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.