More water...

I generally like Brad Warner's blog posts; he's sincere, and he actually has some knowledge of what he's doing, even if there are some subtle differences in what he does and was taught versus me. But....

 Let's first go where I largely agree...

I've said several times that I feel like Buddhism is sort of like advanced physics. Albert Einstein pioneered so much of advanced physics it might be considered appropriate to call it "Einsteinism." But if we did that we would not want to stop all of advanced physics at the point of Albert Einstein's death and say anything that came after is not legitimate.

Same with Buddhism. Buddha never claimed to be a prophet or messiah. So to say Buddhism stops with the death of the historical Buddha would be a grave misunderstanding of Buddhism. Westernization and modernization of Buddhism is inevitable and helpful....

 Yeah, Buddhism continues with the Buddhist practitioner, and the Buddha can be made into an idol even by iconoclastic Westerners in the same manner as Che Guevara or Bruce Lee.  This "nowness" of Buddhism is one of those things that was extremely attractive to me, and resolved some of the conundra of Christianity, viz. the issue of dead folks before "Jesus," people at "Jesus'" "time" in history, and us now...and yeah, it resolved those conundra by saying there was too much myth and thinking overlayed onto what might have been - or not - a reformer of Judaism.  

And then...

 I was going over the galleys of Nishijima Roshi's translation of Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. It's due out in about a month. In the translation, Nishijima Roshi insists upon translating the Sanskrit word shunyata as "the balanced state."

Everybody knows that the word shunyata means "emptiness." This is the accepted translation of shunyata and has been for many years. Nishijima himself is well aware of this. But he also felt that the word "emptiness" in English really did not convey what Nagarjuna was talking about when he used the word shunyata...

"Balanced state" is an improper translation of shunyata. No doubt about it. But it may convey more of the meaning of shunyata than the word "emptiness" is able to. That was Nishijima's feeling anyway.

The translation is idiosyncratic. It does not match other English translations. But there are several more standard versions easily available to anyone who wants them. There is no reason for yet another one of those.

People worry themselves far too much about the Westernization and modernization of Buddhism. It's nice to have faithful versions of ancient texts. But we also have to be aware that even the most faithful versions we can produce are not faithful. Even if we read the texts in their original languages, we come from such a different place culturally we still won't be able to get what the people who wrote them meant exactly. Even the people who read those texts during the authors' lifetimes may not have fully understood what their writers meant.

It's hopeless!

Brad, I know you must defend your master (oh, no, I quoted Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill Vol. I!) but really there's no excuse for an inaccurate  translation, and "balanced" simply does not convey shunyata, especially either to Westerners or Japanese.

His post goes on to quote Nishijima-roshi on these things, and I am pretty sure he gets the science all wrong here.  For example,  the autonomous nervous plays a large role in the "fight or flight" response, and it's actually the conditioning of both nervous systems that allows us to do stuff like swim, abstain from bodily functions when necessary, and so forth. It's not in any way a "balance" of these nervous systems so much as a training of them to be able to function in the world in a manner that's more effective for all beings.  And of course to say that "Nagarajuna appears to me to be saying here that until the autonomic nervous becomes balanced, it is impossible for the real universe to become clear," mixes anachronism into it.  I've read Nagarajuna, Brad, and you can't find a whiff of neurophysiology in his Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.  You will find deep precursory thought to the existentialists and post-modernists, but not neurophysiology.

And yet despite all of the above, I still have a great admiration for Warner, and via him, his teacher Nishijima-roshi.  They've actually done the practice, jumped off the 100 ft. pole and all that stuff. It's not so much that I don't care that they're wrong; I care more for who they are, so that even when they're flat out wrong, I can still write the above with that level of respect.

But I tell you, there's more science in Wing Chun - namely mechanical physics, and yes, behavioral psychology - than there is in any of the above. Much more.  We don't need to overlay pseudo-scientific gobbledygook into Zen practice, especially when there's enough empirical evidence to show that, regardless of the "spirituality" involved or not, it's helpful.

Yes, I got a prroblem with "certified" miracle stories...

Anyone else have a problem (emphasis mine)?

CHAMPION, Wis. — In France, the shrine at Lourdes is surrounded by hundreds of hotels and has received as many as 45,000 pilgrims in a single day. Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico, draws millions of fervent worshipers a year.

Now, a little chapel among the dairy farms here, called Our Lady of Good Help, has joined that august company in terms of religious status, if not global fame. This month, it became one of only about a dozen sites worldwide, and the first in the United States, where apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been officially validated by the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1859, the year after Mary is said to have appeared in Lourdes, a Belgian immigrant here named Adele Brise said she was visited three times by Mary, who hovered between two trees in a bright light, clothed in dazzling white with a yellow sash around her waist and a crown of stars above her flowing blond locks. As instructed, Ms. Brise devoted her life to teaching Catholic beliefs to children.

On Dec. 8, after a two-year investigation by theologians who found no evidence of fraud or heresy and a long history of shrine-related conversions, cures and other signs of divine intervention, Bishop David L. Ricken of Green Bay declared “with moral certainty” that Ms. Brise did indeed have encounters “of a supernatural character” that are “worthy of belief.”  ...

Catholic leaders described the decree in Wisconsin as a bolt of joy at a trying time for the Catholic church, which is troubled by revelations of sex abuse.
“This is a gift to the believers,” said the Rev. Johann Roten, director of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton...



Over the 20th century, some 386 major apparitions of Mary were reported at a level beyond local rumors, said Father Roten, who has been an investigator in purported sightings. About 75 of those were studied, and at most a dozen were recognized as valid, he said. Increasingly, he said, the church makes use of psychiatric examinations and brain scans to see if people making claims are mentally healthy and not having hallucinations.
That kind of examination was not possible, of course, for Ms. Brise, and Bishop Ricken said that his panel of three theological specialists had considered a host of indirect factors in concluding that her sighting was credible, following guidelines set by the Vatican in 1978.

By all reports, he said, Ms. Brise was humble and honest and faithfully carried out Mary’s mandate to serve the church throughout her life. In one striking sign of a divine presence, he said, the shrine’s grounds and the terrified crowd who gathered there were spared the flames of the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, which devoured the surrounding lands and homes and caused more than 1,200 deaths. Her account of Mary’s apparition and message was consistent with accepted cases.

I mean, it's just not sporting, is it?

Science illiteracy, philosophical illiteracy, allows for shouters, woo-merchants

I think the problem, ultimately, with Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers is that their position inherently trivializes much of what we do know about philosophy, linguistics, and even physics, and that is why when they posit a metaphysics of "nothing beyond what we observe," I have to take issue because "what we observe" will always be in question - there's that "we" part and that "observe" part in there, and cogent arguments can be made by us Buddhists that "we" is a construct of our minds.  And New Atheists often (Sam Harris being an exception) present a limited menu of choices.

That's of course the extent of my quibbles with Dawkins and Myers (I leave Hitchens out because despite what seem like standard boilerplate atheist arguments, his arguments for the Iraq war were highly disingenuous.

But enough of that, except to say that a lack of understanding of certain areas tends to bring distortion to one's views, and we should always be checking for our lack of understanding, regardless of from where in our awareness we think it arises.

Another purpose of this post, and example of to what I'm referring, is in the way of a reply to a comment - a really odd comment - by Barbara O' Brien to me on her blog.

First, a bit of background: Way back when I was a freshman in at Polytech (Bernie Glassman's alma mater, or one of them, at any rate, so don't hold it against me) I asked Professor Wainfan how electrical charge is inhered in matter.  Now there was active research in theoretical physics at the time (and still is) but even at the sub-atomic particle level, charge is still inhered.  It is accepted as axiomatic as a property of whatever matter is in question.   I had, in fact, asked a metaphysical question - a question beyond the bounds of measurability and observability.   That is why my professor responded, “I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a plumber.”

I could say inherent from the presumption of Barbara's answer, 

There’s bench science, which is like cooking, and then there’s theoretical or analytical science, which is nothing like cooking. Your physics professor was speaking for bench scientists, but we’re talking about the other kind.

is a lack of understanding of what scientists and physicists actually do.   Now let me open up this discussion with one caveat: Everything scientists and physicists do that is science is because the theory and analysis they perform is subject to observation and experimentation.   We are pretty damn well sure we know there are exoplanets because of the myriad of other experiments done that verify Einstein's laws of Relativity, and other aspects of modern physics. Now, it is true that regarding certain aspects of String Theory are said not to be able to be verified experimentally. Too, we engineers take a far more practical take on this sort of thing: if you have to build a particle accelerator 1/2 the length of the universe to verify a theory, then for all intents and purposes, the theory is unverifiable (until some practical method of experimental verification arises.)

But Barbara wasn't talking about this; the subject in question was quantum physics, for which there is a plethora of experimental results consistent with observed phenomena.  The "hard" part of quantum physics for the lay person to understand is the fact that many of its phenomena are probablistic in nature.  Strictly speaking quantum mechanics is not my specialty (though I passed the course with flying colors back in the day), but I do know quite a thing or two about Probability Theory, which is a bedrock discipline of quantum mechanics, as well as Communication Theory.  

And a lot of people (especially creationists and woo merchants) like to exploit the ignorance of the themselves and/or the public of Probability Theory for their own purposes.  But the core of Probability Theory - a bounded form of Measure Theory - is actually quite compact, self-contained, and, unlike what the public might think about "randomness" is (here's that word again!) inherently predictable.  And that's why it's useful

Probability Theory deals with 3 objects, and functions defined therefrom:

Ω, an abstract space, also known as a "sample space"

S: a σ - algebra defined on Ω (i.e., a collection of subsets of  such that meaningful, consistent probabilities may be calculated), and

P a probability measure defined on S.

Probabilities may then be calculated based on functions which map  Ω into some other useful space, such as the real line, the complex plane, or Euclidean n-dimensional space, or charge, etc.  The "nature" of Ω may never be known; its "fundamental nature" is irrelevant to the subsequent calculations.  We just take it as axiomatic that there is a space Ω, and that there is an S from which meaningful probabilities may be calculated. The introduction of  Ω and S only serves to provide a consistent, logical framework from which to develop probability theory rigorously; it's an artifice, in much the same way an alphabet is an artifice for writing down spoken words.

Probability theory is defined this way because there is no other coherent way to talk about stochastic phenomena, and when "random" phenomena are expressed this way, meaningful predictions and regressions and inferences may be calculated.

In other words, the whole point of Probability Theory is to extract order from the seemingly disordered, and for what we can talk about (including quantum theory) it works.  That is, we can construct meaningful analysis that are amenable to experimental observation and verification.  

So, to me, the whole premise of the question on her blog post,  based on a religion article in the Ottawa Citizen entitled "Do you think quantum physics lends itself to religious belief?" is related to the Argument from Ignorance: in effect the question is asking, "Who can say whether or not quantum physics is true?" Well, dammit, if you have doubts, or are sincerely interested, educate yourself.  And note that whenever scientists or engineers say something is "true" we are talking about phenomena only.  We don't do metaphysics in our day jobs.

If you are not interested enough to attempt to educate yourself (and there's some excellent primers on the subject in the layman's scientific literature, I'm sure) then it is insincere to attempt to equate what is science with what is unverifiable religious positions. 

As my father, a very conservative Catholic, said about his engineering profession: we do science, not faith.  Now I do science mindfully, and practice as I do science, engineering, and management.  But if it's not science, engineering, and management I'm doing then I'm just not engaging in right livelihood.

One other thing: when we scientists and engineers do analysis, we are envisioning possible ways in which things could be, function, or exist based on an abstract view of question in possible in the same way in which a musician might compose a fugue, or a poet might compose a poem according to a certain form.  For example, if I want to design a set of reference signals to aid in the demodulation of a received communication signal, I would envision the set as being a subset of an larger space of signals, and then determine the subset of interest based on properties desired for those signals; from that I would then verify experimentally (via simulation, which tracks "lab bench" results ridiculously accurately these days) to show  that the properties of the reference signals are indeed met. 

There is no gross separation between "lab bench" and analysis; they're one and the same more or less these days, except for the "vision" part.  And that's just training, just as it's just training to write a fugue or think of how sauteed mushrooms might taste when cooked in garlic and olive oil.

Quantum physics questions?

I think Barbara's basically starting in the right direction here, though I cringe at the inclusion of Ken Wilbur of course. I can't seem to get the comment in on her blog. (I'm sure it'll appear once this is posted!)

"Do you think quantum physics lends itself to religious belief?"

What an odd question. I can't even parse it really.

Similarly with the response that quoted Ken Wilbur.

Quantum physics, like any other scientific theory, is a predictive description of reality. The degree of accuracy or veracity of the theory is the degree to which the theory consistently predicts experimental results - observed results.

It's a recipe.

So quantum physics no more or less "lends itself" to religious belief in any way any more than any of Francis Lam's recipes.

There's no "first person" or "third person" gobbledygook involved in that any more than a recipe for caramelized onions with sauteed mushrooms.

I might put more on my blog about this later.

However, given my comment, you can see that I might take issue with the following:

There is no reason why science and dharma should interfere with or contradict each other, and in spots they do seem to touch each other in a harmonious way. But I also think that to fully engage in one requires letting go of the other.

 If you think of science like cooking (which the latter kind of is, anyway!) then the idea that to fully engage in the business of science is to "let go" of the Dharma is absurd - ask any Tenzo you happen to meet.

But otherwise, she's kind of in the right direction.

But - general rule of thumb - when a non-scientist or non-engineer uses the word "quantum" keep your woo detectors out.  The idea of asking this question to religious business people and not scientists is less relevant, to me, than asking the identical question to scientists, engineers, and those who fund their projects.

My web-surfing, my mind, my dukkha

One of the interesting things about the internet - how many sentences do you read that begin like that anymore? - is that it gives, irrefutably, a history, a memory, of where your mind's been.

I of course, have a number of things I do each day with the 'net, a number of things that involve family needs, work, retirement planning, my interests in the news, politics, science, and fitness.

So here's where my mind is today:

• Most Americans don't care about the budget deficit compared to unemployment.
• The Hindu has a book review of a history of Cambodian Buddhism.
• Finland opposes an Irish bailout.  Things could get weird here, as in Argentina weird.
• "In-country" operations means a lower dollar probably won't significantly reduce unemployment.
• Here's the best conclusion to this post: Focused attention will be more satisfying than random wandering of the mind:

I’m not sure I believe this prediction [about focused attention versus random wandering of the mind], but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working...

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth [of Harvard] says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

 But then we mindful Buddhist folks kinda knew that, didn't we?

More on Procrastination, Planning, and Dukkha

I have a few more minutes now to expound a bit more on the post I made yesterday.

When we plan, we often think we are creating an expectation about how certain things will be done within the context of certain events we expect to happen.   But as any good project manager or field commander knows,  all plans go awry at some point, and there are still expectations of things that need to be done and events that will happen, as well as the realization that certain unexpected things had to be done or weren't done, and unforeseen events happen. 

Murphy's Law is real, and it is a hindrance, really, only when dukkha is reigning over the planning and execution of the plan.   The "plan" must be carried out moment to moment anyway, even though in the very near term we might value surfing the net over coming through on our deliverables.

So when we regret procrastination - or other "unforseen" events, we are really regretting a realization of a world that never existed, where all plans and expectations were fulfilled.  

Such a world doesn't exist as far as I know, but it is possible to be dependable despite Murphy's Law.

 The trick is neither to be come too attached to the plan or too attached to departing from the plan,  or even, oddly enough the execution of the plan.

The practice of breath-counting in meditation is one of humanity's greatest inventions: not only does it "build up concentration" or, if you like, help you develop 情理気 (I presume I got the Kanji right on that one - it's joriki!) or concentration energy, but it also helps develop nonattachment. Your "plan" of course is trivially simple: count from 1 to 10 in synch with your breath.  But if you lose count, go back to the beginning.  The trick of course is not to see "10" as some kind of success, and not to see losing count as some kind of failure.  Either attachment will of course result in an inability actually carry out the exercise!

Executing all the other plans of life are similar cases, in my experience.

Murphy's Law is a Corollary of Dukkha

That's the conclusion my Rube Goldberg mind came to after reading this article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki on procrastination.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”...

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run..

Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

 I'll have more to say on this in another post; I'm just too pressed for time right now.

If a moral code is not "utilitarian" according to some performance measure, what the hell good is it????

As a systems engineer (communication systems, that is), I likely have a few things that I do not agree with in Sam Harris's new book,  “The Moral Landscape,”  if the critical review in the NY Times Book Review is to be believed.

In particular, I'm not quite sure a  "purely" scientific explanation can be found for "the moral code."  As I think I've written on this blog before, in systems engineering, particularly in the areas of control systems engineering, there are critical concepts of observability and controllability.  A system is observable if all its states can be observed; that is, if the states can be determined from measurements.   States are those values or conditions of a system that given its history (perhaps only a very limited history) and given an input, the state of the system in the future can be predicted.  Likewise a system is controllable if for any desired state condition there exists an input to bring the state to that point.  In short, it is not clear to me, even if human beings can be reduced precisely to meat machines, that humanity and moral choices are completely observable or controllable, in which case the moral landscape or code will not only always be complete, but complete in a defective, non-trivial way as opposed to those aspects of natural numbers of which Gödel wrote.  In short, there will be unanswerable and debatable questions.

Having said that however,  (and having seen Harris on The Daily Show last night)  I would take issue with the position of the NY Times reviewer, Kwame Anthony Appiah.  Appiah writes:

Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science — the right values being ones that promote well-being. “Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health,” he writes, “it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.”

But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?

It’s not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.

Now at first glance it appears Appiah is making an objection similar to mine, but I don't think so.  "Science" hasn't "revealed" a moral code (I cringe when someone like,  say, Deepak Chopra uses phrases like "science reveals." It smacks of those miracle organ enlargement/reduction pill ads). True, but can we know another's well being?

Uh, that's what we Buddhists call compassion.  We can't knowthe "well" being of another in its entirety, but we can get that the beings we see and of which we have experience, either directly or indirectly, had existences and senses and experiences as total to them as ours are to us.

In the sense of the transcendence of the suffering of all beings, the moral code of the Buddhist religion is indeed a utilitarian outlook.  And regardless of the toy problems raised by philosophers, the existence of the Buddhist moral code,  by its mere existence, without bombast, shouts an indictment of all alternative moral philosophies, as I see it:  If a moral code is not "utilitarian" according to some measure of "goodness" what the hell good is it????  If it is not utilitarian according to some measure of goodness, then it must follow as night follows day that such non-utilitarian moral codes are themselves morally inferior in a utilitarian sense to any such code that does have a performance measure. 

And on that point, I can agree with Harris, even if I think Harris is overly optimistic about the prospects of science. 

No matter, we humans have evolved a certain degree of compassion and empathy.

Light blogging this week

I have quite a few deadlines at work, and will be on travel on Friday.

Meanwhile, read Barbara's post "The Mystic Eye."  I hate the title, but watch the video referenced there.  This is a good post from Barbara.  There's further to go than what she says, but implies a point I've thought about for decades: what we do when we practice is a natural, original state of functioning of the human mind-process.

The other side of fundamentalist religious oppression

As Barbara notes here, one component of it is a fear of losing one's self - but there is another component. And it's a type of hubris, greed, and narcissism, based on a denial of a fundamental self-evident observation of  human behavior in the human condition, as succinctly put by R. D. Laing:

I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot "see" my experience of you. My experience of you is not "inside" me. It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me as inside you.
"My experience of you" is just another form of words for "you-as-l-experience-you", and "your experience of me" equals "me-as-you-experience-me". Your experience of me is not inside you and my experience of you is not inside me, but your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you.

And:

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence.

We can take "experience"  for Buddhist purposes to mean one's own collection of the 5 aggregates and the various forms of consciousness.  When I declare that your experience invalid because of either my experience or some external to both of our experiences (such as somebody's opinion of "scripture" or  what someone was told "God's intention" or "God's words" were, this is a statement against your very being.  In the case where either of us are citing something external to invalidate both of our experiences, this is a statement directed against both of us.

Although we can "see areas light up in the brain" corresponding to all kinds of human thoughts, feelings, emotions, hallucinations, volitions and sensations, these can never be the equivalent if any person actually experiencing those thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, hallucinaitons, and volitions.

Despite what I have experienced in my life, I  really don't have a clue as to why Lindsay Lohan  is messed up, or what makes a fundamentalist tick,  what's in Eddie Long's brain, or any of a thousand other such questions.  Only the principals know what's in their hearts and minds. True, there is empathy and compassion, but this empathy and compassion is counterfeit if it does not take into account that what another is experiencing is really experienced..

It is this invalidation of others that is the beginning of all kinds of religious exploitation, and all the big religions have done it from time to time.  I practice Buddhism in part because by placing the issues with regard to the Way on the individual, at least in my school, much of this harm can be avoided.  And that's another reason, as I say, that such practices are the last best hope for religion. Maybe Taoism and Jainism are too.

Modern neuroscience and Buddha nature and the "god concept"

What do recent results in neuroscience portend for some Buddhist ideas, particularly the Mahayana concept of the Dharmakaya?

... Our brains create an illusion of unity and control where there really isn’t any. Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism [i.e., belief in a separate individual "soul" and a separate "mind" as used in this article], from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding of the brain. In fact, to advance their ideas, these authors have to be almost completely unaware of neurology and neuroscience.  For example, Robinson tells us, “Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.” The translation might be, “indoctrination tells us we have a soul, it feels like we are a unified little god in control of our bodies, so we are.” 
In explaining why science suggests that the unified mind is illusory, there are thousands of supporting cases and experiments to choose from, but let’s take one case from the Emergency Room.
After eating dinner with her husband, Mrs. Blanford collapsed. She could not move the left side of her body. I met Mrs. Blanford soon afterwards: Her speech was normal, but she couldn’t see objects to her left, and she couldn’t move or feel the left side of her face, or her left arm or leg. Mrs. Blanford was suffering a stroke.

An interesting thing happened when I brought her left arm up across her face so she could see it. I asked, as I always ask such patients, “Whose arm is this?”
“That is your arm.”
“Then why am I wearing your ring?” I pointed to her wedding band.
“That wedding band belongs on the arm of Mrs. Blanford.”
“So whose arm is this?”
“That is your arm.”


How can we explain this? Given that we find neglect soon after right-brain damage, we are best served by adopting a neurological point of view. To do so, we need to understand a bit about how the brain works. In general, and in the broadest strokes, the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere processes speech and the motor and sensory information for the right side of the world. The right hemisphere processes nonverbal information and representations from the left side. This particular stroke rendered Mrs. Blanford’s right hemisphere dysfunctional, unable to process anything from the left side of her world. It is not the left hemisphere’s job to recognize the left arm, and the left hemisphere can’t immediately step in to do that task. To the left brain, the left side of the body essentially does not exist. The right brain has failed, not only to process arm information, but failed to let the left hemisphere know it failed.
For Mrs. Blanford, it isn’t only that her left brain can’t do the right brain’s task. The left hemisphere also can’t recognize that there is missing data, or that there is something wrong with the data it receives. It has to use the data it has, so the left hemisphere comes up with confabulations, creating verbal fabrications to explain away missing information. In this case the confabulation becomes, “That is your arm, not mine.” Although easy to falsify, the idea is internally consistent, makes some sense of the scrambled internal data, and feels correct. The injured brain creates a confabulation to maintain a unity of self and a feeling of control. We find a brain convincing itself of something that feels right, but isn’t.
A neglect case only makes sense if you consider each hemisphere as its own separate entity. We see that when a stroke damages the right brain just so, the mind follows as a result. It is expected, to be compared with the unplugging of a mouse resulting in a frozen cursor.

Clearly this comports with the Buddhist expectations in regard to the "soul," as well as the experience of many during meditation.

But what of the "god concept" in Buddhism? We say "Buddha nature pervades the whole universe." Is this a falsifiable claim?  


Shaku Soen via D.T. Suzuki maintained,

One of the most fundamental beliefs of Buddhism is that all the multitudinous and multifarious phenomena in the universe start from, and have their being in, one reality which itself has "no fixed abode," being above spatial and temporal limitations. However different and separate and irreducible things may appear to the senses, the most profound law of the human mind declares that they are all one in their hidden nature. In this world of relativity, or nânâtva as Buddhists call it, subject and object, thought and nature, are separate and distinct, and as far as our sense-experience goes, there is an impassable chasm between the two which no amount of philosophizing can bridge. But the very constitution of the mind demands a unifying principle which is an indispensable hypothesis for our conception of phenomenality; and this

hypothesis is called "the gate of sameness," samatâ, in contradistinction to "the gate of difference," nânâtva; and Buddhism declares that no philosophy or religion is satisfactory which does not recognize these two gates. In some measure the "gate of sameness" may be considered to correspond to "God" and the "gate of difference" to the world of individual existence.

Now, the question is, "How does Buddhism conceive the relation between these two entrances to the abode of Supreme Knowledge (sambodhi)?" And the answer to this decides the Buddhist attitude towards pantheism, theism, atheism, and what not...

Thus, according to the proclamation of an enlightened mind, God or the principle of sameness is not transcendent, but immanent in the universe, and we sentient beings are manifesting the divine glory just as much as the lilies of the field. A God who, keeping aloof from his creations, sends down his words of command through specially favored personages, is rejected by Buddhists as against the constitution of human

reason. God must be in us, who are made in his likeness. We cannot presume the duality of God and the world. Religion is not to go to God by forsaking the world, but to find him in it. Our faith is to believe in our essential oneness with him, and not in our sensual separateness. "God in us and we in him," must be made the most fundamental faith of all religion.

We must not, however, suppose that God is no more than the sum-total of individual existences. God exists even when all creations have been destroyed and reduced to a state of chaotic barrenness. God exists eternally, and he will create another universe out of the ruins of this one. To our limited intelligence there may be a beginning and an end of the worlds, but as God surveys them, being and becoming are one selfsame process. To him nothing changes, or, to state it rather paradoxically, he sees no change whatever in all the changes we have around us; all things are absolutely quiet in their eternal cycle of birth and death, growth and decay, combination and disintegration. This universe cannot exist outside of God, but God is more than the totality of individual existences; God is here as well as there, God is not only this but also that.

If there is one thing we read over and over and over in the Lankavatara Sutra, it's that these categorizations are themselves not quite where Buddha is, and I cannot help but think some of this was written by Suzuki and Soyen Roshi as a means to try to "explain" Buddhism in Christian terms much the same way that Christian missionaries  tried to explain Christianity in Buddhist terms.

As I mentioned before, Buddhists do not make use of the term God, which characteristically belongs to Christian terminology. An equivalent most commonly used is Dharmakâya, which word has been explained in one of the sermons herein collected, and it will not be necessary to enter again upon the discussion of its signification. Let us only see what other equivalents have been adopted.

When the Dharmakâya is most concretely conceived it becomes the Buddha, or Tathâgata, or Vairochana, or Amitâbha. Buddha means "the enlightened," and this may be understood to correspond to "God is wisdom." Vairochana is "coming from the sun," and Amitâbha, "infinite light," which reminds us of the Christian notion, "God is light." As to the correct meaning of Tathâgata, Buddhists do not give any definite and satisfactory explanation, and it is usually considered to be the combination of tathâ = "thus" and gata = "gone," but it is difficult to find out how "Thus Gone" came to be an appellation of the supreme being.

 I would submit that the attempt to make a correspondence between a monotheist deity and the Tathâgata is bound to fail quite early.  I can understand the difficulty my ancestors had in describing this particularly before the advent of modern existentialism and critical theory, which are better frameworks for making metaphors to Buddhism.  I just don't see support for these notions elsewhere in Buddhist literature, though I'm open to exploration, with a skeptical, doubtful  stance.

So I think the recent findings in neuroscience in no way, as I see it, are relevant or threaten to falsify the relation between the Absolute and the Relative.  They seem to buttress Buddhist views on this; only the idea that one can easily harmonize a creating personal deity with Buddhism is getting harder, I think.

Reason #49134 that I'm not a big fan of "Voice Dialogue"

Salon  has an interview with Meredith Maran, who has recently written a memoir of her involvement in one of the 90's witch-hunts: the mass of children and women who were led to claim a "recovered memory" of abuse that never happened.

There are of course, guided meditations in many traditional Buddhist practices, but these are rather benign, extending to such things as calming one's self and so forth; you know, making new body-mind connections generally.  And of course koan practice is clearly not in this league at all: it's not for nothing, as they've said in Brooklyn, that the "source language" of koans is meaningless. Koans aren't at all about replacing one narrative one has with another. It's about not having a narrative at all, really, and seeing what is and what happens.

"Recovered memory" is like "disowned voices," as far as I can see. It'd be nice for practitioners of such Voice Dialogue stuff to try to explain the differences.

Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's Case Against a Possible Creator

The recent article by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow saying there is no case for a creator deity  is finally available on the 'net for now.  Rather than opine about it and take a swipe and "New Atheists" I would entreat all to actually read the article. Here's the key points:

It is possible to turn that last statement into a scientific principle: The fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. For example, if we did not know the distance from the Earth to the sun, the fact that beings like us exist would allow us to put bounds on how small or great the Earth-sun separation could be. We need liquid water to exist, and if the Earth were too close, it would all boil off; if it were too far, it would freeze. That principle is called the "weak" anthropic principle.

The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints, not just on our environment, but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves...

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.
The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.
Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.
Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation. 

The universe, vast as it is, is as Grace Slick once sang..."Compared to your scream, the human dream doesn't mean sh!t to a tree."  The planets we've "seen" outside our solar system are even wilder than we had thought at first. If there were an anthropic principle, it's pretty well hidden amongst the strange variety of objects in the universe.  Sorry if that doesn't mean "religion and science are enemies,"  as far as scientific inquiry versus dogma are concerned but it seems to be the case.

When Hawking and Molodinow say, "the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing," I believe, based on what I know as an educated non-specialist, that it means that there is a probabilistic mechanism by which universe arise. That probabilistic structure means that it is fundamentally irrelevant whether or not a deity exists in regards to the universe coming into being.  It falls out of the math so to speak, just as it is irrelevant how the laws of physics effect a large numbers of rolls of two fair die.

In saying there's any kind of anthropic principle we're just thinking we're too damned important in the universe. I would say even Hawking and Mlodinow go in that direction, perhaps as a salve, for saying though we're puny, we're the "lords" of the universe.    There's too much variety in the universe we've already seen to make such a grandiose statement, in my view.

The vast variety of the universe and my limited knowledge of the intertwining of probability into its origin is a catalyst for this Buddhist's sense of wonder, awe, and humility.

By the way,Nathan at Dangerous Harvests had had a post on this earlier.  I would challenge all to actually consider what Hawking and Mlodinow are saying, not from a "Religion" versus "Science" perspective, but to hold that issue in brackets until you have a sufficient understanding of what they're saying as science.  They're not condemning religious people as enemies, they're condemning  dogma as the enemy of reasoning.   I  would make a similar metaphor of religious dogma being fundamentally opposed to the search for the resolution to the Great Matter.  And the search for the resolution to the Great Matter, as made into a parable in the famed ox herding pictures, will always - can only triumph over a dogmatic command to "Believe this because god told me so."

Can we pursue happiness? Should we pursue happiness?

A recent post on the Tricycle blog talked about "The Pursuit of Happiness Project," which is some kind of conference:

Hosted by Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, the conference marks the fifth year of a project in which 18 senior fellows studied the traditional teachings of happiness versus scientific understanding of what happiness is.

It's at Emory University, which I believe is in Georgia (Atlanta area?), and its website states:

Most famously formulated in the American Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness" theme is an ancient and enduring Western ideal grounded in various Hebrew, Greco-Roman, Christian, and Enlightenment sources. Recent developments in positive psychology have brought the idea of happiness back to public attention with a flurry of books and undergraduate courses. By putting religion and science in conversation, and by focusing on the relation between altruistic love and happiness, our project will retrieve some of the rich traditional teachings captured in this ideal and reconstruct them for our day in light of the new findings of the human and social sciences and of the new liberties of constitutional democracies.

Before I go any further, the Voice of Cynicism (see? I can do Big Mind speak too!) in me wants you to know about the rest of the story, also from their website:

Project Accomplishments

• Roundtable, October 13-15, 2006
• Roundtable, April 20-22, 2007
• Roundtable, October 12-14, 2007
• Roundtable, April 11-13, 2008
• Roundtable, April 17-19, 2009
• Roundtable, October 16-18, 2009
• Roundtable, April 16-18, 2010

Sponsors

The John Templeton Foundation and an anonymous donor

Voice of Cynicism:  Now, I tell people regularly working on my project never to write in status reports, "We had a meeting"  and call that an accomplishment.  What I, and those in upper management want to know is the results: inquiring minds want to know just which rich traditional teachings were captured in this [Judeo-Christian and Western philosphical]  ideal and reconstructed for our day in light of the new findings of the human and social sciences?

Blogging Me: Of course the John Templeton Foundation's famous for not asking  questions that result in answers that can stand up to criticism (just ask Richard Dawkins), and it's a good gig, I suppose, for those that can make the right pitch.  OK, well, that's the Voice of Cynicism for you; always trying to ask about those damned results.  

 But, as I often do, I digress.

I want to know, and perhaps it's worth asking in depth: should we be happy? Should we pursue happiness?

I once admit I actually bought and read the book to the left above here; it's probably still in my house somewhere.  I don't remember the details other than a warm and fuzzy feeling throughout.   But I also remember the book I  read to the left below here (many times in Japanese hotels, and finally obtained a copy in a Pure Land Japanese-heritage Buddhist temple); and especially it brings to my mind the story of the Buddha himself.

The Buddha lived in the lap of luxury; he had a family, and yet was still disturbed at the sight of sickness and death.  The Buddha came to realize that sickness, death, and suffering were our lot.  It is the condition of being human.  There is simply no escape from this.  We are born to die. 

So what's this about happiness anyway?

Well, the Buddha said,

A man struggling for existence will naturally look for something of value.  There are two ways of looking -- a right way and a wrong way.   If he looks in the wrong way he recognizes that sickness, old age and death are unavoidable, but he seeks the opposite.

If he looks in the right way he recognizes the true nature of sickness, old age and death, and he searches for meaning in that which transcends all human sufferings.  In my life of pleasures I seem to be looking in the wrong way."

The true nature of these things,  like happiness, is that they are fundamentally empty.   There is no essence of happiness; the pain is really felt, the happiness is really felt, but it cannot be captured and mounted like a butterfly. Happiness is pleasurable, and that should set off warning bells right there that from a Buddhist standpoint, it is neither to be craved nor avoided.  Yes, one should not be attached to happiness in the same way that one should not be attached to the avoidance of suffering.

Of course, deep mindful  practiced existence of this will bring relief via transcendence of suffering via profound, heavy compassion for all beings.  But to want to "get happy" by doing these things is simply another attachment, and you'll be sure to avoid the happiness that comes from radical acceptance of what is really there..  The highest principle in the transcendence of unhappiness is vast emptiness and nothing holy.

Just do your best with what you have at the time; remember the sufferings you feel are echoed in every other being and their sufferings are resonating in your suffering.

And just forget about pursuing happiness.  You'll be happy When the Revolution Comes. Or Jesus. Or Maritreya, or the 12th Imam. Or Bono.

You're not there anyway, so maybe it'll be a good idea to try to be nice to those around you and give them a break.

Scientific findings (more or less)

• Brains are found to "re-network" themselves in response to "Integrative Mind Body Training," a meditation technique.
• Exercise can apparently moderate anger to at least some extent.
• I too like swimming, though I've never had a serious exercise related injury...that I can remember.

“I was frankly demoralized that I’d be one of those people who ‘used to run’ and athletics would slowly become part of my past,” Jason said. It took time and effort to learn a new sport, he added. But now he loves swimming, especially, he says, the meditative aspect. “For 45 minutes, I can see little, hear only my thoughts, and talk to no one.” 

• I have to contact a good friend who needs me.
• Low carb diets are good for your heart.  Squaring that with wanting to leave a smaller earth foot-print to me is akin to "eating less."  As readers of this blog probably know, I am not a vegetarian, and I have moral and ethical issues with the idea that humans, who clearly have been evolving from and as meat eaters, should abandon all animal-based protein.  But in keeping with preserving life as much as possible, and in understanding that there's over 6 billion of us to feed, we have to do better about how we gather, prepare, and consume food.
• Thankfully, nipple piercings have given some researchers a topic to study, and the study indicates that some serious things might happen.
• Ray Kurzweil is a quack.  Oh, and for a variety of reasons I doubt his "singularity" will arrive. But PZ Myers isn't completely right either.

More on Reincarnation and Buddhism

As I was reading the recent book on Hakuin to the left, it became clear to me, a quite rationalist, scientific minded person, that the notions or rebirth do indeed permeate much of the thought of Edo-era Japanese Buddhism.  Hakuin, is quite cosmopolitan in his use of devices which, if interpreted literally,  would be dismissed as woo and superstition today among the skeptics and rationalists.  And frankly, those bits would get in the way   of the larger purpose of Hakuin.  Similarly, jn my opinion, attachment to the tulku system and the merging of politics with religion has been disastrous for Tibetan Buddhism and the young boys who undergo déformation professionnelle to support that system.  What is the place, if any, for rebirth in Buddhism?  Yeah, we can interpret rebirth in such a way as to reconcile it with modern notions of multiverses, of awareness arising and descending and so forth.  But a literal rebirth?

As I said, Hakuin uses many opportunities for introducing the supernatiural into his writing.  Among the opportunities taken, there is kami speaking through a young boy, as well as the implicit understanding of a soul-less rebirth in which the reborn has no prior memory of "his previous life."  And of course there's the precipitating events of his life, about being worried about being reborn in a kind of Buddhist hell.   Although I have not read all of the existing English literature of Dogen,  what I have read does not leave me with a memory of what I would call the superstitious, so perhaps in this regard the Soto folks have it easier.

How to reconcile all of that with a modern outlook?  Well, is that even the right question?  In a certain sense, I think it it is: clearly if one engages in the practices developed and promulgated by Hakuin, one clearly develops an understanding and skill to be able to function in previously difficult circumstances.  There is no doubt about that, and I could set up an experiment to verify that, and indeed these practices do have their counterparts in mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy.   So the reconciliation of the more superstitious elements of the traditions of Buddhism is a) something humans do naturally (resolve issues of cognitive dissonance) b) is useful for deepening the practice, and c) is a way of enhancing the view of the world that allows for this practice to be extended and useful for all beings.  So, yeah, how to reconcile?

Well, I would submit that it is necessary that, as I've previously written, that claims that are at variance with that which can be falsified via science should not be made as though science does not matter.   And those claims which cannot be falsified one should not demand that others respect them or honor them, simply as a matter of compassion and mercy as well as  savior-faire. Realistically, Tibetan monks finding the dead lama reborn as a young boy are treating the dead lama as the Virgin Mary and the young boy as a piece of toast in which they see her, or at least it is impossible to to show that they are not, and it is a bit arrogant to suggest that the rest of the world honor that decision simply because it is a "belief."   It may be honored for other reasons (such as wanting to not injure others' feelings, or wanting to ensure that things of higher priority are given the attention they deserve),  but there is no more reason to accept these sorts of things than it is to allow creationists to teach their kids creationism instead of science.

So my basic "reconciliation" is simply: that which is not useful to the objectives of Buddhism (helping beings, remember them?) should be treated sensibly and with compassion and mercy.  But we should be sincere about what is and what is not science and what is and what is not verifiable. 

In good science we have well-constructed experiments; these experiments allow for observation of results of  hypotheses to be well-separated.  That means that the possibility for  mis-identificatin of hypotheses causing the observation is minmal, or as we say there are a minimum of false detections and false alarms (or false positives and false negatives). In addition, these experiments are repeatable; they can be done time after time after time,  and the outcomes can be predicted. In communication systems, for example, a radio receiver is in effect a device which is constantly separating hypotheses of one type of signal received compared to others or no signal at all.  When real scientists speak of evidence, they mean  evidence in this way.  That's how you can tell a scientist from a non-scientist .  If they are talking about anecdotal evidence (e.g, "evidence" of reincarnation) , they are not talking about scientific evidence in the sense that scientists would use.  They may be talking about observations which might be able to be verified scientifically, but if such phenomena cannot be separated from naturally occurring explanations, we should insist that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof.  With regard to reincarnation, there just has not been that kind of evidence shown, and to insist on agnosticism in the face of such a damning lack of evidence is, in my opinion, unreasonable; it is as unreasonable as asserting that  we should be agnostic as to whether unicorns exist because there has been no good observation as to whether they do or do not exist.

So regarding my comments on Dr. Tart's work previously: if he does want to subject his work to scientific scrutiny, I will be happy to assist him in the protocols,  if I have the time, to help him collect $1 million from the James Randi foundation. 

Lankavatara Sutra Chapter 2, Sections XLI and XLII

As usual, this non-teacher is using this translation.

To the Buddha, Mahāmati asks,

The chain of origination as told by the Blessed One depends on a cause producing an effect, and that it is not a theory established on the principle of a self-originating substance. The philosophers also proclaim a causal origination when they say that all things rise conditioned by a supreme spirit, Iśvara, a personal soul, time, or atom. How is it that the rise of all things is explained by the Blessed One in another terminology bearing on causation but in its meaning not different? Blessed One, the philosophers explain birth from being and non-being, while, according to the Blessed One, all things coming into existence from nothingness pass away by causation, that is to say, the Blessed One has Ignorance from which there rises Mental Conformation until we reach Old Age and Death.

And the Buddha replies that his viewpoint...

is not a causeless theory of causation which results in an [endless] interconnection of causes and conditions. I speak of "That being so, this is" because of my seeing into the nature of the external world which is nothing but Self-Mind and because of its unreality of grasped (object) and grasping (subject). However, Mahāmati, when people clinging to the notion of grasped and grasping fail to understand the world as something seen of Mind itself; and, Mahāmati, by them the fault is committed as they recognise the external world as real with its beings and non-beings, but not by my theory of causation.

What then follows in the next chapter is quite, um, sensible, given the sensibilities at the time, however, it is illustrative of the caution one should take in using religious texts as predictors of science...

Mahāmati asks,

[I]s it not because of the reality of words that all things are? If not for words, Blessed One, there would be no rising of things. Hence, Blessed One, the existence of all things is by reason of the reality of words.

And the Buddha replies:

Even when there are no [corresponding] objects there are words, Mahāmati; for instance, the hare's horns, the tortoise's hair, a barren woman's child, etc. —they are not at all visible in the world but the words are; Mahāmati, they are neither entities nor nonentities but expressed in words. If, Mahāmati, you say that because of the reality of words the objects are, this talk lacks in sense. Words are not known in all the Buddha-lands; words, Mahāmati, are an artificial creation. In some Buddha-lands ideas are indicated by looking steadily, in others by gestures, in still others by a frown, by the movement of the eyes, by laughing, by yawning, or by the clearing of the throat, or by recollection, or by trembling.

Interesting, at least to me, is that (obviously) the concept of irrationals was unknown to the writers of this Sutra, which would mean that the converse is true as well, that there are ideas for which there are no words.

But the "big point" of the text is - at least as seen by a guy who has the benefit of having read a bit of 20th century Western philosphy of linguistics- that the correspondence between words and reality is rough at best, and while the phenomenal symbolic representation of existence arises from beings,the phenomenal symbolic representation of existence is not really isomporphic to existence.

That's my take-away. But if you're thinking that you can get "literally true" predictive science here, well, I don't buy that...

Mahāmati, even in this world that in the kingdom of such special beings as ants, bees, etc., they carry on their work without words.

We know that bee dances have "meaning" to bees (and I think ants have a similar mechanism, but I plead ignorance), but given that these folks were not in posession of the scientific method, it's understandable that they would express their observations this way.