The Mirror and The Seashore

Thoughts. Mind. Thinking. No-thoughts. No-mind. No-thinking. 

Within Zen Buddhist and Taoist thought worlds there are two metaphors: these are those of the mirror and the seashore. They serve similar purposes: to promote ideas of non-attachment to thoughts and the refusal to be bound by any thoughts, ideas or narratives at all. This is not a vision of the mind which is about the attainment or collection of things and so the agglomeration of something denominated ‘knowledge’. Indeed, it is one which privileges the refusal to hold anything at all within something we might call our mind. The mirror, for example, is a reflecting surface. It does not hold what it captures. It simply reflects it back. In a similar way, the seashore is caressed by the sea which may, from time to time, deposit items upon it. But the seashore, in this case, is indifferent and unconcerned about this and is happy to let that which is left upon it stay indefinitely or be just as easily swept away again. The metaphors of mirror and seashore encourage non-attachment, being dispassionate and acting without action.

In his book Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, towards the end, Friedrich Nietzsche has the following aphorism:

“Life as the yield of life. - No matter how far a man may extend himself with

his knowledge, no matter how objectively he may come to view himself,

in the end it can yield to him nothing but his own biography.”

I see in this thought a mentality compatible with that of the Zen Buddhists and Taoists above. For what is it to imagine that a path of life yields nothing but the tracings of where it has been, a biography? Is it not to look disapprovingly on the notion that one may have collected up things egotistically regarded as ‘knowledge’ or ‘truths’ and to count them all as vanity? In this aphorism Nietzsche is agreeing with the past, present and future versions of himself that human beings are prey to many powerful illusions and that they should regard them all as exactly that and treat them accordingly. Here it is noteworthy that Nietzsche, in general, did not so much think of thoughts in terms of true or false but in terms of therapeutic valuations: he wanted to know if such things promoted health or disease in the human being and in human culture generally. Already when Nietzsche had written this aphorism in the late 1870s he had written of the human being as that creature which is a matter of will and desire where, for such a being, it doesn’t matter much what illusion they become attached to so long as it gives them a feeling of power and of control.

Yet it is just such power and control that, it seems to me, the Zen Buddhists and the Taoists are looking to give up. They think these things to be some of the “illusions that we have forgotten are illusions” which is what Nietzsche calls those things we denominate truth in an essay he wrote earlier in the 1870s. Taoists, for example, speak of and value the idea of ‘wu wei’ a great deal. ‘Wu wei’ is best translated into English as ‘actionless action’ rather than the often common ‘non-action’ since, so I am led to understand, it is not a concept which means doing nothing. Instead, the Taoist practitioner is imagined as an active participant in the things of life - yet not as someone with micromanaged intentions. This is seen as a matter of genuineness or authenticity in a conception of the whole that is the existence of all things in which ‘emptiness’ is seen as the source of all possibility. From such a point of view desires, will, intentions, attachments, are all barriers to possibility and enemies of becoming because they impose upon people mental structures which limit their abilities to see, to imagine, to participate and to dream. In effect, the Taoist asks why we should put up mental walls or restrict ourselves by means of entirely thought-based schemes when nothing about our universe of experience itself imposes such things or presents them as inherent to life itself. The situation, whatever the situation is, is not limited to the things we immediately, or even reflectively, think about it. There is no equation of thought and reality. This is, in turn, to concede, as the theologian and philosopher Jack Caputo does, that there is nothing we think that is not an interpretation.

But if there is nothing we think that is not an interpretation then this surely also means that there is nothing that we think that is not partial - in at least two senses. First, an interpretation is our’s, and not someone else’s, and, second, because of the first reason it is also much, much less than the whole, the whole which would be all the possible interpretations. Realising this, we now see, once again, how becoming attached to things or desiring things is actually a restriction of possibility. In fact, it is the imposition of a fiction simply because we become attached to it, either because we want to be through desire or will or because we are not sufficiently detached from it to see it as simply an interpretation. It would be like trying to become like a mirror that wants to possess the image it reflects or like a seashore which wants to retain the items the sea spits out onto it. Yet such a seashore, if it did this in reality, would soon become cluttered. Over time, it would cease to be the empty expanse next to the sea upon which things might occasionally be washed and would, instead, become a dumping ground, a tip, a public dustbin. The seashore as mind would actually impair its own ability to be that which it is. In Nietzsche’s terms, we would then be able to diagnose the habits of attachment, will, intention and desire as unhealthy and disease-inducing habits. So, actually, refusing to hold onto things, taking a detached attitude to the action of the sea of life as it sweeps across our minds, turns out to be good for the seashore, the seashore that is mind. The thoughts may come and the thoughts may go, the actions of a mind that is thinking, but we do not need to accept them or be under their tyranny. We are not forced to hold onto them them or take them seriously anymore.

There is another saying that comes from these Eastern philosophies and it is the following: “the no-mind thinks no-thoughts about no-things”. It seems, to me at least, to be a riddle and yet I imagine that in this brief essay I might have had some thoughts which illuminate its meaning. Zen Buddhists and Taoists know well that we have minds and we think thoughts. The Buddha himself, in fact, is said to have said that “we are what we think”. (He also said ‘there is nothing to stick to’ which is relevant but a whole other story!) This, indeed, is why I imagine such philosophies are so concerned with thinking in the first place. But, that being the case, it suggests that mental hygiene and psychological health are of primary importance for these most therapeutic of spiritualities in which peace and enlightenment are the highest personal goods and the most valuable possessions. This saying, I think, encapsulates the lack of attachment and refusal of imposed narratives that I have already spoken about. It encourages actionless action and loss of intention and a ‘letting things be’ that is hard for people used to ‘gaining knowledge’ or ‘understanding things’ to accept. They only ever do these things to use them in accordance with their own intentions and desires and attachments in the pursuance of some imagined necessity they call “making sense”. Rarely, however, do they question the narrative, and the values, which have motivated them to imagine that this was the purpose of thinking or the mind in the first place. We have here, then, a completely different way to see the world. But you should not then think that this Eastern way is ‘the right way’ where the other, more Western, one was not. 

For then you will only have fallen into the same trap all over again.

Thirteen Keys to A New Vision of Life

Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance.
All is relationship, everything is interconnected.
Be content with what you have, the way things are.
Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate.
If you want to be rich do nothing for money.
Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.
Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices.
Nothing remains, everything must be let go.
Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action.
When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place.
Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.
Now is the time, there is no other.
Know nothing.

These are all actions, how to live life, states of becoming. They are called ‘keys’ because I think each helps unlock something if we take them seriously.


Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance


It all begins with humility. But the first key is not “be humble”. Instead, I speak of a cultivation, a tending to, a concentration on, an ongoing process, something also relevant to every key here. I also speak of a context rather than an abstract. That context is the cosmos, the universe, everything we can imagine existing. In the context of that, what are we? To cultivate your cosmic lack of importance is to groom yourself into a non-egotistical state so that when various people tell you that you matter or that you are important you take it in a context in which it should be more properly set. So cultivating your cosmic lack of importance is not regarding yourself as the lowest of the low or the dregs of existence. Instead, it is an “everything in its place-ness” where that is just to co-exist with all things. It is an inability to concern yourself with status or rank or importance. It is a living, active humility, a non-egotistical becoming.


All is relationship, everything is interconnected


That all is relationship and everything is connected is to recognise and actively embrace that you are not the only thing that exists. Once that is realised, you begin to see things in the context of other things or as a set of interlocking relationships. It becomes the viewpoint of actions and consequences or non-actions and consequences, for, whether we act or don’t act, things must follow. This, then, becomes an existence which is about consequences, relation and interconnection. Since you are not all that exists and since things must inevitably affect other things, a more rounded view than “just me” becomes necessary. So this realisation is also a further example of a non-egotistical existence and a contextualisation of ourselves as a link in a chain or as a set of interlocking relationships. We surely cannot abstract ourselves from everything else for it is everything else, in its possibility, that gave us birth and enabled us to exist but, more than that, that enables existence at all. So such a view is the end of the abstraction or instrumentalisation of both people and things. Instead we think of their linkages, relationships and interconnections in non-egotistical ways.


Be content with what you have, the way things are


At first flush, this might sound cruel or harsh. We imagine any number of oppressive situations or contexts and we ask how the people in those situations could be “content” with them and so accepting of “the way things are”. Indeed, many in our society today preach the exact opposite to this third key that I am here putting forward. They speak of not being content with your lot and the way things are. But this key needs to be approached in the right way to understand what it means. It does not mean to be accepting of oppression or to explain away pain caused by others or the domination of one person over another. Instead, it means to cultivate (there is a lot of cultivation involved in these keys for it is not imagined these are qualities we necessarily have already) a principled indifference to circumstances, to see through the narratives humans impose upon life. It is also to accept that no one person, or group of people, control the way things are or what happens, both things far beyond the capabilities of either. In fact, it is a refusing to rush to settled conclusions about this time, this place, our life and its context. It can also be seen as a seeing things at their best possibility at all times and an acceptance that change is always going on. In fact, this key very much interacts with key seven in this respect. Yet there is also a sense of flexibility here, a privileging of flexibility over possession of something thought ideal which can easily lead to greed for more or an obsession with possession. Indeed, this key seems not to accept that an ideal ever exists to be possessed. Instead, we cultivate contentment in ongoing situations, a training of ourselves, a discipline, a meditation, regarding a process. We treat all circumstances as imposters just the same.


Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate


These two commandments compounded can be seen as a summary of the entirety of social morality and, indeed, the key to achieving it. The first is famously taken by Jesus as a summary of the Jewish law and exampled by the parable of the Good Samaritan in which he suggests that even your enemy in danger is your neighbour. He thus answers the obvious follow up question to “love your neighbour as yourself” which is ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Yet this is also a third key which focuses on the dissipation of ego. For in taking yourself as the measure and acting to others as you would hope you yourself receive there can be no ego. For here is recommended both an active “love” of neighbour rather than a mandated passive attitude if a neighbour should, by chance, come your way, and an active not acting towards others in ways you would hate, the negative form of “the golden rule” known in human societies since antiquity. In both cases activity, an active mentality, is envisaged. It is a way we are imagined to actively pursue, a path we choose to go down. If growing numbers of us acted this way human societies would be transformed.


If you want to be rich do nothing for money


No one ever suggested that these keys would leave the world as it is with just a little decoration around the edges, as if all that is needed is a few cosmetic changes to a world that is basically sound. On the contrary, that’s not my view at all. Instead of basically sound I see it as fundamentally flawed and one way it is fundamentally flawed is economically. This is far from simply a case of redistribution of wealth, however. Indeed, I seek to abolish wealth, eradicate money, and obliterate commerce. My fifth key takes this from the individual point of view by totally devaluing money and by asking each one of us to find wealth in other things. For the fact is that money is not the inherent way to wealth. Instead, money is a communal agreement to accord value to it from which imagined wealth springs measured by how much of it you have. But, that being the case, we can change our minds. We can choose to find wealth elsewhere. We can forget the dogmas of economics, devalue them and infuse other things with value instead… such as human life and dignity. Money is basically a system of valuations but, as can be clearly seen, it is not one without negative effects. An economic system requires losers and so creates them and holds them up as examples to the rest of what might happen to them if they aren’t careful.


So why do we live in a world where people starve because they cannot pay for food? Is an economic mantra more important than human life? Why do we live in a world where someone might die of a treatable medical condition because they can’t afford to pay for the treatment? Is an economic mantra more important than alleviation of human suffering? And the important thing here is this isn’t a given, an unavoidable fact of nature: its a human choice to value money and economy over living beings. I find that inhuman and I revolt accordingly from any kind of economic system which judges people according to ability to pay or financial means, something our current world does as a matter of course as it credit rates them and judges their current and future earnings ability. In my view, we need to free ourselves of this terrible burden and imagine a world without money, without finance and without commerce and it starts with each one of us forgetting the monetary motive in our daily lives. We could make money valueless and make caring for each other the supreme value if we wanted to. Its in our gift to decide how society should run. We should dare to dream of better rather than settle for worse or imagine that our course is set. For that, of course, is what the haves in an economic system will always want the have nots to think. But how about we remove such structural inequalities whole and entire? If you really want to be rich do nothing for money.


Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.


I would describe this as a reversal of the current world order, a bottom up rather than top down ethic. “The poor” I regard as the ordinary mass of people, unassuming, perhaps existing from day to day, week to week, month to month, which is most of us. They are those you would not raise above others. They are not famous, they have no status, they are those who must be active to maintain their circumstances. But this ethic goes further than that. It is not just about treating these people, these ordinary, every day, regular people as blessed, and blessing them by your actions towards them everyday in friendship and community, but it is a refusal to admit notions of status, rank or standing to our social ethics and morality at all. People should not be compared and judged better or worse based on judgments about things like race, creed, colour, gender, physical and mental ability or sexuality. There should be no method or idea which splits people up along ideological lines in order to have “the better” and “the worse” or “my side” and “the other side”. Not distinguishing between people entails the abandonment of any and all partisanship. Instead, the prevalent creed here is one of common humanity, even common life if we see ourselves as living things like so many other things that are alive. And so this can also broaden to encompass an ecological dimension as well. But it is important we begin with those in the worst circumstances and work up rather than the other way around. In caring for the worst off we care for ourselves, for we are all the same. To add value to another’s life is to add value to our own. What you do to another, you do to yourself.


Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices


Everything you think is wrong. Everything you think is an imposition of thought, that is always related to the thinker, imposed on things outside that thinking. Thoughts are interpretations and interpretations are not inherent to things as essentials of the things. Instead, they are rhetoric about things, ways to explain things, possible descriptions, meaningful understandings. But in each case they could be different. Our thoughts about a thing or situation are not the thought or situation or even equivalent to the thought or situation. They are just one possible set of thoughts about it. So everything you think is wrong. But only because there is no right. So thoughts are both fictions, sometimes useful and sometimes not, and thoughts are choices, in the sense of things that didn’t have to be and in the sense of other options (redescriptions, reinterpretations) are available.


The consequences of this are huge. For example, if some thought is giving you a problem then rethink it in a different way for the first way was neither the only way nor the essential way. There is also the thought that we need not think at all, at least not in the way we have formerly been taught, as if life and truth and knowledge are about having the right thoughts and, having collected up all the right thoughts, thought itself then ceasing to be necessary. Taoism speaks of non-mind and non-thought and these are important concepts for this particular key. In thinking we are not seeking a thing called knowledge or truth which we can possess and thought itself is not about possession. Indeed, here we do not seek to wall ourselves in by the artificial boundaries of thought which lead to knowledge at all. We seek only an emptiness which is an openness. That which we “know” is accorded no status. It is not ranked in a hierarchy. Our minds should not hold onto things but, instead, let them go. This encourages becoming and avoids the ossifying lack of flexibility that “knowledge” or “truth” promote. In thinking, it should not be imagined we gather the essence of anything for our thoughts are merely temporary and ephemeral, impressions as we pass by. High understanding comes from not understanding at all.


Instead of knowledge as facts that can be possessed and may be accorded the supposed honour of “truth” this ethic valorises knowledge that is experience. It is an experience in the moment that we each can have. It is not based on academic learning or a canonical narrative. It is not about building up a collection of right thoughts you distinguish from the wrong thoughts. Here possession is loss, not gain. Here every moment has its own integrity simply because it became and it is about its own natural authenticity. Reality, imagined by scientists or philosophers, does not exist. It is artificial. What is real is what you experience as you experience it rather than how some commentary, any commentary, may describe it. Commentary is interpretation and interpretation is never foundational in any intrinsic sense. Commentary is boundary rather than openness to reality. There is no reason why reality need be, or could be, reflected in words. So there is no need to seek truth. Simply cease to cherish your own opinions, a further anti-egotistical move.


All you know is wrong. All you know is fiction. All you know is choice. Thinking can only ever imprison you in a room of your own creating. Freedom, and, ultimately, peace, is not-thinking not-thoughts with a not-mind. Here I promote mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. Epistemology is abandoned in favour of possibility in which there is nothing to gain and nothing to know. Thoughts aren’t fixed realities but simply movements of a mind that is thinking and so we see thoughts for what they are: the passionate attachment to unreal and non-substantial things, the creation of fictional identities that fade so that only the energy remains. We must realise that nothing is as it seems, that what we think is not the same as what is.


Nothing remains, everything must be let go


This key is an observation, a context, one it is imagined the reader should take note of. This is that everything is moving, changing, passing away, in every moment of our lives. Of course, we are doing these things too and none of this has anything to do with how we feel about it, whether we believe it or whether we have knowledge of it. For this constant change is not something constrained by us or our thoughts. Rather, it is the other way around. The mountain range we observe may seem solid and eternal but over millennia it wears away to dust. It doesn’t just happen one day; it is always happening until it doesn’t exist as a mountain range anymore. So nothing remains and everything embodies change. But, that being the case, it is sensible to adjust ourselves to this situation by having minds appropriate to it. The things we hold in our heads, both as objects and ideas, must also be let go. For, just as we cannot stop the mountain range wearing away, so too these ideas and objects pass away as thought and language changes over time. Here we combat the conservative notion to freeze things in time and give them an eternity and a fixity which is strictly inappropriate to them. All conservation in the end is a wanting to have things forever as they are now or in some other imagined better state and this is always a fight against an unstoppable force, the force that is change. The issue is, however, that our nature, nature itself, is change and we must accept and internalise that fact if we do not wish to lead constantly dissonant lives. We must learn that nothing remains, all things must pass and so all things must be let go.


Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action


Here is a metaphor and a concept. The metaphor is the river. The river just flows. It goes wherever the water will go and adapts to circumstances as they are come upon. It has no purpose and does not want anything. It just flows, never holding on to the ground it flows over, always continuing on the way. The concept is non-action, wu wei in the original Chinese. This non-action, so I understand, is an active quality. It is not a doing nothing. That is why the second half of this key is to act non-action. In a way, the river is itself a good metaphor for this too. For the river acts, it flows. But none of this is deliberate. Flowing is what rivers do even as the flowing that is living is what human beings do. Yet do we live as the river flows, with non-action, an unintentioned lack of concern with where and how and why and what for? Non-action is lack of intention, lack of care or worried concern, but, more than that, an indifference to such things, a cultivated lack of intention. Should the river care if it flows this way or that, here or there? So within this key is also a hidden warning: beware the dangers of care, of desire and of intention which can lead us astray and disrupt our lives. Be as the river.


When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place


The key here is to see every moment as a special moment, to fully inhabit and experience each of those moments. It is also not merely to see the ordinary as the sacred but to see the sacred as the ordinary, to not section off bits of life as special but to allow the special, the meaningful, the valuable, to infuse the whole of life. This then becomes a recontextualisation and reconstitution of life itself. Some bits aren’t more important than other bits; each bit just happens as it will in an ongoing process and each is indebted to what came before as will that be which comes after it. Sacred and ordinary therefore become synonyms rather than opposites.


Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.


This is a key that I have thought long and hard about. In fact, its not an exaggeration to say that my whole life has been spent thinking about it. The issue is “What is the highest good?” and my answer, after almost one half century, is that, in the end, it has to be peace, personal, social, planetary, cosmic. There are other values or qualities we might wish to take that place instead (like love or compassion) but, ultimately, these are things which lead to peace in themselves by their existence and their being in evidence. So, finally, it is peace I take as the goal and this goal is the unspoken goal when I speak about all of the other keys.


But if peace is the goal how is it achieved? The answer seems to be that it is by avoiding extremes and hence the preference for the middle way devoid of intention, desire, care, concern, worry. In ancient Greek thought there was sometimes a dichotomy presented between reason and passion, logic and feeling. But I reject this bifurcation as inaccurate and misleading. There is no such thing as a passionless reason or as a reasonless passion. When operating by logic, so it is imagined, we have not then turned off our feeling, as if it was something we could ever turn off in the first place. What we are is organisms, holisms, that include both reason and passion, feeling and forms of logic, at all times. There is no turning these off. They are always there. So the peace that we seek must always appeal to both or neither equally for there can be no one without the other. Here too we must follow a middle way rather than appeal to one thing at the expense of another.


No doubt this involves appealing to more than yourself for even a person who has isolated themselves still has surroundings. So there is an element of co-existence to this, a sense in which peace is about more than simply your own, settled state. Can one be at peace if elsewhere others are not? This is an important ethical question that we should be concerned with. For myself, I imagine that the more people who are at peace, the more they will be able to share that peace with others - and so increase their own. Peace, then, involves fraternity, co-existence, holistic thinking, a “middle way”, that is in the midst of everyone and all things.


Now is the time, there is no other


Existence is always in the now, this present moment. We never exist in the past we imagine or the future we expect or hope for. We live in an ever present that rolls on. When we die and our identity fades our matter will still exist (some think our consciousness will as well) in that ever present but we will not. This key is really nothing more than a fresh realisation and emphasis of this, that now is the only time we ever exist in, the only time we can ever influence or experience. So we should enjoy and experience each moment of now for there will never be another time. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.


Know nothing


It is a long held insight of philosophy that wisdom is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. The keys I offer here, especially this thirteenth and last, are broadly anti-epistemic but not anti-wisdom. They take a dim view of knowledge as it has been valorised and rhetoricized in the Western tradition, they see through its puffed up, egotistical claims of insight and importance. This key challenges us to take the same attitude and do the same thing, to throw off canonical narratives and fictions imposed by personal and organisational authorities, to see that life is not something we need a set of hard and fixed rules for. Understanding, might I suggest, is not something that anybody needs to have. Bean-counting up the universe and writing the complete set of facts in a book that we can call “The Book of Knowledge” is literally an unachievable aim. One can be happy, or at peace, without reason. As the Buddha once claimed, “There is nothing to stick to.” (He said this because “Everything changes”, by the way.) “If you understand,” runs the proverb, “things are just as they are. And if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” So what is the difference?


The issue is that knowledge as a general category is very prone to being used egotistically. This key, by the way, is nothing to do with knowing how to do things. When I say “know nothing” I do not mean “do not know how to do anything”. On the contrary, this key is about how we view knowing and knowledge philosophically, what place we give to them, what stature we imagine they have. Enlightenment here is regarded as knowing what you do not know rather than counting up all the things you suppose you do. Knowledge, under this rubric, is never a cause for pride. Indeed, often knowledge is regarded as a trap or a blind or a stumbling block. So sure are we of what we know that this knowledge becomes a bind and a stumbling block that has been self-imposed. Better than knowing, then, is an empty openness to all things. Here the ethic is that if you change how you see you will be able to see how you change. Knowledge, on the contrary, is not about change at all. It is about setting in stone. But in a world of change can that ever lead to peace… or only to ever increasing dissonance? So this key is to see knowledge more as experience than collected facts and to see this insight itself as a piece of wisdom. What you possess, you lose.


Note

These thirteen keys should not be read separately as if they were distinct items. Instead they should be read interactively and in relationship with one another, holistically. Then one can, hopefully, see the consequences of one for another. It is the thirteen keys together which unlock a new vision of life, the world and existence.

Three Things are Appropriate

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is a book by Benedicta Ward which collects and catalogues the sayings of Christian ascetic monks in Egypt in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. It interests me primarily as an observer of human behaviour and as one seeking to make sense of it. One can read through the book even at random and begin to get a sense of the mentality of these people, how they think, what they value, what their aims in life are, and so on. I find in them a strange mix of the philosophical, the theological and the very human. One saying in particular has stayed with me since I first got the book and not least because it is attributed to a namesake, Abba Andrew:

Abba Andrew said, “These three things are appropriate for a monk: exile, poverty and endurance in silence.”

I must admit that I have stared at this apophthegm many times and found in it many pathways of thought. I note several things initially. For starters, the saying does not say that its three things are good; it says that they are “appropriate” and for a monk. It is, thus, not focused on people in general but on those who have taken a specific religious vocation and what is appropriate, not good, to it. Next I note that the three appropriate things are things which cut the monk off from society in general. A monk is exiled, economically bereft and uncommunicative. There is a sense here that the monk is perfecting himself, taking responsibility for his own existence and not expecting things to just happen except by attention to them and focus upon them. Third, I note that this is a kind of “how to be a monk” saying. There is no reference in the saying to anything outside of this. “Monk” thus seems to be a very single-minded vocation - and perhaps one in which the monk separates himself (it was usually a him) from society and community. It seems a vocation in which the individual life looks beyond itself to an eternal context in which it becomes the thing at stake. Here the existential and the eternal seem to meet and interact, in fact, and in a way in which the temporary and ephemeral existential are not extinguished by the sheer awesome overwhelmingness of the eternal but in which it is, in some sense, purified or perfected by it. We see from numerous other sayings of the Fathers that to take this vocation was to take suffering as a vocation and Christians, in Jesus, have from their very first writings taken their God as their paradigmatic forebear in such “perfection through suffering”. A Christian is led to think, “If Jesus suffered then why shouldn’t I?”

But I turn to Andrew’s three things in turn now beginning with “exile”. Exile is a prominent theme throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures where the exile is from God but also from his promises such as “land” or “salvation”. We may sum up the notion of exile here as being cut off from God. Meanwhile, both modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and theologians such as Tom Wright have used “exile” as a metaphor in their own academic work, the former perpetuating an argument about language as an alienating and exiling force whereas the latter has argued that Jesus was God’s agent of the end of human exile from Himself in a theological interpretation of the historical Jesus. If we ask ourselves what the monks are exiling themselves from the answer must be “society” and so, basically, outside influence or temptation to straying from the existential path the monk has set before them. This is not an inconsequential choice or an easy path to take, as anyone who has ever been alone for a decent period of time will likely testify. It is noteworthy, however, that here exile is regarded as a positive thing, something which gives the monk space and time to go about their monkish business. Often exile is perceived religiously as a punishment or in a negative light in contrast to this.

So why is exile appropriate for a monk? Because they are those who have single-mindedly chosen to focus on a vertical relationship with God which, they believe, will result in their own eternal good. But in choosing exile from society they have also chosen exile from friendship, from comfort, from diversion from themselves, from simple help, for such monks historically lived alone in cells. Exile is a choice to bear one’s existence alone without assistance, to forego the horizontal  community for the vertical eternity. This puts oneself under a terrible microscope in which hitherto unnoticed details about the self become apparent. It seems that Abba Andrew finds this entirely appropriate for the monk who must seek to root out all insufficiencies from the one who seeks to dedicate himself to a God thought perfect. That one cannot be of God and of the world is an old Christian thought and so the monk is to choose exile from the world in an attempt to better approach God instead. Abba Arsenius is reported to have heard God say to him, “Flee from men and you will be saved.” This is the attitude that Andrew also preserves here. Human society in general, so it is thought, can only distract and contaminate thought that should be on higher and more eternal things. “The perfection of the self cannot be carried out amongst the distractions of the crowd” is the thought at work here.

Next in the list of things appropriate for a monk is poverty. Monks should not have “things” in general and for much similar reasons as to why they should not have neighbours: they can only act as a distraction from the focus required for the task at hand. Abba John the Dwarf is reported to have said that “if a man goes around fasting and hungry the enemies of his soul grow weak” and we see this thought in Andrew’s imposition of poverty upon the monk. Theodore of Pherme said, “It is best of all to possess nothing,” another desert witness to the same thought. Here possessions are simple distractions, unnecessary things which can only take up time and thought and get in the way. Having things or wealth are those things which will demand attention of their own which the monk can ill-afford to give away since he must always be watchful. Interior peace is regarded by many Desert Fathers as something necessary and how can one have that if one is worried about his possessions - or has possessions to worry about? Better, then, not to have any and here we see the very ascetical bent of the Fathers brought to the fore. This ascetical poverty is an enforced simplicity, a mindset of “having enough” as being good enough. If one survives then one has achieved one’s goal and one, by very definition, has had enough, all that was required, to do so. Here “excess” would be any more than this bare minimum. This poverty would seem to enforce a necessary simplicity and humility upon the monk in his reduced circumstances. And this, in turn, reminds me of the second two of the “Three Treasures” from the 67th saying of the Tao Te Ching, those being frugality and humility.

The third item in Andrew’s list is “endurance in silence,” a composite notion that needs unpacking. “Endurance” suggests something that needs to be endured and in the notions of both exile and poverty we have suitable referents for neither are simple matters easily negotiated. “Endurance” here also suggests to me the New Testament Greek word (the Fathers were Christians after all) “makrothumia” which is longsuffering, forbearance, fortitude (sometimes simply rendered “patience”). It is literally makro - long - and thumia - temper - and so cultivating a “long temperedness” as opposed to being short tempered. Paul gives makrothumia, the ability to calmly play the long game, as one of the “fruits of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22. But here the endurance is “in silence” and this is not an unimportant addition for, once more, talk is seen as a problem because it is a distraction, something else to be concerning yourself with instead of the thing the monk should be focused on. To be a monk is, as one Father says, “to be always mindful of God.” Another, Abba Pambo, was asked by the brethren to say something to Theophilus the Archbishop when he came to visit the Fathers in their desert cells. But he replied to them, “If he is not edified by my silence then he will not be edified by my speech.” Here silence is taken as having better things to do with one’s time than talk and is indicative of a more important communion than oral discourse. “Endurance in silence” is then an inward attitude of silent resilience without distraction yet also a witness to something beyond words.

Having given brief thoughts I now want to change tack and interpret this from a Taoist / Zen perspective. Consider the following Zen / Taoist sayings culled from a popular Twitter account dedicated to tweeting such things within 24 hours of me writing this:

Mirror facing mirror. Nowhere else. - Ikkyu

If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it. - Taoist proverb

The art of simplicity. - Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Without the Tao, kindness and compassion are replaced by law and justice. - Lao Tzu

The supreme form of wealth is contentment. - Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. - Zhuangzi

The valley stream's rushing sound is the eloquent tongue of Buddha. The mountain's vibrant colours are nothing but the Buddha's form. - Dogen Zenji

If you let go a little you will have little happiness. If you let go completely you will be free. - Ajahn Chah

Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity. - Lao Tzu

Silence is proactive. - B. D. Schiers

When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much. - Zen proverb

Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself. - D.T. Suzuki

What mindset, what attitude, what worldview, is being cultivated and recommended by these sayings? How does it compare with that put forward by Abba Andrew as an example of the Desert Fathers? One big difference is that the Desert Fathers, as Christians and monotheists, have personalised the infinite and eternal, that which is beyond them, whereas Buddhists and Taoists in general have not. Taoists, for example, have “the Tao” which translates loosely as “the Way” and it is thought to be in, around and through all things. “Buddha” itself is a title (like Christ is whether applied to Jesus or not) meaning “the awakened one” or “the enlightened one” and not a name and the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, is not a god within Buddhism but merely the most enlightened human being who ever lived, one in balance with all things and at perfect peace. This latter point, however, is a point of possible contact with the Fathers who also seek peace yet through communion with their god. Yet we may say, in general terms, that there is a very different point of emphasis for these two ways. The focus of the Desert Fathers is God and they themselves are regarded as those who need to be perfected to be in perfect communion with him. Along the way they may expect to struggle, to have to purge themselves of sin or evil desires and this will more than likely be a painful experience. In contrast, the Buddhists and Taoists might be represented by the quote of Zhuangzi above: To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. Here the focus is the individual themselves, albeit in the context of absolutely everything else one may experience or encounter. Neither Buddhists nor Taoists seek communion with a being but perhaps they do seek it with Being, an ineffable oneness with all things in a peaceful harmony. Peace or serenity we may see as a, if not the, goal of these latter paths.

Here the mention of silence in both traditions is interesting and worth exploring. From both Abba Andrew’s words here and those of some of my Zen and Tao quotes we can see that words have their limitations. For Andrew words were confusers or distractors that pulled the monk from the place he needed to be. Yet for both Abba Pambo and B.D. Schiers silence itself is saying something, perhaps plenty, yet without words. In both these religious traditions more widely conceived it seems to me that there is just so much room for what cannot be said, for acknowledging that words fail and language reaches a limitation. One need not be overtly religious to reach this conclusion either since 20th century philosophers of language, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, both seemingly come to similar conclusions should you read their work. I see in both of these ways, that of Christian Desert Fathers and that of Zen Buddhists and Taoists, that neither perceive of everything as a mass of facts scientifically understood, a very instrumental and detached mode of thinking. The world, existence, could not for any of these people potentially be tagged and catalogued so that one day we could imagine that everything could be logged, known and worked out. Both operate with a much more experiential and even existential understanding of knowledge than that. For them, we are in a world of experience and not one of subjects and objects where the former can, with ingenuity, skill and patience, learn all about the latter. I see the importance of silence in all these traditions as related to this. I see the recognition that words stop as a recognition that “knowledge” stops too. It is not the supreme need, the major requirement. It is merely a tool but the true riches are so much more than it can ever provide. Words are inadequate to experience as knowledge is inadequate to understanding.

So what happens when the talking stops? For one thing, other things then become possible such as listening and thinking (the latter perhaps being a kind of listening to yourself). In the Zen proverb quoted above “understanding” takes one beyond the realm of words so that even one is too much, or, perhaps, never enough. Thinking like this even seems to make something like a Derridean deconstructive operation something of religious significance. Here, according to Derrida, language is itself insufficient to the task it sets for itself. In use we find that it cannot fix the price of things. It sets out to say something but, in the act of so doing, we find that it disrupts its own operation. It can also be seen to say other things it did not mean to say, it can be subverted and used against itself, it falls short of its target. This, in philosophical guise, is not far from the monkish notion that silence can be more edifying than speech or the Zen notion that even one word is too much. According to one Buddhist proverb “the no-mind thinks no-thoughts about no-things” which expresses this mode of thinking perfectly. Not only is there no-mind but there are no-thoughts and there are no-things. How would a knowledge-based, instrumental, objective, scientific mindset cope with something like that? Neither tradition here has to worry about that, though, since, I argue, they are experience-based mindsets and not epistemologically-based mindsets. They are focused on experience not facts. Experience, unlike facts, is not simply known; it is felt, it is intuited, it can be instinctive, it embraces more than intellect. Experience gives cash value to the lives, and the pathways those lives take, of every thinking being.

I discussed above how, for the Desert Fathers, exile was primarily a matter of separation from the world for the purposes of personal devotion to God and the cultivation of that vertical relationship. The figure of exile applies in Buddhist and Taoists contexts too but here it is in the guise of alienation from the Tao, if Taoist, or “all things” if we talk more generally. The aim of these religious paths, it seems to me, is therapeutic: they aim at universal peace and harmony and so rest which becomes understanding or enlightenment. Their aim is the dissolution of a grasping, desirous existence which can only lead to conflict and turmoil. As Ajahn Chah says above, the aim is to “let go completely” and here the notion of Wu Wei, the action of non-action, plays a large part. Here again we can see how knowledge or fore-knowledge is consequently deprioritised for in these traditions we are not knowing subjects who progress through our existence by the manipulation of objects we know facts about. Indeed, it is hard to see how these traditions are based on knowledge at all as an essentialist, foundationalist or realist (in the philosophical sense) might understand these things. This idea of letting things be is totally alien to a modern Western mentality based on knowledge about things and this knowledge as the means to their instrumental use. For the Taoist, for example, it is not our job to impose our will upon things. The viewpoint here is much more holistic than many are capable of being, the idea is that, in a meaningful sense, everything is already a part of everything else and it a part of that in return. So when D.T. Suzuki says that, fundamentally, “the marksman aims at himself” he really does literally mean it. “Mirror facing mirror. Nowhere else” says Ikkyu, to change is to ruin, to hold is to lose, runs another Taoist proverb. The worldview here is one of movement, of constant change, of the idea of knowledge, beloved of others, being one that is static and ossifying and so not at all true to the world of experience for that is never still and always changing. A Buddhist or Taoist experiences exile, alienation, when out of this stream of existence, not in balance with the way of all things. This is not something we know facts about and so attempt to control; it is that which, with non-action, we become one with.

The Taoist and Buddhist alike also know about Abba Andrew’s “simplicity” (which he calls “poverty”) and they would see its necessity. I have already mentioned that the Taoist Tao Te Ching regards frugality and humility as two of its “three treasures” - and this is not merely for monks, those dedicated to a life of religious devotion, but for all to be in accord with that which is beyond them, be that a Way or a God or simply the Everything. For neither religious tradition here, the Christian and the Buddhist/Taoist, is the personalised, self-concerned form of existence that we experience all that there is. For these traditions, Man is not the measure; instead human beings are part of a much greater whole the overwhelming majority of which is unknown and, to all intents and purposes, perhaps even unknowable. For a Christian their God is not reducible to human minds and understanding anymore than for a Taoist the Tao can be put in a box and explained. Both retain concepts of the Beyond, the Ineffable, That Which Can Be Experienced But Not Known. Its also worth pointing out that this isn’t necessarily about us doing anything either. It is about our not-doing. “Do your work, then step back,” says Lao Tzu, suggesting that we just go about our business quite matter-of-factly. In these traditions simple things become sacred things, not because they are special but because the whole, everything, anything, is, in that sense, special. Here we partake in the All just because we are, because we exist. We seek peace within it not by grasping it and bending it to our will but by flowing as it flows. Unlike the God of the Desert Fathers, the Tao is not a will and so it is not a matter of using our will or bending it to that of another. Instead, its absence and negation is sought. “Simplicity” here is a life of non-action lived without will, an openness to all things. And if we are open to all things then the value of specific things dissolves accordingly. Things are made simpler. Less is more.

I have not wanted to suggest in this brief essay that Christian Desert Fathers and those of Buddhist or Taoist persuasions are versions of the same thing. This essay has been far too brief for even a cursory evaluation of such issues and my intuition is that, if such an essay were attempted, it would find areas of common interest but also others of conflict and differing agendas. But what I would take from the words of Abba Andrew, and from the Buddhist/Taoist interests that I introduced to discuss those words, is that exile, poverty and endurance in silence are not merely matters for monks in the desert in the conscious gaze of their god nor Eastern mystics seeking enlightened harmony with all things. They are matters for all of us. Exile, alienation, is very prevalent in the world of anybody who looks out of the window. The question of what is needful for a human being, and if the economic treadmill so many willingly climb onto, and to which so many others are either coerced or forced, is beneficial or necessary, is very apparent. That people’s experience of life is disregarded and vilified to their detriment for a mentality of “knowledge is power,” the logical conclusion of an epistemological approach to life, takes its toll upon the existence of many who are regarded as inconsequential casualties of progress or as natural wastage, those who couldn’t keep up.  “Exile,” “poverty” and “endurance in silence” my seem very objective things in Abba Andrew’s statement but when read through any number of real lives they come to have consequences far more far-reaching than Andrew himself can ever have imagined. They also come to be relevant to every human being.

Human society is constructed from an ever growing number of human beings. Each, by means of any number of connections, is connected to all the rest. Each, by virtue of living in a shared space, has consequences for the rest. It is my intuition that it would do us good to concentrate on these notions of exile, poverty and endurance in silence, and their consequences, some of which I have teased out in this short essay, and that doing so would be to our common good. It is my view that we each have our part to play in the world and that any “change” that we think the whole needs begins with each one of us. You cannot change a system if you cannot change the people within it and so positive change of any kind is a matter not merely of changed circumstances but of changed people. Abba Andrew recognises this in the monk when he requires him to completely change his lifestyle in order to change society for, in fact, the Desert Fathers were taken as examples by many of how to devote oneself to God. They acted for many as examples of devotion and commitment. We may not believe in God but the point remains that to change the whole it starts by changing yourself. (Of course, it may be granted that Christianity in general has had a mixed record of effects upon society in general and that all but the most bitter of its critics would admit that these were not all bad.) The Buddhists and Taoists, too, recognise this in that their thinking is about a program of personal change which works a holistic harmony through the dissolution of both individual wants and an obsession with knowledge as power. No one can force people to change themselves. No one can even enlighten them to the notion that they need to be changed. Yet it remains my own personal, perhaps spiritual, conviction that when people change, societies change. And if they can change then why not for the better? The battle is not merely at societal level but, fundamentally, at the personal one as Abba Andrew, sundry Zen Buddhists and Taoists  seemingly know so well.

This essay is taken from a forthcoming collection of philosophical, theological and hermeneutical essays I am writing called Being-in-the-midst: Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Tradition.

The Gospel of Existence (Redux): The Problem with Spirituality

It so happens that when you read and write about things sometimes someone might send you an article with the note "You might like this" attached to it. Such happened to me yesterday. Whilst the precise motivations of the sender are unclear (but it was gratefully received anyway), I did get to read an article from the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. "The Tricycle Foundation", so I read, "is dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available". And so its fair to say that what I was about to read is written from an insider point of view. But I am not a Buddhist neither do I particularly wish to be persuaded of Buddhist truths. Truths that seem true to me will do. Nevertheless, I took the article that was offered to me in good faith, not least out of respect for the person who did me the favor of offering it to me to read. Reading what I say about it below, he may or may not recant of the fact that he ever did so. At this point let me say that for those who want to read the original article they can do so HERE and let me reassure any readers that what comes next isn't just about either Buddhism or religion. 

The article is entitled "We Are Not One" and concentrates on a Buddhist explanation of its doctrine of interdependence, something I touched upon in my last blog when mentioning The Heart Sutra and its seeming notion of a flux of interdependent becoming. Here the writer, who is a Buddhist abbot from California called Thanissaro Bhikkhu, writes concerned to show why this does not mean everything is "one". Of course, as you might expect, he has reasons for wanting to do this and, it seemed to me when reading, these seemed to be Buddhist religious reasons that, if you are not a Buddhist (as I am not), you simply would not share. As I began to read the article I was set out on the path of regarding the writer as untrustworthy immediately in an "argument" he supposed was against the idea of there being a god. This argument boiled down to "If there was a god he would have done a better job than this". Well he might have and he might not have but I doubt the creature would get to decide what the creator did or did not do in any case. Such a viewpoint would also overlook theist explanations for the world we live in, such as Christianity's suggestion of its fallen nature and its need to be saved. Our writer glosses all this with his simplistic assertions and this gave me what I suspect was a fatal first impression. (You should know that, as with the Buddhist writer, I don't believe in any god either.)

It didn't help me in reading his article that the major concept the writer was trying to discuss, "Oneness", was never defined. I don't know if this was because it was assumed the presumably Buddhist readers would know what he was talking about (although in a subheading to the piece it was suggested the subject is something many Buddhists get wrong) or simply because he didn't bother to define it. In any case, this lack of definition was fatal as far as the piece was concerned and his lack of definition regularly had him arguing against a shadow foe all the way through it. This didn't endear me to what he was saying because half the time I didn't have a clue what he was arguing against. Instead we got what were to me silly arguments that were perhaps of concern to intra-Buddhist debate but of no use to those outside the fold. Bhikkhu is especially fond of suggesting that the interdependence we biological beings endure is one of "inter-eating" (i.e. living creatures eat each other to survive) and this somehow shows that everything is not one but simultaneously that this inter-eating is no cause for celebration. I must admit that I found this point lacked force and I'll come to why shortly. 

Bhikkhu used what were, to me, a number of non-sequiturs and his argument came across to me very much as a discussion amongst Buddhists where I imagine he would of thought he could have assumed the readers shared certain basic beliefs. Besides talk of casting off "ignorance" in order to progress to something called "clear knowing" he made what I thought were a number of mistakes. He argued against those who identify us with the cosmos but I thought he made a mistake there because the cosmos is not an identity or an entity in the first place. We are. So its a comparison of like with not like. The writer seemed to me to not have thought through what he was saying but, instead, to be locked in his train of Buddhist thought concerned, as he demonstrated again and again, to vindicate the words of his holy man of choice, The Buddha (which means "enlightened one"). I thought that he did his cause no good in making arguments for things that seemed manifestly false to begin with. Let me give you an example.

Bhikkhu writes:

"The first distinction is between the notions of Oneness and interconnectedness. That we live in an interconnected system, dependent on one another, doesn’t mean that we’re One. To be One, in a positive sense, the whole system would have to be working toward the good of every member in the system. But in nature’s grand ecosystem, one member survives only by feeding—physically and mentally—on other members. It’s hard, even heartless, to say that nature works for the common good of all."

Bhikkhu's use of "in a positive sense" is his only get out clause in this paragraph for I find myself asking "Why does the system have to be for good or bad at all?" It doesn't. What Bhikkhu imputes into his piece here is a moral impetus given from a human being. The cosmos as a system is not moral and knows absolutely nothing of morality. It is without sentience. It is neither an entity or an identity as Bhikkhu has assumed before already in his piece. Thus, it need not and, indeed, cannot work for good or bad at all, either for the one, the many or the all. It just operates - beyond good and evil. And so here interconnectedness and interdependence, the relatedness of all things, can indeed be seen, casually, as a Oneness (contrary to Bhikkhu's desires) - although I don't think it means much to say it. It is, to me, benignly obvious that all things are related, interconnected, and, thus, One. Only if one has a doctrine to protect would one even bother to question this casual notion. So we must note that morality is human and not of a universe invested with an identity it doesn't possess. If a fox eats a rabbit in the woods and no one is there to hear it… it doesn't matter a fig. We do not live on the front cover of The Watchtower magazine and have no need to dream up lurid moral imperatives concerning all the creatures living happily together for all of being and time. Bhikkhu, in his desire to escape the carnivorous nature of life on Earth, seems to want such a thing and to say that the carnivorousness means we are not One at the same time.

And here is really the first problem I had with this in a more general sense. It is a point against all religions and forms of organized spirituality (which I regard as the same). The problem here is that all these notions involve ideas of right and wrong and often in a "one size fits all" kind of a way. I do not really believe in this at all and see no reason why one size should fit all. It may be that you could persuade me that there are contingent versions of these things that will do service for us for the here and now. But, then again, I might also be persuaded that morality is a man-made irrelevance that always services some power base first and foremost and that, in the end, all paths lead to the same place anyway: the grave, the dark recycling bin of life. What no religion or spirituality ever convinces me of is that its moral truth is the moral truth and this is because I find it highly coincidental that this group of religious people just happen to have got all the truths together where others somehow managed not to. Hence the regular spiritual concentration on special insight or knowledge. Without it such religious groupings would have no basis for their teachings. What can be said, as Nietzsche prophetically saw, is that religion and spirituality can basically be boiled down to morality, a way of living, judgments based in designations of good and evil. This, in turn, gives birth to what every spiritual person wants in the end: some kind of salvation.

Of course, one problem for the moral, as Bhikkhu very much wants to be here, is freedom of choice. Its hard to preach for morality if people don't have the freedom to choose the good over the bad. So a belief in morality necessitates a belief in freedom of choice. Bhikkhu duly notes this and tries to provide one but it seems to me to be a hodge-podge idea that is utterly unconvincing. Bhikkhu says:

"If we were really all parts of a larger organic Oneness, how could any of us determine what role we would play within that Oneness? It would be like a stomach suddenly deciding to switch jobs with the liver or to go on strike: The organism would die. At most, the stomach is free simply to act in line with its inner drives as a stomach. But even then, given the constant back and forth among all parts of an organic Oneness, no part of a larger whole can lay independent claim even to its drives. When a stomach starts secreting digestive juices, the signal comes from somewhere else. So it’s not really free."

Note the adjective "organic" there which Bhikkhu has sneaked in (for he doesn't always use it). His analogy is clearly ridiculous. But who says we have "freedom of choice" anyway? There is much literature and comment to the effect that "freedom of choice" is often illusory and always within set parameters.  You have the freedom to be who you are much like Bhikkhu's stomach. Freedom's not free (not least from within pragmatist or existentialist readings of existence) and this dents the argument here for it is assumed and not argued for noting objections. Any system can have a set of choices within it for various parts of the system that operate along a sliding scale of "freedom". But, actually, it is better here to talk of possibilities rather than freedoms not least because the latter term is frequently misleading and taken to mean "without condition". An example is Bhikkhu's ridiculous stomach/liver analogy. Freedom, if we must use the term at all here, is always a matter of possibilities and opportunities otherwise we must recant our knowledge of the universe and wonder why ducks don't decide to become mountains or windows decide to talk. They don't because they can't. In a physical universe all things are defined by their possibilities not their "freedom". The speaker would have been better to explore his realization that things aren't really free. Indeed. But that would lead to more system-friendly conclusions pertinent to Oneness that our writer here certainly does not want to find much less explicate.  His morality mandates freedom.

And here's the jump: "For the Buddha, any teaching that denies the possibility of freedom of choice contradicts itself and negates the possibility of an end to suffering. If people aren’t free to choose their actions, to develop skillful actions and abandon unskillful ones, then why teach them?.... How could they choose to follow a path to the end of suffering?" Are we starting to get the writer's angle on things now? Now we find out why freedom of choice must be preserved. Its a doctrine. The Buddha said it therefore we good Buddhists must defend it. The Buddha apparently sees freedom of choice as a path to the end of suffering which is surely salvation.

Bhikkhu has argued that Oneness condemns you to no freedom of choice (freedom of choice being something he has assumed or needed due to his moral stance in the first place) and to being a part of the carnivorous system of inter-eating. But what if you or I, his readers, see no problem with inter-eating or if, as I, see no problem with death, decay or even fighting over resources (which all living things do in their various ways) in this universe of our's, a physical, finite universe? Surely these are just ways the universe works? Sure, they can be seen as problems. We can wish it was another way. We could hope, in the Christian phrase, that the lion would lie down with the lamb. But that doesn't make it so. Physical things are always limited things and an abundance of life will always fight over those things - because it must. Life generally tends to want to live and does not always have scruples about how. The issue here seems to be that as a Buddhist the writer wants to escape from the universe he finds himself in to some other one. It is this spiritual impulse (common to many spiritual and religious people) which creates the dilemma. It becomes a moral issue so, again, the problem here is that the spiritual/moral human impulse interjects. (The math is "suffering is bad so suffering must be escaped". But compare that critic of Christianity, Nietzsche, who says "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".) Again, I must retort that the universe is not moral and knows no moral imperative. So where Bhikkhu sees that "each of us is trapped in the system of interconnectedness by our own actions" I just see the conditions of life and existence. He sees something to escape from. I say there is no escape possible, let us make our surroundings as fair and equitable as we can as we have opportunity since we must all, somehow, get along.

The issue then is that Bhikkhu's spiritual/moral impulse keeps interjecting, finding problems and seeking (doctrinally acceptable) solutions. Yet the universe isn't moral: we are. The problem is ours, is existential, not its. But if the universe isn't moral then suffering cannot be either good or bad except as we say so for the reasons we give. Morality becomes rhetorical. It changes from a problem of all Being in general to a local one to do with our form of life or existence. It becomes not a universal problem but one that we must deal with as the people we are. It is, as far as I can see, not about enlightenment and escape to something more real and less illusory but more about recognition and acceptance of what human being is. This is why I have said before in something I wrote that the problem for humans is not to cure cancer, it is to be a human being whether you have cancer or not. Whilst the human being labours under a moral impulse, one which designates goods and bads and seeks escape from the bads to a world constructed only of goods, then we as a species condemn ourselves to never find the very things we seek in any ultimate sense. And we will always be running. This is true whether you are a Christian seeking cleansing in Christ, a Buddhist seeking to flee illusion and find enlightenment or a Transhumanist wanting to escape biology (which must ultimately be the wish to escape the physical world of decay).

We are back to a theme I've had before. We want to become gods or touch divinity. This is nothing more than escaping time and chance. Bhikkhu's Buddhism becomes about salvation (awakening) without a savior. And this is why any language of essentialism is always wrong and talk of "illusion" and "real" worlds is misguided. It trades on the idea there is something better waiting for us if only we could reach it. And that is nothing more or less than the religious false promise that all religious and spiritual people have offered since human beings could first look at themselves and wish that things were different, better. It is nothing more than the human wish to transcend itself, our impulse to dream. We are never more fully human than when we do this but never less the gods we wish we were in needing to do it. This is why Bhikkhu seems to have got it all wrong for me. He has been seduced by Buddhism's narrative of salvation and I have not. He seeks to overcome all things and register some kind of win on the cosmic scoreboard whereas I am happy merely to have been if I must be at all.

I, in contrast, offer no way of salvation or "positive" message (where "positive" is, once again, a moral denomination). I, in contrast to the mainstream of humanity under the influence of religion and spirituality, say there is no win for us humans to have whilst simultaneously recognizing that this is what such thinking is really always about. Humans want some kind of win out of life. I say that existence is pointless and mundane and this does not sound like a win at all. It isn't. It turns its back on the very idea of one. This idea of winning, somehow, is what motivates all the escapes and salvations human beings seek. It can surely be a reasonable explanation for them. Being human creates the desire to create a win. Human desire, something identical with us, is the motivating factor here. But, as Buddhism teaches about other things, this too must be viewed dispassionately and given up. We must be emptied of it or forever run after it, seduced by its Siren song. Put away childish desires, become who you are, creatures of the void in an amoral universe, rhetorical beings responsible for yourself and your environment. You do not need some moral/spiritual win out of life and any you did find would be hollow anyway.

Here endeth today's lesson according to Dr Existenz.