Consciousness and Life

"The Two Pillars of Buddhism: Consciousness and Ethics" by Pier Luigi Luisi, From the Proceedings of the meeting Mind and Life XII, ‘What is matter, what is life?’, held in Dharamsala, India, in 2002, in the presence of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama.

Some excerpts from the section on consciousness and life:

Dalai Lama said: ‘If Buddhism adopts the notion of the Big Bang as the beginning at this universe, then the origin of matter in this universe is not a preceding continuum of consciousness, or divine consciousness. Nothing like that. The origin or substantial cause of the first matter in this universe was preceding matter. Only mass-energy gives rise to mass-energy, and consciousness always gives rise only to consciousness.’
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From Eric Lander: ‘As scientists we think that consciousness is a property somehow of the organization, but we have no idea what. What’s interesting to me is that Buddhists, as Matthieu explained, seem very disturbed by the idea of a first cause for the universe. I share that disturbance, which is not to say I am any happier with the idea of beginninglessness. That also disturbs me. But you go from the idea that there is no first cause for the whole universe, to the idea that there can be no first cause for consciousness. It seems to me that in Buddhism you can’t imagine consciousness arising from nothing. And we scientists, perhaps because of our world view, cannot imagine a different explanation. I don’t know that either of us have a logical reason to say that it must have persisted forever, or that it must have arisen from complexity. In science we have so little to say about it because so few experiments try to probe consciousness. Mostly we avoid the question.’
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More from the Dalai Lama: ‘Buddhist philosophy employs the logical reasoning that if consciousness can arise from matter, then we have to posit a beginning to consciousness and a beginning to the continuum of sentient beings. By extension of that reasoning, we would also have to accept a beginning to the whole universe, which opens up a whole can of worms. Since Buddhism rejects that, and accepts the beginningless continuum of consciousness, it also accepts the beginningless continuum of sentient beings. And since sentient beings have no beginning, Buddhism interprets the evolution of the physical universe as intimately interdependent with the sentient beings who inhabit and experience the external world. ‘As to the question of why it matters: first, it presents a philosophical problem. If we are forced to accept a beginning to the universe, we have two options. Either something comes from nothing, or else we have to posit a divine creator, a transcendent being, neither of which Buddhism finds comfortable. Second, from a soteriological point of view, a single lifetime is an extremely brief duration in which to achieve liberation and enlightenment. It’s said to be possible in principle to achieve enlightenment in three years, three months, and three days, but this is much like Communist propaganda: the chances of this happening are so remote you might as well forget about it! Even in a lifetime of sixty years, the chances of achieving enlightenment for most of us are remote. So we need a bit more time…’

Read or download the whole article (.pdf format).

Into the Wild

"For the bodhicitta of intention, the training has three stages: considering others as equal to oneself, exchanging oneself and others, and taking others as more important than oneself. For the bodhicitta of application, the training consists of practicing the six perfections."

From "Words of My Perfect Teacher", Patrul Rinpoche

This is a fine example of traditional Buddhist teaching at its best. Patrul Rinpoche's masterpiece "Kunzang Lama'i Zhalung", aka "Words of My Perfect Teacher", brings a thorough exposition of introductory teachings in Dzogchen of the Nyingma school. It's a great example in that it systematically expounds the steps by which an aspirant in Mahayana steps into wakefulness. Simultaneously, it is in many ways a snapshot of traditional beliefs - not just Buddhist ones - and of the universe as understood by premodern folks, confused or awakened.

Back to the quote, and into the 21st century: imagine if "considering others as equal to oneself" would imply seeing everyone - that is, oneself and others - as a result of 13.7 billion of years of cosmic evolution. Then, "exchanging oneself and others" would imply the ability to shift horizontally and vertically, actually taking and honoring all perspectives that have arisen so far and are thus available to us now in the 21st century. Not just available, but constituting the perspectival space of this moment's arising, just as the perspectives held by Dza Patrul Rinpoche and his teacher Jigme Gyalwai Nyugu and his teacher Jigme Lingma etc. constituted their space at that time. And finally, "taking others as more important than oneself" would definitely imply abandoning the self-centered position, and instead embracing the cosmocentric impulse, bolstered by the pristine recognition of universal primal kinship, and repeatedly choosing to live for the sake of everything, as if everything depended on it, because it does. Becoming awake constantly in this sense, one is born into the realm of emergent bodhicitta, already enlightened and always interested in creating the future.

As to the application in the last line, remember that the six modes of excellence (plus skillful means, intention, power, and knowledge) are rooted in deep awareness (i.e. emptiness), but imagine these simultaneously permeated and enlivened by a surge of evolutionary urgency, a quickening of will and clarity that finds great bliss in plunging the novelty of human enhancement and in uplifting the ethical, intellectual, cultural, economic, and social conditions. Imagine what would that, what should that, and what must that be like today if it's really going to make an impact. So, what in the world can stop you embodying That now and then, gradually ripening to become a living, knowing, feeling, and acting expression of That?

Emergent Bodhicitta

(The previous post on Buddhist Evolution concluded that "Giving birth to bodhicitta becomes nondual with giving birth to a new level of authenticity, the latter a natural continuation of the former." Let's move on.)

I guess you know about bodhicitta, the awakening mind. It's often presented as absolute and relative, so there you have the very subject (i.e. citta) as the locus of the greatest tension: the tension between that which is only and self-evidently real yet hidden from most, namely the absolute, and that which appears to be for some and appears to not be for others while all remain excited about it, namely the relative. Absolute bodhicitta is born from wisdom beyond all elaboration, the truth of emptiness, and is in short the non-relative position to everything - all phenomena, all experiences, all situations, all conditions, all states. The relative bodhicitta is usually explained as intention and application, or aspiring and engaging, to realize the absolute bodhicitta. According to the traditional understanding of the path, as in the five stages on the path of a bodhisattva, training in relative bodhicitta to realize absolute bodhicitta takes a very, very, very long time. In short, it most probably ain't in this life, so....

(*If we go into details of that model, we'll quickly have to conclude that it does not fit our reality. I'm not aiming at that, not here. If you're interested in a no non-sense perspective on un/realistic models, see Dan Ingram's discussion by reading chapter 31, parts I-XI, from his book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha".)

Absolute bodhicitta is, therefore, as yet unrealized for the regular aspirant to awakening. But the View must be in place if we are to practice properly, right? And absolute is crucial in the View, yes? We need correct intellectual intimations and strong direct intuitions of this fundamental fact to aspire and be moved to translate that aspiration into a discipline of purification and transformation. So, the absolute must be established by experience, through a spontaneous recognition, or through association with a teacher, or through pointing out, or through diligent study and analysis, or all of the above or whatever - it must be established for the View to be in place, for without the absolute the View cannot be. Admittedly, the absolute has not as yet arisen as a realization for the seeker, as an unassailable fact from which there is no lapse, but a non-relative recognition must be there for practice to make any real sense. This paradox involves and/or introduces the notion of buddha-nature, which is synonymous with absolute bodhicitta. Some schools see the relative bodhicitta as an aspect of buddha-nature, while some would go one step further and make the two bodhicittas essentially one. The situation gets very interesting very quickly, because what you're seeking for is who you in fact already are, and who you in fact are is not passive but unceasingly active in relation to your myopic predicament, and your seeking is in turn - at least ideally - a response to that. So there are these two levels of knowing and will in mutual resonance. Enter evolution.

Evolution is the becoming itself - samsara plus directionality - and at this point when evolution is becoming aware of itself in us, and as us, the one awakening to consciousness is beginning to recognize the purpose behind the very potential of freedom. Embracing evolution is embracing the world of causes and conditions in a very special way, from the position of what I would call emergent bodhicitta. This is an opportunity not simply for awakening - because Wakefulness in any of its modalities (ground, path, or fruition) is already at the heart of this emergence, hence bodhi citta - but for giving an ever-fresh meaning, purpose and expression to what has already begun awakening to itself in both ultimate and relative terms. While such emergent bodhicitta has several important ramifications in Buddhism for the 21st century, the crucial one is making sure that the mysterious motive inherent in the continuity of Ground, Path, and Fruition gets reaffirmed as a fathomless drive to novelty. In short, this entails creating a new culture of radical awareness, beyond sectarian loyalties with their crippling effect on individuals' critical faculties, and beyond the patent unwillingness to face awakening in real time while indefinitely postponing transformation and creating buddhistish nestworks (I'm not sure this translates well... whatever).

Of course we'll always have a downtranslated, horizontal Buddhist culture at various levels of sophistication, but such culture of what is essentially spiritual embellishment is dependent on and owes its very existence to the culture of depth, that is, to authenticity and vitality at the core of liberation. Authenticity is preserved by maintaining constant access to absolute realization, and vitality by maintaining full relevance in terms of understanding and presenting the purpose and meaning of that realization. The former equals utmost depth, the latter equals highest perspective.

Buddhist Evolution

Buddhism has often and rightfully been presented as a path of "inner revolution". In fact, the term "dharmacakra pravartana", literally "turning of the dharma-wheel", may be rendered as "spiritual revolution". The early sangha is a result of the great revolution initiated by the Gautama Buddha's own awakening and teaching; Mahayana is a result of the revolution initiated among the early Sangha; Tantra and Zen are results of revolutions initiated within Mahayana itself. Now, looking at 25 hundred years of continuation, we can see that these revolutions proceeded along a spiritual evolutionary trajectory hardly envisaged or planned. Every shift was a reaction to a limitation that became evident, and certainly there was a potential for both the limitation and the breakthrough into novelty provided by the preceeding stage in the unfolding of Dharma. Each of these revolutions preserved what was necessary to retain an organic continuation at the level of the View, while advancing fresh formulations and perspectives on the Ultimate and introducing new applications in terms of method. And the last such revolutions happened long before the advent of modernity, before the dawn of awareness which found everything in manifest universe to have evolved, that is, developed through vast stretches of time.

So, for approximately 2,500 years the View, or in other words the Big Picture, has been summarized as follows:

All compounded things are impermanent.
All phenomena lack self-nature.
All dualistic experience is intrinsically painful.
Nirvana alone is peace [and is beyond concept].

With the advent of modernity, evolution enters the Big Picture, becoming a compelling aspect of, well... everything. All compounded things are still impermanent, but their mode of impermanence is held in place by laws of evolution. All phenomena still lack self-nature, and this allows them to be relatively unobstructive to emergence of novelty. And yes, all dualistic experience is intrinsically painful, while Nirvana beyond concept alone is peace. But the View doesn't stop there, not if we embrace what we discovered in "Western" enlightenment and digested in postmodernity. This indeed is just the beginning of something new altogether: this is where we embrace cosmic evolution as the very purpose of awakening. Giving birth to bodhicitta becomes nondual with giving birth to a new level of authenticity, the latter a natural continuation of the former.

Emergent Dharma

Evolution is not simply birth/death, as in the classical, cyclic model of samsara. Evolution is something coming out of no-thing and then developing through time, and once we're aware of this everything changes in a significant way. Not only the material universe, but also our life-forms, our spirituality, and everything in the range of dependent co-arising, including all forms of natural perception and all levels of cultural complexity, have developed through time.

This means that, instead of having one cyclic model of samsara (worldly or laukika pratityasamutpada) and another unfolding model of liberation (transcendent or lokuttara pratityasamutpada), we need to recognize the unfolding in the world-process itself, an unfolding which allows a much deeper integration of the two models in a post-metaphysical manner.

So, basically dharmas don't simply arise - though they appear to simply arise when observed phenomenologically from a 1st person position - they arise in a developmental space. And, in 13.7 billion years of this cosmic evolution, not all dharmas have arisen simultaneously. At the beginning of this story, there were no sentient beings to be reborn and no five skandhas to start with. And so starts the recalibration of abhidharma to embrace and acknowledge a perspective-based, instead of a phenomena-based, evolutionary reality.