Tag Archives: philosophy

Everything humans see is a simplification.

24 Feb

Everything humans see is a simplification.

A human sees the world in 3 dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalizing creatures living on autopilot. Categorization is the brain’s tool to organize nearly everything we encounter in our daily lives. Grouping information into categories simplifies our complex world and helps us to react quickly and effectively to new experiences. Categorization and classification allow humans to organize things, objects, and ideas that exist around them and simplify their understanding of the world. Categorization is like your brain’s very own personal assistant, grouping similar things together so you can find what you need, when you need it.

Our brain categorizes continuously: not only chairs during childhood, but any information at any given age. What advantage does that give us? Pieter Goltstein says: “Our brain is trying to find a way to simplify and organize our world. Without categorization, we would not be able to interact with our environment as efficiently as we do.” In other words: We would have to learn for every new chair we encounter that we can sit on it. Categorizing sensory input is therefore essential for us, but the underlying processes in the brain are largely unknown.

Social categorization is a fundamental human cognitive process because it allows for the quick simplification of complex social information. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now shown that also mice categorize surprisingly well. The researchers identified neurons encoding learned categories and thereby demonstrated how abstract information is represented at the neuronal level.

While categorization is a natural and necessary mechanism to cope with the complexity of our world, it perilously inhibits our ability to address the most pressing and tangible problems of our time. The psychological force at play here is a need to categorize — to fit things into neatly defined, clearly labeled boxes. In times of increasing complexity, such categorization can be extremely useful, creating order in a world that is fundamentally messy and establishing structures so that we can better organize, analyze, and manage it. Yet also, extremely limiting in understanding the natural deeper complexity of life.

Siddhartha’s Existential Crisis/ The Buddha’s Resolution

16 Mar

Siddhartha’s Existential Crisis/ The Buddha’s Resolution
All copyrights are held by the author Rodger R Ricketts, Psy.D.

“He, who injures living beings, is not Noble. He is called Noble, because he is
gentle and kind towards all living beings.” Buddha.
“In the past, monks, and also now, I teach Dukkha and the cessation of Dukkha.”
Buddha

Introduction
This book examines relevant factors, as different from the Traditional texts’
stories, regarding Siddhartha Gautama’s psychological crisis causing him to
leave his home and renounce the secular life at age 29. A primary assertion of
this paper is that the traditional story of the ‘Four Sights’ is allegorical and the
description of Siddhartha’s psychological and emotional response to them is
better understood what modern psychology calls an existential crisis or crisis in
understanding life. An apparent significant factor in his renunciation is that
Siddhartha Gautama and his family were members of the Kshatriya or
warrior/leader caste, and it is a fact which is usually not elaborated on in many
Traditional texts.
Dukkha, or often translated as suffering, was the key element of Siddhartha’s
crisis and is the focus of all Buddhist doctrine in the Four Noble Truths. The
Buddha put suffering as the focus of his inquiry and he taught the doctrine of
The Four Noble Truths; the truth of suffering (Dukkha), the truth of the origin
of suffering (Samudāya), the truth of the cessation of suffering (Nirodha), and
the truth of the Path to the cessation of suffering (Magga). However, in
Buddhist thought there is a wide discussion about the meaning of suffering. In
this book, a definition of Dukkha with its variations will be
provided. Siddhartha’s response to suffering became the impetus for him to
seek a life of renunciation to answer his perplexity about Dukkha and its
cessation.
Finally, Gautama Siddhartha’s original crisis, told in the symbolic story of the
Four Sights, strongly brought the problem of Dukkha to the forefront of his
awareness. This is the significance of the legend from the Four Sights. Their
lesson is that besides ordinary physical and emotional pain, there is a deeper
existential grief and discontent resulting from one’s awareness of life’s inherent
impermanence and groundlessness. Awakening or Enlightenment became the
basis of the resolution of his personal crisis leading to the formulation of the
Four Noble Truths.
Since most people try to understand the Buddha’s teachings from the common
perspective based on duality, substantialism and egotism, suffering is
understood as physical or emotional pain- unhappiness in the sensual,
material, egotistical sense of aversion and disappointments in life. In the past,
when this perspective was used, the Buddha’s teachings were interpreted as a
pessimistic theory due to the impossibility that one can always have or keep
what he/she wants; therefore, the interpretation was ‘Life is Suffering’.
Nonetheless, this is not the teaching of the Buddha.
This paper advocates that instead the Buddha found a solution to existential
sorrow and alienation and the greed and hatred created through being
ignorant of the true nature of life.

Reflections about The Buddha’s Teaching: Seeing Without Illusion

18 Dec

Rodger R Ricketts, Psy.D.

    The Buddha placed primary importance on our thinking and volition. In fact, our difficulties arise when our thinking is unwholesome, in the past and in the present. Our citta or heart/mind is our kingdom or our own mentality. It is our private place where the swirl of thoughts continually passes across our mind. Only you can know what truly goes on there. There is both privacy and the possible control to think the thoughts you want. You can choose which thoughts to accept or refuse. Whichever thoughts you allow will shortly be expressed through your volition in the outer environment. Once you think the thoughts, you cannot take them back. Your choice lies in thinking or not thinking about them in the first place. The more you think unwholesome thoughts, it is like taking a substance that will sicken you both physically and mentally. What your mind dwells on will sooner or later become your ‘world’ and you will attract those energies to you. To entertain and encourage thoughts and feelings of anger, jealousy, resentment, greed, etc., is certain to not only damage your health in some way but also cause a lot of trouble and suffering in your life. So, the Buddha taught you to be Mindful or aware from every moment onwards, to watch even your habitual thinking with utmost care and nurture and promote only wholesome and skillful thinking. May All Beings Be Well and Happy.

The Buddha emphatically declared that the first beginning of existence is something inconceivable. “When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When
this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases, namely: dependent on ignorance, arise volitional formations … and so on … Thus is the ending of this whole mass of suffering.” There is a flux of
psychological and physiological changes, a conflux of mind and body (nāma-rūpa). Anamatagga Saṃyutta, S II 179
‘And even now in physics, they say that ‘Now’ is not something that moves forward but it is the empirically-always-present field of change which is the domain in which events are created. Therefore, the future is always indeterminate and creating new possibilities opening for genuine free will.’ Ruth E. Kastner

The young man said to the Buddha, ‘I will take up the Eightfold Path when I am older, but first I want to enjoy myself and have fun.’ Many people have this idea that by following the Eightfold Path they will be giving up things like intense sense pleasures and self-importance as well as riches and beautiful objects that they will regret not having experienced later. Instead this misses the big picture which is that what one truly comes to sacrifice by personal development through the Buddha’s teachings is selfishness, fear, alienation, insecurity, physical malady, unwholesome pleasures, pride, vanity, doubt, jealousy, self-pity, cravings, anger, hatred, etc. and, instead, what one gains through the Bhavana training includes immeasurably more happiness, peace, joy, compassion, bliss, serenity and vastly improved relationships with all sentient beings as well as oneself. So only giving up things that are not truly worth having and instead of gaining that which is, is the final ample compensation for proceeding diligently on the Eightfold Path until achieving Enlightenment.

The Buddha gave to all a practical method (Eightfold Path) for the development of the mind and heart for the shaping of our lives to eventually achieve Awakening or Enlightenment. He did not teach theology or doctrinal orthodoxy. The Buddha understood that all religious doctrines and theology are human inventions built up by the particular authors out of their own mentalities and foisted on people’s minds from the outside. Instead, The Buddha was the teacher who gave the lessons and, if we so want, we are the ones who practice sincerely what he taught and thereby develop our own insights and knowledge of especially the primary Three Universal Truths of Impermanence, No-Self and the existence of Suffering. In Buddhism, this is entirely a matter that each individual has to settle for him/herself. But if one makes the effort sincerely- the benefits appear immediately.

A wonderful and powerful practice is with especially people we have difficulty with but also all people- when you see or interact with that difficult person imagine seeing their living Buddha Nature and then you will see the layers and type of ignorance with which you are interacting. This practice is good for not only maintaining our own composure but also helps in our judgment of the difficulty of the situation. With metta.

The Realms or Worlds from ‘hell’ to ‘heaven’ are commonly described as extra-human realms but they are also instructive to us when viewed as all our ranges of mental experience created by our conscious as well as non-conscious mental or cognitive processes.

 Whatever we give our attention to is what governs our life – mentally and physically. We have freedom in our ability to choose what we direct and maintain our attention on. What we consistently pay attention to becomes our ‘world’ and habitually dominates it. If we constantly direct our attention on the ever-changing, impermanent outer world we suffer anxiety and uncertainty; if we direct our attention on nothing then nothing, in particular, is expressed in our life with uncertainty and boredom. If we direct our attention to the four divine internal states and eventually arrive at Emptiness we experience happiness/bliss, good health, compassion, wisdom and certainty in the Truth of the Four Noble Truths.

Metta (loving-kindness) is defined as follows: Loving-kindness has the mode of friendliness for its characteristic. Its natural function is to promote friendliness. It is manifested as the disappearance of ill-will. Its footing is seeing with kindness. When it succeeds it eliminates ill-will. When it fails it degenerates into selfish affectionate desire. Eventually, one can begin to practice loving-kindness towards a dearly beloved companion, and then towards a neutral person as very dear, or towards an enemy as neutral. It is when dealing with an enemy that anger can arise, and all means must be tried to get rid of it. As soon as this has succeeded, one will be able to regard an enemy without resentment and with loving-kindness in the same way as one does the admired person, the dearly loved friend and the neutral person. Then with repeated practice, jhana absorption should be attained in all cases. Loving-kindness can now be effectively maintained in being towards all beings.

Ñanamoli Thera

However, those who believe in a soul only too often override the limits set by experience and concern themselves with “something completely unknowable,” as Bertrand Russell says. Moving along these wrong tracks of thought, they readily admit that all cognizable and experiential constituents of the “personality” are subject to constant change, to an unceasing rise and fall; and for that reason, they, of course, cannot be considered as an abiding ego. But it is, so they believe, just from behind or beyond the cognizable and experiential components of the personality that the true eternal self or soul appears which, naturally, must be beyond cognition and experience. What is wrong in such a position and in these conclusions, has chiefly to be attributed to the fact that an empty concept has been raised to the dignity of man’s true essence or core—a concept obtained by mere abstract ratiocination, having nothing in common with observation and experience. The futility of such a play with words has been shown by Kant. For him, a way of thinking that transgresses the limits drawn by experience is playing with ideas, and the alleged vision of something imperceptible is “a poetic fiction transcending everything imaginable, a mere whim.” The Buddha and his monks, however, are no dreamers chasing after metaphysical phantoms. They are sober realists who will not admit such groundless speculations even to the range of their considerations or refutations. Dr. Anton Kropatsch, Vienna

I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From up and down and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all -Joni Mitchell

This is the true question that the Buddha’s teachings really address – ‘Do I Really Know Life At All?’ And in investigating the question, the answer becomes quite clear- for the uninvestigated mind, No…I don’t. All existence is much too complex, interrelated, and deep for us prideful humans to truly comprehend and indeed mystery is the result. But this is not a defeat but an affirmation of our embeddedness and interrelatedness with All of other existence. Not the folly, alienation, and separateness of the conceit of humans being the supreme being of the universe or even earth but the authentic identification of the true ecological, co-arising nature of all things. You will hear people say, ‘I am trying to find myself.’ But if you want to find yourself, then transcend yourself. When we transcend our-self, we truly find each other and our interconnection with all. We are not alone! Just look around you, there are creatures of life everywhere. If we feel alone, that is our blindness to life all around us, our suffering of alienation created by the illusion of separateness and ‘I’.

The Buddha understood how humans create “conceptual proliferation”- thinking, a representational and abstracting process that they believe and attach to. This is another way to speak about that:
‘When the animals evolved the talent to produce a virtual presence, they acquired a soul.
Then there was a God to be adored.
And an Adam was created.
As the production of virtual presences increases, man’s tie to the Real decreases. Soon, he praises innovation and inhuman courage. He invents thrills and excitement. He relies on myths and mysteries. He downgrades Nature with a reckless chisel. Life becomes the Grand Illusion. With a facility in the manipulation of virtual presences, the primal Superman was born. With perfection in the art, a second Devil took charge. It was then that man came to defy the God. The interminable conflict thrusting the virtual presences against the real intensifies.’ R. G. H. Siu

Upon Awakening the Buddha realized emptiness and the illusion of duality and a substantial Self- the consequences of the ignorance of dualistic thinking is expressed well in the following quote by Professor l. k. Tong-‘And so you opted for the substantialist’s art of self-making, Cutting off all umbilical cords to the Mother of Field-Being. You first dignify yourself in the kingly robes of an independent entity, enthroning yourself in the lonely kingdom of ego-substance. Then with the projective magic of your subjective substantiality, you objectify everything on your way to Godlike rigidity. And with the pointing of the substantializing wand, a bond was broken; a shade of mutuality has withered and waned. Now everything becomes merely external and separate from everything else. External is your objective world, you objectified a God, and your objectified self. Anything you cannot safely possess and control you relegate to the dark side of the Other, the Hell, the objective pole, and condemned it as ugly, or evil. Oh, in carrying your Godlike rigidity to all eternity (as if you were in fact rigidly eternal), you, a virtuoso in dualization, have created the most unhappy situation.’

In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha said, ‘Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.’ 
Many honest seekers today of the Truth, like the Kalamas, become confused and worried by the many conflicting and inconsistent sects and theologies that are pronounced daily by so many people calling themselves the ‘light to follow’. The Buddha provided a simple and direct test to guide us to know the truth of his teaching: trust yourself, your own experience, and through your experience of the correct teachings which you have found to be reliable and insightful – follow and use. Those people who are “the wise” will teach with the plan that you will see the benefit for yourself through your experience and transformation and not through blind faith and, therefore, you don’t become a slave to their wisdom, instead, you use your reason, your common sense, and your own experience as the ultimate guide and confirmation. So, you develop insights for yourself ultimately. While you can benefit from reading books and listening to teachers, etc., your true reliance is upon your real understanding created through the real work that must ultimately be done in transforming and purifying our individual mind. In the end, you know for yourself the confirmation of the Buddha’s teachings – there is suffering and the ending of suffering- and this is the only authority needed or desirable.

‘To avoid all evil, to cultivate good, and to purify one’s mind—this is the teaching of the Buddhas.’ (Dhammapada 183.) Throughout human history, innumerable plans and schemes and doctrines have been invented to make people happy, serene, and compassionate by making changes in human’s external conditions while leaving the quality of the mentality untouched and the result has over and over again been the same- failure. The Buddha taught that this failure is so because the very nature of our external existence is only changed by the purification of our conscious awareness. The difficulty for human history and never finding the key to happiness and compassion is that purification of one’s mind takes effort, diligence, and devoted practice to be successful. We must have constant unceasing vigilance and mindfulness to break the old unwholesome mental habits which are so troublesome. The Buddha understood this but also understood the benefits that arise when we do the Eightfold Path with the result of Nibbana. ‘This is peace, this is exquisite — the resolution of all fabrications, the relinquishment of all acquisitions, the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; Nibbana.’— AN 3.32

To purify our mind as the Buddha taught, we need to release any anger or resentment toward others or our self. When we experience hurt, disappointment, deception, etc, from other people, these feelings sink into our memory and cause inflamed and festering emotional/psychological wounds of anger, resentment and possibly revenge. To purify our mind, we need to forgive. Forgiveness is a conscious, willing decision to release any feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they deserve your forgiveness. Forgiveness is difficult and it does not mean condoning or excusing offenses, nor does it obligate you to reconcile with the person who harmed you or releases them from accountability. Instead, forgiveness brings the forgiver peace of mind and frees him or her from corrosive anger and resentment. Forgiveness involves letting go of deeply held negative feelings but also maintaining a feeling of at least neutral goodwill toward everyone who may have injured you in any way. In that way, you recognize the pain you suffered without letting that pain define you, enabling you to heal. By forgiveness, you set yourself free from the attachment to the link that you maintain even mentally to the past and the negativity. Setting yourself free from the attachment, releases you. This includes forgiveness of oneself for actions you did that you now understand were unwholesome and unskillful. Through purification and letting go of the guilt or resentment, happiness and peace will follow as well as increased wisdom and equanimity.

The Biological Origin of “Self”

14 Feb

“Everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler!” ~ Albert Einstein

The Biological Origin of “Self”

 In my book, The Buddha’s Teachings: Seeing Without Illusion, I explore the Buddha’s concept of Anatta, or no-self. I show that the Buddha described the concept of self as a relative, linguistic, social construct dependent on culture and time. Experiencing this insight of ‘no-self’ helps us to comprehend and dissolve away the attachment and clinging to self-identification that causes suffering until ultimately all traces of self-identification are gone and all that’s left is freedom.  However, the nature of self is one of the most enduring assumptions of humankind, and if asked how one knows they have a self, often the reply is, “I can make decisions, I can choose; therefore, I know there is an ‘I’ who is the chooser behind my choices.” This blog explores the question, “How real is the conscious self as the cognitive executive in charge?”

 The newest research in neuroscience and biology indicates that besides some significant cognitive embellishments on the original phenomena, selectivity and choice is a function based on an organism’s biological and evolutionary need to minimize and sort out all possible “blooming, buzzing confusion” (William James) that would occur without the body’s filtering system. In his book, Quantum Reality, Physicist Wolfram Schommers quotes physician Hoimar von Ditfurth, who stated: “No doubt, the rule ‘As little outside world as possible, only as much as is absolutely necessary is apparent in evolution. It is valid for all descendants of the primeval cell and therefore for ourselves. Without a doubt, the horizon of the properties of the tangible environment has been extended more and more in the course of time. But in principle, only those qualities of the outside world are accessible to our perception apparatus which, in the meantime, we need as living organisms in our stage of development. Also, our brain has evolved not as an organ to understand the world but an organ to survive.”

 In fact, every second, we are inundated with information from the many stimuli around and in us. In order to keep the brain from becoming overwhelmed by the steady stream of data competing for attention, brain cells work together to sort and prioritize information. Our sense organs and our brain operate as an intricate kind of filter which limits and directs the mind’s focus, so that under normal conditions, attention is concentrated on just those objects or situations or sensations that are of importance to the organism. This ability to pay attention to relevant information while ignoring distractions is a core brain function.

 Without the ability to focus and filter out “noise” we could not effectively function. As reported in Science Digest, in a study appearing in the journal Nature, researchers from Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the University of California Davis studied communications between synaptically connected neurons under conditions where subjects shifted their attention toward or away from visual stimuli that activated the recorded neurons. The results point to a novel mechanism by which attention shapes perception by selectively altering presynaptic weights to highlight sensory features among all the noisy sensory input. “While our findings are consistent with other reported changes in neuronal firing rates with attention, they go far beyond such descriptions, revealing never-before tested mechanisms at the synaptic level,” said study co-author Farran Briggs Ph.D., assistant professor of Physiology and Neurobiology at the Geisel School of Medicine. “Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions, we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.” The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which options participants would take up to seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. The fact that decisions could be predicted so long before they were made goes against our usual intuitive sense that we always make our decisions with conscious deliberation, and that this deliberation process is a foundation of our self.

 How does our brain achieve this ability to choose and focus attention? The answer is believed to be connected with what is called “efficient selection”, which is likened to a filter; routing important sensory information to higher-order perceptual areas of the brain while suppressing disruptions from irrelevant information. Reporting their research in Neuron, Justin Gardner and colleagues at the RIKEN BSI, found that sensory signals were efficiently selected. They said that stimuli that are particularly disruptive to our ability to focus and that evoke high neural activity, are preferentially passed on to perceptual areas of the brain because stimuli with high contrast that evoke large sensory responses, such as flashing lights or loud noises, can easily disrupt our ability to focus. 

  Expanding on the description of the neurobiological- cognitive system in his paper, The self: social construct or neurobiological system?, Philipp Rau wrote:

 ‘We can rightfully reject the social theory of selfhood with its claim that the self is only a social post-lingual emergent. Rather, the self is at root a neurobiological-cognitive system that, long before socialization, allows the individual to be conscious of itself in the world. But having rejected a social account of how the self emerges does not compel us to deny that the self, once emerged, can be shaped by sociocultural factors. The processes contributing to the self are distributed across a number of neuroanatomical structures. It is only their synchronous neural activity that generates a self.  The core self of the neuro-cognitive theory only arises when the organism becomes conscious of itself interacting with the world. Thus, the self emerges precisely when the internal–external boundary is straddled. The phenomenal content of the neuro-cognitive self, however, corresponds to what Cartesian intuition would have us conceive of as an ontologically independent self. There is no such self-independent of the brain and body, of course, but the self-representational processes described by the neuro-cognitive theory, in creating a conscious self-model, produce in us the illusion that there might be (cf. Metzinger, 2003, chs. 1, 6, 8).

 What Descartes in his Meditations believed to have isolated as “a res cogitans” (a thinking thing), is the content of the core self, the product of a neurobiologically driven cognitive system.’

Biochemist Mae-Wan Ho goes one step further by saying that this system is a function not only of the brain, but of how the organism functions as a coherent whole; what she calls “the quantum coherence of the organism”. In an article on the ISIS website titled, Quantum Coherence and Conscious Experience, she wrote, “I propose that quantum coherence is the basis of living organization and can also account for key features of conscious experience – the ‘unity of intentionality, our inner identity of the singular ‘I’, the simultaneous binding and segmentation of features in the perceptive act, the distributed, holographic nature of memory, and the distinctive quality of each experienced occasion.”

In her book, The Rainbow and the Worm, she explains that:

“The liquid crystalline water matrix pervades the entire organism from the extracellular connective tissues to the interior of every single cell and is the carrier of electric and electromagnetic signals. Special membrane proteins have water-filled channels that cross the cell membrane, acting as ‘proton wires’ to transport protons in and out of the cell. This is a special instance of the proton jump conduction that’s much faster than ordinary electric currents through wires, and it could be happening all over the body. The same liquid crystalline matrix transmits the heart’s large pulsating electromagnetic field throughout the body, including the brain, which paces and intercommunicates with the myriad local rhythms. Within the cell, it transmits the much higher frequency electromagnetic waves emitted by molecules that depend on specific frequencies to recognize one another and coordinate their actions even at a distance. So we see that the body is a quantum coherent organism which creates and recreate herself from moment to moment.”

 Mae -Wan Ho likes to call this process “Quantum jazz”, which is the music of the organism dancing life into being. She goes on to write that:

 “Quantum jazz is played out by the whole organism, in every nerve and sinew, every muscle, every single cell, molecule, atom, and elementary particle, a light and sound display that spans seventy octaves in all the colors of the rainbow. There is no conductor or choreographer. Quantum jazz is written while it is being performed; each gesture, each phrase is new, shaped by what has gone before, though not quite. The organism never ceases to experience her environment, taking it in (entangling it) for future reference, modifying her liquid crystalline matrix and neural circuits, recoding and rewriting her genes. Quantum coherence is the ‘I’ in everyone that gives unity to conscious experience.”

 As we can see from these examples of a new understanding about the significance of biological regulation and coherence of the organism, the previously intuitive construct of the “Cartesian Theater” in the brain, wherein the self sits as a spectator on the world and self acts as the CEO executive of all decision making, is exposed as an illusion. Clearly, the biologically based core functions of organization, selectivity, and coherence are necessary for organism survival. The abstracted cognitive embellishments serve as relative, convenient designations or identifications, which constructs a virtual presence of the ‘self’ illusion, and is based in ignorance, and through steadfast identification creates craving and suffering. Only now are we able to empirically support the Buddha’s insights of ‘anatta or no-self’ which he gained through the introspective practice of bhavana, or meditation.

Copyright Rodger R Ricketts, Psy.D. 2021