concepts and paradigms. These skills, demonstrated through example, will form a helpful basis for further conversation.

Parlêtre: Let’s, for a moment, adopt another way of looking at this scenario. I know from my personal history that I tend to feel generous as a way to avoid the guilt and shame that accompany focusing on my own interests.

Daniel: Parlêtre demonstrates that he can process and relate to feelings using psychological concepts. This also demonstrates a base of common understanding.

Parlêtre: I know this because I have been able to observe that pattern over time; linking together numerous examples of thought, feeling, and behavior allows me to understand that my current feeling of generosity is an attempt to avoid focusing on my own projects and ambitions.

Daniel: That you have learned these skills is hopefully a source of joy for you and all others you interact with. I can only applaud this set of capabilities and the spirit implied by acquiring them.

Parlêtre: This, in my opinion, speaks to the problem of spiritual bypassing and boundary violation that are so rampant in meditation communities.

Daniel: Yes, a clear problem. I am not sure it is even just your opinion, but, may in many ways, be arbitrarily designated as a common understanding between us emerging more broadly in our cultural context as memes. Do these memes own us? Perhaps. Showing as much restraint as this flawed mammal is able, yet joy at the possibility that we might realize we are on very similar pages in some ways, while acknowledging that I am starting to fail to avoid quote-mania, I present the following quotes from MCTB from Chapters 37, 30, 13, and 37 respectively:

“Spirituality that ignores, denies, or covers up our inevitable undesirable sides is doomed to be bitten and burned by them. Models of realization that involve high ideals of human perfection have caused so much dejection, despair, and misguided effort throughout the ages that I have no qualms about doing my very best to try to smash them to pieces on the sharp rocks of reality. They are not completely useless, and there is some value in keeping the standards to which we aspire high, as we will see in the next chapter, but most of the time they are taken too seriously to be helpful at all.”

“I have concluded that, with very rare and fleeting exceptions, ninety-five percent of the sensations that make up our experience are really no problem at all, even in the difficult stages, but seeing this clearly is not always easy. When we fixate on very painful or very pleasant sensations, we can easily miss the fact that most of our reality is likely made up of sensations that are no big deal, and thus we miss many great opportunities for easy insights. Further, the Dark Night can bring up all sorts of unfamiliar feelings that we have experienced rarely if ever with such clarity or intensity. This has the effect of busting attempts at spiritual bypassing, as the Dark Night is basically the exact opposite of spiritual bypassing. We are in it, deep into it, facing our darkest and most challenging stuff. However, until we get used to these feelings, they can frighten us and make us reactive because of our lack of familiarity with them, even if they are not actually that strongly unpleasant at a sensate level.

What compounds our misery is the mental content we tend to kick up in response to sensations. Often the stories we make up and then tell ourselves, about why these difficulties are happening and what it all means, exacerbate the problem they were intended to solve. There are multiple ways to reframe the meaning of these occurrences that might make them more bearable and point to solutions that are more likely to work, particularly learning to reframe them in terms of these insight maps (and the three characteristics), which is why they can be so valuable. It is not that the insight maps are the be-all and end-all of meaning, as they obviously aren’t. However, focusing entirely on the psychological end of our work without also focusing on the underlying insight process is a common trap that typically doesn’t go as well as the dual approach that keeps making progress on the insight front also.”

“The list above omitted the nearly perennial issues of corruption, miscommunications, personality cults, crushes, affairs, romances, vendettas, scandals, drug use, power plays, politics, agendas, financial concerns, cliques, physical and mental illness, and all the other challenges that can show up anywhere there are people. In short, whatever you imagine that you or other people might have issues around, these are bound to occur sooner or later, or even to be exponentially magnified, if you spend enough time in spiritual circles or retreat centers. While solo practice is an option, it doesn’t get you away from these and has its own set of downsides, such as making you think you have fewer issues than you do. There is nothing like interacting with others to show us our blind spots in relation to our issues, whether we are great meditators or not.”

“Further, it is oh-so-easy to imagine that the teachers on the front cushions couldn’t possibly be as neurotic as we are, and before you know it we have the breeding ground for massive shadow sides, exploitation, isolation, and scandal, just like we had with the models that serve up emotional perfection. The jet-set culture of teachers popping in and out of town, getting up on the front cushion, spouting their beautiful ideals, and jetting off to somewhere else before anyone can see them as the humans they really are, only goes to reinforce these dangerous notions. It is just so easy to project all kinds of wondrous qualities onto them when the dream is so nicely laid out, the opportunities for reality testing so few, and the amount of transference and countertransference out there is simply huge.”

I had so many quotes to choose from, I hardly knew where to start. Again, were you to rewrite these, how would you do it so that a person like you would remember them and understand their meaning better?

Parlêtre: Many have spoken to the fact that spiritual teachers are subject to idealization by students, lose access to accountability structures, etc.

Daniel: Amen, Brother!

Parlêtre: Another factor, less recognized, is that meditation as traditionally conceived undercuts the process of psychological self-understanding (i.e., recognizing the meaning of our thoughts and feelings, how they link up with our personal histories, and how they drive patterns of emotion and behavior that recur over time).

Daniel: While it is true that many conceive of meditation and insight that way, and this is a serious problem, I explicitly do not, and go on at length about that “not”. I firmly state numerous places that this understanding is a seriously rapid way to totally mind-fuck yourself, using only slightly less strong language. In this, we are on the same page except for the fact that you attempt to associate such a misunderstanding with what I was trying to say. At this point, I truly feel I am in a surrealist, Kafka-esque drama based on the childhood game of Backwards Day where whatever I write will be interpreted the exactly opposite way it was intended, a theme that will continue until the very last page, unfortunately.

Parlêtre: I have seen this in process take place in many patients who have engaged extensively with meditation and also in my own engagement with these practices.

Daniel: I have similarly seen this hundreds of times in my own practice back in the day, and today in emails, posts, and people I have spoken with, and spend literally hours per week trying to correct this gross misunderstanding.

Parlêtre: Recurrent training to attend to the sensate experience moment-by-moment can undermine the capacity to make meaning of experience.

Daniel: Again, Friend, in this, we are on the same page, and presumably with similar feelings towards this truly unhelpful and damaging phenomenon.

Parlêtre: (The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described this as an ‘attack on linking’, that is, on the meaning-making function of the mind.) When I ask these patients how they are feeling, or what they are thinking, or what’s on their mind, they tend to answer in terms of their sensate experience, which makes it difficult for them to engage in a transformative process of psychological self-understanding.

Daniel: Yes! Yay! Consensus! A taste of joy in the otherwise bleak landscape of frustration. Back to the frustration: I spent much of the first part of your book explaining that people should train in sila first and foremost and also even after any grand successes in meditation, defining it as The First and Last Training. I define sila as including psychology and all other elements of ordinary care and development in the ordinary world. I very carefully state many times that they should only apply the frameworks and assumptions of Wisdom (which involve immediate sensate experience) when during explicit periods when they are doing that very narrow type of training and not mix them up with other forms of work if one can possibly help it. How would you feel when those blogging about your work totally miss key meanings of that whole first section and accuse you of doing what you went so far out of your way to try not to do? While this might be entirely my failure as an author, is it possible that there are causes for this on the readers’ sides? Are you willing to acknowledge some mutually dependent causation to this problem? Any hint of the possibility of blame being shared a bit here? Throw this dog a bone, if you are able.

Parlêtre: In my next post, I’ll look at the theory of transformation implicit in PD.

Daniel: Again, that reductionistic PD which totally misses the intended meaning of PD. How would you explicitly frame PD other than the following such that someone such as yourself and your patients might better understand its intended meaning?

I quote from Chapter 1, which I presume you got as far as:

“In this same pragmatic vein, there has arisen a global movement, inspired by numerous things and promoted by many people, now often referred to as the “Pragmatic Dharma” movement—which I hope one day will be called something more welcoming of those allergic to words such as dharma. This movement can be characterized as embracing a worldview that includes the following ideas:

We can improve the way our minds function and the way they perceive and process reality, in numerous skillful ways.

What works is key. Specifically: it doesn’t matter at all where you draw useful things from if they are effective, meaning that they provide the specific benefits sought.

Innovating by extracting key useful elements from various traditions, and combining things to come up with something that works for you is encouraged, as is pursuing traditional goals in traditional ways, as long as the approach works.

This book follows this general approach while refraining from being dismissive of elements of great value from the old traditions.

Part One contains some traditional lists that were taught by the Buddha and relate directly to spiritual training. They make important and practical points in very concise ways. These teachings were presented succinctly on purpose so that people could remember them and use them. It is their very simplicity that makes them so practical and down-to-earth.

However, I am going to take these very condensed teachings and go on and on about them. It turns out that the Buddha sometimes made things so simple that we, 2,500+ years later, are left wondering what he was talking about and how to apply his teachings to our lives. Still, it is amazing that his teachings are still so relevant to our lives today. These teachings are designed to help people get in touch with their reality in some way that makes a difference. They can also help people avoid some of the common pitfalls on the spiritual path and in life in general, some of which I will talk about later.

The Buddha’s teachings are also designed to help people develop along some of the nearly infinite axes of development. By axes of development, I mean all the ways we can improve our mind, body, and world. Since this is an endless undertaking, in this book we will focus on a relatively few very specific ones. As the book goes along, I will introduce various things we can practice, experience, gain insight into, develop, and modify that make a positive difference.

Chapter one, “The Three Trainings”, introduces morality, concentration, and wisdom (see also The Long Discourses of the Buddha, or the Digha Nikaya, sutta 10, usually referred to as DN 10). These three trainings encompass the sum of the Buddhist path. Thus, as is traditional and for good reason, they will be used as the conceptual framework for this book. The three trainings involve skills that we consciously and explicitly try to master. Each training has its own specific set of premises, goals, practices, and standards of mastery for those practices. These are different from each other, and problems can arise if we conflate the premises of one training when pursuing the others. Each training also has its common pitfalls, limitations, and shadow sides, which are rarely made clear, and failure to do so has caused much confusion.”

Those shadow sides, limitations, and pitfalls are exactly what I discuss later, and involve the exact critiques of solely focusing on immediate experience that you also care about.

Parlêtre: Critique of Pragmatic Dharma #2

with 3 comments

In my last post, I wrote about the ways that I see Pragmatic Dharma (PD) as based upon an impoverished view of the mind.

Daniel: Which, again, by this point you know well my feelings and thoughts on this ironic interpretation of PD and MCTB.

Parlêtre: I argued that it specifically neglects the role of meaning in mental life.

Daniel: I argue explicitly the opposite. Ouch, that divide feels pretty uncomfortable. Oh, wait, Attachment Theory. Are we both possibly playing out our interpretations of MCTB through our various Drivers to maintain a functional distance from projected/reinterpreted parent figures, such as The Dharma, A Teacher, An Authority, etc. so as to come up with a Script in which MCTB must be the limited thing you imagine it to be and so you can keep your comfortable emotional and intellectual distance from it, just as I do the same sort of thing to you? If so, we are likely doomed to failure without addressing those in some conscious way.

If there are no possible such dynamics (likely impossible, given how totally differently we read and interpret words as is going on here), then perhaps we will be ok. However, if we are just habitually playing out our Attachment Styles, those are likely somewhat fixed, and likely suppressed even worse as we both know what those are and are likely too proud to allow a more conscious acknowledgement that we both likely do this all the damn time despite our intellectual knowledge of the phenomenon, then this also will likely go badly.

Also, given that MCTB does explicitly throw some serious critical shade on some aspects of misapplied psychology, particularly in some meditative contexts, and thus, by categorical inclusion, psychoanalysis, is it possible that part of your apparently strong cognitive filters to miss so many of the explicit words in MCTB is based on a reflexive tribal loyalty to your profession, just as much of what is written in MCTB is a reaction to the shadow sides of psychology gone haywire on insight meditation retreats in the hands of inept practitioners of it which thus tainted my tribe of Buddhism? If we can’t be conscious of these dynamics, we also likely will fail in our endeavors here. Actually, given that contemporary evidence indicates that our capacity to overcome such barriers even to organize sufficiently to save our species from likely extinction appears to be utterly insufficient, what are the chances that, given a vastly less potentially motivating task as this one that we will be successful?

Parlêtre: I suggested that this explains, in part, the plethora of spiritual bypassing and boundary violations in meditation communities.

Daniel: Yes, on this we very strongly agree, O Potential Ally in this Noble Fight (don’t you just love the vocative case and how personal it is?).

Parlêtre: I also suggested that it undermines our capacity to recognize and work through psychological problems. I’d like to say a bit more about the philosophical ideas that support these points here.

Daniel: Yes! Yay!

Parlêtre: In a recent podcast interview, Michael Taft asked Culadasa whether meditation might get in the way of seeing, much less of working through, certain psychological problems. I would argue that this is necessarily the case to the extent that meditation is understood as focusing on sensate experience as it arises moment to moment.

Daniel: Ok, speaking of blind spots, political landmines, the toxic politics of “Pragmatic Dharma”, psychological problems, spiritual bypassing, and the like, I am guessing that you are relatively naïve to those issues as they apply in this specific case and thus, as an outsider, will be forgiven for proving strong temptation for me to err even further than I have done by even mentioning these topics. This, by the way, is an explicit Dog Whistle to My Posse, but also will be to those who follow these debates from other angles and with other agendas. Yay, friends! Ouch, enemies! I can only imagine the hours of painful reading and typing that will result from this one paragraph. Holy shit, we are a bunch of dumb mammals crashing around a dying earth.

Parlêtre: Why? Because the nature of the mind is that it depends upon shared semiotic systems, chief among them language (Litowitz, 2014).

Daniel: Cleary, numerous aspects of “mind” depend on shared semiotic systems, which, for those who are not familiar with this technical terms, and I quote Wikipedia: “Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the study of sign process….It includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.”

Parlêtre: By undercutting our capacity for symbolic engagement through language, we, in essence, cordon off huge portions of our minds [1].

Daniel: Yes, utterly correct. Here’s the trick: this is a bug and a feature. It is clearly a bug for many types of work, namely any work that involves language and concepts, which is a huge amount of what is important in life. Yet, as clearly explained in MCTB, it is also a feature that can be used in very specific contexts for very specific purposes, namely certain specific meditation practices, and hopefully fully aware of its serious downsides which you rightly mention. It is also useful for some flow states, some sports, some activities like playing music, or making love, or going to sleep, or some other activities that might not involve that staggeringly useful power of symbolic representation and manipulation. Also, when psychoanalysis goes very deep, when you get to the good stuff, the reason that most people I have talked with say they go into psychoanalysis, those profound breakthroughs that change lives, do they occur purely at the level of symbol, or do they also involve visceral, functional, biochemical, structural components that might better be described using other symbols than “symbolic”?

You probably fail to appreciate the Mythic Resonance of this Story to some aspects of my Primitive Psyche. You see, in my Childlike, Mythic World, I went on a Hero’s Quest to Learn Meditation and Awaken, to find the Holy Grail of True Knowledge, to Face the Unknown, to Plunge Valiantly into Danger, was tempted to Err and Failed, like an Knight-Errant on a Quest for the Lady of Wisdom succumbing to temptation of Another and away from the True Path, yet, having my Dreams Die, and being Plunged into the Underworld, I finally triumphed over Death, and emerged to Return Home to find Redemption.

In this specific case, I learned meditation, made some of the classic errors you describe due to the undisclosed shadow sides of those practices, fucked up my life, finances, career, and first marriage, lived to tell the tale, and then spent thousands of hours trying to make lemonade from those lemons by trying to extract what gold is in those techniques while going far outside of my Tradition to bring those exact criticisms to that Tradition, and at great pain due to the alienation that caused. I also got my career together, rebuilt my finances, and found a stable marriage that lasts to this day. Thus, your framing of this is doubly painful, as it not only denies me a key aspect of that Redemption of serving that lemonade to others, but it accuses me of instead making more lemons, which was exactly what my Quest was designed to overcome. Ouch.

That said, if you misinterpret it this way, that is solid evidence for contributing to Lemon-Making, and evidence that you and your patients are not likely the only ones involved in this misunderstanding. What, specifically, should I do to MCTB2 to try to prevent this Mythic Tragedy as well as the practical point of not hurting others when I try to help them, to not lead them exactly into the Perils that I fought so hard to overcome?

I would be surprised if you didn’t have some Mythic Resonance to this also. In my clearly projection-heavy fantasy, you would similarly view yourself as the Crusading Knight for the True Faith, charging forth to rid the Holy Land of those Heretics who would dare defile the High Church of Psychiatry and spread the Heinous Heterodoxy that Vipassana is a complete world view and Sufficient and Salvific Psychological practice and worldview on its own. I realize it is terribly limiting to characterize you in this way and present it only to bring light and guilty admission to my own Transference, such that it might consciously be addressed.

In these Grand Quests, I submit we both have a touch of the Quixotic, as the Corporate, Religious, and Tribal Armies we have to conquer are vast and mighty, yet perchance our Tilting with Windmills will result in some good.

Parlêtre: Let me say a bit more about how I understand the term ‘mind.’

Under the umbrella term subjectivist, Cavell (1991) unpacks two assumptions about the nature of the mind that are deeply embedded in our common sense thinking. The first of these is that consciousness is a constitutive feature of the mental, which implies that first-person, subjective introspection is the only way to uncover mental contents.

Daniel: I personally would never imagine such a limited view to be true. It fails under the flimsiest of investigations. Curiously, one of the people I have to deal with in my extended social circle is a prominent person who claims to have no feelings or mind states of any kind. They are not actually the only one who claims this, but I will focus on this person for the sake of argument, as they make the loudest public claims to it. Yet, predictably, anyone who has been around them for even a few minutes knows they have moods, mind states, emotions, but through meditation dedicated to this ideal, they have literally cut off the ability to have any awareness of this at any times, so they claim. It is one of the most extreme examples and so one of the most demonstrative. I use this example often when decrying the exact problem with those who fail to draw on the experience of others to help them see what is going on. My online community that I started of thousands of people actually experienced its First Great Schism, as I call it, over these exact issues, and never entirely recovered from the damage, though some learned something from the process. I have also lost friends over this exact issue and seen some do serious damage to themselves and their relationships when they cut off external feedback and chased radically dehumanizing dreams.

Bill Hamilton warned about this sort of thing all the time, claiming that people can auto-hypnotize these massive blind spots by using models of meditation that idealize these sorts of results. Drawing on his kind warning, I write for thousands of words about this in my book.

Thus, I think you fail to appreciate the historical power that this issue has for me, and hopefully that will explain the outpouring of response you find here, giving some hint of sympathy for what is clearly over-the-top verbosity.

Parlêtre: With the importance he places on a second-person interpreter in uncovering unconscious thought processes and the centrality of transference and countertransference in psychoanalytic practice, Freud clearly rejects this first subjectivist assumption about the nature of mind.

Daniel: You, me, and Freud, Baby! Brothers in Arms.

Parlêtre: More recently, cognitive science, among other disciplines, has clearly shown us that outside observers can learn things about our minds not available to us via introspection.

Daniel: You don’t say? Recently this has been discovered that people can learn from the perspective of outside observers and that others can see things about us we can’t? In what recent year did this profound insight become known? Sorry for the deeply sarcastic tone here, but seriously, what are you doing? If this is news to someone, then, wow, ok, good they found out, and if it took it appearing in a scientific paper to get this message to them, ok, cool, Dude, but have they read basically any work of literature before these scientific papers came out that sometimes we can see things about others that they can’t and vice versa? Have they ever noticed that, perhaps people, such as their parents when they were growing up, could see things about them that they couldn’t? Even if resistant to such obvious insights, and requiring written confirmation before becoming conscious of them, ever picked up a Greek Tragedy? Just sayin’.

Parlêtre: The second subjectivist assumption is internalism, that is, the idea that my thoughts must be in principle describable by things happening inside me alone.

Daniel: Ok, wait, what? Are there seriously people that hold this view today? I am happy to have learned that such people exist today, as I had no idea that someone would subscribe to such a strict view. If you are finding patients that you are treating that believe this, I am very glad you are able to recognize it and help them. Ok, knowledge increasing by this exchange: good.

Parlêtre: Contra Descartes’ notion that the mind and body are separate substances, Freud believed that the mind was a function of the body. Where there is a mind, there is a brain-in-a-body upon which that mind supervenes. For the internalist, that mind’s content is determined by things that are happening “from the skin inward” (Cavell, 1991, p. 142) and the content of a mental state, the meaning of it, is intrinsic to it. Related to this is an assumption about subjective priority, which holds that an inner, private world comes before knowledge of an external reality, both epistemologically and developmentally. We first know our subjective sense impressions, which then become the building blocks of thought and knowledge. This seems to be a fundamental assumption of modern vipassana: that it is from our sensate experience that our whole world of experience is built up. It also seems to be a fundamental assumption of much of the modern neuroscience research into meditation. I would argue that it is a mistaken assumption.

Daniel: Ok, to the degree that this view is a fixed, blind view, to that degree I agree it should be countered, augmented, enhanced, transcended, and amended. Yay, agreement!

One key point however about Vipassana: it is a very specific training, part of a much larger package of development, and framed in very specific limited ways for extremely circumscribed effect, at least by those who are selling it with some degree of responsibility, IMN-HO, as discussed at length above.

Parlêtre: An externalist, anti-subjectivist view holds an individual’s mental states mean what they do only in relation to a vast network of other thoughts and to certain relations between that individual and the external world.

Daniel: For nearly all endeavors outside of a scope such as the particular period of training in the exercises described as “vipassana”, that is clearly the vastly more functional, superior view.

I quote from MCTB2, page 7, Chapter 2, Morality, The First and Last Training, to refresh your memory of my words:

“The third training, called wisdom, as understood within the Theravada framework, has limits, in that you can only take it so far, and it can be fully mastered. Interestingly, this cannot be said of the first two trainings of morality and concentration. There is no limit to the degree of skill that can be brought to how we conduct ourselves in the world. There are so many ways we can develop, and no obvious ways to define what one hundred percent mastery of even one of these might be. Thus, morality is also the last training in the sense of being the training we need to cultivate throughout our lives. We may be able to attain to extraordinary states of consciousness and understand many aspects of the actual nature of sensate reality, but what people see and what is causal are the ways that these abilities and understandings translate into how we live in the world.”

How should I rewrite those words so that they mean to someone like you something like what they mean to me?

Parlêtre: Wittgenstein (1953), for example, suggests that the meaning of a word requires knowing how to use it in activities with others.

Daniel: You mean words and terms like “Pragmatic Dharma”, “Vipassana”, and words like that in an online discussion? Ok, yes, good to have some idea of how those you are in conversation with are conceiving of them, and good to do the work of clarifying what they mean when those aren’t understood so there can be clear dialogue.

Parlêtre: Certainly the externalist, anti-subjectivist acknowledges that there is a sense in which the mental is subjective and private, for we have access to some of our thoughts in a way that is unique to us.

Daniel: I am truly glad it is so clever and insightful.

Parlêtre: Yet the externalist also argues that the mind is constituted by the relations between an individual and her environment, which includes other persons.

Daniel: I can’t help myself at this point, it seems, to add in just a touch of levity: https://time.com/4026473/ridiculous-science-studies/

Parlêtre: These relations take place as an individual interacts with her environment and with other persons in it.

Daniel: You don’t say? If you wish, and in further discussions, you can save a bit of time by assuming that this individual interacting with the online environment in relation to the posts of another person has, at that moment, some sense that these relations take place as an individual interacting with other persons in their environment, and all such similar straightforward points.

Parlêtre: These interactions are inseparable from communication, which is the exchange of messages through a medium that both interactors share.

Daniel: Ok, like we are doing here? Ok, got it! Thanks!

Parlêtre: In other words, the nature of the mental is that it depends upon shared semiotic systems, chief among them language (Litowitz, 2014). Language mediates our experiences even before we are born. Loewald (1980) writes of the patterns of sound and rhythm in the mother’s speech that permeate the infant’s early, even pre-natal, experience. Even then, the infant begins to lay down the structures for her developing linguistic capacity. Their minds are entangled from the beginning of the infant’s life through these shared language structures.

Daniel: Yes.

Parlêtre: If we take an externalist, anti-subjectivist view seriously, then one of our best tools for understanding our minds is language, through higher-order symbolic functioning that allows us to re-present our minds to ourselves.

Daniel: It is interesting that, as someone who has used a technique called “noting”, which uses language to understand the mind, I agree with you. In fact, I have used language in various forms for some years now, and really appreciate the many insights it has allowed me into many different aspects of my mind. For this, I am thankful.

Oh, wait, you weren’t saying that. You were saying that using language takes us away from our minds, like when we do noting.

Oh, wait, you weren’t saying that either. You are saying that language used certain ways both gives us certain insights into our minds and also blocks certain insight into our minds, depending on how it is used. Yay, consensus! In this, we agree yet again.

This insight might be used as a foundation on which to build a philosophy.

Oh, wait, I think someone already did that.

Having this nuanced understanding of language allows us to skillfully choose which aspects of ourselves we wish to illuminate and which we wish to block at that moment, which is, in some ways, explaining swimming to a fish, as that is most of our daily interchange with ourselves and others.

Denial. Advertising. Rhetoric. Argument. Music. Literature. Social Media. Selective Attention. We do this all friggin’ day long.

Parlêtre: From this point of view, our minds aren’t solely ‘inside’ our brains and bodies and, as such, won’t be cleansed of emotional poisons through a physiological / energetic process of purification (at least not entirely).

Daniel: Remember that Three Trainings thing, the fundamental organizational strategy of MCTB? It was kinda important. Perhaps you also recall one of MCTB’s most infamous but culty B-sides, that rockin’ little single called “The Limited Emotional Range Models”? You know, that model that got me so much heat in the flame wars of the Western Dharma World?

Apologies for the Long Quote, but, as I doubt you read my work, and appear to be interested in it hopefully as something other than a Foil for a Script (again TA language used), this from Chapter 37 of that infamous section that was basically enough to get me black listed from IMS and BCBS. (You probably didn’t know that they even tried hard to block me from accepting a personal invite from the organizer of a private conference at BCBS due to writing stuff like this, among other things. It is a strange world, but as you and I both know, words have staggering power.) The quote:

“It is also worth mentioning that a relentless emphasis on not indulging in the content of experience but noticing the three characteristics of the sensations that make up emotions can easily become a form of emotional repression and/or dissociation, so be careful to try to avoid that. Noting is not supposed to turn us into robots, it’s supposed to sharpen our wisdom and to help us realize the intrinsic alignment of heart, mind, and body.

I personally benefited from going back and giving the emotions much more attention after my more technical phase in which I gained some fundamental insights. It helped to round out the picture and to take those insights and integrate them into various aspects of how the emotions can manifest. Once we gain transformative insights, it is helpful then, in that new mode of perception, to revisit previous issues, hangups, neuroses, tensions, and conflicts—bringing them into awareness to see what is different and what is the same about them. This revisiting often leads to a changed perspective on them, and this often provides at least partial resolution of some aspect of them that was caught up in some previous way of being. Doing this consciously, intentionally, as a systematic practice often provides some additional looseness, openness, clarity, perspective, humor, and balance.

By this point, we are likely to be very, very familiar with our issues list. We might even write them down, sit down after deep insights, and bring them to mind in this new space one by one to see how they feel, how they perform, what is still sticky, what is less so, and so performance-test whatever it is we have learned on the cushion. I realize that, by writing a paragraph like this one, I risk undoing the necessary counterbalancing of the emotional models. However, if our fundamental insights don’t change something essential about the way we perceive and relate to what dwells in our human hearts, particularly the tricky bits, then more insights are called for and likely available with good insight practice. As one of my favorite meditation teachers, Sharda Rogell, once said, “Meditation is not about turning a human being into a stone. It is about turning a stone into a human being.” (Is this an original saying of hers? I don’t know, but she is the one who shared it with me.)

There are some benefits to identifying and then skillfully moderating the inner processes and external manifestations of negative emotions while simultaneously being conscious and accepting of the fact that difficult emotions occur. Morality training is vast and contains many foundational practices, forming a skillful, albeit incomplete, solution to how to deal optimally with our unskillful emotional aspects. For example, in my work as a physician, I do my best to maintain professionalism and kindness in the face of various suffering patients and their myriad reactions (such as kicking, hitting, screaming at, and spitting on their care providers) to help defuse situations and maintain an atmosphere that is more conducive to good patient care and healing for all involved. However, if we repress our various emotional reactions to suffering while simultaneously pretending that they can’t or don’t occur within us (usually based on some “spiritual” model that tells us they’re verboten), this sort of cultivated denial can also produce huge shadow sides and a lot of unconscious, more extremely reactive, neurotic, and even violent behavior. A tour of basically any spiritual community on the planet (or hospital for that matter) will reveal this in staggering abundance. Dissociation and passive aggression are classic manifestations of this sort of denial and refusal to see our emotions for what they are.”

I realize that presenting this quote is dangerous, as it could very likely be misinterpreted in the light of your apparent cognitive filters to read MCTB in very specific ways antithetical to its intended meaning. Perhaps try to see that I mean it very differently than you are likely to read it, and ponder, in a helpful way, how I might rewrite it to make it more understandable to one such as yourself and your patients.

Parlêtre: In fact, we won’t encounter significant parts of our minds at all unless we make use of reflection through language.

Daniel: By which, again, I presume you don’t mean noting, and, in fact presume you explicitly exclude this highly specialized technique from your argument.

As you rhetorically set this use of language up in explicit opposition to PD=MCTB, I presume you also don’t mean in this sort of reflective way, quoting from a technique, one you presumably have practiced as you stated, found in Chapter 22, Harnessing the Energy of the Defilements:

“Ask yourself: Is there a wish for yourself or others to be happy in these sensations? Is there a wish for the world to be a better place? Is there a wish for someone to understand something important? Is there a wish for things to be better than they are? Is there a wish to find pleasure, tranquility, or the end of suffering?

Sit with these questions, with the sensations that make them up, allowing them to be strong enough for you to see what is going on but not so strong that you become completely overwhelmed by them.

Notice that fear has in it the desire to protect us or those we care for. Anger wants to right a perceived wrong, wants us or the world to be happy and work well, or for justice to be done. Frustration comes from the caring sensations of anger being thwarted. Desire is rooted in the wish to be happy. Judgment comes from the wish for things to conform to high standards. Sadness comes from the sense of how good things could be and from the loss of something cherished. I could go on like this for a whole book, so don’t turn these into dogma; each has much more nuance that you can explore.

Actively reflecting along these lines, sit with this compassionate wish, acknowledge it, and feel the compassionate aspect of it.”

Given your opposition to MCTB and its practices, I presume you also don’t mean in this sort of a recommended linguistic reflective way, as mentioned in Chapter 2:

“One pitfall that must be addressed here, however, since it is so common, is guilt. We in the West have grown up in a relatively privileged culture in which we can be extremely hard on ourselves, causing ourselves staggering amounts of pain to little good effect. If we can learn to substitute wise remorse, which simply says, “Well, that didn’t work, and that is unfortunate. I will try my best to figure out why and hopefully do something better next time,” we will be much better able to train successfully in living a good and useful life.”

Or this sort of an MCTB recommended way, which I presume you practiced, as you said you had practiced MCTB’s techniques, which to me really looks a lot like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which, I get, is a competitor to psychoanalysis, so I imagine that I understand your objection to this cognitive, linguistic technique, from Chapter 23:

“Sutta 20 in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (MN 20) is called “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts”. In it, the Buddha admonishes his followers to deal with unskillful, evil, unwholesome, or useless thoughts in the following ways:

If the meditator is paying attention to something that is causing these unskillful thoughts, then he or she should give attention to something wholesome that does not produce unskillful thoughts.

If this fails, then the meditator should reflect on the danger in those unskillful thoughts and thus try to condition him or herself not to think such thoughts in this way.

If this fails, then the meditator should try to ignore those thoughts and not give them any attention.

If this fails, he or she should give attention to quieting the mind and to stilling these thoughts.

If this fails, the meditator should bear down with full will and “crush mind with mind”, forcing the thoughts to stop with unremitting and unrestrained effort.

Or this sort of MCTB advice from Chapter 4:

“There are many types of insight that we may derive from experiencing the world. Usually, we might think of training in wisdom as having to do with conventional issues like how to live our lives. In this sense, we might just try to be wiser. Perhaps we could skillfully reflect on a personal or professional situation that went badly and see if perhaps in the future some wisdom gained from that experience might change the way we live our life.”

Ok, I’ll stop, but I find it weird that you would be against all of those techniques that you have practiced and read all about in MCTB. What is so wrong with them?

Parlêtre: In important ways, it is not possible to encounter our unconscious – at least in the sense implied by this perspective – through moment-to-moment awareness of our sensate experience.

Daniel: I love it when straightforward things are straightforward. You can’t experience that which isn’t part of experience. Yes! Good. Yet, as we all know, you can try to extrapolate from it, as we all do all the time though often pretty badly. I presume you didn’t do as MCTB recommends and read Blink, a great book which discussed the science of this, as recommended here in Chapter 11:

Their own practice might be in a strange or difficult place and they might not be able to fully control the bleed-through from that. So, if something seems off in an interview or interaction, consider gently asking what is going on. They might not tell you, and they might not even know or be able to identify the reason for the difficulty at that moment or ever (check out Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, for fascinating information on how we try to retrospectively explain our behavior and just make things up). It might be that that’s the way they are, but at least considering the issue shows that you have enough of a meta-perspective to come up with a broader assessment of what is happening at that moment rather than personalizing it and backsliding to reactivity.

However, it is also possible that something about that interaction is in fact personal in relative terms, meaning that the reaction is about you and your way of being in that interaction. What personal, meditative, psychological or other things were going on that influenced each part of this book as I wrote it? I am certain I couldn’t tell you everything that influenced the tone and presentation of each part, and in person in real-time my assessment would probably be just as inaccurate and incomplete.”

Parlêtre: Yes, in meditation we can have the experience of our thoughts bubbling just beneath the surface – what Shinzen Young calls the brain’s pre-processing – but this is not the unconscious that I’m referring to, it, or at least not all of it.

Daniel: Agreed.

Parlêtre: Let me give an example. Suppose that I have just learned that a close friend has died. I’m deeply saddened by this news. Moments later, I spill a cup of coffee on my new pants and become quite angry. Let’s further suppose that, throughout my life, I’ve had difficulty feeling sadness. For reasons related to my personal history, sadness frightens me. In my moment of anger, if I adopt the perspective of awareness of sensate experience, moment-by-moment, then I will have no access to the fact that I am sad. On the contrary, my sensate experience seems to reflect the fact that I am angry. But given what I know about myself, it’s quite reasonable to posit that my anger is a defense against the feeling of sadness, a feeling of which I am unconscious as I am caught up in my anger.

Daniel: You know I am an emergency medicine doctor, right? One of the tricks to being successful at that job involves that exact sort of awareness in real time while rapidly multitasking. One good example of the phenomenon you mention that I got to learn about in myself is that, while I can witness the death of most adults and be pretty functional and compensate pretty well almost immediately after I tell the family what happened, this is not true with dead kids and babies, and 15 years between residency and my clinical practice didn’t change that. It took me at least a few hours after each one before that creepy feeling of distraction, spaciness, fatigue, and cynicism would start to fade, and I really wouldn’t be anything like back to something like full power until the next day at the latest. Thus, I learned to tell my nurse and APP colleagues this, to let them provide a bit of support, have my back, and watch for decisions and interactions during the rest of the shift that weren’t at the level that they were used to from me, as, despite all my dreams of being stronger than this, I had to admit that I couldn’t count on myself alone to do this. I also attempted to consciously provide that same support for them, as the death of a child hit us all hard.

Parlêtre: [1] I believe that sensate experience, or ‘nonconceptual experience’ as Ken McLeod discussed in a recent Imperfect Buddha podcast, is thoroughly infiltrated by language and ideology, but that is a separate discussion.

References

Cavell, M. (1991). The subject of mind. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72, 141 – 154.

Loewald, H.W. (1980). Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Litowitz, B.E. (2014). Coming to terms with intersubjectivity: Keeping language in mind. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(2), 295 – 312.

Wittgenstein, L. & Anscombe, G.E.M. (1997). Philosophical investigations. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Parlêtre: Critique of Pragmatic Dharma #3

with one comment

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;

Daniel: That is kind of you. I respect you for sticking your neck out there, particularly given what you probably knew about my likely habitual response and its rhetorical qualities if you are familiar with my work. It is a somewhat brave thing to do, honestly. I also respect that you care about your patients and those who would read MCTB and be affected the way you were. I hope that you are able to offer the helpful suggestions I humbly request.

Parlêtre: it is a sincere dialog with a person and his or her ideas.

Daniel: Hopefully, you will similarly appreciate that I carefully read and considered each of your points. That sort of careful reading of another’s work is so valuable in these situations.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Considering my works apparently contributed to you and your patients being lead down the Dark Passages that I intentionally wished you to avoid rather than following my younger, foolish self down them, I will bet that did give you a lot to think about.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: We have covered this already.

Parlêtre: 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.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: This actually requires a bit more nuance than we had time for. Again, presuming that you didn’t read MCTB2 this time, I get why you were confused. In fact, to explain it is confusing to many. Imagine that you started off not perceiving the little intentions that precede actions and thoughts clearly in your own perception, and then trained hard to bring those more into your conscious awareness. In this way, one can see them actually arise and vanish on their own in a way that was unconscious or subconscious before. In this way, it is through clarity that they are known, not denial. I have greater sensate perception abilities than before, as that is how I trained.

In the same way, I trained to notice the little mental impressions that occur after other experiences. Most are only partially conscious of these, taking them to be something that they are not. They confuse the impression of a phenomena for the phenomena itself. Not only does learning to perceive mental impressions as mental impressions help make them much clearer, it also provides fascinating partial solutions to some complex problems that phenomenologists and philosophers have struggled with for thousands of years. I will leave off that fascinating topic for the moment to focus on your critique. The key point is that, through training, I brightened aspects of my experience, and, in doing so, discovered that they were not what I thought they were. This is the exact opposite of denial or repression.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Actually, it was vastly more cycles than that, as stated clearly in MCTB1 and MCTB2, but, by this point, it is clear the degree to which you studied that text of which you offer critique. I realize that I might be old school, but I advise you to consider reading books at least once before you critique them, or so I was taught in sixth grade when I started writing book reports. Yes, I know it is really, really long, some 320,000 words, and reading that is a pain in the ass, particularly these days, when getting someone to put down their phone or keyboard for long enough to read a long book is like pulling teeth. Still, sometimes good things come from hard work. Might look at the section that discusses “Twelfth Path”, namely Chapter 36, and other models found in Chapter 37, such as in A Revised Four Path Model.

Parlêtre: 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’.

Daniel: Those topics are best investigated through direct experience, as these topics are only really interesting in the technical context of a craftsperson/practitioner trying to replicate those levels of the experiment. Still, we can play at the level of armchair theory if you really wish to, though I am not sure it will help you that much. Let’s say that I told you, “Yeah, probably best to mix in 10% bicarb into your lidocaine for that injection,” and you weren’t actually a doctor or performing procedures involving lidocaine. It has that feel to me, just FYI.

Parlêtre: Beginning with the first question, members of the PD movement seem to regard cessation as a “transformational object” (Bollas, 1987),

Daniel: Some do, some don’t, some are clearly ambiguous on the point. Actually, it is a source of considerable controversy, and it also depends on how you draw the boundary of PD and which teachers you believe are caught within that boundary. That’s part of the blessing and curse of pragmatism and the freedom for those in it to adopt various conceptual frameworks they find helpful for their purposes, rather than this being a rigid structured orthodoxy.

Parlêtre: an experience that will alter self-experience to a remarkable degree,

Daniel: Actually, some hardly notice it. It is a funny thing. Most overcall what we would call the A&P and think it is a Fruition, etc. Plenty do this for other attainments, such as momentary dips into formless experiences. However, a few odd ones for whatever complex and unknown reasons will have a Cessation/Fruition and yet not notice much change. Just saying that, in the Wild, rather than in theory, we find a range of presentations.

Parlêtre: akin to a mother soothing a young child in acute distress, transforming his agony into relaxation and delight.

Daniel: I wouldn’t describe it that way, and I don’t actually know anyone who has, but I will roll with it just to see where you are headed with this.

Parlêtre: 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).

Daniel: Actually, it is not Fruition/Cessation that does that on its own, and, in fact, it is routinely reported (well not routinely, as these numbers are pretty small), that people go through thousands if not tens of thousands of Fruitions/Cessations before they achieve that goal, the accomplishment of which is unfortunately rather rare. The experience is one thing, the perceptual changes it creates are another, the interpretation is another, and the other implications are some others. Let’s please be sure we keep these straight as we go and not presume that we can talk about that whole package without taking it apart a bit, as otherwise we risk many of the errors that the SNB kids routinely accuse those of us “x-Buddhists” of.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: No! Straight up fucking no! Stop the madness! Seriously! Dude! WTF?

Sorry, you have touched a nerve, a nerve I will explain as calmly as I can. The vast majority of “peak experiences” are the A&P, insight stage 4. A few peak experiences occur in Equanimity, insight stage 11. A very small percentage of what people call Fruition/Cessation are labeled as “peak experiences” even by those who have this. Typically, most find it a letdown, particularly in comparison to the A&P. Yes, the aftershocks can be impressive, but the thing itself isn’t even an experience. It is what would happen if you just edited out some frames of your personal movie. As such, Fruition is not an experience in that sense. It is a glitch, like a gap without anything in the gap, just a bad edit between the frames, like the glitch in the movie Matrix involving the cat. It has a very boring setup to it, a very specific entrance lasting less than a second that, while revealing and profound, isn’t really pleasant, and the exit just feels a bit confusing, if often refreshing in some way, but it is a clean refreshing.

One of the serious issues that is contributing to burnout for me personally is my bizarre notion that somehow I should make myself freely available to seemingly daily field emails and calls and the like from people who had a “peak experience” with classic A&P phenomenology that they or some (typically for-profit or corporate) insight teacher has diagnosed as a Fruition/Cessation. It is seriously burning me out, like wanting to say, “Fuck the whole thing and move to an island in Thailand without an internet connection,” burned out.

This is my personal issue, and clearly I need to learn to set better boundaries, but, since we are here, and since you risk becoming to me just one more asshole contributing to this chronic problem, a problem the old texts even warn about (see Visuddhimagga Chapter XX somewhere near the end of it, for those not spasmotically allergic to the Commentaries), as it was clearly common many hundreds of years ago. Help me by not becoming “that guy”, that dude who helps contribute to this epidemic of misdiagnosis. I really don’t want to view you that way, as I have enough disgust about this already.

Parlêtre: But how is it, exactly, that a cessation experience could lead to lasting transformation of the mind?

Daniel: That is a seriously complicated topic, only some small part of which is known. How much do you seriously want to focus on that? Let me know, and I will go there in as much detail as I can muster, but perhaps check out the chapters that attempts to explain this, specifically Chapter 30, Conformity section, and Chapter 31, the Three Doors. As to the true underlying phenomenology, we have no clue, though I do have a recording of a 132-lead EEG tracing from Dr Jud Brewer’s lab during which I attained to a few Fruitions, though, as they eyelids often blink or flicker at just that moment the muscle artifact is going to make interpretation and analysis difficult. Theory: it has something to do with a subjectively perfect convergence and synchrony of attention centers, but that’s about the best I can do. This topic might not be as fruitful for your other points, as it were, though it is interesting. Perhaps, if you have the background and chops, consider lending your talents to contributing to the science of this, such that we gain further knowledge of what is really going on from other vantage points, the Great Feast as the punk rocker calls it.

Parlêtre: 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 the meaning of the event.

Daniel: Yes, this is part of the clearly organic process that builds up to it. It has long been debated in the Vipassana community this sort of chicken and egg question, which came first, the insight or the Fruition, but, as with the chicken and egg question, the answer has to be the egg. In other words, yes, it is clearly a developmental process where you slowly build up the wiring, understanding, or however you want to try to conceptualize a process we can only describe subjectively and phenomenologically at this point. Perhaps check out Chapter 34 on the Vipassana Jhanas, as it talks a bit about this from an experiential point of view but doesn’t slice it as finely as the stages of insight or get bogged down as much in the finer phenomenology along the way.

Parlêtre: 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).

Daniel: Well, yes. Clearly, a glitch in experience and some missing frames isn’t that interesting, even as a thing to happen. Plenty of people nod off, space, out, don’t hear something that their partner said as their mind was in a fog, or whatever. You can easily go to a float tank and have a “theta state”, as they call them, where time vanishes, and 60 minutes seems like 15. It is the specific perceptual, functional, and possibly paradigmatic changes that occur as a result of that very specific, very unusual manner in which that particularly specific glitch in perception occurs and clearly also as a result of the developmental process that leads to it.

Parlêtre: Certainly the experience of cessation

Daniel: Please stop saying that. It is not an experience. It is the sort of verbal habit that so grates upon the nerves of a strict and obsessive phenomenologist such as me. It is like an editor having to read “literally” over and over again in a paper they are being paid to edit. Ouch.

Parlêtre: reveals that experience, and the self-as-agent in particular, is constructed in some sense,

Daniel: Yes, that it does do, in some very specific, limited sense.

Parlêtre: but it hardly seems necessary to go through 16 stages of insight to realize that, even in a deeply experiential way.

Daniel: Ah, you wade deeper and deeper into these murky waters. I will start simply: tell me what specific, verifiable knowledge you have that supports this point of view. If you really have that conclusive longitudinal, population-based data, let’s analyze it and publish it. If not, then tell me exactly how you know that.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Which “members of the PD community” do you mean, and how could you even define what that is? We ourselves can’t even agree on what and who might fall into that designation, just FYI. I don’t mean any evasion here by this.

Parlêtre: I have often encountered the idea that “because experience is constructed, we can deconstruct it and the re-construct it differently.”

Daniel: That is clearly true within certain limits, and so the debate comes regarding where those limits are and how one could really know. Attempting to build consensus, let’s start with the premise that there is some limit beyond which we would both agree that we no longer believe it can be re-constructed so differently from how it was.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Funny to call the foundation of your profession “trivial”. I am not sure that it is trivial, but you would know better than I. Might check up on the literature of on the “placebo”, whatever that is. It is interesting stuff.

Parlêtre: Yet I also feel that much of the dialogue I have encountered fails to acknowledge the limits of reconstruction (that is, constraints on meaning).

Daniel: Please give examples so that these points might be more clearly addressed. Without concrete specifics, it is hard to know what stands out for you and is not so absurd as to be written off yet is not so obvious as to be unworthy of comment.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: I know a lot about grief, having grieved numerous losses in my own life and witnessed countless others go through what I will conceptualize in EKR terms as the Five Stage of Grief. Yes, these are a part of this mortal life. I quote from MCTB, Chapter 37, the Psychological Models, which, given your career and interest in my writings, I presume you have read:

When I think about what it would take to achieve freedom from all psychological stuff, the response that comes is this: life is about stuff. Stuff is part of being alive. There is no way out of this while you are still living. There will be confusion, pain, miscommunication, misinterpretation, maladaptive patterns of behavior, unhelpful emotional reactions, weird personality traits, neuroses, and possibly much worse. There will be power plays, twisted psychological games, people with major personality disorders (which may include ourselves and our dharma friends and teachers), and craziness. The injuries continue right along with the healing and eventually the injuries win and we die. This is a fundamental teaching of the Buddha (SN 4.6). We could arguably classify all of these as learning and growth opportunities, or we could lump them into the great slagheap called “suffering”; you must determine for yourself which paradigm works best for you as you go along. I wish the whole Western Buddhist world would just get over this notion that these practices are all about getting to our happy place where nothing can ever go wrong, hurt us, or make us neurotic, and move on to mastering real Buddhist practice rather than chasing some ideal that will never appear.

Is that a reasonable basis on which to base a discussion, or did you have something else in mind?

Parlêtre: Consider Ingram’s (paraphrased) comment, “A smell of a rose is just a bunch of chemicals. It’s not real.”

Ok, that’s the Scientific Materialist Model that I am explaining. In certain contexts, this is a very useful model. Just FYI, while I can put on a Scientific Materialist Hat when I need to, as I did then, nobody hopefully will be so cruel to accuse me of being a Scientific Materialist. You have to take that quote in its specific context, something that I realize is hard to do, or perhaps I didn’t explain myself properly, or perhaps both.

Parlêtre: (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.

Daniel: Well, that’s complicated, very complicated, in fact. It is such a huge topic I am not sure where to start. I was just looking at an image circulating on Twitter that involved a bunch of images of brown balls selectively overlaid by lines of red, blue, and green. Depending on which line overlaid the spheres, they looked entirely different colors, yet they were all the same color when the lines weren’t there. If you wear glasses that invert the world long enough, eventually your brain will literally flip your visual field, something that will wear off eventually if you take them off. You are probably familiar with these sorts of examples.

However, if you are trying to level the criticism at me that I believe that we can magically make the world any way we wish, then you have seriously misunderstood me and so seriously misrepresented me.

Parlêtre: (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.)

Daniel: Well, that’s also very complicated. I can hear the voices of my peers screaming, “You idiot! We told you this would happen. Your talking about magick to the Muggles always leads to this sort of stupidity and crazy talk! They read The Secret and lose their furry little minds! There is no winning to be had there!” However, being clearly an idiot myself without the common sense that God gave a duck, I will ignore most of the functionally accumulated advice to shut up about it and instead plunge on. It is true that, if we get our concentration strong enough, we can experience what we wish to, though the limits of this are not known to me. Interestingly, it is from the literature on hypnotism that you might at least derive some sense of what might be possible in that territory.

To try to bridge the gap between a practitioner and a philosopher/critic with some psychological experience who doesn’t apparently have and has never had that truly unusual but well-described level of concentration, will attempt an example.

I recall from my early teenage years when we lived across the street from a man who was a psychologist and also a hypnotist who worked primarily at the large inpatient state mental health hospital in the state where I grew up. When a family member who had asthma would get a bad attack, if this hypnotist wasn’t around, he would go the emergency department, get a blood gas arterial stick (very painful), get a shot of adrenaline, get numerous breathing treatments, and get some Theophylline. Eventually, shaking from all those medications, he would get better. It was not quick. It probably cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. It was pretty traumatic for him as well.

However, if this hypnotist was home, he would just walk across the street and get hypnotized. It was wild to watch. Within a minute or two he would be in some very odd state. On command, his breathing would slow, his wheezing stop, his sweating halt, and he would calm down. Then the hypnotist would often say something like, “You are going into a movie theater, walking to your seat. Star Wars starts playing. Ok, now the movie is done. You feel well. You walk out of the theater happy. You are now waking up.” He would suddenly be back, yelling, “Hey, that was so cool, I just saw Star Wars!” His lungs would be clear for the day.

Would we have taken him to this hypnotist if he got hit by a car and was seriously injured? Clearly not. However, for some things, the mind does have power beyond what we may sometimes ordinarily imagine. Again, where all of those lines are, I don’t know, but that’s what I have fun exploring.

Parlêtre: 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]

Daniel: Clearly. We agree on this in general terms.

Parlêtre: 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?

Daniel: It is specifically the illusion of independent, noncausal control, an illusion that resolves by improving the instrument of perception.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: That is one part of it, as it is a complex process that has many aspects.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Clearly, that level of discrimination has many uses. Still, it can be improved upon, as happens as we develop. I think you and are likely to just disagree on how far and by what mechanism that development occurs.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Very good. We are actually on functionally very similar pages here so far. I like it.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Yes. If one works in Pediatrics, as we emergency physicians often do, we get to learn all about these developmental landmarks in theory and practice.

Parlêtre: Now, Ingram seems to be claiming that he no longer has a conscious experience of himself as an agent,

Daniel: Very true, but for the exact opposite reason from the one you propose.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Yes, that sentence, at least, is accurate.

Parlêtre: I find it entirely believable that it’s possible to establish a meditative state in which this, phenomenologically, seems to be the case.

Daniel: Ok, so that’s something. However, it is not a state. It appears to have been permanently hardwired regardless of state, such that, if there is enough experience to make any even rudimentary sense of the world perceptually, this is the case.

Parlêtre: I have experienced this myself.

Daniel: Ok, that’s cool. Tell me about that. Finally, we get to the stuff I care the most about, the shop talk of what actually happens in experience. Nice. It is amazing how much one sometimes has to be willing to slog through to get there.

Praletre: That does not mean that the representation has been eliminated from my mind, though.

Daniel: Good! You couldn’t pull it off in the way that I have if that was, at least so far as I can tell. It is by that becoming bright, clear, hardwired to be perceived in a way that doesn’t create habitual misperception that it happened to me, not the other way around. While your misrepresenting what I mean so apparently habitually is irritating, I will attempt to reframe it such that my experience is different and try to view it as an opportunity to correct potentially widespread confusion. It also helps answer other questions you ask above. Still, the intellectual answer is only so satisfying. The experience that derives from practice is vastly more so.

I quote from MCTB, Chapter 30, Equanimity:

“It is the highly inclusive quality of formations that is the most interesting and leads to the most practical application of discussing formations. It is because they are so inclusive that they are the gateway to the three doors, stage fifteen, Fruition (see the chapter called “The Three Doors”). They reveal a way out of the paradox of duality, the maddening sense that “this” is observing, controlling, subject to, separated from, etc., “that”. By containing all or nearly all the sensations comprising one moment in a very integrated way, they contain the necessary clarity to see through the three fundamental illusions.

One of the primary ways that the illusion of duality is maintained is that the mind partially “blinks out” perception of a part of each formation that it wants to section off to appear separate, in control, or observing everything else. In this way, there is not enough clarity to see the interconnectedness and true nature of that part partially blinked out of reality, and a sense of a separate or autonomous self is maintained. The problem is not the arising of those sensations and patterns that the mind is partially blinking out to, it is that these sensations are not clearly perceived. It is almost as if the mind is placing some sensations in its map of space and what is in it, and then only partially doing that for other sensations that it wishes to turn into a sense of something stable and continuous. When the experience of formations occurs, it comes out of a level of clarity that is so complete that “blinking out” can no longer easily happen, as everything is mapped equally and completely to the same volume of our perceived sensate space and so, finally, the clear perception we have developed threatens the core illusion of a stable, perceiving, separate self. Yay!”

There is a whole section on Agencylessness in MCTB starting on page 561 that, if you haven’t read it, is perhaps worth your time. I won’t quote it here, as it is long, but I recommend it to you if you care about these topics and my take on them.

Parlêtre: On the contrary, it has only become latent, occluded by aspects of my conscious experience that have become more compelling.

Daniel: The real thing doesn’t arise due to occlusion but incorporation. When experiences are much more just part of this sensate world we find ourselves in, qualities like intent and mental impressions are at once more clear but also much more proportionally represented in the field of experience according to their subtlety. It is a hard thing to explain that things would at once be more clear and yet less perceptually compelling.

Parlêtre: This is how defense mechanisms work,

Daniel: Again, positing denial and suppression in the sense of defense mechanisms is not at all what I am talking about. How should I rewrite sections, such as that one on Agencylessness, such that those who carefully study and critique my works, such as yourself, do not make this mistake?

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Yes, that is the definition of denial. Good job.

Parlêtre: I am skeptical that this model of agency has been eliminated from the mind entirely.

Daniel: I am as well, actually beyond skeptical, it seems a dead end to attempt this to me, entirely the wrong direction. Who sold you this idea? I would attempt to return it for a full refund.

Parlêtre: 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?

Daniel: Yeah, sounds completely fucked up to me. I would go the other way, given a choice, the direction of sensate clarity as advocated by techniques such as certain insight practices, that is, if you can manage to learn the appropriate applications of their very specialized frameworks so that they don’t cause the well-known problems both you and I know well from our own experience and that of others. If not, probably best not to try to go there.

Parlêtre: That self-as-agent model originated for a purpose, after all.

Daniel: Yes, and it is darn useful. It is even more useful when its mechanisms are somewhat clearer and the painful illusions related to those that occurred before practice reached that level are not occurring anymore.

Parlêtre: It may be that conscious awareness of the model has been suppressed, but I suspect that the model is still very much in place.

Daniel: You are welcome to your suspicions, but how do they functionally help you? Are they perhaps themselves some sort of defense mechanism? Just something to ponder.

Parlêtre: Ingram describes himself as ‘sometimes arrogant.’

Daniel: Q.E.D.

Parlêtre: 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?

Daniel: Modern reality testing shows that the complete incorporation of the sensations that previously seemed perceptually to be a separate, independent, observing agent into clear experience through habitual training is not as universally transformative of the human animal as those with more orthodox and traditional views, such as yourself, believe. It is so interesting to meet people who are a strange hybrid of cynical and traditional, clinging selectively to what I consider some of the less helpful aspects of both ends of the spectrum. Such is the case here, at least partially. There are some helpful views in what you are describing, as noted above.

Parlêtre: To uproot the self-as-agent model from the mind entirely would, I think, render an individual entirely incompetent to function in the world.

Daniel: Yes, in the way you imagine it, I suspect it would. Again, definitely don’t go in that direction, at least if you are interested in replicating the experiment that was taught to me which involves sensate clarity rather than repression regarding the experience of elements that appear to make up a separate, independent self.

Parlêtre: [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.

Daniel: To be clear, when I say hypomanic, I mean specifically the following:

1) As anyone who has been around me for even a few minutes when I am not sleeping knows, I have more energy than most people, in fact, more useful energy than nearly everyone I know or have ever met. I have a friend from medical school who was farther out on this spectrum that me, but he is the only one I know personally. This is the element of my personality and presentation that is probably the most commented on by people who have met me. In this, as in some other ways, I am clearly some sort of unusual phenotypical outlier. Some people with lots of energy have a lot of anxiety to them, but, in my case, while it does have a sort of kinetic restlessness, like a greyhound that benefits from long runs daily, it is very easily channeled to useful tasks.

2) I tend to be much happier than most people I know these days, yet, unlike true mania, it is an extremely functional happy. Even when I am annoyed, as I am today, there is a focused, driven, yet resilient energy in what I am doing, an energy pulsing in the raw joy of the feel of the flowing energy itself. I can’t remember the last long low period I had despite numerous life challenges having arisen.

3) I have somewhat unusual behaviors that reflect these elevated affective qualities. I am prone to singing with joy, smiling, dancing, laughing, and the like when people around me likely wouldn’t be. Elation arises easily and often through even small delights. In this, I am clearly a bit odd, yet not so odd that I couldn’t do things like become a doctor and even become an assistant medical director of a major trauma center emergency department group.

4) In contrast to many who have a lot of energy but can’t focus, I seem to approach whatever end of the spectrum is the opposite of ADHD, being able to stick with many necessary tasks and multitask for many hours without fatigue or apparent cognitive penalty. In this, most consider me somewhat to very hyper-functional, even for people at my professional level, who do tend to be in that general neck of the functional woods.

5) I know of nobody who would dream of calling me merely euthymic in the sense of most ordinary people they know, similarly I am definitely not truly manic, as that typically involves rapid life destruction.

So, I am blessed for the moment to generally exist in what I consider the optimal place between mania and euthymia, of which the traditionally problematic word “hypomanic” is what I have used to describe this, but it is probably not the best word. As a psychoanalyst, what word would you suggest?

This state of health will not last, and I could be dead or severely impaired any second now, as working in an emergency department taught me daily, but, for the moment, I am grateful for my blessings.

As a last point, it is odd that you so reflexively reject the insights and other unusual experiences that made deeper psychological healing for me so much easier, and even stranger as I believe is the purported goal of your profession. Consider this experience, which, while admittedly a wild outlier, really did happen and really did what I said it did: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/8551354

Yeah, it seems pretty out there, but it really did function as described, proving lasting changes that remain to this day. This is actually nothing in comparison to what happened in April of 2003, but more along the lines of something that might be intriguing for one who has likely dealt with many who are trying to process trauma.

Parlêtre: 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.

Daniel: Well, over 20,900 words, if you made this far, you are a trooper. I hope this was somehow helpful, as I put 12 solid hours into it today with one 5 minute break for a meal and to pee once. Perhaps this at least will be appreciated, an E for Effort, as they say. May good conditions results from well-intended actions.

While the SNB kids are not likely to like this last point, it is true that, by doing certain practices in appropriate contexts with appropriate appreciation of their limits, risks, benefits, and alternatives, these topics can be elucidated and some apparently physiological perceptual changes can be accomplished. Best wishes!

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Written by parletre

June 22, 2019 at 3:01 am

Posted in Uncategorized

15 Responses

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  1. […] have given some thought about how to best reply to Daniel Ingram’s response to my first three blog posts [1] [2] [3]. Given that his reply is quite extensive, I have decided […]

  2. In the first instance, non-buddhism is interested in the identity of a thought system, presentation, postulate, whatever. The question is not “is x true?” That is, the aim of the non analysis is not to determine to what degree x-postulate is adequate to reality. The aim is to disclose the machinery, machinations, munitions covertly laboring within x-system. Four assumptions are operating behind this approach. The first is that while truth value is the stuff of eternal disputation, function is quite readily determined. The second is that “function” is invariably one of calling flesh and blood individuals to subscribe to x-system, thereby assuming specific features (habits of thought and action, etc.) as subjects of that system. The third is that this calling or interpellation entails both violence to the human and hallucination of a World. The fourth is that liberation from the incessant harassment and attempted capture of x-system requires a form of thought that employs perpetual resistance as a non-negotiable active ingredient. So, the question for a non-analysis (whether applied to philosophy, x-buddhism, Daniel Ingram, pragmatic dharma, or whatever knowledge) is “what kind of Thing do we have before us here?”

    Responses like Ingram’s lends great value to Adorno’s insistence that generalization be established as a first—and extended—foray into critique. How can anyone respond to Ingram here? The way he has framed it, we can’t. In short, Ingram makes an appeal to exception at every turn: appeals to long textual passages, and to minute textual citations; appeals to interminable details; appeals to multifarious Baroque practices; appeals to autobiographical experiences; appeals to inner experience; appeals to the ever-transmutating Worlds of magick; appeals to attainments and mastery. In my new book, I say that x-buddhism is so difficult to critique because it is a shape-shifting zombie. Ingram’s reply here is more evidence of that fact. This is not a denigration. It is statement about identity.

    If the reader is interested in doing the work I am suggesting for him-/herself, why not have a look at the heuristic I created for this very purpose? Here’s the link. https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2018/11/20/in-augury-of-oneness-restored/

    I think the following items are particularly salient for determining the identity of Ingram’s text:

    Buddhemes
    Decision
    Desire
    Detail fetish
    Dharma, The
    Exemplificative braggadocio
    Humophobia
    Ideological opacity
    Material
    Principle of sufficient Buddhism
    Rhetorics of self-display
    Spiritual narcissism
    Thaumaturgical refuge
    Ventriloquism
    Vibrato
    Voltaic network of postulation
    World

    Glenn Wallis

    June 22, 2019 at 3:55 pm

    • So you want to make generalizations about Daniel Ingram’s positions based on a cursory knowledge of his work, find a group of pigeonholes to apply to him, and thereby define him without engaging with anything he has said. C’mon, Mr. Wallis, this is poor and lazy stuff. You have adopted a method and a language that allows you to shut anyone down without having to do any real work. If you don’t want to do the work, just admit that you don’t get what he’s doing and aren’t interested because you have other priorities.

      On the matter of his lengthy quotes from his book: parletre is by his own admission criticizing Ingram’s book after having read the first edition a few years ago. I may be getting old, but even when I was younger I would have taken the time to refresh my memory of a book I was planning to critique publicly before doing so, especially one as difficult and complex as MCTB, and furthermore I would have taken a look at the updated edition as well to see what was new that I should know about. In the absence of such effort on the part of his critic, Daniel ends up needing to quote extensively from relevant passages to explain how OP has misread him, but you dismiss these efforts with a wave of your hand. I can’t imagine you got a PhD from Harvard by such methods.

      On the matter of his citing exceptions: Daniel is attempting to show that the OP is mischaracterizing his thinking by boiling it down to gross simplifications. I can’t see what is wrong with Daniel’s having done so.

      On the matter of “Baroque” practices: well, you can’t really talk about something you don’t understand, and whether you like it or not, you won’t understand these practices without actually doing some of them (which parletre claims they did, but sometimes even that isn’t enough to understand them). In my own case, I have to admit that my reading of MCTB (the first edition, which was the only one available at the time) bogged down at points, especially in the descriptions of the stages of the Insight Path, so I would stop reading and practice. I came to understand more and more as I had my own basis of experience for making sense of what Ingram was saying.

      I’ll conclude by saying that if you really want to discern what kind of thing this is, you might start at the very least by refraining from misreadings. If you can’t or won’t do that, then you should avoid speaking about it altogether.

      Laurel Carrington

      June 23, 2019 at 2:32 am

      • Hi Laurel. I’m afraid you have misunderstood. I am inviting YOU to “make generalizations about Daniel Ingram’s positions based on a cursory” thorough or whatever (think fractal geometry) knowledge. I am suggesting that my heuristic will prove useful to that end.

        Glenn Wallis

        June 24, 2019 at 2:06 am

  3. While perhaps those are the only valid SNB/NB concerns, I would guess that, unless this was all a ruse by the wily Paltêtre, agent provocateur, to further those singular ends on a site that is not specifically SNB/NB in designation (or perhaps it is: did I miss that?), I might guess he had some other genuine agendas related to practice and the health of his patients in addition to those. In this, perhaps I err, and perhaps Parlêtre will chime in to clarify the degree to which this was all an elaborate charade to further SNB/NB ends.

    danielmingram

    June 23, 2019 at 12:03 pm

    • My dyslexia strikes again: “Paltêtre” should be “Parlêtre”, and “diversely” should be “differs”. Ah, the Real.

      danielmingram

      June 23, 2019 at 12:27 pm

    • paltêtre can speak for himself (no pun intended…well, maybe!). But as far as I know, this site is wholly SNB/NB-free. I only framed my comment the way I did because you (Daniel Ingram) opened your text not only with mention of it, but that you’ve spent fifteen hours on the blog.

      One of the points that you make that I can deeply sympathize with is the fact that people launch critiques without thoroughly engaging the matter in the first place. That is extremely frustrating. Sometimes (rarely), though, someone seems to have cut out a slice of the larger corpus that does constitute a viable sample of the whole. The original posts by paltêtre, I believe, do so. They are not critiques of MCTB1/2 per se, but of a sliver of DNA that the PD aspect of your work (arguably? even if ultimately incorrectly?) contains.

      Another point to which I am deeply sympathetic is that those of us on the margins would be better served by simply glancing over at one another, nodding, and proceeding on our respective nomadic ways. Those figures who operate within the striated mainstream are very skilled at paying us the compliment of disregard, as Tom Pepper puts it. The marginal figure seems to derive joyous jouissance from encounter and engagement, whatever form it might take, and, well…hey, look over there–it’s Daniel Ingram!

      Glenn Wallis

      June 23, 2019 at 4:42 pm

      • What Glenn says is correct. I wasn’t familiar with SNB before writing my first post. I have since read some of its materials and learned a great deal. As for focusing on MCTB1/2 as the object of critique, well, I chose it because it’s one of the few texts I’ve been able to find (contrary to most mainstream Buddhist writing) that was compelling enough to warrant deep thought and engagement and that impacted me personally enough to make the effort.

        parletre

        June 23, 2019 at 4:48 pm

  4. Dear Glenn,

    A little present or offering — some audio I recorded and tweaked a few days ago. It is in a style dramatic, absurd, and theatrical to match your own in some ways yet diversely wildly from that style in others for comic effect. I actually really like the quotes and much of the message, so it is not just parody, but also tribute, both in one. Matthew was supposed to send it to you, but I don’t know that he did. So, if you are interested, here it is. It is a recording of your Trash Theory #1. Enjoy!

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/hb319qk36vfjxup/Trash%20Theory%20%231%20copy.m4a?dl=0

    danielmingram

    June 23, 2019 at 12:08 pm

    • Dude, that’s some beautiful shit! Thank you! I deeply appreciate your generosity. I mean not only the effort of the slow read, but your comments at the end. You have given me a grand idea. Something about how you read brings out features of the language that are lost in a silent, in-the-head, read. So, I am thinking about always adding a spoken version of a post. It is even tempting to go back and record some of the more linguistically-loaded essays. I really like how you are right on the verge of one of those disguised criminal voices. A deep bow…

      Glenn Wallis

      June 23, 2019 at 4:25 pm

      • The conversation has to happen after that!

        Mark

        June 25, 2019 at 4:19 pm

  5. […] Daniel Ingram’s reply to Wooldridge […]

  6. […] this post, I will discuss Daniel Ingram’s response to my first three blog posts [1][2][3], focusing in particular on our dialogue on the agency in […]

  7. […] parlêtre. Daniel Ingram’s Response […]

  8. danielmingram

    July 26, 2019 at 9:49 am


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