Thoughts 15 Dec. 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

If a society relied excessively on financial markets to allocate resources, develop research, and improve industry, Keynes believed, it was destined for underperformance, instability, and unemployment. He had designed a theory and a policy agenda in which financial markets were subjugated to the authority of the state, believing the coordinated action of a government was capable of meeting the investment needs of society which financial markets could only secure through fleeting accidents.

Have financial markets become any more successful (in terms of any reasonable understanding of the common good) than they were in Keynes's day?

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The financial run for safety happened very fast. It made sense individually. But when implemented simultaneously by the men and women who manage tens of trillions of dollars worldwide, it threatened total systemic collapse and forced massive intervention by the state.

Lots of individually rational decisions can result in collective failure (irrationality).

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The Romantics seeded a whole tradition of Anglo-American criticism in the nineteenth century to which the conservative Dickens belongs as much as Thoreau, who famously asserted in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. This largely moral critique of modernity was broadened by writers in countries playing ‘catch-up’ with the Atlantic West. The Russians, in particular, stressed social facts: the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, and the loss of a sense of community and personal identity.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

“The law is a coarse net; and truth is a slippery fish.” Yes: but a net, however coarse, is better than no net at all. Yet the purpose of law has little (and sometimes nothing) to do with truth. It is the establishment of justice—or, more precisely, the protection against injustice. And justice is of a lower order than is truth (and untruth is lower than injustice. All of Christ’s parables taught people to follow truth, not justice). The administration of justice, even with the best of intentions for correcting injustice, may often have to overlook or even ignore untruths during the judicial process.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Among Arendt’s chief concerns in Between Past and Future is to convey a concrete sense of the high price traditional thought will pay when a conception of human affairs, of political reality, which no longer conforms to our experience is relinquished. The traditional conception, which lasted for more than two thousand years, derives, as we have seen, from Plato, to whom Arendt refers more than any other thinker in this book, and nowhere more decisively than in her reading of his familiar cave allegory. The heart of her reading is Plato’s justification of the rule of philosopy, “the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm.”

From the Introduction written by Jerome Kohn.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In one passage [Buddha] rejects the premise that what is useful is true, what is useless, false. There are statements, he says, which are true but useless. Again, four categories are implied: (1) true and useful, (2) true and useless (like knowing how many insects there are in the world, to use a later Buddhist example), (3) false and useful, (4) false and useless. In this formulation he said that he himself bothered to teach only what was both true and useful.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In the rationalist and absolutist tradition self-canceling or uroboric formulas were excluded from the discourse about experience, where they were seen as invalid by contradiction, and were applied only in discourse about the transcendent and absolute One. The Neopythagorean Moderatus, for example, used the formula “It is neither this nor that” to describe the transcendent One; Plotinus said of the One, “It is the not-this.” In this tradition it was considered that Plato had shown (primarily, but not exclusively, in the Parmenides) that language must lapse into paradox when it approaches ultimate reality.

Crafting Hypnotic Spells! - Casebook Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

Confusion is hypnotic because it creates absorption: that's it! If you are confused you are temporarily trying to understand something – this absorbs your attention.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 24 June 2021

 

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

If a spectacular emergency, like war or hurricane or flood, throws off the Market spectacularly, why do not the thousand accumulating accidents of life throw it off subtly yet persistently at all times? The answer is, plainly, that they do. Death, sickness, luck, accidents of all sorts, the manifold interventions of human perversity, make it impossible to correlate success with quality or virtue. Yet both [Woodrow] Wilson and [Herbert] Hoover were on record as desiring, after the war, to restore this inefficient system in the name of efficiency. They did not see—Americans will not see—the truth that has always surrounded them.

The psychological need to deny this truth is very great. Inefficiency is a charge that should be fatal to Market thinking, deep as that is in the whole American language of business and politics and education.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Jonathan Swift, “On the Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self,” says you must have a reflective mirror to achieve self-knowledge: “A Man can no more know his own Heart than he can know his own Face, any other Way than by Reflection.” For Swift this reflection comes from the regard of others.

A Secret History of Christianity

Mark Vernon

His [St. Paul's] thorn in the flesh became a means of grace. As he was crucified with Christ, as opposed to leaning on Christ’s crucifixion and praying for his own agonies to go, he found God dwelling within him. He had learnt what Mary had on the morning of the resurrection: not cling to Jesus but to be free to live his life in the Spirit (John 16:7 and 20:17). This was the truly sweeping realization, his central enlightenment. It is a secret conception of freedom. Today, for example, the working assumption is that freedom means liberty from restraint in order to pursue what’s desired. Spiritual freedom, though, is the liberty to realize what is truest in us, to see the “human form divine,” to use William Blake’s phrase – the twoness, which Blake said enables “double vision.” It is the freedom to move from an involuntary, often conflicted embroilment with the powers and principalities of original participation to a conscious, active union with God under reciprocal participation.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Epicurus, like the Buddha of the Nikayas, stressed inductively derived concepts of causality which eliminate supernatural forces from the account. In both cases it was believed that a knowledge of natural causation would eliminate groundless fears and superstitions, as well as make clear the way to alter one’s own behavior patterns.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But no substitute has water’s exact range of biological and ecological properties. If water is scarce, our options for dealing with the scarcity are restricted; we can’t drink anything else or grow our plants with anything else.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood’s great discovery is that history must be understood as sui generis.

The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 7 October 2020

 

Dao De Jing

Roger Ames, David Hall

At a common sense level, anyone who is irreverent about his or her own well-being cannot be charged with any other responsibility, and certainly not with important matters of state.

The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus

Gary Lachman

The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.

Buddha Takes No Prisoners

Patrick Ophuls and Jack Kornfield

To reiterate, the spiritual and political realms are necessarily governed by different moral codes, meaning that absolute standards cannot be applied to politics. Like Jesus, who rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, the Buddha therefore left worldly affairs to the civil authorities. So it may be that the best and noblest political act is to forget politics and to devote ourselves primarily to training our minds in wisdom and our hearts in compassion, even as we continue to live as householders. The above is not a call to apathy or passivity. But the Buddha’s way is to be clearly aware of the world as it actually is—not as we conceive it to be or would like it to be—and then to respond accordingly.

And for the deeper dive, back to Hannah Arendt's Essays in Understanding and in particular, her "On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding."

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Montesquieu was the last to inquire into the nature of government; that is, to ask what makes it what it is (“sa nature est ce qui le fait être tel,” L’Esprit des Lois, Book III, ch. 1). But Montesquieu added to this a second and entirely original question: What makes a government act as it acts?

....

What is it that makes a state recognizable as a republic, a monarchy, or a tyranny? After giving the traditional answer to the traditional question—affirming that a republic is a constitutional government with the sovereign power in the hands of the people; a monarchy, a lawful government with sovereign power in the hands of one man; and a tyranny, a lawless government where power is exercised by one man according to his arbitrary will—Montesquieu adds that in a republic the principle of action is virtue, which, psychologically, he equates with love of equality; in a monarchy, the principle of action is honor, whose psychological expression is a passion for distinction; and in a tyranny, the principle of action is fear.

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 330). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Tough Love, Buddhist-style. A Review of Buddha Takes No Prisoners: A Meditator’s Survival Manual by Patrick (William) Ophuls

Reading this book, I sometimes wonder, “Is it worth it? All of this time spent on meditation, all of this concern? After all, I’m pretty old, and I’m never going to escape samsara in this lifetime. I’m a householder, and even after years of mediation and having spent 10 days living and meditating like a Buddhist monk, I’m not sure that I’ve made a dent in taming my monkey mind. My prospects are bleak. And if that isn’t bad enough, I live in society that is perhaps the worst of all possible worlds for hoping to achieve nirvana.”

If you pick up this book and read it in the hope of finding words of praise and encouragement, you’ve chosen the wrong book. Buddha takes no prisoners and neither does Ophuls. Whether he’s talking about meditation or the social world, he isn’t sparing in his assessments. Yet for all his bluntness, he encourages by throwing down the gauntlet of an impossible quest. For every time you read something that suggests your situation or your efforts are hopeless, Ophuls seems to acknowledge the quandary and say “do it anyway”. And why not? If we don’t try, we fade off into oblivion without having attempted the noble quest. As a practical matter, life can be bad. And life can be worse. We can’t escape old age, sickness, and death, but we can experience the “The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to” with greater or lesser equanimity and therefore greater or lesser suffering.

Another reason to continue this book (and the path it recommends) comes from Ophuls’s pithy writing. As Ophuls notes in his beginning remarks:

So Buddha Takes No Prisoners is a different kind of meditation book— one that is quite idiosyncratic, not to say iconoclastic, by traditional standards, because it has no pretensions to orthodoxy . It also tries to inject a note of playful irreverence into what is usually taken to be A VERY SERIOUS MATTER. I want to emphasize the word playful: my aim was to produce something that would be fun to read and, above all, fun to write, while still being instructive. Otherwise, why bother?

Id. “Not another meditation book!”

In fact, Ophuls does provide fresh and engaging ways to consider meditation and the aims of the Buddhist tradition. I came away with some memorable insights, such as this one about the realization of what it’s all about:

[M]any years of intensive spiritual practice had succeeded in clearing [Buddha’s] mind, and one day an early childhood memory bubbled up. Left to himself under a tree by the side of a field in which his father was supervising the ritual plowing, Siddhartha had relaxed into a state of pure presence— a condition of open, amplified awareness in which he saw everything perfectly, just as it was. Feeling with his whole body and mind the clarity, grace, and power of that remembered state, Siddhartha knew he had found the way forward at last.

Id. (p. 8)

We all probably have some like memory of pure presence, of open, unencumbered awareness with which we can identify Buddha’s experience. So this is what it’s all about! This insight alone is worth the price of the book. It gives one a sense of the grace that we seek through meditation, not simply relaxation or some trance state, but an experience of an ineffable relationship with the world.

Another key insight is that meditation is all about purification. We all have a Buddha mind, it’s just covered in dross. Ophuls recounts the ways in which meditators have often described the mind and then he adds an even better metaphor of his own:

[M]editation is like taming a wild beast— traditionally, a spooky horse, a mad monkey, a drunken elephant , or a bewildered ox . But the real beast is, of course, you, so think of it as housebreaking your inner hyena.

  

Id. (p. 14)

Your “inner hyena”? Ophuls later refers to us humans as the “two-legged hyenas” and notes that “[o]ur hyena nature is always scheming, conniving, and chiseling, always maneuvering for advantage. Only the saints refrain—on their better days.” Id. (p. 45). This isn’t your garden variety, soft-soap, self-help book. 

Ophuls emphasizes that meditation is a matter of purification, which is in turn mostly a matter of renunciation. Now how welcome are those words in our culture and in our minds? Nice in theory, but do I really have to give up [cherished pleasures and junk of your choice]? This is where Ophuls pulls no punches (or takes no prisoners). Yup, that’s what it’s about: purging the dross of the mind. It ain’t easy. Meditation may be seem like the ex-lax of purging, but sooner or later, you’re going to have some uncomfortable episodes. For this aspect of meditation, you need endurance and toughness to work through it. Indeed, it’s not just the mind; oh, no, it includes the body as whole, which is the home of the mind. (The mind is not located exclusively in the brain.) Ophuls explains: 

To free your mind, you must dissolve these physical blockages (and, of course, vice versa: to free your body, you must untie your mental knots). The fireworks generated by the collision between healing energy and coagulated defilement will take different forms— and can be more or less intense depending on individual karma—but physical purification and transformation are always an intrinsic and integral part of the meditation process.

Id. (p. 32)

For instance, following a mediation retreat that I attended, a guy that I thought could have been an American pro-football player told me that he balled like a baby during one period of mediation as a damn of physical and emotional pain broke in him. This is not the stuff of wimps. 

Ophuls, like about every other meditation teacher, tells us that we’ll fail in our efforts, especially at the beginning. But he writes: 

Of course, you will fail pitifully when you try to carry out this simple program. Everybody does. But it doesn’t matter. You simply do the best you can, and you keep doing it over and over, not being attached to how well you are doing or to what results you obtain. Even a few brief moments of metta and equanimity are enough to begin the ripening process .

Id. (p. 28)

“I’m a failure.” Big deal. Get over it. “Small, small catch monkey” as they say in Cameroon. 

In what can seem like a stream of discouraging words (which rightly taken are challenging words), Ophuls offers this point of encouragement: 

But meditation is not like art, where a hundred years of practice will not turn a dabbler into Degas. It is more like Edison’s formula for genius: ninety-nine parts perspiration to one part inspiration. So practice is everything . Whatever your talent for meditation, you cannot succeed without practicing ; whatever your lack of talent, you can succeed by practicing. If you produce the perspiration, the inspiration will come— 

Id. (p. 50)

Toward the end of the book, Ophuls includes a chapter “Return to the Marketplace” along with four appendices that deal with these issues more directly in the realm of daily life, including the marketplace and the public square. This is a value-added aspect of Ophuls’s work that I don’t find in other fine works on meditation. How does it fit with the lives we live? (Assuming you’re not a monk or nun.) On one hand, he simplifies the message for us: 

Enlightenment shows us that all the world’s a church, and all of life’s a pilgrimage, so we must live accordingly: with wisdom and compassion. In a nutshell, wisdom is practicing nonclinging, and compassion is practicing kindness.

Id. (p. 131)

But while we’re living the spiritual life, we mustn’t get ourselves lost in our personalized versions of a spiritual trip. He writes: 

The corollary is not to be rule bound— that is, enslaved by some image of holiness that you (and everybody else) have to live up to. Making a big deal out of spirituality or identifying it with political correctness and your personal preferences is delusion, not enlightenment. Spiritual trips are just as obnoxious as worldly trips, if not more so (especially when the two get all jumbled up together). As hard as it might be for some in the spiritual scene to accept, vegetarianism is not obligatory, and a glass of wine with dinner is not anathema. Nor is voting Democratic any more enlightened than voting Republican . And social workers are no holier than sailors.

Id. (pp. 131-132)

For some, this might come like a cold bucket of water in the face. (N.B. Voting Democratic is (nowadays) almost always smarter and wiser than voting Republican, but it’s not a sign of spiritual enlightenment.) Indeed, lest we all go off to live in monasteries, we must deal with the world, and deal with it in worldly-wise ways. Ophuls notes: 

[A]s long as we are living as householders rather than as renunciates, it is entirely appropriate to create and enjoy fortunate circumstances. Fortune fosters joy, and joy fosters generosity and other positive, skillful qualities of mind. So we need to find the middle way between self-abnegation and self-indulgence. We need, in other words, to create a way of living that is simple, beautiful, and life-affirming: a squalid hovel is a blight, and a trophy mansion an extravagance, but a well-designed, well-built, and well-furnished home is a blessing. To mention beauty is to come to the heart of the matter. Beauty is not an option or a luxury, but a necessity. We need beauty in our personal lives, because beauty uplifts the mind and reconnects it to the power and wonder of creation. And we desperately need beauty in our collective life (perhaps even more than we need political, social, and economic reform).

Id. (pp. 132-133)

The “perhaps” in the last sentence is noteworthy; let’s agree that we can use both.

Just as you may think that Buddha and Ophuls are going soft, Ophuls writes that we in the West want to have “healing” and enlightenment; we want the pleasures of life and the benefits of renunciation. No way, he says. Freud sought to compromise with reality, to whittle away the suffering of our neuroses into ordinary unhappiness. Buddha wasn’t willing to take this path. Buddha goes all the way, and team Buddha isn’t going to boost everyone’s self-esteem by letting everyone make the cut and get a letter. No. “You’re going to have to earn it.” (Cue John Houseman’s sneering voice for full effect.)

In the four appendices, Ophuls situates Buddhist thought within contexts of modern science, Western political thought, Western psychology, and contemporary culture. As with the rest of the book, the tone alternates between it’s all FUBAR (for younger readers:  “fouled-up beyond all recourse” or something like that) and “Okay, it’s FUBAR, let’s get to work on it”. (I wrote earlier about the appendix on politics.) 

Ophuls is like a great teacher or coach, at once demanding a level of performance that one can never hope to obtain while providing a pat on the back indicating that you’re getting there. Challenge and encouragement. With this, Ophuls's book goes on my shelf (electronic shelf in this case) as one of the best guides to meditation and what life is really about: living it with wisdom, compassion, and equanimity.