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| I trust the Orgy Pit's been scraped and buttered |
Many of the most formidable social and cultural problems we face today are rooted in the sharp divide (schism) that has divided Western civilization between science and religion.
Science claims invincible knowledge based on testing (empirical investigation of) the natural world. Most religions do little more than call for faith in supernatural beliefs along with obedience to codes of morality and ethics that require restraint, self-discipline, and worst of all self-sacrifice.
Since most religion, as traditionally understood, often rests on no more than blithe promises and pompous threats, its appeals to our allegiance seldom win.
The ethical ideals it claims to advocate (when not being hypocritical) don't stand a fighting chance against the constant injunction — thrust in our faith by screens, radios, and signboards — to ENJOY life to the hilt while we can.
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| What'd you do in there? - Well, I took the butter |
Too often, those in the religious camp, sensing the threat secularism poses to their own security, feel driven toward an aggressive fundamentalism in a desperate bid to salvage traditional loyalties.
The quest to establish a sound basis for proper conduct in today's world has been made particularly difficult. Why? A consequence of the "scientific" worldview has been to banish values from real life.
While many scientists, in their personal lives, are staunch advocates of such ideals like world peace, social justice, and greater economic equality (parity), the worldview promoted by modern science gives values no objective grounding, not in the grand scheme of things. Thinking like this, values' root and basis is purely subjective. So they bring along all the qualities that subjectivity suggests: being
- personal,
- private,
- idiosyncratic,
- relative,
- not to be talked about with others
- and sometimes even arbitrary.
The Buddha's Teaching
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| "If there's any religion...it would be Buddhism" |
Both Buddhism and science draw a sharp distinction between the way things appear and the way they really are. And both offer to open our minds to insights into the real nature of things normally hidden from us, sometimes in plain sight as falsified ideas based on distorted sense perceptions and "common sense."
Forget science-school and meditation. Let's dance!
Still, despite of Buddhism and science's affinity, it is necessary to recognize the great differences in the aim that separates Buddhism and science. Both may share certain conceptions about the nature of reality, but science is essentially a project designed to provide control and objective, factual knowledge, with information about the public domain. Buddhism is a spiritual path intended to promote inner transformation and the direct realization of the highest good, called awakening, enlightenment, liberation, or nirvana.
In Buddhism, the quest for knowledge is important but not as an end in itself or to control others. The main cause of our suffering and bondage is ignorance.
What does that mean? Ignorance (avijja) is not understanding things as they really are. Instead, we distort things even as we perceive them, judge, and label them. So the antidote needed to heal ourselves is knowledge or liberating-insight.
The type of knowledge acquired by practicing Dhamma differs from that sought by science in several ways. Most importantly, the knowledge sought is not gaining objective information about the physical world. It is about a deep personal insight into the real nature of our personal existence.
The aim is not to understand reality from the outside. It is to understand it from the inside, much as psychology originally intended to do. Knowledge from the perspective of one's own living experience is the key -- as it is to shamans, Gnostics, and experimenters on a quest in this lifetime.
We seek not debated "facts" and "opinions" as knowledge, but insight, wisdom, personal knowledge that is inescapably subjective. That's the point. The whole value of it lies in its transformative power and impact on our own life.
Concern with the outer world as an object of direct knowledge arises only insofar as the outer world is inextricably implicated in personal experience.
As the Buddha says, "In this body, with its perception and thought, I declare
- the world,
- the origin of the world,
- the cessation of the world, and
- the way to the cessation of the world."
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| First, I'll be born as a prince then renounce it all |
This means that Buddhism gives prime consideration to values. But even more, "values" for Buddhism are not merely projections of subjective judgments fashioned according to our personal whims, social needs, or cultural conditioning.
On the contrary, they are written into the texture of reality itself just as firmly as the laws of motion and thermodynamics. So values CAN be evaluated: rated in terms of being true or false and ranked as valid or invalid.
And part of our task in giving meaning to our lives, which means unearthing the true scheme of values. To determine the true gradation of values, we have to turn our attention inward and use subjective criteria of investigation. So what we find, far from being private or arbitrary, is an integral part of the objective order.
This order is permeated by the same lawfulness that governs the movement of the stars and planets.
Science says it's for something
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| Natural science (wiki) |
While natural science can be undertaken as an intellectual discipline, the Buddhist quest is an existential discipline. That can only be implemented by regulating and restraining our conduct, purifying our mind, and refining our capacity for attention.
What is there to pay attention to? To our own physical (bodily) and mental processes.
This kind of Buddhist training requires ethics all the way through. Ethical guidelines support and pervade the entire training. The starting point is right action, and the culmination is the highest liberation of the heart/mind.
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| OK, there's escape from this lack-of-fulfilment? |
It is just here that contemporary science approaches Buddhism in its discovery that "nature" is a process actually. It reveals the lack of any ultimate substance hiding behind a sequence of events. There are events. But this correspondence again points to a fundamental difference.
In Buddhism the impermanent, unsatisfying (unfulfilling), and impersonal nature of reality is not just some factual truth to apprehend (or believe in). It is above all an existential truth. It is a transformative principle.
It offers the key to being able to stop clinging to the false and to let go as we gain right understanding.
Right understanding (seeing things as they really are) leads to right liberation. To use this key for its sole purpose, which is to open the door to spiritual freedom, we must govern our conduct on the premise that the false idea of a substantial self is a delusion.
It is insufficient to merely intellectually grasp this selflessness as some idea or to turn it into a plaything of thought. The principle must be penetrated by training ourselves to discover the absence of selfhood in its subtlest hiding place, the deep recesses of our own bodies and minds.
[HOW? How can this ever be accomplished? Buddhist Meditation Master Pa Auk Sayadaw explains. By mastering "meditation" (the absorptions or jhanas), the mind/heart is purified and able to see. What does it look at? It breaks down this body, this materiality, into its components, the smallest of which are "form particles" (rupa kalapas). The body is not "body," but rather countless constituent elements constantly built up and torn down, rising and falling away. The mind is not "mind," but rather countless constituent elements (a stream of "mind-moments" called cittas) constantly built up and falling away. This is what's really there, if only we could ever see it as it truly is.
Knowing and Seeing: True...
We can see it. That is to say, we can know-and-see directly. How? First, we settle the mind into absorption, emerge and move to a deeper absorption. With practice, this comes at will. Then we turn our attention to the "fourfold setting up of mindfulness." This is just a fancy way of saying we give systematic attention to body, feelings, the mind, and various phenomena. With exercises to directly perceive the Dependent Origination of things (the fact that everything that arises arises dependent on causes and conditions), the mind is made ready to see things as they really are. And in doing so, it naturally lets go of ignorance, illusion, and falsehoods. It thereby gains light, knowledge, wisdom, and liberation.]
Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw of Burma
Buddhist thinkers and open-minded scientists, if they were to share insights and reflections, could show us an effective way to heal the divide. What divide? The rift between seeking "objective" knowledge and spiritual wisdom. We could bring about a reconciliation of science and spirituality.
In this way, spiritual practice could become an integral part of the discipline that aims at knowledge. Spiritual practice and knowledge combined could become the tools for achieving the highest good stuck in the world and breaking beyond limitations to enlightenment and spiritual freedom.
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| Hedonist Stephen Hawking in Epstein Files |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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| American Theravada monk Bhikkhu Bodhi |
- Online Dharma Lectures | BODHI MONASTERY
- Bhikkhu Bodhi (accesstoinsight.org, 2005) clarified and expanded by Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly
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