Tag: Buddhist Practice
Two interviews on communism important for understanding America’s position and options
Is the thought “I should have seen that” where we draw the line between higher and lower awareness?
As humans, we cannot but think sometimes: “I should have seen that. I had all the information but had not put it together.”
I am pointing this out because this ineluctable thought is an aspect of our consciousness itself and not of our culture or language, whatever those may be.
Do conscious beings who have no language think thoughts like this non-verbally? Do they have a sensation like we do that accompanies a similar realization in them?
Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. Non-verbal beings on earth obviously correct their behaviors, but how far does that travel in their awareness? Do dogs laugh at themselves? Do they have a feeling of self-recrimination as we sometimes do when we realize I should have seen that?
Is at least some of the feeling of shame grounded in this thought? Dogs clearly manifest shame.
Would a computer that can pass many tests of consciousness have the thought I should have seen that?
It seems to me that beings higher than us—angels, Bodhisattvas, Dharma protectors, prophets, and more—would very probably have this thought sometimes.
The full enlightenment of a Buddha as understood in the Mahayana tradition seems to indicate a state of awareness where the thought I should have seen that no longer arises.
In his life as we know of it, the Buddha did make new rules for monastics as conditions dictated. At such times, did he have this thought or not?
In your view, is the highest consciousness possible unbounded? Such that it must also think this thought?
Would you be happier if you never had the thought I should have seen that or not?
Is consciousness inert, like water, yet permeates everything? Inert but does not permeate everything?
I should have seen that is interesting because this thought seems to inhere in consciousness itself and not arise from language, culture, training, or other conditions. It seems to be accompanied by a sensation, at least in us.
Is it subject to Buddhist “dependent origination” and thus a feature of ordinary consciousness but not of ultimate consciousness?
Are the conditions it depends on its own conditions? Or other conditions? This might be a very big question.
A materialist would say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter dependent on matter. A true physicalist would not speak so fast because conscious may very well be a primary aspect of all things, even the driver of physical laws.
Is the thought I should have seen that where we draw the line between higher and lower awareness? Do single cells, which can change their minds, have a sensation that expresses this thought? Does God never have this thought? Do Buddhas?
Notice that a great deal of humor depends on bringing to our awareness something maybe not that we should have seen but that we could have seen. Humor like that gives us no new information outside of our ourselves, though it does fit together information we already have in a new way,
So, I should have seen that can be occasion for delight and laughter. Fundamental to feelings of relief or peace of mind; it’s a feature of consciousness that arises in consciousness and that we react to consciously, almost always with some sort of sensation.
“Our Constitution doesn’t exist to protect us from religion; it exists to protect religion from government” Betsy DeVos
Too many misinterpret a separation of church and state as an invitation for government to separate people from their faith.
In reality, our Constitution doesn’t exist to protect us from religion; it exists to protect religion from government. The First Amendment affirms our free exercise of religion, and we don’t forfeit that first freedom to anyone or in any place, especially in public schools.
~Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos
Announcement of the Guidance on Constitutional Prayer in Public Schools
A universal feature of human consciousness is the capacity to sometimes say, “I should have seen that.”
By this I mean, you had all the information but had not fit the pieces together.
I can avoid waking my partner with the coffee timer (stove timer) by simply setting the timer for one minute more than I want and shutting it off early.
That knowledge was all there and I had used it for others timer chores, but not for coffee (French press) until yesterday morning. The reason probably is early morning haze, but that is not the deep point.
The deep point is the doing of that or the not doing of that could have been better and I can now wonder why I didn’t see it before.
This small thing is compounded by my partner having already informed me that the timer sound does not and has never bothered her at all. And that looks like grounds for yet another I-should-have-seen-that moment somewhere down the road.
For why am I concerned if she is not and also I completely believe her? Is that a bug in my head or a seed of something more important?
Another example is for years I was not drinking enough water. The information was there, I had it all, but did not put it together for a long time.
Seeing this as a universal feature of human consciousness highlights in retrospect that a fundamental aspect of consciousness is its capacity to arrange or rearrange bits of information to affect intent.
When we rearrange even minor bits of known information, we can sometimes feel I should have seen that before. (If our rearrangement is based on new extrinsic information, we more often will feel aha, now I’ve got it or that will do it.)
Philosophically, I wonder if God also has this feature. That is, does this feature of human consciousness extend to the highest level of consciousness possible in our universe?
For hard atheists, the same question would be does an invented God have this feature?
How do angels or beings much higher than us but less than God see us?
Surely they will sometimes be perplexed by this same feature of consciousness. I expect that would make them sympathetic to us. Maybe they feel even worse than us.
Does this help explain to you why our world is so messy and sometimes just awful? And sometimes so beautiful?
ISTB – “I Said This Before”
My partner and I made up this acronym because we like to revisit subjects often, a valuable practice.
When subjects are revisited, misunderstandings can be exposed and corrected, changes in opinion can be voiced, new evidence or insights introduced.
Saying “ISTB” cuts off the horrible default response: “You already told me that…” or the feeling that such a response could be appropriate.
ISTB signals that either new information is forthcoming or the speaker wants to ensure that something—possibly something very subtle—has been understood in the way intended.
It might also simply signal that the speaker feels like saying what will follow for no other reason than that.
We say ISTB by just voicing those four letters out loud.
Group values and perverse individual needs for them: an example from NXIVM
The testimony below of Lauren Salzman can be interpreted in many ways.
One that stands out for me is how even a very wealthy person may need very weird external forces to provide meaning and direction.
This seems to be a core aspect of delusion in the Buddhist sense of the term.
You provide your own self-incriminating “collateral” material to join and stay in a group that then requires you to accept humiliation and punishment and even self-administer it while also continuing to provide yet more self-incriminating material.
The snake biting it’s tale is the traditional metaphor for this very graphic example of an ego entirely lost in self-delusion. The kicker is these initially “voluntary” behaviors were supposed to lead to some sort of “enlightenment” or “growth.”
I have no doubt that many very powerful groups use a formula similar to this to control their members and further their goals. If you think about it, there must be a lot of groups like this in the world because there is no better way to fashion a power- and/or crime-oriented organization.
This is the kind of senseless cycle Buddhist practice is designed to get us out of. Whether you manufacture your own delusive “values” or take on those of a perverse group, it’s much the same.
From Salzman’s testimony:
It wasn’t specifically about what would happen much beyond it was you were just in there until they let you out but what I — you know, you would just be in there surrendering, it could be, you know, ten minutes, it could be an hour, it could be days, like you didn’t know how long it would be and that was the whole point of surrender but what I imagined was like being in there and having to go to the bathroom or something and then having to go through like that type of a humiliation which I think was the point of surrender, being willing to go through things that were vulnerable or humiliating or being willing to go through whatever as an experience of complete surrender and so that’s what I imagined and, you know, obviously not the kind of thing you’re hoping to experience. I wasn’t. I wasn’t hoping to experience that. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. And the fact that it was being linked with growth, like the most committed people to growth, so it became like if I didn’t want to do it, then I was one of those people that wasn’t committed to growth and that was a very hard thing to get my mind around and I didn’t believe that you couldn’t be most committed to growth unless you were willing to do BDSM things.
For more of her testimony and an article about it see: Relentless Collateral, Staging Fake Crimes, Standing Barefoot in Snow, Locked in Dungeons, Being Kicked on Ground, Paddled — Welcome to the Insane World of Lauren Salzman.
Master Huiyuan
Huiyuan (Chinese: 慧遠; Wade–Giles: Hui-yüan; 334–416 AD) was a Chinese Buddhist teacher who founded Donglin Temple on Mount Lushan in Jiangxi province and wrote the text On Why Monks Do Not Bow Down Before Kings in 404 AD. He was born in Shanxi province but after a long life of Buddhist teaching he wound up in Jiangxi province, where he died in 416. Although he was born in the north, he moved south to live within the bounds of the Eastern Jin Dynasty.
Huiyuan was posthumously named First Patriarch of the Pure Land School of Buddhism. His disciples included Huiguan (慧觀), Sengji (僧濟), and Faan (法安). (link)
Imaginary communication
Normal socially-defined communication—business, school, professional, etc.—operates within known limits and terminologies. Skill is largely defined as understanding how to use the system without exceeding its limits, how to play the game.
Many other forms of communication do not work within known limits or clear contexts and thus must be largely imagined. That is, I have to imagine what you mean and you have to imagine what I mean.
In many cases of this type I will imagine that you are normal to the extent that I am able to imagine what normal is. And I will imagine that you imagine me to be normal. As I imagine you I will probably assume that your sense of what is normal is more or less the same as mine. This is probably what the central part of the bell curve of imagined communication looks like. People in this group are capable of imagining and cleaving to normal communication standards. If you reciprocate, we will probably get along fine.
If my imagination is better than normal, I will be able to imagine more than the normal person or given to imagining more. If this is the case, I will tend to want to find a way to communicate more than the norm to you. If you reciprocate, we might do well communicating. If you don’t, I might appear eccentric to you or distracted.
If my imagination is worse than normal, I will have trouble imagining or understanding normal communication. I won’t have a good sense of the cartoons we are required to make of each other and will probably appear awkward or scatterbrained to most people. If you reciprocate, we might do well communicating and find comfort in each other.
Normal communication, even when imagined, is based on something like cartoons. I see myself as a cartoon acting in relation to the cartoon I imagine for you. If my cartoon fits you well enough that you like it and if your cartoon of me fits well enough that I like it, we have a good chance of becoming friends.
A great deal of normal imagined communication is cartoon-like, and being normal, will take the bulk of its cartoons from mass media—movies, TV, radio, and, to a lesser extent today, books and other art forms.
People still read and learn from books and art, but normal communication has come to rely heavily on the powerful cartoons of mass media.
The big problem with our systems of imagined communication is they are highly idiosyncratic, messy, and ambiguous. We have to spend a lot of time fixing problems and explaining what we really mean.
It’s good to have idiosyncratic communication, but we have to find ways to understand each other on those terms.
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first posted May 25, 2014
Complex trauma as distinct from anxiety & depression
If you think about it, there are a great many people worldwide who have lived through years, even decades, of horrible treatment.
And often that horrible treatment led to maladaptive skills that led to more horrible treatment from people who know how to exploit weaknesses like that.
The following quote puts it very well. Be sure to read the whole piece linked below. Emphasis mine.
…For those who have experienced trauma, anxiety comes from an automatic physiological response to what has actually, already happened. The brain and body have already lived through “worst case scenario” situations, know what it feels like and are hell-bent on never going back there again. The fight/flight/ freeze response goes into overdrive. It’s like living with a fire alarm that goes off at random intervals 24 hours a day. It is extremely difficult for the rational brain to be convinced “that won’t happen,” because it already knows that it has happened, and it was horrific.
Link: We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety
People who have experienced complex trauma can be difficult to deal with because they very legitimately do not fucking trust anyone.
The linked article laments that few therapists are trained in complex trauma, which is true.
I would add that very few people know that many societies in the world, including the USA, contain malicious groups that work complex trauma to super exploit and/or destroy people.
These groups either start with a person who has been abused or start the abuse themselves. It is a form of persecution.
It can be done by states to repress whole subgroups (“counter-revolutionaries,” for example). Or by clandestine groups to gain power.
Free energy principle & interpersonal psychology
To be very brief, Karl Friston’s “free energy principle” says that the brain is an “inference machine” or “prediction machine” that uses Bayesian probability reasoning and is motivated to act by an inference seeming not true or “surprising” to it.
More can be found here and here.
The free energy principle is a straightforward way to explain what FIML practice does, how it does it, and why it works differently than any other form of psychotherapy and in many significant ways why it works better.
A psychological “complex,” “neurosis,” “personality disorder,” or “persistent thought,” call it what you will, affects human behavior by being or having become a nexus of thoughts, ideas, perceptions, feelings, interconnected neurons and chemistry.
The same is true for any personality trait or skill, including very positive ones.
In Friston’s free energy terms, the psychological elements described above are surrounded by Markov blankets.
That means they are isolated or protected systems with their own variables. These protected systems (protected by Markov blankets) are hard to change because they have their own sets of rules and habitual inputs and outputs.
And that makes them stubborn candidates for most forms of psychotherapy, especially psychotherapy that requires a therapist. One reason for this is time & expense. A second reason is it is difficult for the patient to change without therapeutically experiencing for themself the complex or trait in real-world situations.
The key here is therapeutic experience in the real-world of the unwanted trait or complex that requires change.
The third reason most psychotherapies are ineffective is very subtle incisiveness in real-time is needed to penetrate psychological Markov blankets.
What FIML does is penetrate the Markov blanket enshrouding a complex with a series of small pricks. Each prick in the blanket is small, but each prick also allows some of the valence (gas) inside the blanket to escape.
FIML slowly punctures the Markov blanket with many small pricks, eventually causing it to collapse.
Once it has collapsed, the energies that were trapped inside it can be used for other things. In this way FIML optimizes even non-neurotic psychology by removing pockets of inefficiency held within psychological Markov blankets.
By using only small pricks to penetrate Markov blankets, FIML allows people to gradually and painlessly see what needs to be changed, why, and how to do it. Since FIML works in real-time real-world situations, even very small insights can bring about large changes.
Free Energy Principle — Karl Friston
Mindfulness and error recognition
Mindfulness practices improve our ability to recognize error.
A recent study shows this by monitoring brain activity with an EEG.
The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses. A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls,” said Jeff Lin, co-author of the study linked just below. [emphasis mine](link to quote: How meditation can help you make fewer mistakes)
The study is here: On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring.
Few Buddhists will be surprised at the general findings of this study.
Error recognition is what first got me to read about this study.
The findings became even more interesting to me when I saw the statement about the one-half-second error positivity response in the quote above.
Error recognition or the recognition that one might be making an error is key to successful FIML practice.
The second key is to act on our recognition quickly, within a few seconds if possible.
I have always figured it takes about a half second more or less to feel a slight disturbance that tells us we might be forming a wrong impression about what someone is saying or doing. That we might be making an error.
It is this disturbance that tells us it is time to do a FIML query. Virtually every time I do a proper FIML query I find I am either flat out wrong or wrong enough to want to revise my original impression.
In the past, I have called the slight disturbance mentioned above a “jangle,” a term I don’t really like because it makes the response sound stronger than what it is. I suppose I could refer to it as the “error positivity response,” but that would require an explanation every time I used it.
[Edit: I have decided to solve this problem this way: A jangle is basically a trigger. The word jangle is used rather than trigger because the word trigger normally places too much responsibility on the speaker. A jangle should be understood as an internal emotional or psychological trigger that the listener 100% owns until it has been queried about. In most cases, partners will find that their jangles largely or entirely belong to their own psychologies and not their partner’s.]
In Buddhism, a jangle is probably the second of the five skandhas—sensation.
Buddhist practice will definitely make you more aware of the second skadha or “error positivity response.”
By being aware of this response in conversation with a trusted partner, FIML practice helps us take our mindfulness to a new level by providing us with the opportunity to ask our partner about their intentions. In this way, we check our own mental work for error.
If this is done quickly enough to preserve clear memories of 1) your “error positivity response” and 2) your partner’s memory of what was in their working memory at that moment THEN you both have one of the few psychological facts you can both be sure of.
Facts of this sort are not just psychologically of great significance, they are also of philosophical significance because they really are one of the very few fact-types you can truly know about your own idiosyncratic existence; your own very weird being.
I believe this is why the Buddha emphasized the importance of the moment.
FIML practice explodes the moment or expands it to include more reliable information (your partner’s input). And this allows both of you to do a really good analysis of what just happened, what that moment entailed.
And doing that many times, will help both of you see how you really are. It will help you break fee from erroneous psychological frames or theoretical misinterpretations of any type.
Working memory is the fulcrum of psychology
It is the hinge between inner speech and outer speech. Psychology doesn’t happen without working memory.
Yet working memory is elusive. You hear something and speak to it but did your interlocutor mean that or even say it at all?
Let’s define outer speech as speech spoken to another person. Inner speech spoken aloud is still inner speech.
Inner speech informs outer speech and often becomes it. Same thing goes for outer speech. It can be taken in and reshape inner speech in very deep ways.
During the dynamic of two people talking to each other, our working memories are tasked with listening and responding as best we can. TBH, we usually don’t do that very well.
Many mistakes happen during active speech exchanges. I don’t think I need to prove that.
If what is being exchanged has psychological import, to that degree mistakes can be serious or not.
What is weird to me is our entire sense of who we are is built on the insecure fulcrum of our working memories as we speak and listen.
This happened between your mother and father and between them and you and everyone else you have ever spoken with. It’s all very messy, uncertain, filled with potentially extremely grave errors.
This is part of the deep foundation of our psychologies but it is not often mentioned or taken into account nearly enough.
We go for theories about ourselves because they are established outer speech that we can take in and adapt to. To me, that is weak. A very weak way to understand yourself.
Inner speech as subversive marker of psychology. True speech passes quickly
Inner speech—what we say to ourselves when alone—provides a reasonably good outline of our conscious psychology, an outline of how we understand ourselves.
Inner speech may also include semi-conscious information and subject matter.
When engaged in personal art and poetry inner speech frequently draws on unconscious material, though it is difficult to know where to draw lines between that and psychology. Art is all but defined by its capacity to evoke many interpretations.
Inner speech wanders and can become subversive, even if beautiful, by confirming misunderstanding.
When we are consciously mindful of our inner speech and deliberately pay extra attention to it (a valuable practice), our speaking will change because whenever we strive or focus on anything our relationship to it changes.
When speech pays attention to itself, it brings recursion, one of its core features, to bear on itself. In doing that it raises self-awareness to higher macro-levels or causes self-awareness to view itself from different perspectives.
Consciousness seems to require consciousness of something; in this case it is consciousness of consciousness, a very simple thing actually.
Does water know it’s wet? I don’t know. Does consciousness know it is conscious? Of course it does. We must admit here, though, that what we are conscious of is often wrong.
Being wrong is a big problem with inner speech. I might be talking rather passionately to myself about something that never happened the way I have come to see it. We all know this, though it’s hard to know what to do about it.
That’s probably a big piece of what the Buddha meant by delusion, or even wrong speech. Mumbling away in my own head about something I am completely wrong about!
Oh well.
With an honest partner at least I can get an honest answer about whatever they are thinking right now and compare that to whatever I thought I saw in them. And from that I can tell whether what I thought I saw in them was right or wrong.
That is very good information, some of the best. Let a few seconds pass and their memory will already be eroding, their information not-so-slowly consumed by inner speech.
Friends will typically provide all the inner speech you want, but we would be back at square one if we took that in place much better information from as close as possible to the actual moment that just occurred.
If you think about it, you will probably agree that we can really only gain an objective insight into our psychology in the moment with an honest partner. And in those instances, we will mostly only gain insights into small bits of it.
Fortunately, with time and an accumulation of many small bits of information like that, we will see much better outlines of our psychologies than either our own inner speech can provide us or that can be provided by any theory that comes from outside.
American Buddhist Net 