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?

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.

Reinventing the wheel

The advertisement for "Reinventing the Sacred" by Stuart Kauffman just came in from WIE. The intro seemed interesting enough:

"One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know."

Then, however, I googled the title and found a video with Kauffman himself explaining the essentials of his view on the Sacred and what it is that needs to be reinvented. In short, Kauffman is another highly intelligent person who unfortunately can see only two major cultures in today's "First World" - namely, the ahteistic, agnostic, secularist humanist on one hand, and the rigid, fundamentalist, mythic-God worshipping believers on the other. For those of you fluent in integralese, that's the classic level/line fallacy, commited not long ago by the Four Horsemen (with a feable nuanced exception by Sam Harris, not to make much of). Kauffman too speaks of "faith and reason". So, it's back to square one with this attempt in reconciling the opposites which are not really that. There is potential, nonetheless, in Kauffman's point of view, to become influential in both camps and this then may well serve as an introduction to a truly transformative discussion with more integral ideas being included as necessary for building mutual trust. (Just speculating, of course.) Kauffman mentions Wittgenstein and Weinberg, but certainly won't mention Wilber and Wallace who have done more to bridge the Gap, known both as matter vs. mind and science vs. spirituality. First, however, I should read the book that won't let biology be reduced to physics (chapter 4) - of course Kauffman is a biologist - while wondering if ethics and even "the Sacred" can be somehow reduced to "biocomplexity."

There's a Ning network devoted to Reinventing the Sacred, where you'll find the aforementioned video and some discussion that you may want to join if you resonate.

And finally a quote from the book:

"Today the schism between faith and reason finds voice in the sometimes vehement disagreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who believe in the transcendent Creator God, and agnostic and atheist "secular humanists" who do not believe in the transcendent God. These divergent beliefs are profoundly held. Our senses of the sacred have been with us for thousands of years, at least from the presumptive earth goddess of Europe ten thousand years ago, through the Egyptian, Greek, Abrahamic, Aztec, Mayan, Incan, and Hindu Gods, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions. (...) Ways of life hand in the balance. This book hopes to address this schism in a new way."

Ok - Aztec, Mayan, Incan? But do read the pages made available at Amazon's Search Inside.

Change and the Changeless

An utterly delightful talk from Father Thomas Keating, entitled "Oneness and the Heart of the world", found at GlobalOneness. Time 35 minutes. Enjoy!



Thanks to Vincent Horn for heads up. Here's the link to the original video, available in high and low res, and also for download in .mp4 format.

Deism vs Fidelism

~C4Chaos points out Michael Dowd as an integrally informed speaker, working to promote a synthesis of religion and science. Indeed, for a Christian public, Dowd is a promising voice of neo-deism (see a really nice entry at Wikipedia), though he doesn't identify as such, nor does he identify as integral (but then, some who do are not etc.). Deism is typically contrasted with fideism, where semantically religion and spirituality is identified or - more correctly - delimited in many Western cultures as "faith", as if religion and spirituality cannot be known by any other name. I believe Wilber is correct to point that the current conversation on science and religion "assumes that everybody knows what we are talking about when we talk about religion. While science is something that we can fairly well agree on the meaning of, religion or spirituality has a very broad range of meaning."

That broad range of meaning is definitely NOT given enough attention to warrant an informed debate (i.e. a debate on a level of perspective that would permit an integral proposition to even be considered). "Religion" is NEVER used by Dawkins, Dennett, and even Harris (who won't be called an "atheist", but is definitely atheistic) in a way that would allow or include something like Deism, and they don't qualify their usage of "religion" as a mythic, literalist, dogmatic, amber or lower religion, as opposed to higher levels. Well, that religion is easy prey for a rational or higher attack, but then one basically commits "LLF" (level-line fallacy, of which I've posted before) , and off it goes... Enjoy this promotional video for Dowd's book.




NOTE: Michael Dowd, in his own words, wrote Thank God for Evolution! with five different audiences in mind:

1) Those who embrace evolution but don’t have joy, peace, or a deep sense of meaning and purpose in their lives (i.e., those who don’t have a personal relationship with God).
2) Mainline Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Anabaptist believers.
3) Progressive, and Emerging Church Christians.
4) WWJD-type evangelical “Christ followers” (i.e., those committed to following Jesus “in His steps”).
5) Anyone and everyone struggling with their sinful or addictive nature.

And, he points that "Thank God for Evolution! is NOT intended for those whose walk with God is solidly embedded within a strict, literalist interpretation of scripture. But those who experience twinges of doubt when the book of Genesis is used line-by-line to explain the creation of this world are likely to experience this perspective not as a breath, but as a gust, of fresh air." This somewhat puts his work in perspective, especially when considering the more general science/religion "debate".

While Dowd offers a gust of fresh air, that is, a renewal within the Christian discourse into a spiritual perspective on evolution and an evolutionary view of spirituality itself, the debate around "new atheists" seems to be a v-memetic turf war, and - as it has become increasingly obvious - values are only one of many developmental lines, not to be naively confused with worldviews or even views in general. Dawkins probably sells most books among them, and his approach seems the most flattened (almost vulgar). What people espouse, what they embody, and how they differ significantly in various developmental streams - all this makes the whole issue much more complex than simply (rational) science vs. (mythic) religion.

A God within our reach

Andrew Sullivan comments on Freeman Dyson's arguments on the connection of theology and biology in his post "A God Beyond Our Understanding". When Dyson suggest, "So our theology also reflects our possibly skewed view of the world", Sullivan concurs, "It has to, of course, because we have no other way of knowing God." But that's not quite true, because there are other ways of knowing God, ways presented by contemplatives and mystics, ways that culminate in unio mystica wherein God, even Godhead, is known directly. But even to common folk, God is known intimately through deep faith, not through theology, analytical thought or conceptual framing, however useful these prove in the theological approach.

So, yes, a God beyond our understanding, but within our reach, much more close than we dare confess, absent from nothing, immanent in everything, greater than anything - Silent, yet Obvious.

And by the way, Dyson has a good point on Dawkins and a "heretical" stand on climate change, as well as an interesting grasp of cultural evolution as the new driving force of change. See the whole article here.

Dawkins the Believer

CJ Smith has a nice post entitled "Richard Dawkins and Multi-perspectivalism", including a video, duration 09:35, from newsnight Book Club presentation of his "God Delusion". Quote:

"Normally I'm not a big fan of this (non)debate (so-called) between religion and science. The science is rarely, although sometimes defined, the religion never is---one kind of religion/faith is simply assumed and then argued from or about, depending on whether the person is pro or con.

The first question Dawkins answers by stating he is after "The truth". Watch how many times he drops the "t" word or the "R" word (reality).

Now you'll notice the truth is science. There is truth in what he says. And he is accurately describing his own position--he actually describes quite brilliantly the world he lives in, the space he inhabits."

Read on here.

Evolution & Religion

If you evolve, or if you believe, take a look at this video. Lecture by David Sloan Wilson on raging debates on evolution and intelligent design. Thanks to ~C4Chaos for heads up. Time 1:25:51 Enjoy!

13 little things

... that do not make sense (in a scientific sense). The "placebo effect" is just one of these serious and difficult problems. Check the article to see why hard science is nowhere near to offer an answer on the origin of this universe, or life, or mind.

"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see."