How Minds Change

Ever since I listened to Michael Taft interview David McRaney on his Deconstructing Yourself podcast, I've been eagerly anticipating his new book subtitled "The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion".  Unfortunately, I think coming to McRaney's book via this route may have given me an exaggerated expectation of its profundity that it wasn't able to live up to.  At its deepest level -- the level I took it at in the context of meditation -- McRaney's question is how we form our beliefs about the world, and thus how those beliefs might change.  While it was an interesting read, the book stops far short of posing this question in a philosophical way.  Instead, McRaney aims at something much more mundane, captured in the fact that it's nominated for a prize in the marketing/communications&sales/influence category of business books.  Essentially, it's about how to get someone to agree with you.  Yes, reading between the lines, you can see that some of what McRaney has to say is relevant to questioning ones own beliefs.  But the vast majority of examples and explanations throughout the book rely on the premise that you are clearly right and they are obviously wrong.  Because these wrong folks are unable to see the error of their ways, you have to use the counter-intuitive persuasive techniques that McRaney describes to get them to see the light.  Just which techniques these are, and the science behind why they work, are the main meat of the book.  So the deeper question of how we know what's 'right' basically just gets bracketed.

It's not entirely fair though, to judge a book by what it's not.  So let me provide a quick summary of what it actually is.  Because it actually lays out quite an interesting story.  McRaney opens by asking how the notorious 9/11 conspiracy theorist Charlie Veitch could ever have changed his mind and publicly recanted his belief that the attacks were an inside job.  How did he come to hold these beliefs despite all sorts of seemingly compelling arguments to the contrary, and then why did he suddenly change them after many years?  He proceeds to organize most of the rest of the book as the story of his own quest to understand how this reversal was possible. 

His first stop is to speak with David Fleischer about the power of "deep canvassing" to shift people's opinion on the issue of gay rights.  The deep canvassers approach is to go door-to-door engaging people in open conversations about their attitudes regarding gay people.  They discover that people form these attitudes based on all sorts of personal experiences they've had or communities they've been a part of and almost never on any sort of facts.  As a result, bombarding them with facts or browbeating them with what you think they should believe does nothing to change their attitude.  Instead, any potential change is catalysed mainly by listening to folks talk about the stories and emotions they have surrounding these issues.  Not only does this openness make them feel less attacked, but as they explain themselves they are forced to reflect on their own beliefs and experiences in a new way.  

McRaney then spends some time discussing scientific studies proving the efficacy of deep canvassing, and delving into others that propose a model of how it works.  Unfortunately, his explanations of the science here don't go very deep.  We hear a little about "elaboration" and "perspective taking" and "SURFPAD".  But McRaney is writing a marketing/communications&sales/influence book here, so we basically just learn that the brain doesn't work as a bottom-up information processing machine, but is in fact largely a top-down information guessing machine whose guesses are based on our past experiences.  The predictive processing model of the brain is a profound idea with far out consequences and implications, but McRaney only pursues it to the level of optical illusions like the dress.  His take away is just that when the correct interpretation of the world is uncertain, we can be wrong about something yet still feel a complete confidence that our perception is accurate.  In this case, it becomes impossible to change a mind with 'the facts' because those facts are too ambiguous to be interpreted without some priors.  The only way we can overcome this phenomenon is to force people to articulate their priors and see that they could well differ from other folks'.  

Naturally then, McRaney's next question is: what types of situations force us to take a step back and call into question the mental model we use to make sense of the world around us?  The answer to this is fairly obvious: when our model fails.  We only think when we are forced to.  McRaney references but doesn't really flesh out two models of how these paradigm shifts can take place. -- Kuhn's scientific revolution, and Piaget's shift from assimilation to accommodation.  For him, the point of both of these is that when a few things don't fit into our model of the world or we make a few mistakes based on it, we don't tend to change anything about how we think.  It's only past a certain critical level of cognitive dissonance that we consider the hard work of examining our views. 

However, because the subjects in Kuhn's and Piaget's theories (scientists and children, respectively) are presumed to be open to revising their model should its failures become increasingly apparent, this relatively simple explanation of paradigm shift is not going to explain why someone like Charlie Veitch changed his mind.  After all, like all conspiracy theorists, Veitch had spent years examining the exact same facts that lead the rest of us to conclude that, obviously, 9/11 was a terrorist attack.  Instead of being convinced that his theory needed updating, Veitch became convinced that his conspiracy theory was right, and that what counted as a 'fact' was the problem.  There's more than one way to reduce cognitive dissonance.  So the question now becomes: what situations can induce this cognitive dissonance and cause someone to reevaluate their priors when they deliberately surround themselves by forces that prevent them from ever encountering a fact that causes their model to fail?  In other words, how could someone like, say, a sheltered and indoctrinated member of a cult, ever change their mind?

To pursue this next thread, McRaney talk to several people who left the Westboro baptist church, a famously anti-gay religious cult.  He discovers their stories share a key feature.  None of these people left the cult because they objected to its views of gay people.  They all left because, one the one hand, the politics of the institution resulted in other members treating them inhumanely, and on the other, they happened into interactions with humane and sympathetic outsiders.  It was only after they left the cult for these personal or social reasons that they began to reevaluate, and then abandon, their prior convictions about gay people.  In short, we mostly believe what those close to us believe, and we don't bother much about whether these beliefs are based on facts so long as we feel taken care of by our tribe.  

This turns out to be the key to Charlie Veitch's conversion.  It happens that just before recanting his 9/11 theory, he had gotten involved with a hippy new age group who prized a free spirited inquiry into 'the truth'.  In fact, he had even begun dating someone he met in this group.  So it was not so much the facts that finally forced him to chang his model, but the availability of a new model that corresponded to a new group perspective.  Before that point, changing his mind would have meant abandoning his role as a prominent member of the 9/11 conspiracy theory community and striking out into the social wilderness.  Afterwards, changing his mind just amounted to shifting from one group to a different, more welcoming, one.  The tipping point is not created by an accumulation of facts that contradict a model, but by the contrast between the ways we feel in two different groups.  In fact, given this conclusion, is seems inaccurate to suggest that there has been any mental accommodation analogous to Piaget's theory.  Nor has Kuhn's revolution based on new facts happened in any individual's head.  The truth here is closer to Max Plank's notion that "science advances one funeral at a time".  One group theory has been replaced by another.  The truth is social.

Okay, but then how do groups come to believe what they believe?  Well, they argue about it.  And the reasons people use in these arguments are not designed for an individual to get at the truth, but to convince a skeptical group.  McRaney paints a picture of reasoning, based on the work of Mercier and Sperber, as a mechanism that only makes sense at the group level because it is ultimately more a mechanism of producing consensus than logically and empirically evaluating facts.  This accounts for the fact that we reason much better in a group setting than by ourselves.  As a faculty, reason is geared toward forcefully putting forward our own biased perspective while simultaneously challenging someone else's bias.  This picture also accounts for the many demonstrated failures of individual reasoning that have become so familiar from the work of Kahneman and other behavioral economists.  Our brains actually outsource the time consuming process of considering counterexamples and carefully weighing various perspectives to the group interaction.   In short, the tool of rationality wasn't designed with any notion of 'truth' in mind, but simply with the goal of holding a group together in performing some action that does not kill everyone.  You would think that after this revelation McRaney would need to overhaul his own theory of truth.  I mean, "the truth is whatever everybody else thinks is true subject only to constraint that it doesn't lead to our mutual extinction," is not a slogan that likely stirs the righteous heart.  But McRaney is not out to pursue the philosophical implications of the view he has come to.  As I observed at the outset, he's not really interested in how we collectively invent this notion of truth, but only in understanding how we can change the minds of those who stubbornly defy that consensus.

Accordingly, the final chapters of the book focus on research into persuasion.  His first stop is something called the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion.  The idea is to predict what kinds of messages people will find persuasive under what circumstances.  Like it's cousin, the Heuristic-Systematic Model, the goal is to predict when folks will think deeply and rationally about the content of the message, and when they will be more influenced by the style or circumstances of its presentation.  The basic idea McRaney draws from either is pretty common sensical.  You are more likely to engage with a message is it comes from someone you consider trustworthy and reliable, when it comes paired with its likely counterarguments, when it isn't too complicated for you, and when the medium chosen is suitable for the content of the message.  Again, despite everything McRaney has said along the way, the unspoken assumption here is that the truth is something we come to after a careful and rational consideration of the facts.  And since the only (legitimate) reason to try and change someone's mind is when it has departed from this truth, the goal of persuasion should be to construct a setting and message that gets people to rationally examine the facts, thus overcoming their tendency to lazily believe what they already believe.  In other words, it's clear that McRaney is just going to leave several large cans of worms open on the table.  What if you just want to convince people to buy your McProduct instead of someone else's nearly identical one?  The truth is that the vast majority of the times our mind is made up to begin with don't depend on facts and rational arguments but on the dark art of advertising's exploitation of our desire for conformity.  What if you take seriously the idea that 'truth' is always a socially constructed human phenomena (that nevertheless interacts with 'facts' that originate outside the human world)?  Wouldn't you then have to admit that the persuasive techniques he's advocating are, on a philosophical level, no less than their own form of advertising?

The finale of the book skips over these difficult questions and simply presumes that if you somehow trick your audience into thinking deeply about something, they will inevitably end up agreeing with you, because ... well, obviously you are right!  So the final chapters simply review the concrete steps that various groups have found work best to get a hostile audience to at least consider you message.  He compares the techniques used by deep canvassing, street epistemology, smart politics, and motivational interviewing.  Essentially, these all work the same way.  First, give up the idea that you are going to convince someone with the facts.  Instead, establish some rapport with them by asking questions, listening to their story, and opening a non-judgmental space.  Then, ask them how strongly they feel about the topic at hand.  The key thing seems to be to get them to quantify the strength of their beliefs.  After that you can ask them how they arrived at that level of belief rather than another, and you can ask them what might change that level.  In other words, you begin to investigate their reasons for their belief and the quality of these reasons.  This forces the other person to step back from what they believe and begin to think about why they believe this.  The meta-cognition introduces them (at least implicitly) to the central thesis of the book, namely that there are social and psychological forces behind belief that have nothing to do with the content of the beliefs themselves. To maintain the rapport and non-judgmental aspect of things, you do not try to argue with their reasoning (just as you did not try to argue with the content of their beliefs).  You simply show that you are actively listening by repeating what they told you and confirming that you understood it correctly.  And that's it.  You don't change their mind -- they do.  

Coming Into The Country

John McPhee is such a great writer that it doesn't really matter which particular topic he chooses for a book or essay.  It's going to be interesting regardless.  However, this set of three long essays about different aspects of Alaska in the late 70's is one of his most fascinating.  

In the first, he describes a canoe trip down the Salmon River, which drains part of the Brooks range to the Kobuk River.  Since the trip takes place almost entirely North of the Arctic Circle the only things he and his companions meet along the Salmon are bears.  It's only when they reach the Kobuk that they bump into a few Eskimos from Noorvik.  This gives McPhee a chance to introduce a theme that reappears in all of the essays -- the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.  I didn't know anything about this piece of legislation, but it appears to be by far the largest "reparations" the US government has ever made to a group they fucked over.  McPhee's episodic way of telling a story means that in this first essay, we mostly get a few details about the circumstances of its enactment (Alaksa's Native tribes sued when Exxon tried to build the oil pipeline).  But by the end of book he accumulates a variety of perspectives on it.  These ranges from Native voices (both pro and con), to the homesteaders, to State government officials.  As always, McPhee creates is a journalistic perspectivism without any pretense to objectivity; we read him because he actually thinks about his reporting.  

The second essay is a relatively short one devoted to the theme of urban Alaska.  Apparently about half of the (fewer than 1 million) souls who live in Alaska live in the suburban hell that is Anchorage.  Perhaps given the amount of land dedicated to Natives and conservation, this should not come as a surprise.  By contrast, Juneau, located way down along the Alexander Archipelago has a tenth of this number.  It seems that at the time McPhee was writing, the state had recently decided in a referendum that they would move the capitol somewhere closer to the center of population.  But because of a rivalry between the two largest cities, Anchorage and Fairbanks, the plan was to relocate the capitol to a newly created town somewhere halfway between the two.  So McPhee spends much of the essay flying around in a helicopter with the politicians in the Committee to Relocate the Capitol looking for a good spot near Talkeetna.  The absurdity of the whole situation is certainly not lost on him.

The final, and longest, essay describes life out on the final frontier of America -- the area along the Yukon River between Eagle and Central.  At the time (perhaps still, who knows) this area was sparsely populated by off-grid homesteaders and a few Natives who survived mainly by trapping, fishing, hunting, mining, and a double serving of DIY.  It's a colorful description of a group with a lot of different personalities linked only by the fact that none of them fit into life in the lower 48. 

In The Buddha's Words

I recently did a 12 day jhana retreat led by Leigh Brasington and Mary Aubry.  In addition to giving guidance about entering the jhanas, they gave a more general talk everyday, based mainly on Brasington's interpretation of "early Buddhism" -- that is, Buddhism before the Theravada.  A lot of this is covered in his recent book Depedent Origination and Emptiness.  And many of Aubry's talks drew on her teaching experience with Bikkhu Analayo in which he transforms the Satipatthana Sutta into a practical meditation guide.  All of this is to say that they spent a lot of time reading from and analyzing the suttas in the Pali cannon.  Every time a teacher delves into this material, I end up finding it fascinating and useful.  But when I've tried to approach the original suttas myself (for example by simply ploughing through the Middle Length Discourses) I've been frustrated by their opacity.  So on the final day of the retreat, I asked Brasington how to approach reading the original suttas.  His suggestion was to read Bikku Bodhi's Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Cannon.  

I wish I'd heard of this book sooner.  Bikkhu Bodhi not only provides a greatest hits compilation, but he organizes these thematically and progressively, and introduces each aspect of the Buddha's teaching with a short overview essay.  This was immensely helpful.  It's the first time I feel like I've had a sense of the full sweep of what the Buddha taught, much of which has little to do with meditation.  In fact, close to half of the book is devoted to teachings on ethics, the proper behavior of householders, the attitude with which one should approach the dharma, etc ... It's only much later in the book that we reach the suttas most folks cite in meditation circles.  The book also makes these suttas much more readable by reducing the (for me) mind-numbing amount of repetition they contain.  I would definitely recommend this as a first stop for anyone interested in approaching the Pali cannon. 

One Blade of Grass

Henry Shukman's is the second 'dharma autobiography' that I've read (counting Adyashanti's The End of Your World in this genre).  As befits a guy who was a professional writer before he became the main teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center, Shukman's book is a true memoir, not merely the collection of personal stories and anecdotes that he uses in his teaching.  Likewise befitting a writer, it is not only exceptionally literate, but often downright poetic.  

It's also immensely encouraging.  Shukman paints himself as just your basic neurotic Englishman.  His life was that unremarkable mix of privilege and suffering that characterize most of our lives in the gods realm.  The implicit (and even explicit) message is that if he can do it, anyone can.  What exactly he did, of course, remains a bit of a mystery.  He gives poetic expression to a series of mystical experiences that he interprets as glimpses of some true reality.  However, after 20 years of practice, these seem to culminate in a profound and abiding awakening experience that no longer makes any distinction between true and apparent reality.  While his description of the 'endpoint' does little to clear up what 'enlightenment' (a term Shukman pointedly denies knowing anything about) might be like, it is nevertheless fascinating to hear him try to match words to his experiences.  

Probably even more interesting than the endpoint is Shukman's description of the path that led him there.  Even though I had understood his Sanbo Zen lineage to be a combination of Soto and Rinzai Zen his practice seems to have focused mostly on koan training.  Since this is the first account I've read that includes a complete description of how koan training works, I found it fascinating.  While I can hardly claim to really understand what's going on, what struck me most about his account of the process was the sense that the important thing in a koan was observing the way your mind moves in search of a 'solution'.  It's as if the koan is a sort of force that pushes on you, and the method is to observe your own reaction to this force.  In this light, the interview with the teacher that Shukman insists is a core component of koan training becomes an interesting variation on our normal idea of communication.  Instead of transmitting fixed knowledge from student to teacher, perhaps the 'presentation' shows the teacher whether the student has followed the movement of the koan, has seen how it operates on their self.  The exact 'solution' would then be irrelevant, and the answer could only come in the form of another koan that manifests the same movement.  

Zen Words for the Heart

Hakuin's commentary on the Heart Sutra is another of those classic Zen texts that it's difficult to say anything useful about.  It has the same irreverent and acerbic tone that seems to increasingly characterize later Zen writings (eg. it's much less marked in The Platform Sutra).  Hakuin spends a lot of his time making fun of Kanjizai/Kannon/Kuanyin/Avalokitesvara (Bodhisattva of compassion) who preaches the "Great Wisdom Perfection Heart Sutra".  He also lays into the Buddha's right hand man, Sariputra.  Naturally, his point, the point of all Zen literature as far as I can see, is basically to shock your brain into stopping.  Stop holding even something like the wisdom of the Heart Sutra to be the final word.  Go out there and experience it for yourself.

Team of Rivals

It's possible that I am the last person in 'merica to read Doris Kearns Goodwin's mammoth biography of Lincoln.  And no, I didn't see the movie either.  I think I first heard of the book years ago at some industry conference where a CEO (Rich Kinder if memory serves) suggested that it made for a good lesson in leadership.  This is actually a pretty good summary of what the book depicts.  While it's enormously sympathetic to Lincoln, it manages to avoid becoming a hagiography because Goodwin convincingly shows us just what exactly made Lincoln so great.  He was, in short, an extraordinary leader.  Today this term has been debased through its appropriation by a parade of petulant tyrants.  Many now lauded for their visionary leadership are nothing more than stopped watches who, inevitably, find themselves in perfect alignment with the public or media or market fashion clock.  They only know how to get their own, uniquely correct way.  Lincoln was a leader in the profound sense of someone who draws more from the people around him than they are capable of on their own.  Someone who enables cooperation amongst a group that would have been unable to cooperate without a leader.  Most fundamentally, a leader is not someone who unilaterally steers the ship (for this we have Dear Leader) but someone who enables the ship to both move and be steered.  This is real power, a power that creates capability.

The biography shows us Lincoln's leadership primarily through the way he handled the other candidates for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.  Lincoln was able to secure the nomination simply because he had fewer enemies that any of the other candidates at the nomination convention.  He was everyone's second choice, the candidate of compromise.  Initially dismissed as a lucky country bumpkin by his opponents Seward, Chase, Cameron, and Bates, Lincoln was able to overcome both their disappointment at losing to someone they considered inferior, as well as their infighting with one another that threatened to rupture the new and fragile Republican party.  He did this by naming all of them to important positions in his Cabinet, which then became an important force for holding the North together throughout the Civil War.  According to Goodwin's Lincoln's political genius lay in this talent for getting rivals to cooperate as a part of a team, in this case, rivals even to their leader.  It's an inspiring story of what true leadership can accomplish when the focus is less on the leader than the team.

The other thing that was particularly interesting about the book was the way that it depicts Lincoln leading public opinion on the meaning of the war.  This reveals a somewhat different sense of leadership that it closer to "shepherding along".  While Lincoln had definite principals he remained true to throughout his political career, as a politician, he was also careful never to get too far out in front of public opinion on an issue.  This resulted in a shifting justification for the war on the part of the North.  At first, it was more of a "police action" aimed at restoring the Constitutional Union as it stood before the illegal Southern secession.  As the war progressed, however, the justification slid gradually in a more moral direction.  The Emancipation Proclamation serves as a sort of hinge between the original, narrow, desire to return the South to the Union with slavery intact (though with the prospect of its expansion eliminated) and the later ratification of the thirteenth amendment that abolished the "Southern Way of Life" forever.  This change of heart was of course made possible by the war itself.  The North needed the help of black soldiers and the South was using their slave labor force to build fortifications.  What Unionist wouldn't have support the emancipation of Confederate slaves under those circumstances.  Lincoln never liked slavery.  And some of his best friends were even black, as the saying goes.  But his stance was never that of visionary abolitionist pursuing a moral crusade.   At least at the beginning of the war, this would never have unified and mobilized the North to fight for the Union. So part of his larger political genius lay in staying just one step ahead of public opinion.  A leader never, it seems, operates in a vacuum.  

Seeing That Frees

Rob Burbea has written my favorite meditation book yet.  His Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising (as the subtitle has it) span the entire length of the path, from simple exercises that provide basic self-help, to the mystical deep end where even emptiness is empty.  

Because he starts all the way at the beginning, and writes in such clear, plain, and logical language, I think almost anyone would find the first three parts of the book an accessible introduction to both the principles of meditation and what one may hope to gain from it.  Burbea begins by defining slippery terms like insight and emptiness clearly and with examples drawn from daily life.  Insight is the feeling of seeing how we fabricate some (inherently empty) aspect of experience.  While these preliminary definitions are refined as the book progresses, starting at a more conventional psychological level makes the path feel much less esoteric.  And instead of presenting progress on the path as a series of stages that bring us closer to some 'ultimate reality', Burbea presents every new stage as simply a new "way of seeing" -- as in "take a look from this perspective and see what's there".  

As the water deepens, this idea allows him to present anicca, dukkha, and anatta, as ways of looking at objects that let us relax their grip on us, rather than as metaphysical marks of existence. In other words, these are subsumed as ways of experiencing the emptiness of self and world.  Gradually, other complementary ways of seeing are introduced beyond these three, all of which are meant to help us achieve a more thorough experience of the simple thesis: everything is empty.  One of the most intriguing ideas in this section is that the formless jhanas can be interpreted as steps in a spectrum of what Burbea calls the "fading of perception".  As the name suggests, we begin the sequence of formless jhanas by leaving behind forms to experience 'empty' space.  Burbea sees the jhana of infinite space not as some 'direct' experience of emptiness itself (which is not possible), but as a way of seeing that the forms we usually imagine filling space are empty; all that's really there is space.  Likewise, by progressing to the jhana of infinite consciousness, we see that the experience of infinite space we were just having was itself just another empty appearance.  Etc ...  This has the potential to change the way I look at the 'object' that defines each jhana.  instead of trying to concentrate on successively more abstract objects like space or consciousness or nothing or neither perception nor non-percetion (whatever that is), perhaps each new jhana is accessed by seeing the emptiness of the previous level.  When forms become empty, space appears.  When space is seen as empty, consciousness naturally replaces it as a more subtle object of fabrication.   

Finally, the end of the book takes us into territory that's easy to follow conceptually, but above my pay grade experientially.  Intellectually, the idea that even foundational concepts -- like the links of dependent origination, or space or time or emptiness itself -- are empty is already implicit in Burbea's logic.  Experiencing this emptiness fully is another matter entirely.  I'll have to be sure to reread these latter parts in the years to come.

#reread 

The Mathematician's Mind

Jacques Hadamard was a well know French mathematician who undertook a monograph length exploration of "the psychology of invention in the mathematical field" (as the subtitle has it).  The essay is particularly interesting because it combines introspection into his own working process with reports from a variety of other mathematicians to concoct a basic theory of how it feels to discover a new mathematical idea.  The upshot is that most mathematician's seem to work with various visual, auditory or even motor (in the case of Einstein) images at a pre-verbal level.  Hadamard takes these images to be conscious representatives of unconscious processes that get linked together as so many stepping stones that later guide linguistic or conventionally symbolic arguments.  In short, there's nothing deductive about mathematical invention, which in Hadamard's view is not a substantially different process than what we might more readily associate with poetic invention.  The conscious mind prepares the field with a long immersion into the subject.  Then the mathematician sleeps on it, so to speak, and their unconscious tries out various combinations until a successful one bubbles to the surface in the form of concrete images.  Finally, these images must be consciously and painstakingly translated back into a form that will stand up to the scrutiny of logical communication.  I would reserve judgement on whether Hadamard's is an adequate description of all possible types of invention; surely the question has been studied in much greater depth in the 70 years since his publication.  But it is a coherent and interesting one that definitely fits with my own experience of writing.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

I picked up Chögyam Trungpa's classic about three years ago and found I couldn't get into the first few chapters.  I'm not sure what I didn't like back then because this time I found the book really insightful and engaging.  These transcriptions of talks he gave to Western students back in the seventies fall into two sections.  In the first half, Trungpa explains what the spiritual path is not, and in the second he begins to progressively explain what it is.  

The title of the book stems from the message of the first part.  The spiritual path is not another attainment that we can "get".  It's not another skill or notch in our belt or collectible display item for the modern home.  The idea that the path leads to a goal is what stops us from walking down it.  Trungpa spends many chapters warning about the various illusions and self-deceptions we will accidentally create for ourselves as we try to use our concept-addicted ego to navigate.  It's only when we give up this ego's desire to possess wisdom, when we surrender and open up to our inability to grasp things that we begin get an idea of where we are going.  The overall message is very similar to The End of Your World -- let go of your expectations about how things should be.  Since giving up is a lot harder than it sounds, it's nice to hear many of these same lessons repeated.

The second half of the book contains Trungpa's own presentation of the path from the perspective of his Kagyu lineage.  Since this is a Vajrayana tradition, the presentation works its way up through the three vehicles.  His discussion of the Hinayana tradition begins with a particularly interesting chapter on dependent arising ("The Development of Ego"), passes through the four noble truths, and gives a great reading of our circulation through the six realms.  Then there are a couple of chapters devoted to the core ideas of the Mahayana tradition: the Bodhisattva and Emptiness.  Finally, his view of the path culminates in the Tantric practice of transmuting energy.  It's probably more of a commentary on my own practice than the book to observe that this chapter seemed somewhat vague and ripe for abuse.  In Tantra, everything is legal, so to speak.  When seen properly, anger, lust, etc ... are all just various flavors of awake energy that need not be avoided.  While this is a satisfyingly non-dual philosophical conclusion, it leads to some obvious practical difficulties.  Trungpa seems to want to instill in us a confidence that everything we do from true awareness is correct and appropriate.  While he himself acknowledges the danger this attitude represents, he points out that this teaching only occurs at the end of the path, when the student should know how to use it properly.  Given that anyone with an internet quickly discovers Trungpa himself arguably fell victim to some of these dangers, it seems relevant to ask if his "crazy wisdom" was something we should learn from rather than emulate.

TechGnosis

I've been meaning to read Eric Davis's classic account of the religious and mystical roots hidden in our modern attitudes towards technology for a long time.  Fortunately, it did not disappoint.  Though the book is plainly over-written in a sense (Davis calls it, "almost ridiculously dense" in his afterword -- a hypertext of a text) and lacks anything like a simple thesis, it's unfailingly engaging throughout.  I got to learn about Gurdjieff, the Extropians, Hermes Trismegistus, and, of course, the Gnostics, among many other cult-like groups.  Davis' main point is that these "fringe" beliefs have always been tied up with and reflective of society's relationship to its technology, and that they remain deeply ingrained in our experience of technology today.  Consider, for example, our constant faith in progress and the techno-capitalist utopia we are always being promised, and see if it is at bottom any different from John's New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation.  Or, ask yourself if the stark dualism and paranoid society of control we immediately relate to in the Matrix movies is anything but an update of the Gnostic myth that we have been imprisoned in this material world by a conspiracy of archons who have hidden our true spiritual nature from us.  The goal of the book is not really to trace the provenance of these ideas with academic rigor, but just to point out connections and correspondences that can shed some light on the psychology of our relationship to current our technology in general, and to the internet in particular.  Today, almost our whole sense of self and world is mediated through various information technologies, so perhaps it's inevitable that when we go looking for our selves, we find their refracted and reflected images in the nature of those very technologies.  

Moby Dick

The whale wins.

 

#reread  

Pointing Out the Great Way

While the subtitle of Dan Brown's massive tome is: "The stages of meditation in the mahamudra tradition", it doesn't really read as yet another meditation map book.  In part, this is because it focuses less on what results the meditator should expect at each stage, than on what the meditation instructions are for that stage.  Of course, you could use it to check off a list of meditative accomplishments and find a rank for your practice in the same way that The Mind Illuminated lends itself to.  But it seems more useful as a guide for how to order a series of techniques so that they point you gradually towards deeper levels of emptiness.  

This view of it is reinforced if you consider how tremendously repetitive the book is.  Crudely summarized, the whole path is just one long series of alternations between stabilizing and letting go.  To give it slightly more detail, we could notice that the major chapters correspond to the "main sequence" Michael Taft teaches in his Vasy Sky Mind class (and which form the backbone of his guided meditations).  

1. Shamata with an object -- "Formal Meditation: Concentration with Support"
2. Shamata without an object -- "Formal Meditation: Concentration without Support"
3. Vipashyana -- "Special Insight"
4. Dropping the Ball -- "Extraordinary Practice"

Because Brown aims to develop a very traditional account, he gives us way more substages for each of these practices, and includes several (kinda uninteresting) chapters on the preliminaries to formal mediation (like guru yoga), but the basic trajectory is recognizably the same.  While I learned all sorts of things from it, I can't say there's anyone I would really recommend the book to.  The language and presentation are just so specialized that I don't think I would have gotten much out of it if I hadn't already been exposed to these ideas in a more modern and informal way.  Which perhaps means that the book is most useful as a sort of reference manual for people already deeply familiar with the Mahamudra tradition.

Silence

I don't really have anything interesting to say about Erling Kagge's little book Silence.  It's a thoughtful if a bit whimsical and scattershot reflection on the importance of silence, and more generally inner peace, from a guy who has spent some time by himself being quiet in extreme conditions.  Kagge's fame seems to revolve around the fact that he's gone to both the North and South Pole on foot; he describes the solitude of solo-skiing across Antarctica in several places in the book.  Does spending 50 days cold and alone make you an expert on silence?  I suppose more of an expert than most of us.  So what, then does Kagge actually have to say about the subject?  

Basically, the book is a long apology for the value of silence and solitude in a world increasingly obsessed with connecting everything together and making it move as fast as possible.  This speed, this noisy profusion, it sometimes seems, has become an end in itself, so that we no longer even ask why we wanted to clink 'refresh' yet again.  Kagge rightly argues that the key to breaking this cycle is to somehow find a moment in the midst of the color-coded traffic jam of our calendars to actively do nothing.  The silence he has in mind isn't a passive lack in our experience but an active engagement with what's before us here and now in itself, rather than as the mere representative of conversations past or future.  Without trying to experience the intrinsic value of a moment, we are never able to ask what all our ever-so-efficient activity is for.  Unfortunately, while I think this is ultimately a sneakily profound idea, I don't think Kagge's exposition of it really contributed all that much to my understanding of this concept.  So unless you haven't thought very much about the problem, you might want to pass over this one in ...

Dhamma Everywhere

At the Alexis Santos retreat last year, he gave all of us a copy of his teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya's little Dhamma Everywhere book.  It was interesting though strange to be encouraged to read a few pages of the book while on retreat; meditation and words still don't mix all that well for me.  But in retrospect, the exercise was very revealing.  Trying to bring the dhamma to everyday life in the simplest possible terms is the core of Tejaniya's teaching.  What good are fancy concentration techniques and exalted states if they fall apart the moment we have a conversation or even just pick up a book?  Instead of providing an elaborate theory or set of special practices, Tejaniya encourages us just to keep investigating what's happening in awareness right now.  While at first this might sound like mindfulness 101 or perhaps something similar to noting, it quickly becomes clear that awareness is a broader concept than attention or focus.  Tejaniya's goal is an awareness wide open and unfixated, even temporarily.  So instead of focusing on noting the details individual objects, he's really interested in our being aware of the moment to moment quality of our awareness itself.  Is there craving present in the way we're aware right now?  Is there aversion?  The idea is that if we just keep checking what we are aware of, we gradually build up a picture of the patterns in our mind, the habits of thought that dictate not only which objects we are aware of, but how we are aware of them.  Ultimately then, we become aware of awareness itself, so to speak. Which might just be the end.  Or the beginning.

The Overstory

I'd heard praise of The Overstory from several different people, and Richard Powers sprawling Great American Eco-Novel did not disappoint.  While the main plot is just another dose of sober realism about humans running amuck on a planetary scale, I enjoyed the way Powers broke the overall narrative up into what is effectively a novel bookended by two collections of short stories.  The device of introducing the characters individually by capturing the entire sweep of their lives in a sort of flip-book animation was particularly effective at making them sympathetic.  Which was important for me, because I found that the book dragged a bit once the main "trunk" of the story got under way and the characters began to cross paths.  Despite writing that at some times felt too heavy and details that felt unnecessary, the narrative picked up speed as it went.  I also enjoyed the greater abstraction of the denouement chapters, particularly their sidelong brush with the 4 noble truths.  Here again though, I felt like better editing could have tightened things up and left us with a book that, while perhaps less soaringly and breathlessly epic, would have been more philosophically pointed -- the meaning of life is something we don't possess, but merely participate in.  These minor gripes aside though, The Overstory is a book that will stick with me for a long time as another prompt to stop, take a deep breath, and see what's going on.  

Diaspora

I recently came across an interesting article by philosophy professor Eric Schwitzgebel that suggested a list of 5 philosophically interesting sci-fi novels.  Since I thoroughly enjoyed Stories of You Life and Others, Klara and the Sun, and The Dispossessed, I figured the other two on the list were bound to be interesting.  Unfortunately Greg Egan's Diaspora doesn't hold a candle to these three in terms of writing and storytelling craft.  Egan does broach some philosophically interesting topics like what personal identity might mean for software based life capable of cloning itself at any time, and what existential issues such eternally self-modifiable  gods might confront.  But he's just not enough of a writer to make you feel these questions as anything more than the bland philosophical thought experiments you heard freshman year.  Egan's brand of sci-fi is also so hard that he makes even Liu Cixin's elaborate description of the heat death of the universe look like soft serve by comparison.  Many parts consist of such fantastically complicated reveries departing from real life mathematical or physical problems that by the third paragraph you feel like you're skimming an arvix pre-print.  Sure, Egan might be real smart, but who cares?  

There are at least a few parts that really pull the reader in though.  I particularly enjoyed the description of the neutron star collapse that spelt the end of the "fleshers" (humans who remained on earth in flesh form rather than uploading themselves to become software "citizens" or transferring their selves into the bodies of robot "gleisners").  Apocalypse sells, I suppose.  And there was a certain amount of compulsion in following the citizen diaspora's search for a way to avoid eventually succumbing to the same fate.  Enough, at least, to read the whole thing.  But still, there was a whole lot of novel that could have been short story here.

Blood and Thunder

Hampton Sides provides a truly epic portrayal of Manifest Destiny's long march to the sea.  While it's a well researched and true to life history of the westward expansion of the country in the period between roughly 1830 and the civil war, it's also written with a novelist's attention to detail and storyline that keeps it engaging.  Sides centers his story on the peripatetic life of legendary "mountain man" Kit Carson because the arc of Carson's life intersects so perfectly with the history of the period.  Carson first became famous as a symbol of the rugged freedom of the West in an era when St. Louis was the frontier city.  He traveled all over the area as a trapper, whose experience with the land and the indigenous people later made him an invaluable guide to the expeditions led by John Fremont that established the Oregon Trail.  Towards the end of his life, he served the army in the Mexican-American war, the Civil War, and the various Indian wars that marked the beginning of the reservation system.  

Carson was above all an interesting and complicated character.  He killed a lot of Indians.  He also married several (consecutively).  He became a household name as a hero of dime novels.  But he himself never learned to read.  He was constantly in demand as a famously hard-traveling guide and soldier.  Yet after the age of 30, he appeared to want nothing more than to settle down and be a family man.  These contradictions make him a great character to portray the complexity of the Westward expansion of the US.  Turns out, history is pretty complicated when you look at it with more curiosity than desire to prove your point.  So many forces are in motion at this time -- the crumbling of the Spanish empire, the rise of the North as a manufacturing area, the discovery of gold in California, the beginning of the European immigration explosion in the East, the struggles of various increasingly threatened Native tribes with  existing hispanic settlers and with one another, etc ... -- that explaining the whole works as simply the natural consequence of bloodthirsty colonists appears even more ludicrously reductive than previously imagined.   Not that the colonists weren't quite often bloodthirsty.  Just that they were many other things in addition to that.  

I think just about anybody would enjoy the book.  And I suspect it might be particularly suitable as an audiobook.  If I had one critique, it would be that it could have been shorter.  Sides is generally a good writer, but he embellishes the story with many more details than are necessary to keep things interesting.  He also occasionally gives us too much biographical backstory for characters who remain relatively minor.  I think it would be an even better read if some of its 624 pages were streamlined a little.

The End of Your World

I picked up The End of Your World because my meditation teacher suggested that it provided a clear description of what he sees as the most common path to awakening.   It contains a lightly edited collection of talks that Adyashanti gave back in 2007, together with a long and illuminating interview with the founder of Sounds True publishing.  His central idea is that most folks do not experience complete awakening in one single earth shattering moment.  Instead, he observes that most people at first just get a glimpse of awakening where they see the fabricated nature of the self.  That is, they have a non-abiding awakening.  With time and practice, they can then begin to revisit this awake experience, gradually seeing through deeper and more tenacious manifestations of self until they experience a second, and this time abiding, awakening.  Adyashanti says that in his own case the time between non-abiding awakening and abiding awakening was about 6 years, so this transition period can be substantial.  The book is specifically written to help people negotiate this intermediate period by outlining its overall trajectory and identifying some of its common pitfalls.

As far as I can tell, Adyashanti's non-abiding/abiding distinction mostly corresponds to the first path/second path distinction in Theravadan buddhism.  But I'm not super clear on how all these various maps compare and contrast.  Nor am I particularly interested in maps anymore.  For myself at least, I've concluded that the maps are more a hindrance than a help.  They exacerbate my own natural tendency to practice with a gaining idea, my frequent inclination (confirmed ¡scientifically! by my Investigator/Observer enneagram) towards a sort of spiritual avarice.  

So then, why did I enjoy reading a book that in some sense provides a map of the progress towards awakening?  There are two things that make Adyashanti's "map" distinctive and hence more useful to me than other accounts of meditative progress.  

First, the idea is in a way so obvious that it constitutes a kind of anti-map.  Translated into everyday terms, he's basically saying that while you may grasp the importance of some particular idea or experience in seconds, it can take years to unpack all its implications.  Or, equivalently, that once you have some idea of where you're headed, you then need to correctly practice a skill until it becomes automatic.  Ultimately, these are just generic descriptions of the learning process that apply to any case where we are trying to learn how rather than trying to learn that, trying to cultivate a skill rather than assimilate information.  The only reason that a description like this can appear as a map of sorts is because we so often implicitly assume that learning ideas should be instantaneous.  Adyashanti clearly wants to disabuse us of the notion that awakening is some ideal endpoint we can someday "get".  It's not a state of eternal bliss we are seeking so much as a whole way of approaching our experience, even, perhaps especially, when it's anything but blissful.  Throughout the book, he repeatedly points out that even abiding awakening has nothing to do with feeling good and it does not come with any permanent guarantees of a blissful peace.  Awakening is just the willingness to look at what's happening right now, and now, and now, over and over again, moment by moment.  In other words, Adyashanti's "map" is animated by the same paradox that defines all of Mahayana buddhism -- we are already awake, we just need to realize this.  Our "progress" lies simply in more often realizing where we already are.  It's a strange sort of map that only ever describes your current location, that never asks you to go anywhere, but only to consider why you feel like you're anywhere other than right where you are.

Second, the way Adyashanti describes traversing this map makes all the difference.  Instead of characterizing our progress by what we attain, he characterizes its entirely by what we lose.  And as the title of the book indicates, we have to be willing to lose everything in order to fully awaken.  The process is one of increasingly deep surrender of our sense of control.  Instead of discussing specific steps we need to succeed at reaching, Adyashanti always comes back to the fundamental values of honesty and sincerity in the face of our failures.  The basic question he advises us to keep asking is, "If you know what awakening feels like, what's keeping you from being there right now"?  This isn't a rhetorical question but a tool for constant inquiry into the conditions that cause our self to arise.  It's only when we understand these conditions, and fully accept our helplessness in the face of these conditions, that, as he puts it, Spirit begins to awaken from our ego, rather than our ego attempting to possess awakening.  

In the Heart of the Sea

The subtitle of Nathaniel Philbrick's non-fictional account of the story that inspired Moby Dick is: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.  And, certainly, the real story involves a lot of dead whalers.  It seems that reality, unsurprisingly, didn't provide anything quite comparable to the hubris of Ahab and the monomaniacal obsession with his malevolent foe.  The captain and crew of the Essex may have made a few dubious decisions, but they were mostly just victims of bad luck.  So the book could be more accurately subtitled: the bizarre accident of the whaleship Essex.  Despite the lack of ancient Greek levels of comeuppance, the story has plenty of drama, and Philbrick ably combines historical accuracy with an engrossing narrative.  Maybe I'm odd, but I found the most interesting part was not the human interest story of 20 men trying to survive a mid-Pacific shipwreck in 1820, but rather all the color that sets the context.  I particularly enjoyed learning about the paradoxes of the Nantucket Quakers at the heart of early 18th century whaling industry, as well as the history of the gradual exploration of the Pacific for purely commercial purposes.  The book is a quick read, so I won't spoil it for you by giving away the ending.  But let's just say that the whale wins.

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

Though I disavow all prior knowledge of it, I was apparently assigned The Platform Sutra at some point in SLE.  As usual, I dutifully read something I had no hope of understanding; though surprisingly there are actually a (very) few perceptive notes in the margin of the Yampolsky edition I had on the shelf.  I can't imagine why anyone would ask a freshman to read this particular text, since it's really only of historical interest even for someone with (now) some modicum of experience with Asian philosophy in general and Zen in particular.  It's lousy as an introduction to Zen thinking or practice.  It's a bastard piece of literature that clearly doesn't hang together to compose a coherent whole.  And this particular edition includes more poorly written scholarly apparatus than actual sutra.  I give this classic of world literature a 3.

Nevertheless, as I said, there were some points of historical interest.  The Platform Sutra turns out to be the founding document of early Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.  The earliest version we still have was probably compiled around 800, though Yampolsky makes clear in his introduction (in exhaustive detail) that this date and the manner of compilation are both up for debate.  As the title suggests, the teachings in the text are attributed to the Sixth Patriarch Huineng.  Alongside this most legendary dharma talk, we also get his autobiography, a quick list of Buddhist lists (6 of these and 3 of those makes 18 of that, etc ...) and a brief Q&A session.  Of course, it's clear that none of this was written by Huineng, not least because the guy identifies himself as illiterate!  

While it's not clear exactly who did write it, the overall goal of the Platform Sutra seems relatively straightforward.  The intent is to retroactively establish a particular sect as the real Ch'an Buddhism.  To accomplish this, the author(s) need to construct the authenticity of an unbroken line of transmission stretching all the way back to the Buddha himself.  Even more importantly, they need to deal with a recent schism in their community between the Northern and Southern schools of Ch'an, associated with the ideas of gradual and sudden enlightenment, respectively.  So the text represents not only the creation myth of the Sixth Patriarch, but of the idea that there were five that preceded him to form a school leading up to him.  With these historical considerations in mind, many of the peculiarities of the text make better sense.  Huineng was an illiterate country bumpkin who attained enlightenment suddenly at an early age.  His talent was later recognized only in secret by the Fifth Patriarch, when Huineng asked another monk to write down the brilliant poem he had composed in response to a rival as part of an epic rap battle.  

First, the impostor Sixth patriarch dropped:

The body is the Bodhi tree,

The mind is like a clear mirror.

At all times we must strive to polish it, 

And must not let the dust collect.

To which our man Huineng replied:

Bodhi originally has no tree, 

The mirror also has no stand.

Buddha nature is always clean and pure;

Where is there room for dust.

I'm sure you can see who ended up with mom's spaghetti on their sweater.  Huineng goes on to preach that all one has to do to attain an enlightenment equal to his own is to see one's true nature even for just an instant.  This makes a lot of sense for a guy who came from nowhere to secretly become the Sixth Patriarch.  The real dharma is available to all of us and already inside each of us, just waiting to be revealed.  The iconoclastic individualism (if that's the appropriate term) that still characterizes Zen today can be seen right here in its founding myth.  At the same time, you can see the problem this creates from an institutional perspective.  If every individual can suddenly realize their fundamentally equivalent enlightened self-nature at any moment, how are we supposed to know who should be in charge?  Turns out the Platform Sutra is designed to answer precisely this question -- not because of something it says though, but because of what it is.  Since Huineng supposedly only gave these teachings to his closest disciples, the text claims that merely to possess a copy of it authenticates the holder's enlightenment.  In other words, the text not only creates the Patriarchy as already five generations deep, but also itself becomes the instrument by which this Patriarchy can be further extended.  It's a pretty canny political and rhetorical strategy when you think about it.  Especially considering they didn't have NFT's back then.

Finally, I did find one passage particularly interesting from a philosophical point of view.  Huineng gives an interesting twist to the Bodhisattva vow.

Good friends, when I say 'I vow to save all sentient beings everywhere,' it is not that I will save you, but that sentient beings, each with their own natures, must save themselves.  What is meant by 'saving yourselves with your own natures'? Despite heterodox views, passions, ignorance, and delusions, in your own physical bodies you have in yourselves the attributes of inherent enlightenment, so that with correct views you can be saved.  (pg. 143)

I had previously heard this vow conceived as some sort of ultimate self-sacrifice.  You agree to delay your own enlightenment until everyone gets theirs.  But what can self sacrifice mean in a world of no-self?  To save all sentient beings everywhere is to see that these beings are already naturally saved, already constitutive of Buddha nature all on their own.  So 'saving' these other sentient beings in this way is the same as seeing Buddha nature everywhere, which is identical to saving yourself.  The Bodhisattva vow isn't meant to be the compassion of a subject for all the objects (in this case other subjects).  It's meant to illustrate how the salvation of both subject and object are one and the same.  

Infinite Powers

If you're one of those people who had a dreadful calculus teacher who convinced you the whole subject was both totally uninteresting and utterly beyond your comprehension, Steven Strogatz has written the book for you.  He tells a wonderful story about the long history of calculus from Archimedes to Poincaré.  He gives examples of many applications that show you why the abstractions of calculus are so useful in practice.  But most importantly, he actually explains the core ideas of calculus in a simple, progressive way that enable nearly anyone to fully grasp the central insight.  In other words, the book isn't just about the history of calculus and its applications -- you can actually learn calculus from it.  In fact, the math in the book is explained so clearly and simply that they should probably just hand it out on the first day of math class.  Sure, if you want to study advanced math or physics, you'll still need to power through all the rigor of delta-epsilon proofs and whatnot.  But everyone else probably only needs to carefully read this one book to say they truly understand the central mathematical concept that Strogatz calls, "The Infinity Principle" -- you can solve a hard problem by differentiating it into infinitely many infinitesimally simple problems and then integrating their solutions back together.  

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

I didn't know anything about Shunryu Suzuki (and actually confused him with the other Suzuki) before picking up a copy of his classic that I had sitting on the shelf.  And since the book consists entirely of excerpts from informal talks he gave at the San Francisco Zen center back in the sixties, I still feel like I've only just gained a little flavor of his teaching.  As with all things Zen, it's hard to know what to say about it.  I enjoyed reading his plainly spoken but utterly paradoxical explanations of true zazen.  Some parts of it resonated deeply.  Other parts felt like they were at the tip of my tongue.  And some of it was simply baffling.  Perhaps the thing I will remember is his repetition of the idea that we cannot practice zen with any "gaining idea".  Zen is good for nothing.  In turn, anything we do without expectation, without attachment to is outcome, is zen.  That is all.

An Inquiry Into the Good

After spending the past six months reading Eastern philosophy almost exclusively, I've reached the end of the list of the original texts I wanted to cover.  Of course, I'm now even more painfully aware of how limited this list was, as every book spawned an interest in three new ones, ranging from other original texts, to the vast secondary literature on Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta.  This is hardly the last time I'll study the Asian non-dual philosophies.  But the time has come to look back to the West for a moment.  

Before I did that, however, I noticed an old copy of Kitaro Nishida's first book sitting forlornly on the shelf, only half read two decades ago.  Since the dust jacket billed him as a serious student of both Zen and Western philosophy, I thought he might serve as a perfect pivot point.  And, actually, the book does serve as a good transition, though not quite for the reasons I expected.  An Inquiry Into the Good is not so much a synthesis of Western and Eastern ideas as it is a traditional book of Western philosophy written by someone whose basic worldview is deeply informed by the fundamental experiential insight of any non-dual philosophy -- subject and object aren't always and essentially distinct.  Nishida makes surprisingly little mention of any Eastern writers, thinkers or religious figures.  Instead, at least in this book, he prefers to approach philosophy entirely on Western terms, and speaks more (and positively) about Christ than he speaks about the Buddha.  Yet you can plainly see the influence of Zen ideals that run underneath everything and provide -- to use a phrase Nishisda is fond of -- the alpha and omega of his thought.  In short, An Inquiry Into the Good is Western philosophy elaborated from an Eastern starting point.  Therein lies both its interest and its shortcomings.  

The most interesting part of the book is the way it starts.  In Part 1, Nishida begins with a description of "pure experience" that will serve as the foundation for all his philosophy.  It is immediately obvious that he is describing what I prefer, less judgmentally, to call 'non-dual experience'.  This is the state where subject and object are not yet separate and distinct entities.  It's not an easy experience to describe, which is why most descriptions tend to the metaphorical -- a vast and spacious awareness that is like the sky or the ocean.  Nishida isn't satisfied to rely on these traditional metaphors, and tries to pin down the most salient aspect of the experience in philosophical terms -- namely, that it is not your experience.  You don't have the experience or possess it.  It doesn't happen inside of you as a subjective state.  Instead, it's more like the experience has you, that your everyday self appears inside the experience, as a bit of content that you no longer particularly identify with.  Or as he puts it:

Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience arises because there is an individual, but that an individual arises because there is experience.  (Preface, xxx)

In other words, pure experience does not belong to an experiencing self, but it more like an experience of self.  Hold off on the question of to whom this experience belongs if not you.  

The reason Nishida calls this pure experience is because it does not involve the addition of any conceptual fabrications.  Leave your mind alone.  He has in mind a direct and immediate experience, unmediated by a subjective self, an experience that is unconcerned with identifying or representing anything with concepts.  The initial idea is that all our abstract thinking only comes afterwards, when experience becomes impure, as it were.  Hypotheses like our belief in a material world made of atoms are nothing but abstractions we add to pure experience to make sense of it.  This might at first sound like a version of subjective idealism -- all we can really know about directly are our internal sensations; everything else is just a matter of speculation.  But that reading of it inappropriately installs a primary subjectivity where Nishida sees only a derivative one.  Sensations can be a non-dual experience, but only if they are no longer the sensations of a pre-given subject.  Pure experience isn't about what we usually call our most 'basic' 'inputs'.  We're not looking for the 'atoms' of experience, which in the end would be nothing more than another abstraction created by comparing various experiences.  What makes experience pure is the fact that it is complete in itself.

The directness and purity of pure experience derive not from the experience's being simple, unanalyzable, or instantaneous, but from the strict unity of concrete consciousness. (6)

This seems to me to be a great starting point.  Nishida seems to be trying to ask the largest possible question -- what is experience? -- with the fewest possible presuppositions.  But there are a couple of things about this starting point that should give us pause.  Both the idea of purity and the concept of consciousness seem to me to smuggle in some expectations right from the start.  If we are willing to question the idea that experience belongs to a human self, why wouldn't we go a step further and question the idea that experience needs any unifying consciousness at all?  The word 'consciousness' cannot help but suggest the model of our own individual consciousness, even though this is exactly the assumption we're trying to find a way beyond. In which case the 'unity' that for Nishida is constitutive of experience is immediately in danger of simply duplicating the most familiar unity we have -- our self identity.  Likewise, the word 'purity' has a long and checkered history that is inseparable from its political and moral implications.  Talking about pure experience implies that there is impure experience.  And we all know that impure stuff is both derivative and bad, as well as essentially distinct from the pure stuff.  So it seems that Nishida is surreptitiously introducing a new duality, one carrying 2,000 years of moralistic baggage.

However, these observations are in no way intended as some sort of refutation of his philosophy.  The most interesting aspect of the book is the way that you can see Nishida struggle mightily against the problems these words express.  The difficulty is of course not merely linguistic, though perhaps to really develop any new philosophical concept we need to introduce new words and liberate old ones.  The difficulty lies in consistently thinking outside our selves, outside our own empirical subjectivity, without accidentally reimporting these selves at a transcendental level.  Nishida tries to do this, and fails.  Perhaps this is due in part to his very abstract and propositional style?  I would call it the 'Western' style of philosophy if Plato's genre-bending dialogues didn't sit so uncomfortably with this description; certainly it's the post-Cartesian (pre-Nietzschean) style.  At any rate, as the book progressed I increasingly had the sense that his core non-dual insight was gradually being swallowed up by and tending to return to the same philosophical platitudes that had been imperfectly ejected at the beginning.  I'm certain Nishida was attempting to reach old mystical concepts like, "God is love" and, "Reality is inherently spiritual", from a new angle.  But in this book at least he simply ends up sounding like a Christian mystic.

Intriguingly, Nishida himself would agree with this assessment.  In a preface written 25 years after the initial publication, he sympathizes with critics who regarded it as "too psychological".

As I look at it now, the standpoint of this book is that of consciousness, which might be thought of as a kind of psychologism.  Yet even if people criticize it as being too psychological, there is little I can do now.  I do think, however, that what lay deep in my thought when I wrote it was not something that is merely psychological. (Preface xxxii)

This suggests that it would be interesting to revisit Nishida's philosophy towards the end of his career, when presumably he was able to more faithfully develop his brilliant starting point.  The situation reminded me strongly of Deleuze's comments about the trajectory of Bergson's philosophy:

Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life.  And it is true that Bergson had to express himself in this way, at least at the outset.  But, increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round.  That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox.  Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change.  (Cinema 2, 82)

Of course, Nishida does not begin with the idea that experience is in us.  Quite the contrary.  But what he ends up saying is effectively that experience is in God, that it is a manifestation of God.  Perhaps later he can finally reverse this formula to say that God is in experience.  But here at the beginning of his philosophy, he seems to get trapped in the idea of a divine subjectivity that that is as closed and completed as we, alongside the early Bergson, imagine our own to be.  An open and unfinished God whose unity is anything but given perhaps still awaits us.

Like I say though, the interest of the book lies in the way we can still glimpse the possibility of this new road even if we get lost in the thickets surrounding it.  Accordingly, I want to examine some of these breadcrumbs in the hopes that they will later enable me to return to the original insight.  Maybe the most interesting aspect of Part 1 is the way that Nishida tries to divide experience into categories like representing, thinking, willing, knowing, and intuiting, while simultaneously trying to undo the damage that these distinctions threaten to do to his theory of pure experience.  For example, one his early statements is that pure experience, since it is not representational, is also, strictly speaking, meaningless.  It always happens spontaneously in the present.  Any judgement about the value or meaning of this experiences, or any memory of it, is not pure experience.  Except that memories, plans, and judgements about experience are also experiences in their own right.  They too have to happen in the present, even if their contents is interpreted as belonging to some other time or dimension.  So Nishida is quickly led to passages like this one:

Assuming the pure experience is [already] endowed with discriminations, what are the meanings or judgements added to it and how do they relate to pure experience?  People usually argue that when pure experience is connected to objective reality it generates meaning and takes the form of judgements, but from the perspective of my theory of pure experience, we cannot leave the sphere of pure experience.  Meanings or judgements derive from the connection of a present consciousness to past consciousnesses; meanings and judgements are based on the unifying activity in the great network of consciousness.  They indicate the relation between present consciousness and other consciousnesses, and therefore merely express the position of present consciousness within the network of consciousness. (9)

Here you can already see that Nishida needs some sort of fractal structure to discuss pure experience.  There are unities nested within other unities in a way that threatens to topple the 'purity' of experience into meaninglessness.  If all experience is pure experience, then what does 'pure' add to the description?  A version of this question will appear throughout the book, and it is the underlying force that eventually pushes Nishida to his divine mysticism -- the buck only stops with God's consciousness.

The same problem recurs in the chapter on thinking.  Nishida begins by describing thinking as the subsequent relation of two representations.  In this way it would differ from the immediacy of sense perception.  But this relation of experience is also is an experience of relation.  This opens the door for Nishida to claim that most of our thinking is, like all pure experience, not really ours.  

In the instant it shift from one representation to the next, thinking, too, is unconscious, and as long as the unifying activity is actually functioning it must be unconscious.  By the time we are conscious of this activity as an object, it already belong to the past.  The unifying activity of thinking is in this way completely outside the will. (14)

While this is a suggestive passage, introducing the unconscious here raises more questions than it answers.  Is our unconscious (out-of-conscious) precisely within the consciousness of some larger being?  Are we, as Nishida seems at one point to suggest, merely the differentiated moments in the unified development of something like Hegel's Absolute Spirit?  Is Absolute Spirit the same thing as God and both of these equivalent to Non-dual Awareness?  I don't think these are the same concept.  But if your only image of nested unities is a set of concentric circles, then you will find that the larger space in which your self-consciousness exists looks just like the smaller you.  The point of non-dual awareness cannot simply be to discover that your little ego is inside a bigger ego structured in exactly same way.  This is why, despite the fact that Loy shows us how the two formulations can be philosophy equivalent, I find the Buddhist concept of non-self less easy to misinterpret than Advaita Vedanta's concept of the absolute self.  Throughout An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida will overload terms like 'self' and 'consciousness' and 'unity' in ways that at first seem like mere problems of terminology but later turn out to undermine his whole project.

We can finally leave behind Part 1 by noticing the same pattern cropping up in the chapter on will.  At first, it seems as if Nishida considers will a distinct and somewhat derivative category of experience that deals with the relations between objective representations of the world and subjective representations of our movement.  If there is no subject nor object in pure experience, then will seems to be the last thing that would qualify as pure.  But then Nishida goes on to once again relativize these distinctions that at first seemed absolute.  In his theory, pure experience is always positing a goal for itself.  This goal is exactly what allows for the experience to have the unity that constitutes it.  In other words, pure experience is inherently teleological, with its end operating from within right from the beginning, and Will is the most fundamental category of experience.  Yet while Nishida makes it clear that he has in mind a larger and more absolute Will, not our small self-centered "free will", it's hard to see how we're not now even more mired in the same problem as before.  Absolute will seems destined to be an absolute subject that harmonizes and unifies the (for it) absolutely objective world of little subjects.  

I won't discuss the rest of the book in detail because I think you can already see its essential trajectory.  Once Nisihida slips into this teleological view of pure experience as carrying its own goal within it as the endpoint of its unifying will, it's almost impossible for his theory of the Good to amount to anything other than God working out his divine plan.  From there, it's downhill into the 'bad mysticism' that has nothing concrete to offer us beyond an assurance that all is one and all is for the good in this most perfect of worlds.  The book gets less interesting the further it goes.  Hopefully I can someday return to the late Nisihida to see how his philosophy changed in response to the charge that he was too "psychological".