Thoughts on Immortality: From a Skeptical Philosopher Who Doesn’t Want to Be Decieved, But Sees Potential in Ibn Arabi, and Spacetime Smearing

A Luneberg Lens: A ball shaped lens that increases its degree of refraction the closer you get to the center. Basically, it produces a hologram of a what’s around it from all sides inside of it. Perhaps the universe is like one of these turned inside-out, a sort of gravitational lensing in reverse, something quite in sync with many trends in contemporary theoretical physics

As anyone who’s read this blog recently knows, this has been a time of loss in my life. And this has lead me to return to questions that once seemed much less interesting to the philosophical side of me. Like if philosophy should provide comfort in the face of loss, death, pain, etc.

This post will advance a theory of immortality based in Sufi philosophy, and contemporary quantum physics, and some detours in neuropsych, and theories of belief. A wild ride indeed, but one full of hope.

Neuro-Agnosticism: A Neurological Approach to the Issue of God and Immortality

I’ve long ago given up ‘believing’ the religion I was taught as a child. Over the past few years, I’ve often described myself as “neuro-agnostic,” a neologism of my own devising, by which I mean the fact that I think the human brain is wired, in at least in the set of configurations from the past several millennia of recorded history, to want something like a God. Anyone who’s studied basic neuroscience knows that human brains are “pattern completion” machines. When something is missing, we guess. When there are parts, we try to devise a whole. When there’s a tendency, we extrapolate.

God is the largest pattern of which our brains can conceive. God generally has all the perfections we can imagine, all combined, no matter the contradictions, on one notion. And   with pattern completing brains, it’s natural to see this in the world, as it’s necessary complement, because that’s the way our brains are made. Evolution, of course, made the brain this way, and this would lead us to believe that completing patterns, and perhaps even a belief in something like God, was somehow good for the survival and flourishing of our species. And perhaps still is. Certainly people seem happier when they believe in something like a God, for whatever that’s worth.

And yet, the very same brains now generally see something like God as irrational. We see no evidence for it, and the hankering for evidence produced the science which produced so much change in our physical worlds. Yet there is a sort of psychological efficacy to God. It impacts how people act, think, and feel. Certainly that is real, as real as a psychosomatic illness! But does that mean we should all just delude ourselves in believing in something we can’t see?

The same goes with notions of immortality, at least of the personal sort. No-one who believes in science can find any reason to support any notion of personal immortality. We don’t see anything to disprove its possibility, per se, just as with God. But we don’t see any evidence of it either. Except, perhaps, psychologically. As someone who has lost someone who I love dearly in the recent past, I can testify, it feels unjust, and downright impossible, that this person who was such a dynamic, vivid person in the recent past, can simply be ‘gone.’ My rational brain, the brain that relies on evidence and reasoning, whatever we mean by ‘reasoning,’ simply sees no evidence of immortality. But my gut, soul, whatever you call it, finds this loss of this person’s presence simply incomprehensible. We all know, however, that this feeling that immortality must exist fades as the lost love one is gone longer and longer. And this leads me to believe that this sense of impossibility is based in feeling more than anything else.

It’s easy to simply dismiss this ‘gut’ feeling as emotion, and hence, irrational. Neuroscience shows us that our feelings arise from the limbic system, which is tied into maps of our bodies. Our bodies react to things, our brains map these changes, and release chemicals that “modulate” the way the brain globally processes information, hence the description of these chemicals as “neuromodulators.” These are the “mood” chemicals, such as serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine (which is moderated by adrenaline), etc. Mood oversimplifies, because these chemicals, depending on the extent to which they are released and absorbed in particular areas of the brain, then induce more specific neural shifts. Together, the symphony we call feelings emerge, and give rise to distinct emotions, like anger, fear, happiness, joy, ecstasy, and all the shades in between.

Those without properly functioning emotional systems, contrary to what many might think, turn out to be profoundly irrational people. Antonio Damasio and others recount how those with damage to specific “emotion” centers in the brain tend to make terrible decisions. They can do rational cost-benefit analyses, but seem to lack the ability to form or relate to the values that determine how and why to deploy cost-benefit analyses. If you can weigh pros and cons, but can’t figure out why you want good over bad, for you or others, you’re likely to make terrible decisions, at least, according to the criterion of most humans, and likely, evolution itself. We were evolved with emotions precisely because we are not only reasoning machines, but valuing machines .

And so to dismiss the gut level feeling that there must be something like personal immortality, or a God, is to oversimplify what is meant by ‘reason,’ of the most used and abused terms in the history of human theorizing. Any attempt to define precisely what “reason” is is quite likely to use unreasonable arguments if it is to be believable, and to be unbelievable, which is to say, ridiculous or trivial, if it doesn’t. All of which is a fancy way of saying that recourse to reason isn’t perhaps the best way to address this problem.

For if reason and feeling are two sides of the way we process the world, whether we call this thinking or otherwise, and it seems the first deals mostly with pattern completion, due to the structure of the neural nets in our brains, and the second deals with value systems, this just gets us back to the same place, namely, that humans seem programmed to want something like God, or personal immortality, and this seems part of our evolutionary heritage. What to make of this, however, is another story.

Either way, this is why, when people ask me things like whether or not I believe in God, I usually respond in ways that confuse most folks. My standard joke response is, “I’m a philosopher, how much time do you have? Do you really want me to start talking about this issue?” But if people really want to know, I’ve often said things like, “I’m a neuroagnostic, I think our brains are wired in such a way that we can’t not, on some level, believe in a God, whether or not there’s anything there, and that this is a side effect of the pattern completing nature which evolution used to construct our brains.”

From a Mosque at Isfahan, Iran

To Believe in God? The Paradoxes of Belief

But does that mean we should “believe in God?” Ultimately, this might be a false question. The binary nature of “to believe” or “not believe” is something created by dogmatist approaches to religion, in which one is either saved or not, part of the religion or not, etc. Real life seems to happen in shades of grey. Many who “say” they are believers in a particular religion don’t “act” like believers, and many “non-believers” act quite like those who believe, in theory, should.

And the issue of belief is much more complex than most of us tend to take it to be. Do I believe in Santa Claus? Well, I certainly believe that this notion impacts the world quite profoundly, in everything from commerce to the way we raise our children, decorate our houses, etc. So Santa Claus is definitely “real,” though also “imaginary.” Mickey Mouse, or any “imaginary” character, like Hamlet, is quite “real” in its way. I can have long conversations with people about whether or not Hamlet really meant to do this or that, even though this person isn’t “real.” Do I “believe” in Hamlet? Certainly I believe he exists as an idea, and one that feels real, has contours, features, etc.

Is Hamlet more “real” than my couch? Certainly I know that I can physically touch my couch, and that generally when I am in my living room, it hasn’t vanished. The same with the Shakespeare book in which Hamlet exists, in his own way. Do I believe in my couch’s existence the same way as I do Hamlet? What about the word “Hamlet”? Is that material?

Still, there are many immaterial things, things that only have indirect effects in the world, that we believe in. I have no evidence that anyone feels or thinks like I do, and yet, I treat other people like they have interior worlds of experience like mine. Based on indirect evidence, like what people say or do, it seems like they must have feelings, thoughts, desires, passions, etc. But I have no more evidence of this than it’s material effects. The same with Hamlet, who only seems to exist, materially at least, in the ways in which physical humans talk and act in the physical world.

And yet, we call Hamlet and God “imaginary,” but not the notion that other people have interior worlds. Why is “faith” in the existence of feelings and thoughts in other people reasonable, yet “faith” in God unreasonable? Most likely because when the body stops working, the interior world seems to vanish in people, at least as far as we can tell by indirect effects. And when interact with people’s bodies, it seems like their interior world interplays with their physical bodies, there’s a way to interact indirectly with this interior world. And yet, many attest to the fact that they interact with God in their interior worlds. Or that they have a “sense” of how Hamlet “thinks.”

I’m not trying to say that therefore we should all start believing in God. But rather, that the difference between believing in God, Hamlet, or the interior worlds of other people aren’t fundamentally different kinds of things. They are differences in degree. There is more evidence that people have interior worlds, less for Hamlet, less for God, because only some people seem to interact with God, and in very indirect ways.

And then there’s the issue of choice. Often humans say things like they believe in this or that, but what does that mean? Does it mean this was a conscious choice? I don’t think I could simply “choose,” consciously, to believe that the moon is made of green cheese. Sure, i could say that I believe this, but that’s quite different from believing this. And while I can even lie to myself, and try to convince myself that I believe this, in reality, I don’t, and wouldn’t be able to convince myself, consciously, if I tried. My unconscious, or my belief system, or whatever part of me chooses my beliefs, isn’t really something that my conscious mind gets to control. And so, it seems we don’t really choose our beliefs, in fact, it’s oddly almost as if they choose us!

And so, I believe in gravity, I didn’t choose this, but the evidences compelled me, based on other things I believe in, like science experiments, that gravity exists. But there’s an infinite regress here, because I don’t remember choosing to believe or not in science experiments either, it just happened at some point. Belief is like that, it seems we always chose it in the past, or will in the future, but when do we ever really choose it in the present? And even when we do, it seems like we’re simply recognizing that we “already” chose something, some other part of us, call it our unconscious if you will, chose in the past for us, and we are simply now admitting this. It’s like being in love. You recognize you are in love, or you think in the future you could fall in love with a particular person, but it seems like our gut decides, not our conscious ego-self, so to speak.

And so, in some odd sense, we don’t choose to believe or not, but beliefs choose us, based on who we are, how we relate to the world, our modes of interacting and relating with the world. Or we could say our unconscious chooses. It’s all metaphors. While we can choose to say we believe something we don’t, or try to lie to ourselves, that itself is a belief that this is a good path. It’s an infinite regress all the way down, and hardly something that should make us feel secure. This is why many faith traditions talk about things like “grace,” because wherever you look for belief, it oddly always seems elsewhere than where you’re looking.

But does this mean that one needs to either believe or not in God to “be” a believer? I think this is also an issue of degree. I think all of us believe that God is real, if you mean real in the way that Santa Claus is real, as an idea people have that impact how they act, think, and feel in particular situations. But beyond this, it’s an issue of degree. Some people base their whole lives around this notion, and these seem to believe in the ultimate reality of this God, its intertwining in the realities of the world, the most strongly, and those who see God as simply a fantasy, less so.

But I don’t think anyone completely believes that God “doesn’t exist” at all. Nor that anyone believes that God is the only thing that exists, because even if God is the only thing in the world, the distinct parts of God, like things or people, have some degree of independence and distinctness, and hence, are in a sense God “less intensely” than God properly speaking. Either way, it’s impossible to believe that God is all there is without there being matters of degree.

And in this sense, any attempt to believe in God is a matter of degree, just as is any attempt to say whether or not it is reasonable or not to believe in God. But if we’re trying to get a sense of whether or not to believe in something like personal immortality, or the existence of God, it seems we’ve muddied the waters, but haven’t gotten that far…

Two Images of a Spherical Lens: A Maxwell Fish Eye Lens, from Two Different Dimensional Views

A Possible Solution: Quantum Eternity, Ibn Arabi, and Neoplatonic Notions of Eternity

There is, however, a way of recasting this problem that I think does actually get us somewhere, and largely by shifting the terms in which people generally ask these questions. The preceding questioning perhaps loosened the hold of traditional approaches, but here’s an attempt to reframe things. And it may not quite satisfy some. But it makes this skeptical philosopher feel that, at least, there’s a start to the question of how to address these things.

Lately I’ve been reading Michael Sell’s excellent book Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994). It’s an investigation of mystical language in figures such as Plotinus, Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, etc. In the Ibn Arabi section, he discusses Ibn Arabi’s complex way of reframing the notion of immortality, one which, in many ways, expands upon the Neoplatonic frame which is the foundation of much of the Islamic philosophical tradition.

For Ibn Arabi, God is perpetual creation, and in many ways, there are strong similarities here to the notion described by Deleuze as “the virtual.” Paradoxically, God created the world with his “primordial breath,” and yet, also recreates the world perpetually at every location in space and time, none of which are identical. The more we see this, the more we come into sync with God. Ibn Arabi’s  favorite metaphor for this is that of a mirror. Each part of creation is like a dirty mirror which can reflect how God, which is all things, manifests in this particular aspect of itself. Only those who know God with their hearts, however, polish themselves properly, and become transparent mirrors that reveal the image of God in themselves. At this moment, the person in question ceases to be themselves, they undergo a state of fana’, annihilation, which is often thought of as an ego-less state, similar to Buddhist nirvana, in which only God is present where the person once was.

In this moment, the person is no longer within time, but rather, taps into the eternity in which God exists. This eternity is beyond time, before, after, and during time, it is a perpetual now that is beyond all time and yet in all time. The eternal now becomes one with the pre- and post-time of eternity.

Of course, this is paradoxical, mystical talk. But in some senses, it has many very real analogues with some of the insights of quantum physics. When a quantum particle is in an entangled, superpositioned state, often simply called a “quantum” state, it is in multiple spacetimes at once. This is difficult to describe in language, like I’m using now, which uses linearity in delimited and positional spacetime to communicate.

Sometimes researchers use the word “smearing” to describe the ways in which quantum particles seem to be existing in multiple spacetimes at once, but within a particular zone of our regular spacetime. This is why we see clouds of electrons in many diagrams of atoms and molecules, for scientists know that as we approach particular areas of spacetime, an electron is increasingly likely to ‘appear’ if we disturb the area in which it is likely to be. In fact, however, the electron isn’t in a particular location of that spacetime unless we disturb it, for it is in all of them in its ‘smeared’ zone semi-equally, more intensely in some areas that others, but as if spread out in a cloud.

This is how quantum phenomenon seem to interact with our non-quantum world. And it is like they are able to go backwards and forwards in time, or even show up at multiple places in spacetime. This is why some researchers believe it is quite possible that there is only one light particle, or photon, in existence, and it is simply showing up at multiple spacetimes in our extended universe, bouncing around, interacting with aspects of itself, in various intensities as it interacts with matter.

The similarities to the God described by many Sufi mystics, or the Buddha as described by those Buddhists of the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, is uncanny. This is why the Dalai Lama is fascinated by quantum physics.

Returning to Ibn Arabi for a moment. Here’s how Sells describes his position: “The one primordial breath by which the world flowed into actuality is seen now as the eternal breath that always has occurred, and always is occurring” (Sells, Mystical Languages, 106-7). Now its important to know here that the primordial breath is God’s creation of the world by actualizing his potentials in matter. God is the most real aspect of the world, matter the least real, it is literally God’s imaginations or dreams, for God is the only thing that exists out of necessity, and is that of which we can be most certain.

This sounds quite otherworldly until we realize that Ibn Arabi’s notion of God manifests only as perpetual change in the world.  Those aspects of the world that are closer to God are the most God-like, they refract him more clearly, and they do this by creating in a manner similar to God, giving off creation, and this is done by refracting God’s creative power, by being able to manifest more of the outside world in oneself despite and through their contradictions.

For Ibn Arabi, rational thought strings together particular categories whereby God can be known, which are ideas (God’s names or attributes), but often gets stuck at contradictions. But humans can use their hearts to bring together opposites, to provide a fuller picture of the world, one which takes into account what appears irrational as well. And it’s clear that the world has much that appears irrational in it. God isn’t limited to what makes sense, he can encompass all of this. And so can the one who knows in a way that’s deeper than reason, what Ibn Arabi calls gnosis.

The one who polishes their mirror refracts the creativity of the world the most intensely by being in sync with the creative principle of the world, which is God, which exists outside of time and yet in ever moment. And this happens when the human creates like God, coming into sync with God, so that God acts through them, beyond their limited ego. This means to dream up a world like God, to give rise to it, to create. To imagine, to dream. But if one is in sync with God, one dreams like God dreams, in a way that is constantly changing, constantly taking in more and more of the world, loving it with the heart, exhibiting compassion, and wanting to liberate it all to be more Godlike, which is to say, to create for itself in similar manner.

This is incredibly similar to what I described in relation to Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism’s notions of “compassion,” “bliss,” “englightenmet,” and “nirvana,” several sides of the same. And in both traditions, those described by Ibn Arabi and these Buddhist schools, this state, as it approaches the world of God/Buddha, is outside of time. By intensifying the present moment, it ties into infinity, eternity, and the pure creativity which exists as pure potential in all aspects of spacetime, but yet which is also outside and beyond them. Or at least, this is how it seems when one enters a mystical state, namely, that one taps into a quantum smearing of one’s spacetime, and that of which it is simply a part.

Many researchers have argued that its completely possible that our universe isn’t actually extended in spacetime, but only seems to be, and rather, is simply a superpositioned quantum state unfolding in itself. That essentially, our world is some sort of 4D hologram, and that we wouldn’t know the difference, because it would seem to all of us like space was extended and time moving. Which is to say, the world could be an illusion. But such an illusion would be more real, in a sense, to us, than the “reality” that caused it.

The point for Ibn Arabi is that God is pure creativity, and the closer we are to this, the freer we are, the more complete we are, the more real we are, and the more in sync with the essence of the universe. Those dogmatists who try to argue that they have it right prove themselves wrong by limiting God to one particular appearance. God is all aspects of the world, but most intensely those which are creative like him, in a manner which compassionately wants all that exists to create like him, which is the way in which he can in fact create the most intensely, which is to say, to liberate the world, himself in another form, to create to maximum potential.

This is why creativity, eternity, compassion, freedom, power, and bliss are so many sides of the same for Ibn Arabi, and in similar yet distinct ways, for many Buddhist thinkers. Reification, which is to say, thing-ification or limitation, is a necessary part of the way God appears in one particular location in the world, and yet if taken as an end in itself, it is, as Ibn Arabi says, “idolatry.”

This is why the greatest error, for Ibn Arabi, is to try to “bind” God to one particular manifestation, and he calls this “idolatry,” just as he calls reframes “infidelity,” as Sells nicely shows, as failing to believe in the full power of God to manifest to all, through his love, differently. A pure heart sees this. And this is why dogmatism is idolatry and lack of belief, faith in the power of God to manifest creatively in the imagination of others.

Refraction in Perspective: From a Mosque at Isfahan, Iran

What Could This Mean For Us Today? God, Belief,  Immortality?  

Does this mean that Ibn Arabi believes in God? He was accused by critics of monism and pantheism alike, but as Corbin and others argue, this is to radically oversimplify. Ibn Arabi’s approach to these issues is radically non-dual, anti-reifying, in the sense I described in relation to various trends in Indic and/or Buddhist thought in previous posts. Ibn Arabi believes that the force towards creation is the most real thing in the world. And he is right.

More real than the existence of my couch, a stone, other people, Santa Claus, or anything we’ve yet to encounter, all of which will eventually pass away, and which once didn’t exist, is the existence of the push to change within the cosmos, that which was before the Big Bang, and which will exist, in some form, long after we are gone. It is that from which we all came, and will all return.

This force in the universe, which created the universe and likely will exist beyond it, which was before space and time came to be in the Big Bang, is present in every aspect of the world today, pushing it forward via various tendencies, forces, movements, etc. This force pushed us to evolve from inorganic matter, and into complex human forms, and we are most in sync with this the more intensely we are like this force, which is to say, create, and liberate more of the world to create in turn. A non-restrictive, loving, compassionate desire of liberation of self and others from binding into particular forms, to continual overcoming of self and world. Precisely what Deleuze knows as the virtual, the Buddhists as Buddha nature, and the Sufi’s as God.

Framed in scientific terms, it is easy to see why it is not irrational to “believe” in this force. But can this force give us comfort? Can we have a personal relation with such a force? And what about personal immortality?

A Personal God?

According to Ibn Arabi, this abstract force towards creation exists in pure form in a way that is ultimately inaccessible. And this makes sense, none of us can directly access the Big Bang. But its manifestations are in every aspect of the world, and most intensely in those aspects of that manifestation which tend towards greater creation. Each aspects of the world is, to Ibn Arabi, a “face” of God, waiting to be seen by the “heart” of the person who becomes like a polished mirror, refracting God back to itself by creating.

But creating what? The face of God that is seen. Most see a couch, a stone, another human, but the Sufi gnostic in the mode of Ibn Arabi also sees a face of God, and in doing so, is transformed into a mirror. God, self, object, these refract each other as manifestations of God’s creation, and this is accomplished by the imagination, the creation, of the human in question, who transforms the everyday object into a manifestation of God’s creativity, and in so doing, recreates and transforms themself. By imagining, the human comes closer into sync with how God created the world by imagining. And so, by seeing God in every aspect of the world, but moreso in the creative aspects, the human recreates themselves.

But how? But fostering creativity in a compassionate sense in all the world, and in themselves. By working to liberate all the world from its self-imposed constraints, and to strive to be compassionately creatively liberatory of self, world, and other in the same way. But trying to show dogmatists, the paranoid, the reified, the creative potential lurking within. Recreating the world in this way, the creative dreamer recreates themselves, and vice-versa, and in doing so, channels God’s creativity by giving it a channel to flow into the world. One is no longer there, but God acts through one. This is why the Sufis refer to this state as annihilation, because our ego dies, and we become a refraction of God.

And we do this by dreaming, but in the world. By seeing the physical world as less real than the potential it has to become radically more liberatorily creative. By not reifying, or dogmatizing. For Ibn Arabi, all faiths, all beliefs, all dreams of God are viable paths to God. What matters isn’t if someone is Muslim or Christian, or even agnostic or atheist, so long as they love in a non-reifying, creative, liberatory, compassionate way towards themselves and the world. They cease being themselves, and become this force refracted in the world. They die as ego, and become the world, become a vessel for pure creation.

Not caught by idols, and not losing faith to believe in the potential of the world to arise in infinite creative difference, the believer is only a believer to the extent that they liberate-create self-world-object. Language does, in fact, break down. But in practice, this continual effort to continually recreate God in oneself, world, object, and other, this is the goal, the continual quest for fana’.

And eternity. For this pure creativity returns eternally in the perpetual now, even as it is outside of time, before and after time, in all of time, etc. The quantum state before and after and during our universe, and in this universe, yearning to attain within matter the freedom it had in potential in quantum states before “falling” into materiality. So much of this cosmogeny syncs nicely with the quantum view of the world.

But if it’s all imagination, why not dream terrible dreams with one’s creative power? Many have, of course, and this has had disastrous consequences to life, joy, creativity, and much more. Death, destruction, pain, horror. But these are all forms of idolatry and infidelity, the belief in a limited God, be this the nation, or money, or one particular “god” or dogma, or whatever else, and then forcing others to see God, which is to say, the creative potential of all that is, that way. Love, another word for which is creative liberatory potential, the virtual, or what Ibn Arabi calls “the heart,” is the guide. Some imaginings further potentialize the power of all others to imagine their own, while some attempt to contain and hold it all for themselves. The difference is pretty clear.

And of course, the freedom to dream differently includes the freedom to dream terrible dreams. But without this, the world would ‘t have the freedom to go beyond itself, and hopefully, to learn the dangers and suffering this causes, to itself, and other. For our worlds and ourselves always mirror each other. Those who harm others are consumed on the inside, whether they show it or not, the world and self are always in interplay.

Freedom, desire, curiosity, compassion, liberation, rather than paranoia, fear, anger, and reification. These words, such as freedom, desire, curiosity, liberation, compassion, these are easy to say, but hard to create and recreate in oneself perpetually. But that is why all these traditions see this as a perpetual practice.

And immortality? If one is more God-like the more in sync with liberatory creativity, the more one participates in this force, not as ego, but as refraction. One intensifies one’s being by becoming more intensely, one becomes full with the potential to be all things, and to bring always more into actuality. Immortality is wrongly conceived as all or nothing, that one has eternal life because of one’s devotion to one particular God, or one ceases to be immortal if one chooses the wrong one.

Degrees of Immortality?

But what if, like everything else of value in the world, it’s all a matter of degree? Those who are most Godlike have the most immortality, but all of us have some degree or another of immortality. What might this mean?

Certainly the Big Bang, in its quantum superposed state, is the most immortal thing we know, for it is both within our time, in all of our times and spaces, and yet, both before and after them. Our spacetimes unfold within the Big Bang, or rather, the “Big Banging,” as it explores itself in and beyond its spacetimes within it. Language can only do so much to explain this.

But to the extent that we come into sync with it, the more we refract it, the more we tap into this immortality. And the more we become one with it. This is why figures like Plotinus and Spinoza, Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra, all those in the tradition of Neoplatonism, and the Buddhists who may have even influenced Neoplatonism early on, believe that there is no personal immortality, but participatory immortality. That is, the immortal part of our soul lives on. But some of these thinkers believe that the more Godlike we become, the more of us lasts on.

Following Ibn Arabi’s logic, this would mean that the more we create in a Godlike way, the more we live on. What could this mean?

Those of us who raise children live on in them, and those who love their children live on in how they love others. Those who create works of art live on in those who appreciate that art, that grow as humans because of this. And those who do any of these things live on materially, but also in memory.

But there is more than just that. Those who see God in the world, who experience theophany (the appearance of God), in particular aspects of the world, also tap into eternity. To see God in a stone, in a person, is to touch eternity in that present moment, that eternal now. And I have always felt that in those moments, whether I called what I was tapping into ‘God’ or something less theological sounding, that I was touching eternity.

A landscape that is impossibly beautiful. A loved one that one carries in your soul for eternity. This eternity isn’t simply illusory. Each time one holds an aspect of the world up to God as a manifestation of God, one gives it greater eternity, and in the process, gives oneself eternity, for you are yourself transformed. Not in some fantasy, but in one’s very concrete reality. The more you see “God” in the world, the more you change. The Buddhists would say that one reduces “craving,” while Ibn Arabi would talk about one “binding” God less, and coming more into a state of “fana.’”

But here we see why for so many of these Mahayana Buddhists, “nirvana is samsara,” the world IS release, one just needs to look at it differently. But this change in perspective is everything, it is liberation, and compassion, for oneself and the world. It is the cessation of craving, without the elimination of desire. It is to see everything as a refraction of the path to the Buddha, which is the path to its creative liberation of itself and its world.

Is this religion? Does it require belief to produce salvation? Is this even recognizeable as a traditional sort of God? Or is it just pattern completion of some of the evidences provided by the physical world, and the odd data supplied by experiments in quantum physics?

Does it matter? Believing this certainly seems like it would make one happier. It’s not simple irrationalism, nor is it limited by ‘if I can’t see it it doesn’t exist’ of simplistic forms of atheism. Perhaps it’s agnosticism beyond agnosticism. Hard to say.

But it makes me think of the person I lost recently. And that her love lasts in all eternity. That the more I meditate on that love, the more real it becomes, the more it will transform me, the more eternity I give it. Ancestor worship makes more sense now, though not in the literal sense. Once gives ancestors immortality by producing that immortality in oneself.

Beyond “Objective” Immortality

Does that mean we continue on when we die? Certainly every aspect of the world always already existed in the quantum eternity of the Big Banging, in which it’s all always already there even as it gives rise to itself within itself.  This is what Whitehead calls “objective immortality,” no aspect of the world is truly “forgotten,” for it leaves physical traces in the world. Move a stone, and it moves others, producing ripples that last for all time, but which are washed out, generally, by similar movements. No-one will remember the stone moved on tiny bit.

But the more intensely we transform ourselves by our dreams, the more we transform our worlds, and in a sort of virtual reality, our dreams impact very physical things. We see this in Tibetan Buddhism as well as Sufism, in which visualization techniques are employed. And in many of the more advanced aspects of these traditions, it becomes quite clear that there is a creative aspect of this, one doesn’t just receive visions, one makes them up, one meditates on one’s desired visions, and they become real inside one, transform one, and by your actions, changed by these practices, one then changes the way one acts, feels, thinks, and exists in the world.

So by meditating on my Grandma’s love for me, I give her greater intensity of existence, and this alters the way I think and feel about the world, how I act within it. I give her more life. Not conscious life. No, it does seem our aspects split up, cease to be a unity. But the aspects, like the love of my Grandma, live on. The body separates from it, but the love continues, for I give it more time as I meditate on it, and the more intensely, the more intense the now becomes, the more it dilates to approach a dream of eternity. And since dreams are more real, in a sense, than reality, for they have the power to transform reality, beyond any particular instant, location, or matter than is the excuse or support for that dream in any given moment, the dream is always more powerful than reality. But it needs reality to extend it, give it body, support it. And the more a dream extends into reality, the more eternal it becomes.

We touch eternity when we dream, but we extend eternity into time when we bring it into time. By meditating on something like the love of my Grandma, I give it greater eternity by giving it greater foothold into time. Time and eternity, these are two sides of the same, and each quantum phenomena is both within time, and outside of it, smearing the difference.

There are, of course, terrible things that live on. Murders, hatreds, genocides. These live on in intensity as well. Nothing can erase them. Each death is the death of a world, each pain cannot be erased, and the more intense the suffering, the more it cannot be erased in the objective immortality of the cosmos. But each pain then becomes a call, a duty, something we must understand the causes of, commit ourselves to prevent from happening in the future, pledge to make right. To redeem these pains as teaching us something so vital, something we had to learn to prevent greater horrors in the future, so that these pains were not in vain. Nothing can make those sufferings go away. But as we meditate on them, we try to convert them into horrific lessons that the world, the species, the universe needed to learn.

Let us hope we learn, never, never again. And let us hope that we find a way to overcome death, pain, suffering, materially, mentally, emotionally, socially, etc. Such a hope, such a pipe-dream, but dreams have a way of impacting reality when believed with great intensity. Not by abandoning reason, but reconstextualizing it as only one way of dreaming. All artists throughout eternity have dared to dream, and to bring their dreams into the world.

And this is why, for Ibn Arabi, when Moses was before the burning bush, it provides a key example of what he’s talking about. Was Moses insane, what today we’d call psychotic, or schizophrenic? Or simply an artist, an artist of the soul, perhaps? But how many have died because of dogmatic interpretations of religious visions? Should we all simply dream up new  religions? Is that what Ibn Arabi’s advocating?

My sense is that we should believe it’s possible to see God in everything, and that if we all do this, all together, the world will transform itself radically, and God will become real, the world will be God, in sync with God, and irredeemably better. But what prevents this is idolatry, dogmatism, reification, binding, whatever we call it.

Does this mean I’ve become religious, or started to “believe” in God? It’s all a matter of degree. Once all the terms of religious discourse are transformed in this way, nothing is the same. But if this is what it means to believe, let’s say that I’ve started to dream. I still believe in neuroscience, and physical evidence, and I think most traditional notions of God are just silly. I still think that after we die, something conscious stops, and we certainly change, transform. But there is also some sort of eternity. It is here in every moment. And we can tap into it, here and now, and that there is something very, very important here.

And so, to see this force in all that is as a personal, caring God, one that loves and remembers all, this sort of theophany, is in a sense more real, as dream, than the reality in front of us…more creative, more powerful, more human, more quantumly divine, compassionately liberatory, and even moreso the more real we make it, the more we extend it into the world, at least, such that it gives rise to more dreaming of this sort. And if the human mind is but an echo of the quantum state of the Big Bang, then perhaps Ibn Arabi is more right than we ever dreamed….

Either way, it seems that, as Sells says, in Ibn Arabi, the dichotomy between eternity and ephemerality is overcome” (108). At least, that is the hope. But as Sells argues, while there is ecstasy in the fusion with eternity, there is also sadness, for it perpetually runs away into a new form in a new moment. While each moment can extend forever, and Ibn Arabi is quite clear that it is intensity that determines the length of a moment of time, not the time of clocks, up to and potentially including eternity/timelessness, it is also clear that time passes. And here we see the link to Buddhism, the manner in which getting beyond “binding” for Ibn Arabi must also lead to a learning not to “bind” the way the world appeared in the past.

This is learning to let go. Ibn Arabi speaks of ecstasy as well as sadness in his erotic poetry, which is Sufism is frequently a way of discussing mystical experience. And it is, as Sells argues, precisely the ambiguity of reference, the fact that what is being discussed could be erotic love for a beloved, or for God, that gives the poetry its power. For in fact, it is the ambiguity that makes it creative, possible of more meanings. Bringing these meanings into the physical world is the only way to anchor them, just as reimagining the physical world is the only way to liberate it. This dialectic cuts both ways.

And so eternity is always present, even as every moment vanishes forever. Nirvana is samsara, and we need to learn to give up everything to gain it completely, and vice-versa. Dreaming can liberate matter, just as matter can anchor dreaming. And while dreaming is closer to eternity, and matter closer to passing away, humans always live between these. The more intensely we bring the dream into reality, the more we eternalize and materialize our dreams, and the more we dream about matter, the more we liberate it, eternalize it.

And this is why everything in the world is potentially holy, sacred, a site for the appearance of eternity, and it is our recreation, our dreaming, that can make it so. But we need to learn to give up our dreams to create new ones, to transform with them, or we become prisoners of them, we lose the link to eternity in the present, that which breaks our tie to craving and binding. This is why the eternity of the present comes at the cost of perpetual dying and rebirth.

 

 

The Metaphysics of Refraction in Sufi Philosophy: Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi

Refraction: The Vault of Heaven as Sublime Mirror of Earth, at the Mosque of Isfahan, Iran

“Every creature is ultimately the manifestation of the Face of God and its reflections through the immutable archetypes upon the mirror of nothingness.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Truth of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (2007).

A Metaphysics of refraction, in which God dreams up the world, and we are the refractions of his light. What could this mean? This post will examine how this all plays out in the Sufi philosophies of Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi.

First, a little context. Any attempt to describe God in any devotional tradition is always complex and fraught with controversy, and in Islam, and Sufi Islam in particular, this is hardly an exception. However, the descriptions of God by Sunni Sufi Ibn Arabi, modified and systematized by the Shi’ite Sufi Mulla Sadra Shirazi, has without question described the most influential notion of God within Sufi doctrines. Mulla Sadra combines Ibn Arabi’s descriptions with Surhawardi’s metaphysics of light, which resurrect ancient Persian Zoroastrian beliefs on light and angels into Islamic form, while Ibn Arabi builds upon the Neoplatonist Islamic philosophy of Ibn Sina, known in the Latin west by the name Avicenna.

While the Latin scholastics generally assume that Islamic philosophy concludes with the writings of Avicenna and his semi-Aristotelian opponent Ibn Rushd, known in the Latin world as Averroes, these other figures, namely Ibn Arabi, Surhawadri, and Mulla Sadra are essential developments upon the insights of Ibn Sina. For they take Ibn Sina’s Neoplatonism, and restore and expand upon the mysticism which lay as latent potential within this cosmology since the times of Plotinus. And as will become apparent, there is much here that, via Ibn Sina and the intermediary of Maimonides, shows up in Spinoza, in ways that have crucial resonances with these later Sufi developments.

Closer to Quantum Physics Than You Might Think: The World as Creatures of Light

Manifesting the Divine: Essence, Names, and Creatures

According to Ibn Arabi, there are three levels of God, which are God’s Essence, his Names, and the Creatures of the World. For anyone who knows Spinoza, we see here what he calls substance, attributes, and modes. To put this in simpler terms, Ibn Arabi believes there is the core of God, his essence, then a second layer of his Names, which describe the ways in which he manifests in the world, and the third layer, which is the world of matter, the world we all see. In this sense, the names connect God in his purity to the world of things.

To put this more in terms used by Ibn Arabi, God’s essence is the aspect of him which, to use Ibn Sina, is the “necessary of existence,” or that which has as its essence to exist. The names are the attributes of God, such as the Merciful, or the Wrathful, and these describe the ways in which God exists. It is worth noting that these are derived from the Platonic forms, reconfigured by the Neoplatonists by mixing them with Aristotle’s notion of entelechies, to become form-forces. This is why anyone who knows Plato is likely to get confused with how the Neoplatonists, and anyone influenced by them, use the notion of ‘forms.’ For while Plato envisaged the forms as immaterial and static, the Neoplatonists put this all in an emanationist frame, such that, the forms seem as if to “desire” to manifest in the world. That is, they are forms which are also forces, for they emanate ingressions into that which is less perfect than them, which exists less purely, namely, matter, just as they are emanations of the pure essence, the only aspect of what is that is truly Real. This is what is debated under the notion of divine names in various forms of Islamic philosophy. Finally, individual entities in the world, often called ‘creatures’ in Islamic thought, things like stones or people, are complexes of attributes which are vibrated into existence by God, and in this process, they go from potential to actual.

Each thing in the world, then, is an inmixture, or to use Whitehead’s term, an ingression, of various attributes. A tree, for example, has greenness, tallness, strongness, etc., in particular proportions according to its nature. But the most important attribute, that of existence, that which makes these fantasms of possibility closer to being real, is when they are dreamed into existence by the only Real. And this means that the attribute of existence of everything is derived from God, who is the Real, the only Real, that which gives existence to all else to the extent that they participate in his Realness.

The Metaphysics of Light: Pure Light, Colored Jewels, and Refractive Screens

Surhawadri reconfigures this all in terms of light. In pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism, the god Ohrmazd was a god of light, and the entire cosmogeny was built of refractions of this light. Suhrawardi, a Persian Sufi executed for his radical beliefs, reworked these notions, but in an Islamic frame. He sees God as the only pure light, and by means of a subtractive function, imagines the attributes of God’s names as giving rise to colors of light, and the existent entities or creatures as bits of opacity which refract these colored lights in various ways. In this way, we can think of the attributes as jewels that refract the pure light into colored light, and the entities as bits of opacity, which is to say, screens, upon which intermixings of these colored lights are projected.

This is in fact incredibly similar to the ontology of light described by Bergson in Matter and Memory, and developed by Deleuze in his Cinema books. While there’s no reason to believe that either Bergson or Deleuze knew about Suhrawadri (though it is remotely possible that Deleuze knew of him through Suhrawardi’s French translator and advocate, Henry Corbin, a contemporary of Deleuze’s), it does seem that Plotinus, Spinoza, and Leibniz, were shared by these French thinkers, with Plotinus as the likely common ancestor.

One of the most influential inheritors of Ibn Arabi and Suhrawadri, the Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra, adopts many of their innovations, but adds the notion of intensity. While Ibn Arabi believed that the attributes of the Names are separate from God’s essence, which were both distinct from the creatures, Mulla Sadra argues that God is the most intensely Real, the attributes less real, and creatures less real still. However, everything in the universe becomes more intense the closer it comes to God. And God is defined, as it is for all from Plotinus to Ibn Arabi forward, as that which is both unchanging yet also able to give rise to all that exists or ever could by emanation. And our world simply is an attempt to bring some of this perfection into us, but our inability to do so leads to multiplicity, the shattering of the material world into many aspects. Only the complex recombination brings us closer to God.

And yet, what would this look like? God is the ultimate intensity of all aspects of the world, for God gave rise to it, but is bound by none of it. God is pure power to exist, to exist more fully, and to have all the aspect of the world as potentials within it, all at once, and to be able to actualize all of them at once in all their permutations. This is most similar, in fact, to the human mind, that which is able to think of all things it sees without having to ‘be’ them.

World as Crystalline Regime, With a Pull Towards Liberation

Dreaming the World Towards Freedom

And here we see why Ibn Arabi believes that our imaginations and dreams, which is to say, visions, are one way in which we get in touch with God. For if the world is God’s dreams, then our dreams, when we are in sync with God, in which our ego is in suspension, a state called fana’ by the Sufis, participate in God’s, not in the imperfect manner of all matter, but in purified form. Just like Neoplatonists, even down to Spinoza, felt we came into sync with the Agent Intellect when our reason comes into sync with that of the ‘way of the world,’ so to speak, so it is with Imagination with Ibn Arabi. For between the Agent Intelligence, the Reason of the World, and the Things of the World, is the Agent Imagination, which is to say, how God expands upon the pure forms of reason, and incarnates them into things.

But what does this mean? If God’s attributes are qualities, then only by their combination into refractions do they come to exist, for example, as ‘this’ tree, rather than as tallness, greenness, and other sets of disjunct qualities. Only when they are linked into a full knot or image does a particular entity come to ‘exist,’ and in this sense, we can think of existence precisely a this knitting of qualities into knots or images of this sort. From such a perspective, the qualities are the forms or categories, the generalities of reason, while the imagination produces combinations which gives rise to things.

When humans imagine, they recombine images derived from the images which comprise the world, and these images are less ‘heavy’ that those in the world, and in this sense, more free. And this means they are closer to God, for like God, humans can recombine images and intertwine them freely. What humans can’t do, and which God does effortlessly, however, is make imaginations real. However, when our imaginations come into sync with those of God, our visions can tell us something essential about the world, and this is why Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra after him believe that prophecy, which is to say, evidence communicated to us directly by God, is the most true evidence we can have of anything.

Science, Philosophy, and Prophecy?

Here we see why Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra continue to be influential in the Islamic world today. What makes Mulla Sadra so influential in particular is the manner in which he brings this all into a Shi’ite frame, and as such, the school of thought he founded remains the dominant one in Iran to this day. The irony of all this is the fact that Sadra was against dogmatic forms of interpretation in his time, while today, he has been coopted for a regime that tries to dogmatically tie interpretation to one form. This is, as Corbin noted before the Iranian revolution, a contradiction, for Shi’itism, based on the esoteric interpretation of scripture which is possible for each individual, can only ever have an uneasy relation to forms of state power that often thrive on trying to fix interpretation into a particular form. The manner in which this is accomplished in Iran today is that the interpreters of scripture are limited to the Imamate, and those with heterodox views are persecuted.

While Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra clearly believed that prophecy was the most valid form of evidence, this is not necessarily a position which conflicts with science as we know it in the  west. Spinoza makes a similar point in his Ethics, when he speaks of the intuition of reason, culminating in the “intellectual love of God,’ as higher than deductive reasoning, even if they both arrive at the same truths. And this is the point made by Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra, namely, that philosophical truth and truth by revelation end at the same place, which is to say, at the truth. Or at least, this is what should happen in theory, but human limitations often shatter and refract these truths into many, often conflicting forms. But as any good scientist knows, many times, it is intuition, based on the beauty of certain formulations, their elegance, which often guides experiments into what is truly unknown. Reason only often works out why in hindsight.

And in fact, any deduction is always based on basic ‘intuitions’ of truths. I see that a tree is green, and I have ‘faith’ in that ‘intuition.’ From this I may deduce that the tree has chlorophyll in its leaves because of this, but without the primary intution of greeness, or of the intuitions which lead our culture to link greeness in plants with the presence of chlorophyll, and to the very procedures of deduction themselves, none of this would be possible. And so if we doubt the veracity of the intuition of ‘greeness,’ the whole house of cards falls apart.

But does this mean that science is no different than prophecy? Not quite. For Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra are clear that some visions could be misleading, harmful, etc. The way to tell the difference, for these Sufis, is complex. Firstly, there is the Qu’ran and the hadith, but these are open to many interpretations, and it is the goal of gnosis (used in the sense of access to hidden knowledge, rather than in relation to Gnostic Christianity) to help us understand which pertain to particular situations. And so it is the relationship to God which anchors which visions are true, and which are simply fantasies, and perhaps even harmful.

Dreaming in Sync Towards More Intense Refraction of Light

And so, those visions which are in sync with God are those which will ultimately be confirmed by reason as well, for prophecy and philosophy should, in theory, end in the same place. But what of science? Surely science is a collective dream of sorts, an enterprise in which theorists use strange symbols, like mathematical equations, often with no clear referents in the concrete world (the ‘x’ of algebra being the simplest form of this), and speak of things no-one has ever directly seen (ie: molecules, electrons, quarks), but in ways which produce real effects. Surely these collective imaginings, which are able to sync together with the appearances of the real world, indicate a coming together of forms and dreams which produce effects that seem, well, often quite effective. Whether or not they are ultimately good, however, depends on how they are used. But this can be applied to more than just science, but to all social discourses, like philosophy, psychology, and collective dreams of various sorts which language and various other technologies allow humans to share.

But how do we know when these are on the right track? If they lead us closer to God, they are, but what might that mean? If God is that which tries to liberate all that exists to be more like God, which is to say, maximally free and potent, then we end up with a Spinozist cosmology. We should all strive liberate all that exists to be more like a perfected form of the human mind, which is to say, maximally free and powerful. In this, we participate in God’s nature, which is to not be bound by selfish desires, but to have compassion on all around us, in our desire to liberate it as well, to give it maximum freedom to be all that can be.

All that accords with this is true, good, and beautiful, and all that brings us closer to this is truer, better, and more beautiful than the rest. It is more real, and to come in sync with this is to make the world that small bit better, to increase the intensity of freedom in all that is.

To do this, of course, one needs to leave one’s self behind, or rather, not be limited by it, and rather, be liberated from the self, it’s partial viewpoints and cravings, and come into sync with this larger motion to liberation of all for and by all. To assist in the effort to help all emerge from itself into greater emergence. Such a project would use science and philosophy, but always in light of an ethical orientation to this larger project.

But such a project must defend the freedom of each and all to give rise to all the freedoms they can, and in this, there are necessarily many  pathways to this truth, and this is why Ibn Arabi believes there are many prophets to many peoples, and therefore, all the world is a theophany, which is to say, the appearance of God to aspects of himself. God reveals himself, and to each aspect of the world, there is a vision of God appropriate to it, a lure, as Whitehead would say, to greater freedom. The trick is figuring out which lure is the one that leads to God, and how to get there.

What seems evident, not only from the Sufi tradition, but many philosophical and devotional traditions, is that it lies in some form of negation of the partiality of the individual ego. Hegel argued that evil is particularlity with no regard for the universal, while Ibn Arabi would simply speak of “idolatry,” which is to say, reification for its own sake, blindness to the call of God to liberate all from and with all. Each aspect of all that exists has its God, it’s lure, the appearance of the true, good, and beautiful, which calls to them, and the side that calls them to think of their own narrowly defined self-interest. Only collective liberation, the desire to liberate all the world from others and themselves, can lead to liberation of the self, and vice-versa. Paradoxical as it may seem, the way to greater power and freedom for the self is to give it up for all other than the self, and vice-versa.

And this is where the Sufi path has much in common with that of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, as described in previous posts. While there are many differences between these traditions, there are many theophanies, for God is theophany, God is the appearance of existence and its potential to better itself, intertwined together.

For those interested in reading more on these issues, the best general place to start is the really excellent Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (2005), edited by Adamson and Taylor, or Majid Fakhry’s Islamic Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide (2009). For anyone interested in the light metaphysics of Zoroastrianism, and its influence on Islamic thought, and Suhrawardi in particular, should check out Henry Corbin’s old but still excellent Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran (1960). Mazdaism is the religion begun by Zoroaster, its prophet, in worship of the God Ohrmazd, or Ahura Mazda, and is essentially synonymous with the term Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia.

Fana’: Sufism’s Notion of Self-Annihilation, or How Rumi Can Explain Why Nirvana is Samsara in Mahayana Buddhism

An Image of Rumi having a religious dispute: Persian Painting, particularly from the Safavid Renaissance, is one of the notable exceptions to the ban on human depiction, or aniconism, dominant in most Islamic artistic traditions

Sufism is the mystical side of Islam. And for those who know something about Sufism, it is perhaps no small surprise that it cohabitated well with various aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism in Indic lands, even having a hand, along with Hinduism, in the birth of Sikhism. This post will work to show why there are some commonalities between certain notions in Sufism, Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism. And then try to say something about what this could have to say to us today in the so-called ‘west.’

But what might Buddhist notions of enlightenment, particularly in the Mahayana form in which “nirvana is samsara,” similar to what in Deleuze’s philosophy might be called ‘identification with the virtual,’ have to do with Sufism?

The notion of fana’, commonly translated from Arabic as annihilation or obliteration, provides a potential point of contact between Sufi practices and Buddhist notions of nirvana, a word which, in Sanskrit, derives from the type of extinction one sees when one snuffs out the flame of a candle. Are there similarities between these notions, ones which might be constructed without radically oversimplifying the issues at hand?

On the surface, ‘annihilation’ and ‘extinction’ might seem similar. But what a Buddhist extinguishes is craving, while what a Sufi annihilates is themselves before God. And yet, as will become clear, there are crucial parallels that can help us see the ways in which what these traditions have to teach us today have crucial resonances within and through their very real differences.

How does one achieve fana’? One remembers, and this remembering, or dhikr, often also translated from Arabic as recitation, can take many forms. Essentially, one puts oneself into sync with some original pronouncement made by God, for the universe is the speech of God, God speaks the world into being (according to the Qu’ran, by the word “Be!”), and when we remember one of God’s actions, we do so by having our action in some way coming into sync with God’s, by repeating this aspect of his recitation. And since God is beyond time and space, while we are not, God’s action is always before, during, and after ours, our actions are never initiatory, but merely remembrances of God, the one who brought about all that is, even that which is in the future.  All potentials are in God, as we were, and will be.

God as Refraction: From the Dome of the Mosque of Isfahan, Iran

Beyond Judeo-Christian Notions of the Divine

It is worth noting, how different the notion of God implicit in the Islamic context is from that presupposed in a Judeo-Christian context. For in many ways, this notion so God is much more similar to that of the Buddha described in my preceding post on Tibetan Buddhist Tsong Kapa, than seen in the west.

Firstly, the Prophet Muhammed is quite different than Jesus in contemporary Christianity, no matter which form. Islam is quite clear, in all its manifestations, that Muhammed is a human being, and is not a divine incarnation like Jesus is believed to be by most Christians. And while God may have aspects like that of the God of the Jewish scriptures, redescribed by Christians as that of ‘God the Father,’ these are merely manifestations of this God. What makes Islam distinct is that there God is much more a force or principle, a divine power to be. A father-like God wouldn’t be head of the Godhead, but rather, more something like what Christians tend to call ‘the Holy Spirit.’

And Jesus is just a prophet, which is to say, a man, as is the Prophet Muhammed. In fact, Henry Corbin, a prominent expositor of Islamic beliefs, argues that it is the very notion of the incarnation that leads Christianity to kill the visionary power of theophany which he sees as so essential Islam, its foundation in interpretation of the world via gnosis. Without getting into this in greater detail, it’s worth saying that in Islam, no human can be God, and in fact, the very notion is problematic. All humans are God in a sense, but no human can ‘be’ God, and limit God in this way.

What’s more, rather than have priests or Jesus or saints intercede for you, there is a direct relation to God, leading some colonial powers to describe Islam as a “religion without priests.” It is you before the supreme force of the universe, of which we are all but pale shadows.

Then again, in Shi’a Islam, there are Imams, but these are guides and teachers, and while they may become something like the western notion of a saint after they die, these are more manifestations of God’s attributes, like Bodhissatvas emanating from the Buddha, than distinct beings that can help get us things like the saints of Catholicism. For while some may pray to these ‘friends of God’ for specific things, the purpose of prayer in Islam is not generally of the form of a request.

Dhikr: Coming into Sync with God

But if prayer in Islam isn’t a form of request, what exactly is it? As opposed to a request, prayer is seen as a mode of dhikr, it is the repetition of one of God’s acts that places one into sync with some aspect of God. And this is why, for many Sufis, music, dance, and poetry are forms of dhikr. For the world is like a melody or dance or poetry which God creates inside of himself. In many accounts, God has all the pre-existent potentials or forms for what comes to be residing with him for all eternity, and it is God’s vibration of these by his breath in recitation that brings the world from potential into existence. When we vibrate ‘in sync’ with God, we are simply more God-like.

And when this happens, there is less of ‘us’ there, and more of God. When this happens particularly well, we are obliterated, annihilated, in a state of fana’. That is, God works through us, and as many Sufis would say, in this state, my hearing is that of God, not my own, my sight is that of God, not my own, etc. Of course, some traditionalists in Islam have called this heresy. And many famous Sufis were persecuted and even executed for statements like these, the most famous of which was Hallaj, about whom I’ll say more in a moment.

Bur first a little more on fana’ itself. Fan’a, according to Chiddick, takes on some distinctly Buddhist overtones:

“This entrance into “non-existence” is a return to the original human situation, when we dwelt at peace with God before creation. This is the state that is sometimes called the “annihilation” of the ego’s limitations and the “subsistence” of the true self…One must throw oneself into annihilation, which in fact is the fullness of Being. As Rumi reminds us, “We and our existences are all nonexistences, / but You are absolute Existence, appearing as annihilation”… Dhikr is an alchemy that transmutes perception and awareness into utter joy.” (Chiddick, Sufism, 109, 129, 132).

One aspect of this experience which is distinct to Sufism, however, and quite distinct from Buddhism, is the emphasis upon the ecstasy, intoxication, and erotic love in the evocation of this state. According to Chiddick:

“After long struggle on the path of discipline and self-purificaton, the seekers may be opened up to the effusions of divine love, mercy, and knowledge…This is the stage of true intoxication, but it is not the final stage of the path…They had reached the still-further stage, “sobriety after drunkenness,” which is the treutn to the world after the journey to God. In traveling to God, the seekers undergo total transformation, but now they come back with helping hands. They began as stones, they were shattered by the brilliance of the divine light, and now they have been resurrected as precious jewels…The two higher stages…that is, “intoxication” and “sobriety after intoxication” – correlate with the famous expressions fana’ and baqa,’ or annihilation and “subsistence”…The annihilation of obstacles and impediments…they now see what subsists after the annihilation of idols and false selfhood…The terms annihilation and subsistence are derived from the Koranic passage, “Everything upon the earth is undergoing annihilation, but there subsistes the face of your Lord, Possessor of Majesty and Generous Giving” (55:26-7)…When travelers reach the perfection of their own capacity, created in God’s image, they experience nothing but the negation of egocentric, separative reality and the affirmation of God-centered, unitive reality… annihilation is the negation of something that never truly was…” (Chiddick, Sufism, 43-4).

Fana’: Annihilation, or Nirvana Before God? 

In regard to what I’ve been discussing in recent posts, the potential resonances with Buddhism here are profound. None of which is to say that there were actually influences between these two distinct devotional traditions, though it is possible that this was the case in one form or another, particularly because Shi’ite Islam and Shi’ite forms of Sufism developed in a Persian context, one which had much more interchange with the world further East in which Buddhism developed than the more Sunni oriented western ends of Islam. But putting aside any claim to historical influence, it’s worth examining the resonances, whatever their cause, in greater detail.

And this notion of fana’ in fact has quite a lot in common with the Mahayana notion that nirvana is samsara. For in fact, it seems that after the experience of fana’, one doesn’t leave the world, but integrates fana’ into the world of baqa’, or subsistence, becoming the vessel of God, yet living one’s life, but without craving the idols it presents to one that can separate one from God. And in the process, our relation to the world changes, it becomes a relation of of seeing all as what Nagarjuna calls shunyata, translated from Sanskrit usually as ‘nothingness’ or ‘emptiness,’ a relation with the aspects of the world which is beyond reification, for everything is simply an aspect of God, which is what Deleuze would call the open-whole, which is to say, the virtual, a principle of infinite creativity.

But perhaps Chiddick has invested a Buddhist twinge to his reading of these classical texts? Not likely, for according to Seyyed Hossain Nasr, Chiddick’s Ph.D. supervisor, ”the annihilation of annihilation (fana’ al-fana’), which is also called subsistence (al-baqa’) in God” (Garden of Truth, p. 135). But perhaps it is best to let famed Persian Sufi poet, and founder of a Sufi order, speak to this from the thirteenth century.

Meditating on one of the primary statements of faith in Islam, the Shaddah, which states, “There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his Prophet,” a statement which often serves as a point of departure for meditation on the negation and affirmation of aspects of the world which describes God’s relation to them, Rumi says the following in one of his poems in regard to God’s love of the world:

“Love is the flame which, when it blazes up, burns away all except the everlasting Beloved,

It  slays “other than God” with the sword of no god. Look carefully: After no god, what remains? There remains but God, the rest has gone.

Hail, O Love, great burner of all others! It is He alone who is first and last, all else grows up from the eye that sees double.” (Rumi, cited in Chiddick, Sufism, 84).

All of which is to say, all that seems distinct from the open-whole of God, the ‘no god,’ is  the ‘but God,’ the relation to context, everything is both itself and beyond, a notion which Deleuze describes as the disjunctive synthesis of the virtual with itself in the process of differ(c)iation into actualization. Returning to Islamic notions, God others in relation to himself, he dances the universe into being, or, to use the notions of Sufi philosopher of Ibn Arabi, God literally dreams the world into existence. When we see with dual eyes, we see the  various things of the world as both distinct from God, and as aspects of God.

And this brings us back to Hallaj, the Sufi who was executed for heresy. Here his famous statements are described in prose by Rumi:

“When Hallaj’s love for God reached its utmost limit, he became his own enemy and he naughted himself. He said, “I am the Real,” that is, “I have been annihilated; the Real remains, nothing else.” This is extreme humility and the utmost limit of servanthood. It means, “He alone is.” To make a false claim and to be proud is to say, “You are God and I am the servant.” In this way you are affirming your own existence, and duality is the necessary result. If you say, “He is the Real,” that too is duality, for there cannot be a “He” without an “I.” Hence the Real said, “I am the Real.” Other than He, nothing else existed. Hallaj had been annihilated, so those were the words of the Real.” (Rumi, ctd. in Chiddick, Sufism, 21).

This notion of naughting oneself, to identify with the Real to the point of channeling it, is to  lose one’s ego, this is certain, and to act in a state the Taoists call wu-wei, which while often translated as “inaction,” is perhaps best thought of as, as many commentators have argued, as ‘no unnecessary action.’ One is in sync with God, and so one acts as an appendage of God, or rather, God acts through you. You are yourself, you still think, act, know, but doubled to oneself and hence without self, self-and-non-self.

But why describe this unity, as Rumi just did, in terms of duality, as he did previously, in terms of “dual eyes”? Here is another famed Islamic philosopher, al-Ghazali, describing what is meant by these “dual eyes”:

“The gnostics [Sufis]…see by direct eye-witnessing that there is none in existence save God and that Everything is perishing but His face … each thing… is perfishing from eternity without beginning to eternity without end … when the essence of anything other than He is considered in respect of its own essence, it is sheer nonexistence. But when it is considered in terms of the face to which existence flows forth from the First, the Real, then it is seen as existing – not in itself, but through the face toward its Giver of Existence. Hence the only existent is the Face of God. So each thing has two faces, a face towards itself, and a face towards its Lord. Considered in terms of the face of itself, it is nonexistent, but considered in terms of the face of God, it exists. Hence there is no existent but God and His face. (al-Ghazali, ctd. in Chiddick, Sufism, 57-8).

This is a strange duality indeed. For if everything in the world is dual, it is split between itself, and that which unifies everything as its aspects, which is to say, the non-dual. This is a non-duality which has duality as one of its aspects. To put this in other terms, the Real has its dreams as its aspects. And we, and all that exists, are simply the dreams of this most Real, the only Real, which is God.

Unveiling the Veil: Metaphysics of Non-duality in a Sufi Context

Or veils. The notions of ‘veil’ and ‘face’ are used frequently in Sufi imagery to discuss these issues, and the paradoxes proliferate. According to to Sufi commentator Mustamli,

“The self is the veil of the Real…The sum of all that has been said about the veil is that everything that busies the servant with other than the Real is a veil, and everything that takes the servant to the Real is not a veil” (Mustamli, ctd, in Chiddick, Sufism, 183-4)

And so the self, and all its cravings, all the things its believes are distinct like itself and its cravings, keep us from God, which is to say, the Real. Here is another Sufi theorist, Niffari,

“Your veil is yourself, and it is the veil of veils. If you come out from it, you will come out from the veils, and if you remain veiled by it, the veils will veil you.” (Niffari, ctd. in Chiddick, Sufism, 189)

But Niffari has a complex metaphysics here, and the parallels to Buddhism are striking:

“The forms seen by the eyes and perceived by rational faculties… are all veils, behind which the Real is seen… Hence the Real remains forever absent behind the forms that are manifest in existence… The entities of the forms that are manifest in Being – which is identical with the Real – are the properties of the possible entities in respect of the states, variations, changes, and alterations that they have in their fixity… But the Real does not change from what He is in Himself… The veils remain forever hung down. They are the entities of these forms… All this – praise belongs to God! – is in actual fact imagination, since it is never fixed in a single state. ” (Niffari, in Chiddick, 191-2).

God is the only thing which remains fixed, which, like the Lacanian Real, returns always to its place, that which repeats its difference eternally as what Ibn Arabi would call “recurrent creation,” for in fact, God recreates the cosmos at every instance with his breaths. He is the storehouse of potentials, and the goad to development, the lure to creativity, the God as described in Whitehead’s cosmogeny. And when we see this, when we come to dream in sync with him, our veils are lifted. According to Niffari:

“God has made you identical with his curtain over you… When someone achieves obliteration [fana'], his reliance on the occasions [the events of the world] is obliterated, not the occasions themselves… The occasions are veils that were established by God that wil never be lifted. The greatest of these veils is your own entity. “Your own entity is the occasion of the existence of your knowledge of God, since such knowledge cannot exist except in your entity. It is impossible for you to be lifted, since God desires for you to know Him. Hence He “obliterates” you from yourself, and then you do not halt with the existence of your own entity and the manifestations of its properties … There is no veil and there is no curtain. Nothing hides Him but His manifestation… Nothing is nonmanifest. The lack of knowledge has made it non-manifest… In other words, what you seek in the nonmanifest domain is manifest… He said to me: Once you have seen Me, unveiling and the veil will be equal” (Niffari, in Chiddick, 192, 194, 198, 199)

If unveiling and veil are equal, which is to say, if nirvana is samsara, then what is needed is simply to “see” Him. Which is to say, what al-Ghazali calls this second sight, which is to say, to see everything as an illusion because it fades. What is the only thing that doesn’t fade? The Real, that which is more existent than any particular thing. But what exactly is this Real like?

Sufism’s Complex Cultural Context, and Thoughts on Where to Start Reading

I’ll say more about this complex nature of God in a Sufi context in my next post. But to bring this post to a close, I’d like to first say something about how the notions articulated above are necessarily partial in relation to the terrain of Sufism as a cultural entity as a whole.

Saying something about Sufism is a difficult enterprise, and yet, it is more difficult to ignore the complex of practices, beliefs, institutions, theories, and more that together offer a wealth of insights that contemporary philosophy is silly to ignore. But as with my recent posts about Indic thought, or Buddhism, Islam in its various modalities, and Sufism in particular, are difficult to write about in the way that one would, say, write about Bergson. Bergson was a single human, wrote a limited set of texts, and while complex, we have the texts and can study them. But a notion like Sufism, Buddhism, Vedanta, these are cultural formations that include texts, practices, people, theories, and these vary over time, place, and culture, in ways that have a ‘family resemblance’ to each other, but not necessarily a unifying essence, such as is generally the case when an individual, ie: Bergson, creates a set of theories on the world.

Such difficulties come up whenever one tries to speak about a cultural movement comprised of many individuals only acting somewhat in concert. For example, writing about Surrealism. But trying to write about Sufism, as an outsider, is infinitely more difficult. I possess none of the complex of assumptions and contexts which I might have growing up within this culture, all of which I might bring to a Sufi text in order that it might speak to me. And these contexts might make my entire mode of relating to texts, or to notions of time and space, radically different.

For an example of such a situation, Robert Thurman tells the story of the difficulty he had with a university press when he tried to explain that the text upon which his work was based was written by a person who was a reincarnation of another. And hence, the dates that pertained to the text, and the name of the author, were not those recognized by western, non-Buddhist academics, but should be those recognized by Buddhists, who see the author of the text, and the dates appropriate to its composition, as pertaining to the original person recincarnated, not the vessel into which they were reincarnated later. Thurman’s point is that in a lifeworld in which reincarnation is a recognized fact of life, it is simply wrong to date and name things otherwise, and his university press should acknowledge this plurality of ways of relating to the world.

While this example is drawn from Buddhist scholarship, it applies to the study of any type of worldview, and with devotional worldviews, those which may have different criteria of what counts as real for almost anything, well, the pitfalls are many.

When trying to learn about Sufism, there are many types of texts available, and the issues surrounding the attempt to learn about Sufism are similar to those encountered when trying to learn about any devotional tradition. Some of the texts on Sufism are devotional, which is to say, oriented to those who either are Sufis, or want to become Sufis. Others are devotional, but written by other Muslims who see Sufism as a threat. Often these are split between Islamic modernists, who often see Sufism as a threat, full of medieval mystical beliefs which can keep the Islamic world from joining the modern world, with its clear divisions between faith and reason. There are also fundamentalists who view Sufism as a set of deviations, based on teachings that stray from the original writings and sayings of the Prophet, as codified in the Qu’ran and the hadith (the sayings of the Prophet). Of course, this all depends on what one considers an authoritatize reading of this large corpus,  and like all fundamentalisms, often depends upon a highly selective literalism. Then there are those who want to detach Sufism from Islam, who see it as having more in common with the mystical tradition of other devotional traditions than with Islam, often pointing to the ways in which Sufism and Hinduism found ways to overlap in Indian tradition. Many of these writers wish to extract Sufi mysticism from Islam, and use it to develop new mystical discourses and practices.

But then there is scholarly literature, and that varies widely as well. There is some written in a scholarly vein by believers, and this has a different tone than those written by interested non-believers. And of these, some emphasize the external aspects, such as the history of Sufism, how its beliefs changed over time and place, how it developed into institutions and ‘lodges,’ texts and shrines, government support or condemnation or even persecution, etc. Others concentrate on the structure of belief, and yet others still focus on texts alone.

Lately I’ve found several sources helpful. The work of Carl Ernst, such as Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam (2011), is great at describing the external manifestations of the tradition, while that of William Chiddick, such as Sufism: A Beginner’s Guide (2007), concentrates more on the internal belief systems themselves. Then there’s the complex legacy of Henry Corbin, unavoidable for anyone in the  west trying to study Sufism today, about whom I’ll write another post shortly. While his works are always worth reading, it’s important to realize that he’s a philosopher who articulated his own views through various Sufi ideas, and while he was greatly in sympathy with aspects of Sufism, his views are unique in their own right, and often inflect his articulations of Sufi notions. Either way, Corbin was essential bringing Sufi and Shi’ite notions to attention to the West during the period of the 50′s-70′s.

I also really enjoy the works of Seyyed Hossain Nasr, such as The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (2007). His works are wonderful introductions from within the tradition. Garden of Truth is written by a believer, and it shows, the work is touching, personal, and clearly written in a “devotional” context. I found it difficult to sync up with this type of text at first, because of its devotional tone, until I’d read the more detached, scholarly materials.

Now, however, I find it really refreshing, intense, and wonderful. And it truly gives you a sense of how this tradition feels from the inside, in a way that is full of very different insights than the Chiddick, Ernst, or Corbin. These writers aren’t as much interested in the soul of the reader, but more with presenting information and ideas. Nasr believes that Sufism is one of the great gifts to the world by God. Nasr taught at Tehran University with Corbin before the Iranian Revolution, and while there he supervised Chiddick’s Ph.D. dissertation. Chiddick is currently at StonyBrook, and Nasr at George Washington, Corbin passed away in 1978.

Nasr is not only a prominent writer on Sufism and Islam in general, but is a representative of the school of the “perennial philosophy,” which argues that all the major religions not only have a mystical side that share related philosophies, but that there are many paths to God, all with more in common than otherwise, as reflected in fuzzy set of philosophical and devotional traditions from around the world. I’ll say more about what is often called “perennialism” or “traditionalism” (perhaps a misleading name for this approach) in future posts, but it often associated with names like Rene Guenon, Aldous Huxley, Corbin, Fritjof Schuon, and Ananda Coomaraswamy. In many ways, this school is a rigorous, scholarly and devotional approach to world devotional systems and philosophy that is the serious counterpart of New Age fluffiness, even if it couldn’t be more different in its seriousness and rigor.

Either way, reading Nasr is such a joy, because it’s great to see someone quote the great texts of Sufism, and in the next breath, quote Shakespeare, or obscure references from other faiths as well, like the writers of the Kaballah, Christian mystics, etc., and take them all seriously, and with deep reverence and erudition to what they have to say. Here’s a man who truly believes there are many paths to God, and they are all God’s gifts to the world, so long as they don’t lead to hatred, disparagement of the paths of others who are sincere and try not to hurt others, etc. Basically, an approach to God that’s about love and learning, rather than controlling others.

Reading through these works, I’m amazed at the sheer difficulty of trying to say anything about Sufism that’s not simply overgeneralization, despite the fact that I think contemporary philosophy needs to speak about Sufism and what it has to teach us today. But is Sufism the shrines and saints, the genealogies and rituals, the lodges and Sufi orders, the political and social history, or is it a set of texts, practices, beliefs? Music, poetry, dance, philosophy?

And as Ernst shows, is even the notion of Sufism as distinct within Islam perhaps a product of colonialism itself? Might the attempt by westerners to know something about Sufism be simply an exercise in the west coming to know its own misreadings of a much more complex set of social phenomenon? This is certainly  to some extent true. However, it does seem that the colonial discourse on Sufism impacted the discourses within the Islamic world, and as such, Sufism has become a structure which now exists as such in our post-colonial world, even if it was not necessarily a distinct object within the Islamic world before this, but rather, a diverse set of practices that may only have this much in common with the shifts in Islam during and after the colonial period. All of this shows how difficult it is to even speak about Sufism in a way that doesn’t radically oversimplify.

And yet, learning the difficulty of speaking about something shouldn’t stop one from saying anything. Rather, it should be a prelude, or postscript, but there is a danger in not saying anything. For the fear of speaking radically limits the extent to which Sufism can speak to us today. And this tradition, which is so much about listening to the world for what it has to say, and then to try to articulate what it is saying to you, is perhaps best understood as a call, a call from the world, for us to hear it and be spoken by it.

And so it is with humility that I attempt to have anything to say here, and yet, I must speak. Sufism speaks through those that hear its call. And so, if I get it wrong, and I must get it wrong, I can only hope the melody is musical in a way which resonantes with some aspect of the spirit of what it is trying to say through an imperfect instrument like myself.

And so, this post is necessarily an extreme simplification, and the notions I want to extract from a few thinkers, texts, practices, and traditions, are an attempt to simply find some way in which the Sufi tradition can blast us out of the simplicity of our view of it, and of the sense that it is somehow beyond the purview of what philosophy today, in the west or elsewhere, should consider as having something vital to say.

Emerging: Or, Why Buddhist Dharma is Like Identification With the Deleuzian Virtual In and Through the Lacanian Object a . . .

Your Brain on Emergence: Or, Identifying with the Virtual as the Path of Buddhist Dharma

In previous recent posts, I have argued that Buddhist teachings can be thought of as identification with nonduality (advaita) and emptiness (shunyata), that they are fundamentally anti-reificatory. If those posts were intended primarily for those with no prior background in contemporary philosophy, this post will go in the opposite direction, and explain why I think Buddhism presents a crucial addition to contemporary philosophy, in more directly philosophical language. While usually I feel it’s essential to speak accessibly, there are also times to employ the specialized sub-languages of philosophy because of what they are uniquely able to do, which is imagine virtual worlds. For those who might not know all the terms used, however, what follows might read more like philosophical poetry of a sort, however, rather than just dry technicality, because it’s precisely about why the Buddha’s message can never be reduced to anything like that.

Non-Duality, Or the Path Beyond

And so, let’s start with the notion, developed in these posts, that Buddha’s teaching is a form of identification with the non-dual. But if non-duality is beyond duality and non-duality, then the very notion of binary of any form is a limitation. And this is why I think the issue is more unity and multiplicity, which really underlies duality anyway, for a duality is a clash of two unities, each of which conceals, in its reified fixation on one thing over others, multiplicity. Of course, this duality needs to be overcome as well. The Buddha’s dharma is beyond language.

And this is why I like the single word description of it, which in this case, is damma (Pali) or dharma (Sanskrit). As Carl Olson argues in The Different Paths of Buddhism: A Narrative Historical Introduction (Rutgers, 2006, really great book!), dharma is both “universal cosmic law… and corrective process… both the source of cosmic order and a means of liberation from the world.” (80). It is not something that can be grasped rationally, but rather, intuitively, for it is really a process in which one comes into sync: “In contrast to the rational and analytic type of knowledge associated with empirical consciousness, wisdom (prana) is nonrational and intuitive… intuitive knowledge that serves as a flash of insight into the nature of everything” (100).

For the Buddha, logical proof is a craving for certainty. What matters is that one redescribe the world so that it’s possible to see the path to liberation. Giving up certainty, and logical proof, is in fact a precondition to insight into dharma. Attachment to any particular logic, process, or set of ideas, beliefs, or feelings can blind one to what is right in front of one. What is needed is what Freud famously called “even hovering attention,” but not only in relation to one’s mind, but one’s world. This notion is nicely described by the notion of tathata, or “suchness,” the flip-side of seeing the “emptiness” (shunyata) of things, which is to relate to them with openness, trying to see the world without beyond limiting preconceptions). A non-dual, multiplicitous way of relating to the world. Curiosity and openness to the new, identification with the Deleuzian virtual or the Lacanian object a, are perhaps other ways to say this. But what might that actually mean?

Dharma: From the Object a to Differance

Dharma cannot be taught, only modelled, and while one can help others to see it, they need to find it for themselves. And this is why the Buddha continually argued that the only proof or justification needed for his models was found in one’s own experience. Logical argumentation, the authority of others, or various types of ideas, clear or otherwise, all these can help us, but ultimately, they can also seduce us to forms of thinking which serve craving, and in particular, the craving for certainty. Buddhism doesn’t aim at logical proof. Rather, it aims to show a way to see for yourself.

But what it aims to show can only be shown by and through the world and its distinct and discrete objects, entities, experiences, thoughts, feelings, and words, but is ultimately beyond them. And once one sees that there is something beyond all these things, one can identify with it. But because it is a process, rather than a state, thing, or idea, it is hard to describe in words, or even to point to or hold. For language and the world crave, in a sense, in that they try to grasp what always slips out from underneath them, and the result is the impermanence of all things, the creation and cessation of everything in cycles. Only nirvana is beyond this, and the path to this is dharma.

In a sense, we could say that one nirvana-s by dharma-ing. Bending language towards the poetic is one means to help indicate what is there so sync with, and Zen koans and actions in response to questions are another.

What is there to see, what does the Buddha want us to grasp? In Deleuzian terms, we could say that the virtual is that which is continually giving rise to the actual, yet is always beyond it, and it is the pure freedom that is both the substance of everything that is, as well as the ultimate immanent ethical pull towards the betterment of what is, which is to say, greater freedom and liberation. In Lacanian terms, one could say that it is the Real, which terrifies us when it floods over us, and yet, if we identify with the object a, and hence desire like an analyst, we begin to relate to the world in the mode of the not-all, and we transform our symptoms into sinthomes, and ourselves with this, making ourselves into a continual point of separation in regard to images, signifiers, and narratives that try to ensnare us. In Derridean terms, we could say that always listening to the call of the Other, we enter into a continual tangental relation with writing, in the widest sense, by means of the continued ethical attempt to foster the liberation of the play of differance. In fact, Nagarjuna argues that ultimate truth will always slip away from conventional truth, which always deconstructs if taken to the limit, while ultimate truth, beyond words, will not, even if it requires conventional truths, like words, to point us on the path towards this. And for Nagarjuna, this truth is beyond absence or presence, it is non-dual, beyond time and in all time, and yet its precondition, so similar to differance, down to the deconstructive potential it brings.

While Derrida focuses on writing in a way I find too restrictive, and Lacan ultimately on human experience, they remain useful because I think they explain nicely how this identification with the nondual, the void, manifests in relation to language (Derrida), and human experience (Lacan). Deleuze, however, takes this to the next level, by relating these insights to the structure of the physical world.

The Buddhist-Deleuzian Virtual

The virtual is the potential for transformation, liberation, emergence, and freedom within all things. It is beyond things, yet it is what they are composed of when folded against itself. It is the process of folding of the virtual in relation to itself that potentiates the virtual to new forms, new modes of freedom. And here we see that the virtual needs the actual, to lose itself and become folded, in order to find new and different ways of unfolding. Like energy, but like energy and all that it can give rise to, the virtual folds into itself like energy binds itself by means of forces into consistent patterns known as matter. And matter is able to channel more energy into ever more complex forms.

What’s more, just as quantum phenomenon are full of freedom, beyond spacetime, so it is with the virtual. And yet, just like quantum phenomenon, which are impermanent and indefinite, and need the stability matter provides to increase in complexity, so it is with the virtual, it needs to become actual to give rise to new potentials. Quantum phenomenon might be incredibly free in an indefinite way, but only by means of choosing specific forms can they give rise to systems like those seen in matter which intertwine cosmic potentials, not in indefinite blurring and superposition, but as differentiations that are then intertwined. Quantum phenomenon cannot give rise to complex systems like dogs or humans or economies without taking definite stakes in the world, and then intertwining those. Virtuality must “fall” into matter, in order to give birth to itself in more complex forms. The virtual frees itself from the only prison it knows, its ‘mere’ potentiality, by putting itself in prison, and then using this prison to liberate itself in yet more virtual forms. Intensification occurs by going beyond and through its opposite for Deleuze, yet in a manner that in which there are always more than two in any opposition.

It is with this virtual potential for continued emergence of ever more intense ways of being free, of giving rise to new possibilities, that we need to identify with. Nirvana is samsara, it is this world seen from the perspective of its potentials to be freer. And this is why so much of Tibetan Buddhism is about visualization, because by imagining what we could become, even as we know it is only imagination, we practice what we could do.

Meditation: Identification with the Lacanian object a

And yet, along the way, there are obstacles, cravings that tie us down to particular things. The desire for security gives rise to paranoia, the need for absolute proof, to a rigidity in our modes of behavior. This is why Lacan says that the analyst is one who identifies with the object a, the leftover within any system, that which can unravel it. Meditation is a practice of staying with the object a.

For it is when we find that we are caught by a signifier or image that we need to remember that they will never completely capture the Real, something always escapes. And that which escapes is the radical potential for freedom from all particularities. This is why we shouldn’t identify with the Real as such, which can flood us, but rather, with that within the system of the world, the chains of fantasies and signs, which can take us beyond them. If images and signs, and the scripts and desires we produce from them, are like the Buddha’s notion of the distortions produced by karma, then we need to continually liberate ourselves from attachment to these.

This is what Lacan calls the desire of the analyst. This desire is a qualitatively different type of desire than any other described by psychoanalysis. It is not a desire to be something specific, but to always be free of any sign or image that tries to catch one, tie one down. It is the desire for freedom, and it manifests by taking on the logic of the ‘not-all’ which Lacan describes in relation to set theory in his theories of sexuation. Relating to signifiers and images with the logic of the not-all is to not be captured by any of them fully. To view them with detachment. To liberate oneself from signs and images, not by abandoning them, because how would we relate to the world? Rather, we change our relation to them. We convert samsara, the world of illusions, into nirvana, not by leaving the world, by by shifting our relation to it. From symptom to sinthome…

And this immediately brings with it compassion. For the desire of the analyst is the desire of the psychoanalyst, the one who analyzes their own images and signs, but also those of others. It is the one who says encore!, ‘I will not give way as to my desire,’ but rather, I will remain curious as to what newness life can yet produce, to have faith in the future in a radical way, in its potential to give rise to the radically new, and to liberation from suffering by means of this. For liberation does not mean we leave this world, that’s nihilism. Rather, it means we live it fully. Which means we desire, a desire beyond object, a desire for what’s always beyond any object, we become desiring analyzing and analyzing desiring, becoming beyond.

The result is what the Buddha calls bliss (ananda), which is contentment without craving, the freedom to be one’s own happiness in the world. This isn’t the sort of happiness that fluctuates wildly with suffering, or is intensely inmixed with it at the same time, both of which Lacan describes as forms of jouissance enjoyed by the Other at our expense. No, bliss is the management of flows of jouissance to come into sync with their coming and going, and even build new and more complex yet liberated flows thereof.

Of course, Lacan didn’t say this end part, he felt that detachment was all there is. But ultimately, the desire of the analyst must detach from detachment as well, and then non-attachment, for the object a is beyond both of these. And this is why, if you read the notebooks written by Guattari and recently published as The Anti-Oedipus Papers, we see that Felix Guattari’s goal, as Lacan’s star pupil about to turn his start defector, is to pluralize the object a in Lacan’s theories, to radicalize it. And what resulted were concepts like “the body without organs,” a notion which is itself simply a bodily form of the Deleuzian virtual. That is, when Guattari pluralized the object a, he found the Deleuzian virtual, and their work together was born.

The Desire of the Analyst, or Lacan Learns Compassion

Of course, the virtual is just one name amongst many for what they are trying to describe, and that which is beyond language must necessarily have many names within language, for it shows up differently in different locations, overflowing any particular embodiment or conceptualization. Like a four dimensional form, which can ingress in multiple spacetimes in our three dimensional world (for example, the wonderful depiction of the four-dimensional space whale in a recent episode by Futurama!). And it is for this reason that the networkological project refers to this notion, this radical overflowing of the world that is everywhere, nowhere, and beyond, as the oneand, for it exceeds any particular one, be this a thing, concept, person, process, etc., even as it is that of which any one is composed, even if that one never exhausts it, no matter how unified it may appear.

But any one is ever only something which will pass. Processes become static and solidify into contexts, forces, flows, and things, though these can be liberated from within when the things begin to sync with each other and evolve into acting, living, feeling, thinking, liberating forms. And in order to liberate oneself, one needs to understand this, to see the interconnections, the fact that even one’s deepest hopes, dreams, fears, ideas, one’s very body, was produced and is constantly reproduced by a context which is also constantly reproduced in turn. But it all could change. The most liberated state is the one which can adapt to and thrive in the most diverse conditions. This state is free from the world, not by leaving it, but by being in it. By learning to sync with its deep logic, the logic of changing in relation to the world. And helping others to learn this as well. One cannot become liberated alone. We are always in a context, and that context needs to evolve with us, or it will become a fetter to our own liberation. We need to liberate our context so it can better support our own evolution. And we need to support our evolution to better evolve our contexts. This is the Buddhist notion of compassion, the notion that we need to liberate not only ourselves or others, but become liberating as such.

And in a similar sense, Lacan was on to something quite Buddhist when he described the desire of the analyst, because by identifying with the process of analysis is what makes a person into an analyst, which is one who helps others by analyzing. If we substitute the word detachment, we see that a detacher is someone who specializes in detachment, and helps others do the same, for in doing so, they further identify with detachment, they become detachment, they are becoming detaching. And detachment is freedom. I am not this, nor am I that, but I all of these things. I am radical potential, if always already within a limited context that I need to liberate in order to liberate myself, and vice-versa.

And this is why to identify with potential, the virtual, freedom, liberation, purely impure desire, is to necessarily desire the same for others. To not just merely identify with liberation, but become liberation, one must liberate oneself from oneself, and with this, the binary that separates self and other. One is liberation, and in the process, emanates liberation in all directions, to all (you) encounter. By becoming a liberating, so to speak, one helps the world around one liberate itself, and in the process, this helps one to liberate oneself further. Liberation starts in the mind, but must move to others and matter. This is compassion for others, but it is also compassion for oneself. For one cannot truly become liberated without also liberating the world, first mentally, because that is where potential for change comes from, and then emotionally, because that is usually where we fixate, and then at all levels, socially in relation to others, and even potentially at the most obdurate physical forms. For humans are experts at impacting their physical environments with their technology, only, they often are run by what they create, rather than use it for their liberation and that of what’s around them.

Becoming-Liberating: Differencing Repetition, or Beyond Habit 

And in all this, we are bound by our habits, liberation is all about breaking habit. Liberation becomes dormant in habit, which becomes dormant in form. Matter is just habits of energy, and habits are just discoveries gone stale. Liberation is creativity. And all creativity needs a medium. In this case, one’s medium is the world in which one finds oneself. It is full of memory, or karma, solidified and calcified into things and habits. From this, one can produce liberation, not into nothingness, or a return to pure quantum indefiniteness. But rather, the introduction of quantum-style freedom into mind, and then matter. Mind is already a start, it is freer than matter, though ultimately, mind is simply the way matter feels from the inside, at least from a non-dualist perspective. Mind is simply the less constrained side of matter. Complexify matter, and you complexify the experience within it, or mind.

And it is dynamic systems which seem to do complexification/liberation best. The more complex a dynamic system, the more free its matter, the more free its mind, and the more this leads to greater freedoms in matter in turn. The evolution of the cosmos can in this sense be seen as the attempt by dharma, the principle of liberation, to give birth to itself in matter, and then transcend it, to free itself from indefiniteness, and then regain the freedom of the indefinite within the definite. Humans are the cutting edge of this evolution. And yet we fall so short of our potentials. It is time to complexify, to liberate ourselves, by becoming liberating.

But first we need to see ourselves differently, not by means of words and things and people, but not despite them either. We need to “look awry,” so to speak, and grasp that which is necessarily beyond grasping. Meditation is practice for this, because at each moment when we meditate, we realize, I am not that thought, not that feeling, and yet, I can hold them in myself, I can wear them like clothing, not deny them, accept them, and learn to be with them, no matter how painful or pleasurable. And in doing so, I gain strength to be beyond limitation, I learn to be beyond the need to be this or that, and I learn to be mentally flexible. This is training for learning to make the world physically flexible. We need an activist Buddhism, one which trasforms the world. Not by merely meditating in the mind, but by making all action meditation, of not giving way as to our desire, transforming craving into liberation.

And most Buddhists will argue that meditation is simply practice for making one’s whole life a meditation. And this is why we need to fully transcend the thought/action binary, one which goes beyond sitting in a monastery. Traditional Buddhist practice seem, to me, to not take its own logic far enough. There needs to be a meditation of pure activity, the activity of liberating, true compassion. This is why Buddhists preach the dharma, namely, to change the world. As Marx said, philosophy should not merely aim to describe the world, but to change it. To liberate it. And to do this, one needs to liberate the means of production, which, as Deleuze and Guattari saw, includes the production of ourselves. There is physical and social production. We need to liberate all of these. Even from the monastery, or the monastery state that once existed in Tibet. For those who accuse Buddhism of quietism, it isn’t in the doctrines as much as how they are put into practice.

And so, meditation in a monastery is not enough. Liberation from craving does not mean not desiring, it means desiring better, desiring liberation, desiring the one type of desire which is more than the drive (which for Lacan always has an object), but which is always and only desire for the intensification of desire, not merely in quantity but quality and kind, and not merely in oneself, but in the world as a whole. This is compassion, bliss, to be desire for desire in all it’s radical impurity, to be the virtual becoming actual becoming virtual becoming intensification liberation. It is dharma.

Complexification and Emergence: Ecological Evolutionism

But a dharma that doesn’t limit itself to the mental. This is why the Tibetan lamas were right to use virtual reality techniques with their visualizations, and to try to transform their physical bodies. But this is still too limited. The entire world needs to be liberated. And this starts from what’s easiest to liberate, the mind, and then works its way outward, to the minds around one, to culture. The physical body liberates itself through these liberations. And while we may yet find ways to liberate flesh and matter, we risk collapse if we mess too much with the ground under our feet.

For it is possible to botch liberation, and this is why always we need to remember that the Buddha urged neither asceticism nor hedonism, but the middle path, between extremes yet making use of the best within them all, that which leads to the best, which is maximum liberation, not from the world, but within it. Which means we cannot destroy it, but build it ever better. And to do this, we need to learn what works best. Experiment, and learn.

And in the process, cultivate that within our environment which produced the path to liberation within us and beyond us. And so, on a physical level, to foster that which leads to evolution of life, that which sustains life, and that which increases the complexity of that which is around it. This is a compassion of matter, and it leads to maximum freedom of matter, a democracy of matter. And just as we should help evolution evolve our world, we should help it evolve us as well, all with the goal of a sustainably evolving and self-liberating world as a whole as a goal. We evolve best to liberation when our world is as well.

This is identifying with emergence. For by identifying with emergence in all its forms, by becoming emerging, we help all around us emerge more intensely, including ourselves. For in fact, we only ever emerge more intensely when we help that which is around us emerges more intensely. Growth and development only ever occurs by means of intertwining. The precondition for this is differentiation, intensification through closing off, but this only leads to intensification at a higher level if it then intertwines back into emergence again.

This is why reification, thingification, differentiation, these are not bad things in an of themselves, but only when seen as ends in themselves. They are potential paths to new forms of freedom. Without the limitation of enclosing itself in a cell, life could never have formed multi-cellular complexity. A step backwards allows two steps forward, while an attempt to go forwards without this will never work. The virtual only potentiates by differentiating and intertwining with itself so as to channel more virtual. Production requires anti-production to produce more, at least in the language of Anti-Oedipus, for this is what gives it the consistency to intensify its complexification.

The balance between production and anti-production is essential, the Buddhist middle path, what complex systems theorists call meta-stability, that which keeps one and one’s environment continually pushing to higher states of evolution, while being careful to safeguard the evolution of all to avoid collapse. For the Buddhist middle-way is between extremes, and this is how non-duality manifests in action, for it is neither extremely this, nor extremely that. It is not too conservative to grow, nor too radical that it expends itself without reserve. It is not cancerous growth without limit, nor paranoid isolation. If, as Hegel famously argued, particularity without the universal is the definition of evil, it is selfishness and paranoia that are evil, and this is precisely what the Buddha taught. Selfishness and paranoia ultimately undercut that which they aim to promote, namely, safety, certainty, and stability at all costs. And growth at all costs is simply this in another form, a desire for complete sameness, or complete nothingness, which ultimately lead to each other. No, it is transformation, the balance between growth and consolidation, which is the middle way. Meta-stability, meta-evolution, growth, complexification.

Networkological Buddhism

Evolution, continual evolution of oneself and environment, this is identification with the virtual, the object a, and ultimately, emergence. The conscious evolution of our own evolution. An ethics of meta-evolution, an ethics of life, complexity, and emergence. That is what Buddhism proposes. And the similarities between this and networkological relationalism are profound.

Like the networkological project, Buddhism sees the world as infinite, eternal, fractal, holographic, of infinite potential, in and beyond all reification, in process, ordered by rules which provide a path to liberation, and fundamentally evolving towards complexity. The networkological project views all that is as the intertwining of emergence with itself as relation, a process which potentiates emergence to emerge more intensely from itself by intertwining with this relation to produce complexity. And complexity is simply dormant emergence, which can be used to give emergence structure, or to power further emergence in the process of unfolding in a way which intertwines with other complexity.

If this seems paradoxical, it is. At least, as paradoxical as gasoline is. For gasoline is simply highly compressed energy in matter, which if channelled properly by other matter, can give rise to electricity which can intertwine with inert matter to produce objects in a factory, or with dynamic matter like my body to produce things like these theories. Gasoline is more than just matter, or even potential energy, it is potential theories, potential objects, potential to become many, many things, depending on what it intertwines with. So it is with emergence and its complexification. Emergence self-potentiates by folding with itself, intertwining its folds, and then unfolding in an intertwined way with these folds, and for this is precisely what is meant by complexification. As strange as this might sound, this seems to be the picture painted by contemporary fundamental physics, and many have found parallels between this and a Buddhist worldview.

And this is why one always emerges only with one’s world. One needs to change one’s world to change oneself, because our world evolves us, and vice-versa. But even the desire to emerge can become a trap, if it is reified. For as the Buddha argued, one cannot become attached to this desire, but to emerge from desiring it in the manner of craving, which is what desire turns into when it reifies its object, rather than emerges continually from it. And we can never know what we will desire in the future, but so long as we emerge from it, we will be ok, for desiring emergence is a radically different type of desire, it is desire detached from craving.

This is beyond language. It is virtual, dharma, a path rather than a thing, theory, or a specific set of doctrines. Words, actions, things, they will all betray it. And yet it can be shown by means of these things, if indirectly.

And this is why many Buddhist cosmologies describe the Buddha’s body as an avatar, an incarnation, for the Buddha is beyond any body, and is rather a principle, dharma, an ordering which teaches how to give rise to more liberated and complex ordering. The Buddha is beyond all spacetime, and yet manifests differently, as each needs, in relation to its particular needs, pointing the way towards liberation. The Buddha is like a pull, the pull towards emergence. It is the pull towards life in matter, the pull towards evolution in life, and the pull towards liberation in consciousness. It is emergence, that which is most intensely itself when it is emerging from itself as complexity. It is the tendency within all that is for the better.

This is an ethics, politics, ontology, and epistemology. For if the Buddha urges us to move beyond craving, this is a middle path, one which finds no certainty nor seeks any, but seeks sync with the deeper logic of what is, and finds its only justification in what its praxis produces. Beyond any theory, it is an attempt to emerge from within any theory that allows it to take root. Ethics, politics, ontology, epistemology, these are tools from which a ladder can be forged, the famous Buddhist raft towards liberation which can then be discarded after use, or the famed ladder described by Wittgenstein (but without the limitations that came with his earlier project).

This is a radical post-dialectics, what Benjamin called a “tiger’s leap into the future,” the pulling of oneself into radical futurity, pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, climbing the rope that one strings, leaping into the Klein bottle and after two twists coming out at oneself yet also beyond oneself. Emergence, Dharma, Virtual, Liberating.

Dreaming, Writing, Acting…

I rarely write like this, in my posts. But this is what it’s like inside my head. And sometimes it is fun to dream out loud, with no constraints. The downside of this is that only those with prior training can follow the philosophical dreamscapes produced this way. The upside is that it’s possible to use language to its fullest, to imagine new realities, dreamworlds, any of which can become reality. By sketching dreamworlds, we imagine what could be. And by translating these back into everyday language, we make this accessible to others.

But why do we need all these forms? Specialized language, like poetry, helps us dream, and dreaming is where we try on new possible realities before we try to make them ever more real. Philosophy, like religion, mathematics, and poetry, is a way to imagine virtual worlds that can influence and even change reality.

But the danger is that these worlds become an end in themselves. And so there’s a need to use the specialized languages that philosophy, math, and other artistic forms provide, to dream with the stuff of the world, and yet, to always find a path back, a path to action, to politics, ethics, and science. If we let the concrete or the imaginary predominate, we lose the middle path, we lose the potentials to maximum evolution and liberation.

And yet, why not simply learn to dream in everyday language? This would be to cut off the most radical tools we have to dream with. No, we need to exploit the full potentials of every medium. And yet, we also need to keep action and worldchanging in mind. The middle path. And this means not the path of  the mediocore middle any more than simply the extremes. It means meta-stability, it means, as Deleuze would say, both…and…and….

A liberating requires dreaming and acting, and all beyond and in between. And a writing which aims towards liberation needs not only dream, or only speak towards use and action, but all and neither and beyond and in between. This is language without grasping, and acting without grasping, dreaming without grasping, and going beyond without grasping. It is emerging, or the dream of emergence. And if all writing is a form of acting, and yet, dreaming of acting as well, then we also need to act upon our dreams by doing more than just writing.

But writing is a start, writing calls into our future and challenges our past, and speaks to us anew each present. It is a meditation, a challenge to ourselves and others, to dare us all to dream, and to live up to our dreams.

Of course, all this is much easier said than done. Identifying with the object a, the virtual, emergence, the oneand, these are processes, life-processes, that take continual practice…

Buddhism as Practice of Desire: On Non-Dualism and Nirvana

Mandelbrot Buddha: The Buddha is a Principle Beyond Time, Space, and Duality, and so is Nirvana. So Nirvana can't be simply lack of desire...

Last night I had dinner with a friend, and mentioned to him how helpful Buddhist ideas had been to me lately in terms of dealing with loss, crisis, and the difficulties of life. And he explained to me why Buddhism had never appealed to him, and he described what I’d always felt about Buddhism, until very recently. Namely, that it was what I’d been taught in H.S. and college. And it isn’t.

Here’s what he said to me: “I remember learning the Four Noble Truths in H.S. Everything is suffering, desire causes suffering, the way out of suffering is to get rid of desire, and that’s nirvana. That doesn’t sound all that good to me, why get rid of all desire? Would that really make you happy? I don’t think so.”

And of course, he’s right, destroying all desire would likely make you miserable! But as I’ve tried to show in some recent posts, Buddhism isn’t about destroying desire. This takes some explaining, of course, because it’s against what most of us have been taught about Buddhism, usually in our World History classes in HS.

And in fact, we can see this in the Buddhist notion, nearly as famous and just as ancient as the Four Noble Truths, which is the notion of the Buddha’s way as the “middle path.” The Buddha saw the religions of his day as radically ascetic, divided between the highly conservative Brahmanic rituals, and the wild monks in the forests who practiced various types of self-mortification. The Buddha believed we should live between these various asceticisms and hedonism. And if the middle path is between asceticism and hedonism, which the Buddha is quite clear about in the earliest Buddhist texts we have then getting rid of desire is likely not his path. Then what is?

Why Isn’t Buddhism About Killing Off Desire? A Detour Through the Pali Language

One way to start answering this question is to examine the language used in the earliest Buddhist scriptures, which are the closest thing we have to what the actual Buddha might have said. Much of what follows here will concern Nikaya Buddhism, which is the term scholars use to describe what they believe was practiced by Buddhists in its earliest stages, which is during the Buddha’s life and in the few hundred years afterwards. This is to distinguish this from the Mahayana Buddhism that emerges about five hundred years after the Buddha’s death, and which becomes the dominant form of Buddhism thereafter, as well as the Therevada school which survives today, but which is still different from original Nikaya Buddhism, even if less so than the Mahayana schools (which include the later tantric Vajrayana schools as subdivisions).

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on Nikaya Buddhism, which is to say, the earliest scriptures, because if we’re interested in what the Buddha actually said, it is to the earliest scriptures we need to go. However, this is problematic to some extent. Firstly, Buddha was an oral teacher, and wrote nothing down, everything was committed to paper years after this death, and likely after hundreds of years of oral transmission. In addition, however, the Buddha would likely argue that such a craving for certainty as to his authentic words versus others is just another form of the desiring for permanence that his teachings attempt to alleviate. But for purposes of argument, let’s look at the oldest Buddhist scriptures, and see how even there, getting rid of desire isn’t quite the point.

In the Pali language spoken by the Buddha and his immediate disciples, a language often quite similar to Sanskrit), the cause of suffering is tanha. Of course, the meaning of this word has likely shifted dramatically over time, not the least because of its role in the rise of Buddhism. The term is most directly translated as “thirst,” which is not the same as “desire,” which is kama in the Pali language, as seen in the title of the famed Kama-Sutra, a later Sanskrit text which is a how-to book on sensual, sexual, and physical desires. It is also distinct from the Pali word lobha (raga in Sanskrit), which is passion, as well as “grasping” (upadana in Pali), or greed (kamachanda, from Pali words kama and chanda, which is an effort to get something). Chanda isn’t always bad, however, because the ‘desire’ for liberation is referred to by the term chanda, and some have suggested converting tanha to chanda is precisely the goal of Buddhist practices. Further help in understanding tanha comes about when we see that it was subdivided in the earliest scriptures into types, including kamatanha (desire for physical pleasures), bhavatanha (desire for something to be or exist), and vibhavatanha (desire for nothingness).

Either way, the Buddha is quite clear that tanha leads to dukka, often translated as “suffering,” but more precisely translated by some scholars as “dissatisfaction, consistent unsatisfactoriness,” of which according to Carl Olson in The Different Paths of the Buddha, “If one retrieves the root meaning of the term, dukkha refers to an axle that is off center to its wheel, or it is like a bone that slips out of its socket” (52). And dukkha is caused by avidya (ignorance, delusion), such that what’s needed then is a change of perspective on things, seeing them as they “really are.” The result is nibbana (nirvana in Sanskrit), which literally means “extinction.” But what precisely are we supposed to extinguish?

This gets tricky. It seems clear that once one does achieve nibbana, there isn’t nothing, but rather, the state of upekkha, often translated as “equanimity” or  ”detachment” (and often mistaken for sheer “indifference.”) Another result is ananda, which is bliss, joy, or contentment, or sukkha, which is the exact opposite of dukkha, since it originally means an axle that is centered in its wheel. So it seems that we need to get centered, and we do this by getting rid of that which makes us uncentered. All of which bring us to the contentious issue of rebirth.

Why Reincarnation Happens All the Time: A Detour through Neuroscience and Quantum Physics

What is it that keeps us off center? This is kamma (karma in Sanskrit, different from kama, or sense-pleasure). Kamma/karma is a term which goes back to way before Buddhism, it is one of the core terms of Hinduism. It is that which gives rise to rebirth in the cycle of reincarnation. This term has many, many meanings, and can be translated as action, cause, or effect. This ultimately makes sense, however, because it describes how actions act as both causes and effects, for past actions influence us in ways that effect our future actions, or at least, our tendency towards them. This is why some people have linked karma to memory or habit, because it describes the more we act a certain way, the more likely we are to act this way in the future. This is something that has a basis in contemporary neuroscience, in the notion of LTP (long-term potentiation), though the power of habit is something we all experience every day, and don’t really need neuroscience to see as part of everyday life.

So if we’ve acted a certain way in the past, it gives rise to what many have called a “constriction” of our discernment, and this leads us to tend to repeat those actions in the future, because we are blinded by our illusion/delusion (avidya) caused by the influence of past actions on our present, and through this, the future. The link to memory, whether bodily, mental, or even cultural, seems pretty powerful. Habit blinds us to other possibilities, and tends to just repeat itself. The result is suffering, and so learning the Buddha’s path would be an attempt to break some bad habits of thinking and acting.

The most pernicious of all of these, however, is the self. The original Pali scriptures indicate the non-self (anatta) as essential to the Buddhist path. But why get rid of the self? Firstly, because it isn’t really there, it’s an illusion. According to Carl Olson, the Buddha argues in the early Pali scriptures the following:

The Buddha answers that we are composed of five khandas, which can be translated as heaps or aggregates [or] branches of a tree or the shoulder of a body…the five aggregates [of matter, sensations or feelings, perceptions, mental constituents, consciousness]…are constantly in a state of flux…mental dispositions help to explain why it is impossible to have pure perceptions…the fifth aggregate is consciousness, which represents a reaction… Ever-changing consciousness serves to explain the continuity of experience, time, and ultimately rebirth, even though it represents disunity rather than the unity of a personal self… From this perspective, a “person” is a series of clusters of p hysical and mental events that occur in a human pattern… [But] If there is no real self that endures, what happens after death?… The Buddha responds to this problem by using the example of a flame being passed from one candle to another. The question arises: Is the flame on the last candle the smae as the original flame? … there is a causal connection between the flames of the candles, although there is nothing of substance that is involved. Likewise, what is subject to rebirth is an impulse of kammic energy that is transmitted to a new mode of existence” (61-3).

The Buddha thinks we are like a pattern of quantum events that happen to dance together for a while. Of course, contemporary quantum physics actually takes this view, each object in front of us is nothing more than a relatively stable pattern of events, an intertwined dancing of energy which is stable for a period of time, giving rise to stable matter. But eventually, the energy will unwind, and the dancers will disperse, and then, where did the dance go? Ultimately, it was nothing but the sustained patterned intertwining of these energies. Our selves are just that.

And this helps explain why the Buddhist notion of reincarnation isn’t perhaps as strange as it might seem. Rebirth, and hence death, happens at each and every moment. For example, when we sleep, our “consciousness” flashes out of existence. It sometimes remerges from the depths of sleep in the semi-consciousness of dreams, but most often, it is simply gone. During these pauses, does our “self” cease to exist? Well, there is a body there, but is our self just dormant there?

As contemporary science has shown us, the physical form of our brain, the wiring of the neurons, is what holds our memories. And if, as many neuroscientists have argued, consciousness comes about when parts of the brain fire in sync with each other, such that our waking consciousness, or consciousness of any sort, is what happens when patterns of activation in our brain come into sync with each other, with small patterns as thoughts and the largest “dynamic core” as conscious awareness itself, then isn’t the Buddha actually right?

It seems quite likely, from such a perspective, that our sense of selfis the dance in our brains. It’s a process, not a thing, for while it requires the physical memories stored in the brain, which we can think of as a form of karmic deposits, to reconstitute, just like a dance requires the physical bodies of the dancers to dance it, ultimately, it is nothing more than a temporary process, a mode of coordination between the flows that are channeled by the wires in our brains.

From such a perspective, we die and are reborn not only each time we go to sleep, but in a sense, each thought and feeling is born and dies, and in a sense, we are born and die each moment as the dance mutates. For if this dance is nothing more than the beating of neurons firing in sync, then the pulse of these firings could in a sense be the speed of our thought, and some scholars have argued that these sorts of neural clocks, and how they speed up and slow down, explains why time seems to stretch and contract in its lived form, even if it doesn’t seem to do so in relation to clocks.

And so, if we die and are reborn each moment, reincarnation seems less, well, silly. What happens after death? Some Buddhists believe that our energies, memories, bodily components, and others go back into some cosmic well, and are then redistributed. And this ties into an early Buddhist belief that the universe couldn’t have been created, but must have been here in some form for all eternity, since even before a creation event there must have been something with the potential to do this creating, and hence, we were there in some sort of potential form.

Likewise, all that’s here now will recycle, because, as science has shown us, matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. And while we don’t know if there was something like matter, energy, or even time or space before the Big Bang, there must’ve been something like something for there to have been whatever gave rise to the Big Bang.

Other Buddhist schools believe that our self will reincarnate into another sentient lifeform, and in this it is closer to traditional Hindu belief systems. And how we act, via our karma, will determine which new type of form will be attractive to us, and since like attracts like, we can go down the ladder and end up an animal, or go higher and become a more enlightened human in our next life.

But What Exactly Is Nirvana?

How does this all help us in figuring out what nirvana is? In fact, this question has been debated, not only in the Buddhist tradition through the centuries, but in the earliest scriptures as well. It seems that, according to the Pali canon, that nirvana is outside time and space, the chain of causation, and it is free, liberated, and “unconditioned.” But just because it is outside of the realm of causation doesn’t mean it is nothing, it’s just that it’s hard for us to understand. And as the Pali canon makes pretty clear, nirvana is not something that can be grasped successfully by words, which are limited human constructs.

And so in order to even grasp what nirvana might be, we need to get beyond our traditional notions of what it means to be something, be describable in language, or of a self which could describe or be. For if part of the path towards nirvana is understanding that the self is itself an illusion, then isn’t there something paradoxical here? In fact there is:

“If there is no self, who or what realizes nibbana?… The Buddhist answer is that there is no permanent self to annihilate … According to the predominant Sanskrit viewpoint, to blow out the candle is not to detroy the light but is rather to transform its mode of existence from visible to invivle. Similarly, nibbanna is not the annihilation of the person or soul… What are extinguished are the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion” (65).

Now if the Buddha was enligtened and achieved nibbana while he was still alive, we shouldn’t think of nirvana as nothingness, but, as some have argued, no-thing-ness. It is possible to have this state while alive, and also after the death of the physical body. But does one just vanish after this? This remains unclear, at least in terms of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. However, there seems as much reason to believe that it is a state of simply being outside time, space, body, desire, distortion, etc. One is centered, blissful, and joyous. This doesn’t sound like nothing. Rather, it seems like one is liberated, but not gone.

Why the Buddha Argues for the Middle Path

The difficulty of grasping precisely what the Buddha felt about nibbana is what lead to disagreements within Buddhism, and this is tied to the split between Therevada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism. The Therevada side, which sees itself as much more purist, views the approach to nirvana as one of removal, or as Olsen argues, “purification.” The Mahayana side, however, tends to the side which feels that nirvana is something that can’t merely be described negatively, but rather, in more descriptive terms. It is a state outside time and space, but it is still blissfull and a state of equanimity.

Nirvana then isn’t simply being gone, but as the famed Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna argued, emptiness (shunyata in Sanskrit), which means composed only of infinite chains of causal connection to what is around it. For as the Buddha famously argued in his example of the chariot, if you take a chariot apart, is it in its parts? Which one can you remove and say it’s not a chariot? So it is with the self, or anything in the world. This is what Nagarjuna calls the emptiness of everything. Is this nirvana?

Nagarjuna and the Mahayana tradition famously argue that nirvana is samsara. And hence, what is needed isn’t that we leave this world, but rather, that we recenter ourselves within it, like the axle and the wheel. We don’t leave the world, we relate to it differently. We see everything, including ourselves, as empty, as void, as caused by chains of influence and habit, and we step outside of this. In doing so, we remove ourselves from the need to be one way or another, and become totally free. We don’t cease, but we cease being constrained, even if this means being constrained by a self. Between a belief in nothing at all (nihilism) and belief in absolute permanence (absolutism), Nagarjuna pursues the “middle way” of emptiness, between nothing and something. Many later scholars, particularly Zen Buddhists, described this approach to things as “suchness” (tathata or dharmata in Sanskrit, chen-ju in Chinese, shinnyo in Japanese). Suchness is an attempt to approach everything in our world by means of emptiness. Between fullness and nothingness, it is seeing the world without pre-conceived filters, learning to see it as if for the first time, being open to surprise and the new.

All of which would lend us to support the conclusion that nirvana is a state outside of time, place, space, self, and even non-self. The orginal Pali corpus indicates that desire for nothingness is desire as well, and that we should avoid desire for being as much as non-being. Both are desire, and desire for specific states. And if the Buddha preaches the middle way, between hedonism and asceticism, this is also the middle way between other extremes. The Buddha was critical of the Brahmanic notion that the world was created by gods, for the Buddha felt it was always there. But he also felt that the Cavarka school of atheistic materialist philosophers, a thriving sect in his day, were also wrong. The Cavarka believed that what’s present here and now is all there is, and after we die, that’s it.

But the Buddha also came up with his theories at a period in which the dominant approach to the world was the Brahamanic semi-dualism in which the goal was to see through illusion (maya in Sanskrit), to see the true realm of the gods. The Buddha believed we shouldn’t see through to the gods, but rather, he was agnostic about the gods. We should just see through, and this was enough to bring us to nirvana. And what is to be seen? That everything is connected in chains, what he called dependent origination (patticcasamuppada in Pali), the chain of influences which includes karma, or as Nagarjuna put it so well later, that everything is void. And this would include nirvana itself, which is neither thing nor non-thing, but void. And since it is the only thing the Buddha describes as being outside the karmic chain, it is either nowhere or everywhere. And likely, both, and neither.

Buddhism as Non-dualism

And this is why so many later Buddhist scholars have argued that we simply can’t apply human reasoning or language to nirvana. It is not something that can be grasped, no matter how much we thirst for it. And in fact, our very attempts to grasp for it are part of the very problem! This is thirst, once again. Once we see it correctly, however, we realize that nirvana isn’t a thing, or a place, or a lack, or a presence, but is beyond these.

And this is why the notion of non-duality (advaita in Sanskrit) becomes so essential to both Buddhism and later forms of Hinduism that arose in response to Buddhism. For in fact, much of what non-Hindus consider the core beliefs of classical Hinduism today, as based in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, were formed in response to early Buddhism, and systematized during the period of the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism, which many see as a counter-response to the shifts in Hinduism.

In the Gita, for example, one needs to see beyond the maya or distortions in our perspective produced by karma and make an internal sacrifice of all actions to Krishna, and become one with Krisha, an avatar of Vishnu, who is outside form, time, space, place, etc. Krishna briefly reveals his true form to Arjuna in the text, and he is literally incapable of comprehending the multiplicity of forms. This isn’t absence, but rather, radical plenitude, even if it is absence of a particular form, time, space, etc., but the potential for all of these. Beyond lack and absence, it is pure potential which can be actualized in multiple ways in multiple spacetimes.

And this is how much of the later Buddhist tradition then presents the Buddha, such that his bodily form was just an avatar of the principle or force or teaching or law (all possible translations of damma in Pali, dharma in Sanskrit) which the Buddha truly is.

Mahayana and later forms of Buddhism, as well as Advaita Vedanta of the sort systematized by the famed Hindu philosopher Shankara, argue that we should strive for non-duality, that which is beyond binaries, and hence, that which would be beyond even binaries and non-binaries!

Contemporary philosophy has many analogues of this. The deconstruction of Jacques Derrida can be seen as an attempt to identify with differance, Jacques describes the attempt to continually identify with the object a as his famed notion of the ”desire of the analyst,” and for Deleuze, his ethical project of becoming-virtual describes an attempt to identify with the virtual, which seems a pretty great description of what nirvana is when conceived in the mode of non-dualism.

Beyond Desire, and Non-Desire

We can never know exactly what the Buddha said. Like Jesus, he never wrote himself, and his words were passed down orally for centuries before being written. And even after being written down, scholarship in devotional literatures from around the globe before the age of printing often modified sacred texts to be copied as what they thought should be there, rather than what actually was there. It is impossible to know if ancient texts come down to us unmodified.

In all it’s forms, however, it seems unlikely that the Buddha wanted us to get rid of desire, but rather, to get beyond the desire/non-desire binary, the nirvana/samsara binary. To recenter. To see and act differently. And to cease thirsting, but also non-thirsting. And this is why Buddhist literature is so full of paradox. It requires we move beyond the limitations of selfhood, and even language. This is why many have described its goal as moving us beyond reification, which is to say, the “thing-ificiation” of aspects of the world. To try to see the world from a perspective beyond time and space, beyond ourselves, and to use this perspective to help us live differently.

And this is also why the later Mahayana Buddhists felt that compassion for the suffering of others was essential to the Buddha’s plan. Because as soon a one sees that the self is an illusion, then we start to see just suffering, whether that of myself or anyone else, as that which hinders liberation. And hence, to liberate myself, I need to liberate others, and to liberate others, I need to liberate myself. And this means to identify with the Buddha-principle, the Buddhadharma, which simply means the teaching of the enlightened one.

The middle way, the non-dual path. Nirvana is samsara. The world remains the same, and yet everything is different. We still desire, but we do not thirst, we detach. And in the process, we paradoxically desire better, because it no longer runs us. We can live life more fully, and have bliss. Bliss is contentment, not needing outside things to be happy. But to enjoy them if they come, but not have that enjoyment turn into an expectation of further joy, since that is a trap which will create later suffering when, like everything, the enjoyment passes.

This is of course paradoxical. Equanimity, however, is the only happiness that cannot be taken away. It is the only secure pleasure. And this is why the Dalai Lama says that if you are to be selfish, at least be smart about it. The best way to achieve the maximum pleasure is to take the long view. Pursue bliss, equanimity. And then any added pleasure is just a boon, but you won’t be limited by it after.

The ancient Greek Epicureans in fact believed something incredibly similar. Limit your desires, live a simple life, and then no loss will ruin your happiness. Gain your pleasure from striving for maximum pleasure, which meant learning to curb unnecessary desires, and keep only that for maximum pleasures, which meant going beyond desire, and in fact, through it. Then each pleasure becomes a blessing, without also becoming a cage. Friendship and community of like minded individuals is the best way to help you get there, but ultimately, this too can be a trap. Becoming identified with the gods is the goal, just like in Vedantic Hinduism, and in its more radical agnostic way, identifying with the principle of desire beyond desire, or nirvana.

This is the paradoxical path of Buddhism. Give up the whole world to gain it better. Give up desiring to learn to desire better. Give up the self to be it better.

A Brief Map of Indic Thought: Knowing Tantra from Krishna and Vedanta and Beyond

Krisha showing Arjuna what's beneath appearances in the "Bhadavad-Gita"

If you’ve ever been curious about Indian thought, yet can’t seem to keep straight the difference between Veda and Vedanta, Upanishad and Atman, Shiva and Sutra, this post is for you. A roadmap to help first time explorers navigate the baffling complexity of Indian thought. Of course, what follows will be a radical oversimplification. But it may help first timers out there get a sense of the terrain of Indic thought, and not be overwhelmed not even knowing where to start.

The last few posts I’ve been exploring Buddhism, and in particular, Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism. There are strong similarities to the worldview described by Tibetan Buddhism and the networkological perspective. Tibetan Buddhism views the stuff of the world as fractal, relational, relative, perspectival, practically infinite in spacetime, with practically infinite potential in its aspects, with reification as the primary source of problems, and with everything seen as a refraction of the whole, including ourselves. All of these notions are shared, in one form or another, by the networkological worldview.

Studying Buddhism, however, inevitably leads to Hinduism, and if in my last post I tried to differentiate some of the vehicles of Buddhism from each other, this post will attempt to provide a basic roadmap to help folks orient in the baffling proliferation of worldviews that is the Hindu Tradition. As will become clear, many of the ideas within Buddhism are shared by various Hinduisms, and that both traditions evolved over time, and often in relation to each other.

Learning the Pitfalls of Trying to Study Indic Thought

For this reason it’s probably best to refer to the nexus of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and other schools which originated within, or drew primary inspiration from India (ie: Chinese and Japanese Buddhisms) as “Indic” philosophies, as some scholars have suggested. For in truth, these various approaches to the world have more in common than not, and it’s difficult to understand any of them in  isolation from each other, just as much as it’s often difficult to understand changes in these traditions over time without mentioning how these various schools responded to each other.

One problem  that is often encountered in studying all of these traditions is one mentioned by Kim Knott, namely, that different texts on these approaches have different biases. Western scholarly approaches to the study of these traditions are often radically different from western or Indic ”devotional” sources, which aim to recruit converts, or help practitioners master a spiritual discipline. Often devotional sources will pull as much from oral transmission and personal experience, much as Indic sources have for millennia, as much as from scholarly forms of documentation, evidence, etc. And very often, there are simply different criteria as to what counts as worthwhile in these approaches. For example, in traditions that believe in reincarnation, attributing a work to a particular author might be inherently problematic, because the author of the physical text might be seen as a reincarnation of an earlier sage who “really” wrote the text. For example, either you believe that the philosopher Nagarjuna lived over six hundred years, or that he was several different people telescoped into one. Likewise, criterion for dating texts might be radically different in sacred/devotional texts and western scholarly ones.

It seems to me there’s benefits to taking all of these varied sources. The very fact that the authorship and dating of texts might be different in sacred/devotional and western scholarly contexts is itself worth learning, and there’s much that can be learned from the living oral tradition, still alive today. For in fact, many of the written texts in these traditions are only bare-bones guidelines, which were understood as needing explication. In fact, the sutra (thread) genre, one of the most famous in Indic literatures, makes use of short aphorisms which condense large amounts of knowledge. This makes them easier to memorize. The teacher then needs to explain and fill in the context. A great example is that I mentioned in an earlier post, Robert Thurman’s excellent Jewel Tree text, in which he spends several hundred pages expanding on the meanings of a 10 page poetic text.

It’s also worth noting that when texts are prepared by those from various devotional traditions, they might be biased against certain other traditions. Hindu texts on Indian philosophy might present Buddhism as a strange aberration which has since died out in India. And so those who read texts on ‘Indian philosophy’ might find that the text covers the “six schools,” all of which are Hindu. Buddhist oriented sources, however, often view Hinduism as a mere precursor to the flowering of Buddhism. It’s essential to have an understanding of where any given text is coming from, and in regard to the Indic tradition, there are so many options.

Another concern when studying Indic thought is simply how ancient much of it is. Scholars vary widely about the age of the earliest sources, but none contest the fact that the Indic spiritual tradition is the oldest continuous culture on the planet. Most of the earliest texts were conveyed orally for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before being written down. And we know from how many of these texts continue to be passed down this way today just how careful and accurate this can be when done in the disciplined manner which often occurs in this context. But this makes dating texts, both absolutely and relative to each other, as often a highly problematic affair.

Then there’s the issue of language. Most of the Indic scriptures are written in Sanskrit, though there are exceptions, such as the original Buddhist scriptures being written in Pali, a related yet distinct language. And as anyone studying Indic thought quickly comes to learn, one quickly has to develop a lexicon of Sanskrit terms to understand much of anything being said. However, often there are competing etymologies of words, offered by competing schools. And while the same terms are used by most schools, they are used in often very different ways. And so, just because you know what a word like dharma means in one context doesn’t mean you know what it means in another. In fact, understanding how a given school redefines each crucial term in the general Indic lexicon is often a key to understanding what they’re trying to say.

Then there’s the continual competition for followers. Very often the position a school takes on ritual sex, or the caste system, or whether liberation is social or individual, can have radical differences on how popular it is, and this translated into followers, money, buildings, power, etc. And many of the shifts within these belief systems seem to occur in relation to the attempt to compete for followers.

Few philosophical traditions in the world can better be described as a multiplicity as the Indic tradition. For there truly are certain themes which unify the entire tradition in nearly all its forms, even if these are radically distinct in others.

Basic Time Periods: The Vedic Prehistory

Let’s now lay out a general map of this often bafflingly dense terrain. Time periods are likely to be the most helpful path, though I won’t generally mention dates, because they are so disputed. One great source to help with the general layout like this is the oddly named text The Yoga Tradition, by Georg Feuerstein. Despite the name, and the fact that it does emphasize the Yogic side of things, the text is actually a very accessible guide to the sheer proliferation of Indic thought.

The earliest Indian religion occurs in the mists of prehistory. This oral tradition, passed from generation to generation, was originally written down, giving rise to what many consider the oldest scriptures in the world, known as the Rig Veda, or Veda, and hence, this period is known as the VEDIC PERIOD. The Veda are hyms to a pantheon of gods, many of which weren’t essential to later Hinduism. That said, Indra, Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu make their appearance here, though their later importance is only evidenced later.  After this period, the priestly caste, or Brahmans, wrote down in precise details the rules for the rituals of the various sacrifices needed to keep the gods happy and the world going, and these are the Brahmanas, composed in what can be thought of as the post-Vedic or BRAHMAN PERIOD.

It is only after this that the famed Upanishads are written, and we can call this the UPANISHADIC PERIOD. The word upanishad means something like to “sit nearby,” because they were originally secret doctrines that were only communicated orally, metaphysical doctrines abstracted from hints dropped here and there in the Vedas. The Upanishads are the key philosophical texts of the ancient Indian religion. And it is here that we really see some of the notions that have made ancient Indian thought so famous emerge.

The Upanishads, or Atman is Brahman

It’s in the Upanishads, for example, that we see the famed equations “Atman is Brahman” and “Thou art that” which form the foundation of nearly all later Indic thought, and these are worth exploring. Atman is the name for the universal self, the self of which all our selves are mere emanations, while Brahman is the creative principle, of which the god Brahma is the incarnation who, while dreaming, emanates worlds from himself. Brahman is the creative principle and that which is created. By equating these, the worldsoul or spirit of the cosmos is equated with the creative principle which is also the stuff of the world. And we are that, for we are versions of atman. And so, whatever you look at, whatever you apprehend, “thou are that.” Hence the is the goal of all meditation, to see beyond the illusions, called maya, to learn that despite appearances, all is one, the many hide the one, and the one manifests in all the many.

This sort of  immanence is one of the key features that, in nearly all its incarnations, distinguishes the Indic tradition, and while there are traces of these notions in the early Vedas, it is truly in the Upanishads, themselves technically the final books of the Vedas, that we see these ideas take the mature form that would influence all that followed. As the final books of the Vedas, the Upanishads are often known as the Vedanta, which just means the conclusion of the Vedas.

Many, Many Yogas

It is in this period that there’s a real shift away from the physical rituals and sacrifices of the Brahman priests, most importantly the fire ritual, to the notion of inner sacrifice. And hence inner discipline shifts from being something merely practiced by ascetics in the forest, to mainstream disciplined practice.

And so, the period of the composition of the Upanishads is also that in which many of the traditions of spiritual discipline, or yoga, begin to take shape into distinct traditions. India was always full of ascetics, including those who broke away from the official Brahmanical rituals. In fact, anyone who practiced extreme renunciation was seen as generally being able to store up enough power of one sort or another to be able to perform superhuman feats. But it is during the period of the composition of the Upanishads that we see the eight traditional yogas begin to take shape. Yoga simply means “yoking” or “unity,” in that one who is disciplined in a particular way becomes yoked to or in union with the spiritual power they are trying to merge with. And this word is often used in ways far beyond its traditional use in Europe in America, where yoga is generally seen as a physical practice, or simply meditation.

Physical yoga, however, is called hatha-yoga. But devotion to a god through passion and ritual is also known as yoga, known as bhakti-yoga. Discipline in terms of action is known as karma-yoga, while the use of sacred sounds to resonate with the fundamental frequencies of the universe, since in many Indic traditions, the fundamental stuff of the world is vibration (with so many parallels to contemporary string theory), is known as mantra-yoga. And the use of knowledge to free the self is known as jnana-yoga.

All these and more were considered forms of discipline which could help bring the devotee closer to liberation from suffering. And here we see another common thread in all Indic traditions, namely, that the goal is always this, liberation. But the various yogas weren’t systematized and synthesized into the dominant yoga tradition that influenced all that came afterwards until Pantjali much later. During the period of the composition of the Upanishads, however, there were simply many competing traditions, mostly passed down orally from teacher to disciple, outside of formal schools.

The Epic and Classical Periods: From the Ramayana to Buddhism and the Gita

Now we approach a period in which dating becomes a bit less problematic. In the millenium before the common era, we have what can basically be called the EPIC PERIOD, named after the period in which the two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharabata, were composed. Of course, these come in many versions, often in different languages, and seem sewn together from countless smaller episodes that were part of the patchwork oral culture that only was written down much later. These sprawling mystical epics are the Illiad and Odyssey of India, depicting everything from great battles, mythical stories of gods, and great love stories, and they continue to be incredibly popular in today’s India as vibrantly living stories.

The most famous part of these epics is the section of the Mahabharata known as the Bhagavad-Gita. Again, scholars argue over the date of composition, and whether it really was originally part of the Mahabharata or added later. It seems the text was written around the start of the common era. The Gita is one of the most important texts in Indic thought, and part of what makes it so remarkable is the extent to which it transforms the Hinduism of the Upanishads to compete with Buddhism.

For it is in the middle of the epic period that both Buddhism and Jainism find their start. And while Jainism, with its emphasis upon radical nonviolence and incredible asceticism, has always been a relatively small offshoot of Hinduism, Buddhism was quite a different story. If the Buddha lived about 500 B.C.E., about the same time as Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and Socrates, the religion remained a relatively small Hindu offshoot as well, until the northern Emperor Ashoka made it his state religion about 200 years after the Buddha died. After this, Buddhism became incredibly popular, particularly as it developed and changed, shifting from its original more individual focus, and onto a more socially oriented form, the Mahayana Buddhism which Ashoka seems to have played a large part in formulating, by directing the third Buddhist council, and then propagating throughout his empire. Once the basic notions were fleshed out into the highly complex arguments of Nagarjuna in the 2nd century C.E., Mahayana Buddhism was a force to be reckoned with.

Many date the start of the classical period with rise of the Gupta dynasty in the 2nd century B.C.E., and it is in this period that we see the shift from Buddhism from Therevada to Mahayana, and with this, widespread popularity, and the shifts in Hinduism to compete with this. For the Gita is in many ways the way Vedic tradition fought back, absorbing many of the innovations of this new upstart worldview. In the Gita, the warrior Arjuna is about to engage in battle, but he has qualms of conscience, because even though he knows he fights on the side of those who would be better for the everyday people, he sees people he knows on the other side. The god Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, comes to visit him to give him council. And Krishna counsels that he should act, but his act should be an inner sacrifice. That inaction isn’t an option, because that’s just a different type of action. And that what’s most important in all this is one’s relation to karma.

Karma is a word with a complex history in Indic thought, for it can mean action, cause, effect, memory, habit, and many other things, depending on the context. In earlier Vedic texts, it was one’s actions, and the effects thereof, which then determined one’s later character, and one’s reincarnation. Karma and reincarnation are another thread which weave their way through most of Indic thought from its earliest period to the present. While in earlier texts it seems that one’s actions simply accrue merit towards one’s next reincarnation, Krisna’s description of karma in the Gita seems a deliberate theft from much of what made Mahayana Buddhism so distinct, and hence appealing, to the masses.

For Krishna in the Gita, it’s not one’s actions that accrue good or bad karma, but one’s intentions. If all your actions are a sacrifice, they will aim at benefiting the world around one, and if that is the case,  you won’t act based on your own egoic desires. Overcoming one’s own limited egocentric perspective is key. And if you see the through the illusions of the world, produced by your ego and its karma, you’ll see that atman really is brahman, at least in the figure of Krishna/Vishnu, who both is the whole world, and the principle of its salvation. By becoming one with this, one achieves liberation, has all ones actions as sacrifice, and will act for the benefit of all.

What Krishna suggests here is quite similar to Mahayana Buddhism, which doesn’t view desire itself as something which needs to be extinguished, but rather, attachment to an egocentric worldview. While early Buddhism, in its Therevadic and currently extinct varieties, seems to value the removal of desire, Mayahana Buddhism argues that “nirvana is samsara,” and that if one acts out of compassion for others, you overcome attachment, are free from egocentric desire, and realize the interconnectedness of all things, hence, emptiness of self, objects of desire, and objects in the world.

And like Mahayana Buddhism, Krishna articulates liberation as blissful. If early Buddhism depicted nirvana in simply negative terms, now it was bliss. And bliss in the Indic tradition (ananda in Sanskrit), is a crucial term, it is the self-contentment that the gods feel. It is dynamic, steady pleasure that has no need for an external object. Liberation provides one with bliss, for one is free from bondage to fleeting pleasures and contingent pains. Bliss is freedom, it is what gods experience, and which they radiate out in all directions. All we have to see is that the path to bliss lies all around us, in moving beyond the illusions of our egocentric perspectives. Realize that all is one, and that all our actions should be for the benefit of all, since all are one, and the pain of others is intertwined with my pain. And in doing so, one will be increasingly freed of bad karma, and one’s bondages, both in perception and desires, will increasingly evaporate in a self-perpetuating cycle.

It’s difficult to say whether this perspective is that of Mahayana Buddhism or Gita period Hinduism, for in fact, they both share the perspective described above. The Gita can be seen, in many senses, as a bid to retake the masses for Hinduism. And as the history of India shows, Buddhism simply couldn’t compete. Hinduism absorbed much of what made Buddhism distinct, but it had the advantage of being in sync with the traditional gods and rituals which Buddhism dispensed with. Buddhism isn’t a religion, its a therapeutic psychology. And while Mahayana Buddhism allowed for a worship-like relation to Buddhas and Boddhisattvas of various sorts, it simply couldn’t compete with the tradition of the historical Indian gods. The Gita was for many the best of both worlds, the compassionate path to liberation described by Mahayana Buddhism, but without having to get rid of the gods.

As Buddhism changed and developed, many of its later schools incorporated various deities as avatars of the Buddha or vice-versa, and Tibetan Buddhism is often described as a synthesis of the original Bon religion of Tibet and the modified Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the later classical period. The Yogacara movement in Buddhism had a large influence Tibetan Buddhism via the figure of Asanga, just as Hinduism reinterpreted many of its gods via Buddhist principles. Increasingly Hinduism and Buddhism became flavors of the same multiplicity of perspectives, all of which nevertheless shared the broad notions of liberation, discipline, interconnectedness, compassion, karma, attachment, unity in multiplicity, etc.

Towards the end of the classical period, the takeover of Buddhist principles comes to completion with the figure of Shankara, perhaps the most famous of the Hindu philosophers. It is during the classical period that the so-called “six schools” of Indian philosophy come to be, though it’s important to note that these are schools of Hinduism. These include the radically atheistic materialist Cavarka school, as well as the dualist, emanationism of the Samkhya school, a fascinating evolutionist school in which there are many stages of the differentiation of nature by means of the ingression of spirit within it.

Shankara’s school is the most famous, and it goes by the name of Vedanta, often Advaita Vedanta.  Shankara wrote in the 8th century C.E., and he helped complete the reconquest of the Indic philosophical tradition for Hinduism, by making Hinduism completely non-dualist. Reinterpreting the Vedic tradition in completely non-dualist form, he reworked many of Nagarjuna’s key developments in Mahayana Buddhism, in which one needs to continually blast apart reifications and binaries in the name of emptiness (shunyata), which is in between presence and absence, A and not-A, derifying whatever it touches and pointing instead to the relational intertwining of all that is. Shankara claims the anti-essentialism of Nagarjuna for the Hindu tradition, using it to interpret the works of the Vedic tradition, and the Upanishads in particular, giving rise to what has since been known as the philosophic school known as Vedanta.

The Vedanta school based itself upon the Vedanta (the other name for the Upanishads). While the Upanishads are semi-dualist, for they opposed the maya of illusion with the truth of Atman/Brahman, with maya being distinct from Atman/Brahman, Shankara eliminated this weak dualism and replaced it with complete non-dualism. Just as Mahayana Buddhism argues that nirvana is samsara, and hence, nirvana isn’t removal from rebirth as much as learning to see it differently, so it is that Shankara sees the illusions which compose this world as part of Atman/Brahman itself. While some later thinkers would temper Shankara’s non-dualism, it is with Shankara that the absorption of Mahayana Buddhism’s innovations finds its peak. After this, Buddhism would mostly flourish outside India, in China, Japan, Tibet, and to the South of India (ie: contemporary Burma, Myanmar, Indonesia, etc.).

The Tantric and the (Semi-)Monotheistic Periods

Towards the turn of the millennia, the political situation in India becomes less stable, Buddhism is no longer a strong cultural presence, and Hinduism starts to shift again. It begins to incorporate many folk traditions into it, and it many previously hidden and esoteric practices start to become not only more mainstream, but integrated into relatively mainstream practices and even written down and intellectualized. These new practices and scriptures are often described as the Tantras, and this can be thought of as the Tantric period.

Tantra, whether in Hindu or Buddhist form, involves a series of procedures, which Feuerstein calls psychotechnics, which like the yogas brought together in Pantjali’s great 2nd century C.E. synthesis, but in many new forms. Tantras often involve channeling energies, performing rituals, and attempting to develop potentially magical powers. Very often, the physical world is seen as a dream, and intense visualization seen as being able to modify the very structure of the physical world, just as mantra-yoga sees sound as able to reconstitute the matter of the physical world.

But Tantra is more than just rituals aimed at producing magic. Rather, it also marks a philosophical shift in Indic thought. Firstly, it valorizes the female principle as much as the male principle, and sees the radical powers of creativity as that of the feminine aspects of the cosmos. And with this came the valorization of the body, sexuality, and this world in all its manifestations. If early Buddhism presented the Middle Path as that between asceticism and hedonism, and Mahayana Buddhism saw this world as redeemable by a change in way of viewing the world, then Tantra saw this world as the very source of liberation, power, and godliness. Radical immanence is the order of the day, and the world itself, long despised in Indian thought, and the body with it, were finally seen as good. From ascetic rituals of self-denial that go back to the start of India’s spiritual practices, desire finally makes it appearance as the road to god.

None of which is to say that Tantra is simply hedonism, far from it. Tantra uses desire to bring its adherents closer to the deity, tapping into the creative power of the gods that reveal themselves in the body. The goal is still liberation, and hence, transcendence of attachment, but desire acts like a ladder, helping us to learn to dissolve ourselves in ecstasy as a way of getting closer to the unity of all that is, without allowing our attachments to the pleasures produced distract us. Tantra uses meditation and various yogic practices as tools to detach us from attachment, and while some saw it as a regression to simple magic, others saw it as the birth of a this worldly technics for liberation, one which no longer saw desire as bad, only attachment. Rather than renounce the world, the goal is to learn to live it differently, a process begun with Buddhism, and brought to the next level by the practices of Tantra.

Tantra famously makes use of ritualized sex in some of its rituals, and this led many traditional Brahman to see it as a radical departure from the proper path towards liberation, not to mention the other problems they had with Tantric practices. And there’s no question that some of Tantra was orgies and magic. But a complex philosophy built up from this. And as Tantra intertwined with Buddhism and entered Tibet, it gave rise to the complex system I described a few posts earlier.

But this isn’t the end of the story at all. For at the same time as Tantra is flourishing, worship of the various gods in the Vedic tradition was shifting. Krishna was a god of compassion, one of the first to emerge within the otherwise rather cold ritualistic society of the Brahmanic tradition. But increasingly, the gods became more human. With the Tantric period, we see the rise of Shiva’s consort, Shakti, a female deity worshipped throughout Hindu Tantra as the power within Shiva.

The worship of Shiva and Vishnu became increasingly important parts of the Vedic world as Tantra increased in popularity, and in particular, by means of integrating with the worship of Shiva via Shakti. Both the worship of Shiva and Vishnu, known as Shaivism and Vaishnavism, respectively, became increasingly popular within the Indian world.

This tendency only increased as India came under Muslim control during the Mughal Empire which started during the 1500′s. Vedic religions were seen as dangerous polytheisms, but the worship of Vishnu/Krishna and Shiva had enough monotheistic elements as to be less offensive to the Mughal authorities than other forms of Indian religion. And so we see the rise of a quasi-monotheism in India during this period, as well as a firm condemnation of Tantra, with its magic and sexual rituals. It’s for this reason that Hindu Tantra has largely disappeared in India, but it thrives in Buddhist forms in Tibet to this day. Sikhism arises during the Muslim period as well, during the 1600′s. Integrating aspects of Sufi Muslim mysticism with the traditional beliefs of India, Sikhs are radical monotheists for whom ritual is less important than persona, inner devotion, combined with charity and, like nearly all Indic beliefs by this period, moving beyond attachment.

The Colonial Period to the Present

It’s at this period that the Portugueses and then the British began to make their presence felt, and the rest is colonial history. Some Indic texts, now called Hindoo, start to be translated into western languages, with the Bhagavad Gita being translated into English in 1785, early enough to influence figures as diverse as Hegel, Goethe, Emerson, Whitman, and various other 19th century Euro-American thinkers. But it is only with Swami Vivekanada that there was a proponent for the Indic tradition that spoke to the Euro-American nations in a language they could understand, namely, English. Vivekanada described Hinduism, but did so in largely Vedanta terms, and it is for this reason that non-dualist Vedanta has been seen as representing all Hinduism up until Europeans and Americans began to go to liberated South Asia in droves in the 1960′s to study these traditions firsthand. And in the process, many discovered the sheer variety of traditions, for none of those described above ever fully went away, there were always living fossils of previous forms. In a land of 800 languages, and over 800 million people, and a thriving oral tradition to this day which operates in tandem to written print culture, it is unlikely that it would be otherwise.

But it is only in the last forty years or so that the true diversity of Indic thought is being explored. And this is hardly surprising, since so much Euro-American scholarship is still influenced strongly by the legacies of colonialism, from the work of early “orientalist” scholars to the often radically oversimplifying romanticizing western acolytes of the 1960′s.

Many practitioners of Indic traditions today have argued that many of the disciplines, philosophies, and approaches also need to change in relation to the differing needs of western individuals. For example, if liberation is the goal, then urging westerners to identify with “emptiness” often leads to an increase in the feeling of alienation which results from contemporary capitalism. But as many contemporary Buddhists have argued, Buddhist shunyata is not the same as western anomie. For if the western self is often estranged, the traditional Indic self, like that in the Far East, is often highly enmeshed in a culture that doesn’t prioritize the individual at all. And so the needs of the enmeshed self are different from that of the estranged self.

This is why so much of Indic thought, whether Buddhist or Hindu, needs to be read in relation to its cultural context, and its insights then translated to western contexts, and modified accordingly, if they are to be helpful towards a goal of liberation. And as this post has worked to show, liberation is one of the guiding threads that links the Indic tradition in all its forms. Hopefully after reading this, some first time readers will feel more confident approaching some of these materials.

Where would I recommend going to take this deeper? The work of Georg Feuerstein is a great start, including his books The Yoga Tradition and Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, which in combination do a really great job of introducing the history of what today we call Hinduism. Kim Knott’s Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction is a great intro to contemporary Hinduism. For primary sources, check out Radhakrishnan and Moore’s A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy is a great collection, and Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Sue Hamilton does a great job of introducing classical Hindu schools.

Knowing your Buddhisms: Distinguishing the Vehicles of Therevada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, and Beyond…

Tantra: Virtual Reality as Worldchanging

This post will be largely an attempt to explain, in forms accessible to western ears, the differences between the main branches of Buddhism. This will be done largely to help situate the reading of Tibetan Buddhism provided in the preceding two posts.

The Three Vehicles: Therevada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana

Those who study Buddhism in its historical context quickly come to learn that there are three primary branches of Buddhism, the three “vehicles,” which often go by the name Therevada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. These developed in chronological order, first Therevada, then Mayahana, then Vajrayana. Today Mahayana is the most widely accepted form, with the most practitioners. Therevada Buddhism, largely confined to contemporary Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, is a smaller branch, even if it claims it has deviated the least from the original teachings of the original teachings of the Buddha himself. Most scholars refer to the practices of the early Buddhists, from the period of the Buddha’s lifetime to the advent of Mahayana approximately three to five hundred years after the Buddha’s death, as Nikaya Buddhism, to distinguish it from the Therevada practiced today. While Therevada claims great similarity to Nikaya, there are differences, many of which aren’t worth going into in such a short post.

But it’s worth noting that in all it’s forms, Buddhism has blended with a variety of religious practices that were there before it arrived. Buddhism found many ways to cohabitate with the worship of various deities, so long as these were seen as less perfect spirits and beings than the Buddha, and equally in need of liberation. This lead to a great amount of mutation and local variation, and this is why the practices of all contemporary forms of Buddhism are full of rituals and practices that are likely quite different from Nikaya, no matter how conservatively the scriptures are interpreted by Therevada practitioners. But beyond this, there is simply the fact that Buddhism started as a largely oral culture, and didn’t truly take off until the Buddhist councils, and particularly, the third one sponsored by the first Buddhist sovereign, the famous Emperor Ashoka. And with layers of revisionism going on, it’s hard to know what originary Buddhism was really like. Hence, the distinction between Therevada and Nikaya.

While there were many small shifts within Nikaya practices, Mahayana Buddhism is generally considered the first crucial shift within Buddhist orthodoxy, and one which truly took form as Buddhism was widely codified and promoted under the auspices of Emperor Ashoka 2-300 years after the Buddha’s death. Today Mahayana Buddhism has many branches, and is dominant in China, India, and Japan. While Buddhism is largely a minor practice in India, many of its ideas blended with traditional Vedic religious traditions to give rise to the more complex Vedanta forms, the forerunners of the diverse practices and beliefs generally called Hindusim, the dominant religion of India today. In China and Japan, Mahayana Buddhism remains, and gave rise at first in China, then in Japan, to the Cha’an (Chinese) or Zen (Japanese) variants. Mahayana Buddhists often refer to Therevada Buddhism as Hinhayana Buddhism, or the “minor vehicle,” a term which views this more traditional set of practices as less complete understandings of the Buddha’s teachings.

Distinct from all of these is the Vajrayana branch, which is dominant in Tibet, Mongolia, and Nepal. If Mahayana Buddhism sees itself as the complete and full revelation of the Buddha’s vision, even if Therevada Buddhists sees Mahayana Buddhists as having strayed from the original teachings, both traditions see Vajrayana Buddhism as barely Buddhist, a late and degenerate formation, far from the Buddha’s original path. Tibetan Buddhists see things quite differently, for like Mahanaya Buddhists, they believe that the Buddha had public and secret teachings. According to Mahayana Buddhists, the Therevada teachings were the Buddha’s original public teachings, but he passed down the supplementary teachings in secret until the time the world was ready to hear them. It was these additional teachings that were made manifest in the Mahayana tradition. Likewise, the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition argues that their practices, often referred to as Tantra, were also passed down in secret, and only when the rest of the world was ready for them were they given more concrete form and written down. As will become clear, however, much of this rests on a Buddhist approach to time which is quite different than common western linear notions, and hence, what seems a bit strange here seems less so in its original cultural contexts.

Mahayana: Compassion, the Bodhisattva, and Nagajuna’s Philosophy of Emptiness

What are the doctrinal differences between these? Most students of religion see the advent of the Boddhisattva in Mahayana scriptures as the primary shift between the Therevada and Mahayana traditions, but there’s more to it than just that. Buddhism was largely a minor practices of individuals looking for their own enlightenment within monasteries for the first few hundred years after the Buddha first spread his teachings. It was seen as a relatively ascetic discipline of the passions, and rather divorced from the need of everyday people. With the advent of Mahayana, the notion of compassion comes to the fore in Buddhist thought, and the Boddhisattva is the embodiment of this. This is why the word Mahayana literally means “universal vehicle,” it is the Buddhist path that opened Buddhism up from out of the monasteries and made it a worldview with wide popular appeal. Rather than the more austere Therevada monasticism which appealed mostly to the elites, Mahayana practices were of the sort that peasants found spoke to them.

Mahayana Buddhism argued that it was impossible to achieve enlightenement without compassion, for englightenment means selflessness, and this deconstructs the self-other binary. If there’s suffering in the world, I only see that suffering as not mine if I have a discrete notion of the self. But since Buddhist practice aims to deconstruct this, the suffering of others becomes my suffering as well, and hence my own enlightenment and compassion in regard to the suffering of others becomes necessarily intertwined. Reducing the suffering of others reduces my own, and by coming to enlightenment, I become better able to help others see the path, because I can be a better teacher and example for others to follow.

While these notions are in some sense implicit in earlier Buddhist notions, Mahayana Buddhism makes them central to its approach to the world. There are other crucial shifts in emphasis, however. The most important philosopher of Buddhism after the Buddha himself, Nagarjuna, is the primary philosopher of the Mahayana tradition. He famously argues that Nirvana isn’t merely the freedom that comes from the lack of desire, but rather, the realization that everything around one is actually empty. Emptiness, or shunyata, becomes a fundamental Buddhist notion with Nagarjuna. And while frequently misunderstood, emptiness is not the notion that there is nothing in the world, but rather, that anything we encounter is simply the manifestation of the influences, contexts, and processes which brought it about. Nothing is distinct from these grounds, and hence, everything is dependent upon its continual recreation within the processes that make up the world.

This is famously then applied to the self. When we examine our consciousness, we see that various sense impressions flow by, or thoughts or feelings. But which one of these is the self? The self seems to be the awareness of these things, a deeper type of entity. But since the self can never grasp itself as an object, but only the objects and entities of which it is composed, it is in a sense an empty notion. Likewise, any object in the world can be deconstructed to its parts, but remove all of these, and there is no there there, so to speak. This is why many contemporary commentators have argued that Nagarjuna’s notion of emptiness can perhaps be best understood, in a western philosophical contexts, as essencelessness. That is, there is no fixed essence which expresses itself in entities in our world. Rather, there are interactions between parts, wholes, contexts, influences, processes, etc. But there aren’t transcendental essences that require that things only change in particular ways. Rather, there is simply cause and effect, in infinite chains as far as the eye can see. Freedom is the realization that everything can change, doesn’t need to remain fixed to an essence. It is in this sense that they are empty, for there is nothing deeper than the play of surface appearances which give rise to the appearance of an essence, which is itself just one more appearance.

This is why Nagarjuna famously argues that “nirvana is samsara,” and it is with him that this famous notion becomes a core of what will later become known as dominant Mahayana practice. Rather than view nirvana as some other realm, the extinction of all desire, or a state without appearances of any sort, notions which remain interpretations of the Buddha’s mission in Therevada practices, Nagarjuna argues that nirvana is a different way of looking at the world of ordinary life. Rather than the seemingly impossible state of extinguishing all desire, a notion which pulls Buddhism back to the ascetic practices that the Buddha tried to refute, Mahayana Buddhism reemphasizes the notion that Buddhism is the “middle way” between asceticism and hedonism. Rather than extinguish desire, desire needs to be viewed differently, and in fact, all the world needs to be reviewed. It is this reviewing which transforms samsara, or the world of appearances caused by the cycling of karma, into nirvana. While Therevada practitioners argue this is a distortion of the Buddha’s message, bringing desire in by the back door, so to speak, even though the Buddha argued that desire is the cause of suffering,

Mahayana practitioners argue that the Buddha didn’t see desire itself as the problem, but the clinging which occurs when the nature of desire is misunderstood. When things in the world are seen as substantial, rather than empty, we cling to them as potential sources of satisfaction, or we cling to aspects of the world which help us to seemingly flee from dissatisfaction. Mahayana practice believes that if we extinguish desire completely we extinguish the self. It is clinging, rather than desire, that needs to be reviewed. For some this might seem a subtle shift in emphasis, but for practical purposes, the difference is quite profound. Rather than try to eliminate desire itself, the goal is to transform it into something labile and free. If Therevada is austere, Mahayana is more joyful, placing the emphasis upon compassion and liberation rather than solely on the extinguishment of suffering. Mahanaya views compassion and liberation as essential to this goal, while Therevada views the extinction of suffering by the removal of desires as the only path.

Cha’an/Zen Buddhism is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism that is particularly influential today in Japan. Originally, it came about as an attempt to develop an more down to earth Buddhism, one which dispenses with complex arguments of academics, and focused on how paradoxes in the everyday could help bring about extra-conceptual leaps which bring one to enlightenment. In some senses, it is radically anti-academic, yet it has a reputation of being highly cerebral, precisely because it revels in paradox. For all these reasons, it has fascinated the Western imagination, perhaps in a way that outstrips its influence within the wider Buddhist world.  The rationality of the irrational remains at its core, and it’s likely that the fascination of the West with this approach has to do with the west’s own emphasis upon rationality.

It’s also worth noting that the Mayahana tradition, particularly in as it moved to China and especially Japan, makes use of the term suchness (tathata or dharmata in Sanskrit, chen-ju in Chinese, and shenyo in Japanese.) This is the flip-side of emptiness, it the attempt to see the world without preconceptions of the way it must be, similar to Freud’s notion of even-hovering attention. It is continual curiosity about what the world, in all it’s manifestations, down to the simplest physical experiences, can show us. It is being with these, holding these, not needing them to be one way or another, but experiencing them in their full emptiness and empty fullness.

Vajrayana: Tibetan Buddhism, and Virtual Reality

Vajrayana Buddhism, an offshoot of Mahayana Buddhism which in many ways became a distinct third branch, focuses on desire, extending and radicalizing its expanded role in the Mahayana Buddhism from which it developed. If Therevada largely concentrates on exploding the pleasure/displeasure binary, Mahayana the self/world binary, and Cha’an/Zen the reason/unreason binary, then Vajrayana focuses on the reality/fantasy binary. Largely the result of how Buddhism mutated as it went over the mountains from India into Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia, Vajrayana sees itself as the completion of the other two “vehicles.” According to Vajrayana, often simply called “Tibetan” Buddhists, Therevada limits the Buddha’s message to the few, Mahayana opens it up to the many, but Vajrayana makes it possible to envision an entire Buddhist society. The reason for this is that it is able to speak a language even more accessible than that of Mahayana, one which could not have been revealed earlier, however, because the world wasn’t ready for it. Only after the advances of Mahayana, bringing Buddhism out of the monasteries and to the masses, was it possible to imagine constructing Vajrayana.

As is to be expected, the other two branches view Tibetan Buddhism as a major step away from Buddhist orthodoxy. And while Therevada, long in Mahayana’s popular shadow, tends to view Mahayana as still recognizably Buddhist, in general Mahayana and Therevada see Tibetan Buddhism as a strange deviation, and it is often described as decadent, degenerate, etc. But why?

From the perspective of Mahayana and Therevada orthoxies, Vajrayana Buddhism goes much further than Therevada’s agnostic relation to local gods, and Mahayana’s attempt to incorporate them as being enlightened by the Buddha and having become his disciples. For mainstream Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhism absorbed aspects of the original religion of Tibet, or Bon, far too much into it. As a result, it focuses on Tantra, which is the set of practices which go beyond traditional Buddhist meditation, and make use of strange visualizations of virtual worlds, and practices aimed at transforming the body. Of course, these practices, various sorts of yoga, have existed in India for millennia, but they were always kept at arms reach by Buddhists. Tibetan Buddhism works to integrate them into its practices, and even goes as far as seeing sex as having a yogic function which can help a person on the path to Buddhahood. But if Buddhism attempts to tame desire, how can this be possible?

As was mentioned earlier, Mahayana shifts the emphasis from the extinction of desire to the extinction of clinging within desire. Building upon this, Tibetan Buddhism sees two approaches to enlightenment, namely, sutrayama, or the approach of using written verses and traditional meditation, and tantrayama, or the use of special techniques, known as tantra, to speed the process up. As a result, it might not take eons and several lives to achieve enlightenment, but it might be possible in this life. Mahayana and Therevada practitioners view this as dangerous populist distortian of the Buddha’s message, while Tibetans view this as the set of secret techniques that the Buddha could only reveal secretly at first, and which could only be made public later.

Tantric techniques start with visualization. And anyone who studied Tibetan Buddhism knows that its meditation exercises aren’t traditional emptiness meditation. Rather, they are brilliant visions of gods in refuge fields, in trees that spread multicolored light via dazzling jewels. There is also the role of the mentor, the guru (Indian) or lama (Tibetan), who is seen as the embodiment of perfection, the means whereby the Buddha communicates to the initiate. The mentor introduces the initiate slowly into meditating on a carefully prescribed set of visions, designed “like a ladder” to pull one deeper into enlightenment as one masters higher stages. If all goes well, not only do emptiness and bliss, or presence and absence, of things become indistinguishable, freeing up desire from clinging, as in Mahayana Buddhism. But going beyond this, the visions themselves become more real to the initiate than everyday reality. As the initiate comes to realize that all their experiences are empty, whether sensory or envisioned, they increasingly come to see their envisioned dreams as having influence on their sensory embodied lives.

It is for this reason that, in my previous post, I described Tibetan forms of Buddhism as a sort of virtual reality combat with “the real world” of sensory experience. Tibetans know these visions aren’t real per se, at least, not like the sensory world, but the more real they seem, the more their approach to the sensory world shifts. The sensory world is seen as deriving, in a sense, from the jewel world. This world isn’t elsewhere, it is here, and yet, indicates the potential for perfection within this world.

In this sense, these fantasies are a sort of immanent fantasy, an attempt to create a this worldly heaven which can alter the very way we live in this world. And as initiates increasingly control their visions, they then begin to work to control ever more precise parts of their bodies with these visions. This is where physical yoga practices start to play a role.

And in all this, desire is essential. If sutrayama is the path of the sutra, then tantrayama is the path of desire, and often in Tibetan literature these are described as the right hand path, and the left hand path, respectively, of the Buddha’s teachings. Rather than dispense with desire, the left hand path makes use of it to shift it. The desire for the mentor to embody perfection produces an intersubjective situation similar to psychoanalytic transference, in which the desire of both analyst and patient is actually the engine of the cure. Likewise, the mentor relationship, in which the mentor’s imperfect self is seen as a conduit to the inner enlightened self that they are, in a sense, channelling, if imperfectly, provides the relational network between subjects which allows them to pull each other up the chain by  their desires into mutual self-transformation.

Likewise, with visions, they become self-fulfilling prophecies of a sort. Rather than feel defeated, one imagines oneself as a deity, if one that we can only partially recognize because we have layers of illusion that we are only learning to see through. The more we visualize ourselves as identifying with a deity through the mentor, the more we desire to change ourselves to be liberated from worldly clinging like that deity.

What we see here is not radically unlike a entire social form of what we practice individually in the western world as therapy. Individuals learn to separate from clinging to anything and everything, whether these be limiting self-conceptions, objects of desire, narratives of what one “should do” in the world, etc., and replace this with what is often called in Buddhist practice non-duality. This is the state of interpenetration of opposites, a state of tensionless tension in which one is both presence and absence, nirvana and samsara, fullness and yet also emptiness. Between self and world, real and fantasy, pain and pleasure, all is possible but none is binding on the subject. The goal is freedom to act in the world with less compulsion, for in the liberated world described in Buddhist visions, there is complete freedom from having to take any form. The Buddha, and the lesser gods which are his emanation, are seen as possible states that a Buddha can emanate once they have achieved pure enlightenment, which is pure freedom. Once the initiate realizes the boundary between reality and fantasy is permeable, then decision precedes desire, and the desire for freedom becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Tibetan Buddhism is an attempt to give this a concrete form that the maximum number of people can latch onto, by means of concrete visualizations.

A Fourth Vehicle? Social Activism and Buddhist Practice

While this might seem like an oversimplification of the Buddhist message, the use of colorful picture stories to water down Buddhism for the masses, the fact is that the visions, meditations, and bodily exercises are carefully constructed, and always in relation to the mentor, in a way that the subject is guided to continually separate from any particular reified concept or binary dualism that would limit their approach to the world. By keeping subjects identifying with that which is outside time, place, embodiment, and reality, the subject sees all before them as contingent. They aren’t deluded that they can change physical reality, at least, not unless they learn the higher techniques of learning how to transmute fantasy into reality. But as the tantric path gets to the higher rungs, the initiate is led back to the body, and even to sexual intercourse, if under rather controlled and ritualized circumstances.

And if we see this in the context of compassion, which is to say, the fact that it is impossible to achieve enlightenment without pointing the path out to the world, we see that the dream of a Buddhist society is in fact the very transformation that Tibet put into practice with its collective tantra. The dream of individual liberation only comes about by means of a collective dreaming, which then feeds back into collective action. The uptopian longing for a better life, one of true liberation, helps us detach from our mental cages. But once we learn to dream freely, we then have to learn how to make reality like our dreams. We have to bring this deep truth to others. We have to teach, and in particular, by example.

That said, there is still a certain emphasis on quietism over activism here. Tibetan Buddhism, like all Buddhism, is a prescription for finding release from the images, narratives, and concepts that trap us into thinking reality should be one way or another. And in this it helps us free ourselves from needing the world to be a certain way to make us happy. But in the end, there is a limit to what this can do without changing the world as well. Of course, the world must be ready for this change. And this is why one needs to pursue one’s own enlightenment not only for oneself, but for the sake of others. Because the more enlightened one becomes, the more one will be a model that will inspire others to follow. One will radiate bliss, and this will draw the desire of others to your path. In this way is it possible for the world to be transformed.

Buddhism in all its forms is an attempt to alter one’s expectations, to provide a more secure happiness by seeing clinging in all its forms as problematic. In this it is quite similar to ancient Epicureanism, which viewed the surest path to pleasure as coming about when one eschews unstable and volatile pleasures, and learns that true pleasure, one that cannot be stolen, comes from within. But in Buddhism, within and without increasingly collapse the more one understands what is meant by emptiness. One’s own enlightenment and that of the world become united projects. The suffering of any aspect of the world becomes your suffering.

And this is why I think it is even possible to imagine an activist Buddhism. One that goes beyond Tibetan practice, to a new vehicle. A radically social vehicle. The similarities between various forms of Buddhism and psychoanalysis are I think clear, but there are also potential parallels with Marxism as well. For what is a social virtual reality experiment, a collective vision, if not the dream of the proletariat?