Is Intention Really Probabilistic?

 

A friend recently sent a link to an Atlantic article, written by Bahar Gholipour, whose provocative title,  "A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked", prompted me to do some thinking about intention. The article reported on the history of the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential. The readiness potential was discovered in the 1960's by two German scientists, Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his graduate student Lüder Deecke. They collected a group of volunteers and hooked them up to an EEG machine, then asked them to sit in a booth and move one of their fingers at random, whenever they decided to do so. Up until then, cognitive neuroscientists had mostly focused on measuring brain activity related to perception. This experiment was the first to measure brain activity related to an internally generated intention.

What scientists found is that the brain started showing evidence that a movement would occur about 500 ms before it actually did. This was unexpected, as a half second delay between the evidence of an upcoming movement and the moment was a huge gap. The discovery provoked widespread attention and discussion among cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of science, but nobody really knew what it meant. Benjamin Libet at UC San Francisco seized on the experiment and decided to take it further. Libet wanted to know why it takes almost a half second between the brain "deciding" to move and the actual movement itself. In particular, Libet wanted to determine if a person is actually conscious of the upcoming movement, that is formulates the intention to move, at the half second mark or not. Libet refined the experiment by asking the volunteers to watch a clock and record the time when they consciously decide, or notice the intention to, move their finger. What he found was that the decision only became conscious 150 ms before the movement. Apparently, the brain was actually "deciding" to move before the decision became conscious. Libet interpreted this as evidence that free will is basically an illusion and that the brain unconsciously but deterministically controls movement.

Libet published his work widely, and the results caused a furor,  particularly among philosophers. In the over 2,000 year history of Western philosophy and religion, there has been a continuous debate between those philosophers who maintain that humans, unique among animals, have the ability to control their destiny through free will, and those who maintain that fate determines destiny and that we have very little control over the events in our lives except in a minor way. Humans have an intuitive sense that the choices they make in their lives are not somehow predetermined and therefore they are in control of their own fate. On the other hand, at the macrolevel, the level of human perception and events, the physical universe obeys certain natural laws that have been formulated in a deterministic fashion. Quantum mechanics certainly loosened up determinism at the microlevel, and approaches such as Bayesian networks can extend a probabilistic approach to macrolevel events. Nevertheless, people have the implicit feeling that they can choose and that their choices make a difference in the course of their lives, so their fate is not predetermined but nevertheless is not a matter of random chance.

Free will is central to the Christian notion of sin and redemption. While the standard Christian (basically Catholic) belief is that God gave humans, unique among the animals, the power to choose to behave in a moral and compassionate manner (or, as the Catholic Church would have it, according to Catholic teachings) or not, much of how the universe evolves is determined by God's will. Some Protestant religious thinkers on the other hand, like John Calvin, rejected free will for predestination, the premise that certain people were bound to be saved, and there was nothing anyone could do to change their fate. In Catholicism, a sinner can always experience redemption through God's grace, whereas in Calvinism, there is literally nothing you can do to have your sins forgiven, and neither you nor anyone else will know about whether you will be saved until you die.

In Buddhist philosophy, the tension between free will and destiny is resolved through karma and intention, and the way they interact with dependent origination, the process by which the mind creates suffering. Intentional acts, especially those with moral effects or consequences, result in the generation of karma. Good karma results from acts motivated by good moral intention, neutral karma from acts motivated by neither good nor bad moral intention, and bad karma from acts motivated by bad or evil intention. In the traditional interpretation, karma is built up in kind of Cosmic Blockchain,  where the causes and effects of actions reverberate as the future circumstances in which a person finds themselves, including the circumstances in which they are reborn in their next life.

Dependent arising is the basic process by which the mind generates suffering and karma. Physical contact with sense organs (including the mind) creates painful/pleasant feeling, which then generates craving for more or less of the feeling, which then generates the intention for action, and actions that then result in karma. Dependent arising can be moderated by generating the intention to not act on the experience of craving, mindfully noting the arising of craving without acting on it, and thereby short circuiting the process. Dependent arising can even be completely eliminated by uprooting the root cause, Avijjā, or ignorance of the causes of suffering and their cessation, a process corresponding to the traditional Theravada notion of enlightenment.

Among some Buddhist teachers, Libet's discovery is viewed as a kind of confirmation of the Buddhist philosophical interpretation based on dependent arising. The preconscious part of the readiness potential could be viewed as the arising of contact + feeling, where in the case of finger movement, the "sense organ" is the mind exercising a decision. The conscious generation of the movement can be viewed as the clinging + craving part, carrying through the intention to move at random, installed in place when the volunteer began the experiment. The moral impact of moving a finger is basically neutral - so long as the finger isn't, for example, positioned on the trigger of a gun pointed in someone's direction and the intention to kill is present. So Libet's work was not as surprising, and not as threatening to the intellectual foundation of the Buddhist tradition as it was in Western philosophy.

In the Atlantic article, Gholipour goes on to report some new developments in the history of the readiness potential. In 2010, Aaron Schurger, a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, was studying fluctuations in neuronal activity. Like many natural processes, the activity of neurons rises and falls in recognizable rhythms. Schurger took records of neuronal activity, lined them up by their peaks,and calculated the reverse average, using the same procedure that Kornhuber and Deeke used in their original EEG study, but with far more data. The result was a graph that looked like the readiness potential. Schurger interpreted this result as indication that the readiness potential was not the cause of the movement, but that the movement was generated at a time when the brain's neuronal activity was already primed for motor action, in a similar way to how the brain makes decisions about whether an external perception corresponds to something. The brain gathers evidence, weighs it against past experience, and comes up with a decision, for example that the sensation of red and smell of perfume comes from a rose. In the case of random movements, because their is no sensory input, the brain weighs the evidence and determines whether it is sufficient to fulfill the previously generated intention to randomly move the finger.

Gholipour interprets this as vindicating the notion of free will, but I'm not so sure. Viewed from the Western perspective, I think the situation becomes worse. Like quantum mechanics, whether or not we actually perform some action is now a matter of probability, not our decision to act. When an action becomes probable due to the brain's neuronal activity being in a particular state, it happens. The missing piece here is intention, and intention rarely enters directly into the Western philosophical discourse around free will. But intention and free will are not the same. Intention is more an inclination in the direction of action, sort of a background behind the actual decisions. Actions with intention behind them generate karma, random actions do not.

So the next question for cognitive neuroscience is: what is the brain activity behind intention? Does it establish a kind of overall scope or shape for the neuronal action? Can it be viewed in brain activity? How about an experiment where one group of volunteers is told to generate the intention to randomly move their fingers whenever they want to and the other group is told to suppress the desire for movement should it occur?







Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/164240717639974117/

How a Consideration of Bullshit Jobs Leads to a Hypothesis About Karma and the Creation of the Self

Recently I came across a book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs - A Theory. Graeber published an essay entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" in Strike!, a radical online magazine, in 2013. Graeber asked the provocative question: "Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?" and requested people to send him email about their work situation.  Graeber was referring to jobs like HR consultants, financial consultants, corporate lawyers, and lobbyists, the kind of jobs which Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, characterized as "telephone sanitizers". These jobs contribute very little to people's overall well being, in contrast with kindergarten teachers, waiters, road workers and nurses where the actual work is connected with a product or service that people genuinely need. Graeber's inbox was flooded with email from people responding to the essay about how unsatisfying the nature of their jobs were. The response was overwhelming. Some people reacted angrily to the question, based on a specific political view (typically libertarian) that jobs which didn't contribute simply wouldn't exist in a capitalist economy. So Graeber decided to write the book.

While Graeber does devote part of the book to discussing bullshit jobs as "spiritual violence", in this post, I'd like to discuss another point that he brings up, which fundamentally underlies his premise but is rather peripheral to his basic argument. This point nevertheless seems to go to the heart of how desire results in the creation of an illusory self-view, and even, ultimately, why a person perceives a job as being bullshit rather than not. From the Buddhist standpoint, karma is cause and effect, the fact that actions have consequences (or more specifically intentional actions have consequences). The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination are based on karma, each link being connected to the following one through a cause and effect relationship. Experience is created through the twelve links.

An important characteristic of a bullshit job is that it has no effect on the world. Graeber sites research by the German psychologist Karl Groos from 1901 in Chapter 3. Groos looked at the response of infants that were allowed to make some predictable effect on the world, versus infants that were prevented from having such an effect. The effect didn't need to have any benefit to them. An example is an infant that discovers it can move a pencil by randomly moving its arms. The infant discovers that they can have the same effect by moving their arms again. The result is expressions of total joy, which Groos coined "the pleasure of being the cause". Groos suggested this reaction was the basis of play, exercising causality simply for the pure joy of exercising it. Subsequent work has confirmed Groos' initial observation and expanded on it. In the footnotes, Graeber cites work by Francis Broucek from 1977 in which Broucek maintains that the sense of causal efficiency is the core of sense of self, and not a property of a predefined self. In other words, the pleasure derived from experiencing one's physical presence as a cause is the fundamental basis upon which the illusion of a sense of self is created.

Now one could argue that a baby accidentally knocking over a pencil once and deriving an obvious sense of pleasure from the action isn't intentional action. Intentional action means action formulated with some aim or plan to accomplish some effect. Because the action is accidental, there is no intention behind it. However, the next step, the baby knocking over the pencil again,  in order to experience that same sense of joy or happiness does involve intention. In fact, it is an example of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination at work, specifically the link between feeling (pleasure at being the cause) and craving (wanting to have that effect happen again), then doing something about it to make the effect happen. The next step in the Twelve Links is clinging, thinking about getting more of the pleasant sensation, planning how to get it, etc. A baby might be too young to do much planning, and its capacity to move around is not well developed enough to do much about fulfilling such a plan even if it could make one, but ultimately, when the baby gets old enough to crawl, it can find other stuff and knock it over to watch it fall. And when it grows up to be an adult, it will feel a sense of unsatisfactoriness to its life if its put into a job where the actions it has have no consequences at all, basically a bullshit job.

Therefore, undermining the connection between experiencing one's physical presence as a source of causal efficiency seems like a fruitful place to look for practice opportunities.

Image source:  https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/86

Emptiness and the Disappearance of Perception

While most beginning meditation books stress basic mindfulness or being "in the moment", Rob Burbea in his book Seeing That Frees goes beyond that, describing how to develop a view of emptiness around specific aspects of the five skandhas, which is basically the sravaka emptiness of the individual person, and a view of emptiness of phenomenon, which is the Mahayana emptiness of the world. He also describes how to do analytical meditation, something I've encountered in my readings of Tibetan texts but which receives almost no attention at all in the Zen and Theravadan texts I've mostly been exposed to in the past. As I tend to be of an analytical mindset (being an engineer) I've been curious to see just exactly what was involved in analytical meditation on emptiness. 

One of the nonanalytical meditative techniques Burbea recommends is to perform anatta (not-self) meditation on various perceptions. So rather than cognitively noting the sensations as in the Mahasi technique, or noting the three characteristics around them, you instead note how they are empty of any essence or core, because they are dependent on causes and conditions to arise and pass away. While he says you can go into the causes and conditions, he recommends that you not dwell on them, but just briefly note their empty nature.

The exercise is intended to develop the same insight as the Buddha had into dependent origination. After a while, the nature of how the mind fabricates reality by clinging to particular perceptions becomes apparent. This clinging doesn't involve any cognitive labeling (i.e. the thought "this is a flower") but rather is built into the basic mechanism of how we perceive, which is why it is so difficult to tease out. In order for us to perceive a flower in front of us or a sensation in our body, there must be an object, the flower or the body with something going on, and the mind must grab onto it and have a particular view about it.

The intent of this meditation is to reduce craving, or reactivity around perceptions, and thereby loosen up the mind to treat perception in a different way. Burbea notes that after a while, perceptions in meditation should be come lighter, and that they should then fade away. The classical texts speak of this in many places, for example this quote from Nagarjuna:

One who sees the absence of 'mine' and I-making does not see.*

In the classical texts, this is called "the pacification of perception (sarvopalambhopasmah in Sanskrit).

I've been noticing something like this in my daily meditation off and on for the last year and a half or so. Basically, I'll sit down and after I make sure my meditation timer is advancing properly (sometimes, if I don't hit the on button just right, it sticks and doesn't advance so I end up sitting for an hour or more instead of 40 minutes), I'll settle in and take note of what sensations happen to be arising in my body. Like this knee has a particular feeling of twisting, or my body is off center. If I need to actually make any physical changes in my posture, I'll make them. Then I will continue to note the sensations and usually tune into the breath at my abdomen. I use that because my Mahamudra teacher likes to have us start with what he calls the "origin point" at the base of the spine as the meditation object. My mental stance or view towards these objects (body sensations and the breath) is quite neutral, that they are just arising and falling as such things do, so more or less like Burbea's emptiness meditation. After a while, the sensations will fade. As the Heart Sutra says: no sound, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind. Shortly before the 40 minutes is up, hearing comes back on line and I hear the meditation timer chime.

Of course, not every daily meditation goes like that, sometimes I have stuff come up from work or in my life, and then need to notice it and return to the breath. I rarely get extreme papancia in my daily meditations though. About the most extreme is some light planning about what I'll do the next day at work, if it's an evening meditation, or during the day, if it's morning.

The funny thing about this fading of perception is that it is pretty easy to see the difference between sarvopalambhopasmah and when I'm drifting off to sleep. Basically, I am able to hold my posture fine and I don't think I am snoring either. Sometimes I do drift off to sleep and slump forward if it's an evening meditation and I've had a particularly long day, so I can tell the difference.  And finally, perception begins to return just before the meditation timer rings for the end of the session, as would be expected. I don't wake up suddenly with that: "Huh? I've just been sleeping for 40 minutes?" feeling. Since I'm going into the session with an intention to sit for 40 minutes, my mind has formulated some clinging around the end of the session; therefore, when the session is about to end, perception returns. The difference in the quality of mind of sleep and sarvopalambhopasmah is pretty obvious, but until I encountered Burbea's book, I was kind of wondering what was going on.

The other interesting point is that the fading is not like the path or fruit moment. These types of disappearance of perception are (or were for me) quite sudden, and twice the disappearance happened when I was doing something other than meditating. In those cases, perception simply stopped then rebooted a few moments later. In another, which occurred during a meditation retreat, the moment was preceded by a kind of strobing of perception which then ceased quite suddenly. And afterwards when the mind comes back on line after path and fruit moments, there is an enormous amount of energy and a feeling of well-being, as if something profound has occurred. So these experiences are quite intense. With the fading of perception in daily meditation, it's kind of like a feeling of comfort and ease, refreshing, not a great deal of energy, so it is more like the term in the classical texts, a pacification.

Later in the book, Burbea's goes into the relationship between intention, perception, and craving, basically unpacking the relationship between my intention to sit for 40 minutes and the return of hearing just before the meditation timer chimes.  Any kind of perception involves a very subtle clinging (tanha in Sanskrit) beyond the feeling of pleasant/unpleasant (vedana in Sanskrit) associated with the bare sensation, links seven and eight in the chain of dependent origination. He also talks a bit about karma, but spends most of that chapter discussing "purification" and catharsis, which many mediators believe and experience as an important part of their practice, but which he emphasizes is ultimately empty. One needs to approach this emptiness with the right mindset, of course, and he talks about that.

Anyway, I highly recommend Burbea's book if you want to check out some interesting approaches to meditation on emptiness. I would, however, be a bit careful about going around and claiming sarvopalambhopasmah as an "attainment" especially if you are on a Bodhisattva Path. Like the Heart Sutra says: "With no attainment, a Bodhisattva dwells in prajnaparimita (the Perfection of Wisdom)". Prajnaparimita is the understanding and perception of the fundamental emptiness under the phenomenal world.



* Mulamadhyamakakarika
Image source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-optical-illusion-insight-world.html

Saving Light and the Bodhisattva Vow

 

So last week I posted the lyrics to a trace song* called "Saving Light" by Garth Emery and Standerwick, with Haliene (an American electropop singer) on vocals. The song was the top trance song of 2017. According to Wikipedia, the lyrics were written by Haliene, Roxanne Emory (Emory's sister and manager), Matthew Steeper, and Karra in 55 minutes. Emery and Standerwick tried various versions before settling on a classic trance interpretation. The lyrics are about bullying, and the music video shows the story of a high school girl being bullied. Money from sale of the song during Feburary last year was donated to an anti-bullying organization. Haliene's soaring vocals certainly are a big contributor to the reason the song did so well.

But the first time I heard the song, it sort of blew the top of my head off, like the picture of the thousand armed Avalokitshvara you see on Tibetan thankas (one of which hangs on my living room wall). I just had to get up and dance. And, a month later, it's still that way. I get this prana in my feet flowing up my back out the top of my head, kind of like a mini-version of the kundalini episode I experienced in the late 1990s. I could not for the life of my figure out why. I've been listening to trance music since the early 2000's, and lately been going to raves and trance festivals, but this was the strongest reaction I've had to a song.

With all due respect to Emory's, Haliene's, and Standerwick's, intentions, I don't think their stated theme was the reason. Bullying is a serious problem and I certainly feel compassion for the victims, but there was something else going on here that I couldn't put my finger on, until today. While I'm fully aware of the issues around reading something into an artist's work that the artist isn't claiming they put there, for me, the lyrics speak to a more spiritual or cosmic theme, a theme broader than the suffering of a single individual, a trans-personal theme so to speak.

Specifically, I feel the lyrics are addressing the Bodhisattva Vow, the vow to be reborn in samsara until every single sentient being is enlightened. The words about standing on the edge where endless meets the end, is about giving up nirvana, which is the end of suffering, for the endless cycle of rebirths. The voices whispering are the voices of all the suffering beings, pulling the bodhisattva back, life after life. In the second verse, the words "You're here, like lightening in my veins" is about prana, which can feel like lightening. Overall, the "you" that's the saving light, is the bodhisattva, so the person standing on the edge is kind of a proto-bodhisattva in the process of transforming into the full-fledged article. There are some aspects of the song that don't quite line up with this interpretation, but overall, I think the song deserves a broader, more spiritual interpretation than the authors originally intended.

The song was sort of an arrow targeted at the heart of my practice.

Whether you believe in rebirth or not is irrelevant I think. You can view it as a metaphor for giving up being comfortable to dive in and help. Or you can wait until you die and see, cause sooner or later you'll find out.


* Trace is a particular sub-genre of Electronic Dance Music known for its high energy, lyrics that often go beyond the usual pop lyrics to encompass drug, spiritual, and religious themes, while, at the same time, being eminently danceable. It originated in Europe, and particularly Berlin, in the mid- to late-1990s. The perfect music for carrying out my meditation teacher's recommendation: "More dancing, less thinking".

Image from https://themettagarden.com/2016/06/22/bodhisattva-vow/

Saving Light

 

[Verse 1]
I'm here
Where endless meets the end
Do you see me?
I'm hidden here again
Your whispers found its way
Calling me to stay

[Chorus]
I'm standing at the edge
But something always brings me back
All the voices in my head
Reminding of what I have

If I fall tonight
You can bring me back to life
If I fall tonight
You can be my saving light

[Pre-Drop]
You can be my saving light
You can be my saving light

[Drop]
You can be my saving light

[Verse 2]
You're here
Like lightning in my veins
Now they see me
And they'll never be insane
Your whispers found its way
Calling me to stay

[Pre-Drop]
You can be my saving light

[Drop]
I'm standing at the edge
But something always brings me back
All the voices in my head
Reminding of what I have

If I fall tonight
You can bring me back to life
If I fall tonight
You can be my saving light

You can be my saving light
You can be my saving light

[Outro]
You can be my saving light
You can be my saving light

Garth Emery & Standerwick, featuring  Haliene.

Listen to it here and read about it here.

Meaning and Truth

Nagarjuna Conqueror of the Serpent, 1925. A painting by Nicholas Roerich, (1874-1947)

Recently, a friend at work told me that he had listened to a podcast by Sam Harris interviewing Robert Wright concerning Wright's new book Why Buddhism is True. Knowing that I was a Buddhist, he wanted my opinion about it. I told him that Buddhism, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, has a particular philosophical approach to truth that differs considerably from Western philosophy, but that we should rather talk about it some time over a beer (nonalchoholic in my case). I was of course referring to the Mahayana and Vajrayana notion of the Two Truths, which I've written about before in this blog. Though I haven't read the book, I suspect it is not a particularly nuanced discussion of the topic, and that Wright entitled it that (or his publisher did) as a provocation, which, in many cases, helps sell more books. I'm sure the Dali Lama would never so entitle a book, or even make it the title of a talk. But the topic of truth and in particular its relation to the opposite, namely falsehood, or, when uttered by a person, lies, is in the air right now: "fake news", "alternate facts", etc. With respect to the Western society's discussion, the two truths don't have to do with facts and "alternate facts", they have to do with how reality appears to us and how is actually is.


The Two Truths doctrine is shared by all the Mahayana schools, though they differ on certain points, in some cases greatly in other less. Nagarjuna, the 2nd-3rd century monk whose philosophy serves as the basis for the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana (and who I have also written about previously in this blog here and here) held that conventional truth, or how reality appears to us, is about cause and effect, and ultimate truth, or about how reality is, is about emptiness, i.e. that reality, including cause and effect, holds no abiding substance from its own side. Some schools whose line of argument does not descend from the Madhyamaka, for example the Yogachara/Cittamatras, hold that there is no external reality at all, not even conventionally, and everything we experience as conventional reality is simply a construct of our minds. Nagarjuna never goes that far, but he doesn't specify any view with respect to ultimate reality, he simply uses negation to refute any view you, or in the case of his best known work Mulamadhyamikakarika (the Karikas for short) a theatrically postulated opponent, happen to raise. To do otherwise would simply raise his opinion to the status of a "view" which one could then subject to negation to refute.

Most of the argument in Mahayana and Vajrayana philosophy is about ultimate truth, but Wright and the discussion that is up right now in Western society, particularly the US, isn't about ultimate truth, at least not directly. It's about relative truth. Specifically, what constitutes relative truth. And there Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka, regardless of their particular take on ultimate reality, have a clear message: truth is what corresponds to cause and effect. In the context of the generation of human suffering, that's Dependent Arising, or Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskirt. In the context of everyday life or science, its about a particular collection of causes (some of which are technically known as "conditions" if they are not perceived to be the main cause) leading to an effect [1]. Even if cause and effect and Dependent Arising are not ultimate truth, as Nagarjuna so skillfully argues in the Karikas, they are how we perceive reality. If a postulated collection of causes does not lead to a specified effect, then the statement that there is a causal relationship is not true. 
  
I made the connection with meaning after recently finishing Asanga's (channeling Maitreya's) work Middle Beyond Extremes (Madhyantavibhaga in Sanskirt). I've been struggling with this work for some time now, but after taking a break, I finally managed to put some of it together. What particularly caught my eye is this:
 

Connection and familiarity,
Lack of connection and no familiarity:
Due to the first two, meaning is present and to the latter two, it is not-
This is being unmistaken about syllables [V.14][2]

What this text is saying is that meaning derives simply from two things: familiarity with the words that were spoken or written and a connection with what the words are designating. The commentaries (in particular, the one written by Ju Mipham, the great 19th century proponent of the Shentong) explain this in more detail. If you are not familiar with the words, for example they are in a language you do not speak or you have never encountered them before, then you won't be able to understand what the other person is saying. Similarly, if you are not familiar with what the words designate, you will not understand. The words will convey no meaning to you. So meaning is really the effect of these two causes, namely familiarity and connection, and their role in human conceptual thought.

The connection between truth and meaning is the following. Meaning is something that is linguistically constructed and is part of the conceptual mind. (Relative) Truth is about cause and effect, a statement about the world. To the extent to which statements about cause and effect are always filtered through the conceptual mind, a disconnect can happen between the truth of how we perceive the world and how we describe it to ourselves (which in many cases can influence how we perceive the world). One person can maintain that the connection sits with a particular designation while the other can maintain that it happens through another designation. Either person can have other reasons for maintaining their view on the designation.

And here's the connection with ultimate truth: because there is no abiding essence to reality, in other words because of emptiness, two people can differ on how they perceive it, on how they perceive the cause and effect. They might even perceive the cause and effect quite differently. The decision to agree about a particular case will therefore cause people to perceive reality differently. That perception can either correspond to the underlying physical realty or it can deny it. To the extent that it denies, the people involved are in for trouble down the road.

Image source: Found in the collection of the International Centre of the Roerichs, Moscow. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

[1] I would add here "probabilistically lead to an effect". The ultimate truth of emptiness means that even low probability events, like the sun suddenly disappearing, are still possible. They just don't happen very often if at all. Less extreme cases of multiple possible causes leading probabilistically to an effect are also easy to find. Most classical Buddhist philosophy doesn't deal with probability at all.

[2] Dharmachakra Translation Committee translation, p. 136, Wisdom Books, 2006. 

Meditation and Depression

Graph showing positive effect of Transcendental Meditation (not Mindfulness Meditation) on relief of depression

I hang out a lot on the Dharma Overground discussion list, usually checking it once a day as part of my nightly tour of Web sites I’m interested in. Now and then, someone posts a note that goes something like this:

Hi, I’m new on this site, just found out about meditation. I’ve had depression for a number of years and want to see whether meditation can help to relieve it. Does anybody know…

Often the initial post will sit there unanswered for a while, but sometimes a regular will come on and post something like this:

Welcome to the site. I had the same problem as you for many years. It went away after I started meditating regularly, and so far, it hasn’t come back…

Recently, I posted a response to an initial query that went something like this:

Welcome to the site. My advice is to work with a therapist and if the therapist suggests medication, give it a try. If the initial medication doesn’t work, then there are others. If no medication works, then maybe your genetics is such that drugs won’t help and talk therapy, maybe with some meditation under the guidance of teacher might work.

A couple other people responded as in the previous paragraph. You can read the thread here.

Now, my reason for giving this advice has to do with my experience regarding meditation and depression. Even though I have never had a diagnosis of depression, I experienced major depression after a meditation retreat that I had to leave early in 1996 (you can read about it in my memoir) in which my entire plan for the rest of my life collapsed over the period of about a month. This is what many in the Dharma Overground community and elsewhere call “The Dark Night”. The experience I had is not particularly uncommon but also it is not a forgone conclusion that everybody goes through it. For someone who already has depression, however, starting a serious meditation practice that then leads to further, perhaps deeper depression could be devastating.

So, being a fan of fact based analysis, I got to thinking: what does the research literature say about meditation and depression? Anybody who knows how psychological research works knows that anecdotal reports, such as that cited above by the list posters, are excellent for pointing toward a possible cause-effect relationship, but to really prove it, you need a rigorous statistical study. So I turned to Google Scholar and googled “mediation depression”.

I came across this article on the Web site of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The article is a meta-analysis, which means that it sorts through the primary literature looking at various studies that meet criteria and summarizes the results from those studies. The analysis runs only up until 2012, about when the current popular interest in mindfulness was just starting. The studies surveyed were restricted to those that were randomized clinical trials with controls for placebo effects. Randomized trials are more or less the gold standard when trying to measure cause and effect, and placebo controls are necessary to ensure that the effect is in fact coming from the presumptive cause, and not simply a result of the subject being convinced that they are getting an active treatment, when in fact they are part of the control group. The authors reviewed 47 studies having a total of 3,515 participants.

The results showed that mindfulness meditation had a moderate effect in reducing anxiety, depression, and pain for up to 6 months, but low effect at reducing stress and improving mental health related quality of life. The authors found no evidence that meditation helped with improving mood and attention, reducing or eliminating substance abuse, promoting healthy eating habits, helping with weight control, or improving sleep. In addition, even for depression and anxiety, meditation was no better than other active treatment regimens such as drugs, behavioral (usually cognitive behavioral) therapy, or exercise such as yoga. The authors then go on to note that many of the studies reporting positive effects are uncontrolled or don’t control for placebo effects, and the people conducting the studies often are themselves meditators or have had positive experience with meditation or may have some other vested interest or belief in the effectiveness of meditation for relieving psychological problems.

What to make of this? One way to look at it is that, even though the pharmacological companies have heavily marketed antidepressants for years, they are really not any more effective than meditation, yoga, or talk therapy for helping relieve depression. There is some evidence that genetics may influence the effectiveness of selective serotonin inhibitors (SSIs, the component of many antidepressants). Other studies haven’t found any relationship between a person’s genetics and SSI effectiveness. The same might be true of meditation, that is people with particular genes might benefit more from meditation and talk therapy than from SSIs.* A recent study connected relief from depression to use of probiotics. The digestive tract is known to have many serotonin receptors and the microbiome is currently an active area of research that is turning out to have surprising effects on physical and psychological health. This study has yet to be replicated.

Anyway, based on what I know now, I think I would change my advice to someone who was looking for relief of major depression. The most important point is that you need to work with a therapist, and, if you try meditation, with a qualified (in other words trained) teacher. The reason is that you need to have someone who has the training to give you an objective opinion about whether a particular treatment is affecting your emotional state. Since meditation generally costs little and seems to be about as effective as drugs, starting with meditation is a good way to go. Also exercise, like yoga, and maybe probiotics all are relatively inexpensive and have been shown to help. If you are working with a therapist, then you will probably also be doing some behavioral therapy, and I’ve known some meditation teachers who include that in their approach. Your support network can give you objective feedback. And finally, if nothing else works, try drugs. They are expensive and don't work any better than much cheaper methods.

*I speculated to that effect in the DhO thread, having seemed to recall an article I had recently seen, but upon further searching I could not find the article. 

Image source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2010-04-depression-transcendental-meditation.html

Karma and Logic

Tibetan Wheel of Life

Nagarajuna has an interesting view on karma. His view is that it is not subject to analysis. This means that you can't approach it logically. The Tibetans classify karma (including rebirth) as the only one of the Buddha's teachings which is Extremely Hidden, which means that it is impossible to find evidence for it. Teachings which are classified as Hidden, like dependent arising, are subject to analysis and evidence can be found, but it requires careful attention. The evidence for other teachings, like on metta, is clearly visible for all to see.

What does this mean? Well, it means that describing a mechanism for karma and rebirth is impossible. By "mechanism", I mean a cause and effect sequence that explains how they work. The mechanism for rebirth comes down to: it's driven by your karma. And the mechanism for karma comes down to: unknown. Incidentally, that karma is the "cause" of rebirth need not be the case. It is possible that someone might be reborn with no connection to the meritorious or unmeritorious acts in their life; in fact, the Buddha explicitly refuted this in one of the suttas.

Why is this a problem? It's particularly a problem for rebirth because from what we know about how humans and other animals come into existence, on the physical side and increasingly on the psychological side, there is always a sequence of causal events and their effects, that determine the outcome, namely the coming into existence of a new being. This sequence of causal events doesn't have a place in it for "this dying person here is reborn as that being there" without any intervening events on the physical and psychological side. For this reason, most Secular Buddhists reject belief in karma and rebirth. Note the use of "events" here, I'm abiding by the modern view of causality, that a cause and effect sequence is primarily the arising of one or several causal events that come together to fashion the effect. This is different from the ancient Indian view, in which a cause was viewed as an object, and the effect was too.

Now, I would argue there is some evidence for karma and rebirth, but it's reliability is somewhat suspect.* As I described in the book, I've had visions of past lives of myself and others during meditation, other contemporary practitioners have as well, and from the sutta reports, the Buddha did too. I think the Buddha probably took these visions at face value, since they reinforced the cultural view that karma and rebirth exist. In addition, it gave him the opportunity to comfort family members who came to him in absolute grief due to the passing of a loved one**. My theory is that he would go off to meditate, go into a deep jhana state, and when he came out, a vision would arise of the next life of the family's departed member. Then he would go back and tell them, to their great relief. Unless of course the vision was of an unfortunate rebirth, in which case the Buddha could use that as a lesson for why ethical behavior is important, hopefully prompting any family members who had the same tendencies to clean up their act.

So karma and rebirth are basically a matter of belief. Though I don't have any proof, I also think whether or not you have visions of past and future lives depends on whether or not you believe in rebirth, as I talk about in the Epilog to the book. What does that say about the actual existence of karma and rebirth? Who knows! Like I said at the beginning, it's impossible to gather any evidence, either physical or psychological, for it. You either believe in it or you don't.

But if you don't, it's not like the Christian view of belief, that you are going to hell if you don't believe in God. It's more like if you don't believe in the science behind global warming and continue to pollute, the planet is going to cook regardless of your belief. In other words, the view is that karma works whether you believe in it or not, and that your next life will depend on how you comport yourself in this life. If you do good acts, then you'll be reborn in a happy destination, if not, well then too late. People in the Secular Buddhist community, like Stephen Batchelor, are perfectly in harmony with the Buddha's teachings if they don't believe in rebirth.

Despite what some Buddhist Web sites and teachers say, you can be a perfectly good Buddhist and not believe in karma and rebirth. The important point is not to behave like a self-centered jerk, and try to bring some generosity and compassion to your interactions with others and yourself. Whether or not you get reborn into a better next life..well, I guess you'll just have to wait and see, eh?



* Another body of evidence comes from Ian Stephanson a former professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who  conducted research by interviewing young children about their memories of past lives. I feel this is in the same category as meditative visions, namely there is no plausible hypothesis about how the memories could have gotten from the former life to the current one, so their cause must be something different.

** This is contrary to the predominant Secular Buddhist view, that the stories in the suttas about the Buddha's visions on past and future lives were added by later editors, to reinforce a particular theological view of the universe.

Image source: buddhaweekly.com

Nirvana: A Fifth View

Mt. Kangchanjunga, Nepal

In a blogpost of April, 2015 titled Meditative Attainments: Four Views of Nirvana, I described four views of Nirvana from different traditions. After spending the last half year studying Nagrajuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, I think I now understand a fifth view, or maybe lack of view is a better way to put it. Because that is what Nagarjuna's view of nirvana is, the lack of any fixed view at all.

It's difficult to see how this could be possible. Language forces our thinking into classifying the world into objects and what they do, nouns and verbs, with prepositions acting as a kind of relational glue. This observation provides the first hint about one property of this non-view: it is difficult to describe in language. And, to the extent we use language to communicate, the non-view of no fixed view is difficult to communicate at all. The commentators to the Karikas nevertheless felt that the Buddha and other enlightened beings have to communicate with students about what liberation is like, and so they have to use some kind of language.

From the Theravada/Early Buddhist perspective, the Buddha's teaching is all about abandoning desire and aversion through the realization that the self is just a constructed entity and not something fixed. This realization does not come easy. The deep altered states of consciousness coming from the path and fruit (magga and phala) moments in the four stages of enlightenment are needed to sever the bonds between sense perception and the constructed entity of the self. Wynne in his excellent essay "Early Buddhist Teaching as Proto-sunyavada" describes this as "no-self".

Nagarjuna's view which is based on some threads in the Nikayas from the Buddha's teaching, is that, actually, the whole world is a cognitive construction, just like the feeling of self. This isn't to suppose that Nagarjuna was a solipsist or a subjective idealist, in other words, that he believed there is no reality outside of his mind. Rather, his position is that there is an objective reality, but we can never know it as more than an approximation. That's because we construct a view of objective reality from our sense data and the cognitive context we bring to that data. The sense data is constrained by the kinds of events our sense organs can experience. For example, some bees can see into the ultraviolet but humans can't, so bees have a different view of the world than we do. The cognitive context contains such properties as our gender, our native language and any other languages in which we are fluent, our culture, the time and place in which our lives play out, and so forth.


These properties and our limited sense data cause us to interpret the world in particular ways that, if they were to occur to someone else, say a women from the 25th century with genetic enhancements that allow her to see into the ultraviolet who was raised on Mars or a monk from 200 BC India who achieved liberation on the banks of the Niranjara River (aka the Buddha), would result in a different interpretation. Complete liberation from the process by which we construct reality from sense data and our cognitive context seems unlikely to be possible on a permanent basis, though I believe it is possible to experience the constructed nature of reality just like it is possible to experience the constructed nature of the self, through meditation. Being able to realize the constructed nature of our views on reality and treating them lightly, as a hypothesis, rather than as a fixed, immovable, universal, and unending truth is what I believe is Nagarjuna's Fifth View of Nirvana.




Image source:wikipedia.com

Book Review of A Guided Tour of Hell by Sam Bercholz

Picture of the Cosmology of Hell from the Book Jacket

Hell is a topic that most Westerners would rather avoid. Indeed, Sam Bercholz said at his talk I attended on Saturday that when he read Paltrul Rinpoche's Words of My Perfect Teacher, he paged through the descriptions of hell, thinking them to be for Tibetan peasants, and he ignored Dante's Inferno for the Paradiso. But after suffering a massive heart attack at the Palm Springs airport and having a sextuple bypass, Bercholz was in the intensive care ward slowly recovering when he flatlined and literally died. While the medical personnel were frantically trying to revive him, he had a near death experience, but it was not the peaceful, "Tunnel of Light" experience widely reported in the New Age literature. It was an experience of hell. 

This book is a collaboration between Bercholz and an extraordinarily talented Tibetan painter from Los Angeles, Pema Namdol Thaye. The book is lavishly illustrated with Thaye's pictures, and Bercholz subtitles the book "A Graphic Memoir", making the comparison with graphic novels and comics. The pictures of hell are in color, while other pictures depicting Bercholz' life, including a previous near death experience in which he experienced the "Tunnel of Light", are in black in white. Hell in Thaye's depiction bifurcates into two, the hot hells - a roiling place of lava, sulfur and smoke where beings are packed so tightly that some beings are parts of others - and the cold hells were everything is frozen, including the beings who ended up there. Bercholz said that the hot hells are where beings end up whose minds tend toward anger and hatred, while the cold hells are those where beings end up whose minds tend toward disdain.

Bercholz and Thaye spent many hours talking about Bercholz's experience but the power of the pictures comes from Thaye's experience of having visited hell too. As a young child in Tibet, Thaye always wanted to paint pictures of hell, and he is one of a small group of "hell travelers", along with Bercholz: those who have visited hell and returned to speak about it. Bercholz says that the only reason he was able to survive the experience was that he was accompanied on his visit by the Buddha of Hell, a compassionate presence who literally held Bercholz in his hands, and Jhana Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom. Bercholz says that even in hell it is possible to become enlightened and escape. The hell dwellers just need to realize compassion for themselves and those suffering around them, and they will see Jhana Sophia and the Buddha of Hell, and be reborn in another, less suffering intensive realm. But the hell dwellers are so caught up in their own anger and distain that they don't see these two beings.

Most of the pictures show hell as a modern cityscape, not the traditional Tibetan architecture nor even the Renaissance landscape of Dante in his Inferno. Bercholz says that before he entered hell, he encountered Yama, the Lord of Death and the embodiment of impermanence, and that Yama was the only aspect of the entire experience that looked like the traditional Tibetan depiction. A long time student of Tibetan Buddhism whose teachers include Choam Trugpa Rinpoche, Bercholz says that after he was revived, he was surprised that hell looked a bit like a big city having expected that it would look like Tibet, but that after some research in the experience of hell in other cultures, people universally experience it in ways that are consistent with their experience in their life.

Bercholz says that this is due to our "habit of space and time". Being dead, you no longer have a body to ground your experience in the material world so the continuity of your mind begins to construct experiences based on your habits during your life. If that includes habitual anger, hatred, and distain, then you will experience hell. Even though the book is structured as a series of vignettes telling the stories of the suffering beings he met in hell, Bercholz is clear that the actual experience was completely nonconceptual. The stories are an attempt to render this deep, nonconceptual experience into the "and then this happened, and then I met this being and she told me her story..." by which humans pass on their experience to each other. 

I've personally always been interested in hell, read Dante's Inferno with interest when I was in college, and have been a fan of Hieronymus Bosch's art. The description of the Buddhist hells have also drawn my attention, particularly the "Hell of the Iron Doors", where the suffering being is in a room of hot iron and there are doors open on the four walls, but as they run to escape the room, the door slams shut. What exactly hell is or isn't is another question, but from Bercholz' and others description, something seems to be there. Unfortunately, while his and Thaye's book is a fascinating read, the way such an experience is communicated, through stories, is unlikely to reach the people who really need to hear it, those whose lives are ruled by habitual anger, hatred, and disdain. If they could for one minute experience the intensity of the suffering that they are causing others through an experience of hell (100% suffering, 100% of the time), they would likely reconsider their behavior.

So if you are interested in hell or just want to check out some fabulous contemporary Tibetan art, I'd recommend buying the book.
 
Image source: forwardreviews.com

Was Nagarjuna a Well Poisoner?

In today’s New York Times, Alexander George writes in the periodic philosophy column, The Stone, about well poisoners. The essay was specifically directed at the current occupant of the White House, and questioned whether his continued denigration of scientific facts as “lies” and his accusations that the mainstream media promotes “fake news” will end up poisoning the public discourse so that people finally are unable to discuss serious issues based on facts. He cites the case of the Dutch art forger van Meegeren who successfully forged paintings by Vermeer. Van Meegeren was able to do so by managing to convince a prominent Vermeer collector, whose collection was used as the yardstick against which to compare questionable works, that a forgery was an authentic Vermeer. While today it’s completely obvious that van Meegeren’s work looks nothing like Vermeer’s, that move allowed him to pass off his forgeries as authentic. 

George states that this move in philosophy is called “poisoning the well”, and that behind every philosophical skeptic is a well poisoner. He cites the case of Descartes, who, in his work Meditations on First Philosophy completely deconstructs your everyday experience to show that none of your beliefs about the everyday world can be trusted. Descartes does this by raising arguments about the trustworthiness of your senses, and raises the possibility that you are dreaming. According to George, Descartes pulls himself out of his tailspin to his satisfaction, but not to many philosophers’. This kind of move is called “well poisoning” because, like an enemy army trying to cut off the water supply to a village, it is more efficient to poison the well (convince you that you cannot trust what you experience) than to turn off the water at the individual houses (argue each case individually).

Though I’ve never read Meditations on First Philosophy, George’s descriptions of how Descartes argued sounded an awful lot like Nagarjuna’s arguments in the Karikas. So the question arose for me: was Nagarjuna a well poisoner, like Descartes?

Overall, I think not, but with respect to metaphysics, most certainly. What Nagarjuna does is poison the well for those who try to argue philosophically about ultimate reality and metaphysics. He firmly establishes that reality is empty of any ultimate and self-existing objects, and only consists of ephemeral cause and effect events, which he says are “like a dream”. Not that they are a dream, he just uses dreaming as a metaphor. Nagarjuna’s tactics are rather the opposite of a well poisoner, to argue each individual case. Precisely because he wants to completely deconstruct the notion of an ultimate reality with self-existing objects, he cannot base his arguments on any assumed, overarching philosophical framework or view. Even emptiness isn’t such a framework, Nagarjuna says that people who believe emptiness is a view are “incurable”. So we can only talk about reality from a conventional, cause and effect standpoint, not from an ultimate standpoint. Curiously enough, that’s the conclusion I came to (before I even knew a whole lot about Nagarjuna’s thinking) in my practice memoir, Silicon Valley Monk. That’s why I subtitled it: From Metaphysics to Reality on the Buddhist Path.

Image source: http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Poison