Spiritual Enlightenment is Post-Literate

The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham is the story of Laurence “Larry” Darrell, a young man who returned from war existentially troubled by the death of a comrade. Larry leaves his fiancé, Claire, for a year in Paris where he believes he can think through his troubled thoughts to their end. On his small veteran’s pension, he rents a quiet room and studies, learning Greek to read classics in their original tongue, living a life of the spirit. Originally published in 1944, I have a 1946 hard cover with double-spaced sentences. I reveled in every yellowed page of this monastic fantasy.

When Claire comes to Paris to fetch Larry after his year away, he declares his intention to continue. “’But Larry’, she smiled. ’People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now’”. Larry thinks she has said something shrewd. “But on the other hand you might say that if men has been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them.” Larry goes on travelling, ultimately finding his way to a monastery in India.

There is a movie adaptation by John Byram in 1984, starring Bill Murray in a rare serious role. The movie added a defining moment for me. It is not the moment of Larry’s enlightenment, not the shuddering of his head as he awakens, and not the mountain vista as he fathoms the interconnectedness of all things. It was his action just after his enlightenment that stuck with me, the moment when Larry burns his spiritual books.

I think often about books and their role in enlightenment. I think traditional literacy is essential in learning and scientific enlightenment. I also feel that spiritual enlightenment is post-literate. I wanted to read more on this matter, but it was not in the novel. Byrum might have added the burning scene for its visual effect on the screen, but I think there is more to it.
The road to enlightenment has traditionally been a literary one. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian begins his journey after being troubled by “the book in his hand”. Chris McCandless’ pilgrimage to Alaska had its start and finish in literature.

The print version of The Razor’s Edge is narrated by the author, Maugham, serving as a messenger between the different worlds of Larry and Claire, and providing a more mature frame of reference. In the movie, Maugham’s character is absent. The powerful functions of Maugham, including the final dreadful confrontation with Claire, are assumed by Larry himself. This shift in focus away from the literary figure underscores my view that spiritual enlightenment is post-literate.

(There is also a 1946 movie adaptation by Edmund Goulding that I could barely finish watching. While both movies did a disservice to the sexuality of Claire, and to the implied homosexuality of the character Elliott, the 1946 movie did a worse job of it. It also cleansed Sophie, and in so doing killed her character more tragically than the story.)

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Is there a difference between knowing time in your head and from a watch?

Say the word, “cyborg,” and people imagine the fictional Borg from Star Trek, beings implanted with technology, penetrating their skulls to enhance their brains. Frightening. We consider it perfectly acceptable, however, to extend our intelligence and abilities by using technology outside our bodies, everything from speech to pen and paper to computers. Is there a difference? Andy Clark, author of Natural-Born Cyborgs does not think so. “We are, in short, in the grip of a seductive but quite untenable illusion: the illusion that the mechanisms of mind and self can ultimately unfold only on some privileged stage marked out by the good old-fashioned skin-bag. My goal is to dispel this illusion, and to show how a complex matrix of brain, body, and technology can actually constitute the problem-solving machine that we should properly identify as ourselves.”

Clark knows his Heidegger – humans are technological to the core. We readily project feeling and sensation beyond the shell of our bodies, e.g., the cane of a blind person. In a neat demonstration of visual memory, he shows how we only store outlines and make errors when pressed for details. We store metadata but interpolate baseline data. It demonstrates our dependence on external storage devices. We are born to do this, argues Clark. Our brains are plastic, adjusting to our tools. As our tools become more intelligent, we can make more intelligent tools, bootstrap style.

Phantom pain shows that the body is a transitory construct. If mind does not stop at the skin, what exactly is a self? I agree with Clark’s alignment of self with our narrative, our story, projects and intentions. If we wear special goggles and gloves that allow us to see and operate mechanical arms elsewhere, our sense of self is carried along. Clark poses a “soft self”. I compare it with the Buddhist teaching that there is no permanent self. I wonder though if technological augmentation will compound the illusion of self?

He predicts “new waves of almost invisible, user-sensitive, semi-intelligent, knowledge-based electronics and software … perfectly posed to merge seamlessly with individual biological brains.” He foresees a future of ubiquitous invisible computing, allowing us to pluck answers on demand from the ether. Published in 2003, his vision seems close at hand with wearable tech and augmented reality.

The vision is compelling for efficiency but notice a shift in the locus of intelligence. Technology externalizes our minds, making people smarter, but not the person. Clark says there is no difference between knowing the time in your head and being able to retrieve it quickly from a watch. There is a difference, I say, regarding personal control but it is less obvious with a watch than, say, a sandwich board where the information is entirely public. Information in our heads has a private personal perspective, if only a soft self. The personal perspective is needed observe and evaluate ideas.

Clark prefers transparent or invisible technologies, ones that are always on and do not make the user think. He contrasts these with tangible technologies with a noticeable edge, an off button. If technology is going to do more thinking for us, it will become more difficult to critically evaluate it. Perhaps all technologies should be scheduled for occasional shutdown and evaluation.

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It Feels Good to Think

“I’m not an introvert. I like people.” It is a common misconception. We are all social beings, but introverts process information differently. It can be a challenge. Introverts are typically outnumbered by three times as many extroverts. It is no wonder if introverts feel out of place. It can also be an advantage, as shown by Marti Laney in her book, The Introvert Advantage.

Introverts have increased blood flow in the brain, and it follows a different pathway, engaging memory, problem solving, and planning. The pathway is long and complex, activated by the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, which stimulates a good feeling when thinking. The extrovert path is activated by dopamine, fired by adrenaline – they need external stimulation to feel good. Extroverts like to experience a lot, and introverts like to know a lot about what they experience. Introverts find that outside activity raises their intensity quickly. It is like being tickled – the sensation goes from feeling good and fun to ’too much’ and uncomfortable in a split second. Their brain may shut down – brain freeze, ‘vapour lock’. Social encounters are rich in stimulation and introverts process them deeply, sometimes needing to limit the encounter, “It’s time to go now.”

The introvert and the extrovert are the tortoise and the hare. Introverts tend to be slower and steadier, while extroverts are faster and take bigger risks. The tortoise strategy tends to work better in the long run. Introverts can focus deeply, and to understand how a change will affect everyone. They have a propensity for thinking outside the box, and the strength to make unpopular decisions. They help slow down the world a notch.

A hundred light bulbs went on when I read Laney’s book. At the time of the reading, I identified myself as an introvert off the scale, but I have since met people who are much more introverted. Laney’s book recommends several excellent coping strategies. Wake early and gently to let the brain engage. The introvert’s nervous system causes food to metabolize quickly, so graze through the day. Avoid rewinding and replaying words after social encounters (I do this). Speak to extroverts in short, clear sentences (hilarious but true). Introverts tend to have fewer, deeper relationships, which is great, but the best of advice I received from this book was to accept that relationships can be light as well as deep. It makes the world a friendlier place.

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The Most Important Book Never Finished

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger is a pillar of post-modernist thought, an essential reference for understanding the philosophy of mind and technology. Reading it is no small undertaking. Ontology is an abstract subject, requiring prior reading in the philosophy of mind, and familiarization with the new language introduced by Heidegger. On the first day of my existentialism class in 1990, the prof wagged her wise old head over the reading list, intoning, “it’s a tough slog,” debating whether to inflict the book on us. She did.

Reading Being and Time was my initiation into the art of slow reading. I pored over the book page by page, making careful notes as I read. I made good progress, but I confess I stopped after two hundred pages, less than halfway through the book. I did not finish the book, but then neither did Heidegger. A third part and a second book were supposed to follow but instead Heidegger retired to the Black Woods. Ontology does that to people.

Understanding Heidegger is essential as technology plays an increasing role in our lives. I rounded out my understanding of Heidegger in later years. Some excellent essays may be found in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon. If you want to read a small introduction, I recommend Heidegger, an excellent 56-page summary by Jonathan Ree. What follows is my own summary of the main concepts.

Ready-to-hand. Before we can inquire about the being of things, we must look at the inquirer – people, you and me, who ask about these things. Prior to any kind of inquiry about anything, people are just going about doing what they are doing, busy using the things of the world, carrying on their business, like reading this article. You are immersed in a stream of experience. Heidegger calls this state, “ready-to-hand.”

Presence-at-hand. It is only when something is askew that we reflectively notice a thing and begin the activity of inquiry. You’re reading this article, and you notice a word misspelled or a concept you disagree with. Your focus then moves in on the thing, and you begin to analyze it. You regard the object of your attention as a “thing” that can be objectified and theorized about. Heidegger calls this state, “presence-at-hand.”

Inauthenticity. There is a natural tendency to apply this same kind of theoretical approach to ourselves and others. Descartes took this tendency to the extreme, depicting people as entities isolated from the world, looking out upon it. By extension, others are entities, distinctly separated from our viewpoint. Heidegger calls this perspective the “they-self,” a distortion of ourselves and our relations with others and the world, leading to a preoccupation with gossip, entertainment, and other triviality that reinforces or advances our status relative to others, trying to substantiate our fragile selves. Heidegger calls this state, “inauthenticity.”

Dasein. Heidegger argues that we are not isolated entities, distinct from others and the world. He introduces the concept of “Dasein.” We are first existences in the world, doing our business, involved in activities. We have “being in the world” before we do any kind of theoretical inquiry. In contrast to Cartesian solipsism, he coins the word, “Dasein.” We are openings to the world, having access to phenomena. We are fundamentally linked to the stream of experience. We must have this link, or it makes no sense to inquire into the nature of phenomena. It would be impossible to say anything sensible at all about phenomena without first having some kind of qualitative relationship. We are Dasein, windows to others and the world. Dasein is always “thrown” into some circumstance. Where it is thrown, it cares about what is going on, and it projects into the future its plans for dealing with its circumstances. Dasein is first a window to its experience, and then a theorizer, planning a way to handle its experience.

Time. The main cause of inauthenticity is our tendency to regard time as a series of “now-points.” We tend to regard birth and death as distant facts. We consider out lives a finite resource of discrete units of time which we must fill. Hence, we fashion an “I-point” (the Cartesian self) which is a certain quantity of “now-points.” We intend to fill our life with a certain quantity of experiences that will define who we are. In fact, death is an ever-present reality. This fact causes us anxiety, but authentically, we cannot pretend that our self is defined apart from birth and death. Our being is not measured by the now-points we fill. Our authentic being is a constant incompleteness, at any time to be ended by death.

What does all this have to do with modern technology? Heidegger introduced the famous example of the broken hammer that stops a worker and causes reflection. It applies to all tools and technologies. What is to be done when the hammer or information technology breaks? We become unnerved as our 24/7 electric blanket of technology cools off. Without vigilance, our analyses become inauthentic, self-serving spirals of falsity, having nothing to do with the original need to hammer. We invent mighty technologies that seem cool but belie our original purpose. Reflection must be grounded in Dasein’s open view on the stream of experience.

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“Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue” ~ Meister Eckhart

In The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley offers a comparative study of Eastern and Western mysticism, articulating universal themes about the Divine. I summarize the themes here with personal reflections.

Monotheism. God is a divine unity, the ground of the human condition. The concept of God being a united ground is quite different than the traditional notion of an omnipotent being. I personally prefer polytheism. When the knower is poly-psychic the universe they know by immediate experience is polytheistic. The plural form of the pronoun has a new and suitable meaning here.

The human condition is multiplicity. The self has no substance and must be in a state of discontent of suffering, always desiring other, and idolatrous. Political monism is idolatry, causing suffering and obstructing spirituality. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific. It is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dreams, who do the persecuting and make the wars. Very Buddhist, especially if one extends monism and idolatry beyond politics to rigid narrowness of thought in general.

Morality, worship and spiritual exercises. Morality is selflessness, loving others, and vigilance to do good. Rituals can facilitate insight, or they can be idolatry. Spiritual exercises include contemplative prayer, meditation and silence. Miracles are not important; it is important to perform common tasks with love.

Trinity. God is immanent, a personal inner light; god is transcendent, beyond time and the human condition, a rule-maker; and god is incarnate, in the world. Huxley might agree with my rejection of the Christian concept of a fall from which humans need to be redeemed through intervention. I prefer the Gnostic notion that we can become Christ.

Unitive knowledge. The soul is identical with the Divine Ground, so we may have a direct experience of God. The experience transcends self, words, truth, even faith. Again, this fits with Gnosticism.

Two excellent quotes praising the virtue of silence: “Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder, for the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.” Huxley said that in 1945. One of my all-time favourite quotes from Meister Eckhart, “Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.”

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The angel, naked, tiptoes off, weary, content, maybe limping

“To discover now, after twenty-two years of Zen training, that I was still susceptible to otherworldly visions …. Ah, well.”  The narrator has written a book, Against Angels, protesting all the popular attention given to angels in recent years, and rationally discussing the facts known about angels. Now, he sees an angel.

The fictional book has enough substance to have been worth writing. It contains a section with six pictures depicting a maturing understanding of angels. The chief theme is that angels are a projection of our spiritual selves; it is important to stop seeing angels.

1. Longing for the angel. The young man looks to the sky for angels, shading his eyes from the sun. He is open to possibilities but still thinks freedom belongs to somebody else.

2. Seeing the angel. The young man is kneeling and trembling. Perched on a rock, a fierce angel stares down at him. He has seen the angel, but the beauty makes him weak and confused.

3. Wrestling with the angel. The young man stands wrestling with the angel. The wingless angel strains but has a hint of a smile. “At last! He has come to grips with the essential point. There is neither heaven nor earth, holy nor unholy, just the mysterious other, bearing down on him with all its might. He has no choice now. It is not a question of victory or defeat. As long as he is grappled by an other, he is grappled by a self. And though he may not be aware of it during their sweaty embrace, the other wants nothing more than to be defeated.”

4. Letting go of the angel. The young man sits comfortably, gazing into the distance, holding a flute. The angel, naked, tiptoes off, weary, content, maybe limping. The struggle is over; he no longer remembers who won. The light of creation shines from him.

5. No angel, no self. Both angel and man have vanished. The angel is integrated; the man has no one left to confront. He has stopped looking inside or outside. “He has hung out a shingle on his front door that says, “Vacancy: come on in.”

6. Entering the marketplace with angelic hands. The young man is middle-aged, bearded, and smiling. He holds a basket of goodies for children. He has graduated from spiritual practice, from obligations, from enlightenment. He acts for pure pleasure, the benefit of all beings. But all beings are already saved. Open his basket, you will find as much or as little as you need.

Upon seeing the angel, he allows it to teach him angelic sex, and guide him on a tour of the heavens. He learns that the sorrow of humanity is a special thing, the opposite pole of the joy of the angels, a necessary experience to understand others, to truly have love and compassion. “You can love only where you enter.” It is for this reason that when angels meet humans, the help they can offer is so limited. “Actually, our greatest service is to stand before you as clear mirrors. The compassion that a human may feel coming from us is his own mirrored compassion. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.”

Nothing flakey about this book. It has survived many weedings of my book collection.

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Too Many Children are being Hustled off to University

I suspect that Matt Crawford’s publisher came up with the title of his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. The title attracted and repelled me for a year before I read this book. The now largely defunct shop class was still around when I went to high school in the eighties. I learned a measure of competence in handling materials and their machines that has proved useful and satisfying over the years. This connection piqued my interest, but “soulcraft” had the distinct ring of marketing. The subtitle was even more difficult, a pitch to fans of Robert Pirsig’s famous novel on motorcycle maintenance. I would not lightly judge a poser. Fortunately, Crawford speaks with his own voice on a timely issue, the role of the trades and right livelihood in the information age.

Too many children are being hustled off to university in pursuit of so-called knowledge work. Trained in electrical work and vehicle maintenance as a youth, Crawford pursued a doctorate in philosophy. On the way he took a job that seemed ideally suited to him, writing abstracts of journal articles for a database, only to find the quota impossibly high for comprehension. After obtaining his PhD he was hired by a think tank and paid very well, only the results of their thinking were predetermined by the oil company that funded it. He left the academic world to open a motorcycle shop. To hell with economics and opportunity cost. He preferred the cognitive challenges of the trades. Historically, scientific thinking came from a close handling of materials by bright workers. Crawford explains how the separation of thinking and doing is an artificial and harmful practice that started with industrialization and advanced by Taylor at Harvard.

Crawford asserts that the separation of thinking and doing is now being applied to office work. In my years of work in corporate IT, I personally found there are some satisfactions of the manual kind that Crawford thinks are reserved for the trades. Like the craftsman, I take pride in writing code that I know will never be appreciated by anyone except perhaps another developer. I get excited when the switch is about to be flipped on for a major program I wrote. Still, it is true that the only tactile experience I get is that of the keyboard. Worse, as programs begin to write programs, lower-level coders are being phased out in favour of higher-level configurators who have little real control over their products. This shift eliminates the need to master technical skills. Computers are becoming assembly lines of thought sausages.

The problem is not technology. Crawford knows his Heidegger. We are technological beings, handy to the core. We need to feel our tools in our hands, not manage them remotely or regard them abstractly. There is a big difference between the explicit and universal nature of Ohm s law, compared to the tacit and situational knowledge of the mechanic that electrical circuits must be tight, dry and clean. He is not being anti-intellectual but rather attesting to the satisfaction and cognitive challenges of the trades. It is good advice even from an economic viewpoint. In the face of global outsourcing, one still cannot hammer a nail over the Internet.

The book is dedicated to his girls, which is nice, but the sexism in Crawfords writing is glaring. The text is masculine in almost all its pronouns. References to firefighters and chess players are stereotypical, while the one “she” plays music. Sexist jibes are considered appropriate training for young men. According to Crawford, classrooms can only contain boys prone to action using psychiatric drugs, and corporate teamwork is for girls. Call me politically correct if you must, but the sexism is too much. We should have learned by now to welcome girls into the trades rather than scare them off with this tiresome prejudice.

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We are all Strangers in a Strange Land

I was impressed with Stephen Batchelor’s book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, so I read his more recent work, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. The earlier work was a statement of original Buddhism, relieved of the dogmas of karma and reincarnation. Suffering stems from a belief in an unchanging self or soul, driving our perceptions, desires, and actions into anxiety. Yielding up this belief takes the sting out of suffering. This simple statement smacked of truth and was a refreshing break from mystical mumbo-jumbo. Still, there were more questions. I found that practicing mindfulness of contingency frees up energy, both positive and negative. After all, if we yield up any larger system of beliefs, where do we direct our energy? Does Buddhism without beliefs hold up or fall apart? According to Batchelor, even Buddha tangled with it. He called it Mara, the devil, and lived with it all his life.

Mara, Satan, or any devil, says Batchelor is a metaphor for trying to hang on too tight, constricting the contingency of life. In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is depicted as frozen to his neck in ice. Fixations are opposite to the Buddha’s truth that there is no permanent self. We come by it honestly. All of evolution has prepared us for survival, for perpetuation of the self. In the end, it is false. Entropy will have its way. We will age and die. To deny it is to invite suffering. “Each time something contingent and impermanent is raised to the status of something necessary and permanent, a devil is created.” Batchelor recommends an attitude of homelessness. Reality is finally unfamiliar. We are all strangers in a strange land.

Buddhism seems tilted toward openness and against fixity. I think of things cosmic as a two-step, yin and yang in perpetual oscillation. Is fixity always evil? Think of the small stories we tell ourselves, things we fear and fancy that give small meaning to our lives, the tents we pitch to defy the night sky. To be fair, I have yet to find a Buddhist who denies that self exists in a practical sense, or that well-intended planning is vain. They might talk about compassion or care. Quoting a lama, care is “a keen engagement and letting go.” It is a matter of not gripping too hard, not severing out the life in things. That would be evil. Batchelor says that “Buddha and Mara are figurative ways of portraying a fundamental opposition with human nature.” If so, they both represent poles on a continuum from open to closed, neither extreme preferable. So sometimes fixity is the better choice.

If fixity is evil when we clench too hard, then how hard? What about our grand narratives, the meta-stories we tell about the destiny of our lives and the world. Our small stories tend toward more complex ones. We need them to keep faith. Is the faith misplaced? Are we just compounding illusion? Are grand narratives too hard a clenching? If so, why is it that apocalypses never happen, and why do complex social and information systems keep chugging along? As I see it, we should not stop imagining grand narratives. Rather, we should refrain from insisting on only one. Buddhism without beliefs holds up if Batchelor is only rejecting rigid beliefs, not speculative ones.

I have my own speculative grand narrative. It is not particularly consistent or inconsistent with Buddhism or other religious views. At the heart of this narrative is the dualities discussed here. Contingent and essential, small and grand, self and the world. Why do these dualities exist at all? Batchelor says the illusion of self is a function of evolution and I agree with him, but toward what? These splits, I fancy, serve a larger purpose. It is only when a thing is split that it can observe itself. Self is temporarily cut off from the world, and mind captures reality for a fixed moment like a photograph. Maybe the universe is trying to catch a photo of itself. Is entropy inevitable or contingent based on what god sees in the mirror? Who knows? I’m not fixed on it.

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An Idea Inevitably Provokes its Opposite

Critical theory is a way of understanding culture. It proposes a theory to analyze literature, music, entertainment, politics, religion, and so on. It is typically interested in political change. Marxism is a classic example, but there are many other theories, e.g., deconstructionism, feminism, queer theory, and black politics.

Alienation. A core concept in critical theory is alienation, a condition of existing on the outside, in estrangement from a community or nature or even oneself.

Dialectic. The dialectic refers to the alienation or contradiction latent in all thinking. An idea inevitably provokes its opposite. For Hegel, opposites are resolved at a higher level of consciousness.

Narrative. Marx applied the concept of the dialectic to politics, with a grand narrative in which history is the struggle of the working class against property owners. According to Marx, the inevitable outcome is the overthrow of the property owners and the formation of a Communist state. Narrative is basic to the human condition, but grand narratives tend to be authoritarian. More recent theorists prefer to use small narratives to describe their distinctive experiences.

Subtext is a hidden level of narrative or meaning at which people are influenced or controlled. Marx pointed to the cultural ideology of consumerism to explain why the class revolution had not yet succeeded. Freud proposed the psychological unconscious from which repressed sexual desire influenced our behaviour. Structuralists examined how language shapes our interactions.

Structure and Totality. Subtext introduces the idea of hidden and shared structures. We may be able to define a grammar or syntax of the unconscious, e.g., universal symbols such as male and female. The systems of Marx, Freud and the structuralists propose a horizon to knowledge, limiting human claims to enlightenment. At the same time, these theories make a claim on identity, a totality, transferring authority to those who understand them. Always a risky proposition.

Difference. Post-structuralists reject structuralism and systems and emphasize the plurality of meaning. Derrida said there is no precise meaning to a word. It is better to talk about a field of meaning. Foucault rejected the idea of human essence. He described the plight of the mentally ill, homosexuals, prisoners and ethnic minorities. Lyotard coined the term, differends, intractable disputes, e.g., First Nation land claims, which tend toward marginalization of those with less power. Lyotard discussed how postmodern science – incompleteness theory, complexity theory – shows that the future is still open.

Perception. Art reflects the unconscious. Art can be used as propaganda, and it can be used to reveal ideology. Shklovsky contributed the concept of defamiliarization, the making strange of everyday objects to break fascination and perceive freshly. Defamiliarization is a defining quality of literature. Benjamin stated that original works of art have an aura, a context and history that cannot be mechanically reproduced. Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. It is readers who complete the narrative.

Evaluation. In the absence of a grand narrative, evaluations and ethical judgements can still be made on a case-by-case basis, much like our courts. Bentham prescribed “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” and rejected the Ten Commandments.

Simulcra. Technology has changed the nature of the working class. Lyotard was concerned that technology was a last attempt to eliminate difference from the world. In contrast, Haraway saw the internet as a female friendly space, and said she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Baudrillard said we now inhabit a world of hyperreal simulcra, “signs without referents” including the Gulf War and Disneyworld. With technology mediating all our relationships, are we simulcra of human beings?

History. Is there such a thing as progress? Hegel saw an evolution toward absolute spirit. Marx insisted that communism was inevitable. Kafka believed that alienation was an inescapable metaphysical condition. Witnessing WWII violence, Adorno and Marcuse rejected what they called the Enlightenment project, while Habermas said it is just an unfinished project.

To me, the dialectic suggests a two-step. Sometimes we can take two steps forward only to take three steps back. The notion of history moving toward some grand end is suspect. We undertake projects and glimpse meaning, but anyone who thinks they know the big picture with certainty is mistaken. Both memories and hopes are tainted by our fantasies and fears. The meaning I trust is local, actual moments in space and time. Perception is an end-in-itself. The future is open.

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Our Fascinations and Fears Cause us Grief Until we Finally Surrender the Self

When the Dalai Lama visited Canada in 2007 a Catholic asked if he should convert to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama replied that the man should use Buddhism to become a better Catholic. A humble answer, it seemed, but it was also a clever one. Buddhists do not wish to compete with other religions. How rare, I thought. It took some time to sink in, but the Dalai Lama’s reply also positioned Buddhism as a meta-religion, a perspective from which to understand and enhance other religions. Clever. Each new insight I get into Buddhism confirms that position is not presumptuous.

Becoming Enlightened is written by the Dalai Lama. I have knee-jerk resistance to claims about enlightenment. What is enlightenment anyway, a state of perpetual bliss? When asked what the Buddhist outlook is, the Dalai Lama says, “its view is dependent-arising, and its prescribed behavior is nonviolence”. Let’s unpack that. Dependent-arising means that all the fascinations and fears that lead us about by the nose cause us grief until we finally surrender our illusion that self has any permanence. Most pleasures we seek are rooted in suffering. I learned years ago that the only pleasure in smoking is the relief from withdrawal caused by the previous cigarette — like wearing tight shoes for the pleasure of removing them (see Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking). We eat and drink and shop too much to smother the stresses of daily life, mostly the jostling of other people against our wishes and egos. Year by year I lay down my addictions and discover another kind of pleasure, rooted contentment and brimming creative energy. It feels very enlightened, but the Buddhists ultimately insist on altruism, committed service to others. From this view, my enemy is more instructive than my friend, for it shows where I still cling to the illusion of a separate self. I still have a long way to go.

Reading Becoming Enlightened I am again challenged by one core tenet of Buddhism that I have always found illogical. As discussed above, we do not have a permanent self. The Dalai Lama is careful not to use the term, soul, but it seems to me that is exactly the thing he is saying does not exist. The Buddhists also say that actions in this lifetime affect our reincarnations in future lives. But if we have no soul, how can there be any personal connection between one life and the next? It seems like a contradiction.

Frustrated that Buddhism could be so right about practical things and so wrong about this metaphysical issue, I asked the question of Aardvark social search. A helpful respondent quoted Rapola Wahula, “If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can’t we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?” Ah ha, I am still tripping over the assumption of a permanent self, both in this lifetime and possible future ones. This answer turns my question on its head. Our self is just a gathering of physical and mental energies with no permanent core (“dependent-arising”). We do not require a permanent self for continuity past death; moreover, it is not until we give up the illusion of self that we can finally stop reincarnating. Heady stuff. Another one of the social search answers gently suggested my fixation on soul reflects a Christian bias. Point taken. Perhaps there is wisdom in the Dalai Lama’s advice to stick with the religion of your parents.

Becoming Enlightened is a worthy source of reflection for outsiders to Buddhism like me.

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