Sanity and Sainthood

In a way, I'm probably not the best person to objectively review Tucker Peck's book about "Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy.  After attending his weekly eSangha classes for roughly three years, I'm not terribly surprised to find that there's almost nothing in the book I haven't heard him mention in conversation on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, this is hardly a critique; I wouldn't have listened to Tucker talk for ~150 hours if I didn't think his teaching was valuable.  But it does mean I can't come to these ideas with the same mindset as someone hearing them for the first time.  The book was still fun to read regardless because it compiles and organizes all these insights for future reference.  It also gives me something simple and tangible to hand to other people who are interested in quickly (it took less than 150 hours to read this) understanding what Tucker has to offer as a teacher.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who is both a dharma teacher and a professional therapist, the basic point is that both modalities are useful and even complementary, but they serve different purposes.  Meditation helps us to become aware of the process of our thoughts, whereas therapy works at improving their content.  While this simple distinction seems pretty intuitive, it contains a wealth of wisdom.  Because on the deepest level, it helps us to give up on the craving to have perfect content -- to be perfectly happy -- all the time.  As Tucker repeats throughout the book, and I've seen myself, meditation has a lot to offer, but it does not show any signs that it will magically deposit me in a state of permanent bliss anytime soon.  And while that might sound disappointing, I think perhaps we should see it as a blessing.  Do we really want to do something that leads us towards being unable to feel human emotion?  In fact, while meditation does seem to improve life overall, it actually has a tendency to open me to a much wider range of possible emotion.  A lot of the book gives advice for dealing with this sort of destabilization in a way that leads towards a broader dynamic stability that lets us function as a better, more wise and compassionate person, both towards others and ourselves.  And if this isn't the point of life, then what it?

Deleuze and Buddhism

How could I resist a title like this?  Unfortunately, this collection of essays did not live up to the potential I imagined, and still imagine, in exploring how Deleuze's thought overlaps with Buddhism.  They range across the non-sequitur (Higaki), the awful (See), the amateurish (Cook), and the word salad (Bradley), before culminating in the stream of consciousness (Ueno).  That is, five of the six essays are philosophically useless.  The best that can be said of them is that they made me aware of a few Japanese thinkers who sound interesting -- Kenji Miyazawa and Toshihiko Izutsu -- and drew my attention to a particular passage in A Thousand Plateaus (below).

The only essay I found particularly thought provoking was Simon Duffy's.  He approaches the connection between Deleuze and Budddhism by what seems to me a very natural path -- through drawing on Deleuze's reading of Spinoza.  Spinoza's system already bears comparison to Buddhism, and Deleuze's atheistic reading of it only accentuates this resemblance.  Deleuze reworked Spinoza's puzzling and seemingly contradictory idea that knowledge of the third kind gives us a window onto eternity in terms of an intensive and an extensive part of the individual.  Duffy, in turn, goes on to apply this concept to make sense of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation.  Basically, the more my self-definition begins to revolve around the constructive connections I have with the world, the more "I" shift towards being a intensive virtual singularity and away from identifying with my current extensive actualization of this essence.  In everyday terms, I get closer to being a pure possibility, a way of being that can be taken up by any being and hence re-actualized indefinitely.  This is a very complex thought, and the essay manages to be both a bit pedantic and yet short on the details.  Nevertheless, it poses the interesting question of "what happens when a Bodhisattva dies?"  They become completely expressive, completely virtual, only an intense essence that can live on in any of us indefinitely.  Duffy doesn't make it clear exactly how this differs from an eternal soul, or even from the way a lineage actively preserves the memory and spirit of a sage, so we're mostly just left with this suggestion that the path to immortality is in defining oneself as pure connection.  It may not be the version of immortality you were looking for.  But I found it food for thought.

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I imagine that the camouflage fish reference in this quote was inspired by its (dis)appearance in Neo-Finalism (probably not Ruyer's only use of this example).  Regardless, it caught my attention as an apt metaphor for non-duality.

Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance, any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by continued or superposed "traits," or strokes. (ATP, 280)

Individuation Project

Here's the bibliography for the individuation project spawned by my preliminary reading of The Fold.  It includes the philosophy of technology detour that happened between the first and second Simondon books.

Gilbert Simondon -- On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,

W. Brian Arthur -- The Nature of Technology

Langdon Winner -- Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought

Lewis Mumford -- The Myth of the Machine, Volume 1, 2

Joanne Macy -- Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory

Gilbert Simondon -- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

Jakob von Uexküll -- A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch -- The Embodied Mind

Raymond Ruyer -- Neofinalism

Erwin Schrodinger -- What is Life?

Bernard Cache -- Earth Moves

Richard Halpern -- Leibnizing

Gilles Deleuze -- The Fold

Healing Back Pain

My rolfer suggested I read Dr. Sarno's simple and slim volume about the psychological roots of back pain.  Sarno spent many years treating patients with recurring back and neck pain and came to the conclusion that in many cases the pain is actually psychosomatic.  He describes a medical condition which he calls, somewhat unmemorably in my opinion, tension myositis syndrome.  The idea is very simple.  When we have some chronic emotional disturbance (Sarno points particularly to represessed anger) our nervous system can protect us from this threat by using a physical pain to distract us from seeing the emotional suffering.  It's a trick as old as the Freudian unconscious (which itself goes all the way back to the minute perceptions of Leibniz).

After all, in our culture we have trained ourselves to believe that all physical things have a physical cause and that any pain we feel must signal some sort of 'real' physical tissue damage.  That is, we literally can't imagine that a pain could be caused by the mind, because there is no possible mysterious woo-woo new-age mind-body connection.  We take this naive materialist position as an article of faith these days, and indeed, that is what it literally amounts to -- scientism.  When looked at with even a modicum less religious fervor, however, we can immediately see that this sermon can only convince the already indoctrinated choir.  After all, if there's no mind-body connection, there's no pain and hence nothing to explain.  That'll be $4.5 trillion please.  The very possibility that we should look into the mind to find the cause of a pain in the body is excluded in advance, which of course makes this a perfectly airtight mechanism for repressing the consciousness of an emotional state.  It becomes literally unthinkable that the physical pain could be caused by an emotional disturbance.  

By contrast, Dr. Sarno successfully treated back pain simply by talking to patients about their emotions.  The only prescription is mental awareness.  In fact, in order to maximize the potency of this medicine, Dr. Sarno suggests completely ignoring the physical pain, literally pretending that it doesn't 'really' hurt at all, and that it therefore requires no special physical attention or treatment of any kind.  Forget all the scary X-rays and MRI images and other medical rites and rituals.  Once we convince ourselves that the problem is simply repressed emotional tension, the pain which served to hide this tension from us can no longer serve that purpose, and so evaporates.  He says this has worked for many people.  And, at least so far, it has worked for me as well.  

Attentive readers may notice that there is a funny irony to this mind-only diagnosis and treatment.  It requires a similar yet opposite faith that the physical cannot possibly be the cause of the pain.  From the perspective of the efficacy of the treatment, this makes perfect sense.  But from an intellectual perspective, it encloses us in another self-justifying loop of faith.  For now we have convinced ourselves that pain can have nothing to do with the physical body, which is of course only slightly less ridiculous a hypothesis than we began with, since it leads us directly to the idea that there is 'really' no body at all.  The resulting logic isn't quite as self-refuting as naive materialism, but it still leaves us with a very deep mystery.  Why is the idea of a pain in "the body" so convincing that it literally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if there is no such thing as "the body"?