If you’re a western Buddhist, there’s a little ‘high moment’ happening right here and right now! Starting about 15 years ago, his holiness the Dali Lama (or ‘HH’ as hipster in-the-know Buddhist’s are apt to refer to him) began his now legendary ‘Mind and Life’ meetings with western psychologists and neuroscientists including; Richie Davidson, Paul Ekman, Daniel Goleman, Daniel Siegel and the likes. This, in addition to the foundational (and incredibly boring) work of Jon Kanan-Zinn, and the (spectacularly lovable but vanilla as all get out) baby boomer era Buddhist icons, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharen Salzburg and (that wild thing) Pema Chodren basically launched the NüBü2 (New Wave Of Buddhism 2.0) renaissance were currently experiencing. Yeah! Anyway, the Mind and Life crowd have issued tons and tons of ‘sciencey’ books that frame Buddhist philosophy, practices and phenomena in terms of their (snap-crackle-pop) psychological constructs and neurological concomitants. This book is not (yet another) one of those. At this point we probably have enough of those. So good. NOTE: if I sound snarky about all of this, it’s just an 80’s era, insecure adolescent ‘to cool for everything and everyone’ defense mechanism that I haven’t entirely outgrown. Mea culpa. I’m actually a BIG BIG fan of the ‘Neuroscience meets Meditation’ trend. Not only is it fascinating AF to hear about how meditation changes your brain, affect, cognition and behavior. It’s also super assistive in traversing the enormous dung heap of irrelevant religious nonsense that the Buddhist, and other eastern contemplative wisdom traditions are mired in. Go ahead and hate me for saying that. But please bare in mind, that I’m a long-time practitioner, and I have extensive training and experience in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Additionally, I have extensive training in the social sciences and I’m a working licensed therapist. If I bag on the eastern traditions, and popular psychology, it’s pretty much from an insiders perspective. I’m at least a ‘prosumer’ i.e. professional consumer of these books and ideas. So rest assured, I’m not that run of the mill, board IT guy in a gamer chat room, sub-readdit dwelling, myopic, blowhard, tiki torch, golf shirt and khakis sporting hater type. In other words, I’m not your average sh*tty atheist skeptic. I am a sh*tty atheist, but I’d like to assure y’all that I’m not one of those guys (I hope).
Anyway.
This is all a round about way of saying (a) there are tons of good ‘this is your brain on Buddhism’ books available, and (b) this is not one of those books.
This book is good, and useful for a whole different and equally important reason. But it’s not one of those.
This book is useful because it translates some of the frequently overwrought and subsequently confusing as hell Buddhist ideas into fairly down to earth, smart enough, plain ol’ English.
Not as easy as it sounds, and this book does a respectable job of it.
Buddhism has changed every culture it has encountered, and conversely, every culture Buddhism has encountered has changed it.
Buddhism is hitting our western, materialistic, dualistic culture, and we’re hitting back, to everyone’s benefit, with some systematic, hard nosed methodological clarity.
In addition to grounding Buddhist practices in a systematic, materialist, monistic framework, the west is also in the process of squaring the Buddhist world view with western philosophical traditions.
For instance:
Heracl*tus’s doctrine of eternal change is oft summarized with the phrase; no man can step into the same stream twice, for it is not the same river and it is not the same man.
This notion is frequently cited as a western philosophical analog to the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence (Anitya) which asserts that everything in existence, without exception, is transient, evanescent, inconstant and thereby fundamentally unsatisfying.
In other words.
The world is falling apart and it makes us all feel crappy.
Cool right?
Anitya (impermanence) is intimately associated with another Buddhist doctrine of Anatta (no-self) which declares that things (including you and I) have no essence, or soul or no permanent self.
In other words, there is no such ting as a soul, and that self ‘ego’ thing you’re identifying with is simply psychological smoke and mirrors.
Don’t make me quote Niche.
Cuz I will.
Dukha (human suffering) stems from obsessively and compulsively (an necessarily unsuccessfully) trying to find lasting satisfaction in this churning, changing impermanent and illusory world/self stuff.
Sartre and Camu anyone?
Buddha, Dharma and Songha (roughly translated as self knowledge and mastery, effective training, and community of likeminded individuals) is our only reliable refuge in this sh*t storm of suffering also known as the human condition.
Now we’re talkin’ Bill W (and friends) if you catch me.
But please, please don’t get me started!
Anyway.
I don’t know about y’all, but so far, none of this is counter to my experience. And if I was religious, this would definitely be the one!
This book does a nice job of expanding upon these concepts and bringing them to life in a way that won’t insult the intelligence and intellectual training of an educated contemporary western reader.
However.
Some of the poopy Buddhist bath water is still on this baby.
Unfortunately, some of the more cherished Buddhist ideals depend on magical thinking.
These are hard to discuss in this limited format, but in a nutshell, Buddhist’s frequently conflate phenomenologically derived epiphany i.e. cathartic meditation experiences, with scientific methodology and fact.
In other words, they often confuse experience with experiment, and make baseless truth claims about the fundamental nature of things derived from meditation experiences that were emergent from indoctrination in the Buddhist world view to begin with.
Thought Experiment: if I tell you that the universe is one big ‘conscious’ entity, and that we can merge with that ‘big universal consciousness’ by mediating, and you believe me, and then you sit down and ‘experience’ something like a non personal awareness, does this constitute proof of the initial hypothesis?
Answer: no.
But a-lot of Buddhists would claim yes, and even go so far as to claim this as a scientifically valid experiment.
It’s not.
It’s actually like, um, how do you say, ummmmm...... the opposite?
It’s a valid ‘first-person’ observation, but it’s not a reliable ‘third-person’ experimentally valid, double blind, randomly assigned, placebo controlled, replicated, peer reviewed finding.
No it is not!
So stop.
Please.
It’s embarrassing.
In a time when it is increasingly evident, the it’s bad news to become siloed in divisive ‘red verses blue’ world views, due to clever and well intended algorithmically derived personalized news and information feeds that ALWAYS obey your preferences, and ONLY confirm your biases.
The problematic nature of an uncritical approach, to taking as fact, a quasi religious, magical truth claim, based on first-person experiential observation, of an intrinsically ambiguous phenomena, conditioned (i.e. psychologically primed) by a compelling (however nonsensical) notion, floated on top of other comparatively reasonable philosophical presuppositions, should be self evident.
Just think of; every religious cult, or co*ckeyed, half baked, well meaning but actually disastrous political or cultural anything for examples.
Any way, some of this type of nonsense is alive and kicking in this text.
So buyer beware.
If I were to take the middle path, I’d say I ‘like’ this book.
But that would be an unsatisfying synthesis of my actual moment to moment experience of this text.
70% of the this book rocks.
25% is squishy but useful.
5% is poopy effluvium (great word, look it up RN if you don’t already know it).
That being said, the author seems like a mensch, and I really did enjoy this book and benefit from it immensely, and I’d say the world is a better place because of this nifty lil’ text.
So bring your inner sh*tty, skeptical, curious, open, accepting and loving self (or no-self if you want to go there) to your one, wild, first person experience of this (largely awesome and at times sort of squishy, and at other times even a little intellectually bio-hazardous) real good read.
