My intention.
What's this going to be about?
Phowa is an Tibetan meditative practice where you transfer your consciousness into another body at the time of death. This is an attempt a transferring a little piece of my consciousness to you. :-)
This is going to be an experiment in sharing publicly what I’ve been doing privately - reading a lot of things about spiritual practice (more specifically, Vajrayana Buddhism), and practice. If there’s value in original writing, perhaps I will do some, but mostly to start out with I’m just going to share links to interesting things I’m reading and seeing online. I intend to reply to comments and emails if that proves to be helpful. I may choose to charge for this at some point, or not. I’m going to try and keep this lightweight and short so I can do this at a fairly rapid cadence.
To give you one taste, here’s a some things on my mind today:
Quote
A man in prison is sent a prayer rug by his friend. What he had wanted, of course, was a file or a crowbar or a key! But he began using the rug, doing five-times prayer before dawn, at noon, mid-afternoon, after sunset, and before sleep. Bowing, sitting up, bowing again, he notices an odd pattern in the weave of the rug, just at the qibla, the point, where his head touches. He studies and meditates on that pattern, gradually discovering that it is a diagram of the lock that confines him in his cell and how it works. He’s able to escape. Anything you do every day can open into the deepest spiritual place, which is freedom.
Rumi, Jalal Al-Din; Barks, Coleman. The Essential Rumi - reissue (p. 253). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Links
Old essay on “a spirituality that transforms” by Ken Wilbur. Wilbur enjoins us to reach for the top in our spiritual practice — we should aim for nondual awareness and spiritual communities need to center that more. Yes, but skillful means may suggest that there are more prudent paths than “shining my headlights into the eyes of the complacent”. My teacher was also singleminded in this way.
“Platonic Tantra” by Gregory Shaw. I’ve been exploring the links between Greek and Indian philosophical ideas (slowly working my way through The Shape of Ancient Thought). It’s super interesting to see mystical practices popping up in Plato — my undergrad analytic philosophy classes definitely did not teach that. There is a throughline running all the way from the Greeks (maybe Indians) all the way to Western magick. Like many, reading about Aleister Crowley and theosophy and the rest, I thought it was all ineffective crap. But now I see how some of those practices could “work” in the very same way that tantric practices do. Moreover, another teacher who launched me on this reading-fest proffered the idea that western spiritual practices will work best if grounded in our own mythos / symbology and that is what’s required to translate Tibetan practices to a Western audience.
Interesting paper: Could we use neurostimulation to induce non-dual awareness?
Emptiness1 Corner (No one keeps emptiness in a corner)
Everything always points to the mind-constructedness of everything, so inevitably there is going to be something emptiness related. For today’s installment I point you to David McRaney’s book How Minds Change. You can get a flavor of it from listening to his podcast with Michael Taft. One of the chapters of the book is about the art of deep canvassing, where a political canvasser probes the basis for another person’s political belief. The very act of having a person unpack the basis for their belief seems to soften it. A possible reason for this is the illusion of explanatory depth - the belief is undergirded by a lot less than presumed. This looks a lot like a pointing out of emptiness to me. All beliefs are undergirded by a lot less than we presume… see also Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat (don’t agree with everything in this book and maybe will write a review at some point…)
Emptiness, the way I understand it, is the idea that every concept or thing that we perceive in the world, whether it’s mental phenomena, objects in the “external world”, or even our own consciousness, is a construction of mind (i.e. consciousness), merely a convention or view on the world that we adopt, and as such is lacking in an ultimate foundation, justification, or ground. Let’s unpack that a bit more…
In Western philosophy, there is the sorites paradox, which shows how concepts seem to have fuzzy boundaries, leading to a seeming paradox. For example, how many grains of sand constitute a heap? If 1,000,000 then surely 999,999 and so on. So it seems like 1 grain is a heap (doesn’t seem right) or going the other way, if 0 or 1 grain are a heap, then neither are 999,999 or 1,000,000 (also wrong!). Yet it seems pretty weird to draw the line in any specific place. Well, emptiness is like sorites on steroids!
The claim is that for any thing we might try and point at and define as an essence, whether it’s the self, or a table, giving a definition for what constitutes that object is going to be hopelessly fuzzy and vague, giving rise to paradox or incoherence. It’s like trying to define the number of grains that define a heap. Or like trying to define a sandwich and finding that there’s no way to account for hot dogs. As Wittgenstein said, meaning is use within a language game we play with one another (or something like that), and is just applied by convention, and (Western) philosophy is our attempt to solve these seeming contradictions for important concepts until we feel better about them and ourselves (i.e. philosophy as therapy).
In contrast, the Buddhist take on these kinds of difficulties isn’t to try and solve them but rather to point out that our reality doesn’t and can’t hang together in the naive way that our conventional concepts presume. We can’t solve these philosophical problems - the point isn’t to answer these koans but rather to soften our grip on conventional reality and realize that there are alternative views we can take. If we can change our view, we can liberate ourselves from suffering! And yes, emptiness is just an idea and is itself empty.