Biography and the Exploitation of Meditation and Virtue Practice

                                       

Meditation is not done to change, transform, improve, or enlighten your life but to change the nature of moment-to-moment experience at the expense of the presence of suffering. Biographically oriented change through meditation defeats one of its primary reasons for its existence throughout its history.

                                          

More on Body: Rambling thoughts on thoughts

The body lives in "real- time, living time as experience. It does so anonymously until the feeling of selfhood is elicited. Often, that's when the trouble begins. However, trouble is not inherent in this. The body is always faster than thinking, but thinking lives in real time also. Reflection plays catch-up to the body's dynamic, to feeling organized by living narratives that run very deep. The work of embodied narratives is too fast for reflection to catch. However, reflection does its work in real-time also. It's just that we believe the intended objects of reflection are an accurate "mirroring" of what has already occurred. Reflection, in the performative sense, takes as its object the past. Memory can be deceived and has often been caught out in error. Our deepest beliefs, held in body-memory, often lead us astray.

The body is now, the evanescent present flowing with the complication (co-implication) of past, present, and future. The past, i.e., past actions of body, speech, and mind--from time without beginning--flow in an intentional as a yet-to-be future, always. This language attempts to hold what cannot be held, like quicksilver. The body flows in evanescent effluence, flush with acts built of time.

In the "encounter," the body-mind-world is the forgotten but promised land. The memory of this forgotten land hides in our primordial anxiety, our longing for home. Without so much as a wink, the body as the evanescent is forgotten and paradise is lost. We then come upon a strange world that must be thought to know its "nature." Parmenides saw to that. He opened the methodos, the path, that claimed being is known by thought. Thought cannot reclaim that which is lost. Thought, as the belief that it can reflect, mirror, capture, or know the "what is," is an ever alienating movement to know the evanescent in the still. Thought then becomes incarnate belief in the encounter. "I come to being as the still," the still that becomes framed in ideas. Vision, as Aristotle knew, can only capture what does not move, what does not become.

Some notes on karma, novelty, change, and free will

This vectorial nature of (phenomenal) experience is intentional, i.e., meaningful present acts aim toward and determine meaningful future experience.* The unique, incarnate, and meaningful circumstances of each present moment are what makes a qualitative change in future experience possible.

In this depiction of the structural continuum of experience, what some Buddhists refer to as the mental continuum (a problematic translation), there is no room for free will. If there were free will it would require input from a willing agent. This agent, a self, possessing such a will, would of necessity be unconditioned by the past and have the capability to make decisions without relying on input from the past or present circumstances or a conceivable future which would also be free of any input from the past in any conception of a future. This agent would be free of all conditioned imperatives even those which demanded the next breath. Such an agent excludes the existence of a memory in any conception of the time in which and for which a decision had to be made. One is exhausted by any attempt to even conceive of an unconditioned agent possessing free will let alone making decisions...





*This movement is 

On the Manifest and the Unmanifest...short takes

Many of us may think that silence is simply a lack of sound. However, it is only in and through silence that sound can be heard. This statement holds true for all of the other senses with their respective fields or contexts, e.g., the tastlessness of the tongue and the "lack" of feeling that skin minus the contact is touchless and the tongue is tasteless. All six of our sensations or cognitions, including the mind-sense, require their sentient opposites to originate, continue, and dissolve. This threefold process(ing) of origination, continuity, and dissolution is synonymous with time itself as experience. All three may also serve to help us take note of this process and perhaps even practice non-interference, i.el, neither attachment nor averson toward it. All three occur (as occurring) synchronously. In an abstract sense, all three make up each now as the movement of experience. In order to taste, for example, the occurring of tasting must happen as process. So, to manifest taste as tasting time as experience is always an occuring not a static taste but a movement of tasting. This is an occasion for the words more or less. Do I need more ice cream or put my fork down an toss this untasteworthy food--the play of attachment and aversion. However, when we drink pure water, we may be indifferent to its movement of taste. It is often overlooked or ignored when we may use it to wash down what we wish we hadn't eaten. It may now become clear why I call silence sentient silence, for it is a necessary element of tasting anything, liked or not. 

Axioms and Suffering (It's not very clear but I'm working on it.)

The intransigent presupposition (belief) of an independently existing reality outside of human experience, be it the world, nature, or the universe, gives rise to the compulsion to justify the alien others, such as Buddhism, Taoism, meditation, etc., by naturalizing them. This process seems, at first glance, to be a process of discovery of what is and is not affected by bias, i.e., it appears as natural and independently existent. The sciences claim to be a process of revealing the secrets of the universe, be it biology or physics and their related natural sciences.

Science is the practice that ultimately will require justification once these “alien” others are more fully comprehended and incorporated. For now, let me state that we live in worlds that are situational and not natural. By situational we mean manifest as the attempted fulfillment of human desire. So, instead of asking the question "What is?," we intend the question "What does it mean for us?" In most cases of scientific investigation, the answers looked for are driven by the intentional questions "What is it?," What is its function in the natural order of things?," and "Of what use is it to fulfill our desires?," or "What can we do with it?," following a simple progression of explanation, prediction, and control.

The overwhelming inclination, even compulsion, to justify other realms of life, philosophies, or practices by naturalizing them via science, e.g., neuro--whatever, must be examined.

The Western sciences, in light of a fuller understanding of the other(s) such as Buddhism, Yoga, Sufism, phenomenology, mysticism, etc., may very well be those who are summoned to provide more and or other justifications for their own activity.

These so-called others find their justification for adherence in the efficaciousness of their claims to either alleviate suffering and may even provide something of a foundation for the sciences and its (possible) intentions.

In marked contrast to many forms of scientism and materialism, Buddhism etc., are intended as methods different than the acquisition of theoretical knowledge for the purposes of explanation, prediction, and control. The theories propagated by sciences currently rest upon foundations and justifications that are often obscure, assumed as axiomatic, and even based on the profit-bearing motives of capitalist economy. Often our sciences serve the cruel masters of ignorance and afflicted thinking as evinced by environmental degradation, poverty, alienation and the increased suffering of all sentient beings.

The World According to the Buddha

The Buddha said: "And what is the origination of the world? Dependent on the eye & forms there arises eye-consciousness. The meeting of the three is contact. From contact as a requisite condition comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. From craving as a requisite condition comes clinging/sustenance. From clinging/sustenance as a requisite condition comes becoming. From becoming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth as a requisite condition, then aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair come into play. This is the origination of the world."

More remarks on free will and karma, but as yet unfinished...

Some adherents to a free will view may not realize all of the necessary assumptions in place making such a view seem plausible. However, keen or vigilant attention paid to experience reveals that an error is in play. Experience rises and falls, by its own momentum, effortlessly--for good or bad. Its source is unknowable, in a strictly experiential sense. Watch very calmly and closely if you are in doubt, for this is precisely what it takes to come to know this to be an accurate description. A self-sense inheres (as a conceit) in the continuum of experience, not as an agent of actions of body, speech, and mind but as an implicit or explicit component of the continuum. This is often called our karma--because it becomes manifest in our experience with an implicit or explicit attending self-sense. The conceit is what we may refer to as the illusion, the mere appearance of I, me, and mine. However, the vigilant attention spoken of here, while intrinsic to experience, is not a self or an agent of actions. This attention makes the bearer of experience and the contents of experience possible.

What arises as experience results from necessarily incarnate past acts, historical, social, familial, and personal. If experience occurred in any other way, change would not be possible. Thus, change for the better, i.e., change in the quality of future experience is indeed possible through acts taken in the present.

No act (karma) of body, speech, and mind is lost. Meaningful experience, fully human experience, unfolds from the past in the present toward the future. Thus, experience is intentional. Actions taken in the present, providing the deposits for the nature of future experience, include the circumstantial elements of each present moment wherein the past is unfolded as the present toward the future. Thus, the deposits left by the action taken in each present circumstance accounts for the novelty of future experience. Thus, innovation is included in the experiential continuum. If one thinks of this in the manner of geological deposition, such as we see in the sedimentary layers of the Grand Canyon, we must take note of, not only the prior layers of sediment conditioning the structure of the newer deposits, but of the causes and conditions of each moment that also lend to the configuration of each new layer of sediment deposited upon the prior layers. All (and I must stress this word) of these prior layers (the past) are also the conditions which remain to configure each new layer as it is deposited. Thus, each present action, inclusive of all of the circumstances conditioning that present action, will also be conditioned by all prior acts deposited and both the present and the past become the causes and conditions of future experience. This makes the novelty and the continuity of experience possible. In effect, the future is in a sense, but not entirely, present in the past. So, our actions in the present do count. However, they are conditioned acts with the possibility of qualitative change made possible by the manner in which each action taken, not by a free agent mind you, establishes the conditions upon which future experience is created.