Two-horned topics
January 16, 2024
Quote
Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?
José Ortega y Gasset
I came upon this quote over the weekend while starting to read James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, a book I came across from reading about Rob Burbea’s soulmaking dharma (more on that below). It reminded me of the challenges in writing about spirituality - it requires a willingness to address difficult topics, of course. But more than that, spiritual advice often consists of blanket statements, but in my experience both a piece of advice and its opposite may be correct given different people or circumstances (how frustrating!). Take as an example what many might take as the most universally correct advice — that one should aim for awakening. But should everyone?1 I would say probably not - in fact, my teacher would say, roughly, that you should have a self first before you attempt to deconstruct it. For many people, for instance people with trauma/PTSD or people with extremely underdeveloped self-constructs, a practice that operates on the level of mental content (e.g. focusing, or psychedelic therapy, or IFS) might in fact be better as a starting point, or even an ending point. There’s a reason transmissions are heart to heart — it takes a very skilled teacher and real relationship to understand what a person truly needs.
Links
An intro to soulmaking - This was the clearest thing I’ve read about Rob Burbea’s idea of soulmaking dharma. To quote the post,
Soulmaking Dharma, in his own words, is a paradigm that enables the “reclamation, restoration and expansion of sacredness”. And it can do this because it is so thoroughly rooted in insight into the emptiness of everything, that it allows us to reconnect with our innate senses of sacredness, soulfulness, meaningfulness and beauty, without getting caught in the conceptual trap of believing we are attaining to “absolute truths” or “ultimate reality”.
The core idea of deliberately constructing self in order to connect to the sacred is powerful and resonates with my practice. What I don’t totally understand is why Burbea had to go outside of canonical Buddhist sources for this project — specifically because Tibetan discourse around awakening specifically talks about opening up to a “sacred world” or “the world of the mandala”, that emptiness and compassion co-arise in a non-dual fashion etc. It seems to me that his project is entirely in line with the shentong aspect of emptiness (in contrast with rangtong).2 Briefly, Tibetan philosophers pointed out that the direct experience of the ground of being isn’t a void, but rather is alive with love and sacredness. You can take that to be empty (mind constructed) or you can view that loving / sacred aspect as an expression of ultimate reality, but really you are supposed to hold both views as a practice tension. Maybe the key difference is that Burbea was fully rangtong — i.e. he saw that expression as empty.
Interesting paper on what predicts positive psychedelic experiences - while setting intention is key, even more predictive seems to be the personality trait of Absorption - i.e. whether one has a tendency to get caught up in sensory experience or mental constructs. More two-horned advice - even an excessive tendency to get caught in one’s fabrications (something a lot of meditation practices try to get you to do less of!) can be harnessed for positive ends.
My twitter list of Buddhist and Buddhist-adjacent posters. There’s still an active community of Buddhists on twitter and I find these worth following.
The other horn of free will
Last week I wrote a little about the phenomenological argument against free will (in short - everything is given! can’t find a chooser or a choice!) but a friend of mine pointed out how scary that sounded and expressed a fear that abdication of free will could lead to worse conduct. Setting aside the latter3, I just want to point out the way in which spiritual practice can seemingly increase free will. Specifically, bringing a fuller (awake) awareness to the thoughts and emotions that arise create a space between stimulus and response and afford the possibility of doing something differently. Without that, we often remain trapped by our patterns of behavior. So in a sense we can increase our free will4. Another valuable practice tension.
As the saying goes, “Better not to start, once begun better to finish."
In my experience, feeling into the unreality of free will causes compassion to arise.
However, in my experience what I find is that if the self-pattern-construct isn’t running the show instead it’s loving awareness itself, which in a conventional sense still isn’t “me”. So I’d argue this is still a kind of illusion, though a very useful one!