A public-domain illustration by Alex-engraver of the chakras and channels, taken from Wikipedia.
Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.
I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.
The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.
But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.
American psychedelic advocates received a great disappointment a couple months ago when the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The disappointment was great enough to lead Jules Evans of the Ecstatic Integration Substack to ask: “Is the psychedelic renaissance over?“
It seems silly to me to read too much into this one decision. It is not final; a new application could be made in a few years. More importantly, it is one decision, about one substance, by one agency in one country – for one purpose. (It was also a great disappointment for us in Massachusetts that our state voted down the ballot question to legalize psychedelics, but it too is just one state, where the question was extremely poorly promoted; Oregon and Colorado have proceeded with decriminalizing psilocybin.) If the entire “psychedelic renaissance” hung on the outcome of one agency’s decision or one state referendum, it would have been a shallow “renaissance” indeed. Even within the US there are already many other avenues for improving the legal status of psychedelics.
Public-domain AP photo of Timothy Leary.
That said: Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind probably did more to kick off the supposed current renaissance than anything else, and one of Pollan’s most important takeaways in the book was, let’s not screw this up. Psychedelics were famously popular in the 1960s, but the messages around them were dominated by overenthusiastic salespeople like Timothy Leary, who had little sense of caution. The resulting backlash was so strong that it created the ignorant world I grew up in, in the 1980s and 1990s, where even video games felt the importance of including a heavy-handed “don’t do drugs” message – extending even to cannabis. What the FDA ruling should remind us of, is the importance of avoiding the mistakes of the ’60s – so that the renaissance can lead to an enlightenment, if you will.
When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.
A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.
Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.
As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.
Defenders of cross-cultural mystical experience are right to note that in many widely varying cultures, respected sages have referred to the experience of an ultimate nonduality: a perception that everything, including oneself, is ultimately one. But one might also then rightly ask: which ultimate nonduality?
Nondualism may be the world’s most widespread philosophy, but it can mean different things – not merely different things in different places, but different things in the same place. Members of the Indian Vedānta tradition frequently proclaimed that everything is “one, without a second”, in the words of the Upaniṣads they followed. But they disagreed as to what that meant. Śaṅkara founded the Advaita Vedānta tradition – a-dvaita literally meaning non-dual – which argued that only the one, ultimate truth (sat, braḥman) was real, and all multiplicity and plurality was an illusion. His opponent Rāmānuja agreed that everything is “one, without a second” – but in his Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified nondual) school, that meant something quite different. All the many things and people we see around us – what Chinese metaphysicians called the “ten thousand things” – are parts of that ultimate one, and they are real, not illusory.
I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago on this blog, I posted an essay that I had written ten years before that, for Robert M. Gimello’s graduate course on Buddhist meditation traditions. That paper critiques Ninian Smart’s chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?” (in Steven Katz’s Mysticism and Language). My now twenty-year-old essay tears Smart to pieces for his comparison between Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga and the fourteenth-century English The Cloud of Unknowing. And in the light of my more recent thoughts on mystical experience, I now think that tearing up went too far.
There are likely a number of religious-studies scholars who would cringe and groan at Roland Griffiths’s studies of drug-induced mystical experience. I haven’t gone into their literature in a while, but I think it would be easy for them to say Griffiths is setting the study of mysticism back many decades. Because Griffiths’s stated conception of mystical experience is one that many religionists would already have considered very dated – even when I was studying them twenty years ago.
I say this because Griffiths’s first groundbreaking study, in indicating that many psilocybin volunteers had mystical experiences, measures mystical experience using a questionnaire based on W.T. Stace‘s Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960. And when I was in grad school twenty years ago, Stace’s work was often considered impossibly backward.
Continuing my response to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, I want to turn back now to the original point of contention with which our exchange first began: the role of conventional (sammuti/vohāra) and ultimate (paramattha) in Buddhaghosa’s thought. First and foremost, I am deeply puzzled by Ram-Prasad’s claim in his comment on my previous post that “Buddhaghosa does not use the locution ‘merely’ (matta) in reference to conventional language”, when one can find this passage on page 1094 of his and Heim’s own article:
At XVIII.28, [Buddhaghosa] says that “there comes to be the mere common usage of ‘chariot’” (ratho ti vohāramattaṃ hoti) from its parts but that an ‘examination’ (upaparikkhā) shows that ultimately there is no chariot.” Likewise, when there are the five aggregates of clinging, then there comes to be the mere common usage of ‘a being’, ‘person’”… Continue reading →
I now begin my responses to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on the thought of Buddhaghosa. Let me first reiterate a point I made early on: what I refuse is the interpretation that Buddhaghosa’s understanding of ultimate, conventional and the aggregates are merely phenomenological and not ontological. That is, I reject Heim and Ram-Prasad’s claim that “Buddhaghosa does not use abhidhamma as a reductive ontological division of the human being into mind and body, but as the contemplative structuring of that human’s phenomenology.” Emphasis added. I am not, and never was, denying a phenomenological element to Buddhaghosa’s ideas; I would have no objection to the claim that Buddhaghosa uses abhidhamma categories as both an ontological division of a human being and as a structuring of that human’s experience (contemplative or otherwise). As far as I can tell, the ontology/phenomenology distinction is not one that Buddhaghosa employs; in Heim and Ram-Prasad’s article I do not see any evidence that Buddhaghosa makes such a separation.
Indeed that very distinction of phenomenology from ontology seems to me to depend on a distinction between subject (the topic of phenomenology) and object (the topic of ontology). Such a split seems to me one that Buddhaghosa is unlikely to want to make, given his commitment to deconstruct the self/subject. And I think the refusal of such a split may be lent support by Heim and Ram-Prasad’s article itself, on points which I did not refer to because I suspect I am in agreement with them: namely, that Buddhaghosa makes no significant split between mind and matter. Continue reading →
