Keeping in mind the neurological dictum "cells that fire together, wire together," one sees a similar occurrence in the social field.
At the very end of a 10 day meditation course, the noble silence is lifted, in which all of the participants may proceed to talk again.
Much can be seen in this environment, as everyone is socially fresh after having their executive controls lifted for so long. Everyone you approach is open with smiles and questions, and the usual modern social defenses and cautions are lifted.
When you get people in a group, something very interesting happens. When you're talking to a given person, you feel your volition radiating towards the person, and you see that volition mirrored back towards you. Project joy and gratitude for the person's existence, and you see that joy and gratitude coming back through in turn and washing over you, affecting your volition in turn.
This state, upon repetition, develops a memory, which is quicker to happen the next time.
Now take the people that you don't talk to as much, and you can literally see the connection cooling. Their attention drifts from you; they seek others. The connection is weak and it takes more energy to re-establish. Defenses come up over time, and they are less certain about your intentions.
Networks form around these connections, taking their shape from the energy differentials in the connections.
Take this principle to an extreme, and it is easy to see what types of behaviors will develop in a stressed and unstable social environment. Paranoia arises, as well as xenophobia, as each connection is uncertain, and only the closest, most trusted connections hold.
We form these networks on a mathematical, exponential basis, in accordance with the nature of the medium, and the way that energy moves through the medium, much like forming snowflakes.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Mind/Matter
Upon meditating, you are supposed to be able to feel the subtlest sensations on your body, which makes apparent the perpetual movement of energy, and you reach the revelation that all is constantly in flux, and the source of all suffering is attachment to some arbitrary constellation of affairs that is to arise out of that flux, but which is to pass away in time.
But during meditation, some conflicts arise. This metaphysics of course appeals to me personally, because it parallels what I intuitively find acceptable. But the claim of the teacher was that this practice is scientific and universal, that it is merely the practice of observing the body, and coming to conclusions based on those observations, much like conducting a scientific practice.
It is impossible to verify whether this is the case, because as the teacher delivers instruction, he also delivers the metaphysics with it, so that your mind is already primed to organize the phenomena into a given framework. Given what we know about how suggestible the mind is, and how powerful its capabilities of constructing reality are, it becomes very difficult to decouple the subjective observation from the arising phenomena.
How much of these sensations are really happening, and how much is the brain actually filling in with its own representations? Admittedly I haven't gotten to an advanced stage in meditation, and supposedly what eventually happens is a dissolution of this dichotomy, as you can clearly perceive the relationship between mind and matter at the latter stages. The very conception of a purely objective, empirical science is mistaken as well, as it is well understood that we have to organize everything within some sort of framework, and that the mere act of measuring and observing can have profound effects on the measured and observed.
But all of this reveals an important point about the mind/matter relationship. It may be difficult to parse out the finer mechanics of causation in meditative practice, but for many practitioners, simply believing and following through with that belief is enough to bring about some very powerful effects and experiences.
We often feel compelled to create this mind/matter division, as we often find that matter behaves in certain ways regardless of the mind's volition: fire burns whether we want it to or not. We get sick from viruses and bacteria regardless of our choice. But then a strong version of this interpretation obscures the importance of intentionality, of volition, in a wide variety of phenomena.
If the experience is coherent and makes consistent logical sense to the subject, something happens in which it generates a reality of its own. What does it mean to worship a god? What does it mean to have faith in a given metaphysics? To have faith in a Buddhist metaphysics brings about changes in the individual, and the collective that is comprised of those individuals, and the phenomena that manifest from this systematic implementation have a character of their own. It generates something which takes on life, which becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Consider a purely material religion. This society worships purely material goods, as well as the efficacy of the individual in procuring and embodying these goods. Given a collective accumulation of these beliefs, attitudes, and desires, a market is generated, an entity which takes on properties and behaviors of its own, and which is worshiped as a deity.
The deity itself goes through various periods of stability and instability. Within a span of a certain era, the deity bestows all manner of blessings on its worshipers, and then over time it becomes capricious and unstable, a state-change with roots that can be traced to the relationships between the individuals themselves, and their relationships to the ecology.
The matter itself responds. Granted there are forces outside of it which effect it beyond our control, but at the same time, our stress levels, our contentment, our happiness, our concerns, our volitions, all have effects of their own on our bodies. The more you dig into it, the more it becomes difficult to separate and parse.
As you meditate, as you develop a more intimate contact with your body, you find that there is something there. The abyss gazes back so to speak. You find mirrored in your body the contents of your mind, and mirrored within the contents of your mind are the contents of your body, and these respective contents interact as one, so long as you are paying attention, and acting that it is so.
But during meditation, some conflicts arise. This metaphysics of course appeals to me personally, because it parallels what I intuitively find acceptable. But the claim of the teacher was that this practice is scientific and universal, that it is merely the practice of observing the body, and coming to conclusions based on those observations, much like conducting a scientific practice.
It is impossible to verify whether this is the case, because as the teacher delivers instruction, he also delivers the metaphysics with it, so that your mind is already primed to organize the phenomena into a given framework. Given what we know about how suggestible the mind is, and how powerful its capabilities of constructing reality are, it becomes very difficult to decouple the subjective observation from the arising phenomena.
How much of these sensations are really happening, and how much is the brain actually filling in with its own representations? Admittedly I haven't gotten to an advanced stage in meditation, and supposedly what eventually happens is a dissolution of this dichotomy, as you can clearly perceive the relationship between mind and matter at the latter stages. The very conception of a purely objective, empirical science is mistaken as well, as it is well understood that we have to organize everything within some sort of framework, and that the mere act of measuring and observing can have profound effects on the measured and observed.
But all of this reveals an important point about the mind/matter relationship. It may be difficult to parse out the finer mechanics of causation in meditative practice, but for many practitioners, simply believing and following through with that belief is enough to bring about some very powerful effects and experiences.
We often feel compelled to create this mind/matter division, as we often find that matter behaves in certain ways regardless of the mind's volition: fire burns whether we want it to or not. We get sick from viruses and bacteria regardless of our choice. But then a strong version of this interpretation obscures the importance of intentionality, of volition, in a wide variety of phenomena.
If the experience is coherent and makes consistent logical sense to the subject, something happens in which it generates a reality of its own. What does it mean to worship a god? What does it mean to have faith in a given metaphysics? To have faith in a Buddhist metaphysics brings about changes in the individual, and the collective that is comprised of those individuals, and the phenomena that manifest from this systematic implementation have a character of their own. It generates something which takes on life, which becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Consider a purely material religion. This society worships purely material goods, as well as the efficacy of the individual in procuring and embodying these goods. Given a collective accumulation of these beliefs, attitudes, and desires, a market is generated, an entity which takes on properties and behaviors of its own, and which is worshiped as a deity.
The deity itself goes through various periods of stability and instability. Within a span of a certain era, the deity bestows all manner of blessings on its worshipers, and then over time it becomes capricious and unstable, a state-change with roots that can be traced to the relationships between the individuals themselves, and their relationships to the ecology.
The matter itself responds. Granted there are forces outside of it which effect it beyond our control, but at the same time, our stress levels, our contentment, our happiness, our concerns, our volitions, all have effects of their own on our bodies. The more you dig into it, the more it becomes difficult to separate and parse.
As you meditate, as you develop a more intimate contact with your body, you find that there is something there. The abyss gazes back so to speak. You find mirrored in your body the contents of your mind, and mirrored within the contents of your mind are the contents of your body, and these respective contents interact as one, so long as you are paying attention, and acting that it is so.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Circuits
The mind is as a circuit board. What with its resistances and flows, it produces ever more complex expressions out of the same current.
So to radically alter one's expressions, one must radically alter one's own current, or have it altered.
So to radically alter one's expressions, one must radically alter one's own current, or have it altered.
Conscientiousness
There was much conscientiousness in the meditation center. Everyone was keenly aware of the presence of others, forgetting themselves, and acting as such.
Funny, the deeper one dives inside one's own self, the more vibrantly one sees the contours of the outside.
Funny, the deeper one dives inside one's own self, the more vibrantly one sees the contours of the outside.
Paradoxes in Buddhism; Implications
If you poke and prod at Buddhist philosophy a bit, especially in terms of how it is actually practiced, you find all sorts of interesting things; you find out that it is alive.
Buddhist philosophy stresses that all life is constantly in flux, that everything is impermanent, and to cling to any given formation is vanity or folly and will only result in needless suffering.
Yet why doesn't Buddhism turn its own ideological knife onto itself? If all is impermanent, why wouldn't one commit suicide and liberate oneself from material suffering? Why wouldn't one liberate others by destroying them?
Because Buddhism is alive of course. One is to live, to attach to one's own formation by eating and drinking and carrying out daily practical actions, but to do this as gracefully and painlessly as possible. Contrary to letting others disintegrate around oneself, one looks after them more attentively than one looks after one's own self, with compassion.
One comes to terms with the existence of pain and suffering, yet one still avoids these things in its most extreme forms, as they are still useful means of communication for the body itself.
Curiously enough, when one comes to terms with death and disintegration, one lives ever more vigorously and gratefully, yet when one refuses death, life becomes ever more sterile and dead.
Similarly, Buddhist ideology condemns the formation of rigid identity, yet to live as a Buddhist in its purest form, one must cling rigorously to the identity of the disciplined meditator, on the noble path to enlightenment.
This is perhaps the most telling indicator of the gradual decay of the Buddhist philosophical system, though it has been carried on in various forms for the last 2500 years.
Consider the founding mythology of Buddhist thought, the account of Siddhartha, the original Buddha. You have a man that experiences this radiant, fresh form of enlightenment, and who feels compelled to share it. But as in the expenditure of great energy, which seeks to spread, it decays and weakens as it spreads.
The religion propagates itself through a vast unfolding mimetic process. Everyone sees this enlightened being's deeds, hears his words, experiences his radiance, and desires to become like him, following his teachings, retracing the steps he took to his own enlightenment. This works for some, but the original signal becomes more diluted over time. The original ecstatic vision generates rituals and practices to maintain this vision, but in many sects the focus drifts away from the original vision, and towards the rituals, practices, and idols themselves.
This intrinsic pressure to extend one's compassion and pursue truth becomes this guiding teleological image which exercises external control. This radiant cosmic vision fades, with a collective religious focus narrowing ever further to the self. One's efforts become ever more guided towards achieving enlightenment, towards doing the right things to achieve this state, to be like this saintly person and renowned like this saintly person.
But the saintly person is saintly out of necessity, because there is no other way. This person doesn't have to be told to be compassionate, or to think a certain way.
In the abstract, the heaven and hell concept makes its appearance: meditate and have compassion and do good works and one becomes enlightened, one reaches the heavenly end state. Fail to meditate and pursue egocentric sensual pleasures and focus on the self and suffer perpetually in a hell on earth.
Which is a pattern that can be found in the decay of all creative, energetic expenditures, effects which can be traced in changing ideologies, and ideologies' ever-shifting relation with practices. Buddhist philosophy has discovered that integration and disintegration are two sides of the same coin, and to favor either is to suffer greatly. But while the philosophy itself focuses on the arising and passing of individuals, it is clear that this same cyclic pattern occurs with greater bodies: with institutions, philosophies, religions, artistic and political movements, and even societies and civilizations.
2500 years ago, Buddhists faced similar, yet different problems. Today, there is less of an emphasis on the self - though to initiate change one certainly starts with the self - and more an emphasis on a systematic existential crisis, which concerns the nature of entire societies and ecosystems. Of course, to address such issues, we can draw from many ideologies and disciplines across time.
As even a very old religious ideology such as Buddhism still manages to produce artifacts and tools, signs which point the way, and mechanisms which help one get there. A hammer may be invented in an ancient society for some specific purpose, but the form and concept of the hammer can be passed for thousands of years, regardless of whether the cultural milieu within which the hammer was formed can be passed on as a holistic blueprint for living. The hammer will be made from different materials, and be used for different tasks, but its essence remains as a tool.
Vipassana meditation is a great tool that was produced by a great ideology, and a vast expenditure of energy. Its tool-set continues on as an echo, its waves weakened, but which still carry a signal, a means to organize information and conduct a practice to carry out one's own affairs in one's own time. There are many other tools like this, which is just as well, as there is much work to do.
Buddhist philosophy stresses that all life is constantly in flux, that everything is impermanent, and to cling to any given formation is vanity or folly and will only result in needless suffering.
Yet why doesn't Buddhism turn its own ideological knife onto itself? If all is impermanent, why wouldn't one commit suicide and liberate oneself from material suffering? Why wouldn't one liberate others by destroying them?
Because Buddhism is alive of course. One is to live, to attach to one's own formation by eating and drinking and carrying out daily practical actions, but to do this as gracefully and painlessly as possible. Contrary to letting others disintegrate around oneself, one looks after them more attentively than one looks after one's own self, with compassion.
One comes to terms with the existence of pain and suffering, yet one still avoids these things in its most extreme forms, as they are still useful means of communication for the body itself.
Curiously enough, when one comes to terms with death and disintegration, one lives ever more vigorously and gratefully, yet when one refuses death, life becomes ever more sterile and dead.
Similarly, Buddhist ideology condemns the formation of rigid identity, yet to live as a Buddhist in its purest form, one must cling rigorously to the identity of the disciplined meditator, on the noble path to enlightenment.
This is perhaps the most telling indicator of the gradual decay of the Buddhist philosophical system, though it has been carried on in various forms for the last 2500 years.
Consider the founding mythology of Buddhist thought, the account of Siddhartha, the original Buddha. You have a man that experiences this radiant, fresh form of enlightenment, and who feels compelled to share it. But as in the expenditure of great energy, which seeks to spread, it decays and weakens as it spreads.
The religion propagates itself through a vast unfolding mimetic process. Everyone sees this enlightened being's deeds, hears his words, experiences his radiance, and desires to become like him, following his teachings, retracing the steps he took to his own enlightenment. This works for some, but the original signal becomes more diluted over time. The original ecstatic vision generates rituals and practices to maintain this vision, but in many sects the focus drifts away from the original vision, and towards the rituals, practices, and idols themselves.
This intrinsic pressure to extend one's compassion and pursue truth becomes this guiding teleological image which exercises external control. This radiant cosmic vision fades, with a collective religious focus narrowing ever further to the self. One's efforts become ever more guided towards achieving enlightenment, towards doing the right things to achieve this state, to be like this saintly person and renowned like this saintly person.
But the saintly person is saintly out of necessity, because there is no other way. This person doesn't have to be told to be compassionate, or to think a certain way.
In the abstract, the heaven and hell concept makes its appearance: meditate and have compassion and do good works and one becomes enlightened, one reaches the heavenly end state. Fail to meditate and pursue egocentric sensual pleasures and focus on the self and suffer perpetually in a hell on earth.
Which is a pattern that can be found in the decay of all creative, energetic expenditures, effects which can be traced in changing ideologies, and ideologies' ever-shifting relation with practices. Buddhist philosophy has discovered that integration and disintegration are two sides of the same coin, and to favor either is to suffer greatly. But while the philosophy itself focuses on the arising and passing of individuals, it is clear that this same cyclic pattern occurs with greater bodies: with institutions, philosophies, religions, artistic and political movements, and even societies and civilizations.
2500 years ago, Buddhists faced similar, yet different problems. Today, there is less of an emphasis on the self - though to initiate change one certainly starts with the self - and more an emphasis on a systematic existential crisis, which concerns the nature of entire societies and ecosystems. Of course, to address such issues, we can draw from many ideologies and disciplines across time.
As even a very old religious ideology such as Buddhism still manages to produce artifacts and tools, signs which point the way, and mechanisms which help one get there. A hammer may be invented in an ancient society for some specific purpose, but the form and concept of the hammer can be passed for thousands of years, regardless of whether the cultural milieu within which the hammer was formed can be passed on as a holistic blueprint for living. The hammer will be made from different materials, and be used for different tasks, but its essence remains as a tool.
Vipassana meditation is a great tool that was produced by a great ideology, and a vast expenditure of energy. Its tool-set continues on as an echo, its waves weakened, but which still carry a signal, a means to organize information and conduct a practice to carry out one's own affairs in one's own time. There are many other tools like this, which is just as well, as there is much work to do.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
On Meditation
In the Western world, meditation is conceived as bringing about a peaceful, tranquil state that you sort of drift off into upon sitting down, which unleashes this lovely cloud of peace that dissolves stress and makes one fresh, which is only a sliver of the true practice. This is just as well, as the West has largely subsumed various Eastern spiritual practices like meditation to serve as a kind of narcotic - as Zizek has expertly noted - to extract the narcotising effects from the entire body of practice and then toss the rest of the body away, just as one derives heroin from poppies. This narcotic, along with many others, spiritual and chemical, is essential to keep running an essentially insane state of affairs that drives its inhabitants to utter spiritual desolation and existential terror.
To be fair, this is how a society functions: bound by some unifying ideology, it takes in ideologies and practices from the outside and converts them into a projection of its own ideological form which it can then incorporate into its belief systems and practices.
As a side note, the East is now largely administrated through the dictates of global capital, but I'm using "East" and "West" in this case for expediency, and "the West" has become colloquially known as the central locus of empire, the fountainhead of the concentration of material power, the modern Babylon.
Moving on, meditation is in fact very peaceful and bestows its pupils with a lasting and even-ended serenity that no tranquillizer or narcotic can achieve. But at the same time, meditation is quite violent as a practice within Western culture, and it takes a little unpacking to understand this.
To reach a true state of tranquillity and contentment means to adopt a lifestyle fundamentally antagonistic to the Western life in the belly of capital. It means to renounce not just psychological and physical cravings - an act that would collapse the global economy once and for all - but to overcome the aversion to death itself, which would not just bankrupt the healthcare and medical sciences industries, but dissolve the police state and the military as well. This means adopting a living ethos whose axiomatic precepts would generate a society that would have to blow apart the capitalistic society it grew inside.
A serious meditation discipline like Vipassana seeks to break down this systematized pathway of pleasure craving and pain aversion, much like most other types of spiritual practices which have emerged from the ruins of a collapsing material empire.
It does this by simulating a confrontation with the forces of destruction. One is to sit for an entire hour, sitting completely straight, without moving. To a Western subject, the agony starts almost immediately, yet one cannot move. The body experiences excruciating pain all over, but instead of escaping it, it must be met head on and surrendered to. This process changes one's perceptions of and attitudes towards pain.
The state one achieves after this process mirrors what one can find in certain trauma survivors or people who have hit some sort of rock bottom. One reaches a point in the traumatic event in which the forces of destruction cannot be escaped, and one comes to terms with them. The process continues in a macro sense as empire undergoes its slow disintegration: the subject comes out of its dream state, renouncing the pleasure/pain dichotomy.
A practice of peace, contentment, contemplation, and compassion takes on this violent character through dialectic contact of the Western subject. The Western industrial sensibility is administrated with great violence: one is beat about the head with it through a constant assault of advertising. One must consume and produce or else one is functionally useless and left to starve, or be absorbed into the incarceration complex, or be destroyed.
This generates a rational constellation of controls which is constantly administrating and directing the emotional drives, so as to integrate the subject into the greater system with a tolerable amount of social and political harmony. It is this constellation of controls that meditation seeks to destroy and dissolve.
This is not to say meditation is anti-rational. On the contrary, the act of practicing meditation takes rational controls. It takes a measured and disciplined direction of the lower brain. A better way to conceive of it is as a way to reboot the system, to wipe away the messy tangle of heuristics, habits, and thought-patterns which accompany the modern subject, so as to commune with the lower processes and generate a new, functional rational system.
The process lays bare the stark dysfunction of the postmodern mind; one's attention flits from one stimuli to the next, often without processing or resolving the last. One resides in a cognitive state of near schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guattari described. One's attention exists much as a frayed end of rope, the detached strands angling off into space, out of communication with each other. The task is to mend these splits and reconstitute the mind.
All of this is why meditation in its most serious forms is largely practiced in monasteries, sanctuaries which are safely removed from the material-economic mainline.
To learn a serious technique such as Vipassana, one has to learn it in a highly regimented and controlled environment, which is intended to address the effects of living in a highly regimented and controlled society, even as the ideological structure housing meditation practice stresses radical impermanence, change, and encourages an impetus to let life proceed as it will and to let things happen.
Impermanence is the key word. Modern society perceives pain and pleasure in a wholly unique way, a perception which is tied to a greater ideological apparatus and sensibility. In this society, both in its ideology and daily life, death is conceived as this odious specter that man can overcome. We are predisposed to treat disintegration as some cruel abnormality which we must fight against with all of our will, and so as a society we go about generating institutions and cultural artifacts which insist they should last indefinitely.
Man - there's a good reason for saying "man" - stands apart from this cyclic pattern of birth, death, and rebirth. Man alone is divine, and will transcend this cycle. And so we see individuals fighting tooth and nail to maintain a youthful integrity of their bodies and mind, even as they come apart. We see empires committing vast atrocities to curtail the natural ebb and flow of power, to concentrate power among their members, to preserve their access to objects of pleasure indefinitely, and shield themselves from objects of pain indefinitely.
It is power that makes this sensibility particularly explosive. Concentrated material power creates a highway in which objects of pleasure, whether physical or psychological, flow in greater concentration towards the powerful, and objects of pain flow towards the powerless, resulting in a profound state of social polarization. This creates multiple centers of polarization, multiple empires of the powerful seeking immortality, which, upon coming up against resource limits and the reality of a finite planet, results in a violent clash, as no two empires can co-exist with the logic of indefinite accumulation and concentration.
Meditation and other spiritual practices then are part of a natural response to this dangerous state of attachment. They are the breaking away of individuals and eventually masses from this calcified structure.
The Vipassana teachers claimed that meditation was not necessarily a process of self-mortification, but in a way it is. One voluntarily undergoes pain and deprivation to further extinguish this ego which has raged out of control.
This process also reveals the dialectical nature of pain. If one's mind fears and loathes pain as some abnormality, it actually amplifies the pain itself. One looks upon the pain and remarks, good god! One becomes alarmed, and the pain grows in power and importance, and one looks upon this growing power and remarks, good god! And the pain grows in turn.
But if one looks upon the pain as yet another natural phenomena, to arise and then pass away after some time, the pain is diffused. The conversation is not entertained. The pain goes away.
This does not account for extreme pain, as pain still is the body attempting to communicate. To account for this requires an examination of the paradoxes which face Buddhism, which I will get to next.
To be fair, this is how a society functions: bound by some unifying ideology, it takes in ideologies and practices from the outside and converts them into a projection of its own ideological form which it can then incorporate into its belief systems and practices.
As a side note, the East is now largely administrated through the dictates of global capital, but I'm using "East" and "West" in this case for expediency, and "the West" has become colloquially known as the central locus of empire, the fountainhead of the concentration of material power, the modern Babylon.
Moving on, meditation is in fact very peaceful and bestows its pupils with a lasting and even-ended serenity that no tranquillizer or narcotic can achieve. But at the same time, meditation is quite violent as a practice within Western culture, and it takes a little unpacking to understand this.
To reach a true state of tranquillity and contentment means to adopt a lifestyle fundamentally antagonistic to the Western life in the belly of capital. It means to renounce not just psychological and physical cravings - an act that would collapse the global economy once and for all - but to overcome the aversion to death itself, which would not just bankrupt the healthcare and medical sciences industries, but dissolve the police state and the military as well. This means adopting a living ethos whose axiomatic precepts would generate a society that would have to blow apart the capitalistic society it grew inside.
A serious meditation discipline like Vipassana seeks to break down this systematized pathway of pleasure craving and pain aversion, much like most other types of spiritual practices which have emerged from the ruins of a collapsing material empire.
It does this by simulating a confrontation with the forces of destruction. One is to sit for an entire hour, sitting completely straight, without moving. To a Western subject, the agony starts almost immediately, yet one cannot move. The body experiences excruciating pain all over, but instead of escaping it, it must be met head on and surrendered to. This process changes one's perceptions of and attitudes towards pain.
The state one achieves after this process mirrors what one can find in certain trauma survivors or people who have hit some sort of rock bottom. One reaches a point in the traumatic event in which the forces of destruction cannot be escaped, and one comes to terms with them. The process continues in a macro sense as empire undergoes its slow disintegration: the subject comes out of its dream state, renouncing the pleasure/pain dichotomy.
A practice of peace, contentment, contemplation, and compassion takes on this violent character through dialectic contact of the Western subject. The Western industrial sensibility is administrated with great violence: one is beat about the head with it through a constant assault of advertising. One must consume and produce or else one is functionally useless and left to starve, or be absorbed into the incarceration complex, or be destroyed.
This generates a rational constellation of controls which is constantly administrating and directing the emotional drives, so as to integrate the subject into the greater system with a tolerable amount of social and political harmony. It is this constellation of controls that meditation seeks to destroy and dissolve.
This is not to say meditation is anti-rational. On the contrary, the act of practicing meditation takes rational controls. It takes a measured and disciplined direction of the lower brain. A better way to conceive of it is as a way to reboot the system, to wipe away the messy tangle of heuristics, habits, and thought-patterns which accompany the modern subject, so as to commune with the lower processes and generate a new, functional rational system.
The process lays bare the stark dysfunction of the postmodern mind; one's attention flits from one stimuli to the next, often without processing or resolving the last. One resides in a cognitive state of near schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guattari described. One's attention exists much as a frayed end of rope, the detached strands angling off into space, out of communication with each other. The task is to mend these splits and reconstitute the mind.
All of this is why meditation in its most serious forms is largely practiced in monasteries, sanctuaries which are safely removed from the material-economic mainline.
To learn a serious technique such as Vipassana, one has to learn it in a highly regimented and controlled environment, which is intended to address the effects of living in a highly regimented and controlled society, even as the ideological structure housing meditation practice stresses radical impermanence, change, and encourages an impetus to let life proceed as it will and to let things happen.
Impermanence is the key word. Modern society perceives pain and pleasure in a wholly unique way, a perception which is tied to a greater ideological apparatus and sensibility. In this society, both in its ideology and daily life, death is conceived as this odious specter that man can overcome. We are predisposed to treat disintegration as some cruel abnormality which we must fight against with all of our will, and so as a society we go about generating institutions and cultural artifacts which insist they should last indefinitely.
Man - there's a good reason for saying "man" - stands apart from this cyclic pattern of birth, death, and rebirth. Man alone is divine, and will transcend this cycle. And so we see individuals fighting tooth and nail to maintain a youthful integrity of their bodies and mind, even as they come apart. We see empires committing vast atrocities to curtail the natural ebb and flow of power, to concentrate power among their members, to preserve their access to objects of pleasure indefinitely, and shield themselves from objects of pain indefinitely.
It is power that makes this sensibility particularly explosive. Concentrated material power creates a highway in which objects of pleasure, whether physical or psychological, flow in greater concentration towards the powerful, and objects of pain flow towards the powerless, resulting in a profound state of social polarization. This creates multiple centers of polarization, multiple empires of the powerful seeking immortality, which, upon coming up against resource limits and the reality of a finite planet, results in a violent clash, as no two empires can co-exist with the logic of indefinite accumulation and concentration.
Meditation and other spiritual practices then are part of a natural response to this dangerous state of attachment. They are the breaking away of individuals and eventually masses from this calcified structure.
The Vipassana teachers claimed that meditation was not necessarily a process of self-mortification, but in a way it is. One voluntarily undergoes pain and deprivation to further extinguish this ego which has raged out of control.
This process also reveals the dialectical nature of pain. If one's mind fears and loathes pain as some abnormality, it actually amplifies the pain itself. One looks upon the pain and remarks, good god! One becomes alarmed, and the pain grows in power and importance, and one looks upon this growing power and remarks, good god! And the pain grows in turn.
But if one looks upon the pain as yet another natural phenomena, to arise and then pass away after some time, the pain is diffused. The conversation is not entertained. The pain goes away.
This does not account for extreme pain, as pain still is the body attempting to communicate. To account for this requires an examination of the paradoxes which face Buddhism, which I will get to next.
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Kung Fu
Yet in the same building as the digital rainforest, in the next room over, an impromptu martial arts session begins, wherein we carry on the task of regaining knowledge and sensation of the body itself, momentarily shedding higher level thought processes, giving into intuitive muscle movements and immediacy in consciousness.
All this through a discipline called Wing Chun, a distillation of numerous martial arts schools, which, curiously, according to the teacher, is currently being passed on in a decentralized manner from student to student, which is rationalized by the explanation that it will be easier to teach in an unstable time, through crises, which is a phenomenon we are beginning to see with more frequency.
Many types of martial arts practices involve repetitive, mechanical movements that acquaint one with the body. A carefully articulated, measured movement of a limb, or the slow conscious positioning of the body brings attention to the sensations of individual muscles, and the way in which they relate to each other, and the body's overall structure. This is in addition to the general strengthening of the muscle groups and an improvement of balance among other things.
Wing Chun in particular seeks to develop body awareness and the consciousness of structure and the way in which the various parts of the body relate to each other, which positions achieve power, how to distribute weight and make one's muscle groups cooperate, and etc.
This is a valuable process, as living in a complex society and a world of abstraction means that lower level processes, the integrity of the body itself, becomes ignored by the brain's heuristic systems, becoming automated in the background of the subconscious itself and through muscle memory. One can only cast one's attention on so much, so that basic bodily movements and postures, deemed successful and not requiring further conscious attention by the heuristic hierarchy, is left to its own reflexive operation.
An industrial, information society is built on this preliminary success of the basic operation of the human body, but then as the superstructures built on this successful framework grow and evolve, they produce numerous effects of their own that wash back and affect the basic operation of the body itself.
Sedentary lifestyles that are based on office tasks, mechanical transportation, and media consumption wreak absolute havoc on the body. I've become much more active in the past year, but I carry over many of the habits and methods of functioning from a sedentary lifestyle. I slouch and sit for periods of time, arc my neck and back looking at screens, fail to keep various muscle groups worked, and etc. And it is certainly catching up with me.
One's structural modes of dysfunction put great stress on the numerous components of the body, and the components under the greatest stress begin to act up, and one is tasked with restoring communication between the various components, so that they work together best in the structure they exist in. Normally one tackles various bodily ailments in a piecemeal manner: take this supplement, take this medication, exercise this component, have this component massaged or corrected, and etc. Sometimes it works, but if one's structural manners of functioning are not conducive to body integrity, one has to rethink those manners of functioning, or piecemeal solutions will only be temporary.
Meditation seeks to accomplish the same for one's mental processes. The vast stimulation from endless social, fictional, and theoretical abstractions is far beyond what the brain's rational (and pre-rational) systems were meant to handle, so it takes a resetting and redirecting of those systems to get the rational and pre-rational working together again.
You begin to realize it takes everything to do one of the things right. To meditate for long periods of time, it is necessary to strengthen one's back and improve one's posture, or else fatigue sets in and muscle pain is too much of a distraction. This strengthening, this restoration of communication with one's conscious mind and the movements and behaviors of one's body, is achieved with various martial arts and disciplines like yoga.
This then is closer to the meaning of kung fu.
Kung Fu is just one of the methods for accomplishing these re-orienations. There are many out there. Whatever is readily within grasp, and is appealing to the individual, seems to suffice.
All this through a discipline called Wing Chun, a distillation of numerous martial arts schools, which, curiously, according to the teacher, is currently being passed on in a decentralized manner from student to student, which is rationalized by the explanation that it will be easier to teach in an unstable time, through crises, which is a phenomenon we are beginning to see with more frequency.
Many types of martial arts practices involve repetitive, mechanical movements that acquaint one with the body. A carefully articulated, measured movement of a limb, or the slow conscious positioning of the body brings attention to the sensations of individual muscles, and the way in which they relate to each other, and the body's overall structure. This is in addition to the general strengthening of the muscle groups and an improvement of balance among other things.
Wing Chun in particular seeks to develop body awareness and the consciousness of structure and the way in which the various parts of the body relate to each other, which positions achieve power, how to distribute weight and make one's muscle groups cooperate, and etc.
This is a valuable process, as living in a complex society and a world of abstraction means that lower level processes, the integrity of the body itself, becomes ignored by the brain's heuristic systems, becoming automated in the background of the subconscious itself and through muscle memory. One can only cast one's attention on so much, so that basic bodily movements and postures, deemed successful and not requiring further conscious attention by the heuristic hierarchy, is left to its own reflexive operation.
An industrial, information society is built on this preliminary success of the basic operation of the human body, but then as the superstructures built on this successful framework grow and evolve, they produce numerous effects of their own that wash back and affect the basic operation of the body itself.
Sedentary lifestyles that are based on office tasks, mechanical transportation, and media consumption wreak absolute havoc on the body. I've become much more active in the past year, but I carry over many of the habits and methods of functioning from a sedentary lifestyle. I slouch and sit for periods of time, arc my neck and back looking at screens, fail to keep various muscle groups worked, and etc. And it is certainly catching up with me.
One's structural modes of dysfunction put great stress on the numerous components of the body, and the components under the greatest stress begin to act up, and one is tasked with restoring communication between the various components, so that they work together best in the structure they exist in. Normally one tackles various bodily ailments in a piecemeal manner: take this supplement, take this medication, exercise this component, have this component massaged or corrected, and etc. Sometimes it works, but if one's structural manners of functioning are not conducive to body integrity, one has to rethink those manners of functioning, or piecemeal solutions will only be temporary.
Meditation seeks to accomplish the same for one's mental processes. The vast stimulation from endless social, fictional, and theoretical abstractions is far beyond what the brain's rational (and pre-rational) systems were meant to handle, so it takes a resetting and redirecting of those systems to get the rational and pre-rational working together again.
You begin to realize it takes everything to do one of the things right. To meditate for long periods of time, it is necessary to strengthen one's back and improve one's posture, or else fatigue sets in and muscle pain is too much of a distraction. This strengthening, this restoration of communication with one's conscious mind and the movements and behaviors of one's body, is achieved with various martial arts and disciplines like yoga.
This then is closer to the meaning of kung fu.
Kung Fu is just one of the methods for accomplishing these re-orienations. There are many out there. Whatever is readily within grasp, and is appealing to the individual, seems to suffice.
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