The Mindful Geek

I know of Michael Taft as the canny editor who helped put together Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and as the host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.  I've gotten lots out of both of those, so when I happened to see that he was giving away a book of his own on his website, I figured there wasn't much to lose.  Taft is a long-time student of Young's, so a lot of what's in The Mindful Geek is just a beginner level introduction to his teacher's more complete system.  Nevertheless, it might be an even better starting place for the absolute beginner meditator.  

True to its title, the book is aimed at the geeky tech types who Taft often teaches in CA.  It contains not the least hint of the religious aspect of meditation.  It relies heavily on selling meditation as a general form of self-improvement whose effectiveness is increasingly documented scientifically.  Given my sympathy for Thompson's critique Buddhist modernism, you might have imagined that this way of looking at things would not appeal to me.  But Taft actually doesn't fall quite into the trap Thompson describes.  Perhaps, as his interview of Thompson suggests, because he is aware of it.

Yes, he does spend some time referencing the scientific research on meditation's physiological and psychological effects that was covered more extensively in Altered Traits.  This is fine though as far as it goes -- that is insofar as we understand that this research is still pretty preliminary.  I read through these parts fairly quickly, simply noting that the book is also intended to convince busy tech bros to give meditation a try.  In other words, since I already meditate, I was not the target audience for these discussions.   Mostly one can just ignore them, or read them at the level of the latest pop science regarding what supplements one should be taking.  Personally I use the ginger-psilocybin-lovingkindness stack to get shredded.

More crucially though, Taft evades the Buddhist modernist problem because he doesn't try to tell us that meditation shows us, "how things really are".  The book carries little religious or philosophical baggage.  It's a purely practical self help book.  Everything is phrased as, "try this and see if it makes your everyday life any better".  While this is a pretty limiting way of looking at Buddhism as a whole, and doesn't address a lot of the questions that come up once you've been meditating for a while, I actually think it's a great way to get started.  Since the book does not profess to be anything other than an introduction, it mostly stops short of where the problems with Buddhist modernism begin.  And as far as introductions go, I thought it was quite concise and useful.  Taft picks out just a few of Shinzen's techniques, teaches us how to do them, and tells us what we might hope to gain from these practices.  He even includes 10 and 30 minute guided meditations that cover these on his website.  I particularly liked the way he explained the practice of investigating subtle bodily emotions by relating them to body language and our ability to recognize emotions in another person.  

So while I don't think the book advanced my understanding a ton, I would still recommend it as a starting point for someone who fits its target -- a science minded religious skeptic who wonders what all the hoo-haa with meditation is about.  You can cut through most of the clutter surrounding the question for these folks by simply saying, "just try it".  You don't need to believe anything or change any of your opinions to try it.  Just do X and see what you think.

Why I am Not a Buddhist

Evan Thompson's new little book makes a wonderful foil to all the reading I've been doing lately about Buddhism.  It gives clear voice to a number of the problems and reservations I've encountered for myself in studying meditation and its accompanying theory.  However, unlike the Bertrand Russell essay from which the title derives, Thompson is quite sympathetic to Buddishm.  He himself has significant meditative experience and a deep knowledge of Buddhist history and philosophy (studying this is his profession after all).  In his introduction, you almost get the sense that he would like to feel comfortable calling himself a Buddhist, but for reasons of intellectual honesty and precision just can't get there.  Perhaps surprisingly, the problem for him lies less in the fact that he doesn't believe in the classic metaphysical concepts we associate with Buddhism -- karma, rebirth, enlightenment -- than in the fact that he doesn't believe in the philosophical underpinnings of the peculiar form of "Buddhist Modernism" that has arisen in the past century of East-West interaction.  These underpinnings turn out to be, essentially, scientific materialism.  So the subtitle of the book could almost have been "Why I am also not a Scientist". 

Consider his own summary of the book:

My argument has been that Buddhist modernism distorts both the significance of the Buddhist tradition and the relationship between religion and science.  Buddhism gained entry to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century by being presented as a religion uniquely compatible with modern science.  Now, in the twenty-first century, Buddhist modernist discourse is at its height.  But this discourse is untenable, as we've seen.  It's core tenets -- that Buddhism is a "mind science"; that there is no self; that mindfulness is an inward awareness of one's own private mental theater; that neuroscience establishes the value of mindfulness practice; that enlightenment is a nonconceptual experience outside language, culture, and tradition; and that enlightenment is or can be correlated with a brain state -- are philosophically and scientifically indefensible.

 

None of these points is really a critique of traditional Buddhist beliefs.  They all center on the blending of Buddhism and science that has become the default public face of a newly missionary Buddhism as it expands around the globe.  Thompson's point is not the simple political one that the West has culturally appropriated traditional Buddhism.  His first chapter -- "The Myth of Buddhist Exceptionalism" -- outlines a fascinating history of Buddhism, starting with its Indian philosophic backdrop, and explores the very real ways in which it evolved though its encounter with Western ideas.  The punchline though is that most of what we today call "mindfulness" was invented in Burma in the past 100 years.  Buddhist modernism is not a European or American invention; it's an import.  His point is not to complain about modern "inauthenticity" but to combat the conflation of religion and science that this globalization of Buddhism has produced.  

In addition to that historical chapter, the book has: a wonderful rebuttal to Robert Wright's misguided and forgettable Why Buddhism is True; a great discussion of various concepts of the self in both Buddhism and cognitive science that debunks "the self is an illusion" idea as an oversimplification; a compelling critique of the idea that meditation is a purely empirical "first-person science"; and an extended discussion of the philosophic problems you run into if you try to think of enlightenment as simultaneously some particular state of the brain and some transcendent means of being-in-the-world.  

I did find the final chapter of the book a little bit weak or insipid.  Thompson tries to move beyond critiquing the scientific and universalist tendency implicit in Buddhist modernism, and to offer a positive vision of what Buddhism actually can teach us.  His answer to this is actually fairly simple.

In my view, the significance of the Buddhist intellectual tradition for the modern world is that it offers a radical critique of our narcissistic preoccupation with the self and our overconfident belief that science tells us how the world really is in itself apart from how we're able to measure and act upon it.

I think this is a fine statement of what Buddhism offers.  But  it comes wrapped up in a long discussion of a philosophical vision he calls (following Kwame Anthony Appiah and others) "cosmopolitanism".  Maybe he didn't do the theory justice, but it sounded like a whole lot of why can't we all just get along, kumbaya, beautiful soul stuff.  Sure, it would be great if we all learned from different traditions and maintained an open and non-dogmatic mind about what the ultimate truth might look like.  We could see Buddhism as contributing some interesting ideas, science contributing others, with philosophy and art and other religions throwing things into the mix as well.  And when I'm sitting in my armchair I may even be able to juggle all these perspectives and look at the world through many eyes.  In fact, as a confirmed dilettante, I feel like I specialize in this sort of juggling.  I think it's an inspiring vision as far as it goes and we could really use more of this sort of "paradigmatic agnosticism".    But of course, we also have to act in the world.  And no amount of open and honest conversation is going to put to rest all the questions that arise when that action has to be based on your paradigm or my paradigm.  A dialog of differences without a clear hierarchy is a good first step, but you will not remove questions of power with nothing more than good intentions.