metonymy4u

Yesterday I posted a TED talk on suffering and stigma, with a statement about my own suffering, aimed to continue the project of weakening stigma. On most sites, I got support and acceptance. On one site, I got one “like,” and one message of “man the f— up and quit yer whining!” before the site moderator erased our words forever, without offering any of explanation. Since that time I’ve been sitting with a sense of anger, betrayal, and confusion. This morning I realized: “I did reach at least one person. The waves of compassion are spreading. They may not be spreading equally in all directions. And yet they continue. I can live with that.”

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Why is it that we seem to value competition the way we do? Is it because our culture was built on the ruins of the Roman Empire, a society addicted to war? The roman circus was war for entertainment. And it continues today: in the Spanish Corrida and other “professional” sports events routinely televised round the planet. We criticize children for violence, all the while not acknowledging the adult forms of violence we surround them with every second of their lives.

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It seems to me that many of our contemporary social sciences that developed after Kant can be seen as the working out of this dialectic between the ironies of private limitation and the hopes of communal liberation.

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Kant attempted to chart a course between the two competing epistemologies of 18th century western Europe: rationalism and skepticism. In expressing the errors of the latter, he discovered the errors of the former. The error of rationalism was to assume that because we cannot speak otherwise, therefore the world cannot be otherwise. The error of skepticism was to assume that because words are contingent events, therefore the world must be a contingent event. The errors of both camps mirror each other in this regard: reasoning from words to the world and vice versa. Rationalism saw words as absolute correlates of an absolute world, and skepticism saw words as contingent correlates of a contingent world. Kant’s solution was to learn to accept the inevitable limitations of words, which includes the limitation of not knowing, for example, whether we are indeed free, but also the social pressure to speak in no other way.

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For me the end of suffering came (in part) in the following way: I learned to see my thoughts as features of my emotions, my emotions as features of the situation, and the situation as a feature of the universe. Seeing things in this way, I was able to let the thoughts be what they were, nothing more and nothing less. This was the end of clinging. To be sure, not always the end of pain. But the pain became a passing feature of all the causes and conditions of the universe. Itself it was no longer the cause of suffering.

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If human behavior is indeed cognitively caused, if thoughts are the source of our actions and our mistakes, then indeed it makes sense to attempt to reframe thoughts in certain key areas: e.g. the nature of virtue, the truth about reality, and what constitutes real understanding. However, what if the basic assumption is mistaken? What if thoughts don’t make us who we are? Then what?

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Thoughts on Buddha mind.

The Buddhist concept of mind is that the mind is a sensory organ, subject to causes and conditions (i.e. one contingent event amongst many).

The failure to understand this is one of the habits that increases suffering. Because we learn to put more faith in our thoughts than other events (experiences, emotions, needs, urges, actions, dreams, etc).

This is why we spend so much time in zazen learning to notice the contingent nature of thought.

The western notion of freedom and disinterested morality may thus be a notion that increases suffering. By increasing clinging. Though wise intention IS a step on the 8-fold path, it is in many respects very different than western intentionality and freedom.

The dialectic may lead to deep ethical confusions. For example: why is it that we often take the most distressed members of our community (i.e. the “mentally ill,” “felons” or “deviants”) and incarcerate them? Why kick them out of the community in which they grew up, and in that way abrogate any opportunity for healing and recovery?

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As a pragmatist, I begin to understand that my commitment to this way of life commits me to ontological homogeneity, rather than ontological pluralism, which is Kant’s peculiar form of idealism. Because if all truths are to be judged by contextual responsiveness (justification vis-à-vis my verbal community), then epistemology can be the only activity. Because there is no truth out there. The world does not break down into truth sized parcels demarcated by words. They neither re-present nor correspond. Words are simply one event in many, which together sum to the indefinite entirety of everything. And whatever we name any contingent process – proton neutron electron spacetime curve song or just plain love – the words are meaningless. They divide nothing and fix nothing. And if, like Bishop Berkeley, if I must have a cause for all this beauty, call it God and say that she is thinking us alive. Or not. Because beauty needs no reason, as far as I can see.

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