Category: Meditation

Can an AI System Meditate?

Resolute meditators on occasion experience a deep inner quiet. It is a definite state of consciousness. You will know it if you experience it, but destroy it if you try to analyze it.  If you have the good fortune to be vouchsafed such a state of awareness you must humbly accept it and not reflect upon it nor ask questions about it, such as: How did I arrive at this blissful state of mind? How can I repeat this experience?  You must simply rest in the experience. Become as a little child and accept the gift with gratitude. One-pointedness is destroyed by analysis. 

Mental quiet is a state in which the "mind works" have temporarily shut down in the sense that discursive operations (conceptualizing, judging, reasoning) have ceased, and there is no inner processing of data or computation.  You have achieved a deep level of conscious unity prior to and deeper than anything pieced together from parts. You are not asleep or dead but more fully alive. You are approaching the source of thoughts, which is not and cannot be a thought.  Crude analogy: the source of a stream is not itself a stream.  Less crude, but still an analogy: the unity of a proposition is not itself a proposition, or the proposition of which it is the unity, or a sub-proposititional constituent of the proposition.

Can a computing machine achieve the blissful state of inner quiet? You can 'pull the plug' on it in which case it would 'go dark.'  The machine is either on or off (if it is 'asleep' it is still on).   But when the meditator touches upon inner quiet, he has not gone dark, but entered a light transcendentally prior to the objects of ordinary (discursive) mind.

I would replace the lyric, "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream; it is not dying, it is not dying" with "Turn off your discursive mind and swim upstream; it is not dying; it is not dying." "That you may see the meaning of Within."

Can an AI system achieve mental quiet, the first step on the mystical ascent? Cognate questions: Could such a system realize the identity of Atman and Brahman or enjoy the ultimate felicity of the Beatific Vision?  Is ultimate enlightenment reachable by an increase is processing speed? You are aware, aren't you, that processing speed is increasing exponentially. 

The answer to these questions, of course, is No.  When a computer stops computing it ceases to function as it must function to be what it is.  But when we halt our discursive operations, however, we touch upon our true selves.

Taming the Wild Horse of the Mind on the Road to Benares

This morning's meditation session ran from 3:10 ante meridiem to 4:00. Before that I was sketching six blog posts in my journal. My mind was on fire with ideas fueled in part by  some entries from Volume Five of Tom Merton's journal.  As flabby a liberal as he is, both politically and theologically, he is engaged in the seven volumes of his journal in a wholly admirable project of relentless self-examination. I love this argonaut of interiority with all his inner conflicts.

He fled the world but was drawn back to her. The contemplative of contemptus mundi  became a peace activist. He who preached The Silent Life (the tile of one of the best of his books) was an inveterate scribbler of journal entries, articles, poems, letters — how many volumes of correspondence? Five? –  not to mention too many books some of them good many of them not so good.

His journals are a treasure trove of ideas, references, self-criticism, culture-critical observations, weather reports, whimsical vignettes, extrapolations, autodidactic and amateurish, from his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Camus and plenty of people you've never heard of, Isaac of Stella, Evdokimov, Julien Green . . . I could go on.

Anyway, my mind was racing when I hit the black mat of meditation. Now you can pull in the reins brutally on the wild horse, or let him run. Best to let him run and tire himself out while you observe his antics. After 20 minutes he settled down, leaving 30 minutes for a peaceful dive toward Silence or Mental Quiet, the first stage on the mystical descent. The German Versenkung taken mystically* as opposed to nautically well captures the sinking below the  waves of discursivity into the depths.

Now it can happen that you sink so deep that you fear that you will never come up again. The terror of ego loss grips you. At this point you need a great faith and a great trust, lest you miss the opportunity of a lifetime: to penetrate the veil while enwrapped in the mortal coil. I was offered this opportunity many years ago but the fear of ego death  sent me to the surface again when the whole point is to transcend the ego, to let it go, to give up control.  The ego must die for the soul to live. I am alluding to what may be the deep meaning of Matthew 18:3: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The little child trusts. Plato: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

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* (KONZENTRATION) Zustand tiefer Konzentration, Meditation absorption , contemplation
die Verbindung zum Göttlichen durch die sitzende, stille Versenkung: connecting with the divine by means of seated, quiet contemplation.

Two Worries about Meditation

One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha.  He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali  form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any meditation practice. 

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines.  As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to the first friend to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to him an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach  as inner listening.  In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait.  Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God . . . ." But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

This brings me to a second Christian friend who asks, "Do you think the mind clearing function of meditation might be akin to the person Jesus taught us of, the person with a clean and emptied soul that was attractive to the demons as a place to occupy?"  

Yes, there is that danger. A mind cluttered and distracted by  petty thoughts and concerns is, from the point of view of the demons, safe against any irruption of divine light. This is why demons are more likely to be encountered in monasteries than in fleshpots. But once the mind is cleared of mundane detritus, once it returns from the diaspora of the sense world and rests quietly in it itself in its quest for the Unchanging Light, the demons have an opening.  But these facts of the spiritual life are no argument against meditation; they are an argument for caution. One would be well-advised to preface every meditation session with a discursive prayer along these lines: "Lord, I confess my spiritual infirmity and humbly ask to be protected from any and all demonic agents. Lord help me, guardians guard me." Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.  

My second friend is a Protestant, and among other faults, they fail to appreciate the mystical element in Christianity.

Finally:

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent.  Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self.  Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in.  The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self' 

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self? 

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

The ‘Summons’ of Meditation

This has happened often. I go to the black mat to begin my session.  I go there and assume the cross-legged posture. My purpose is  to enter mental quiet and elevate my mind to the highest. But a petty thought obtrudes. I begin to enact or realize this 'centrifugal' thought by attending to it. But then I receive a 'summons' in the form of a light, sometimes blue, sometimes white, sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes pulsating, sometimes not, usually subtle but phenomenologically  unmistakable.  Nothing so dramatic as to throw me off my horse were I riding a horse.  Just a light, but one that calls me to the topic and into focus, and away from the diaspora of the petty. And then it goes out.

I know that the source of the light is not something physical external to my body.  Perhaps the cause is in my brain. But that is pure speculation, and easily doubted. The phenomenon is what it is and cannot be gainsaid: I can doubt the cause but I cannot doubt the datum in its pure phenomenality. It is indubitable as a pure givenness.  Perhaps the 'summons' is a call from the Unseen Order which lies beyond all sensible 'visibility.' But that too is speculation. Perhaps there is no Unseen Order. In that case the 'summons' would not be a summons.  I cannot be sure that it is and I cannot be sure that it isn't.

Neither underbelief nor overbelief is justified by the experience itself.  But the facts are the facts. The phenomenological facts are that I and other dedicated meditators  have this 'summons' experience and it is followed by mental focus or onepointedness which is some cases takes the more dramatic form of a 'glomming onto' the theme of the meditation.

So am I not within my epistemic rights — assuming that it even makes sense to speak of rights and duties with respect to matters doxastic — in treading the path of overbelief? 

Related:

Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief

Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

 

Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.