Response to Ingram #3
In 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 the third post [3]. Daniel generously responded point by point, so I will replicate some of his text below and insert my comments in a different font. I have found this dialogue to be deeply interesting and I have learned a great deal from it. Thanks to the effort of all who have participated. As usual, I’d very much welcome your thoughts in the comments below.
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.
[…]
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.
The argument I was trying to make might be boiled down to this: just because a person experiences himself as without agency doesn’t mean that he has, in fact, eliminated the self-as-agent model from his mind. Based on your comments above, it seems we are in agreement on this. What you are saying is that by making your perception “bright, clear, …” you are able to see the sensations that, in more muddled perception, coalesce into the illusion of self as agent. You articulated this very clearly here, which is helpful.
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!”
[…]
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.
This is helpful. It seems to me that what you have done is to make something that was a conscious representation of a largely unconscious process entirely unconscious. Let me explain. As I understand it, self-as-agent model is represented in consciousness as a feeling of being an agent. If you eliminated the self-as-agent model from the mind entirely, it would seem to me that you’d be unable to function, a point with which you seem to agree. You are arguing that it is the feeling of agency that has been eliminated – not the self-as-agent model, which is largely unconscious.
I do understand your argument that your conscious experience has changed “due to occlusion but incorporation.” I would argue that the incorporation is also an occlusion, insofar as the incorporation disrupts a conscious mental representation (i.e., a meaning) and replaces it with a different kind of experience (i.e., a different meaning).
Let me see if I can give an example to illustrate my point. Suppose that I am looking at traffic light. The color green is lit up and that means something to me – that I can drive through the intersection! By focusing on the green light in a certain way – with greater sensate clarity – it becomes a pixelated pattern of light blinking in an out of existence in each moment. I have “incorporated” the sensations such that I now see that the light is not “on” but, rather, turning off and on moment by moment. In this process, by incorporating a greater amount of sensate detail, I have occluded the representational meaning of the green light, which is that “on” means “go.” As far as I can tell, what you’re describing with respect to agency has this quality. The incorporation is also an occlusion insofar as by perceiving the sensate details, the mental representation of a largely unconscious mental model has been disrupted.
I believe this lines up with one of the central point that’s being made by the Speculative Non-Buddhists. When one practices modern vipassana, one does so with a particular conceptual and ideological surround and imposes that onto one’s experience (by, among other things, the sorts of techniques one chooses to perform), thereby shaping the mind according to a certain conceptual system and ideology. It is not the case that something “more real” is being observed – in this case, agencylessness – as is commonly claimed. I might even argue that important information is lost to conscious awareness – the conscious mental representation of an unconscious process, the self-as-agent model.
Again, I haven’t read Ingram, so my comments are general ones.
“just because a person experiences himself as without agency doesn’t mean that he has, in fact, eliminated the self-as-agent model from his mind.”
I agree completely. The self-as-agency model is built into the fundamental workings of the nervous system at a basic sensorimotor level. If it were eliminated, adaptive behaviour would be impossible. There’s a large literature on this in cognitive science (for a start, see this article of mine: https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/specifying-the-self.pdf ). The feeling of agency in conscious experience, however, is another matter. There may be cases where this is highly attenuated or disappears. Whether such cases are beneficial or pathological is a further question. There’s also the issue that if someone claims to experience herself/himself without agency, the meaning of that claim isn’t obvious or straightforward; it requires interpretation. What exactly does the person mean? What exactly does the person sense is absent or different? Further questions need to posed to probe the fine-grained characteristics of the person’s experience. The answers the person gives themselves need to be interpreted and calibrated in relation to biobehavioural (and perhaps psychiatric) evidence. Only then can we begin to get an adequate picture of the situation.
“It seems to me that what you have done is to make something that was a conscious representation of a largely unconscious process entirely unconscious.”
This is one possibility. But this is ambiguous between transforming a conscious representation into an unconscious one or simply eliminating a conscious representation. (And we’d need to get precise about what we mean by “conscious” and “unconscious” here.)
“When one practices modern vipassana, one does so with a particular conceptual and ideological surround and imposes that onto one’s experience (by, among other things, the sorts of techniques one chooses to perform), thereby shaping the mind according to a certain conceptual system and ideology. It is not the case that something ‘more real’ is being observed – in this case, agencylessness – as is commonly claimed. I might even argue that important information is lost to conscious awareness – the conscious mental representation of an unconscious process, the self-as-agent model.”
I agree. Modern vispassana takes a conceptual system—a Buddhist modernist version of Therāvada Abhidhamma (sometimes with elements from modern Zen and Tibetan Buddhism thrown into the mix)—and tries to make experience conform to it, thereby reshaping the body and mind. I don’t think it’s about seeing things as they are or getting at something that’s “more real.” It’s about enacting a ritual (as you say in one of your other posts). And it can indeed lead to loss of meaning. Maybe this comes with increased access to information that normally isn’t available. But it may be normally unavailable for good reasons, so simply having increased access to it isn’t necessarily beneficial. Whether increased access to it is beneficial or not depends on the background normative framework (which, again, is being imposed onto experience in advance).
Not to keep sounding my own horn, but these are major themes of my new book, so I’m happy to see that there’s a discussion my book can fit into.
evanthomps
June 25, 2019 at 6:00 pm
I don’t see how referring to self-as-agency as a “model” or to conscious experiences as “representations” supports a case against agencylessness as a reality. “Model” and “representation” suggest possible room for a direct experience of these phenomena *as* models or representations (which seems to be partly what Daniel is describing). There seems something not quite right with arguing a “model” or “representation” is in some sense fundamental, or that Daniel’s perspective, which claims to embrace this wider view, could only be less or equally real, when implicitly it includes more.
Vipassana meditation is apophatic. We go looking for the three characteristics, but what eventually heaves into view is something that endures, is complete unto itself, and does not suck — “emptiness”. The goal of these practices is not a ceaseless flight into sensation, as the “green light” analogy appears to suggest, but to take experience apart in order to look closely at how it fits together. From that, understanding and experience of emptiness comes. Experience does not remain broken down into a dissociated or depersonalised state.
Duncan
June 25, 2019 at 7:35 pm
Duncan. You say “The goal of these practices is…to take experience apart in order to look closely at how it fits together.” The viability of that project is precisely what is being contested in parlêtre’s critiques. In the posts and in many of the comments, a suspicion is being expressed that the ideological “surround” overdetermines the “looking,” “seeing,” and “how” that you refer to. How curious that Vipassana Vince turns his gaze toward the inner workings of “subjective experience” and finds–lo and behold!–the categories of Vipassana operating therein. Ditto Soto Susan and Dogen, Mindful Mary and JKZ, and so forth. In my new book, I argue that what is happening is an intermixture and projection that is not at all harmless, in that it deepens the delusion and samsaric capture that the practice is intended to ameliorate. Evan Thompson’s comments in this thread have been very clear and concise in highlighting this facet of the matter.
I think that your first paragraph is very interesting, and actually right, but not for the reasons you seem to suggest. Concepts like “model” and “self-model,” and theories of “representation” are, to my non-expert ears, possibly just as ideologically overdetermining as “emptiness” and whatever other Abhidharma concepts you might want to invoke. So, I appreciate David Chapman’s comment here, and believe that we should keep his cautioning close to hand as one of our very tools.
Glenn Wallis
June 25, 2019 at 9:56 pm
I’m not sure that Vipassana Vince (despite being a solid practitioner, bless him) will discover the categories so readily, but is likely to make frequent misidentifications, and encounter anomalies, and the maps “sort of” making sense, and offering a rough guide but evidently not providing the whole story.
In my own case St John of the Cross’s *Ascent of Mount Carmel* offered a steer simultaneously across what seems the self-same territory. As did the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, *The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage*, Aleister Crowley’s *Liber Samech*, and the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures. All useful, but approximate. All seemed to offer something that seemed to head in the same direction, with slightly different vectors and velocities. If we run with a number of maps and practices at once, rather than devoting ourselves to a specific tradition, does this alleviate the prospect of capture, because whose ideology does this mixed bag of reprobates represent? And who sets these ideological snares for us anyway, and what are their motives?
Viewing ideology as samsaric might then indeed necessitate a continuous project of critique, and engaging with pragmatic dharma on its own terms until the promised result arrives (fruition) may constitute a terminal event horizon past which all chances of disenchantment vanish. For all its pertinence, I can’t help wondering if Parletre’s inclination to critique would withstand such an experience — although I recall Stephen Batchelor’s description of something that sounds very like a fruition in his *Confessions*, and his subsequent denial of any such nonsense, which seems to have determined his trajectory since then, not for the better in my view, but maybe there are some who could argue this has made him less vulnerable to self-delusion in some regard.
Duncan
June 27, 2019 at 6:18 am
Disclaimer: I haven’t read Daniel’s response, and have no dog in the fight.
Mindness is inherently nebulous, and we do not have any good understanding of it anywhere. Meditation is a weird mode of mindness that we have even less understanding of. I’m wary of anyone making strong claims about either of them, because there just isn’t any good epistemological basis. Subjective experience is highly suggestible; objective sciences of mind are not yet developed enough to base much on.
We do have many interpretive frameworks that can be significantly valuable in making sense of experience. Among them, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, various traditional and modernist Buddhisms, Minsky’s Society of Mind (to allude to a twitter discussion of these posts), and many others. Each of these, skillfully deployed, may provide some insight and relieve suffering to some extent.
Each of them is also partial and has obvious defects. I believe it’s important to bear that constantly in mind when applying them.
Particularly, each has an ontology of mental entities which is heuristically useful but which plainly does not accurately represent an objective reality. The biggest danger in taking frameworks overly seriously is in concretizing categories, and thinking about them as if they were well-defined rather than nebulous.
The word “self” is particularly problematic here; it’s exceptionally vague and polyvalent. There are endless “theories of the self.” Are they theories of the same thing? Of many different things? How could any of them be validated? What use are they? Does adopting particular concepts of “the self” tend to lead to particular changes, regardless of their truth or lack thereof? How could we know?
I am not advocating scientistic skepticism here (“it’s not true if we can’t measure it”), just appropriate caution about taking big claims at face value, or uncritically adopting any individual framework.
Rather, I would advocate a meta-systematic approach, of deploying multiple interpretive frameworks while recognizing that they *are* just interpretive frameworks, and frequently asking “does this work here? what are the consequences? what are the alternatives?”
David Chapman
June 25, 2019 at 8:02 pm
Hi David,
I want to agree with your central point here (I probably do, for the most part, or at least for most of the most part), and I would like to raise a question that has been swirling in my mind for some time, and which becomes particularly pertinent as I read your comment here.
How is what you are describing here, i.e. “deploying multiple interpretive frameworks” and “frequently asking ‘does this work here? what are the consequences?’,” different from just plain old pragmatism? From what I understand, meta-systematicity seems to me to just be pragmatism. Granted, you have done something which philosophical pragmatists generally don’t: you have provided a compelling ontological—among other things—case for why pragmatism should be adopted (which is not to say I find it entirely compelling). You have attempted to explain why systems are largely inadequate in any grand sense, rather than just asserting that we should learn to employ multiple and even contradictory systems as necessary for achieving particular outcomes. However, again, it is not clear to me functionally how this is different from pragmatism. So, is it, or is there something more here that I am missing?
Failed Buddhist
June 26, 2019 at 9:21 am
Apparently I suck at WordPress comment code. Please ignore the excessive and irrational (damn Rationality!) application of italics.
Failed Buddhist
June 26, 2019 at 9:28 am
Hmm, I’m not sure what you mean by “just plain old pragmatism”? Do you mean in an everyday sense, or referring to the early-20th-century philosophical school? Or to some more recent proponents of that school?
In an everyday sense, meta-systematicity is pragmatic (sensible and effective) but most pragmatic thought and action aren’t meta-systematic.
In the philosophical sense… I don’t know the Pragmatists as well I should. Generally I find myself in sympathy with their intuitions. I’ve read bits of each of them but not in depth; I know them principally from secondary sources.
Meta-systematicity is something everyone does; any time you apply one system rather than another, or figure out a way to apply one in a particular situation, you have made a meta-systematic choice. The question is how to do that better. If any of the Pragmatists have advice about that, I’d like to know about it!
David Chapman
June 26, 2019 at 4:41 pm
This is a response to David, I don’t see a reply button under his comment. I think you might have more success by looking beyond an individualistic meta-system. Whatever framework you are operating in, it is likely an unconscious aspect that is most problematic. The meta-level is another framework, which might be more or less useful depending on how good you are at unconsciously selecting a framework and which frameworks you can embody. The only way out of these issues that I see is in some sort of group practise and through dialog. One guide is that if you think you have the right paradigm, then you probably need to shift paradigm. If you think you can smoothly shift paradigms you are not shifting paradigms.
The “debates” are typically the confrontation of two paradigms, I find it more interesting to see the participants transcend the paradigms and do something creative. There is a risk that someone is going to transcend this concept with “immanence” so I will just let the contradiction of that sink in.
Mark
June 27, 2019 at 9:46 am
I’m not sure if I should comment on this or not…but I’m going to give if one brief shot.
I hope, Parletre, that you won’t be sucked into the rhetoric of “interpretation” and the claims that every theory of mind is “partial” and defective/limited, or a “framework.” What you set out to do is valuable, and this vestige of postmodern ideology can only impede your project. No theory, if it is a theory, is ever an “interpretation.” It is an explanation. And it can be correct. This postmodern notion confuses ideologies with explanation—that is, it fails to separate out our agendas from our ability to account for actually existing phenomena of various kinds. You can, as you suggested in an earlier post, have a correct theory of mind, and only a correct theory of mind can really help reduce suffering. Ideological “theories” of mind are simply not actual theories, and demand that people alter their construal of the world serve an agenda that might not be possible. Such as when we believe that capitalism without oppression is possible, to give one particularly contentious example.
I would say that you are completely correct that when we think we have gained a nonconceptual pure sensation of the world (as in your green light example) we have actually lost some very important part of the world. We have succeeded in forgetting that the thing we are perceiving has its meaning and existence as a result of human social projects—we have then given up the ability to change the world for the better, and have begun to assume we have to adapt to the world as given. We have, that is, succeeded in reifying the socially constructed, mistaking mind-dependent reality for mind independent reality: we believe that a thing we have socially produced is in fact naturally occurring. So, what is blocked from conscious awareness is our role in constructing our world, and our capacity to reconstruct it. This is a terrible loss, particularly for someone who is suffering in the world as it is.
Too big a point to really make in a comment, so I’m sure this is rather unconvincing and somewhat cryptic…
wtpepper
June 26, 2019 at 12:17 am
Parlêtre wrote “This is helpful. It seems to me that what you have done is to make something that was a conscious representation of a largely unconscious process entirely unconscious. Let me explain. As I understand it, self-as-agent model is represented in consciousness as a feeling of being an agent. If you eliminated the self-as-agent model from the mind entirely, it would seem to me that you’d be unable to function, a point with which you seem to agree. You are arguing that it is the feeling of agency that has been eliminated – not the self-as-agent model, which is largely unconscious.
I do understand your argument that your conscious experience has changed “due to occlusion but incorporation.” I would argue that the incorporation is also an occlusion, insofar as the incorporation disrupts a conscious mental representation (i.e., a meaning) and replaces it with a different kind of experience (i.e., a different meaning).”
Daniel replies: While I get how hard this is to understand and appreciate, please bear with me, as, again, you take my words to mean the opposite of how I mean them.
The qualities that previously meant and were perceived to be “Agent” still arise in their entirety. Every single one of them. Their perceptual implications are very different, but, functionally, their meanings are often the same, or at least similar.
Again, I am explaining something that is not easy to wrap one’s head around it if one hasn’t experienced it.
All thoughts arise in this space. They arise simultaneously as experiences (auditory, physical, visual, etc.), but also as meaning. These meanings include thoughts and representations such as “I”, “me”, and “mine” just the way they did before. No meaning have been cut off. Instead, these meanings are a lot easier to appreciate as they arise for being the representations that they are, and also there is a perspective on this representation that is refreshingly open and spacious rather than being contracted into them as happened before.
When the contraction was happening, it was extremely hard to simultaneously perceive them as experiences and as meanings, the problem you mention when people who haven’t flipped to another way of perceiving experiences try to do psychotherapy, for example.
This is not a problem once one brings all this stuff clearly into experience. It provides the best of all worlds: the meanings are there and are more clear. The meanings are also related to in a way that is vastly spacious, contextualized in the wider world as they arise in a space that has a lot of other stuff in it. It thus adds a nice proportionality that allows a much more reasonable, happy, clear relationship to those contents and meanings. It also allows their impermanence and naturalness/contingency to be appreciated both in terms of meaning and in terms of experience.
Thus, ironically, this is what people dream of in relationship to the world of thinking.
It is not at all as you describe it, in terms of limiting capabilities, suppressing meaning, or making conscious processes unconscious.
Instead, through the practices that take previously not very conscious processes and bring them much more to light, one gains both a sophisticated appreciation of meaning and also the benefits of clear comprehension of experiences.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but I can dance in the realm of the meanings of things with a high degree of nimbleness, as presented here. I can use the word “I” easily and know both what it means and what it doesn’t actually mean at the same time, for example.
I get this is hard to understand, but, by far my best advice is, if you wish to see how this works, do the experiment for yourself. It is reproducible, as has been noted for at least 2,500 years.
I quote again from MCTB2, which I again recommend you read, page 35: “Any thoughts with “I”, “me”, “my”, and “mine” in them should be understood to be just thoughts that come and go. They are simply qualities of manifestation, like flavors of ice cream. It is not that chocolate is good and vanilla is bad; all flavors of experience are just flavors, and sometimes the flavor of the moment is “I”, “me”, “mine”, and the like, and even those flavors don’t constitute a real “I”, “me”, or “mine”. So, if those qualities arise, just notice them come and go like everything else. They never were an “I”, “me”, or “mine” and never could be.”
When thoughts arise that are clear but their volume is just a very small part of the vast experience of the sensate world, they are able to be appreciate for what messages they convey and how they seem to represent some mysterious underlying cognitive processes, yet also avoids the being lost in them that caused so much trouble before.
Curiously, this is the refined version that provides a high degree of Ego Strength in the Freudian sense, as when issues are arising with their meanings, there is an ability to appreciate them without freaking out about them. I would think that, having been informed that such a perceptual mode could exist, that you and your patients would want it. I personally value it beyond anything else I have ever managed to accomplish in my life.
Also, it is interesting that science isn’t being brought into this discussion. Clearly, impermanence is not just a meaning but a scientific fact on multiple fronts, both perceptual and physical. Clearly, causality is not just a meaning but a scientific fact on multiple fronts, both perceptual and physical. Clearly, that, according to all known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, we can’t possibly be some independent, stable, continuous entity. Happy to argue that point in more detail if you care about it. That Great Feast is relevant here.
I also quote from MCTB2, the entire section called The Meaning Models, Chapter 37, as I get that you believe me to have not thought much about questions of meaning. It seems almost custom-written for this particular exchange, yet was written years ago:
“Spiritual practice is clearly not just about sensate clarity, but also contains explicit implications for what might generally be called “meaning”. Meaning is obviously one of the keys to how our lives will go, driving our interpretations and even sensate experiences of essentially everything. Those interpretations clearly are profoundly causal. Remember how I was railing against exclusive emphasis on “content” earlier in the less mature sections of this book? This is an attempt at a more mature version of that same set of points.
Remember how I said that content was only half of the equation and the other half was sensate clarity? That first half, content, is still half of the point, and as such is extremely important. Clearly, the other half, that of basic sensate clarity and the insight that comes from that, is also extremely important.
Putting a section on meaning in the grand sense in a section on awakening is dangerous on the one hand and hopefully creates an appropriate contrast of axes of development on the other. Awakening as having sensate clarity about the three characteristics is one axis of development. Skillful development of a set of meanings that helps us skillfully navigate the fact of having been born into this life is another axis of development. Curiously, the first axis, that of awakening, has a natural endpoint. The second one, that of meaning, is endless.
We could have a sense that awakening in the strict insight sense is meaningful, and here we begin to see some overlap. However, beyond that, the two are strangely unrelated. This is often disconcerting for practitioners, even very advanced ones, as there is often some residual part of us that somehow believes that mastering sensate clarity will perfectly inform meaning. When this fails to occur, it can cause a significant amount of angst, even in awakened beings.
Each tradition generally claims to have found the best, most optimal meaning or set of meanings for the big question of the meaning of life. However, as the existentialists will be quick to point out, meaning is arbitrary. They are clearly right, at least within the framework of existentialism, as the large number of seemingly contradictory meaning structures offered by spiritual traditions and philosophies readily demonstrates. “It is all Illusion!”, “It is all pure love!”, “It is all emptiness!”, “It is all the tao!”, “It is all God!”: each of these clearly has a totally different feel, and a person subscribing to one of them will likely interpret reality differently from someone subscribing to another, even if they both have a high degree of sensate clarity. These interpretations will clearly have radically different implications for the relative aspects of how we think, feel, speak, and act.
That is where the Buddhists come in, as they will remind you that meaning is causal. Meaning is causal in its arising, as it arises naturally from specific conditions that are biological, psychological, and cultural, at a minimum. Meaning is also clearly a cause for other phenomena to arise, and one of the moderating causes for how meaning creates conditions is the relationship to the meaning itself as it arises and vanishes. Meaning when perceived very clearly in the light of awakening is likely to produce better outcomes, it seems, as meaning is part thought, part feeling, and part something else that is hard to define without circular definitions. As we have seen, what happens around thoughts and feelings benefits from clear perception. Still, beyond just the clear perception, there are the relative implications of the specific meanings that arise, and so the question of which meanings will produce the best outcomes is hotly debated, and strong opinions on this tend to be a core component of spiritual traditions. Even those traditions that propose doctrines along the lines of, “The highest meaning is to transcend meaning,” that still conveys meaning.
As all the traditions seem to have a monolithic confidence that their meaning structure is the optimal one, conflicts are inevitable, as we see again and again when the various traditions interact. Two traditions that agree almost completely on teachings related to sensate clarity can still be perpetually at each other’s throats when it comes to questions of optimal meaning. Most traditions generally don’t think along the lines of “optimal” when it relates to their stock recommended meanings. They just have their meanings, forgetting that they have those meanings for some hopefully good reasons. Obviously, this sort of pragmatism as a lens through which to view meaning structures is itself a statement of meaning in some way, but please forgive this point, since if you throw out pragmatism, then, pragmatically, things get dicey in practical terms. Most of the traditions don’t seem to have the breadth of perspective to sit back, examine what their meaning structures and stock recommended goals and interpretations of reality were supposed to actually do, or to remember this when interacting with other traditions and specific individuals.
Pragmatism is informed by statements of value. What is worthwhile? What is valuable? What is most important? Clearly, I believe that sensate clarity and using this to awaken to the specific sensate truths that remove that tangled, painful space warp at the center of perception is valuable. In this, I put value on sensate clarity as a high ideal. There are other explicit skills, perspectives, and techniques that I value, as should be obvious by now. You have similar lists of values, and I place value on knowing what those are, since knowing what we value leads to the natural question of what leads to the things we value, and then this can lead naturally to doing these things that lead to the things we value. However, some of this is clearly very individual, very personal, and conditioned by causes and conditions about which we likely have little to no awareness, as the psychologists know all too well.
Which do you value more, dispassion or engagement with the world to save all beings? Do you value love or equanimity more? Do you value joy or clarity about suffering? Do you value gritty humanity or refined idealism? These are key questions that superficially divide whole traditions which otherwise would agree on and delight in many other points of shared practice and experience. Clearly there are answers that involve various combinations of apparent opposites, shades of grey, and all the other nuanced aspects of mature meta-philosophy. However, somewhere along the way, for reasons we may never really sort out, we became wired to lean more strongly towards one side or the other of these sorts of initially dualistic-appearing questions. Personal predilections are issues of personality; and personality styles, while not perfectly fixed, are powerful karmic conditionings that are not easily changed. It is true that as we age, grow, and develop, we may come to view these questions differently than we did at various previous points along the path, and our honest answers may actually change moment to moment and circumstance to circumstance. That said, certain trends do tend to persist throughout our lives.
Given that personality styles and relationships to these sorts of questions of value and meaning are often relatively stable, I would advocate for traditions which wish to be broadly applicable to make room for both sides of these debates. Clearly, in some way the traditions are aware that, by taking a strongly one-sided stand, they will often alienate those whose personality style is different from their own. They then often forget this, viewing those on the other side of these perennial questions as somehow inferior to them despite the clear evidence that smart, wise, mature, reasonable people may hold apparently different views from them on key topics of meaning.
All that set-up accomplished, we now come to the meaning models in a more explicit way. Most of the traditions explicitly state that awakened beings will hold certain specific values as more valuable than others, interpret reality through specific meaning structures and, in general, agree with the positions staked out by that tradition regarding the core perennial questions about the meaning of life. They will often then use the corollary of this view to confidently state that those who hold contradictory views regarding key spiritual values and meanings are obviously inferior to those who have practiced in their own tradition. We can reasonably presume that most of this is based on the notion that their views are somehow optimal for this life and that the experiment has been done decisively and that their view is the very best.
Here’s the thing: I can’t for certain tell you that some tradition isn’t right when it comes to answering these questions. I personally am quite certain that I don’t have enough definitive data to make such a claim about my own tradition or about any other tradition. It is possible that such a data set exists and is incontrovertible, but I haven’t seen it yet. If you have seen such a perfect data set that optimally proves the supremely practical complete canon of relative views for all practitioners in all times and places, please let me know.
Until then, perhaps we should all keep an open mind regarding perfect certainty about optimal meanings and values and keep doing the experiment as best we can, as this is likely to allow us to get a lot more out of the efficacious spiritual technologies developed by the various traditions and enjoy the conversation about those technologies a lot more.
Here, I clearly value efficacy, communication, and enjoyment in such matters, just in case my obvious biases aren’t clear. If you value something else, I hope it works out well for you based on whatever value system you hold. Still, beware of entangling nets of views that bind you up in fear and conflict, as that may cause needless suffering, particularly when it comes to traditions, and I will try my best to be similarly mindful when I can; this is not easy, as I am sure you have noticed.”
danielmingram
June 26, 2019 at 10:59 am
Daniel you are really verbose. I hope the book is not this problematic, but given parletre’s difficulties it might just be. You seem to have got “non-subjective” experience down. I encourage both you and parletre to reach a common understanding of “non”. It is frustrating to see parletre paint the picture of a psychopath, as you are clearly not that. But it is equally frustrating to see your references to “It provides the best of all worlds” and “this is what people dream of” as you really sound like you drunk the Arahat Kool-Aid (which after painful reading between the lines I don’t think you swallowed). Conscious experience is the tip of an iceberg of experience, you have managed to lift more of the iceberg out of the water (no doubt it took a lot of effort!). It must be very exciting playing with that territory (it is a select crowd, and you are no doubt a star in your tribe). But the game is being played on an unconscious level and your fascination with conscious experience is demonstrating you are missing this point. I do think your abilities are very useful (I imagine you were a good doctor in the emergency room). If you could get over yourself and work with non-buddhism rather than putting so much energy into resisting it, we would all be better off (I see you tried on Matthews podcast and you get an A for effort, but there is still more there). Best wishes!
Mark
June 27, 2019 at 10:11 am
I am not entirely sure how to respond to this post, but at the very least let me say that I absolutely don’t think of Daniel as a psychopath. I am not sure what I have said that would give you that impression? On the contrary, he seems to be a person of deep feeling. I also don’t doubt that he has experienced significant changes as a result of his training. My effort has been to clarify how those changes might be understood and what they might mean.
parletre
June 27, 2019 at 5:53 pm
Hi parletre, someone who has the type of experience you are describing would be a very messed up person. You never said he would be a psychopath, that is my exaggeration. But if you look at the reactions you are getting I think you are misunderstanding Daniel’s message. Maybe try asking questions about his experience rather than guessing that you know what his experience is? If you can understand the experiences from Daniel’s point of view then you would be much better off to offer a “diagnosis” or interpretation. He seems to see you assuming the opposite of many of his opinions and experiences, so I’m assuming a lot of misunderstanding. It seems to me that you are confusing subjectivity and agency. What percentage of an average person’s cognitive processing would you estimate to be conscious ? What percentage does Daniel think he is perceiving? How much insight has Daniel gained into unconscious social processes? Can he give some examples of this? These would be interesting discussions. Best.
Mark
June 27, 2019 at 9:29 pm
This has been a great discussion! I hope I can add something of value, though I’m mostly speaking from a perspective of “my life with ear disease”
What does agency mean without a healthy proprioception? Its hard to operate as an agent in a space you can’t calibrate as continuous in a moment to moment way. The desire to restore sense of continuity, to be the agent that stitches reality into something you can roll with, became almost traumatizing after I had this sort of experience (long story short, Meniere’s disease sucks …). The self-as-agent thing did seem like an object of desire to restore in these moments, but the actual process of sifting bits of sensory stuff into a consistent story was the actual thing that was missing. Without knowing more about your self-as-agent model I’d suggest that it might be a sense of identity cultivated from the process of going from sense to perception.
I think David and Daniel both have valid points. I have had experiences like Daniel describes, where experience has a different quality or focus that almost seems layered atop. Before my ear disease went from “part deaf” to “can’t stand up at will” I had enjoyed several years of thinking I had attained this sort of permanent state. Afterwards, I couldn’t sit still without falling all over the place and practice simply wouldn’t happen, no matter how much I tried. When my symptoms calmed down I revisited practice in earnest, only to discover that things seemed a bit different and practice never felt satisfying like it had in the past. Nowadays, I’ve tried putting it all down but after 2 years I find that passing moments still feel like shikantaza.
Overall, I like to remind myself that life is more highly dimensional than can be conceived (to David’s point). Some meditations are more open than others in this regard (ie vipassana feels like shikantaza narrowed to physicality, which I think can be useful when working with physical pain/suffering but maybe not great as a general disposition). Combining methods, models, practices and the like can help you reach deep and wide, but getting stuck seems much easier than navigating the rich dimensionality of life and human experience.
bchjam
June 26, 2019 at 2:08 pm
This is a general comment, as well. I haven’t read much Ingram, but I am certainly aware of MCTB’s high profile across several communities. I did read (some of) Ingram’s response to Parlêtre’s. (Some; not all, at 20, 000+ words it was too lengthy to go into.)
I have three basic points:
● it’s entirely possible that Ingram is correctly self-reporting that he has achieved a stable (i.e. “a trait”, not a “state”) experience of something like “experiential agencyless”. I recognize Evan Thompson’s, David Chapman’s, and Glenn Wallis’ points and questions above and in preceding threads.
That said, it’s totally plausible that this something Ingram has achieved with his project. I.e. “classical enlightenment” is a state one can achieve, Ingram got there, and MCTB is a process for doing it.
● my question is, without the frame of reference of theravadan Buddhist soteriology (as Thompson raised on a previous thread), what is the point of dis-assembling one’s experience of reality in this particular way, with this particular method? What are the benefits?
More importantly, what are the potential costs/risks, as well as opportunity costs?
This isn’t a concern I have so much for Dr Ingram, as for the hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of people who might be inspired/influenced to put themselves through an intense (“unusually hardcore”) meditation regimen. I am confident that Ingram has put appropriate caveats and warnings in his book. Still: meditational injuries and harm are actual things.
I don’t want to be too confrontational about this, but it does remain an open question: why embark on the project of classical enlightenment unless one is literally trying to escape an endless cycle of rebirths?
● Let’s now assume that there are benefits to this stable trait of agencylessness outside of the soteriological.
What avenues lead to similar beneficial outcomes, and use different means to get there? I think that sitting meditation can be over-valorized and over-prescribed. At the same time I do see value in some of the phenomena Ingram talks about (experiential agencylessness), though I am not so sure it is necessary to install that as a permanent trait. It would seem to be a valuable state experience that one can access through a number of means.
Finally, two observations:
● the experiential agencylessness reminds me of the concept of wei wu wei;
● to the extent that the reported experiential agencylessness is a stable trait, it reminds me of Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight.
timber22
June 26, 2019 at 7:44 pm
Daniel lists a large number of benefits, some of them seem to be personal satisfaction, but I think it does not take much imagination to see benefits for people close to him. Someone who can stay extremely focused and not get flustered into making poor decisions is the sort of person I would rather have as my doctor in an emergency ward (than the zombies we tend to have due to a crazy hospital system).
The benefits are going to be socially constructed goals, so you are not going to get broad consensus even on the list of potential benefits. But I appreciate the benefits of realizing that experience is malleable to some extent and subjectivity is not the only or best frame for interpreting that experience. That is already a hell of a lot compared to what the contemporary education system is doing to people.
Mark
June 27, 2019 at 10:21 am
Well, yes, Andrew, no doubt that a sense of grounded sensitivity, and a calmness-irrespective-of-conditions is a benefit for oneself, and for others. It’s laudable, and I don’t want to diminish the fruits of the efforts, nor the efforts themselves.
My stance (and this seems really trite & obvious to say it so plainly, but I’ll say it): I don’t think high-dose, high volume vipassana is the only way, or the best way, to achieve that.
(Of course, Ingram wouldn’t claim that either, explicitly.)
I do think that a lot of potential people in Ingram’s audience (many whom are earnest, focused, serious, possibly neuroatypical in one or across several dimension) would be better served, and end up with similar benefits “in the world” with a different suite or ecology of practices.
YMMV, and in general, one’s mileage may vary, of course.
timber22
June 27, 2019 at 4:42 pm
If you are pursuing any ecology of practises as a good subject of the dominant discourse then I doubt you’ll get good mileage. I tend to agree that dedicating oneself to trying to have a permanent state of non-subjective experience seems a lot of effort for results that do not seem compelling for broader goals. But having a serious dose of non-subjective experience and being able to control attention better, seems useful for other situations too. You can probably take any of your favorite practises and find someone overdoing it, someone misunderstanding it, someone abusing it etc. The risk with “benefits in the world” is that if one is a good modern subject one probably has a very limited notion of what “benefits” and “the world” are. If you have particular goals/practises in mind please share. As a balance to Vipassana style practises understanding Shadow work, Deleuze and the Non-Buddhist writings seems a good start. That is much easier if your identity is not tied to an authentic self.
Mark
June 27, 2019 at 10:26 pm
Hi Mark,
Can you please clarify what you mean by “non-subjective experience?”
Thanks!
Failed Buddhist
June 28, 2019 at 2:32 am
Hi Failed Buddhist,
I conceptualize experience as having different dualisms/dimensions, e.g. subjectivity and consciousness. So an experience you report as “I see the cat” probably includes a notion of being a subject (self) observing a cat, this is a subjective experience for me. You can have an experience without the subject, maybe reported as “seeing the cat” (although any recollection of the experience is going to re-introduce a subject at the moment of report, so you might say “it was as if I was not there and seeing was just happening”). I would consider a non-subjective experience to be something along the lines of what Daniel is reporting, the subjective aspect is there as part of experience so typically he honestly reports “I see the cat” and at the same time he is seeing the cat without the subject/self dominating the experience so he can also honestly report “seeing cat”. I like my model because it allows for unconscious subjective experience (which I think is dominant in forming subjects).
Mark
June 28, 2019 at 4:56 am
Failed Buddhist, I really would like it if you replied to me on your own blog too: thefailedbuddhist.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/socially-constructed-confusion Thanks!
Mark
June 28, 2019 at 4:59 am
I view the process of awakening as abolishing the power of reification to drive us.
In reification, we make “things” (mental objects) which are held to be identified, real, static, lasting, important and bounded.
The most important “thing” to us is generally “I”.
Things drive us when they are filled with emotional energy and mentally held apart. For example there may be something (regarded as “not-self”) that can be craved for and brought together to this “I” thing (regarded as “self”), a union which is supposed to result in satisfaction.
“Things” are illusory – a mental convenience to bring about focus on an imagined object. It is a mental illness of sorts, since it operates in an imagined world constructed around the thing.
Our own awareness is in process (an ongoing series of event-phenomena) so the “I” thing is a delusion – there is no such “thing.”
Beyond the world of “things” (awakening) there may be identifying, realizing, retaining, valuing, and bounding.
But beyond the world of things there wouldn’t be a drive to adjust imaginary things correctly in relation to the other imagined “I”-thing in the belief that this is supposed to bring lasting satisfaction.
You have to really believe in the “things” in order to make the illusory world of things to be a compelling Disneyland for your life and energy. This results in a kind of corruption of the stream of reality, inasmuch as a “thing” doesn’t correspond to reality and tends to eclipse actual reality (the stream of awareness-events.)
As a simple example, anyone or anything, even myself, that can affect the “I” thing (in my imagination) can produce dramatic shifts in my feeling and awareness, with the idea that the “I” thing might be diminished (humiliated) or expanded (aggrandized.) This is actually crazy, because there isn’t an “I” thing and someone praising me or insulting me hasn’t changed the worth or capabilities of my stream of awareness and actions at all.
Matt Wesson
January 4, 2020 at 1:26 am