Tag Archives: phenomenology

Getting psychedelic spirituality right

29 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Health, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Politics, Psychology

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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.

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Finding mysticism in unexpected places

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Consciousness, Daoism, Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Meditation, Serenity

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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.

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Beyond the Turing test

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology

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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.

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Experiencing different ultimate unities

21 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Consciousness, Metaphysics, Vedānta

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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.

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Who cares about phenomenological similarities?

20 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Roman Catholicism

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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.

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Mystical experience across cultures

06 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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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.

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Mere convention vs. seeing correctly

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Truth

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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 →

There is only name and form

28 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in Consciousness, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Self

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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 →

Buddhaghosa on seeing things as they are (1)

15 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Meditation, Metaphysics, Self, Truth

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Earlier this year I examined the classic Pali Milindapañhā dialogue and its claim that while one can speak of oneself as a “convention” (vohāra), ultimately (paramattha) a person is not found. I referred in passing to the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification), the most famous work of the great Theravāda philosopher Buddhaghosa, as following this understanding. And I noted that on this view a person, or a chariot, can most accurately be described in reductionist terms, as atomized parts; the ultimate reality lies beyond that convention.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad took issue with this description in a comment, referring me to Maria Heim’s forthcoming book The Voice of the Buddha – and to an article he wrote with Heim in Philosophy East and West entitled “In a double way”. Neither of these has been officially published yet, but I could find a preprint version of “In a double way” on PEW’s site for “early release”.

The article claims that Buddhaghosa uses abhidhamma categories, such as the five aggregates (khandha), not as “as a reductive ontological division of the human being” but rather as “the contemplative structuring of that human’s phenomenology.” (1)1 That is to say that according to Heim and Ram-Prasad, Buddhaghosa is not trying to talk about what exists or what human beings and other entities really are, just about the kinds of experiences human beings have, and especially those found in meditation. The article comes to this conclusion through a welcome close reading of the Visuddhimagga, something which, the authors note accurately and unfortunately, “has rarely been attempted in competing views of him…” They add: “It would be a welcome development in the study of Buddhaghosa if other scholars were to offer further or contrasting interpretations – e.g., as that he engaged in constructing a metaphysical dualism – based on such textual analysis rather than on an a priori commitment to a picture of abhidhamma and its interpreters.”

To this I reply: challenge accepted. Continue reading →

A book about everything

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Epics, Epistemology, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language, Physics and Astronomy

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Recently I’ve been carrying around and reading a copy of G.W.F. Hegel’s masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Carrying a book with such a strange and obscure title, and no cover art, sometimes makes me think: what would I say to a curious onlooker, whether friend or stranger, who asked the deceptively simple question, “What’s that book about?”

To a simple question one wishes to give a simple answer. In the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit I think there is only one good simple answer that one can give to the question “What’s that book about?” It is a one-word answer: everything. Continue reading →