Consciousness, Mind, and Evolution

On vice.com  there's a good article dealing with scientific observations regarding consciousness, and it certainly has import to Buddhists.  But I think the writer gets some of the religious implications wrong regarding at least Buddhism.

According to Princeton University neuroscientist Michael Graziano,... Our brains create models of the world around us, including our bodies, in order to be attentive to the various signals we get from our senses. So in the Pinocchio Illusion, your brain creates a model of what your body looks like and the model falls apart due to the conflicting stimuli. Our brains might be exceptionally good at making models, but they’re never perfect replicas of what’s happening in the world, just fast and loose sketches to make sense of things. 

There’s a funny consequence to our brains’ proficiency in model-making, Professor Michael Graziano argues in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain, which came out this month. That consequence is what we call consciousness, the ineffable ungraspable “I,” the magic sauce of Being that defines our essential humanness. From Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” to Kant’s theory of a priori forms, to Taoist, nondualist Vedantic whatever, the origin of consciousness has been, you know, a real head-scratcher. And Professor Graziano’s theory proposes an exceptionally clear explanation of what’s going on in our domes’ pieces every day of our short little lives.   

So to the question: Are we ordained by our divine creator or are we just delusional lumps of carbon and guts? Professor Graziano concludes something closer to latter. But it’s not delusion that makes our brains aware. It’s a highly functional adaptive strategy. 

Graziano is quoted in the article as saying:

So let’s think about what the physical project of attention is: there’s an agent, a brain, a being that’s focusing its processing power on a particular set of signals that neuroscientists call attention; the signals might pertain to the sandwich you’re holding. There’s an agent and there’s a sandwich, and there’s a relationship between the two: that is, the agent is focusing its resources on the sandwich. That’s attention. 

So when you build a model of that it will have a large amount of information about the agent—who you are, where you are, your memories, your information about yourselves—that model should contain information about the sandwich, and it should contain information about the relationship between the two. And, crucially, the model will have information about what it means for an agent to focus attention on a thing. What I’m saying is that there is information in the brain, a large dossier with lots of descriptive information that there’s a you, and there’s a sandwich and a specific relationship: you are aware of the sandwich.

I don't think this is particularly shocking or new, and despite what the author implies I fail to see how it has any particularly damaging implications to Buddhism.  If our small-m mind's awareness is indeed a manifestation of what the brain does to model sensory phenomena (including awareness of awareness), that awareness is indeed interdependent and co-existant with the myriad things.  It is not separate, and is separate from them.  Moreover,  we know that this awareness is modulated in ways that are specifically dependent on other life forms besides "ourselves," even if we're doing the solitary hermit thing.

Moreover, at least as far as practice is concerned, which pretty much sums up the whole thing for Buddhists,  the fact that this biochemical physical process is going on intimately related to awareness isn't particularly relevant unless you're a Buddhist neuroscience researcher and your right livelihood consists of work in that area.

This is not to say that any old, new, or random metaphysical system is true or false, but as far as can be observed, a great many of them are irrelevant to practice in the world, if practice in the world can be realized without appeal to those metaphysical systems.

I have taken Buddhist precepts; I consider myself a Buddhist.  I understand that the Lankavatara sutra places great emphasis on Mind as the "most real" existence.   On the other hand, Buddha nature pervades the whole universe, we chant.  It is revealed right here and now. It's not that the Buddhist precepts requires belief in the "truth" of the Lankavatara Sutra or any sutra, per se.  But clearly the little-m mind does have, at least as is physically observable, a pervasiveness in the universe.  As to the Big-M Mind (trademark  that, Mr. Merzel), if you've had experience of it, I don't see a need to doubt that experience even if it is co-dependent/co-existent with specific biophysical chemical phenomena.  The writers of the Sutras, the Patriarchs, etc. were describing, what seems to be co-dependent/co-existent with these specific biophysical chemical phenomena.  So what?

There's no need to invalidate the experience because of that, and in fact, I would say that an attempt to invalidate that experience by claiming it wasn't real because "the biochemistry and physics did it" is itself a mystification of experience.  The reason I say this, is because through practice we're attempting to have a mind that is not holding on to anything. Anything.  And that includes the infinite fun house mirror logic of not holding on to not holding on to...etc. 

It seems to me as that the author in making his claim might be implying "Hold on to the physical world!"  But, outside of the practice of neuroscience I think the author misses the point of experience and practice.  

We Buddhists of course don't have a divine creator, and I'm sure some Taoists and more than a few Hindus would object to the implicit privileging of of a monotheistic framework for discussing the metaphysical implications of awareness.  I do wish people that write this stuff, and for that matter, some of the New Atheists would be more acknowledging of the nuances of thought involved in non-monotheistic religions and their outlook. More than a few of us reject magic and hocus-pocus and woo. (And some of us, including practicing Hindus that I've met, are atheists.)  But then again,  most of the New Atheists I've read about  are intellectual descendants of Bertrand Russell rather than Jean-Paul Sartre or Nietzsche.  As William Barrett wrote in Irrational Man: A Study in Existentialist philosophy:

I love reading Russell's History of Western philosophy (just as I love reading Dawkins). And I share the general direction of where Sartre and Nietzsche were going, as it leads I think, to a Buddhist emptiness.,  However I think as the above paragraph shows, they were still rather attached to the notions of monotheism, their atheism as attached, as it were, to monotheism to a certain extent, as was Russell.  But Russell was all too human, as were the other Europeans mentioned in this paragraph, as am I.  But I'm practicing.  

"Westernizing" versus "Mutating" Buddhism

James Ford and Barbara have written posts about "Westernizing" the Dharma, and more specifically Zen Buddhism in the West.

I figured I'd put my two cents in...

• Barbara and James talk about how Zen training was at first primarily a Zen training in monasteries.  They're right as far as they go, but what I wonder about is if they get the historical context correctly.  As I've said repeatedly, the degree to which Zen training was "laicized" in Asian cultures depended on the degree to which people had free time, and in the societies in which Chan/Zen flourished, most people had very little time on their hands.  The degree to which Chan/Zen flourishes amongst non-monastics is quite highly correlated with economic status. Thus, samurai and nobility could study Zen, but peasants could not unless they became monastics.  That fact can't really be ignored, and should be taken into account.
• James Ford writes:

Most people, however, who practice Zen, do not live in a controlled rule based environment beyond regular or occasional retreats. The average Zen practitioner today sits with a group that meets maybe once a week, perhaps a bit more regularly. And hits a retreat once in a while, maybe once or twice a year.

  I think that most Americans who practice Zen are in fact living highly structured lives by default because lives today are that structured, and there is "surplus" time in which to do meditation.  That's partially because of the class of folks practicing it.  The challenge for Chan/Zen is to bring this practice to those who have more hours of physical labor in the week and are poorer than those who do not.

• There are similar problems of Chan/Zen going on throughout the Western world; there is a significantly larger lay practice in Japan than there was centuries ago, because the movement to bring Zen to the laity actually started first in Japan, with Japanese organizations.
• Even amongst the less economically well off (and especially amongst the better off) Chan/Zen "offshoots" have been around for centuries with much the same spirit of Chan/Zen.  When James was writing about how there is much criticism in traditional monastics, I was thinking about martial arts training.  Teachers who are worthwhile in this endeavor aim constantly for perfection in their students.  Any practitioner of the so-called "Zen arts" will be challenged by one's continual need to improve skill.  And Barbara's right of course, communities of practitioners of any discipline will make for a better group of practitioners.
• Finally, I'd take a small issue with Barbara's characterization of "Western" versus "Eastern" philosophy.  My take on how professional philosophers do this is not that they intend to denigrate Eastern narratives of Buddhism, but rather that they wish to contextualize Buddhism in terms that have proven useful to Western philosophy.  To me, this is kind of like how mathematics has developed over the world.  Much of Western philosophy is concerned with matters about how to consistently, logically, describe aspects of human existence, just as mathematics attempts to consistently and logically describe numeric and computational aspects of our existence. The fact that much of probability theory has come to us through Soviet era mathematicians doesn't imply that probability theory is in any way "Communist," though I can imagine some know-nothings might assert that for political reasons.  Thus,   I can't imagine a serious professional Western philosopher saying there's no need for reading Nagarjuna when one has Sartre, but my viewpoint is shaped by what I've read on the subject.  But I'm talking about folks like the late William Barrett, whose writing was very respectful of D. T. Suzuki, (not to mention D.T. Suzuki himself) rather than knock-offs like Ken Wilber.
• So from a "Western philosophical" point of view I don't think there's a big problem.  I do think there's a big problem when "Western Buddhism" makes fetishes out of political figures, particularly when those figures have their own agendas.  I also think there's a big problem when "Western Buddhism" is really someone's projection of what they'd like  Buddhism to be, when it's a Buddhism laden with their own psychological or political or gender biases. But that's what I'd call a mutation of Buddhism.  It's all well and good to support political action and have that political action to be informed by one's Buddhist ethics.  It's another thing entirely to say that a particular movement is "Buddhist" and therefore that "Buddhism" should re-make the entire world.  You better free your mind instead, as John Lennon sang.
• Finally, I'd note that "traditional Buddhism" can indeed learn something from the West, and that something is professional ethics.  We in the West really did do that; it's a legacy of a Roman system of law.  All religious personnel should have notions of conflict of interest areas in what they do, and to be on guard for them.  The notions of professional ethics is of course still evolving, but let's give credit where credit is due.

Seriously, though I don't think the subject is so important to think about concerned with the day-to-day practice itself.

The illusion of free will and its utter irrelevance

I like Brad Warner's Zen, despite its Soto flavor.  And I'm sure when his god book comes out, I'll probably read it and rip it to shreds - or not- I might not really; he and I might just come down on the same side of things with just each of using using more unfortunate language than the next person.

This post though is about a comment he makes on his blog entry on his return to California:

Sam Harris is a pretty convincing speaker, isn't he? I plan to watch that entire video soon. But I watched about a minute of it & it seems pretty clear where he's going.

The problem is it's all up in the head. This is what trips up people like Harris. They are far too clever for their own good. They can convince themselves of anything they choose to because their brains are so sharp and efficient.

I actually LIKE Sam Harris' stuff. So don't get me wrong here. Among his crowd of self-satisfied über atheists, he's definitely the best. Richard Dawkins has nothing on Sam Harris.

The best koan I know of that addresses the issue is the one about the guy who stubs his toe and says, "I had heard that the body is an illusion, where does this pain come from?"

It's a slightly different angle on the same problem. "I had heard (from Sam Harris) that freedom of choice is an illusion. Where does this freedom of choice come from?"

Nishijima Roshi always said that determinism and free will are both true. It depends on which angle you look at things from.

Thoughts may be conditioned. But that doesn't negate freedom of action. This is something you see through actual experience, though. Not through thinking.  

First of all, I think Warner's language in dismissing the so-called New Atheists is, yes, unfortunately chosen.

Can a speaker be convincing?  Or are the speaker's ideas, conveyed in the manner in which the speaker chooses convincing? Get it? Warner's language has embedded in it some kind of guru rejection which posits a "New Atheist guru" which  just isn't there in any of the New Atheist writings.   I don't find Warner's words here convincing at all. But not just for that area of his comment, though his dismissive use of the term "self-satisfied über atheists" does nothing to help his case.  Look, many religious folks are going to find New Atheist writings stridently attacking their sacred cows; I'll stipulate to that point.   But given the asymmetry of the playing field, as its been for thousands of years, and given folks like even Brad Warner responding as above, I can't hardly blame them.  Sure they largely don't attack Buddhism, and when  they do it's uninformed.  I'll stipulate to that point, too. But when we have a discussion together, any rationalist atheist is the easiest person in the world with whom a Buddhist can come to agreement. Period. Full stop. In fact, I'd rather spend eternity in the company of New Atheists than I would in the company of someone who gets all touchy-feely about how all religions are one and all that.

If you see my comment below Warner's, though you get to the meat of my objection with this passage. 

We're highly conditioned creatures. as the posts (here and here) indicate with regard to our views and beliefs of death alone. It's been good for our survival to have characteristics like this, and the conditioning to perceive the world as though there were an "I" with "free will" is another biological/social evolutionary trait we have had. 

There is, from  a systems theoretic, behavioral scientific, or Buddhist perspective, no reason at all why there is the necessity of considering that we have a "free will." We seem to perceive ourselves as separate selves with autonomous agency, to be sure, but that's not the same thing as saying we have autonomous agency.

One objection that one might lamely try to bring against this is that people, and Buddhists especially, are prone to develop and improve and cultivate skill. Of course that's true.  But so what? Beings such as us with perceived autonomous agency wouldn't perceive it any other way. In fact if there were a separate self with such autonomous agency it would make the cultivation of skill more difficult, as you can "get" from cultivation of the Buddhist Dharma.

But  that might not be the ultimate objection of Brad Warner (or maybe Nishijima).  That, rather may go like this: if the notion of "self" is inherently empty, with no intrinsic essence, the notion of a  "free will" attribute of this inherently empty self  is also inherently empty.  

But that's not the same thing; it's a kind of category mistake if  they're  going there, and I admit I don't know if that's where they're going.  "Free will" is an attribute applied to certain beings; it is an ideal in the way its advocates apply it, but only imperfectly realized, if at all,  because of the obvious fact of habit.  But that last sentence, to me, at any rate, implies that Occam's razor can be applied, especially given the fact that we improve by suspending such notions, except insofar as we think by practice we improve.  But that thought-position-action doesn't imply the grander philosophical notion; the latter is utterly unimportant as long as there's the former.  That former is assumed axiomatic in Buddhism and its writings; the latter, though, I can't think of something that leaps out at me at the moment that justifies a Western philosophical notion of free will.

I won't be surprised if someone else brings up another Buddhist position on this and cites myriad sutras to back up their position, but I just don't think the Big Question is all that important.

Daily Life and Truly Engaged Buddhism...

I'm not big on the engaged Buddhism thing. It's not that I am not politically in tune with many of the engaged Buddhists' goals.  But rather, too much of it is cause tourism - and by that I mean it's something people use as an escape from their own position, if the issues in which they're engaged are far removed from their own existence.

It's kind of like the left-wing version of the right wing's fixation on abortion and contraception, and for all I know serves many of the same goals - that is to say, there may exist those that instigate such things for the sole purpose of distracting.  The latter point though is not important at all - that is, whether or not there are people who are intentionally cranking up some kind of Wurlitzer is irrelevant.  If there's crankers, let 'em crank - that's not my problem per se.  My problem is simply keeping in mind the answers to the three questions, more or less, in such a way that things get done that actually benefit beings. 

I'm in the midst of all the things that come with family life at my age in this time, the whole shebang  and its various accretions thereon as it were: the joy, the humor, the teaching all around, the frustration, the problems, the worries, etc.  This is where practice is. Other folks, I'm sure, have other practices suited to where they are in life.  But in no way should we substitute practice where we are, at this point in time, for alienation via distraction.

Why are you a Buddhist?

Tricycle has had/is having some kind of campaign to encourage meditation.  All well and good, I say, but how about a campaign to realize the Way moment to moment in one's life?

Sartre v. Kant: Who's More Mahayana?

Over at Justin Whitaker's blog, there's a post on Kant with a detour of Viktor Frankl.  Justin writes:

... Perhaps the Buddha, Kant, Frankl and others will exhort ideals that seem beyond the reach of ordinary people. But it is exactly that ideal, and the striving we ordinary beings undertake to attain it, that allows us to become fully human. Think a bit about the “cross-winds” of society toward complacency, sensual enjoyment, blame, etc…

 I think several things about this:

1. Of course it's kind of pointless to try to crow-bar Western philosophical constructs into  Eastern philosophical constructs, just as it is to say that Kant and Nietzche were saying the same thing.  But...
2. That said, clearly the Buddha did not subscribe the Western concept of the ideal.  He had bigger fish to fry.
3. If I were to map Western philosophers as "near" to Buddhist philosophy, I'd start with existentialists such as Sartre.   Sartre's concept of the human is void of an essence.  That is closer, I submit, to the Mahayana ideal of the aggregates being fundamentally empty than the presumption of an ideal to which one strives.  Striving's important, but not because there's a "goal" there, but because that's what we do.

All of that said, I think frankly that Viktor Frankl's kind of a poor metaphor for Buddhism for other reasons.  You can get a glint of why I might think so from a couple of  Amazon reviews of "Man's Search for Meaning."  The first:

I am a widow, and this book was recommended to me by a psychologist to help lift my spirits. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how page after page of descriptions of life under the nazis is supposed to help anyone with anything. I was already aware that many people have had to go through even worse things than watching a beloved spouse die of cancer, awful as that is. Certainly Mr. Frankel's experience and response to it is a tribute to the human spirit -- proof that we are more resillient than we think. But uplifting? No, I don't think so. Depressing, with no new information, is my synopsis. More power to those who can comfort themselves with some "meaning" in suffering and get something out of this book. But if you don't, you won't be the only one. 

And the second:

What's proven here? That if you can convince youself you have something to live for: you will continue to live for it. So? If after getting hit on the head with a lead pipe 100x one is to receive ten million dollars, I suppose there are some who will endure that pain, too, in the hope they will survive. They won't.
Perhaps the real question is if there is *any* reward for enduring the brutality of life that is worth the suffering. Most, if not virtually all, love relationships are based on a thinly or not-so thinly disguised basis of psychology mercantilism, if not outright economic dealmaking. Other higher pursuits: art, philosophy, philanthropy, so-called spiritual attainment are arguably better, but, really, are little more than panaceas not much different, in their ultimate purpose, than devoting one's life to developing the perfect tennis game, for instance. They absorb one's attention and distract one's focus from the pain & dissolution to come, or even occuring, & keep one, perhaps, from ending it all at the very moment. In this manner, we all buoy each other up, but for what? The question remains unanswered. Life is a concentration camp and we are all going to the gas chamber in the end. What do we do in the meantime. Is it worth it?
Frankl, like any reasonably intelligent person, delineates the central problem well: Why live? But like every other professional philosopher or psychologist, he comes up with a reason (altho in this case the reason boils down to *find a reason*) because, well, what else is he going to do? The biological imperative compels us to go on with life at any price. The alternative: that there is no reason to do so--that is simply too terrifying to contemplate, would violate species survival, and be considered unpublishable. Just once I'd like to see a thinker have the courage to face the ultimate question and not flinch, escape to a flight of fancy, take a leap of *faith* or otherwise dissemble.
Life is not worth living. Don't blink. 

 These are two very good counters to the "living for the ideal/meaning" part.  Frankl's position is kind of an escape- the escape of turning one's life into some kind of essence.

Frankl got through the camps with this view.  But Sartre also got through his ordeals without that view. 

Moreover, you'll never develop the perfect tennis game by pursuing some kind of ideal, because it means you won't be doing it in the moment.

It is true that the things one tell's one's self can help or hinder their journey through or around or above obstacles and suffering.  But one is no less human for despairing.  It just is more suffering though.

Some folks don't strive and they do die. That is the reality, and that reality should be the seeds of great compassion and empathy.  Maybe that reality triggers a Sartrian "will to action" that helps those with that will help all beings. 

But when death is inevitable, when imperfection is inevitable, when the "goal" crumbles into dust, there are times when we must keep going even though it is painful and difficult, with no great likelihood of success. If death is our lot itself, regardless of the outcome, we can attempt to make our mark.

And speaking of 間 (ma) and Western Buddhist blogging and media

I guess what I  can do really really well is present Asian Buddhist ideas from a  perspective of a European American much closer to Asian culture than most of the Western Buddhists with whom I'm familiar.  I'm reminded of this from, yep, yet again Vincent Horn and Danny Fisher.  Consider:

Danny: One narrative that’s on my mind, has been no my mind kind of a lot is the whole kind of narrative of Buddhism in America. And I suspect that many of the people who, not all but many of the people who listen to Buddhist Geeks and follow your website probably take a look at other Buddhist blogs and things happening with Buddhism in the internet.
And it feels like there’s a lot of conversation about that and how well particular communities, groups, individuals, cultures are represented. I mean I think sometimes a mistake that you hear coming out of perhaps this Anglo middle class community is when you talk about the history of Buddhism in America, the narrative arc of Buddhism in America. You sort of say where does it start?
Well there were these guys the Beats poets and they got really interested in Zen and all these other stuff. Again, the problem with that is that it ignores that Buddhism has much deeper root in America, you know, with east Asian settlers in particularly the western United States and people who came over here to do things like work on the railroad and then ended up contributing to the growth and development of temples and centers all over the west that were there for people like the Beats to drink deeply.
And again that’s a problem if that kind of thing gets perpetuated this idea that the narrative of Buddhism in America starts with the Beats. I mean that obviously points to the problem of how we’re privileging maybe the experience of one group, one part of the picture not the whole. And by the way, could I stop for a minute and just add one thing to what I had said before.

And:

Vincent: Cool. And you know it’s interesting because there’s a recent article that came out kind of academic article by someone that we’ve had on the show before on Buddhist Geeks named Stuart Lachs.

And it’s entitled Modern Day Zen Hagiography. In it he goes into incredible details on two Zen masters that were modern day Zen masters. And he talks specifically about the way that they’re biographies were factually and accurate. He sort of points out the kind of accuracies there and then make some conclusions about how this type of hagiography even for inside practitioners, people that are part of the tradition can actually contribute to scandalous and unethical behavior from the Zen master.

Obviously you know in the last few months and we don’t necessarily need to get into the gory details of this. But for everyone listening to show you’re probably aware of some of the recent scandals that have come to the larger cultures attention. Scandals from various Zen masters and of course there’s a history of scandals on all the Buddhist traditions from teachers and people in position of power. It’s really interesting given that it’s current in our practice community, this tension of scandal and people being in hurt in community.

And also this point from Stuart is the way we can see of a Zen master, if we don’t see that it’s not literal that there’s metaphor culture mixed in with kind of mythical storylines that this can actually contribute to some really scandalous and unethical behavior actually. I wonder if you could maybe respond to that and maybe share some of your perspective and on this complex issue. 

 Naturally there's a current "history of Buddhism in America," which as the Angry Asian Buddhist would point out, that would never start the narrative with the Beats.  Hell, even for many, if not most Americans of European descent (Anglos? You talkin' to me?) our own personal history with Buddhism would never have begun that way if we reflected on it for a bit.  In my case it began with a trip to Chinatown when I was 5 or 6 years old. CHINATOWN! You think it was any freakin' different for Allen Freakin' Ginsberg?

That reminds me, I need to get a link about a summer program for youths from the USA near Shaolin  (yeah, the one in China) here.  No Chinese language experience or ethnic background necessary.  I'm just sayin'.

I included the quote from Vincent because I think, despite the verbiage here, they're actually on to something.  But they're seeing from this perspective that seems so outside to me.  I'd rather leave outside out, so to speak.  There's folks like me that I feel are "much closer to the metal" it seems that this Eastern/Western divide is more illusory than all that.  As is the "hagiography" divide.  The big thing about Stuart Lachs, despite his brilliant (but sometimes flawed) criticisms of Buddhist hagiography is that and yet he is still swimming in the Zen water!  That's a huge, huge point these guys seem to miss - or don't get to the point in reaching quickly for a guy like me.

I'm grateful to them for this conversation, but I think there's folks like me who can complement what they're dong here.

Why I don't have a top ten list of "Spiritual Teachers"

The older I get, the more I realize the wisdom of my teacher's line about "There is no teacher." Seriously. "Teacher" is still kind of an odd term to apply to him, but given that I'm pressed for time this morning, I'll go with it.  "Dude" doesn't seem to cut it as an appellation, and 親分 (oyabun), well, I'll be posting about that later, I suppose, but that term doesn't apply either.

There was some buzz in Twitter about "Spiritual Teachers" possibly instigated by this post over at, uh, yeah, Tricycle.  But of course I've said enough about Tricycle for a week or so (until of course they do something else blog-worthy, I suppose).  But via Twitter I cam across this odd post by Diane Musho Hamilton.  She's a bit more poetic I think that the average Integralian - you know, they always say, "integral this" and "integral that." "Integral Cheerios," for example, would not be out of character.

In her response to a Watkins Review article  on a "top 100" "Spiritual Teachers"  she lists her own, though not in much of an articulated order.  Can you see where this post is going yet?

Watkins included Wayne Dyer and Louise Hay, and I listed Genpo Roshi and Choygam Trungpa Rinpoche. Ken Wilber made their list at number nine, just before Rhonda Byrne—but for me, Ken comes in third, just after His Holiness and Oprah. Why? Because he has had more influence in my life that almost any other single writer or spiritual teacher.

Ken doesn’t claim to be a teacher. We all know that. True, he does not fulfill the role of guru, but a substantial number of people around the globe have discovered boundless perfection while sitting alone at night reading his books. Not only has reading Ken’s work opened their minds, but his writing evokes a deep, abiding compassion by helping his readers embrace the complexity-of-the-world-as-it-is through the door of their cognitive understanding. It is a bit of a quandary how one of the world’s most cutting edge thinkers also has the simultaneous capacity for opening the heart. But isn’t that what good theory does?  Help us turn towards the real? And isn’t Ken’s genius precisely for showing us that mind and heart are one—that truth and compassion are the same thing?

Ken’s writing throws nothing out—not evolution, neuroscience or biochemistry, not history, political theory, or social engagement. And certainly not the great spiritual traditions. He is able to bridge meditative insight from the East with the Western mystical traditions, and presence the latest and greatest innovations of science and psychology in our contemplation. And without the pretense of spiritual guidance, he implicitly encourages his readers to be free to grow and to awaken, participating in the magnificence of evolution, and trusting their unique moment of now in the coursing of history. And what a talent that is.

I wanted to include a bit of  the Wilber bit because - well, it's fawning.  And even though I have a low opinion of Wilber's work - who clearly is inferior as a philosopher to those who actually profess the subject - no matter what their particular specialty  biases or what-not- this post is not about Wilber.  Much.  

No, it's that first sentence in the quote - of this post of March 29 - that grabbed my attention. On the exact same day as that post by Adam Tebbe comes out about how Genpo Merzel is doing a "disrobing do-over" - on the exact same day - Diane Musho Hamilton publishes a "list" of "spiritual teachers" that includes him.

Merzel is below Oprah Winfrey, to be sure...but I digress. 

Merzel?  Ms. Hamilton should read all of NellaLou's post on the subject of "Sex and the Sangha."  Admittedly, Musho is a "student" of Genpo Merzel, but as I continually tell my guys, if the student cannot teach the teacher now and then, the teacher is a horrible teacher.  And this was a perfect opportunity for Musho to teach something to her teacher.

 On the Zen Forum International site in an area discussing recent issues with Eido Shimano, one "sweepingzen" (Tebbe?) wrote, "I would also like to state that it's getting very old hearing people trying to save Shimano's reputation.'Eido Roshi’s uncompromising and penetrating Dharma Eye, which reveals directly the luminous power of the unconditioned mind.'  If Roko Chayat believes that then perhaps she is too close to the matters at hand to see the situation clearly."

The exact  thing applies to Musho Hamilton re: Genpo Merzel.  If she think's he's a "top ten" "spiritual teacher,"  then she's way too close to the situation to have any kind of clear viewpoint of such matters. Genpo Merzel has done great harm to the reputation of Zen practice.  Holding him up as some kind of ideal is an insult to those who are struggling with their own practices, not to mention those who have been immediately harmed by his behavior.

Of course, if you poke enough, you could say that about all the people on her list.  I don't have the  time or space to go through every last one of them, but the point is, by holding people up to some kind of ideal as a "great" spiritual teacher,  they are pointing away from The Matter at Hand. 

And they totally don't get nonduality. The preceding sentence intentionally self-referential , referential to myself and my own practice and self-contradictory - go read that last sentence again.  But the reality is, people just starting out in this practice aren't going to get the subtlety of all that.  And holding up Genpo Merzel or any of these other folk are setting up a stumbling block for the inexperienced practitioner, and it's not even a good stumbling block - the kind that is intentionally placed there to improve the practice!

So I think it's best not to have a "spiritual teachers" list.  There is no teacher.

Now go figure it out.  Pay attention.

Emptiness and Deconstruction and Politicized Science

Brad Warner's recent post about skeptics and their take on the Buddhist concept of emptiness reminded me of something I wanted to write a blog post about, but forgot; I was, you know, pretty busy as of late.  Ven. Warner pretty articulately says:

I believe that this conclusion about the doctrine of emptiness negating the law of identity (A=A) therefore no rational statement can be made runs something like this. I'm guessing here, because this is so foreign to my understanding of the doctrine of emptiness that I have a hard time getting my head around it. But here goes nothin'.

1) The doctrine of emptiness says everything is empty of self nature (so far so good).

2) If everything is empty of self nature then every thing in the universe is its exact opposite. White is black, war is peace, The Beatles are The Bee Gees. (This is already going wrong)

3) Since every thing is its opposite no rational statement can be made.

4) Therefore, Mahayana Buddhists are all crazy because they believe that good is evil, chocolate is peanut butter, and Charlie Sheen is the Dalai Lama*. You can't even argue with people like that!

The actual doctrine of emptiness bears no relation to this. Even if your buddy the Buddhist at the coffee shop down the street claims it does and even if he ought to know because he read a book by Alan Watts six years ago...

Buddhists do not think pink is orange, fish are elephants and Paris Hilton is the entire London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Things are what they are. Zen texts like the Sandokai (Harmony of Equality and Difference) are not trying to refute the law of identity. Things are different from each other. Yet ultimately all things are of one substance.

 I'd add at the end of the last sentence, "without an inherent essence, and yes, this statement is also self-referential."  That does not mean 1=2.  That too would be trying to pin down reality like a butterfly pinned in some collection. Can't do it. Nope.

Which brings me to this:

That taking on the scientific establishment has become a favored activity of the right is quite a turnabout. After all, questioning accepted fact, revealing the myths and politics behind established certainties, is a tactic straight out of the left-wing playbook. In the 1960s and 1970s, the push back against scientific authority brought us the patients’ rights movement and was a key component of women’s rights activism. That questioning of authority veered in a more radical direction in the academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when left-wing scholars doing “science studies” increasingly began taking on the very idea of scientific truth.

This was the era of the culture wars, the years when the conservative University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom warned in his book “The Closing of the American Mind” of the dangers of liberal know-nothing relativism. But somehow, in the passage from Bush I to Bush II and beyond, the politics changed. By the mid-1990s, even some progressives said that the assault on truth, particularly scientific truth, had gone too far, a point made most famously in 1996 by the progressive New York University physicist Alan Sokal, who managed to trick the left-wing academic journal Social Text into printing a tongue-in-cheek article, written in an overblown parody of dense academic jargon, that argued that physical reality, as we know it, may not exist.

Following the Sokal hoax, many on the academic left experienced some real embarrassment. But the genie was out of the bottle. And as the political zeitgeist shifted, attacking science became a sport of the radical right. “Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research,” Michael Bérubé, a literature professor at Pennsylvania State University, said of this evolution recently in the journal Democracy. He quoted the disillusioned French theorist Bruno Latour, a pioneer of science studies who was horrified by the climate-change-denying machinations of the right: “Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth . . . while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.” 

I often feel like a dual fish out of water: Having to explain Buddhism as philosophy to rationalists, and at the same time having to explain to Western Buddhists that most New Age garbage is just that.

Alan Sokal's article can be read on-line.  I think Alan Sokal might be a bit proud of what he did with his Social Text hoax, but I could be wrong.  Regardless, if you actually read  Alan Sokal's article  he actually never goes anywhere near refuting the fact that science is fundamentally open; that good science can't be done unless one is open to the possibility of falsification.  This, while not a parroting of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (not to mention the premise of deconstruction as a method) is not at all incompatible with it.  Sokal's hoax allowed for a politicization to creep into his paper  - which should have raised a red flag to the reviewers from Social Text - but did not.

Facts are not made up.  Things are as they are. The fundamental emptiness of all things not only does not negate the fundamental outlook of the scientific method, but is in fact highly compatible with it to the point of being a reflection of the emptiness of all things.

Does that clear things up?

One could say this is a typical Times "Both sides do it too!" bit of nonsense. One probably would say it.  But the fact remains, regardless of your politics, the scientific method is the best tool we have for describing the behavior of nature that can be observed, measured, and for which effects can be separated.  And the nature of existence itself appears to be fundamentally empty.

One thing I am happy about: I do not write like David Brooks

I realize this is like shooting fish in a barrel, and maybe in the New Year I'll do less of it.  But...but... sometimes... it's just that his writing is so out of touch it calls out for comment...

[Huburt Dreyfus are Sean Dorrance Kelly, authors of a new book on Western philosophy. They] argue [the lack of a shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions] has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices...

Dreyfus and Kelly say that we should have the courage not to look for some unitary, totalistic explanation for the universe. Instead, we should live perceptively at the surface, receptive to the moments of transcendent whooshes that we can feel in, say, a concert crowd, or while engaging in a meaningful activity, like making a perfect cup of coffee with a well-crafted pot and cup.
We should not expect these experiences to cohere into a single “meaning of life.” Transcendent experiences are plural and incompatible. We should instead cultivate a spirit of gratitude and wonder for the many excellent things the world supplies.
I’m not sure this way of living will ever prove satisfying to most readers. Most people have a powerful sense that there is a Supreme Being over us, attached to eternal truths. Though they try, Dreyfus and Kelly don’t give us a satisfying basis upon which to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies.

I am convinced that much of what is going on in the Western Buddhist practice however incoherent,  however error-prone, however inarticulate is  providing the answers that these Western philosophers say can't be given and that Brooks tut-tuts in response to these philosophers  that there is no acknowledgment of a monotheist behavioral hegemony.  As for myself, I remember this "shared sense of values" that were inculcated.  I didn't see pervasive happiness.  I doubt there was such happiness in previous times, what with slavery, pogroms, small pox, polio, child labor, and other horrors.

I think we're doing something important; it will be needed.  I think in a way, we're practicing to be janitors.  We're going to have to clean up a really big mess someday soon.   But of course we're not doing it primarily because we're cool.  We have to live our own lives where we find them, right here.

Two op-ed pieces worth a comment from NY Times

1. Sean Kelly at the NY Times, in my observation, seems to be missing the mark:

There may be parts of the culture where this destabilizing force [ of "the death of god"]  is not felt.  The Times’s David Brooks argued recently for example, in a column discussing Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom,” that Franzen’s depiction of America as a society of lost and fumbling souls tells us “more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.”  The suburban life full of “quiet desperation,” according to Brooks, is a literary trope that has taken on a life of its own.  It fails to recognize the happiness, and even fulfillment, that is found in the everyday engagements with religion, work, ethnic heritage, military service and any of the other pursuits in life that are “potentially lofty and ennobling”.
There is something right about Brooks’s observation, but he leaves the crucial question unasked.  Has Brooks’s happy, suburban life revealed a new kind of contentment, a happiness that is possible even after the death of God?  Or is the happy suburban world Brooks describes simply self-deceived in its happiness, failing to face up to the effects of the destabilizing force that Franzen and his literary compatriots feel? I won’t pretend to claim which of these options actually prevails in the suburbs today, but let me try at least to lay them out.

It is a pity folks like Kelly - who should know better - marginalize the Buddhist concept of sunyata here by posing  false dichotomy between indecisive, hopeless "nihilism" and commitment to pastimes that in themselves are void at their core.

2.  I can't imagine the mindset of Ross Douthat.  I just can't.

Julian Assange is no dummy and that's why they're coming after him

Via Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton,  via zunguzungu (?),  you can read why Julian Assange is doing the Wikileaks thing,  and therefore why various political and media organs have demonized him.  From a the post  by zunguzungu:

Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an aside that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the quality of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.

I’m not sure this is what he means, but it’s worth reflecting that the conspiracy’s ability to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy’s tendency to deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the Kool-Aid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn’t, basically, believe their own line of propaganda, if they didn’t convince themselves — even provisionally — that we actually are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD’s, this doesn’t mean that the people talking about ticking time bombs don’t actually believe that they are. It just means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometimes this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanistan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of his advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the banks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the death-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy choice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs might have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public service. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.

This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s  information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat.

This is fascinating in several ways to me,  as a Communications and Information Theorist, and as a Buddhist.   As the former, it's interesting as a way to bring down a network executing a strategy, and as the latter it brings up interesting questions of right speech, action, and livelihood.  Unfortunately for Assange, though, the Prisoner's Dilemma is operative here: no government on earth will likely stand down from its power to operate in a secret and conspiratorial way, and thus he's on some Interpol list, whether justified or not. 

Is what Assange is doing right speech?  In a sense that his goal is greater government accountability to the citizens, I would suppose that his actions are laudable.  On the other hand,  - here's the paradox - the ability of the government to function on behalf of the people lies in its ability to create and  keep secrets, and transmit them in a trusted network.  

It is very difficult to achieve Assange's objective, I'm afraid, without fatally compromising the other objective.  The organ of state that deals with transmission of secrets in a network is necessary to the healthy functioning of the state, and can be used for good or for ill, just as an arm may be used to feed another or kill another. 

Assange, to my knowledge, has disclosed not a thing that has compromised the security of the United States or any other national entity.     But because he has arrogated for himself something that all states prefer to arrogate to themselves, they're going to continue to come after him. 

Paradoxes...

Here's a nice intro for the layman on these kinds of things.  One of the interesting things (for me at any rate) is that the "Liar Paradox" can be realized in circuitry;  it is a metastable digital circuit realized with two flip-flops, plus power and whatever ancillary hardware is needed.

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.

Ethan Nichtern and Slavoj Žižek's Critique of Western Buddhism

I was looking for something new in the Buddhist world yesterday, and came across this article by Ethan Nichtern, yes, in the Huffington post, which was, very oddly, a post that was a critique of something one Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian Marxist apparently wrote in 2001.  Was Nichtern having a problem finding something about which to write?  I mean, this bit's 9 years' old.  It came out within about a year or so when Empire came out, which frankly sets the standard of Western Marxist philosophy in this millenium, as far as I'm concerned, and nothing in the piece by Žižek shows much of the post-modern influences that are redolent in Empire.  (Like you care? Since when did I become the Post-New York Marxist Review of Old Books? )

Obviously I digress.

I guess I can be thankful to Nichtern for pointing me in the direction of interesting philosophy.  I don't get a chance to read much of this stuff anymore, and so I guess it's a nice welcome opportunity to do these kinds of things.

I want to go and give both Žižek and Nichtern a relatively fair hearing; I mean, one seems to be a non-pomo Marxist and the other is on the Huffington Post. Not that there's anything wrong with those things...

First though I'd like to bring up the definition of the word "fetish":

1. any object believed by some person or group to have magic power
2. any thing or activity to which one is irrationally devoted: to make a fetish of sports
3. Psychiatry any nonsexual object, such as a foot or a glove, that abnormally excites erotic feelings

 Now this Buddhist - i.e. I - do not have any beliefs in magic powers belonging to people, groups or objects, though I have been exercising a bit lately.  This definition is important because Žižek raises the charge of fetishim with regards to Western Buddhism in general and Tibetan Buddhism in particular

"Western Buddhism" thus fits perfectly the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person. In the case of a symptom, I "repress" this death and try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality. Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds. They are thorough "realists" capable of accepting the way things effectively are, given that they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In Nevil Shute's melodramatic World War II novel Requiem for a WREN, the heroine survives her lover's death without any visible traumas. She goes on with her life and is even able to talk rationally about her lover's death because she still has the dog that was the lover's favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her entire world disintegrates.³

Sometimes, the line between fetish and symptom is almost indiscernible. An object can function as the symptom (of a repressed desire) and almost simultaneously as a fetish (embodying the belief which we officially renounce). A leftover of the dead person, a piece of his/her clothes, can function both as a fetish (insofar as the dead person magically continues to live in it) and as a symptom (functioning as the disturbing detail that brings to mind his/her death). Is this ambiguous tension not homologous to that between the phobic and the fetishist object? The structural role is in both cases the same: If this exceptional element is disturbed, the whole system collapses. Not only does the subject's false universe collapse if he is forced to confront the meaning of his symptom; the opposite also holds, insofar as the subject's "rational" acceptance of the way things are dissolves when his fetish is taken away from him.

So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs and accepts social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question "OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality 'the way it is'?" "Western Buddhism" is such a fetish. It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always with-draw. In a further specification, one should note that the fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role remains unconscious—as in the case of Shute's heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dog—or you think that the fetish is that which really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the "truth" of his existence is in fact the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game.

Nowhere is this fetishist logic more evident than apropos of Tibet, one of the central references of the post-Christian "spiritual" imaginary... 

Now this is, on its face a powerful charge against Western Buddhism. I won't go into the Tibetan aspects of this because I neither want to make a fetish of Tibetan Buddhism nor do I wish to make a piñata of it; the Western Tibetan Buddhists, are to me, Buddhists, even if they are a bit aberrant. So's the Dalai Lama. The real issue is this:

[Buddhism] enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always with-draw.

To Žižek, it is the rapacious "capitalist game" that's the bête noire of human existence and Buddhism is yet another opiate, a palliative, that does nothing to remedy the fundamental issue. This is horse feces as far as this Buddhist is concerned; because regardless of whether or not the capitalist game continues, regardless of whether or not the revolution comes, regardless of whether or not Richard Gere saves Tibet (and wins valuable prizes in doing so), suffering will continue.  And dammit, it's incumbent to do something, and if you're not paying attention, you can't do squat. Political battles must be fought. Yeah, capitalism is inherently unstable.  But I think Žižek, like many people like him, is so alienated from himself (please note the irony in that statement - most likely due to projection and replacing one ideology with another) that he doesn't recognize there's a plethora of human functions besides economic and political ones.  I have that impression of  Žižek's alienation  because he posits a straw-man "Western Buddhism" as a foil for his Marxist Critique.

 And while I'm sure Žižek cares about suffering in the abstract (in much the same way fundamentalist Christians care about zygotes  as people in the abstract) he's not writing about the day-to-day sufferings of himself, his family, his neighbors, his co-workers and the poor folk in sweatshops and child-laborers on the other side of the planet.  It's all the same bit of suffering.

So, like, uh, what does Nichtern say?  First...

Although his critique of Buddhism is somewhat uninformed, Zizek does offer, in his own way, a good insight into the danger of misunderstanding Buddhist practice and the techniques of mindfulness altogether. What fascinates me is that his critique parallels -- in the language of cultural theory -- the personal wariness that most beginning meditators have about the practice of meditation, especially regarding 1) how mindfulness actually works, 2) what acceptance really means, and 3) how genuine transformation comes about.

The first hint we should have that meditation is not a passive withdrawal into a mental shell is this: Meditating is actually really hard! Things that are passive tend to be easy, right? Watching Project Runway for half an hour is a piece of cake. Watching your mind for half an hour, not so much. 

 For most people who aren't doing retreats, meditation should actually not be that difficult.  The key is to show some compassion for yourself - it was great advice I once heard from Paul Gorman when he was still on WBAI - which, by the way, is a totally Marxist like public radio station in New York run by Pacifica. But I digress again. Watching your mind  compassionately, and kindly for a half an our or an hour is not that difficult.  And more than that, well, what kind of economic class are we realistically discussing?

What else does Nichtern say?

Of course, for people who don't practice, meditation can and does come across like a pitchperfect cliché of passivity before the status quo. When you look at someone sitting there, you might think: "Seriously what does that do for them? What does it really change about their situation? How does it better the world?" We ask these skeptical questions because what we rightfully want is not just the ability to pay attention, but the ability to transform our circumstances. We want change we can believe in, both internally and externally. That's the payoff we are looking for. Without the reward of transformation coming at some point on the path, meditation is useless. Buddhist teachers can preach "there is no goal" as much as they want, but most students aren't going to even stick around long enough to hear the subtleties of what that really means, either. And there are goals in meditation, by the way, just not the kind that can be achieved in 30 minutes or your money back.
Practical transformation is what Buddhist practice is all about. It's also about changing the world. To practice meditation consistently is to push back hard against the tidal wave of materialism that is quite literally killing the planet. But transformation is actually step three in a three-step process. 

Here I must strenuously differ with Nichtern: Buddhist practice is not about any "practical transformation" or "changing the world" except insofar as suffering can be transcended. It is true that there might be practical action and yeah, social engagement arising out of deep concerns for right livelihood and Buddhist ethics and morality.  But the picosecond you make Buddhist practices into trying to "get" anything other than  the practice itself (which in and of  itself  transcends suffering), you're not only messing up your practice, but you are  clinging and attached to an idea, a concept a notion, and another "-ism."

To put it another way, if you occupy your mind during a tennis match with why your shots will defeat the opponent to the exclusion of playing the game, well, you won't be playing the game.

Mr. Nichtern might remonstrate against what I've wrote here, but the only reason for doing so that he's written  is, "but most students aren't going to even stick around long enough to hear the subtleties of what [practicing without a goal in mind] really means, either."  There's that want - he wants students to stick around.  He wants to keep 'em once he's gotten 'em in the door.  In other words, this Buddhist teacher is applying a goal, a gaining idea to his practice as teacher. That's Ethan Nichtern's teaching on the Huffington Post.

Sorry Mr. Nichtern, but I think the "point" of  Buddhism is a bit more than a precondition for capitalism - greed.  And sorry Prof. Žižek, Buddhism is not an opiate; it's more like the opposite.