Mind Shadows      Some Notes on Enlightenment

These comments don't pertain mainly to enlightenment as such, whatever it might be, but to the silliness that surrounds it.

Guru popularity correlates with guru self-confidence and articulateness. Because enlightenment cannot be identified by consensus, such as agreeing on the color red, many people turn to authority figures. Such followers are attracted to those who express themselves well and have an air of complete self-confidence. To follow them, people discard critical intelligence, confusing reasonable validation tests with the "demands" of higher consciousness.

Venerated as a model of transformation, Ramana Maharshi had disciples who saw to the needs of his ashram and to his meals. In his life he never had to work, nor did he encounter other stresses. Had he encountered them, what might his life have been like? (1. His disciple Paul Brunton faulted this passivity. UG Krishnamurti was amused watching Maharshi read comic books. 2. Unlike Zen, which is relatively pragmatic in its teachings, advaita tends to escapism because the world is regarded as totally illusory.)

All religion, including Buddhism and Hinduism, begins with faith. Maharshi's ashram followers had faith in him as a model of what they might become. He was their authority and so, observing him daily, they shaped their behavior after him. (This is rather like Nineteenth Century Japanese rendering even the scroll work on the muzzles of Admiral Perry's cannons. Uncertain of the physics principles, they scrupulously copied the ordinance so that nothing might go wrong.)

In Zen, Buddha is sometimes called a shit stick, or students are told, If you meet the Buddha on the road kill him. The point of this is not irreverence for its own sake.

After disciplined effort, meditators and other introspectors discover they cannot find the self, that it has disappeared. Thus they conclude they have "arrived." Instead they manifest a principle long known in biology: emergent phenomena in an organism cannot be explained in terms of its parts. So, too, sense of self cannot be explained by the usual mental baggage.

Under the light of conscious investigation, sense of self disappears and frees the individual from usual anxieties, and mental chatter. It has not gone away, however. It has retreated to the decentralized nodes of consciousness.

Understand that it does not reside there as some invisible entity. (See the earlier comment on biology and emergent pheonomena; it cannot be located in its neural parts.) Rather, the Buddhist explanation nicely accounts for it as form emerging from emptiness. This is similar to quanta potentia in Quantum Theory.

(As an experiment in perception, stare at a blue dot lit against a yellow background. After a few minutes the blue merges with the yellow.)

With enlightenment itself, consciousness shifts and one can live differently afterward, but troubles don't go away, and enlightenment is a transient state like an orgasm. So have more sex. (Norman Mailer wrote of the Apocalyptic Orgasm : )

Buddha's quest for enlightenment began with abandonment of his wife and child. If a woman had founded Buddhism, would it have folded an abandonment myth into its traditional culture?* What implications would it have in dogma for Buddhist non-attachment? *(She certainly wouldn't have called her child Fetter, the English equivalent of how the Buddha myth has it.)

Which is more heroic? The search for Truth? Or working with AIDS victims in Mozambique?

Buddha resolutely resisted speculations on metaphysical questions, such as whether God exists, why the universe was created, why evil exists and whether individual consciousness persists after death. (Buddha's followers transformed his teachings into a religion, complete with theological dogma, moral strictures and rituals.)

Some current spiritual teachers claim they have answers, albeit to the same questions Buddha resisted.

Religious cultural and phenomenological baggage surrounds the enlightenment experience. The essential is this: to become enlightened means awakening to the dream and into its source, not from it. Nobody leaves samsara fully behind, so enjoy it.

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Mind Shadows      Brain in A Vat

Assume that a brain could live in a vat of chemicals and, wired by external electrodes, it would have all the normal experiences: childhood, sex, falling in love, parenting, even skiing, or sky diving. It imagines itself a person capable of a full range of activity. It has beliefs: it is a person with a name, say, Harvey Smedlap; it has a family; it enjoys food; it has orgasms; a god created it and protects it. It regards all this evidence as reliable.

Now, a question: how can one differentiate his own beliefs from that of the brain in the vat? How can one say that his evidence is more reliable than that of the brain?

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Terence Grey/Wei Wu Wei

Here is a radically different note on happiness, by Wei Wu Wei (literally, "doing without doing"). Born as Terence Grey, an Irish aristocrat, later become a Taoist/Buddhist philosopher, his profound essays reveal a life-long quest for answers:

"Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you think, and everything you do is for your self, and there isn't one."

Home______Descartes & Prozac

Descartes split the modern world into mind and body. He imagined thought as an activity apart from the non-thinking body. The modern variants of that notion: the mind as the software program run in its computer, the hard-wired brain; or the view that brain and body are related but only in that what's above the neck cannot survive without what's below it.

Home______We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

To understand how the outside of an aquarium looks, it is better not to be a fish. --Andre Malraux

What my net can't catch is not fish. --Sir Arthur Eddington, in satire of the mechanist position

Who can tell that when we think we are awake we are perhaps slumbering, from which slumber we awaken when we go to sleep.
--Blaise Pascal

Last night I dreamt I was a butterfly, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was a man?-- Lao Tzu

The mind's fate is, after all, a person's fate. We are drawn along by our private visions, but beyond them stretch almost indefinitely for each of us the vast and compelling mysteries of chance and circumstance. --Georges Bernanos.

I had a prophetic dream last night. I was arguing with a minor official to get my Volvo shipped back to the states. In the dream he told me that he wouldn't ship it. That's what happened today. An official told me that I hadn't completed the paperwork properly and it couldn't be transported until the forms were filled out correctly. --From Hal's Germany journal

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Looking for Self: Yogi Berra, Forks in The Road, Benamin Libet and Free will

Looking for Self: Yogi Berra, Forks in The Road, Benamin Libet and Free will

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! said Yogi Berra. Which fork? Why, the one we take. Which one should we take? Should? The question implies an assumption--that we have a choice. Do we?

In 1983 Benjamin Libet and other scientists reported experiments that shed rather interesting light on the issue.

Home______When Is A Head Like A Rock?

Guillotined head opened its eyes. This is the bizarre story of Monsieurs Beaurieux and Languille and a macabre study done in 1905: