We're all either doing McMindfulness or 功夫

Another Tricycle interview mentioning McMindfulness, if not by explicitly by name...this time via an interview  with Hozan Alan Senuake.

When you worked at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship you had a sign with a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, “Mindfulness must be engaged.” Mindfulness has now been brought into many different realms of our culture, and that seems generally beneficial. But I recently saw an article about mindfulness being used by the US military. This seems like an odd combination. It is true that all Buddhism is engaged because the precepts and teachings are all about how we are all in relation to everyone and in relation to everything around us. That by definition is “engaged.”

When the Buddha was teaching in North India 2500 years ago, the reality of peoples lives was almost completely socially determined by gender, caste, occupation, and the tribe they were born into. Basically, where you were born was where you stayed, in a geographic as well as social sense. In that context, what the Buddha taught was something that could be seen as a kind of radical individualism. He taught that your actual position in the world and your value in it was not to be based on your birth but on your actions, and that you had to take responsibility as an individual for your actions. Fast-forward to what we have today in the West, a terribly individualist ideology. The greatest threat to Buddhism, or any progressive movement, is that it can be turned into a commodity that is sold back to you. We are constantly being sold this commodity of individualism. I believe that if the Buddha were teaching today he would be teaching a more explicitly social doctrine. He would recognize that we have created systems and structures of suffering and that the suffering is not just about individuals experiencing racism, sexism, and various kinds of oppression; what we have are structures of suffering that also have to be addressed. Engaged Buddhism addresses exactly that intersection of our individual responsibility and individual involvement in the creation of systems of suffering.

The problem that you point out about mindfulness is important. I feel there is a risk of mindfulness being seen as a technology, presented as a technique, which is sold back to us. What I’m concerned about in terms of this increasingly popular approach is that it’s being psychologized and marketed.

Certainly a lot of it is very good. Mindfulness is now happening in schools and prisons, in settings where it is truly useful. But I worry about it being brought into a corporate context and a military context. In those contexts people are being helped to find ease and suffer less within systems that are causing suffering. Right Mindfulness would be looking at the actual function of that system as well as the freedom that an individual within that system feels. I don’t wish ill to people working in corporations or people in the military; everyone has the right to be at ease and to live without oppression. On the other hand, I think that an Engaged Buddhist perspective looks at the function of that system. That’s the larger, often neglected view of mindfulness.

Well, first of all, what about them samurai?  As I've written before, Zen as we know it would not have existed but for official patronage of governments, including but not limited to their cultivation by militaries.

Secondly,  having militaries practice Buddhist precepts is not entirely wrong.  It gets substantially more than problematic of course when it's used to justify atrocities, as was done in Japan during its militarist period.  I think Senuake gets that ultimately, but it's kind of odd to bring this up at all, I think.  We get that. 

Secondly, it is in part a technique, and there's nothing really wrong with that. 

In fact, cultivation of skill and technique is part and parcel of the practice. You can't get "good" at mindfulness - like martial arts, yes, like martial arts - without seeing its practice in all areas of your life. 

While I share many of the political positions of so-called engaged Buddhism, I remain skeptical of the attempt to fit Buddhism into a political ideology, any political ideology, because the political ideology is usually a shiny object we're using to distract ourselves from something far more important.

So when I see someone go in the direction of political Buddhism,  I tend to be skeptical of the depth and quality of their practice,  given how hard it is to deeply cultivate an authentic practice.

Some of the best practitioners might not be Buddhists...

For Too Much of My Sitting...

I worried over getting it right.   I really did. I would read something...something of the order of roshi so-and-so saying that you had to practice 無 like Christ dying on the cross...and I would berate myself in thought for not being 無  with all the attendant pain and anguish that goes with being crucified.

That's the sort of thing ... like how this blog hasn't been updated in a while...it's supposed to be, right?

The convergence of my Wing Chun with my 公案 practice has helped with that. And I've always been the kind of guy that says "Don't do stuff just because the 'authorities' want you to!" That is, I always subscribed to the Gandhi thing, being revolutionary as a good thing, and so on. 

I just never realized how much we're conditioned to get nervous about it.  We've got lots of nasty stuff conditioned into us that we're not even aware of.

So,  yeah, stuff matters...but don't kill yourself over it.

For example...there's a lot of people who (obviously to you) don't quite get it. (Like this?)  But ...we're all doing to perish eventually,  and genuine practice will continue anyway, and all that will sort itself out...nobody made me judge jury and executioner.  (I sympathize with Arun, on the point made here, and would up him one by saying it's also quite Western-centric too.)  However...

It is not exactly a matter of life and death.  It is not the Great Matter of Life and Death.  Or to put it better, the matter of life and death is realized in how you approach the endless sewage stream thrown your way every day of stuff is mildly (or severely) frustrating, annoying,  often patently obviously wrong, immoral, dangerous, etc. but is not, in and of itself anything but an opportunity for calm, relaxed practice. That's true even if we're angry and have every right to be.

Thanks for reading this. 

Zen and the Vultures of Anxiety

Not enough is said, at least in the Buddhist blogosphere, at least as far as I can perceive, about the role of relaxation in Zen practice.

It's a very important part of a practice that is life itself.


I'll be having more to say about it in the very near future.

Sometimes I think some of these Buddhist teachers really don't get it.

Via Tricycle (I was bored ) I found a link to that David Loy and Ron Purser article decrying "McMindfulness."  (It was also the one mentioned by Justin Whitaker.)  I normally don't cite either Tricycle or the Huffington Post in my blog, but in this case I'll make an exception, and you'll see why as you read through this.

First, having had the time to read what Loy and Purser wrote I have to say they just don't get it.  Really. 

I'll explain.

I've been doing some math lately as part of my work.  I have to set up a problem in math to verify that an algorithm we're designing will work. If I run the output of my problem through the algorithm, the algorithm should identify the problem. 

The problem involves generating a type of "coin flipping" process.  Now you can't use just any coin flipping process because there are cases where different coin flipping processes are statistically the same.  But if you tweak the problem just a little and put in some "memory" into the process (future flips depend on past flips) the problem becomes quite easy to solve.

In other words, if you introduce just enough structure and complexity into a problem representing reality, reality becomes easy to represent.  But if you don't have enough structure and complexity,  you're stuck.

That's what David Loy and Ron Purser don't get.  They're worried about "mindfulness" being used to promote consumer capitalism,  commoditize something, blah blah blah. It can't happen, because mindfulness alone is self limiting in its effects, and thus won't in any way marginalize the rest of Buddhism.

This is because existence, being so densely interdependent as it is, needs the other parts of Buddhism to go along with it. While Purser and Loy indicate that this is the case, they don't seem to get the implications of it.  Mindful murderers will still be murderers AND will be all the more aware of their suffering.  Mindful minimally regulated production for profit will still be inherently unstable economically and disruptive to millions of people. 

And besides all that we've seen this before! And ironically  the "spiritual mentor" of the founder of the Huffington Post is a case in point for what we've seen before!

Remember the "human potential" movement? Esalen Institute and est and its derivatives? One of  them was I think called Insight Seminars, led by a rumpled looking guy who later founded something called MSIA who had meetings of a sort that were later attended by Arianna Huffington, who became a righty scold and now is some kind of a pseudo-progressive media baroness who doesn't pay her bloggers, at least as of the last time I checked.  The MSIA - Arianna Huffington thing was documented in something called "Life 102," by one Peter McWilliams, which led to what McWilliams might have termed a SLAPP suit by the founder of MSIA (who would have characterized it differently no doubt, probably with lawyers), ...but that's all history. 

Existence is pretty dense and it's difficult or nearly impossible and often useless to isolate one part of it from another (then again there's science but I digress). But I read "Gestalt Therapy" by Frederick Perls back in my teens, and I have to say it was that which led to my interest in Buddhism, via existentialism.

Point is, McMindfulness is probably a gateway to the real thing; its predecessors were too.   But I think it's sort of ironic that 2 guys are using the Huffington Post, in part enabled by Arianna Huffington, whose experiences were shaped by MSIA, which was informed by the Human Potential Movement, which is based on Zen Buddhism, to decry the secularization of Buddhism!

I wonder if they were paid by Huffington. 

"Life"

What *is* American Buddhism anyway?

Justin Whitaker writes,

The story of Buddhism has always been one of adaptation and transformation. This month I am inviting a discussion about how Buddhism has adapted to and transformed America (that is, the Americas) with optional special attention to climate and climate change. 

Given the ongoing heatwave in the southwestern United States and the tragic consequences of a fire in Arizona yesterday, it only seems appropriate that as we reflect on our nations and Buddhism here, that we also consider how Buddhist principles and practices can go toward solving this growing crisis.

I'll be honest: I'm not sure what exactly is the discussion here.  Yeah, there's certain trendy things in psychology based on mindfulness bouncing around...that's a Western-besides-the-Americas thing, no? And regarding climate change and other political/environmental issues, I think American Buddhism is no less marginally useful per se in defining one political stance contra another.   Really, what do you think Edward Snowden's allegedly espoused Buddhism is why he's sort of stateless right now?  Isn't that a bit grandiose? How about Ted Kaczynski's brother's Buddhism? 

If I give you a testimonial about how "Buddhist practice helped me with X, and it can help the world with Y," I'll be doing a disservice to all concerned, despite the fact that yeah, it is a better path than the alternative, and worthy of dedicated practice.

I'm doing American Buddhism not-as-well-as-I'd-like in my own life, and those in my sangha are doing their own American Buddhism, and those in related sanghas are doing their own American Buddhism.

But maybe I ought to get to a comment that Thomas Armstrong wrote on my blog in response to the post on authenticity, because I think it bears examination, especially in regards to the above questions.   There's people in American Buddhism who are  nice.  They can be rather blissful.  There's also people in American Buddhism who aren't always nice.  Both groups of people though are certainly wounded, and perhaps like all of humanity, wounded deeply and condemned to be mortally wounded, whether it be through violence, sickness, or old age. 

I don't want bliss, or  nice in my practice.  It would be, um, nice, though,  in the midst of seeing into the nature of self that there was  just some authentic improvement relaxation and equanimity in the face of the inevitable.   And actually, "American" Buddhism didn't go there that much in that aspect (I had to learn some of that via other means that aren't strictly "Buddhist" at all, but not at all incompatible with it.) American or not, I, myself, had and have  to learn how to not give a hoot so much despite the Big Wound (whatever it is, and regardless of whether it merits the name, it's there).  But regardless of my degree of relaxation and equanimity or lack thereof, regarding practice, it is indeed what it is. 

But yet, yeah, that's American Buddhism.  One of many. Including "the Asians'" American Buddhism.

To return briefly to the climate change topic: humanity might or might not respond appropriately, and I'm not sure Buddhism has so much to do to with it potentially as the exercise of naked political power.   Japan, Buddhist and Shinto, reforested itself because it had a powerful aristocracy that could do so.  Spain did not, despite another powerful aristocracy.  Was it because Japan was Buddhist and Shinto and Spain was not? 

I doubt it, but what I don't doubt is that as the orders went out to reforest, the guys who transmitted the orders weren't nice and peaceful and blissful. I also don't think the orders to to deal decisively with Christian missionary imperialists were transmitted in a nice, peaceful and blisssful way either. 

Authenticity and Buddhism

Another article was recently published in the NY Times op-ed section on line that deserves an appropriate response, at least from a Zen Buddhist/existentialist perspective. This article is entitled "The Gospel According to Me," by two guys, on of which is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and the other is a psychoanalyst.   That should kind of tell you the direction they're going in ...but  let me put some stuff in here to give some context:

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being! 

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest. 

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work. 

Whereas the American dream used to be tied to external reality — say, America as the place where one can openly practice any religion, America as a safe haven from political oppression or America as the land of opportunity where one need not struggle as hard as one’s parents — now, the dream is one of pure psychological transformation. 

This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism. Authenticity is its dominant contemporary expression. In a seemingly meaningless, inauthentic world awash in nonstop media reports of war, violence and inequality, we close our eyes and turn ourselves into islands. We may even say a little prayer to an obscure but benign Eastern goddess and feel some weak spiritual energy connecting everything as we listen to some tastefully selected ambient music. Authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation of history. The power of now.

This seems to be written by two guys, two intellectuals, who are so detached from themselves that they don't even realize they are writing about themselves here! (Like much of this type of moral scold literature, it's written in the first person plural, but of course isn't meant to be understood to apply to the authors themselves.)  But yes, it applies obviously to them. I mean, they decry a drive towards authenticity as it leads to a breakdown of the "classical distinction between work and nonwork." Do they expect their readers to put in effort into trying to understand them,  with the hopes of profiting from their efforts? 

But that's not why I'm writing this; I'm not really writing this because these guys don't realize that this stuff applies to them. 

To the guys who wrote the article: I try to practice mindfulness and yes, to be authentic at work not because I expect to succeed as a result of that practice, but because the alternative tends to create greater despair, suffering, and intractability.  I may or may not succeed in what I do; "success" per se is not the issue, any more than mindful practice to help me deal with idiotically created traffic light patterns (or lack thereof) won't do anything to reset the traffic light patterns to give everyone all green lights.

So the rest of their argument to the extent it's coherent, falls apart from there. 

And it's not about a search for authenticity or "becoming who you are," it's about understanding  (悟り) who/what/X is authentically (or, less deeply, seeing one's True Nature)  and then appropriately acting and responding.

There are other critiques that can be made of this article, in particular, that it is absurdly indifferent to millions of underemployed Americans, it's absurdly indifferent to what are global trends in this regard, spanning the globe with the exception of Africa and some of the Islamic regions. 

It's really why media such as the Times seems to be falling on hard times.  Once this stuff could be done credibly; nowadays any ol' blogger who's read a smattering of Buddhist literature can see through this type of stuff.

Let me close with this: if you're not acting according to your conscience, acting authentically what then? You don't evade responsibility, that's for sure. People figured that out in the West kinda sorta after World War II.  You can't use the Nuremberg defense against acting according to your conscience, i.e., acting authentically.

Fantasy in Buddhism (or the lack of it) and the role of "inventive pretend" in children's activity

There is a strange op-ed by T. M. Luhrmann in yesterday's NY Times about C. S. Lewis, religious belief, and the role of fantasy, at least from a Western perspective. Here's a bit of it:

In “Mere Christianity,” Lewis wrote that to pretend helps one to experience God a real. In “Narnia” he offered a way to pretend — by depicting a God who is so explicitly not a God from an ordinary human church. Aslan keeps God safe from human clumsiness and error. 

What does it mean that our society places such a premium on fantasy and imagination? “No culture,” observes the child psychologist Suzanne Gaskins, “comes close to the level of resources for play provided by middle-class Euro-American parents.” In many traditional societies, children play by imitating adults. They pretend to cook, marry, plant, fish, hunt. 

“Inventive pretend,” in which children pretend the fantastic or impossible (enchanted princesses, dragon hunters) “is rarely — if ever — observed in non-industrialized or traditional cultures,” Gaskins says. That may be because inventive play often requires adult involvement. Observing the lack of fantasy play among the Manus children in New Guinea, Margaret Mead noted that “the great majority of children will not even imagine bears under the bed unless the adult provides the bear.” 

Westerners, by contrast, not only tolerate fantasy play but actively encourage it, for adults as well as for children. We are novel readers, movie watchers and game players. We have made J. K. Rowling very wealthy. 

This suggests that we imagine a complex reality in which things might be true — materially, spiritually, psychologically. Science leads us to draw a sharp line between what is real and what is unreal. At the same time, we live in an age in which we are exquisitely aware that there are many theories, both religious and scientific, to explain the world, and many ways to be human.

Much has been written about the role of ritual in Buddhism, and that might be where it comes closest to the "role of fantasy" described here, but I think it's a false analogy nonetheless. I think it's a false analogy because, at least in my experience, the role of ritual is performative.  The chants are chants, and to put anything more into the chant other than the chant itself is to make it into something it's not and to distract from it.  Chanting the Heart Sutra  - especially in the way it's been given to us via China and Japan and Viet Nam - is to put its "meaning" into a different category than what we in the West might commonly give it.  It is not pretending by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it strictly speaking any kind of literalist assertion - but it winds up being true nonetheless.  Maybe I'll get back to this regular blogging thing by writing 10 posts or so just on the Heart Sutra, because it could be done.  But I digress.

No, I don't think Buddhism has any kind of this fantasy stuff at all; in some forms of Buddhism, there are some particularly elaborate metaphors, and yes, there are Buddhists that take Bodhisattvas and Buddhas to be actual beings, and at least some are.  But we don't "pretend" this to experience something as real, but rather we try to experience experience on its own terms, I think. 

So that brings into question this whole "inventive pretend" thing for kids, because clearly it's not needed for any kind of religious or moral or skillful training in and of itself.  Inventive pretend probably is some kind of double edged sword - inventive pretend might be useful for children incorporating social memes into their consciousness, but it might also be that the social memes which are inculcated also exclude certain unpleasant aspects of the culture, and that these aspects might be excluded to the detriment of the children and society at large. What sort and degree of "inventive pretend" is needed to create a suicide bomber?

My son did not spend long in this phase of life.  Though he did watch Barney too much, until, like every other kid, he was repulsed by that kind of media. 

Lost in the forest

=

I've not been blogging a lot lately because of extreme business, both with work and with other activities.  

But yesterday something interesting happened, and it's worth, um, noting.

I was going running; lately the weather in the Pacific Northwest has been spectacularly good, which is somewhat odd for this time of year.  It seems summer has come early, and I'm making the most of it.  

As is my habit when I go running, I run outside on trails not far from my home. Yesterday, I chose one in Lacamas Lake Park, whose "map" is pictured above.  Note that the trails' signage isn't well laid out.

I got lost.

It's only a couple of miles or so on each side, but after running 40 minutes, about 3.5 miles, well, you can imagine how I viewed the prospect of another 2-3 miles of walking before I found my car.  I was not happy with the signage, to illustrate dishonestly how I deal with frustration sometimes. And all the Middle European folktales came to mind.  Hansel and Gretel. Ah! So that's why they have these tales,  I thought; it's a bit unnerving to be lost in the forest, and if it's a big one you could get dead.  And in fact every year in the Pacific Northwest it happens to at least one or two people.

And after a while, with my legs aching, I realized there was nothing I could do except continue on to try to get out; asking people I saw for the right path out (who said, not particularly helpfully, "There's signs.")  So I kept trying, and luckily had a practice that I kept as I kept trying.

And I realized it was a metaphor for life; we're all lost in the forest, and trying to get out, and there's nothing we can do but keep trying.  We don't want to be there, and it's not entirely "our" fault, but  we're there and we have an honest to goodness plight.  We all have a plight. And the signage may or may not be reliable. Even when it says "YOU ARE HERE" you may still not be where you think you are, and may not know where you're going.  But you've got to keep on the path.

I don't know if there's a koan about this but there really ought to be.  Sometimes it's amazing how existence just has these nice scenarios laid out so you can assign a metaphor to it related to practice, you know? They're there so you can remember to practice.

Christian Apologetics and the need to turn it down a notch

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I'm uninterested in Zen scandals given the profound uniqueness of existence

I realize that this may be somewhat contrarian to the mode of where the Buddhist blogosphere is, not to mention previous posts I've done myself, but I'm less interested than I might have been previously regarding scandals in the Buddhist blogosphere and what-not.

Not to say the scandals didn't happen, not to say they didn't arise in part from "teachers" pretending they had more authority and power than that to which they were entitled, not to say all the points that have already been made time and time and time again on this.   But all of those points might be crowding out from our awareness the point.

I'm thinking of that Chechen young man, and the terrible stupid things in which he and his brother seem to have been involved.  I have had business at Building 32 of MIT, where the campus police officer was murdered.   If these reports are true, and I'd bet today that there's more than a grain of truth to them, these men have harmed and destroyed so much. 

Like politics, life ain't beanbag.  It's serious stuff, and freakishly random things can, do, and will continue to happen.  It is deeply imbued into the fabric of our existence.   That even a flawed human being can offer anyone at least a chance of succor, even in the midst of that helper's flawed motives, and even given the helper's flawed subsequent actions.

I read somewhere that Blaise Pascal had some kind of a carriage incident that profoundly influenced his view on life.  I think I know a little something like what that's about from the recent accident I had.   We're weak, often lonely, and sentenced to death as a result of our birth, and there's going to be things happening to us we just don't want.  Our personal physical pain is our personal physical pain, and others can feel compassion and empathy for us, but they literally cannot feel our pain.

I was reading the Twitter feed of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and the responses to them once that feed was identified as his.  I found it interesting that he gained thousands of "followers" once that feed was identified as his - did these people expect him to actually put for another Tweet in his life? Really? And most of those "followers" were just Americans it seems.  Moreover the responses to his Tweets, like the responses from some others, were not reeking of wisdom, to say the least.

Is this so?

Besides, I read the extracts from Brian Victoria's stuff years ago.  And even in the original edition Rick Fields' book on the history of Buddhism in America Sokei An doesn't appear to be completely a saint.

So, pleas for the sake of all, let's get past the mystification, exploitation, and condemnation.  Life's too damn short and we're all in need, some way more profoundly so than others.

On Bombings and Buddhism and 武道

I have a take on this horrible terrorist act that is in response to posts by  Nathan and Brad.

Nathan's responding to Brad, but I read his piece first, so here goes. Nathan wrote:

[I]t's a little too easy to go there. To make the leap from soft interpretations of the first precept to "we should kill people who commit terrorist acts." [Brad's]  desire for punishment is, again, understandable. A pretty human impulse certainly. And yet it's also so Old Testament God. Or a really raw and unprocessed sense of karmic justice that screams Buddhist fundamentalism.

In addition, this who thing about having powerful militaries and police forces so "we" (whomever we are) can practice seems like a nice excuse for fascism. For "just" wars in "terrorist" nations. And for continued oppression of anyone here, in the U.S., who is deemed to be "disruptive" or "potentially" disruptive. Our government, regardless of the political party in power, is quite fond of pre-emptive strikes, "precautionary" measures, and the like. Not that they give a shit about meditation practitioners really. That's really not what they're concerned with. And it wasn't what the governments in medieval Japan were concerned with, nor the various royal factions in India during Buddha's time. Whatever space they "provided" for "safe" meditation practice and Buddhist study was a byproduct of power and resource control. Of oppression of one group by another. Of bloodshed and ecological destruction.

 I don't like parts of what Warner wrote there; in particular the idea that Buddhism only flourished because of strong military power.  I'll have more to say on that shortly. 

I think that's not historically true in general, and WWII era Japan is a case in point: while it's true that there was Yasutani, it's ALSO true that this had pretty much zilch to do with Buddhism. And State Shinto was favored over Buddhism.

It is undeniable though that religion prospers to the extent the powerful allow it to do so.   That's true of all culture that is the dominant "culture" of a "society."  It does no good to be fixed on decrying it, though; because that's being attached to the culture and to power by different means.  Let me put it plainly: decrying the power structures or the use of force or to advocate the use of force with a Dharma justification is the same thing: attachment.

Moreover...

It's not about "Omigod we need fascism!" The true spirit of 武道  - or if you like Western paradigms, military science - really does involve the cessation of violence - it's about, when attacked, doing as little damage as possible to create a peace as deep and long as possible.

And my response to Brad:

You wrote:

Our societies have to be stable before we can engage in our practice. This is an absolutely necessary prerequisite. That means we have to be able and willing to defend our societies against those who would disrupt them. There have to be very strong penalties against doing things like blowing up the Boston Marathon. In his comedy special broadcast this weekend, Louis C.K. made jokes about how great it is that there are laws against murder. “Because if there weren’t, everybody would murder at least one person.” Those who hadn’t murdered anyone, he said, would be seen as weirdos in a society where murder was legal. It was funnier when he said it. 

So I, for one, hope they find the piece of shit who did this and rip him to shreds. He deserves it. Whether they find him or not, his own actions will be his undoing. It can’t happen any other way. And yes, this news makes me angry. I wouldn’t be a real human being if it didn’t.

Still, society needs to make efforts to resolve matters like this without anger. Because an angry response leads to further tragedies, like the angry response of the people West Memphis, Arkansas that led to the wrongful conviction of the “West Memphis Three.” Still, one can expect anger as a response to something like this. I suppose the worthless motherfucker who perpetrated this bombing intended it that way. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Society has every right to remove him from its midst in any way it sees fit.

No Brad "society" does not have the right to remove the perpetrator from its midst in any way it sees fit; in fact it has the obligation to respond to this even in a way that creates as much of a stable, peaceful, caring and harmonious environment as possible, even if it requires a certain degree of violence to achieve that end.   But it should require absolutely no more than is necessary, and it should be understood that this act has meant that we, as a society, have failed in what Sun Tzu would have called the supreme excellence of achieving that peaceful, caring, harmonious, stable society without violence.  We have failed.  But we are not absolved of the responsibilities that come with our existence.

Evangelical Churches and ...Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is somewhat related to Buddhist practice because in certain forms of CBT the client is encouraged to be mindful of harmful thoughts and activities, and to replace them with better ones.

So it was kind of strange to read this article in the NY Times about evangelical churches and CBT like therapy...

One way to see this is that the books [evangelicals use] teaching someone how to pray read a lot like cognitive behavior therapy manuals. For instance, the Rev. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts. Cognitive-behavioral therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult, and to practice using different ones. That is more or less what Warren invites readers to do. He spells out thoughts he thinks his readers have but don’t want, and then asks them to consider themselves from God’s point of view: not as the inadequate people they feel themselves to be, but as loved, as relevant and as having purpose. Does it work? In my own research, the more people affirmed, “I feel God’s love for me, directly,” the less stressed and lonely they were and the fewer psychiatric symptoms they reported.

Because these churches seem to market themselves like Coca Cola it seems they latch on to any trend and "Jesusify" it.

Obviously the NY Times author is rather shallow not to have seen this.  Obviously too the folks who need this "evangelical CBT" are themselves hurting. 

While a good part of me wants them to see the "real" ways in which suffering is transcended (not to mention a better way to deal with theodicy), it's good that they're being helped at all, to the extent they are.  

I just wish they were helped more to transcend the whole strange evangelical thing.

Remote Viewing is a Pseudo-Science

I see C4Chaos has another post up about TED/TEDx and its discouragement of certain forms of pseudo-science.  

I am generally not too fond of TED, because too much of what they put up - like that "Blink" stuff - I think is nonsense.  But as an applied scientist, I need to respond to C4Chaos's post, because I think its implication that there's something to "remote viewing" is pro-woo,  as is the anti-vaccination crowd.  In fact I was inspired to write this when I saw a story on RT News sneering about how much the Brits spent on a bird flu vaccine - and people didn't get sick! And drug companies made money! 

But I digress a bit.  I don't really follow these kind of woo things, but this one's a no-brainer, frankly.  Here's what Wikipedia says (emphasis added):

Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using subjective means, in particular,extra-sensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind". Unlike traditional psychic practices, remote viewers use physical models to organize their alleged extra-sensory perceptions and to stabilize the virtual umwelt. Scientific studies have been conducted; some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results but they had invalidating flaws,^[1] and none of the newer experiments had positive results when under properly controlled conditions.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} The scientific community rejects remote viewing due to the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain remote viewing, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results.^[7] It is also considered a pseudoscience.^[8]Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.^[9][10] The term was coined in the 1970s by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute, to distinguish it from clairvoyance.^[2] [11]Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the US government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after it failed to produce any useful intelligence information.^[3][4]

Note that bit: there's no theory that explains remote viewing and hence no thing that can be tested as to whether it works or not.  That means it's not a science.

I did see "Men Who Stare at Goats," by the way so I guess I'm not completely ignorant of "remote viewing."  Anyway C4Chaos writes:

I understand the remote viewing protocol — it’s double-blind. The late Ingo Swann was instrumental in designing the protocol. Then it was taught to a few intelligence personnels in the military (one of them is remote viewer #001 Joe McMoneagle). I’ve always focused my attention to the original people who started it all because they did solid research on the phenomenon and they’re the ones who designed the original protocol. Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff had a deal with the CIA and the Defense Department that in return for funding they helped the military with intelligence work (e.g. locating people and cites of interests). Another condition was that Targ and Puthoff were given free rein by the military to publish their work in scientific journals. The classified project — Stargate Project —  lasted for more than two decades. I don’t know about you but I don’t think Targ/Puthoff/Swann could’ve hoax the Defense Department, CIA, FBI, and even NASA for a long time, especially when millions of money were involved. The Defense Department might be wasteful in their spending but I don’t think the people running it were that stupid to be fooled for two decades without them getting valuable results. 

Well, first of all,  just because the Defense Department spends money doesn't mean that it's spending money for a good reason, so thinking that because the DoD kept a program around for 20 years doesn't mean anything.  Really.  In fact, let me name some of the other programs the DoD kept over the years:

• The military had a project for the better part of a decade  with multiple contractors to develop an air force voice communication system for conferencing.  It was started in the late 70s, and went at until at least 1986.  The system called for multiple antennas to be retrofitted onto tactical jets.  Tens of millions of dollars and years of R&D were spent to create a system to work.  The antenna subsystem was finally killed when one general said simply that he didn't want the antennas on his fighter jets.  And that was that.  There were actually really good reasons why the general didn't want antennas on his fighter jets, but nobody cared to discuss that with the engineers.  
• The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
• The original M16 rifle.  They could have just copied the AK47...but no...can't do that...
• The most completely, totally obvious example is the our nuclear weapons program.  We've been able to kill humanity many times over, yet we still have more of these warheads than we ever need.  True the Russians still have nuclear weapons, mutually assured destruction, yada yada yada, but we could reduce our stockpile by 1/2 and the same principles would apply.

Let me continue, quoting from C4Chaos's post again:

Here’s another comment left by Russell Targ on TED Conversations:

Remote viewing is an ability that many people can easily learn. It is a nonlocal ability, in that its accuracy and reliability are independent of distance. Dean of Engineering Robert Jahn has also published extensively on his experiments at Pronceton, (Proc. IEEE, Feb 1982). I am not claiming it is quantum anything. It appears to possibly make use of something like Minkowski’s (8 dimensional) complex space/time that he described to Einstein in the 1920s, and is now being re-examined by Roger Penrose. This is not necessarily The answer. But the answer will be some sort similar nonlocal space/time geometry. We taught remote viewing to 6 army intelligence officers in 1979. They then taught a dozen other officers, and created an operational army psychic corps at Ft. Meade, which lasted until the end of our program in 1995. You can see two examples of real remote viewing on my website, www.espresearch.com. One with Hella Hammid is double blind, live on camera for a 1983 BBC film, “The Case of ESP.” available on Google.

Again, how would you falsify this?  How can we predict whether someone will learn this easily? 

I have one more point I'd make: if this sort of thing existed it would have made its way to Wall Street, in a big way, a reliable way,  wouldn't you think? And Targ didn't do that. He claimed in the video  in  C4Chaos's post that the reason he failed to consistently make money was that greed got in the way.  Really?  Couldn't he have gotten much smaller stakes and done the thing himself and given the money to charity? He could do that today with Forex markets.  And, all other things being equal,  calling something correctly when the thing in question has a  probability 0.5 means that making money 9 times in a row is as equally likely as any other of the 512 outcomes. Claude Shannon, on the other not only made money in the stock market, but his theories have been expanded and have been adopted on Wall Street.  They also make cell phones, DVD players, and defense communication systems work as well; sometimes the DoD does get stuff right.   The number of technologies that were DoD funded that went to the private sector is ...well,  I can't name them all, but it's probably harder to think of technologies that weren't  developed with DoD funding.

Now about this non-locality thing: it's not needed for Buddhists.  The interconnectedness of existence follows from the very structure of existence itself, and the interconnectedness exists quite nicely within the framework of conventional, good ol' boring physics.   And if Targ was a competent physicist  I'd have to say he's got to know that he's not being honest with his audience: quantum effects happen on the microscopic level. And we can demonstrate how they work and test them in laboratories and these tests yield consistent results.

I watched about 17 minutes of Targ.  That's all I could take.   I don't need to spend an hour of my life with this subject. 

I find it sad that there's folks in our blogosphere writing favorable things about stuff like this.  There are legitimate criticisms of TED and TEDx.  Not giving a forum to the likes of Targ is not one of them.

Update:

Targ claims he published his results on remote viewing in the Proceedings of the IEEE.    I remember that issue in fact.  I'll be back with more of that.

Further Update:

Well, I perused Targ's article; and the first thing that came to me was "Are these results reproducible?" And the answer to that question is, no, they are not.  Targ I think would be ethical if he at least acknowledged that his "Proceedings" article was not the only article published on parapsychology, and Jay Hyman's critical approach to parapsychology (Parapsychological Research: A Tutorial Review and Critical Appraisal, Proc. IEEE, Vol. 74. No. 6 June 1986)  really ought to be read by anyone who wants to know what the IEEE editors later thought about such woo.

Junk gets published now and then. Targ's original article should not have been published, in my opinion, but probably was because he did have publications related to his laser work.   Hey, the IEEE  published my stuff, so that just shows you how low they might go sometimes!

So about that new pope and that "interreligious dialogue"...

I realize I'm very late to comment on this, but today is about as good as any day to comment given the new Roman Catholic pope (there's others; you know that, right?) and all that, and the fact that reportedly he's "reaching out" to the rest of the world for more "interreligious dialogue."

Yeah, whatever.

I am more or less a product of some of those institutions and attitudes that weighed so heavily on so many; I was fortunate, I suppose, in that the only abuse I suffered at the hands of these people was verbal and corporal.   But abuse it was nonetheless, and the Catholic Church's response in recent years to the sexual abuse doesn't give me hope for any kind of real possibility that anyone will be made whole in any of the other areas where abuse was pervasive anytime soon.

Nathan calls it patriarchy.  He's not wrong here, but I think it's way more than that.  Patriarchy has the connotation that somehow a few men are running things, and they're in control, have all the power, etc. etc.  I concede I'm oversimplifying here, but the reality is that the former Ratzinger and all the other Ratzingers were enabled by a network of clergy and laity.  The abuse many children in Catholic schools suffered was at the hands of some very distorted (pre-or anti-Vatican II) nuns; it's lampooned in movies like The Blues Brothers but it was taken for granted that you could physically assault children to get them to do what you wanted in those places, and in many places likely still is.  And there is a laity that enabled this, encouraged this, and funded this, and in many places likely still does. 

There is a reason the Catholic Church in East St. Louis is a highly attenuated version of itself, as another article in today's NY Times presents.   And it is precisely because all the crap that the Catholic Church perpetuated and all the "charity" it perpetuated came to nought.  Of course  a "deity" commanded the charity as did the "deity" put in place abusers, so what kind of charity is that if it's stained and sustained by greed and fear?

I became a Buddhist because Buddhism makes better sense of the world and has a more consistent ethic than Christianity.  In Christianity it's sort of verboten for mere mortals to go to hell to save another; in Buddhism you're in hell yourself as long as another is there.  That's why I think the two paths are ultimately incompatible, regardless of how friendly Thich Nhat Hanh gets with the liberal priests (assuming any survived John Paul II/Ratzinger).

And like Nathan, I'm hopeful for collapse; the sooner the better if people are disabused of notions that the charity means you have to support the abuse: they come as a package deal with the Catholic Church; they come as a package deal with humanity in fact.  The Catholic Church maintained that they were above it all.   Some folks in the American Buddhist community thought they were in Christian churches in the sense that they thought Buddhist sanghas were above petty politics, corruption and scandal.

It's a package deal in Buddhism too: the savory and the repulsive permeate each other, and the only hope Buddhism gives you is that there are means by which you can learn to transcend the repulsive as well as that which keeps us stuck or suffering.  It doesn't guarantee that those who prescribe the medicine will not themselves fall ill or aren't in fact already ill.  At least though Buddhism really does recognize this (and it's not to minimize harm when it happens...does every post that touches on this issue have to repeat that?).  And Buddhism has a path that recognizes that its path isn't trod by those who are vicars for deities.

Good luck to Francis; maybe he'll be another John XXIII.   But regardless,  suffering and dukkha are still inescapable, but can be transcended...

A Science versus "Spirituality" Brouhaha Again? With TED???

I was away on business when they elected a new pope.   I have an unwritten as of yet lengthy response in mind to my colleagues in the Buddhist blogosphere that were going in a sort of ecumenical direction regarding the new Pope, a.k.a. Francis.

But I saw something else come to my attention that I thought I'd set straight, though it promises to be at least as entertaining from a blogosphere food-fight perspective, and that has to do with the brouhaha regarding TED, two guys named Sheldrake and Hancock, P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne, if I've recalled all the names correctly.   

Apparently some folks don't like that P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne got Sheldrake's and Hancock's videos removed from a TED/TEDx site.    Apparently this is so because Myers and Coyne decried the pseudo-science in the Sheldrake and Hancock material.

I first got wind of this via C4Chaos (who has directed me to John Ratcliffe's blog ).

I myself am loathe to go into the details of Sheldrake /Hancock.  I've seen too many TED/TEDx videos in my lifetime.   However, I will make a few points...

• I don't have any inclination to view a talk called "The Science Delusion."   The very name of the talk suggests a desire to frame the term "science" as we know and use it today into something it is not.   There is no "materialist science," "alternative science" or "mainstream science" apart from a science that deals with observables and the scientific method. Period.   And I might add P.Z. Myers' one paragraph critique of Sheldrake's video is more or less enough for me.   The constants of the universe might be changing, but that's only observed if we observe it according to the scientific method!
• I have read a bit about Graham Hancock simply because that was most accessible in the time I had; if I had an inclination to produce TED/TEDx talks he'd be right up there with Ramtha in terms of my preferences for speakers...but I may be meaning that ironically on second thought. I might want to have a TED parody...but I digress...no I'm not...
• Let's get this out front and center: TED/TEDx talks are largely bunk.   They're always more about style than content anyway. They've had some rather questionable folk in the past on, who put on rather questionable material.  Too much Malcolm Gladwell. Too much fancy graphics.  Too entertaining.  But the "curators" of TED/TEDx have the right to define what they call TED/TEDx any way they deem fit.  When people complain about "censorship" they're assuming that TED should put just anything on. They don't have to. And they can still be ideas worth spreading, if only as cautionary tales.
• Actually I was digressing a bit.  While I haven't viewed the videos in question,  I have read this bit from Hancock to Chris Anderson who is the TED conference "curator."  Hancock quotes from his presentation:

 “What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter. Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies, so when the brain is dead that’s the end of consciousness. There is no life after death. There is no soul. We just rot and are gone. But actually any honest scientist should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain’s involved in it in some way, but we’re not sure how. Could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity. If you hold to that paradigm then of course you can’t believe in life after death. When the generator’s broken consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship – and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set and in that case when the TV set is broken of course the TV signal continues and this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions – that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms to learn and to grow and to develop. And really if we want to know about this mystery the last people we should ask are materialist, reductionist scientists. They have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let’s go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work for three thousand years on the problem of death and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront after death…”

Now his second and third sentences create a straw-man.   And the "we just don't know" bit has its  own name as a logical fallacy: argumentum ad ignorantiam - the argument from ignorance.   There are models that deal with consciousness that deal with the relationship between what we observe and what is out there, but any of the useful ones, the ones we can talk about, exist in the structure of that which observable. 

I would find it interesting to say the least if Hancock were to litigate this thing.  He'd lose, if what he's quoted above is representative of the rest of his material.  Evidently he got his start pushing something that looks as well grounded scientifically as "the bible code," namely the Orion Correlation Theory.

I know some  people want their consciousness to be indicative of more than observables interacting with each other.  But the nature of observables are such that we can carry out useful things with the observables without any consideration, use or purpose of an underlying metaphysic.  That atheists pointed this out is immaterial to that point, and I'm sure P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne would agree on that - and even that their atheism is immaterial to the science itself.

We Buddhists of the Mahayana variety especially are fond of talking about non-duality, but I think some  do not get that non-duality does not mean that the structures of language and observation are somehow "false" in and of themselves. 事存函蓋合理應箭鋒拄 the Sandokai asserts.   Things exist, box and lid fit, principle responds, arrow points  meet.   The absolute doesn't trump the relative and vice versa.  Physical laws will be physical laws; observables being observed (and consequent measurable distortions therein) aren't trumped by anything "outside the system," because it's all here anyway.   And it's not as though we need to bend either Mahayana Buddhism or science to fit one another.  Our constraints are constraints one way or the other.

It Really IS a Very Useful Practice.

Recently there's been a bit of stuff I'd written & corresponded on re: disruption and setbacks.  

Well I've had a doozy recently; while not nearly as bad as some folks' disruptions, it has been disrupting.

In the course of returning home one night recently, while crossing an intersection, a car went through a red light...

Short story is: I'm OK,  they're OK, my car's totalled, theirs probably is not.  A few thousand dollars is lost.

It's disrupting.  A fraction of a second later and there would have been a much worse outcome.  The brain goes into Alternate Scenarios and What Ifs.

I had never thought about it, but evidently at least short term PTSD is a side effect of being an an auto accident, even if there's no physical injury.

Luckily after sitting for a few years it's possible to understand that the mind is letting thoughts wax and wane, or as Danny said in The Shining, "Remember what Mr. Hallorann said. It's just like pictures in a book, Danny. It isn't real."

Sometimes I realize I'd be completely bonkers if not for this practice.  

Yakuza Buddhist Priest in the News

Via Jake Adelstein (who wrote the article),  I wonder what American Zen Teachers' Association might make of this:

Takahiko Inoue, yakuza boss and Buddhist priest, died Feb. 10 at age 65. The police determined that he fell from the seventh story of the building where his office was located. When the ambulance arrived, Inoue told the crew: “I’m fine. Just take me to the hospital. I’ll walk to the car myself.” Those were his last words. There was no protracted investigation.

Those who knew him, in the underworld and in normal society, referred to Inoue as “Hotoke” or “The Buddha.” “Hotoke” is also police slang for “the dead.” One of his friends sadly joked after his death, “Well, he finally became a real Buddha, after all.”

It’s not uncommon for a disgraced yakuza boss to seek refuge by becoming a priest after banishment; but it’s usually just an exchange of Armani suits for robes and tax-exempt status. Sometimes, the robes double as a sort of bulletproof vest, because even in Japan, it’s bad PR to kill a priest. However, bosses who are practicing Buddhist priests? Rare... 

He reconciled the two realms as follows. Buddhism has its rules. The Inoue-gumi had its rules, taken from the Inagawa-kai Yokosuka-Ikka. Inoue worked to uphold them both. In some places, they actually overlap. The Inoue-gumi rules forbid: 1) using or selling drugs, 2) theft, 3) robbery, 4) sexual misconduct, 5) anything else that would be shameful underninkyodo, the humanitarian way.

To become a Buddhist priest like Inoue, you have to follow 10 grave precepts. Do not: kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, drink or cloud the mind, criticize others, praise oneself and slander others, be greedy, give way to anger or disparage the noble path.

Sometimes I think we in the West can be more than a bit exclusionary in terms of who's a Buddhist and who's not a Buddhist.   That's why it's sort of taken for granted that some folks like the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi are Buddhists - "real" Buddhists, but folks like Hotoke or member of the former Myanmar junta or people affiliated with the People's Republic of China are not, and we thereby fail to see all sorts of axes grinding, not to mention whole universes of other things.