Secular Buddhism does not embrace any form of spirituality, including a belief in God, deities or souls, but it does not deny that there are forms and forces of nature beyond our five senses or our ability to comprehend them. To quote one of my earliest heroes, Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Let me also apply the analogy of a newt by the side of the highway. The road is there and the cars go by but the newt’s intelligence is insufficient to either perceive or comprehend the road, the cars or what they mean. This issue is not unique to technology but exists also in the world of nature; the eyes of certain creatures cannot perceive color, yet for others, color exists.
So it is with us. There are forms and forces, patterns of existence, not only on some distant star but all around us and even within us, which we are completely unable to perceive or even if we do dimly perceive them, to comprehend. Secular Buddhism’s view is that what is a mystery is a mystery and that it not be labeled spiritual simply because it is beyond our abilities to understand or explain.
Why do we feel such compulsion to label what we cannot understand? I think it is because we are uncomfortable with the unknown, the mysterious. Labeling something as spiritual tames and contains it. It gives us the illusion of knowledge and therefore control.
When the universe is more a clockwork, rather than a mystery, it keeps us important in our sense of the scheme of things. The naked ape that we are is more comfortable when things are predictable. Secular Buddhism refrains from indulging in these temptations and therefore from the use of the label “spiritual”, but it does not deny the existence of mystery nor its beauty.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” — Albert Einstein
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Newt © Dave Ingram’s Natural History Blog
Quantum — Image courtesy of CERN
Recent Rick Bateman Articles:
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“Yesterday upon the stairs/i saw a man who wasn’t there/ he wasn’t there again today/ gee I wish he’d go away. ” Christopher Robin ( I believe)
Hey Rick:
It seems to me that our propensity to label is an outgrowth of our ability as humans to use language to express our dualistic state of mind. In other words, if I call myself a Catholic, I am saying that I am not a Jew or a Muslim – or a secular Buddhist, which I am sure you will agree is also a label. If I say I am “spiritual” it means that I am not a materialist or a rationalist or I that am saying that the spirit is something “out there” that I am trying to connect with. Why is it that we cannot get past the separation of ourselves from all of life and thus from the mystery?
Totally agree with you Ross!
Have either of you read http://lifeasahuman.com/2010/mind-spirit/spirituality-and-religion/god-and-the-stick-people-a-metaphor/
I’d love your perspectives!
Cheers,
Gil
Hi Gil. I read over that article and it is exactly in keeping with this post. Your article brings to mind another slightly tangential idea that is also a part of my thinking along these lines: whenever I hear people talk about “When the aliens come…” I think to myself, “Your a newt. The aliens are here. Be careful of that highway now.”
“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” — J. B. S. Haldane, geneticist and evolutionary biologist.
That’s an excellent quote Rick!
Thanks for sharing it!
Hi Ross. I think your first sentence answers your question. Language has played a major part in creating our sense of separation from existence. Just this week at our regular gathering, I was explaining to the group the Buddhist concept of “bare attention” where what enters our awareness from any of the streams of consciousness (body, sound, thought etc.) is observed objectively, without “judgment, decision or commentary”. The latter steps are always preceded by the first step on the path to separation – labeling or naming what we experience.
In western science this is explained in other terms and it involves both language and the way our brains work. It is called the “paradigm effect” which means that we generally don’t really perceive the world at all, but only a very simplified model of it stored in our brains. The universality of the paradigm effect is now well documented but is most commonly experienced when proofreading. After a while you need to ask someone else to read over your document. We intuitively know that any errors remaining have literally become invisible to us. This is because after a while it is impossible to see the real object anymore, but only the model of the object that has been created in our brains. Most of us have had this experience when proofreading but don’t realize that the same thing happens with everything. A truly revolutionary insight if one considers its significance.
The Buddhist practice of bare attention is specifically intended to interrupt this process, to “awaken” us from the model/dream world we take to be the real world and the practice begins by suspending language. Once we suspend language, we perceive the world as so rich in detail and quality that it defies communication. This is why Buddhists say enlightenment cannot be communicated using language; it must be experienced. All the many forms of Buddhist practice are intended to accomplish this awakening to “the true nature of reality”. The mystery then, in all its splendor, is once again revealed.
To go deeper into the question of separation you raise would require we enter into the discussion of what Buddhists consider the illusion of subject/object or that there is no consciousness separate from what we are conscious of. Perhaps in another post!
I will look forward to that post.
Hi Rick, I wonder, do we store these models in our brains for efficiency in much the same way Google Earth does (because it would take tremendous amounts of energy to “refresh” the image every second or so?) If so, then the Buddhist approach has great implications for our ability to evolve and survive as humans, to see beyond the ‘matrix’, if you will, to awaken from the dream or at least be aware we are, in a sense, dreaming. This is no easy task because there is a nostalgic sense of comfort in working with the model we know as opposed to the constantly updated model.
So I ramble…but thank you for sharing this. I agree that it is a revolutionary insight and you have given me a great deal to ponder even as I do digress …
Hello Kerry. It is probable that the brain operates this way for reasons of efficiency as you say but the science of just how the brain manages information is still in its infancy so there is currently no definitive explanation for this phenomenon.
I am more interested in the fact that it does operate this way and why anyone would want to interfere with the process. The Buddha’s thesis is that if we see how reality functions, devoid of our thoughts about it, we would see that there is nothing to grasp onto and no one to do the grasping. This “right view” would then enable us to give up grasping easily because we would see its folly and we would have peace and contentment at last.
Since the paradigm effect fosters the illusion of permanence, Buddhists have developed the technique of bare attention to interfere with it. Commonly known as “mindfulness” it is in fact a lengthy and detailed course of training called “The Four Foundations Of Mindfulness”.
Most Westerners view mindfulness as an end in itself, just as they view meditation, but it is really only a means to an end. In fact, after Right View, the remaining seven steps on the Eight Fold Path are all ONLY means to the same end – Right View. They are, as it were, the instructions for building a precision optical instrument and keeping its lenses pristine so that we can use it to see what we could never see before. When we see, we know.
Of course, I agree with your comments “the Buddhist approach has great implications for our ability to evolve and survive as humans.” Remaining ignorant, in the Buddhist sense of the word, keeps us fighting each other over resources and blindly pillaging the earth. Only when we practice bare attention and thus “take the red pill” does Morpheus (god of dreams and brother to Thanatos and Hypnos) welcome us to the real world where one of the things we see is that we are not in fact separate, discrete beings but part of an interdependent whole. In keeping with the concern you raise, I feel that if we do not chose to awaken, then it will be not Morpheus whose voice humanity increasingly hears but that of his brother, Thanatos.
As it is related to this thread I will mention another practice I maintained prior to my exposure to Buddhism and that is lucid dreaming. For about two years I studied the work of Stephen Laberge PHD who is the worlds leading scientific researcher on the phenomenon of lucid dreaming. If you are unfamiliar with the term this is when you are fully conscious while dreaming. I religiously practiced what Dr. Laberge taught and was soon able to have lucid dreams regularly and conducted a number of experiments while doing so (similar to the awakened Neo learning to function in the Matrix).
Among the most important things I learned from this course of study was something very relevant to Buddhism, and this thread, and it is the answer to this question, “Why is it that when we are dreaming all kinds of whacky things that we don’t wake up and that we only wake up when something dreadful happens?” The answer is that we don’t wake up because we accept it all as perfectly normal. The answer is that when we are asleep and dreaming we are not in some altered state but that we are in exactly the same state of consciousness as when we are awake. And vice a versa.
Thus when The Buddha was first encountered after his enlightenment and was asked what he was (as in which kind of God) he answered, “I am awake”. Just as we can awaken in the dreams of the night so we can also awaken in this one.
I don’t think you digress at all but are in fact seeing the implications exactly as intended.