Smashing Idols With Pat Robertson

In this video clip televangelist Pat Robertson advocates for vandalism and destruction of property regarding a viewer's friend and her Buddha statue:



While I have no intention of labeling Mr. Robertson an idolator, this clip reminds me of something I wrote not too long ago--

You sometimes hear people warn against chasing after false idols, or being idolatrous, and the like. Yet idolatry is limiting the divine to a particular form and raising up that form as an icon of exclusion and ultimately intolerance. The idols become overly elaborate and demanding, serving to reinforce the existing views and prejudices of their creators. Those who can only see the divine in their own holy symbols, which they then guard jealously, are the actual idolaters.

I do think that the concept of idolatry has its uses, but it should be used cautiously and with a good dose of introspection and humility. Idolatry is a kind of hardening of the mental arteries as well as of the heart. It leads to a kind of choking, a lack of flow.

Burn me, a wretch, O God, with undying fire

Image by SearchNetMedia via FlickrHaha, catchy title isn't it?  Let me explain.

Something occurred to me randomly long after writing and scheduling a previous post, a kind of extension, but it was too long to add to that post.  It had to do with things like prayers which we find ineffective or offensive or both.

The premise is simple: Why is it that people can outgrow a particular view of religion and still find prayers or other practices that seem to reinforce that older view worthwhile and useable? What about the contradiction?

So I thought it, "Let's pick a facetious prayer, completely fabricated, such as: God, I am a worthless piece of excrement. Let your judgment burn me like hot coals."

Music and spirituality in the 21st century

Image by Fey Ilyas via FlickrYou don't need to be an  ethno-musicologist, an evolutionary anthropologist or musician to appreciate the deep link between music and spirituality. In Christianity one might speak of finding the Spirit through sound, while in Buddhism sound is one of the gates of perception which can lead us to a direct awareness of our deepest mind.

If we get too mechanistic about it (these sounds trigger these clusters of neurons) without looking at the holistic, in this case humanistic, perspective, we run the risk of failing to appreciate anything more subtle the relationship between mood, awareness and music has to tell us. Any sensory data is translated and transduced to mental phenomena in the brain, taking on a new quality. This can include sounds, sights, tastes/smells, and touch.  In turn these can affect, via the connections in the thalamus, a variety of brain-influenced or directed systems in the body, even the immune system.

In other words, psychosomatic is no longer the "dirty word" once used so derisively to explain away the experiences people claimed to have in their bodies because of what was happening in their brains. The mind-body connection that was once scoffed at a "New Age woo woo nonsense" in many parts of academia is increasingly the subject of intense formal study.

And while that is all well and good, what do centuries or millenia of practical experimentation by various sacred traditions have to tell us about the music-mind connection? What about our own personal connections? 

Did you see that?! Stress linked to illusions and superstition

The premise isn't original but the experiment testing it is elegant:

US researchers say feeling "out of control" makes us more likely to misinterpret information as we search for signs of order.

The study in the journal Science found investment decisions of volunteers were adversely affected by these feelings.

Simple psychological techniques might improve their performance, they said.

The researchers, from the University of Texas and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, believe that humans cope with feeling out of control by trying to impose order subconsciously - even in situations where there is none.

At a simple level, they demonstrated the principle by asking volunteers to look for images embedded in "snowy pictures".

Those whose feelings of control had earlier been undermined were more likely to claim to have seen an image, even where none existed.

However, the researchers believe that other kinds of illusion, from conspiracy theories to superstitions, stem from the same basic subconscious problem...

source

Just another reason to respect fear rather than be ruled by it. And yes, thinking you can reject it is just another indication it still rules you. Living with a healthy attitude towards and an appropriate understanding of fear is not the same as living in fear. This is the true meaning of fearlessness - fear still exists but loses it grip on you. May your life truly be fearless (and selfless, and painless...).

Picnics for peace and other idiotic pacifist ideas

In the documentary film 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama, His Holiness suggests that one way we might see more peace in troubled areas such as Jerusalem is to have more gatherings like picnics and festivals. No doubt this strikes many people as foolish. After all, it is a religiously political struggle? (Or is a politically religious struggle?) Inequity and injustice require some kind of top down solution, right? Economic, military, etc. You've got to have high level meetings, and political road maps, and a week at Camp David between the leaders of the parties in conflict, right? Having people meet and greet is just idiotic. Isn't it? Do we really buy all of the teachings of such renowned spiritual leaders?

But let us ask ourselves why the Clinton initiative failed to bring a peace settlement in Israel. There is no single reason, but a huge one includes speculation that Yasser Arafat knew his people wouldn't accept the terms he was negotiating, and his counterpart, Ehud Barak, claimed he couldn't offer any more concessions. Both leaders realized they couldn't get any closer without alienating key segments of their populations, particularly powerful political supporters. This kind of impasse is rooted in the attitudes of certain groups of Palestinians and Israelis toward each other and fed by past and present conflict. These attitudes, which perpetuate and support the political and economic structures producing inequality and conflict, include distrust, fear, and hatred.

Daryl Davis and the Klan

Now let's turn to another historic example of distrust, fear, and hatred - the Ku Klux Klan and African-Americans. You may not be familiar with Daryl Davis. I first heard about him when his story was included in the film Understanding Race (part of the Films for the Humanities series). I later learned that he had published a book about his experiences going to Klan meeting called Klan-destine Relationships. None of this may strike you as peculiar until you hear the subtitle of the book: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan. His story is also told in a brief article that appeared in the Washington Post.

In brief, Davis met people who were in the Klan and was eventually invited to a Klan meeting. He was curious and friendly and non-judgmental, and became a familiar face at Klan events. In fact, an Imperial Wizard made Davis the godfather of his child. But what is really interesting is that his presence has been a catalyst which has led many members, including that Imperial Wizard, to quit the Klan. Some have even given Davis their robes, which he keeps in his closet. Imagine that - self-identified white supremacists quitting the Klan not because Davis laid on a guilt trip, not because he debated them into submission, but because of his persistent friendly presence.

The mechanics of changing perspective

One theory of how we form expectations about the world is that we organize our experiences into meaningful clusters we then name. This is called a schema. When we select a schema or a composite of schemas to be the standard for evaluating similar schemas. This standard is called a prototype. Similar schemas orbit loosely around the prototype, creating a category with fuzzy boundaries. For example, if we use our experiences to form a schema of holiday, we might include "having family over" and "preparing a large meal". When we experience a holiday without a big meal, we might remark that is just didn't seem like a holiday, because we were using that schema as a prototype to evaluate new experiences.

We can also use the example of the category automobile, in which we use our experiences with cars to form the basis of a schema which is then promoted to the prototype of the automobile category. Hence we may call a truck or jeep a "car", even though there are differences between trucks, jeeps, and cars. Trucks and jeeps are orbiting the idea of car-ness, which may include elements like "large rubber tires", "carries multiple passengers", "runs on an engine", "has pedals and a steering wheel".

This theory can help make sense of the relationship between Daryl Davis, the Klan, and the members who quit. I am not suggesting this theory must be true in every case, but a theory isn't much good if it has no explanatory power, so we can at least see if it produces a workable explanation. People in the Klan tend to have a particular kind of schema they use as the prototype for black people, which we might expect to be very negative. They had a new experience - a black man who wasn't angry or judgmental towards them and who seemed like a really friendly and sincere guy. This didn't match the expectations of the prototype of a black man. In some cases, the continued exposure formed that basis of a new schema of black people that either challenged or replaced the previous prototype (which in this case would correlate to the term stereotype). This sparked a re-evaluation of membership in an organization premised on a particular view of minorities.

This can be condensed into "they changed their minds when they actually got to know a black man", but the process involved - how and why they were prejudiced and the components of changing one's mind - are important. If Davis had been angry or judgmental, this might have reinforced a schema which includes an image of black people as angry and judgmental towards whites. It also highlights how important external influences can be in shaping our attitudes about anything and everything we encounter in our lives.

The relevance to conflict prevention and resolution

Turning back to the Dalai Lama and Jerusalem, I don't presume the Dalai Lama made his suggestion based on the mechanics of a theory from the social and behavioral sciences of the West. Instead, his Buddhist training and the wisdom of a lifetime of exposure to conflict and prejudice showed him the basic pattern, however we might wish to frame it. It would be unfair to say that he thinks that a few picnics will end all of the violence, but I do think he is pointing towards generating shared positive experiences between opposing or distrustful groups in order to offer a basis for new and more positive appreciation of each other. With such a grassroots change in attitude, the existing political and economic structures generating inequality and conflict between the sides would lose much of their support. If enough of the people want peace, they will have it.

People don't live in the abstract - in the "national" or the "global" scene. They live in the every day of their individual lives. Whether attempted solutions to the largest problems in society will either succeed or fail turns on what individuals experience and do in the everyday.

Is a Buddhism-informed science the same as a science-informed Buddhism?

You may have heard about the current Daila Lama giving the keynote address at a professional meeting of neuroscientists. He even wrote a book, The Universe in an Atom, about the potentially fruitful collaboration between Buddhism and science. Scientists are studying meditation, Buddhist and otherwise. And some are writing that certain scientific developments, such as the odd developments coming out of theoretical physics, are in accordance with the teachings and principles the Buddha gave us thousands of years ago. It can be a very exciting time for those who enjoy learning about or working with both topics. But what is the nature of the relationship between these topics?

Science is rooted in the conviction that the universe is intelligible and that is is ordered according to certain patterns and underlying regular processes. This conviction originally came from belief in a Creator who thus organized existence. This conviction is also at the core of what science is and is not, what it can and cannot do and where it can and cannot be applied. In particular, science deals with describing and explaining regularly occurring, empirically observable phenomena and the predictions and retrodictions based on such evidence. Things which are occur irregularly (there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason and there aren't enough observances to even guess at a pattern or process), or which are not reliably (or ever) empirically observable are beyond the scope of science. This does not mean other things do not exist or are of no consequence (contra the fundamental premise of scientism), but that they don't fit in sciences wheelhouse. Ontological naturalism and scientism are metaphysical assumption that are made at level that cannot be verified or falsified by science.

Nor can we assume that science can always give us complete and satisfactory answers even to those areas it is qualified to address. Science is a highly effective tool for investigation that includes a number of intentional assumptions and perspectives which divide reality into an artifical model so that we can better understand the aspect of the universe on which were focusing our attention. This is what makes science so powerful - yes, it does introduce some degree of distortion (bias) as it magnifies what we want to understand, but so long as we acknowledge and accept a degree of artificiality with a correct understanding, this need not be a major concern. But it does mean that the scientific lens does not a perfectly complete and faithful perspective. The scientific lens is one of many possible lenses, and while neglecting a scientific perspective when one is available is inadvisible, simply trusting it is always being superior to every other lens is the same kind of myopic danger that leads some to rely soley on the lens of faith.

Buddhism comes rooted in a different set of cultural assumptions and a different concern - identifying the nature of suffering, the cause of suffering and how to be liberated from suffering (through transformation or transcendence). Because it investigates these things through observation and testing, some of even referred to Buddhism as the science of happiness. The similarity between science and Buddhism for those who tend to generically associate observation and testing with science is obvious. And since some fields of science investigate topics like emotion, mood, consciousness, etc, it is also unsurprising to find that these two lenses have come up to similar conclusions. Nor is the suggestion of a fruitful collaboration far fetched. But that doesn't mean that Buddhism is science or that science is Buddhism, nor that either should be considered a subcategory or simply a spcialized extension of the other.

When it comes to string theory and quantum physics a word of caution is in order as well. Reffering to His Holiness again, the Dalai Lama noted in The Good Heart that really smart people can find or generate similarities and dissimilarities between nearly anything, and can hence make them seem much more different or alike than they may actually be. His caution was about trying to read too much too quickly into superficial similarities between religions like Christianity and Buddhism, but we can adopt the same tone for physics and Buddhism as well. There are some really profound and important aspects that many of not all major sacred traditions share, and there are some important insights that Buddhism may have which sound remarkably similar to what people think may be happening at really large and really small scales of matter and time and energy.

Even if we presume the Buddha could "see" into the various levels of reality, his cultural background would have shaped and informed the impressions he received in his perceptions, including how many levels, how they there organized, how they interacted. Science builds on previous models and schema, but it is possible to have named and organized things a little differently than we have. There are alternative roots science could have taken in describing and explaining things, and it may yet do so in the future. Another way to say it is that the shape of our scientific understanding has a component of cultural and historical context that would not have been available to someone living thousands of years ago. The Buddha would no have known what a cosmic string or a quark was. Instead, even without the lens and context of modern science he was still able to recognize and describe what he felt were universal qualities or properties.

There is a temptation then to focus on what we think the Buddha got right according to the similarties of contemporary ideas from science and de-emphsize what we suspect he may have gotten wrong, and only attribute the importance of historical and cultural context to the latter. But the Buddha was not operating as a scientist. The lens offered by science is not equivalent to the lens of the Buddhist path. A Buddhism-informed science is not the same as a science-informed Buddhism. Which brings us to a question - should we strive either for a Buddhism-informed science or for a science-informed Buddhism? Or should we seek neither? Should we strive to allow them to operate independently and supply inspiration to areas of common concern and interest as well as each other?

The Dalai Lama has said that if Buddhism and science conflict, Buddhism should defer to science. This makes sense for the areas where Buddhism might be used to make predictons about the physical nature of reality, but what about the mental or spiritual nature of reality, which scientists must reduce to the material in order to make it amenable for scientific investigation? Does the fact that there can be a scientific model proposed which performs such a reduction mean that Buddhism should defer to science and go along with a reductionist perspective just because it is available? Or does Buddhism (or do other traditions) offer something more that cannot be fully captured by a strictly reductionist lens? By focusing on one dimension of our existence does such a perpective overlook another? Is there something about the value of Buddhist teachings and practices which remains independent of the worldview or cosmology that happens to be in vogue?

If science were to say tomorrow that physics no longer superficially resembled the ideas of dependent origination and emptiness, they are still useful teachings. Even though ancient cosmologies from the time of the Buddha, which his students would have accepted as a given, may not be accepted today, his teachings are relevant because humans are still humans, still sentient beings. Because phenomena are themselves limited and biased mental constructions intended to break the continuity and flow of existence into manageable chunks. This is an issue of perception and cognition and semantics - and it will always be a challenge for humans inhabiting our limited bodies. Hence the observation of Huineng, the sixth patriarch or ancestor of the early Ch'an ("Zen") lineage, in the following kung-an ("koan") from Robert Aiken's translation of the Wu-Men Kuan (or Mumonkan)...

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree.

The Sixth Ancestor said, "Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves." The two monks were struck with awe.

Who speaks for mind?

So what is the mind? For the sake of argument I propose the rather bland and suggestion that we call a collection of certain coherent observed behaviors 'mind'. Opinions as to what 'this' is include:

1. an epiphenomena of related brain functions which give the appearance a coherent conscious whole;
   
2. an integrated functional complex of the brain which is so complex that it represents a level of organization requiring novel terms to adequately describe it's operation;
   
3. some extra-physical presence or poorly understood form of energy that is mediated by/tapped into by the brain.
   

I have found that in both the professional literature and in informal dialogue with educated and lay people, a common thread for arguing for options #1 and #2 include:


A. the idea that other primates have somewhat similar brains,

B. there is no evidence for the collection of interactive behaviors referred to as a mind without some neural network (biological or simulated)

C. the observation that brain damage seems to affect the functioning of the mind.

I don't believe "A" gets us very far, as we do not fully understand just what the great apes think and feel, and we are constantly learning more about how their mental processes work. Moreover, there are unique features of the biology of the human brain which distinguish our species, and this ties in fairly well with "B". If humans do indeed have a special cognitive capacity called mind, if this is tied to a physical difference in brain structure, and if brain damage impairs the functioning of the mind, that sounds pretty good for arguing for either explanation #1 or #2 for what the mind is. At least superficially.

That line of reasoning can be countered, however, with the example of the eye. The eye can detect certain forms of enery and the optic nerve and corresponding parts of the frontal lobe can interpret that incoming information. Some animals can 'see' better than others as far as color, range, or depth, and we can line up evolutionary comparisons, but that doesn't negate the concept of vision. In the same sense, an advocate of the idea that the mind represents a form consciousness that (in a process sense) rests on the brain or is interpreted by the brain rather than being generated by the brain can make the argument that different animals with different levels of neural development have different levels of conscious awareness. On a related note, obviously if eyes do not develop or eyes or the optic nerve are damaged, what we call "vision" is impaired. However, vision is not solely generated by the brain. It requires input from the eyes, which in turn require input from what we refer to as the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. I think the evolutionary/biological distinctiveness argument works better against the idea that humans have a divine spark or soul that is lacking in other animals such as organs or gorillas. It is less useful refuting for refuting explanation #3 for the mind, which need not invoke supernaturalism.

I think the appeal of using the aforementioned explanation supporting notions #1 and #2 (biological necessity of the brain to what we call the mind) to try to refute explanation #3 comes from a subtle but persistent tendency to equate necessary with sufficient. It is a common problem with models that invoke strict causal reductionism, in which causality always flows from lower levels of organization upward, as opposed to hierarchical explanations which also invoke downward causality.

Option #1 is favored by physicalists who embrace causal reductionism and who think that the mind is not a coherent whole, but rather a collection of processes giving the illusion of a unified identity. Option #2 appeals to many people who accept a view of organizational complexity commonly referred to as emergentism, in which certain recognizeable levels of organization arise from their components to form organizational units most accurately described by their own identity and sets of properties, as opposed to being described solely in terms of constituent parts. It is important to realize this is not invoking some "extra" components out of the ether, it's just another way of looking at the interactive properties of the objects under study.

Option #3 actually holds many possible interpretations. On the one hand, ideas of "souls" in the religious sense of secondary invisible bodies that persists after death can be included in this view. But then again, the idea of consciousness as a fundamental component of the fabric of reality can be addressed by this view as well.

I think that it is unfortunate that the term consciousness or awareness is adopted by advocates of the latter interpretation as it is readily misunderstood. Then again, there aren't any seprate well-known term expressing such an idea, and hence the same word gets used over and over even and subtle differences in meaning become lost. The immediate objection is to associate consciousness with the mind, and then to assume that what we call consciousness is solely generated within the brain with no other imput or interaction. How could there, then, be any kind of "non-bodily consciousness"? What was around before humans acquired sentience?

The basic premise, so far as I understand it, is that there is a type of awareness which comes with a brain capable of what we call consciousness, and that in fact it is an interactive component of consciousness, just as visible light is a component of what we refer to as vision. This component, which as I said is unfortunately usually given the confusing label consciousness, would, like light, exist before there was ever a creature with eyes to perceive it. Some enthusiasts for this notion have suggested it explains the observer-bias inherent in phenomena such as wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, although so far such explanations have received little attention from the mainstream scientific community. However, whether or not such connections to physics are valid, option #3 remains a fascinating perspective that may be worth exploring (although I am certain that misgivings about the similiarity between such ideas and supernaturalism/paranormalism will be a hindrance to such investigation).