Dabbling in Metaphysics

[genderjumper]

Perhaps as a corollary or preface to other readings I hope to do during the current wave of pandemic, I've been poking around some Wikipedia articles about Eastern beliefs, the "nuts and bolts" of Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

It just struck me that one could frame the divide between "Western" and "Eastern" belief systems as polarized stances of "Interventionist" and "Non-interventionist". Not only is the Western model centered around singular, conscious divinities who intervene in human affairs, but the goal of spiritual practice is often to intervene in the affairs of others through proseletyzing, education, and conquer. Conversely, the highest form for these Eastern traditions is a "witness" who attain personal or spiritual bliss through detachment. (I think Jesus said some things about letting the world do what it does and focusing on being a good person, but thanks to my apatheistic upbringing I've read more theology on Wikipedia than I ever have the Bible itself.)

Indeed, my quibble with the Tao Te Ching may come down to its nigh-mindfulness practice that, while purporting to espouse good governance, is actually quite detached and anti-intervention. So as I start verbalizing my break with the only sacred text I've ever known, I want to jot down some things that I believe or do not believe (suspect? perhaps "perceive" is the least loaded term here...) at this point in time:

• Human beings are algorithmic. I can find no favor for the belief that a perpetual self exists except as it is forged by its own happenstance and reactions thereto. That is not a soul, that is machine learning.
• (Metaphorical) lenses help the mind focus on parts of the whole when the whole is too great. For example, time has not yet been proven to exist beyond human perception; it is simply easier to shortcut sequence than to fathom the distinctness of every time-space fiber.
• There are social, historical, and political reasons behind every concept we replicate, including about ourselves. Every datapoint is input as metaphor and coded by propaganda.
• Distinction is an inevitable consequence of multitude. Even when we grieve deaths in numbers too abstract to personalize, we are grieving the loss of distinction and breadth within our species.
• Distinction is an individual phenomenon, diversity is its greater presence. Diversity enriches humanity and improves its survival against calamity. If anything about humanity is inherently worth celebrating, it may be this.
• The greater the diversity of a community, the harder it will have to work at mutual support.
• Diversity is not a seed for violence, but violence will seek it out.
• Human perception simplifies. Binaries are almost always polarities and polarities are almost always planes and planes are almost always galaxies and galaxies fluctuate throughout time. (I'm not sure about the "almost", but positivism is reductive.)
• Everything changes all the time in every context. Singularities are convenient lenses to focus our attention, but that does not give them ongoing meaning.
• Outcomes are ephemeral; peace is an accident but its end comes from will.
• Every leader will ultimately fail because they frame their goals as being ultimate in the first place.
• Beware those who confuse victory with meaning or favor.
• Tradition is nostalgia weaponized against progress.
• Building prosperity is never the same as reducing poverty.
• At the heart of power is a craving for permanence; to the extent it is at all attainable, it is generally to because the powerful have extracted it from the powerless. Permanence opposes distinction.
• There seem to exist forces, conscious or otherwise, active on the periphery of and beyond our perception, however it is the height of hubris to assume that we are exalted, pestered over, or infinitely familiar. Indeed, their proximity to us can only be high if their numbers are many; the more concentrated supernatural power(s), the less relevant we become. Harm comes not from a specific belief or disbelief toward omnipotence or universality, but in declaring it to be intimate and oneself as its proxy. (He's just not that into you.)
• Any spiritual practice which codifies binaries (or even numerical certainties) are insufficiently agnostic, rooted in convenient binaries that inevitably reroute our defaults back to "man and woman" and, perhaps even more, "good and evil".
• Any belief construct that centers the self against society, or society against the self, is committing violence against either or both.
• Even when accurate, the perceived quality of an individual or collective's spiritual insight (or other celebrated endeavor) is irrelevant to any other quality of their practice of being human. No effort is entirely selfless, but you can intervene against a known flaw.
• It is impossible to single-handedly control how oneself is perceived for any duration of time by any number of people; so, too, is it impossible to know another completely. All we have is propaganda, enemy to truth (which itself is unattainable). You can, however, artfully "lie" your way to shared understanding.
• Authenticity is a weird concept if you think about it too long. If it is special for our thoughts and actions to align, are we not normalizing deception, self-obfuscation, and image control? Sometimes, we just want to be misled.
• You can't know everything you need to know, nor forget everything you need to forget.
• Convenience is enemy to freedom. Judgement is enemy to healing.
• Each of these precepts will be a source of joy and inspiration if you let it.
• Most (possibly all) who seek and teach deeper truth (which is not necessary to make a nourishing contribution) will fail to adequately universalize it. You are only as strong as the challenges to your assumptions.

Comments

[genderjumper]

Dammit, I meant to include a more explicit commentary about this: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality. I know there's the bit about positing society and self in opposition, but I want to more explicitly refute the notion of enlightening the self without contributing communally as well.

still working my way through the long post

[flamingsword]

You said, "Diversity is not a seed for violence, but violence will seek it out." I'm not sure I understand what you mean? Do you mean that the violent will seek out the divergent? Or something different.

Re: still working my way through the long post

[genderjumper]

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. And/or that people who resist diversity will use violence to control it.

[flamingsword]

“Outcomes are ephemeral; peace is an accident but its end comes from will.”
This sounds kinda self contradictory? If peace is always temporary then why does the breaking of it have to be intentional? Lots of arguments arise from simple misunderstanding.

“Authenticity is a weird concept if you think about it too long. If it is special for our thoughts and actions to align, are we not normalizing deception, self-obfuscation, and image control? Sometimes, we just want to be misled.”
Authenticity is not supposed to be special, it just winds up being a kind of diversity in a world with a lot of propaganda that leads to self-obfuscation. The existence of power necessitates both propaganda and the self’s misalignment. If we knew our own power we would throw riots every other day.

[genderjumper]

I was definitely thinking about macro peace when I wrote this, but even in individual interactions I think there is a layer at which people can choose to escalate or deescalate a fight. (And to be clear, when peace involves a person or group of people being treated poorly, that's not true peace and its end has already been put in motion. Perhaps I should add that "Accidental peace is never whole" or some such.)

[genderjumper]

I really like your comments about authenticity, thank you!

Addendum #1

[genderjumper]

I found my Tao Te Ching books. Might sit with those soon.

I've been poking around a lot of concepts from various faith traditions, including the Buddhist Middle Way. There are parts of it that very much appeal to me, such as looking more at causality than whether there exists a permanent or non-permanent self. The Middle Way is supposed to dilineate sage restraint from two harmful extremes, pleasure and denial (or, in another context, eternalism and annihilation).

I think this is my favorite passage from the Wikipedia article:

Another passage which discusses personal identity with regard to the middle teaching is found in the Aññatarabrāhmaṇasutta (SN 12.46, with a Chinese parallel at SA 300). This sutta outlines two further extreme views with regards to personal identity and karma:

* “‘The person who does the deed experiences the result’: this is one extreme.”
* “‘One person does the deed and another experiences the result’: this is the second extreme.

The Tao Te Ching is at heart a book not of philosophy or piety but of leadership/governance, and thus advocates leadership that is so precise and subtle it seems absent. "Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!" (Tao Te Ching, 17, Mitchell translation). One of the aspects of the Tao Te Ching that always resonated for me was the letting go of accomplishments and expectations, to see oneself as just one natural force amongst many. Without ever reading further scholarship (other than a few parallels in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- those two texts helped me understand one other better in my 20s), I added my own sense that understanding the forces around me (including myself as force or algorithm) would help me let go of expectations and control and make subtler choices possible, enabling me to "do not-doing", a central and frequent concept in the Tao Te Ching.

And yet this gets at the heart of some of my conflict with the Tao (and perhaps also with Buddhism) in our times. In preaching personal peace and distance from the populace, it actually encourages the very kind of detachment corporate capitalism has embedded all around us. No one person is ever responsible for one decision, but so many executives have lain hands on it that it is impractical to hold them all accountable. So much for doing not-doing!

These are subtly but profoundly different from, for example, the Jewish concept of "Tikkun Olam", or "repairing the world". What I find fascinating about it is not the theological or philosophical debates over how to go about tikkun olam, but the ontological assumption within it: the world is (already? perpetually?) broken, but can be mended.

Confer this with a deity I learned about a couple years ago: Akilandeshvari, the Hindu goddess of "Never not broken". Akilandeshvari draws strength from brokenness. Does this mean everything must be undone before we can truly build it anew?

I've also spent a lot of time the past 4 years or so reevaluating history, recognizing just how much propaganda it all is. Any event we have not personally witnessed is subject to the interpretation of those who told us, and any event we convey to others is similarly interpreted. We don't actually know whether the Dark Ages (originally named for their low output of texts and in contrast to the European Enlightenment, although modern historians can show us both that Europe was not as unproductive as once believed and that other parts of the world were far more productive at the same time) were actually a bad time to be alive. Many concepts we might hold up to contrast our "better" era against their "worse" era are relatively new arrivals. Hygiene is a good example: germ theory has only gained traction in the past 200 years, and the very concept of public health did not exist until the late 1800s. Racism as we know it didn't exist because that was invented over the 1600s-1700s to keep poor people divided and perpetuate chattel slavery. How many people are clammoring for the suburbs and ex-urbs in hopes of getting back to a small-town feel that most of the world knew a thousand years ago?

I only ask as a thought experiment; I have no way of comparing, and that is my true point. Has the world ever been better or worse at any particular time than at any other particular time? The stability known by USians in the mid- to late-1900s was an aberration in human history, and yet it was also one of the fastest moving societies on record because information could not travel so fast. Perhaps we found a sweet spot of telecommunications (a middle way), only to lose it by moving faster and faster yet. In my lifetime, many thought of the Internet as a force of democracy, but we see now just how vulnerable is democracy under the weight of too much information. Moreover, because we have access to so much information (if not always the will to pay attention), we now see the through-lines of oppression that never really died out like we'd thought. Was that period of stability ever really there, or was it just good propaganda because of how well it selected its audience? Were we ever not broken? Would we rather be complicit but unwitting to systemic interference with the success of entire communities, or would we rather see the whole picture and feel powerless to stop it? Is there a way to let go of the self -- the need to accomplish and lead and receive recognition for having done so -- without letting go of the compassion brought on by the self's experiences.

My self-as-algorithm have been shaped by the harm done to me and people around me, and I cannot deny that relationship. I am less invested in the struggles that were further away, and yet I am more invested because I see how interconnected they are. I am less invested when many others are fighting the "good fight" because I see better from the outside, but many are the times I stood fighting that battle alone. I fight the battle within and I try to do so without completely disengaging from the pleasures of my time. I have never been wealthy, but I enjoy a roof over my head, a reasonably priced meal, and the touch of others. But it has not been enough to change myself, thereby changing my neighbors, thereby changing my city, my nation, and thus the world. The conversation of change is hindered by individualism. And yet, I have no community, no followers, no leaders to speak of. To believe in better is to set oneself apart, I sometimes find. The only thing lonelier than hopelessness is deep and unfettered hope.