The Long View, Transience, Progress and the Profound

I recently attended a lecture at a local Sakya Tibetan Buddhist Monastery titled Dharma Lectures: Buddhism and the Hard Sciences. Lecturer Chris Rebholz did an impressive job presenting the intersection of science and Buddhist practice. Even though I've read Buddhism texts and have a Bachelor of Science, I came away from the lecture with new information that seemed to be operating on me in a way that might reconfigure some of my attitude about the meaning of Life.

I gained a lot from Rebholz's explanation of emptiness. It is not a black void. Rather, it is ultimate transience of everything. Meditating with a mental frame of emptiness is not to achieve a kind of ignorance of the world and objects (nouns) in it, rather it is to acknowledge every last little thing you know and see it through the lens of eternity. Unlike Christian and Islamic concepts of a God with an agenda with eternity being the field in which God is going to actualize that agenda, the Buddhist concept is an inquiry into reality at the level of a scientific physics in which nouns such as tables and even mountains have a limited lifespan, with even Earth having limits to its permanence, much less the whims of social fashion and politics. To meditate in emptiness is to simply grapple with and hopefully be at ease with the transience of all that you know. (or as I like to think of it: every noun you know)

Chris Rebholz focused on a few quotes by Geshe Thupten Jinpa that basically claim objective reality and Buddhism are in perfect agreement, that empiricism is trumps everything else in science and Buddhism equally. The gist of all this was to indicate a strong presence of objectivism in Buddhism.

I'll drop pretentious language and say this lecture made me feel real good about Buddhism. I went home fired up about an objectivist, reality worshipping, Godless religion...no not religion, rather Rebholz stressed it is not a religion but a mode of inquiry expressed socially as rhetorical logic and privately as meditation.

In the days after the lecture I scoured the web using search terms that basically bind Buddhism, Objectivism, Science and Technology. I came up with nothing. Even trying refresh and augment my reference to emptiness I got references less clear than Rebolhz's, such as this Emptiness is Form, which, to me, is silly at best, and an attack on logical language at worst.

But that is one writing, by someone who has a prominent webpage, not endorsed by a set of or even one major monastery in the west or east. Every afternoon in most monasteries in Asia monks meet and present their views of reality, with the listeners harshly attacking whatever weakness the detect. I will assume their is much more vetted and strong argument for Buddhism among those monks than this unendorsed writer with a high profile webpage.

After a few hours, my web based research had these results:

• 1%    ↳ Objectivist/Science/Technology Buddhism
• 9%    ↳ Logic-undermining content (e.g. emptiness).
• 90%    ↳ Equal valuation of all sentient beings.

This is when my excitement for Buddhism began to break down.

The Technium wants what evolution began (WTW page 270) and I'll posit evolution is contrary to Buddhist claims of human delusional sensibilities of superiority and inferiority, in the evolution certain things gain advantage while some other thing has disadvantage. In some cases we can state plainly one group has the winning hand, and by winning hand we could mean greater array of options, luxury, ease, or just plain old ability to stay alive.

Buddhist contests in rhetorical logic have enjoyed a few thousand years in which Buddhist wisdom easily won by calling people's sense of superiority/inferiority foolishness. Evolution -both biological and technological- offers a reality that undermines Buddhist schema of valuation.

The Sound Craftsmen -by Seth Galbraith

Twilight of the Elites tipped me off to this speech by C. S. Lewis:

http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

The Inner Ring thesis explains the fundamental social dynamic by which elitism corrupts previously honest normal people (the "mainspring" of "The World.") The existence of informal power structures is inevitable and morally ambiguous, perhaps even good, but our instinctive fear of being left outside the inner ring causes us unnecessary suffering and tempts us to do wrong things in the futile pursuit of an impossible goal.

(When I say "people are monkeys" or "humans are social animals" this is usually what I am getting at: our irrational obsession with everyday status. When you combine this with the tendency of people to act like jerks and make rash decisions when they imagine themselves to have a little authority, the irrational obsession is useful: in certain circumstances we need quick decisions more than we need right decisions or popular decisions and a social hierarchy helps us do that. These situations were common for our ancestors, but rare for civilized people, so the lure of the Inner Ring seems exotic and mystical.)

But there is an alternative to living an empty, sometimes corrupting life pursuing membership in an Inner Ring. If you put some effort into actively resisting the desire to belong to exclusive groups that exist for exclusion's sake, you can become a "sound craftsman" - an exclusive brotherhood of sorts defined by the integrity of their work, who add honor to their professions rather than competing for honor like dogs fighting for scraps. The sound craftsmen are a lonely and powerless bunch in their way - they don't feature in many great capers or conspiracies, but they do good work, and in a world produced by human effort, doing good work makes the world better.

(When I talk about "the engineers" and "The Long War", what I have in mind are the "sound craftsman" - people who improve whatever profession they are in by understanding and giving life to the essentials of that profession. I tend to think of them as engineers and designers, but they could be academics, janitors, artists, maybe even soldiers and politicians. C. S. Lewis points out that cultivating this virtue sometimes requires the sound craftsmen to painfully suppress their craving to be accepted and advance socially.)

This thesis is also the undoing of all conspiracy theories and the reification of Conspiracy Theory writ large. The Knights Templar, Priory of Sion, Freemasons, Rothschild Family, Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Trilateral Commission, Reticulan Empire or Reptilian Visitors are ultimately just superficial structures of formal ritual, membership and rank, while the real power is held by an informal clique of Rothschilds or Reptilians within the conspiracy. And since the formal structure doesn't matter a whit, we can dispense with all those hypothetical secret societies, and recognize that inner circles with no names, using innuendos for passwords and our insatiable desire for belonging as their ultimate blackmail, form spontaneously in the organizations of the daylight world: government, business, church, etc.

The Conspiracy as an elegant scheme is a farce, but Conspiracy as a pervasive force driving history is real and perhaps even fundamental.