Math, Magick, and Reality

Mostly reality seems to be made of math. Sure, there's atoms, photons, neutrinos, space and time, but it's math that rules all that. Math is the One Ring to Rule Them All. In fact, if you drill down into the things of the universe, you get mathematical relationships underlying their thingness. At higher levels, the relationship between math and reality is more obscure, but even evolution, genetics, molecular biology, and the other biological fields all admit of an, at least, logical description of the relationships between the important components. Sometimes, as in island biogeography and ecological modelling (a topic I studied at some depth during my graduate student years), you can even formulate the logical relationships in mathematical terms. Psychology and the social sciences seemed for many years to be exempt from this rule, but lately even that is changing. With the advent of detailed brain imaging, psychology is becoming more systematized and logical, if not yet completely quantitative, while the social sciences (especially economics) are experiencing a quantitative revolution through the advent of large scale data collection and analysis.

On the other hand, during a meditation retreat or after a deep and transformative meditative experience, reality seems to be made of magick. Dan Ingram in his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha calls this the Arising and Passing Away experience, and I talk about having had this experience several times in Silicon Valley Monk. By "magick" here I mean that reality seems to be controlled by human intention and that strong intention connected with high concentration seems as if it could have an effect on reality independent of any actions taken on the part of the intender (i.e. the person generating the intention). Indeed, there has grown up a whole collection of meditators who practice magick, in some cases from the classical Western magical traditions, on the side. One could also, I suppose, view certain Tibetan tantric practices as bordering on magick, though these typically have as their stated goal eliminating defilements in the mind rather than having any impact on physical reality.

So I'm trying to figure out: what's the connection? Many of the people who have this view are people whose meditation practice I respect quite highly so I am not about to dismiss their opinion as nonsense (as some in the secular Buddhist community would tend to do). They say that the link is causality and that what they are doing is simple karma, but really, where is there an equation that describes how a strong intention connected with high concentration can cause something independent of an action? When I get to high concentration why, for example, can't I understand why the zeros of Riemann zeta function accurately model the vibrational quantum levels of the nucleus, a mystery that deeply illustrates the underlying connection between math and reality? Rather than the wild and crazy things that I and others tend to experience?

A variation of the Madhyamika argument as to why any object in the universe can't have permanent, eternal existence might be relevant here. This argument is used by the Tibetans during "Dharma combat" debates at the colleges in India to refute, for example, the existence of any eternal, unchanging entity. Basically, the original argument goes like this. If anything else in the changing, impermanent universe were to interact causally with such an entity, the universe would rapidly freeze up because the interacting thing would become permanent and unchanging, and the other things it interacted with would also, and so forth until change becomes impossible. Since that isn't the way the universe works, such an unchanging, permanent entity is impossible.

The variation would be something like: if intention can influence reality independently of action, admittedly in a causal fashion, then the traces of this influence should be visible and it should be possible to infer the causal patterns of such an influence, yet no such trace is found. I suppose the counter argument is, well, nobody's looked. But actually, for many years, psychologists have been conducting experiments involving parapsychological phenomenon, and the data mostly show a result that is no different than chance. A few experiments have shown slightly (but very slightly) better results than chance, but during followup experiments, the effect has disappeared. Apologists say that such experiments are influenced by the skepticism of the experimenters, but in my view that's a cop out. If intention can have a causal influence on reality independent of action then it should be visible in data.

The data need not even be of an experimental nature. Judah Pearl in his ground-breaking  work on causality describes how one can use data which is uncontrolled to determine the causes of a collection of effects. You construct a probabilistic graphical network describing correlations between events where you are looking to find a cause and use the rules of his "causality calculus" together with data to determine what is actually a cause and what is just a correlation. This method can even take unmeasured, background factors into consideration. Fundamentally, Pearl's method determines a cause-effect relationship by looking at it in relation to something that isn't a cause. The method can handle all kinds of confounding factors. So, in principle, it should be possible to determine whether intention has a causal influence on reality independent of action, but I doubt anybody would be interested in actually performing such a study.

Maybe it's kind of like cold fusion. For many years, cold fusion was completely speculative. Researchers kept reporting anecdotal results that "anomolous heat" was being generated, but the results weren't reproducible. Recently, some researchers at SPARWAR in San Diego elucidated the causal mechanism behind cold fusion, and are able to reproducably generate large amounts of heat. My bet though is that the Tibetans have it right, that magick, if it exists, only works within the body/mind. So you can use intention to influence the action of neurotransmitters in you brain, and thereby purify the mind of the defilements. I suppose one could posit some deeper level of integration between human consciousness and the physical universe that would allow a broader application of magick. Perhaps some day, we'll discover that link, but for now, I just don't see it. Maybe I'm missing something. In the meantime, I would sure like to understand why my mind generates these crazy stories when I come out of a deep meditative experience in retreat.

(Image courtesy of leaksource.info)

The Last Act

Buddha in Saigon Restaurant, Wilmersdorferstrasse, Berlin, courtesy of Jack Miller

In Shakesphere's plays, the action in the last act differs depending on whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy. In the comedies, the couples who have been blundering through the woods, attracted to the wrong person, or otherwise behaving erratically all reunite, and are married by the lord of the estate, king, or whoever happens to be the relevant local political leader. In the tragedies, the hero and usually at least one of his friends end up dead, and the other friends or maybe enemies are left to carry the bodies off the stage. Life, no matter how much we would rather not think about it, is more like a Shakesphere tragedy than a comedy, and we can only hope that the last act doesn't become a prolonged, drawn out scene of suffering as we undergo a slow cognitive and physical decline.

While this might sound morbid, I've been thinking a lot about death lately, partially because its fall and the days are getting shorter, markedly so here in Europe where I'm living at the moment. But also, a good friend's brother recently committed suicide. I didn't know him well, but he was often around at parties and had a ready sense of humor that contributed to a lighthearted atmosphere. Last year, he received news that, like some people my age and older, he was suffering from a disease that would lead to an accelerating cognitive decline, followed inevitably by death. He decided to end it sooner rather than later, and while I can't necessarily agree with the way he ended his life, I can understand the logic of what he did. He really didn't want to become a burden to his family and friends in the end.

Early Buddhism had no explicit prohibition against suicide. There are numerous cases mentioned in the Suttas and Vinaya where a monk who is gravely ill commits suicide. The most famous is in the Channovada Sutta, where the monk Channa is suffering from an incurable disease and commits suicide. The Buddha declares that he has become an arhat after his death. The sutta concludes with the Buddha stating that if a monk kills themselves with the intent of being reborn in a better state they are "blameworthy" but if they kill themselves with the intent of not being reborn, then they are free of blame. Divorced from the philosophy/theology of rebirth, the real question is what the mind state of the person is when they die. Is the person depressed and morbid, or happy and looking forward to the end of their story? The latter attitude might be hard to understand, but in fact everybody's story has to end sooner or later, so why not look forward to it?

Apart from the very last scene in the last act, there's the run up. In most prosperous countries, the usual pattern is to retire, then spend your remaining days in pursuing leisure activities until your physical and cognitive health deteriorates. Golf is popular with men who retire in the US, and some people really get into going on cruises. People with more of a social conscious or who have hobbies that lend themselves to it often become enmeshed in volunteer work after they retire. In fact, many of my friends who have retired are even more busy after they retire than before. In India, older men and sometimes couples who can afford to often withdraw from the world and pursue spiritual practice more intensively, going on retreats and pilgrimages, etc.

Since I'm getting on toward that time when people usually retire, I've been thinking about what I should do. What's on next? And at this point I have to say in all honesty: I really don't know. For the next couple years at least, I'll continue working since I still find work challenging and interesting and I enjoy my colleagues. Now, they're all much younger than me which for me is a new feeling, since I was always the youngest person in my cohort. But after that, assuming my health is good (and it has been overall so far), I'm left with a feeling of having the potential to do something, but not knowing what.

Perhaps I should just leave it as an open question, like a koan?

Meditative Attainments Part IV: "A Bodhisattva has no Attainment"

The Heart Sutra is chanted every day in Zen monasteries and retreat centers around the world. The actual Sanskrit name for the Heart Sutra is Prajnaparamitahrdaya Sutra, which means "Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom". But the word "heart" in the English name has for me a kind of double meaning. On the one hand, the Heart Sutra contains a highly condensed version of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, or "Perfection of Wisdom" Sutra, a huge corpus of work scholars believe originated in India during the 1st century BC and worked its way throughout Buddhist Asia as the Mahayana expanded into Central Asia, China and Japan. Xuanzang, the Chinese Buddhist monk whose pilgrimage to India I spoke about in the book, carried a copy of the Prajnaparamita back to China with him and had it translated from Sanskirt to Chinese. The Heart Sutra reduces the hundreds of thousands of lines of text in the Prajnaparamita to the heart of the teaching, 280 words in Sanskirt or 260 Chinese characters.

Though not actually part of the translation of the Sanskrit name, the other meaning of heart has to do with the way ancient people in India, China, and Japan viewed the human heart. The heart was thought of to be the seat of emotions and of human nature in general. So the Heart Sutra is a sutra that speaks to the heart, to the origin of what it means to be human. Since Prajnaparamita means "Perfection of Wisdom" in English, the sutra speaks of wisdom, as the highest of the virtues, and how to cultivate it.

Here's a translation that San Fransisco Zen Center used to use, which I actually got from the Brooklyn CUNY web site. This is the translation I'm most familiar with from having chanted it over the years:

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita, perceived that all five skandhas in their own being are empty and was saved from all suffering.

O Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness; that which is emptiness form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, formations, consciousness.

O Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure, do not increase nor decrease.

Therefore in emptiness: no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no formations, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of eyes...until no realm of mind-consciousness; no ignorance and also no extinction of it...until no old-age and death and also no extinction of it; no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path, no cognition, also no attainment.

With nothing to attain a bodhisattva depends on Prajnaparamita and the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance no fears exist. Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in nirvana. In the three worlds all buddhas depend on Prajnaparamita and attain unsurpassed complete perfect enlightenment.

Therefore, know the Prajnaparamita is the great transcendent mantra, is the great bright mantra, is the utmost mantra, is the supreme mantra which is able to relieve all suffering and is true not false; so proclaim the Prajnaparamita mantra, proclaim the mantra that says:

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha!

The story here is that Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is meditating, and he perceives emptiness through the perfection of wisdom. He then goes on to instruct Shariputra, the Buddha's chief monk and the one called "First in Wisdom" in the Pali Canon, about the nature of experience. It's a pretty thin story, and there's a bit of 1st century "Yana politics" (Mahayana v.s. Hinayana) embedded in it, but that's really just a setup for what follows.

The sutra is addressing the nature of human experience directly. The key lines, sort of the heart of the Heart Sutra, are these:

Form does not differ from emptiness;
Emptiness does not differ from form.
That which is form is emptiness;
That which is emptiness form. 

What these lines say is that form and emptiness perfectly interpenetrate. They are different but not separate.

Perceiving emptiness, even for just a fraction of a second, is nirvana, peace. The middle paragraph describes what the experience of emptiness is like: quite literally, nothing. Perception shuts down for some period of time, cognition, any kind of mind activity are absent. That is the path/fruition experience spoken of in the Abhidhamma, or after the initial path/fruition, just a fruition.

But emptiness isn't just part of some special experience. It exists within every perception, every thought, and not just the fruition experience, though in a fruition it is most visible. That's what the key lines: "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" are about. Every time a perception disappears, it disappears into emptiness. And every time one arrives, it arrives out of emptiness. Emptiness even pervades the perception itself through its origin and cessation. Emptiness lies between the in breath and out breath, and at the end of the out breath. That experience of emptiness within sensation leads into the deeper experience of the path/fruit moments within meditation.

The line about bodhisattvas having no attainment, the last line in the fourth paragraph, is how a bodhisattva, basically a Mahayana practitioner, treats the experience of emptiness in their behavior. The attainment of bodhisattvas is attested to by the people who they interact with. My teacher, Yvonne Rand, used to say that if you wanted to know whether someone was enlightened, you should ask their husband or wife. Or if they aren't married, then the people they live with.

The next paragraph says that without any attainment, the mind is no hindrance. Why would that be? If you think you've attained something, then your mind has some kind of view about what you are. That view becomes a hindrance. In the experience of emptiness there is no attainment, and so the mind has no hindrance. And with no hindrance, there's no fear. You don't have to be afraid that some experience is going to come along and challenge your view of what you are, because there's no "you" there to challenge. So if you carry the "no attainment" mind of emptiness into form, you don't have to be afraid.

The sentence about being far apart from perverted views nails this down in no uncertain terms. Many more recent translations use a softer word than "perverted". For example, Thich Nhat Hahn uses "wrong perceptions". The newer San Francisco Zen Center translation uses "inverted views" . All these softer words miss this: every view is, in a sense, perverting in the sense that it is limiting. What the Heart Sutra is getting at, I think, is that if we think of ourselves in a limiting manner, we draw a circle around our current experience and say "this is what *I* am". We thus exclude what's outside our current experience as being unacceptable. This process is the process of defining the self, making it into a thing that doesn't change or that we don't want to change or that we think we can force to change in a particular direction rather than a process that is fluid and can often go in surprising directions.

Finally, there's that last line, that funny Sanskirt phrase, a mantra which most translations leave untranslated. Scholars debate about what it means, but the most common translation (attributed to Edward Conze) is:

Gone,
gone,
gone beyond,
gone fully beyond.
Awakened!
So be it!

This was supposed to be what the early Mahanyana practitioners said upon experiencing emptiness for the first time.

Next time you're meditating, try looking for emptiness in your perception. If you're doing vipassana, look for emptiness at the end of a sensation. If you're doing anapanasati (breath meditation), look for it at the end of the out breath. After a while, you'll get better and better at seeing it, and you might find it becomes your object of meditation, the object which is no object. And then you'll have found peace.

Updated 08/29/2016: Fixed broken link to image.

Image Source:  http://unbornmind.com/myblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/heart-sutra-wordle1.gif

Comparing Piti and Kundalini

A friend wrote the other day and mentioned that in footnote 42 of Silicon Valley Monk, which talks about how traditional meditation texts describe the kundalini or "energy" that I experienced after the 1996 IMS retreat, I say that: "...The experience is so intense and overwhelming that I can hardly imagine it having been ignored, though it is never mentioned in the traditional Theravadan meditation texts from the early 1st millennium AD." The friend then mentions that in fact the Visudimagga does mention these kinds of experiences, classifying them as pīti and says that pīti is of five kinds: "minor happiness, momentary happiness, showering happiness, uplifting happiness, and pervading (rapturous) happiness. Herein, minor happiness is only able to raise the hairs on the body. Momentary happiness is like flashes of lightning at different moments.  Showering happiness breaks over the body again and again like waves on the seashore.”

As I mentioned in my reply to her, I believe my experience had about as much in common with the Visudimagga description as a nuclear blast has with a fireworks display. The experience was not at all about happiness, it was about power. There was a feeling as if the base of my spine was connected up to an electrical socket and a 100 amp current was being run through my body, and this experience went on at various levels of intensity for about 3 years, after which it tapered off. I believe that accounts for the reason most people who have a similar experience call the feeling colloquially "energy". From an objective standpoint, there is likely not enough energy being generated to light a light bulb, but it certainly feels like something quite profound is going on.

About the best description I found of the experience is in Gopi Krishna's book Living With Kundalini. Kirishna was a lay person who meditated daily, and one morning he experienced a kundalini awakening. His description of his experience matches well with mine. On the other hand, the Visudimagga's description has a few points in common, but by and large misses the big picture. In particular, there was not one element of happiness in the experience. My experience at the time was of unhappiness, because nobody could explain to me what was going on, and because every time I sat down to meditate, it felt as if I was going to be electrocuted. The Zen tradition, which is what my teacher at the time had trained in, says nothing about energy experiences, not even the little bit of marketing-like text that the Visudimagga has.

Tibetan texts, on the other hand, have quite a bit to say about energy and have many practices in them to deal with it, and, indeed, to utilize it for purification. Though I have never practiced with a Tibetan teacher and don't claim to even be a novice in Tibetan practices, I did remember having read in one book that the way to deal with such energy was to attempt to channel it out the top of your head (not out your chest like the guy in the photo above). So I spent some time in meditation practicing channeling it. I'm not sure whether that was such a good idea in retrospect but it did seem to moderate the intensity. Daniel Ingram, in his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, classifies kundalini experiences as being part of one stage of insight called Arising and Passing Away (A&P for short). A&P experiences are varied but they all have a characteristic of being quite spectacular and having spectacular after effects. I can sure testify that this was true of mine. He recommends just noting it as a particular sensation and not trying to manipulate it, but that is pretty hard to do when it feels like your body is connected into the energy of the universe.

Ingram doesn't speculate as to what the cause is. Krishna postulates a Hindu cause, the rising of a snake spirit energy up the spine to purify the chakras. This kind of explanation doesn't really do it for me, as it isn't anchored in the brain, which is after all where the experience must be generated. My theory is that it has to do with a rewiring of the brain below the cortical homunculus, which you can see in the picture below:

The sensory cortex has a little map of the body on top of it where each part of the body is associated with a different area on the cortex. This was discovered by stimulating different areas of the cortex in people who were having brain surgery and then having them report on what part of their body felt the stimulation, since many kinds of brain surgery don't require anesthesia. 

Meditation tends to cause one's body image to change in various ways. For example, many people have difficulty driving after a retreat, and I've found that for me it's because the relationship between my body and the car gets redefined. It takes a while for me to get the feeling of the car back. In a similar way, maybe the wiring underneath the cortical homunculus gets rewired by meditation to connect the body up to the pleasure and pain centers in a different way. Probably there are some nexuses there that correspond to the classical chakras, minus those that some theorize are outside the body above the head, which, to me, seem to be either imagination or some kind of remapping of the body image to include space outside the body. A part of the traditional story about kundalini is that it purifies the chakras as it moves up the spine to the lotus chakra at the top of the head.

It would probably be difficult to actually test this theory, but I did suggest to one Stanford professor that it would be interesting to get an FMRI machine  on someone that was having a kundalini experience to see which parts of the brain were lighting up. She replied that it would be difficult to convince NIH to fund such a study (FMRI time being expensive) because there is no real health impact, either negative or positive, of kundalini.

Photo source silentwindsofchange.files.wordpress.com

The Power of Emptiness?

My wife and I are spending 6 months in Berlin, where I am teaching computer science at the university. This morning on the way to the farmer's market, I saw this big, orange garbage truck and couldn't help but snap a picture. "Leerkraft" in German means literally "Empty Power", but in English you could also translate it as "the Power of Emptiness". Maybe there's a lesson there? Anyway, I'm sure the Berlin Sanitation Department didn't have Dharma in mind when they painted the word on the side of the truck.

Meditative Attainments Part III: Four Views of Nivrana

 

The great Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai authored a series of thirty-six landscape prints known as Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku Sanjurokekki in Japanese).  The prints show views of Mount Fuji from various viewpoints around the mountain, some located in urban areas and some in rural areas. The most famous print in the series is the first one, entitled The Great Wave Off Kamakura, shown above. The print shows a huge wave overshadowing the small boats and even smaller men. The foam boiling off the top of the wave looks like a flock of birds. In the background, Mount Fuji floats, a serene white presence insulated from the chaos in front.  Most Buddhist traditions talk about nirvana like that, a serene refuge from the chaos of samsara. But there are quite different views of nirvana in the different traditions.

In Part II, I talked about a naturalistic view of meditative attainments, how one could get a base-line shift in a person's long term mental state away from suffering and towards wisdom and compassion without having to invoke any transcendental cause. As I've mentioned, the traditions which view meditative attainments as crucial (and they don't all have this view) maintain that this kind of fundamental shift, basically awakening or enlightenment as a consequence of a meditative attainment, comes from experiencing nirvana during meditation.  In this post, I'd like to talk about different views of nirvana in the different traditions, at least as I understand them.

Guy Armstrong has an excellent talk at the Dharma Seed library with a high level summary of the four views held by various traditions on what nirvana is. These are:

1.  The Madyamika tradition in Tibet, which is the tradition to which the Dali Lama belongs, maintains that nirvana has no ontological reality. Nirvana is the complete and total absence of greed, hatred, and delusion, not an object. It can only be experienced moment to moment, as a moment completely free of greed, hatred and delusion, not as an object in meditation. This view was developed by the famous 3rd century AD Buddhist philosopher Nagarajuna, the founder of the Madyamika tradition, and is in contrast to the view of the Abhidhamma.
2. The Burmese and Sri Lankan Theravada meditation schools have a view developed out of the Abhidhamma and Visuddhimagga which I talked about briefly in Part I. Nirvana is a mental dhamma, or object, that neither exists nor does not exist. It is described as supramundane, the Unborn, the Uncreated, the Deathless. When the mind makes contact with the nirvana object in meditation, the mental aggregates of feeling, perception, formations (sankaras or drives), and consciousness all cease. The mental aggregates reboot when the mind turns away from the nirvana object, and if this is the first such contact at a particular level, certain negative tendencies of the mind are dissolved. Rinzai Zen has a similar view that the moment of satori  involves the falling away of the metal aggregates, as described by James Austin in Zen and the Brain, though it is not as specific about the dissolution of those negative mind tendencies which lead to suffering.
3. The Thai Forest tradition view is that contact with nirvana causes feeling,  perception, and formations to cease but not consciousness. Normally, according to the Buddha's teaching, consciousness can't exist without an object. During the meditative attainment leading to enlightenment, the object of consciousness becomes consciousness itself, and a knowing of the Unconditioned arises. If you're a programmer, you recognize this pattern: its a setup for an infinite recursion. Consciousness takes itself as an object which, being consciousness takes itself as an object, which.... That infinite recursion causes consciousness to somehow become unbound from the need to exist in conjunction with an object. Than Geoff describes this view in his short book The Mind Like Fire Unbound. There's some evidence that the Korean Zen tradition has a similar view. Chinul (1158–1210) the founder of Korean Seon or Zen describes this as "tracing back the radiance" of consciousness to its source which is the Unconditioned. Robert Buswell describes Chinul's teaching in a book by the same name. There's some thread of this in Soto too, as can be seen by some of the essays in Jikyo Cheryl Wolfer's recent book Seeds of Virtue, Seeds of Change, particularly in the essay by Myoan Grace Schireson.
4. The final view is that nirvana is the unchanging nature of Mind, the Big Mind or True Self that doesn't die and wasn't born, Buddha-nature, or the Tathagatagabra, and that we always have it. This view is held by Tibetan rigpa teachings. The goal of rigpa is to experience empty knowing as you go about your daily life. This view is also close to the Dogen Zenji Soto tradition in which Suzuki Roshi taught in, which I practiced for many years and where I still practice with friends occasionally.

 On the surface, these four views seem to have very few points in common. 2. and 3. involve a special experience developed during meditation, but the experience is quite different, and leads to some very different conclusions. 1. and 4. involve no special experience in meditation, but 4. doesn't talk about reduction in negative mind tendencies, just empty knowing, which presumably results in the negative mind tendencies being suppressed or eliminated, whereas 1. specifically defines the experience of nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion as nirvana. So comparing the traditions, one can become quite confused about what an experience of nirvana is. If the traditions don't agree on how to achieve the key goal of practice, how can anybody be expected to know when they've achieve it?

The answer to that in the traditions is that a teacher usually certifies, upon a report of an experience, that one has attained enlightenment. The problem with this is: what happens if you have an experience that is outside what the tradition considers the canonical experience of enlightenment, but falls within that of another tradition? Realistically, teachers can only certify an experience if they are familiar with it themselves. But what if all the views are right? What if there are multiple, equally valid paths to enlightenment, to the long term reduction of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the arising of happiness, equanimity, and understanding?