Myth and Attention

In a post on a discussion list, someone spoke about the way tradition can blur the meeting of a historical figure with the subsequent myths that arisde around the figure: "...even Buddhism has some blurring when it comes to Siddhartha."  I responded with the post below, which brought me some further thoughts on the subject I am still mulling over. I am tucking the words away here for future reference.

Rather say that Buddhism as a formal tradition naturally has some of this "blurring." Myth is a normal part of the formed tradition, which serves egoic understanding - rational thought. When we approach things experientially, doing the practice, we do not need myth. - it serves no purpose and holds no attraction.

When we approach things rationally, thinking about the practice as opposed to doing it, myth can provide a very useful synopsis of what is being taught. It can also reinforce the faith needed to try the experiential approach.

Jesus, Buddha, George Washington, Newton - whatever the myth and the tradition it serves, it is valuable only as a thought-tool, a symbol which can be manipulated by the conscious egoic mind in its endless quest to translate all of reality into a conceptual model. Myth allows us to get a mental handle on the lesson and predict what will happen when we use it. This is the job of the thinking mind and it is quite proper for it to act so.

Of course, being enlightened and awake individuals, we all know that it would be unhealthy for us to confuse this thinking mind with our Selves...:). It is a computer, a handy and effective survival tool which occasionally goes a little out of control and overruns the consciousness it serves and is part of. A facet of the gem, no more or less than any other face.

That doesn't mean we should condemn it, though, any more than we can condemn a saw that fails to produce a straight cut. Carpenter and saw work as a unit to produce the cut, and so the thinking mind is but an aspect of the person. If I blur the historical human being with Siddhartha with a myth of the Awakened One, this is not my Evil Ego but rather simply a normal effect of where my practice is, which facet my attention is focused on. I accept it, then I continue practicing.

D

Eden, Heaven and Hell

This evolved from a post on a Christian-Buddhist list discussing the nature of Heaven according to Christian mystics. Finding the common ground of historical messiahs and teachers in the common ground of human nature fascinates me.

You express the concept well. And that is apropos from where I stand as I see the ability to conceive, and communicate the resulting concepts, as both the apple itself and as the result of biting it.

The sparrow lives in Eden and has never left it. It does so by attending to to the needs of the moment according to its nature, the plan you speak of. It does not imagine the future in place of reality. The sparrow feeds its chicks and so enters Heaven.

We are given a mind which can imagine futures and relive versions of the past, which can exaggerate our worst fears and built fantastic model realities around them, which can shut out the glory of what is in favor of the fear of what might be. What more intensive hell could exist than the one we each build around our own secret nightmares?

Likewise, there is heaven in serenity. No need to predict an afterlife - we can live in the moment free of the legacy of the apple and see what death brings when we die. Resisting sensual distraction is an early step - later comes accepting sensual input without becoming engrossed with it. The Kingdom of Heaven is all around us - it is us. The Gift is what is right now - sin is ignoring it in favor of what we arrogantly think should be, what we neurotically fear will be, what we thanklessly insist was better.

We build these Rube Goldberg realities in out minds and then fritter away our entire lives struggling to force reality to fit the molds we have crafted. Hell is realizing that ice cream, sex, romance, cruises, intoxication, status, academia, control and prime time TV are empty pursuits. Grace is discovering they are unnecessary.

 In tradition after tradition, the lesson has been to step back from the insanity of living in a world created from conceptual thought. That we do have such a capability is right and normal - it is human. That we become enmeshed to the point that we forget it is just perspective is a downfall of the ability. The traditions are all built around the teachings of someone who saw this clearly and felt impelled to pass that discovery on to others.

To see for yourself, experience what is - like the sparrow.

D

From a post on a discussion list. I liked the exchange regarding some points that often serve as centers of contention between Christian and Buddhist, yet are really not at all what they first seem. The pursuit of pluralism can find a path through such things.

Hi M,

Yes, there are too many excellent conversations and too few hours for them all! I have enjoyed this one and will keep your comments to review a few times. Thank you for taking the time to write them.

We have obviously been exposed to differing perspectives on Buddhist teachings. For instance, I learned that the Four Noble Truths represent a message of hope rather than of pessimism: if one happens to experience suffering, as is likely in a world of form, then there is a way to free oneself of it. I honestly believe this is the way the message was intended, although I can not of course prove that. As always, interpretation and translation take their toll.

In reading your post, I find that much of what you says seems to echo my own feelings but with differing words. As I review it, I find the difference seems to be centered more around the concept of time rather than any fundamental disagreements.

For instance, you said, "Once this person has died, then these natural sufferings end and they are said to have entered into the second stage...", yet Buddha didn't talk about the afterlife as a subject of teaching. The cultures his words were taught in added from traditions of reincarnation, but Buddha specifically focused on this life. This is my first example of where the element of time comes into our talks: I am not dead now and so any speculation about post-death experiences remains only that. And speculation is entertainment at best, and at worst a sure course to becoming lost in the fog.

Later, you assert "...the past is real, its just in the past. It is not something we made up... it is real. The future will be real..." and I might agree if we change the tenses a bit: "...the past was real, it was not something we made up." At this moment, though, the past is not real. All we have is the effects it has caused. Here is the reality of karma: that the past bequeaths us memories and ripples of effect. If I drive erratically today, for instance, I may wake up in a hospital tomorrow. I will not be able to undo my actions, though, as the reality would be that I was in a bed and no longer in my car. Neither past nor future exist now. Their only representations are in my mind. Even while laying in the hospital bed, my body knows nothing of how it got there - only my mind has any connection to that. My body knows only that it starts this moment injured.

In the next statement, I see a point I have often pondered: "...accepting reality also means accepting your own desires for comfort, ease, love, enjoyment, not snuffing these all
out, as the Buddhist texts tell us..." And I agree: we need to accept pleasure while it is present just as we need to accept pain. I do not read any Buddhist lessons saying I should not do so. What I do read are lessons which tell me not to spend this moment of pleasure anxious about the fact that it will not last forever. And lessons which tell me not to spend this moment agonizing over the likelihood that I will experience pain again before I die. Time. What is happening now is happening now. What might happen next, whether coming pain or ending pleasure, is not happening now.

Next is one I thought struck at the core of our discussion: "I think the real danger in radical acceptance and the ACT movement is the potential of disarming people of their natural abilities to deal with problems." And, as this thread itself represents, the possibility is a real one. Misunderstanding the Buddhist (and Christian) teachings to promote fatalism or nihilism is recorded as an old and repeated problem. Yet it is also an egoic sidetrack based in the fear of ending.

Buddhism does not say we have no self. It does say there is no inherent self because of dependent origination and impermanence, and this is demonstrably true. I am not the same person I was 40 years ago - I am taller, with more scars and much new knowledge, among many differences. I am the sum of my experiences and cells and environment. Yet this does not negate the soul - it simply means that if I have a soul, it is also a changing part of who I am. The resistance to this usually comes from the ego, which wants to exist forever in its present living form. Meditating on the implications of that makes for an interesting and educational experience!

Regarding the pleasure of ice cream on a hot day, if you get in a car and drive for an ice cream, you are not eating the ice cream along the way. If a traffic jam holds you up and you are upset because the treat is delayed, you are experiencing suffering. While you are driving, you are driving, and traffic is part of driving, so all is well. This can only change if you are physically driving but mentally living in the future of eating. Once you get to the ice cream and are eating it, then you can immerse yourself in the experience, and you can feel the pleasure of sweetness and cold. Once the ice cream is done, the experience changes to whatever follows. In each of these, there is no desire or aversion unless your mind becomes preoccupied with past or future.

Finally, note that none of this should infer there is no planning for the future or no learning from the past. A part of our brain is designed to do just this and it makes sense to use it so. The confusion comes in when we mistake this part, the ego, for the whole Self. It is a tool intended to apply past lessons to future possible scenarios for the sake of continuing organism. Part of meditation practice is to learn to step aside from this constant stream-of-consciousness activity and see that it is not me, but simply a part of me doing its job. This is detachment. Like computer projections, the various scenarios come and go nonstop, but they are only imaginary possibilities, not realities within which to get lost.

Thanks for the discussion, M. Perhaps one day our schedules will once again permit us some conversation!

The views on Buddhist thought represented are mine, so expect differing opinions on them. More learned folks will likely find errors. As always, though, my focus is on the teachings of the sages such as Buddha and Christ, rather than on the way those teachings have arrived at today. In this, it makes sense to try and distill meaning from many sources rather than to accept any single scripture as, well, gospel! No offense is ever intended and my material is naturally outdated as soon as I post it! Impermanence affects everything...:).

D

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Dissonance and Out-Groups

A class assignment for a forum post:

Story telling is an invaluable laboratory for learning about ourselves and others. Which of the stories and experiments cited by the authors did you find particularly meaningful? Can you share stories from your personal histories that we would also find informative?

I wrote my essay on this point, which begins around page 55. The concept of prejudice and of reinforcing my own ego through contrast with an outside group is one I've considered important for years.

In my mind, the process is something like this: the creation of a Them creates an Us by default. And an Us necessitates the existence of an I, thereby validating and reinforcing my ego. I enjoyed reading the perspective in Mistakes Were Made because it suggested some further detail about this. In my observation, much of our thinking either reinforces our sense of self, or threatens it. The concept of cognitive dissonance places a label on this thought for me and the explanations help me explore it further.

Travis & Aronson state that "stereotypes flatten out differences within the categories we are looking at and exaggerate the differences between categories" (p. 57). This is an awesome clue to the manipulations of mental functioning. I think it should be pretty obvious that I am not dealing with reality when I begin to group any set of individuals based not on the totality of each, but rather on only those characteristics I consider significant.

On pages 63-64, we read of an experiment where electric shocks were administered to students fitting the parameters of one group by those fitting the parameters of another. I liked this story because it illustrated to me just how superficial the distinctions are. The authors go on to expand upon the list of groups that have responded in similar ways, including those divided by gender, language, sexual preference and ethnicity. From personal experience, I might add sports team affiliation, religion, income level, political affiliation and computer manufacturer. My personal conclusion regarding this phenomenon is that it isn't about the actual topics involved, which are all arbitrary, but rather about the degree to which I internalize a given stance as part of my identity.

I have run into the behavior at work and amongst friends and family, too. Issues like abortion, dress codes, appropriate use of intoxication and even preferred weather seem to work just as well as any to establish in- and out-groups. Intelligent discussion or debate often takes a back seat to egotistical assertion.

The War on Terrorism is an interesting global display of Us vs. Them. In this, a terrorist is a label placed on a human being who commits a certain type of aggression. Although the terrorist may be a person responding to social or religious pressures and may be a family member and otherwise similar in many ways to me, he is labeled by his behaviors and thus fair game for out-grouping. In fact, he can now be subjected to behaviors on my part that mimic his own original transgressions, such as the killing of uninvolved parties as part of an effort to kill him!

Even more shocking is the fact that I can create new groups around him which don't even directly involve him. For instance, I can join a group that says it is not OK to accept collateral damage in pursuit of holding the terrorist accountable for past behaviors, while my friend joins a group that opposes this perspective. Although we both have far more in common than either of us do with the terrorist, we can become very heated in our defense of the two viewpoints, even to the point of doing irreparable harm to our friendship over them. And yet, rationality suggests that the issues are open to reasonable discussion and that such would require each of us opening his mind to the other's perspective. What is it that so commonly blocks such sensible behavior?

Why do I become angry over this issue but accept opponents of another without care? Is it really because one is so much more important than the other by some objective measurement? Or is it perhaps that I have made this issue over here more personal, more attached to me like some growth of my Self? Do I rage at the other group because of fundamental differences? Or because doing so reinforces my own identity? And if the latter, is my anger, my perspective, valid?

I think it is important to think about this concept because of the daily harm committed in the name of allegiance to ideas, membership and causes. And not only the interpersonal damage, but also the intrapersonal as well: whenever I limit my own identity to a concept, I've reduced the breathing reality to fit into a far smaller box than it really can. I am warping and contorting it and I have to live with the result.

D

Tavris, Carol; Aronson, Elliot. (2007). Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc.