What is a contradiction from one angle is a koan from another. In a contradiction, logical thought hits a dead end. Discursive thought's road end, however, may well be the trail head of the Transdiscursive.
Category: Meditation
The Parable of the Leaky Cup
There is no point in begging for water with a leaky cup. Water thereby gained is immediately lost again. First fix the cup, then beg for water.
So also with the glimpses and gleanings and intimations from Elsewhere. They won't be retained in a perforated vessel. And if they are not retained, then they cannot do you any good. Moral fitness and intellectual discrimination are necessary for their recognition, proper evaluation, retention if judged salutary, and existential implementation. If you can't act right or think straight, then mystical, religious, and paranormal vouchsafings, whether they come 'out of the blue' or as a result of formal spiritual practices, may do more harm than good. They may inflate the ego or lead it into the dark regions of the occult.
Related: Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored
Meditation is Hard
Thoughts don't like to subside. One leads to another, and another. You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty, thoughts that you will soon post to your weblog, all the while realizing that mental blogging is not meditation.
"Man is a stream whose source is hidden," said Emerson and you would swim upstream to the Source. So you make an effort, but the effort is too much for you. Perhaps the metaphor is wrong. One from al-Ghazzali might be better.
A cooling evening breeze is more likely to come to the desert dweller if he climb to the top of the minaret than if he stay on the ground. So he makes an effort within his power, the effort of positioning himself to receive, when and if it should come, a gust of the divine favor.
He waits for the grace that may overcome the gravity of the mind and its hebetude.
To meditate is to wait, and therein lies or sits the difficulty.
This morning's session (sitting in plain English) was good and lasted from 3:30 to 4:25. Fueled by chai: coffee is too much the driver of the discursive. But now the coffee is coming in and I'm feeling fabulous and the thoughts are 'percolating' up from who knows where.
The Discursive as Distraction
The search for the Real takes us outside ourselves. We may seek the Real in experiences, possessions, distant lands, or other people. These soon enough reveal themselves as distractions. But what about ideas and theories? Are they simply a more lofty sort of distraction? “Travelling is a fool’s paradise” said Emerson. Among lands certainly, but not among ideas?
If I move from objects of sense to objects of thought I am still moving among objects. To discourse, whether in words or in thoughts, is to be on the run and not at rest. But is not the Real to be found resting within, in one’s innermost subjectivity? Discourse dis-tracts, pulls apart, the interior unity.
Noli foras ire, said Augustine, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. “Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.”
Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares
If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation? One corresondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation. So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation. A hard saying!
What are the possible views on this topic?
1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble. But he didn't say that in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem. Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic.
2. No time should be wasted on meditation. Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.
3. Time spent on either is wasted. The view of the ordinary cave-dweller.
4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy. But why?
5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time. The view of my Buddhist correspondent.
6. More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.
What could be said in defense of (6)? Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. II, The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):
- The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
- The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences . . . .
- . . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.
Related articles
Re-collection
Recollection is a flight from the diaspora of animal inclinations and social suggestions. One collects oneself. Life is one long battle against the centrifugal pull of these two. Time too flees and flies not just by passing unaccountably but also by losing itself in the diaspora of its own modes, past, present, and future. What is, is not, because its element, time, is not, but is past, or future, or fleeting.
Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief
One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person. Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!" It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such. I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated. As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.
That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience. Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely. I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical and paranormal nature.
A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation. I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love. I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone. Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do.
The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition. He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.
Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent. Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief. Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term. But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.
Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was the love of Christ (subjective genitive), that would be an overbelief. The experience could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, a few years after having the experience, I have no practical doubts about it either: I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories.
Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality. There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open. First, is it of something real? Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of?
Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain." But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd. The experience was certainly not of that. The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.
Indeed, it is arguable that the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word I just now coined. [Correction, 11 July: James uses 'under-belief' on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience.] If an overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained within it, or reading into it what manifestly is not contained within it.
Pounding on such a boneheaded skeptic, however, does not get the length of a proof of the veridicality of my experience.
We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions. Are there perceptual beliefs? If yes, are they not overbeliefs? I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me. But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes. The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .
Or is it rather underbelief if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality beyond my visual perception?
Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?
Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief? Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective? Beliefs are either true or false. Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences. I think James would reject this. For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs. I'll dig up some passages later.
Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation. But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief. One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self. Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses. The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object. Granted. It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self. To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real. How justify that on the basis of a close inspection of experience? It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance. Are we acquainted with it?
The irony shouldn't be missed. Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self. Buddhism is a religion.
Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion
London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics. (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)
In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:
I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.
As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.
The above can be distilled into three propositions:
1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.
2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.
3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.
Harris continues:
The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.
To continue with the distillation:
4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity. There is nothing irrational about it.
5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."
6. One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.
7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.
There is much to agree with here. Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5). Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss. My present concerns are (6) and (7).
Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights. Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience? Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion. But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation. I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period. Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.
So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds: there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.
It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it.
It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.
Here is an analogy. An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses. He searched high and low, from morning til night. Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place. His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!
The analogy works with the eyes as well. From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes. My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place. Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.
It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self. It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.
It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self. That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience. It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:
Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.
This argument is valid, but is it sound? The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience. True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons. But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion. We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical. How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith? Whose faith? Harris's?
My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.
Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own.
For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?
High-Level Self-Denial
Going to the mat of meditation at the appointed time when the caffeine-induced riot of thoughts clamors for blogic expression.
Max Black in Meditation
Meditation: How Long and What to Expect
A student from Northern Ireland writes,
I've recently been contemplating practising meditation. I decided to look up what you had to say on the subject, and I was happy to discover the "how to meditate" post. I was just wondering though, how long should a person meditate, and what should a first timer like myself expect to think or feel during the first few meditations?
How long? Between 15 and 30 minutes at first, working up gradually to an hour or more. What to expect? Not much at first. Mind control is extremely difficult and our minds are mostly out of control serving up an endless parade of pointless memories, useless worries, and negative thoughts of all sorts. In the beginning meditation is mostly hard work. So you can expect to work hard at first for meager results.
At a deeper level, expectation and striving to accomplish something are out of place. Meditation is an interior listening that can occur only when the discursive mind with its thoughts, judgements, intentions, expectations, and the like has been silenced. Meditation is not an inner discourse but an inner listening.
Of course, there is a bit of a paradox here: at first one must intend resolutely to take up this practice, one must work at it every morning with no exceptions, one must strive to quiet the mind — but all in quest of an effortless abiding in mental quiet wherein there is no intending, working, or striving.
Logic greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined thinking. Meditation greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined non-thinking.
Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that some have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Arrival at that hidden source is the ultimate goal of meditation.
Swimming upstream against a powerful current is not easy and for some impossible. So this is a good metaphor of the difficulty of meditation. The more extroverted you are, the more difficult it will be. Why engage in this hard work? Either you sense that your surface self has a depth dimension that calls to you or you don't. If you do, then this is the way to explore it.
Meditation reduced to three steps:
First, drive out all useless thoughts. Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts. Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones. Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper. Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps. You may not even make it to the threshhold. But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.
The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises. Not easy!
Meditation won't bear fruits unless one lives in a way that is compatible with it and its goals. So a certain amount of withdrawal from the world is needed. One needs to 'unplug.'
The attainment of mental quiet is a very high and choice-worthy goal of human striving. Anything that scatters or dis-tracts (literally: pulls apart) the mind makes it impossible to attain mental quiet as well as such lower attainments as ordinary concentration. Now the mass media have the tendency to scatter and distract. Therefore, if you value the attainment of mental quiet and such cognate states as tranquillitas animi, ataraxia, peace of mind, samadhi, concentration, 'personal presence,' etc., then you are well-advised to limit consumption of media dreck and cultivate the disciplines that lead to these states.
De Magistro
Seek the Teacher deep within.
The Mind’s Centrifugal Tendency
Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that many have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Could there be a stream without a source? A wind blowing towards objects (Sartre) that blew from no direction and for no cause?
Changing metaphors once again: you say you like riding the wild horse of the mind into dispersal and diremption? Then do so, and see where it gets you. If self-loss in the manifold proves to be unsatisfactory, you may be a candidate for re-collection.
Asceticism
A reader writes,
I am a philosopher and a conservative (in many ways) and I enjoy your blog very much. One thing I find rather puzzling (and interesting), though, is your extreme asceticism. Recently, you said:
"Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere. But it is at least possible that thinking and trancing will."
I guess I wonder just _where_ it is that you are trying to get and what is so great about being there such that it is better than enjoying some drinking and dancing (in moderation, of course).
Well, if I am an extreme ascetic, then what was Simeon Stylites? I am not now, and never have been, a pillar-dweller exposed to the elements.
'Asceticism' is from the Greek askesis meaning 'self-denial.' On a spectrum from extreme self-indulgence on the left to extreme self-denial on the right, I would place myself somewhere in the middle, moving on my better days right-ward and on the others left-ward. So you could say that I am a mild-to-moderate ascetic. I believe in the value of self-denial and self-control in thought, word, and deed. That self-control with respect to words and deeds are essential to human flourishing I take to be well-nigh self-evident. Control of thought, however, is also essential to happiness which is why one ought so spend some time each day in formal meditation. (More on this in Meditation and Spiritual Exercises categories.)
But not only is control of thought conducive to, and indeed a necessary condition of, happiness, it is morally obligatory to control and in some cases eliminate some thoughts. I argue that out in Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? and Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis.
Moderate asceticism is good and is enjoined by all the major religions and wisdom traditions. It is perfectly obvious that many of the problems we face today result from the lack of self-control. Obesity, for example. Debt, both at the personal level and at the level of government, is fundamentally a moral problem with at least one of its roots sunk deep in lack of self-control.
If you are running credit card debt, you are doing something very foolish. Why do you buy what you can't afford with money you don't have? You must know that you are wasting huge amounts of money on interest. Why doesn't this knowledge cause you to be prudent in your expenditures? Because you never learned how to control yourself. Perhaps you were brought up by liberals who think the summum bonum is self-indulgence and 'getting in touch with your feelings.' By the way, this in another powerful argument against liberalism. There is no wisdom on the Left. The last thing you will learn from liberals are the virtues and the vices and the seven deadly sins. For liberals, these are topics to joke about.
No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of
the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation.
Back to drinking and dancing and the reader's question. Everything depends on what one considers to be the purpose of life. To me it is clear that we are not here to have a 'good time.' For me philosophy is not an academic game but a spiritual quest for the ultimate truth. The quest involves rigorous, technical philosophy, but it also involves non-discursive spiritual exercises. These are impossible without a certain amount of moral purification and ascesis. They are also best pursued in the early hours before dawn. So right here is an excellent reason not to waste the evening hours in idle talk, drinking and dancing. These activities are not conducive to spiritual progress. That is why some of us avoid them.
Socrates
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 4, part 1, p. 40, #286:
When Socrates thought and talked, he walked about; but when the transcendental experience struck him, holding him enraptured and thought-free, he remained rigidly still, standing where it caught him. No probing questions then engaged him, no arguments with his friends then interested him.
The dialectic is dropped when the experience it subserves arrives.