Tag Archives: Yoga Sūtras

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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The scattershot application of “neoliberalism”

27 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in Economics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Politics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Virtue, Work

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In my previous post I agreed with Wendy Brown and other critics of “neoliberalism” that something was genuinely new, and disturbing, about the attempt to treat education as producing “human capital”, a narrow economic value. I do think, however, that such critics greatly overplay their hand. That is, they extend the critique of “neoliberalism” to phenomena that are not even liberal, let alone neo – to longstanding, deeply human concerns that predate capitalism and its ideology.

In Brown’s case, the problem comes across most clearly in a footnote attacking David Brooks. Some years ago in the New York Times, Brooks had written a moving defence of traditional humanistic education:

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Our need for other people

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Buddhism, Flourishing, Friends, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure

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As I write this post, I, probably along with most of my readers, face severe restrictions on normal human social activity, in order to limit the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. Electronic communications have made it possible to continue a social life despite these restrictions – but much of this conversation tends to focus on the virus and the limitations of life under it. I find myself yearning for more conversations about other things, and you may be as well. I also do not think I have anything particularly profound to say about the virus so far. For these reasons, I am not going to write here about the virus, at least for now. Instead, for the next little while I’m going to write about other topics that I’d been planning to write about anyway, but on an increased frequency to suit my and others’ changed schedules: every Sunday rather than every alternate Sunday. This is the first such post. I was not thinking about the virus when I originally wrote it, but perhaps it takes on a different resonance now.

A good human life, in general, requires living with other human beings. Some would take this claim as a truism, but I think it’s important to establish it. The ideal of the autonomous, independent individual is not merely a modern Western conceit, as is usually thought; this ideal is held up as a high ideal by monastic traditions in ancient India, perhaps most prominently in the Yoga Sūtras and Jain Tattvārtha Sūtra which describe their highest ideal as kaivalya, aloneness.

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Intermediate ascents

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in God, Jainism, Monasticism

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It seems to me that the concepts of ascent and descent allow relatively easily for intermediate positions between them, compromises that attempt at a synthesis. I suspect that in this respect they are different from the related binary of intimacy and integrity. Thomas Kasulis tries to argue that intimacy and integrity are incommensurable – one may experience elements of each at once, but it is difficult to take a moderate position between them, let alone to establish a synthesis. I am not convinced that Kasulis is right about this, but I do think that at least middle grounds on intimacy and integrity are harder to establish than on ascent and descent.

For relatively few seek the pure transcendence of the Yoga Sūtras, abiding in a pure universality outside the changing world. It is an uncompromising and drastic ascent that demands we act and be with a higher universal, leaving the particulars of the world behind us. Jain monks, following a similar path, deliberately renounce dependence to all particulars up to and including food – they often end their lives through sallekhanā or santhara, intentional slow starvation. Continue reading →

The monk’s independence

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Generosity, Jainism, M.T.S.R., Monasticism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self, Serenity, Social Science

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It’s often said that “individualism” is an invention of the modern West – meaning the approach that defines human beings as independent and autonomous from their social context. The French sociologist Louis Dumont made this claim directly in contrast to India, seeing India as a highly communitarian place where an individual’s community and social status much more. Dumont applied this communitarian view not only to Indian society at large but to its theoretical thought.

Many students of other cultures soon come to see individualism as a Western conceit – a bizarre peculiarity of an eccentric society that went wrong with Descartes. If indeed the modern West is a complete solitary exception to the rule, then there would seem to be something to this view.

I wrestled with it for a while myself. I used to believe Dumont’s classification of India was correct. It certainly resonated with my personal experiences, seeing how much more my Indian family cared about family and community ties. But those experiences, combined with the communitarian stereotype of India found in the likes of Dumont and Max Weber, blinded me to things I read every day in graduate school for years without actually noticing. Continue reading →

Indian renouncers and the defence of culture

19 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Family, Jainism, Monasticism, Politics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self, Sex

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Patrick Deneen had an eloquent piece up this week at Front Porch Republic, a speech given at a student retreat held by the Tocqueville Forum. This speech is emblematic of many popular conservative (and I mean literal conservative) ideas, with implications that go wider than mere politics.

Deneen’s speech is a “defence of culture.” Following one Romano Guardini, Deneen understands culture in a specific sense that ties it essentially to nature, history and society. Culture thus defined is a tradition of interacting with nature and other humans, suspicious of change, deferring to the past and ready to pass it on to future generations. When defined this way, Deneen says, the enemy of culture is liberalism, the contemporary politics of individual choice and freedom at a great remove from nature, history and society. (In this sense, most of the libertarian American Tea Partiers are consummate liberals; liberalism is generally the ideology of both the modern left and the modern right.) Liberalism, Deneen says, endorses an “anti-culture,” or at least monoculture, in which the priority of individual over collective goods is everywhere enshrined. The particular kind of collective goods Deneen has in mind, I think, have above all to do with raising a family – for example, the ability to raise one’s children in an environment that is not thoroughly sexualized by scantily-clad magazine covers, Lady Gaga, Internet pornography and Bratz dolls. (The example is mine, but it’s true to Deneen’s position as I understand it.) Perhaps the most telling line in the piece, and the one that inspired me to write this entry, is this quote from Bertrand de Jouvenel: the political philosophers of liberalism are “childless men who have forgotten their childhood.” Continue reading →

Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together

26 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by in Christianity, Confucianism, Epics, Family, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Pleasure, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Social Science

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I’ve been thinking further about what kind of categories one may best use to classify philosophies and their associated ways of life. I do think my earlier classification of three basic ways of life hits on something quite important; but I also think Stephen Walker’s criticisms of that scheme (addressed here) are on point. Among those who reject traditional ways of life and knowing on non-ascetic grounds, there is more going on than the pleasure-seeking I identify with the concept of “libertinism.” That’s why I toyed in the same post with expanding the conception based on the Sanskrit puruṣārthas, the “four aims” of worldly success, pleasure, traditional duty and liberation. But as I mused at the bottom of that post, the puruṣārtha scheme loses the far-reaching nature of the three-ways-of-life comparison. The differences between asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism are not only differences in ways of living; they reach down to epistemology and ontology, theoretical ways of understanding the world. When the “libertine” mode of living and thinking is formally subdivided into artha and kāma, these two supposedly separate modes no longer look all that distinct from one another.

Instead, I now turn back to a different categorization I didn’t have time to mention in the puruṣārtha post: the intersecting axes of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity. These two ways of classifying philosophies seem to me to do more justice to East Asian thought, while still going “all the way down”: extending from theoretical foundations all the way up to life as lived. Continue reading →

Ascent and Descent

16 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Bhakti Poets, Christianity, Confucianism, Dialectic, Family, Flourishing, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

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Five years ago, on a language fellowship in India, I had more time to do broad reading in cross-cultural philosophy than grad school usually permitted. I wound up reading a lot of Ken Wilber, and had already been immersed in Martha Nussbaum’s thought for my dissertation. These two thinkers don’t have a whole lot in common, beyond coming out of roughly the same (American baby boom) cultural milieu and having an unusually wide-ranging philosophical outlook. But there is one set of categories that features prominently in both of their work, and I suspect for good reason: ascent and descent.

For Wilber, one of the most fundamental philosophical debates is that between Ascent and Descent: between a spiritual view that aspires to transcendence of the everyday material world, and a materialist view that embraces it. (Like the intimacy-integrity distinction – on which more shortly – the distinction is particularly interesting because it embraces theoretical as well as practical philosophy, metaphysics as well as ethics.) Some of Wilber’s sharpest criticisms are directed against ecological philosophies of interdependence, which suggest that what we ultimately need is to embrace our mutual dependence in the natural world. In Wilber’s eyes, such a view leaves us scarcely better off than the mechanistic individualism it aims to replace, for both views remain squarely within a materialist tradition of “descent,” neglecting the spiritual realm. I have noted before that, while Yavanayāna Buddhists often embrace such views of interdependence, they are wildly at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism, for reasons similar to those noted by Wilber.

Upheavals of Thought, the weighty tome that I would consider Nussbaum’s magnum opus, employs such a distinction through its third, longest and final part – entitled “Ascents of Love.” Continue reading →

Kant on Yudhiṣṭhira’s elephant

06 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epics, German Tradition, Honesty, Jainism, Morality, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Truth, Vedānta

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Michael Sandel has long been fond of a certain eccentric position on the Kantian ethics of lying. Kant, as I’ve noted before, takes an absolute prohibition against lying, even in the most extreme cases: you may not even lie to a murderer seeking a fugitive. If Anne Frank is in your attic, it is wrong to tell the Nazis that she isn’t. The position is deeply counterintuitive, to say the least, but I think it does follow from Kant’s ethics of unconditional duty.

Sandel, however, claims that Kant’s position is not quite as counterintuitive as it seems. Sandel regularly makes this claim in his Justice course, which I taught for as a teaching fellow, and which Sandel has now made available to the public as a course as well as in a book. While Kant brooks no lies, Sandel says, he is quite happy with misleading truths. As evidence Sandel points to Kant’s own life:

Kant found himself in trouble with King Friedrich Wilhelm II. The king and his censors considered Kant’s writings on religion disparaging to Christianity, and demanded that he pledge to refrain from any further pronouncements on the topic. Kant responded with a carefully worded statement: ‘As your Majesty’s faithful subject, I shall in the future completely desist from all public lectures or papers concerning religion.’ Kant was aware, when he made his statement, that the king was not likely to live much longer. When the king died a few years later, Kant considered himself absolved of the promise, which bound him only ‘as your Majesty’s faithful subject.’ Kant later explained that he had chosen his words ‘most carefully, so that I should not be deprived of my freedom… forever, but only so long as His Majesty was alive.’ By this clever evasion, the paragon of Prussian probity succeeded in misleading the censors without lying to them. (Sandel, Justice, p. 134)

I was reminded of Sandel’s position recently while leafing through Śaṅkara‘s commentary on the Yoga Sūtras – Continue reading →

Buddhists against interdependence

07 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Confucianism, Emotion, Friends, Hope, Jainism, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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It’s become something of a cliché to say that Buddhism is about embracing our “interdependence.” The mechanistic Cartesian worldview, so the story goes, has led us to think of human beings as subjects independent of the world around them, in a way responsible for our current environmental catastrophes. (Depending on who you ask, this idea of independence might also be responsible for patriarchy, racism, homophobia, class exploitation and an inability to express our emotions.) But Buddhists know better: Buddhists know that everything arises dependent on everything else, so we should affirm and celebrate our mutual ties to each other and to the earth. In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, Buddhism on this interpretation offers us an intimacy worldview, distinct from the integrity worldview of the modern West. This idea is perhaps most clearly found in the thought of Joanna Macy, but its spread goes much wider among Western (Yavanayāna) converts to Buddhism, especially (but not only) in the baby-boom generation.

The problem: this view is almost the opposite of what the classical Indian Buddhists – including the Buddha of the Pali suttas – actually taught. To be sure, the autonomous, independent selves that we would like to believe in are an illusion. We must indeed recognize the dependent co-arising (paticca samuppāda or pratitya samutpāda) of all things, acknowledge that everything arises out of a circle of mutually dependent causes.

Here’s the thing: this circle of causes is bad. Continue reading →