Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism Is True": Book Review

For those skeptical of supernatural claims and theistic versions of Buddhism, Robert Wright continues the quest that his earlier books such as The Moral Animal and The Evolution of God began. These titles hint at Wright's terrain, where fact and speculation, the tangible and the experiential, blur. He explores in Why Buddhism Is True the worldview that in the time of the historical Buddha could not have been clearly expressed in pre-scientific, and very pre-Darwinian terms to human mindsets.

Fresh from teaching courses on Buddhism and science at Princeton and similar courses at the Union Theological Seminary, Wright blends a wide-ranging series of investigations summed up from neural and biological research. His thesis proposes that the truth-claims of the dharma were a first, and correctly directed, step towards our own understanding of natural selection and the drives it creates. Born with them, we can free ourselves from them. Buddhism predicted the remedy for our human condition.

For instance, what on the savannah might have kept us reproducing, in thrall to our communal band, and with sufficient resources to guard against hunger or competition now linger in us. They may be go under the names of lust, social fear of being shamed, avarice, gluttony and greed, but they convey the same "fetters" which Buddhist teaching encourages, and demands, we must overcome if we want to reach a more balanced and controlled mental and physical state, freed of the illusions of the senses.

Around this central argument, Wright spins a lot of tales. A Foreigner song stuck in his mind, an annoying sitter near him on a meditation retreat, an urge to become easily irritated. He's been on the Buddhist path a while, but he rejects the trappings which have grown up around the teaching. He opts for a secular version, acknowledging that it may well be diluted (as is mindfulness or yoga) as it turns to the West, but he analyzes, in a final addendum. the core concepts that his book's laid out about establishing the veracity of what the Buddha and adepts since have incorporated into the dharma.

The tone is casual despite the heaps of learning stirred in. Wright writes again for a popular audience. Such interpretations possess value, for those of us less able or less leisured to delve into what the labs or monasteries for that matter might be generating as scholarship. However, the weight of so much data, dispersed over many chapters, sometimes slows the pace. Despite his genial tone, parts of this felt repetitious, belaboring the obvious once stated. Yet I find this same reaction to some treatments of Buddhism. A core teaching, a set of instructions  can be summed up pithily, but like chess, for each pursuit the application approaches the infinite. This might convince, therefore, those already initiating some dharma practice for a while, While Wright introduces teaching, it's more its implementation.

That leads him near the conclusion to some elevated claims. He endorses Daniel Ingram's promise that meditation results can be attained with diligence rapidly, and not just by those with decades of training. Wright like many admits that his transports have not occurred often, and when one did, he shows how ephemeral it was. He counsels daily discipline, more to calm and to establish more within one's reactive mechanism (not a term he uses) a longer-range, considered, and composed response to the triggers which, as with road rage, we inherit from billions of years of evolution, becoming an organism determined to gain ground, acquire loot, store up calories, and dominate by trophy wives.

I expected the author to turn to a philosopher who also predicted ways in which we can comprehend our predicament, and who is seen in retrospect as sympathetic to Buddhism, Schopenhauer. In my e-galley, I did not find any mention of the World as Will and Representation that he conceived. It seems prescient here. There's discussion of contemporary thinkers, more from psychology than philosophy..

This book will create some debate, I predict, among the more traditional Buddhist practitioner; those open to his analytical, even detached attitude at times, and his production of a practical set of guidelines, may benefit from a presentation of the dharma seeking liberation not into a higher realm, but from the natural selection which tethers us to demands which prevent us from fully entering the state the Buddha modeled. Sure, as Wright concurs, sentience and cognition and evolution into our present status all have definite advantages. But as to drawbacks, he advises the dharma. Even if the science we now promote might in the future shift, the bedrock of the dharma, Wright avers, remains solid. Beholden as we'll be to our genetic inheritance, we can nurture by Buddhism our true nature.

 (Amazon US 8-8-17 + Edelweiss+; this review by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker appeared after I wrote mine. It's titled in the print copy "American Nirvana" and at the website as "What Meditation Can Do for Us and What it Can't")

Fate of my fathers

Last year, I remarked to a FB thread that the Irish might have suffered trauma in surviving An Gorta Mór. A recent study verified this epigenetic transfer to children born to parents who had endured the Holocaust, after all. I was mocked immediately as if I was trying to support white privilege, and as if I was discounting somehow the experience of the Middle Passage and black slavery and abuse.

Not sure how all this equates in the victimhood sweepstakes, but it wasn't my intent to enter that contest. I merely wondered, as Séan de Fréine did half a century ago in his little book The Great Silence, how the impact of the sudden and dramatic loss of one's identity rooted in language, culture, and family might be shattered so its effects were transferred by mores and habits from those effected.

In de Fréine's account, he focused on the nationalist legacy, but I recall hearing Garrett O'Connor speak of this in nature as well as nurture terms twenty-odd years ago. His chapter on this topic in Tom Hayden's The Great Famine collection of essays suggested from O'Connor's treatment of we Irish how this might have come down 150 years later, and left imprints on dynamics and complexes.

My ancestral region has lost 80% of its population since that mass death and emigration crippled its economy, its coping mechanisms, and its people's prospects. How might that have emanated in my forebears? How, huddled in a farmhouse rebuilt around 1851, might they have dealt with this--or not?

Psychoanalyst Michael O'Loughlin explores this, and he lists some of the research advanced. It's no longer apparently a fringe idea, despite my FB deniers. As genetics progresses, so do explanations.

Now, I write this short entry far from my expertise, but I raise it anew as I happened to see one pundit fear how this upsetting behavior undergone by millions now might echo down the DNA so to speak. The shakeup among half the nation in terms of their expectations for the election leaves many around me self-medicating with more pot, more booze, and more indulgences. I lack this reaction, but it may be indeed my inherited detachment from emotion from my own clan, who knows? An useful article in Discover Magazine in March 2013 elaborates discoveries of Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf.

Apparently I am vindicated. While my own family history is left for discretion off this day's reflections, I can see evidence for supporting patterns I have inherited from stress and separation very early on. While this does not ease my challenges directly, it does offer me explanations for why I am at least in part--is it nature and nurture?-- the way I perplexingly am, facing a topsy-turvy New Year.

The In-Crowd

How much do our quick decisions and snap judgments rest on our implicit, innate bias? I have often wondered about how our ancestral groupings, to use Dunbar's Number of no more than 150 people among whom we can establish trust and form bonds, wired into our brain capacity, works in out post-prehistoric cosmopolis. Two NYU psychologists published their summary of an apt experiment.

This finding — that people are reflexively prone to “intergroup bias” in punishment — is consistent with what many scientists believe about humans’ evolutionary heritage. Homo sapiens spent thousands of years in close-knit communities competing for scarce resources on the African savanna. Members of the in-group were presumably sources of help, comfort and cooperation; members of opposing groups, by contrast, were sources of threat and violence. As a result, the tendency to instinctively treat in-group members with care and foreigners with caution may be etched into our DNA.
Our finding sheds some light on the nature of implicit racial bias. Because people frequently form group memberships on the basis of race, the same biases that emerge along group lines may underlie many instances of racial discrimination. This human tendency is almost certainly inflamed when different racial groups are exposed to racial stereotyping and institutional discrimination, but it may start with common instincts driven by the pressures of evolution.
We need not resign ourselves to a future of tribalism. On the contrary, our research suggests that people have the capacity to override their worst instincts — if they are able to reflect on their decision making as opposed to acting on their first impulse. These insights, for example, could inform the types of implicit bias training programs that the Department of Justice is now requiring for nearly 30,000 prosecutors and law enforcement officers.
Acknowledging the truth about ourselves — that we see and think about the world through the lens of group affiliations — is the first step to making things better.

A short entry today. But as I've been mulling over the pull of the tribal and the push of the social, this merits archiving on this blog. Living in one of the most polyglot cities in the world, in a situation few since maybe the few million in ancient Rome have encountered, I wonder about the pressures exerted. Diversity and multiculturalism are taught and seen in the couples and children around me. But the force of the familiar, as in the perpetuation of the old country and the mother tongue, also dominates the local scene, and it does not fade as immigration sustains the counter-assimilation tide.

Sorry if you expected me to review this Berenstain Bears title. I can guess the plot, however. There's sure a lot of headbands sported on that playground. It's encouraging to see two bespectacled hip-cubs.

John C. Wathey's "The Illusion of God's Presence": Book Review

 

This computational biologist crunches the data to investigate why humans "are prone to the feel the illusion of God's presence". Examining evolutionary theory, John C. Wathey looks at the hard-wiring that underlies spiritual and religious emotions. He explains that his sequel will tackle mystical experience, while this first volume disenchants readers who may be caught up in unverifiable beliefs, and who may assume that the call of the ineffable or intangible belongs only to humans in nature. 

Instead, "belief appears to be a completely natural, neurobiological phenomenon". Wathey compares religion to language as a cultural universal, to which our make-up predisposes us, and one that our cultural exposure shapes into a particular expression of our faith. This may or may not be a personal God. But, Wathey confronts the problem at the heart of such a being in the Western monotheistic tradition, as well as in certain Hindu sects. Cruel judge or loving presence, the Almighty in this dual manner rules over 80% of the world's faithful.

In his phrase, Wathey grabs the elephant in the room by his tusks. He draws from his own experience for a religious encounter, according to his definition, which happened to him as an adult and as a non-believer. Devoid of spiritual content, this event nonetheless matched the parameters for an otherworldly intrusion. This puzzle drove him, raised Presbyterian, to write The Illusion of God's Presence. He wonders why so many naturalistic definitions of faith avoid accounting for the believer's subjective experience.

He labels such a situation as a by-product of "a human neo-natal survival instinct" built on an "infant's innate neural model of its mother". Born with a "circuitry" as a bond and as dependence, the adult version normally lies dormant. But, under stress, this innate model triggers religious belief through religious experience. A certainty that God exists as a presence is felt. Prayer, linguistically, replaces an infant's cry for this comforting maternal being. Humans relate this to their previous cultural model of a spiritual deity. This may account for the persistence of the feminine in so many spiritual conceptions, sexual obsessions, compulsions to pray, and the tilt of women to believe more.

Basing his concepts on biology, sea turtles, gulls, or rhesus monkeys (to name a few), Wathey offers precedents for innate cognition. Our conceptions of God may be supernormal stimuli which fill a God-shaped vacuum (adapting Francis Collins' metaphor) with emotion and cognition. Wathey reckons that God's presence as humans sense it is "largely innate" on a neural basis. The detail as Wathey's argument continues may overwhelm the less biologically fascinated among readers, but the documentation and the evidence, sifted thoughtfully, should enable audiences to support the author.

Wathey advances beyond Freudian theories to critique a dual personality model of a God, who as Roger Finke and Rodney Stark determine, operates successfully within a religious organization by a theology "that can comfort souls and motivate sacrifice". He inserts testimony from a follower and survivor of Jim Jones' People's Temple as a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of credulity. 

Most of this book investigates, however, not the social but the neural root of the biological causes nurturing religious beliefs. That comfort of a personal caregiver clashes with the demands by a formalized authority. Wathey argues in Part Two that a two-dimensional approach explains why a religious or spiritual emotion persists. Cognitive theories are also biologically based, but only this dogged dual-root system delves deeper, he asserts.

In the last third of this narrative, Wathey shifts from the "why" to the "how", as neuroscience begins to include behavioral, psychometric, and twin studies. Wathey integrates these to start to scrutinize the "sensation of God's presence". Wathey avers that this may be an "accidental consequence" of evolution. A "trick of the brain" may endure in human adults, that another being exists, who may bring us love and comfort. For many grown-ups, religious emotion resembles addiction, while certainty without proof characterizes faith. For "in the light of biology, God is a spiritual phantom rather than a supernatural spirit". Born with a longing for this being, many humans craft this desire into a being. Those who believe tend to increase their offspring and pairing with mates similarly inclined reinforces mutual trust as adherents of a particular cultural manifestation of this "universal" formulation. Wathey left this reviewer wanting more, but after all, a second book is in the works.

Concluding, Wathey welcomes personal implications. He particularly urges his readers who have become uncertain about their own faith to face these scientific findings bravely. He examines mind-body dualism, the hope of immortality, and our duty to care for our earth. Rather than theological bickering or "irrelevant moral imperatives", Wathey reminds us of our humanism and our hubris. "We have eaten of the tree of knowledge, and no God had to cast us out of our earthly paradise as punishment. We are trashing it ourselves." Leaving behind fear or hope in the imaginary, John C. Wathey in this erudite, engaging study guides readers towards a secular ethics aimed at reducing our numbers and easing our impact upon "the web of life that is our real creator". (New York Journal of Books 1-11-16; excerpt 2-5-16 via Salon on "God is Not a Prude".)

Soul Food for Thought

 

Have you ever thought of "What Books Do for the Human Soul?" Maria Popova at Brain Pickings reports on Alain De Botton and his London-based The School of Life. I reviewed his Religion for Atheists and I recall when the radio finally faded into static on the Quebec-Maine border that Layne and I listened to a radio interview podcast from the NPR show On Being where he talked about setting up a secular church of sorts (for lack of a better noun; mine, not his) where humanists could find ritual, share meaning, and make community. The SoL appears as the fruit of that, and more, as well as the the city's congenial colleagues who have formed five years ago Sunday Assembly. If Layne and I had more time or more planning in London last December, we'd have paid them a visit.

Like a church, SoL can cost. After all, teachers have to be paid. I note three SoL bibliotherapists set up sessions in person or by Skype at £80; this seems fair as I heard (what do I know these days?) the "hour" of therapists charges $200. I'd rather talk about books than myself if I had to go to a session. 

Popova by way of De Botton's endeavor sums up four main benefits for reading, free of charge. I copy them below as I find them a useful summation. You may want to visit their video, and their site.

1. IT SAVES YOU TIME
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver — because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

2. IT MAKES YOU NICER
Literature performs the basic magic of what things look like though someone else’s point of view; it allows us to consider the consequences of our actions on others in a way we otherwise wouldn’t; and it shows us examples of kindly, generous, sympathetic people.
Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system — the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side — they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-conscious, and cynical world.

3. IT’S A CURE FOR LONELINESS
We’re weirder than we like to admit. We often can’t say what’s really on our minds. But in books we find descriptions of who we genuinely are and what events, described with an honesty quite different from what ordinary conversation allows for. In the best books, it’s as if the writer knows us better than we know ourselves — they find the words to describe the fragile, weird, special experiences of our inner lives… Writers open our hearts and minds, and give us maps to our own selves, so that we can travel in them more reliably and with less of a feeling of paranoia or persecution…

4. IT PREPARES YOU FOR FAILURE
All of our lives, one of our greatest fears is of failure, of messing up, of becoming, as the tabloids put it, “a loser.” Every day, the media takes us into stories of failure. Interestingly, a lot of literature is also about failure — in one way or another, a great many novels, plays, poems are about people who messed up… Great books don’t judge as harshly or as one-dimensionally as the media…

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others — because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

I think I can use these in teaching, and in my own application of literature. Where I work, I am now the only regular full-time faculty member in the liberal arts, so it's getting difficult to claim my turf, or to find any colleagues to talk to about my interests. So, I turn more and more to the virtual realm to stay in touch with those who think and ponder and debate Big Questions for a living, or what's more important still, for leisure or the reflection that the liberal arts are supposed to free us up to pursue.

Photo: nearly every image in a search for "bibliotherapy" is female, and young. Nearly all for "reading" are cartoon owls and babies, or not-babies, but female, and young. So, this instead, a snapshot of the writer as slightly younger (4 years ago) man, and of a not young, not female, reader, undergoing therapy by sustenance and by reading the NYT Book Review in my happy place, near Mount Hermon, in California north of Santa Cruz. More fun than a $200 "hour," at least one that a shrink might provide. How other happiness might cost $200/hour best left to "reflection."

Peter Watson's "The Age of Atheists: Book Review

If neither science nor religion suffices, how do we get past our present impasse? Do we lament our lack of progress, or welcome possibility? Seven years to the day, I finished this after the same author's "Ideas: A History of Thought from Fire to Freud."  Both hefty works share this veteran journalist and now intellectual historian at Cambridge's dogged devotion to rational thinking over supposition, and the view, as his 2006 book concluded, that our human perspective is better suited to watching our world pass by and act out as if we peer at a zoo rather than a monastery. He acknowledges the scientific mission to dissect and pin down all that we observe, yet he nods to the atavistic tendency embedded within many of us to yearn for transcendence. That impulse, his new book agrees, will not fade soon, but the twentieth century charted here (although starting with Nietzsche towards the end of the nineteenth) celebrates the triumph of evolution, the breakthroughs in physics, the insights of psychology, and the wisdom of philosophy, art, literature, and communal engagement which enrich our current times and allow us so much liberty.

"Ideas" took me a month of evenings to study, given its 740 pages and 36 topical chapters, book-ended by a substantial introduction and conclusion, to chart the multi-millennial span of civilized endeavor. By contrast, I fairly raced through about 540 pages of the present book, which I highlighted (on a Kindle advanced copy, which had its flaws in format) in eighty-five instances that show my engagement with its provocative exchanges, cover roughly 125 years; Watson has also written (unread by me) "The Modern Mind" (2001) about the twentieth century, so I wondered how much of that third big book overlapped with "The Age of Atheists."

"Ideas" anticipates many of the newest book's themes. Progress continues despite those who fear it. The brain battles those who fear it. Meaning beckons but floats out of our grasp. Science discovers more only to ponder ultimate questions to pursue. Unsurprisingly, William James' pragmatism and Max Weber's sociology return, prominently among the hundreds of thinkers summarized and paraphrased here. That is both Watson's skill and this book's necessary limitation: he quotes and cites nimbly, making recondite concepts accessible. Yet, this popular touch and the breadth required to survey so much as an historian with his own biases and predilections may leave the specialized reader frustrated that his or her pet theory or favorite thinker suffered by its few pages meted out per topic.

That caveat addressed, an inevitable result of a one-volume book able to be held in two hands, this presentation conveys a firmly Western-centered, by-now familiar point-of-view. Nietzsche remains its driving force, and his fervent denial of a divine presence outside of the alienated, defiant human imagination reverberates through mavericks as diverse as Lenin and Joyce. Watson recognizes that German iconoclast's insanity, even as he roots for this raw challenge to Christian hegemony which encouraged his subjects, American and European rebels who rejected God and welcomed inquiry.

Watson's investigation roams as widely as one expects for an historian tracking modernity's slow march away from credulity and comfort found in the ethereal or emotional, to where more and more of us wind up today, in the post-modern predicament of a worldview where neither cold science nor warm faith eases the loss of grand meaning or ultimate purpose which many contemporaries lament. 
He addresses, as an early example of his wide-ranging bent, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's assertion that charts richer nations' secularization offset by declining birthrates, whereas poorer nations' perpetuation of belief-based systems as a solace for suffering and privation leads to a more populated humanity with "existential insecurity" which overall is becoming more, not less, religious.

Secular proponents, therefore, must contend with sociological explanations for belief, as well as psychological ones. Atheism, Watson finds, may be in the ascendent among the cohort he supports, but a growing sense among developed nations and educated societies of pervasive personal and social disenchantment reveals that consumerism cannot assuage the longing for meaning deep within us. William James agreed that religion emanated from what Watson phrases as "born of a core uneasiness within us" and that for many, faith was seen as the solution. Replacing that with the inspiration of music, the escapism of art, the thrill of scientific discovery, the plunge into sex or drugs, drove many in these chapters to attempt to fill up their empty souls with a spirit energized by bold possibilities.

The usefulness of religion, for James, might be succeeded by the vocabulary of reason; others who followed his suggestions looked to fields as different as dance or fashion to apply more daring experiments. Stories we tell ourselves, as Watson portrays Richard Rorty's model, move beyond the transcendental to the empirical and experiential narratives and scenarios which ground themselves in the body. Watson presents the Swiss art colony at Anscona, the critical faculties generating doubt as explored by Stefan George, and the Symbolist poetry of the early century as settings within which ecstasy might sustain itself, as generated within a movement breaking down distinctions between individuals and between concepts so as to release a mystical jolt, or a disorienting confrontation. These encounters, which would engender the cult of the body and the New Age or therapeutic trends which would return with the "religion of no religion" at Big Sur's Esalen in the 1960s, carry a charge that Watson credits by way of many current approaches in which we treat and regard each other.

George Santayana mused: "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it." A common sentiment among those Watson favors, as resignation to mortality and the impossibility of knowing the secrets behind all of creation appears to gain pace as the century's wars and brutalities weaken rational explanations. Impotence to change human nature contends against discontents driven to improve the human condition. Freud represents the latter contingent: Watson credits him for the dominant shift in modern times, "which has seen a theological understanding of humankind replaced by a psychological one".

Watson observes intriguing indicators of this shift, across the creative spectrum. The cover illustration of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1884-1886) depicts people not worshiping, but picnicking and promenading. One couple, dressed in black, appear to be looking on, "from the (moral?) higher ground" at the crowds "enjoying themselves in very secular ways, most with their backs turned". Additionally, this French painting continues a tradition of "public contemplation" as its many figures reveal serious play. This happens despite a breakdown on the canvas of perceived or imposed order into a teasing shimmer of reality manifesting itself more subtly. The satisfaction for the viewer emanates in impressions "as a web of tiny, distinct stillnesses".

Revolutions and conflicts darken chapters; from the Soviet triumph, "one propaganda poster posited 'prayers to the tractor' as alternative ways to produce change and improvement in the community". Watson emphasizes the substitution of idolatry and worship within totalitarian societies and parties. He also notes that religion was not eradicated in many regions of the U.S.S.R. except by elimination of believers during Stalin's purges. An underlying message persists: belief will be a fallback for humans caught in difficulties, and faith may be wired into human nature despite rational powers.

Rilke sought in the foreknowledge of death that which appears to distinguish humans from other mammals: a direction to guide searchers towards a sense that mortality "drives the plot of life". He recognized that consciousness itself, as Watson puts it, may be "a crime against nature". Why evolution may have embedded within humans the powers of song, the aleatory, musical ability, or a sense of beauty, as well as a tendency in many to interpret phenomenon as supernatural, sparks some of the liveliest later chapters. Suffice to say that many arguments arise, and as many suggestions.

Virginia Woolf's often-quoted observation that around "December 1910" a change happened, so that "reality was no longer public", accompanies modernist plunge into the interior response rather than the recording of the focused, outward observation. The loss of confidence in a shared vision and the gain in conviction that a personal reaction conveyed the spiritual experience that whirled within the intimate sphere and not in the emptying cathedral propels the writers and creators Watson introduces. Oscar Wilde sums up the leap forward: "It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the skepticism of which they were afraid." Kafka throws up "the sediment left by the great monotheisms: that the mind of God can never be known, we shall never solve the mystery of God because God is the name we give to the mystery itself". (Watson astutely footnotes, if half the book away, an apposite aside that St. Augustine had a similar opinion.)

Through Chabad and Beckett, Salman Rushdie and The Doors, Philip Roth and Theodore Roszak, Boris Yeltsin and Timothy Leary, as the second half of the century progresses, Watson explores the impacts after the purported death of God within academia, theological disputes, and popular culture. He delves into less-familiar texts such as the forgotten bestseller Joshua Liebman's "Peace of Mind" (1946) to prove how the post-WWII merger of religion with psychology enticed clergy into roles as counselors, and how this promoted the therapeutic rather than theological cure across America. Such a range of references and examples accounts for much of the bulk of this book, but its contribution towards an accessible account from which a patient, intelligent, and reflective reader will benefit greatly cannot be diminished. Predictably, those immersed in a particular school of thought may cavil at the generalizations and judgments Wilson must convey by such compression given three-dozen chapters. However, the documentation he provides and the stimulation he generates merit respect.

Countercultural chronicler Roszak, to whom Watson gives welcome and lengthy attention, repeated José Ortega y Gasset's reminder: "Life cannot wait until the sciences have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready." An urgency boosts these late-century sections. Their pace quickens as Watson weighs dozens of competing or compatible attempts to forge a third way, apart from the calculated certainties of a stolid scientific method or the fervent claims of a fundamentalist religious precept. Roszak, following Roth and Beckett for Watson in mapping a humanist response looking hard at death if perhaps a bit more softly at mortality, laments the "boundless proliferation of knowledge for its own sake" and the exclusion of many seekers who cannot enter this closed system, and who find themselves alienated as democratic culture weakens.

Watson encourages in his closing chapters those who strive to build meaningful structures by which ecological imperatives and economic equality might co-exist. He rejects those who by faith in a better life to come justify the rape of the earth and the pain of its inhabitants. He accepts that science may not provide comfort for those who, however irrationally, search for truth and beauty beyond what can be calculated or purchased. Mark Kingswell's philosophical rejoinder to a capitalist culture "based on envy, and advertising, the main capitalist means of 'selling' consumerism, works by 'creating unhappiness'". Happiness, if God is removed from the window through which we view Watson's earlier model of the zoo vs. the monastery, may emanate from a rejection of what for many people in Western society supplants or supplements fading religious belief: the "pathography" (he credits Joyce Carol Oates for this coinage) of the dysfunctional, confessional, survivor-strutting meta-narrative that has drowned out the traditional monotheistic, and arguably I may add, modernist world-views today.

Ronald Dworkin may speak for many of his colleagues in the seminar or clinic: "Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians)." Thomas Mann cautioned that the concept of "one overbearing truth" has been exhausted. Jürgen Habermas directs us to look not above for answers but to listen to each other, for communication may produce critical meaning, and within an informed public sphere, guidance can be generated. Watson finds truth in pragmatism. "We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands."

Few will choose this enriching and rewarding removal from reality TV and manufactured distraction, along the course mapped in these heady pages, to a sobering path of self-awareness of our fragile presence surrounded by darkness and mystery. Fewer choose Kafka over Chopra, and fewer may finish this book than the latest novel by even Oates herself. But those who persevere will glimpse in Watson's closing chapters spirited and moving testimony by wise professors and writers exchanging their versions of what Sartre phrased as "lyrical phenomenology": what Watson calls "the sheer multiplicity of experience as the joy of being alive". This quest for meaning may endure, parallel to or divergent from science. This search embraces a persistent appreciation that beyond facts hovers that which may forever suspend itself apart from our perception, no longer named God, still ineffable.  (Edited in RePrint at PopMatters 3-28-14 as "'The Age of Atheists' Considers That Beyond Reason or Science, Our Quest for Meaning Endures" and a second time to Amazon US 2-19-14)

Jeremy Carrette + Richard King's "Selling Spirituality": Book Review

A scholar of Foucault and another of Orientalism combine to expose how deeply the market ideology of the 1980s and 1990s has infiltrated secular and economic contexts. They argue in this clearly conveyed 2004 book a necessary thesis. This "silent takeover of religion," as British critics Jeremy Carrette and Richard King demonstrate, reveals how business repackages religion, cynically or cleverly supporting the selfish motives which underlie unregulated capitalism.

But this corporate capitalist version does not need to dominate the treatment of spirituality. Anti-capitalist or revolutionary, business ethics or reformist, individualist or consumerist, as well as capitalist spirituality, defines this typological range. The nebulous term "spirituality" expresses the privatization of religion by modern secular societies. The commodification by corporate capitalism of what was religion strips that "ailing competitor" of its assets, in a hostile takeover, while rebranding its "aura of authenticity" to convey the "goodwill" of the company, which sells off the religious models of its trappings and teachings at the marketplace. (15-21) God is dead; long live God as Capital.

They cite a 2002 interview with the late Tony Benn to telling effect: 

"Religions have an extraordinary capacity to develop into control mechanisms . . . If I look at the world today it seems to me that the most powerful religion of all-- much more powerful than Christianity, Judaism, Islam and so on-- is the people who worship money. That is really [the] most powerful religion. And the banks are bigger than the cathedrals, the headquarters of the multinational companies are bigger than the mosques or the synagogues. Every hour on the hour we have business news-- every hour-- it's a sort of hymn to capitalism." (23, qtd, from An Audience With Tony Benn audiobook) 

The "religious quality of contemporary capitalism," the authors remind us, now lacks restraints of earlier societies. The market as God, as Harvey Cox herein acknowledges, rules, and seeks monopoly. Killing Joke's song, after Thatcher's fall, looped in my mind as I read: "Money Is Not Our God": "Will you swap your hi-fi for a clear blue sky? Will you cash in all your shares for God's clean air?"

As the authors explain: "The 'spiritual' becomes instrumental to the market rather than oriented towards a wider social and ethical framework, and its primary function becomes the consumerist status quo rather than a critical reflection upon it." Spirituality gets harnessed to "productivity, work-efficiency and the accumulation of profit put forward as the new goals" to supplant "the more traditional emphasis upon self-sacrifice, the disciplining of desire and a recognition of community."

Over fewer than two-hundred pages, Carrette and King elaborate in four chapters the impacts of this takeover. Chapter one surveys spirituality, as it separates from religious contexts and adapts itself to individualism under liberal democracies and then corporations. Chapter two attacks the role played by psychology in "creating a privatised and individualised conception of reality" to align itself with social control and social isolation. (26) Psychology, produced by capitalist intervention, fools people into spirituality as "an apparent cure for the isolation created by a materialistic, competitive and individualised social system." (27) This chapter castigates James, Maslow and Jung for their compliance to cultural, political, and economic norms which fail to liberate those in pain. The sustained and potent argument advanced here indicts New Age practices linked to therapeutic cures. Carrette and King critique this as a trap for sufferers lured in to a desire for elusive remedies. Having been sold escapes from oppression, these intensify rather than ease isolation. Freedom is out of reach.

The link between New Age and esoteric teachings sold to the West and Asian traditions elaborates into chapter three. Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist versions get sampled. The dissonance between systems advising renunciation and capitalism promoting accumulation provides logical case studies. Some of this coverage examines the careers of Osho/ Bhagwan Rajneesh, Deepak Chopra, and the "Barefoot Doctor" Stephen Russell. Carrette and King suggest the Socially Engaged Buddhism and related movements as alternatives, as well as a study of the teachings of Vimalakirti as correctives (if slight taken in their original contexts where neither "social revolution" nor "mass mobilisation" were realistic possibilities) to the prevalent materialism of the times and places generating those teachings.

The fourth chapter circles back to the opening critique. The authors find a vivid analogy to sharpen or sweeten their analysis of how "rejection of the discourse of professional 'excellence' among employees is often presented by managers as 'resistance to accountability'. What such resistance often represents is not a rejection of accountability as such but rather a rejection of a narrow logic of accountancy with regard to such processes." (137) Similarly, they show how difficult it is amid the cult of devotion instilled in the market-driven workplace to resist "spirituality" or "excellence" as a catch-phrase repeated mantra-like by those who act as missionaries bent on preaching a bottom line.

When spirituality gets used such, it "ends up acting like a food colouring or additive that masks the less savoury ingredients in the product that is being sold to us," they demonstrate convincingly. This content throughout this short treatise remains accessible, as the authors admirably seek "to raise a series of questions in a narrative style that is more open-ended and provocative than traditional academic discourse allows," hearkening to the French "essai" to address "wider political concerns and constituencies than are usually appealed to in scholarly works." (ix-x) The Feast of Knowledge?

This remains to my knowledge a under-investigated area of sociological or cultural criticism, at least in passionate, spirited examples aimed at the masses. Given Occupy a decade after this has appeared, two years after that, Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko's Occupy Spirituality and Nathan Schneider's Thank You, Anarchy (see my reviews here and here) covered congenial themes. LGBT activist and Jewish-Buddhist journalist Jay Michaelson's Evolving Dharma, by comparison, overlapped with Fox and Bucko by praising Lama Surya Das, although Michaelson aims his take on Buddhist Geeks-friendly meditation as "brainhacking" liberating a savvier, hip audience. It's the first book (preceding CT/ST naturally, if by a few months) I found that nodded to the project Speculative Non-Buddhism.

In fairness to Michaelson, while he will not win over any non-buddhists, he mingles caution into his treatment, seasoned by his experiences as one albeit from a privileged cadre, able to amble off to Nepal for months of silent retreats. This implicates him as part of the problem he seeks to solve, to adopt Carrette and King's diagnosis. Michaelson will never assuage those sworn to annihilate x-buddhism, but I mention these mass-market books as complements to the popular front (my terms) which underlies Carrette and King's campaign against capitalist spirituality. I raised related issues (at #2, 6, 11, 21) in response to Glenn Wallis' "A Spectre Is Haunting Buddhism or Give Marx Some Credit" about anarchism and the countercultural roots of certain x-buddhisms. To complete my run-through of responses to inequality and spirituality, I'll draw upon what I read immediately before Selling Spirituality: George Packer's The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which documented the cause of neo-liberal market ideology and its everyday effects, since Reagan's rise.

In a chapter set at Occupy Wall Street in Fall 2011, Packer filters his narrative through reactions from representative activists. New Yorker Nelini Stamp, from the Working Families Party, sticks it out, but she wonders about OWS efficacy, as disruptions intensify assemblies and thwart their progress.

"Occupy was dominated by the kind of people who ran the Canadian magazine that had gotten the whole thing started. Adbusters--very educated postmodern anarchists. Nelini was self-conscious about never having finished high school--they'd read so many books she'd never heard of--and they also made her feel sometimes that she wasn't radical enough. She was an organizer, and she worried that Occupy was becoming too narrow, and she wanted to figure out how to turn it into a durable movement that could work on achieving practical goals, like getting people to close their accounts at the big banks and moving the homeless into foreclosed houses. She thought at some point Occupy would need to come up with demands. She was even beginning to think it might be better to move on from Zuccotti Park." (375)

How may this intersect with the non-buddhist project?  While many of its proponents marshal difficult language to shake hearers out of their expectations, to undermine trust in timeworn verities, and to force new reactions that shatter complacency, Occupy's predicament demonstrates the limits of "very educated postmodern anarchism" as perceived by Stamp. Now organizing the left in Florida, she writes: "We were trained to talk to all types of people and got a well-rounded perspective on our issues and how to present them in the most effective ways," since "I couldn't afford to go to college."

I note as an aside that Packer (who does not enter this 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle directly) in the 1980s organized for the Democratic Socialists of America. As I co-founded a chapter of this organization back in my own college stint during Reagan's first term, I presume that Packer's no stranger to registers of rhetoric employed by the Direct Democracy Working Group or those provocateurs or promoters at OWS. Nelini Stamp's testimony reminds us of those on the margins, those who may feel overwhelmed by those who shout down the participants, who listen but who may fidget. They may shrink from engagement, as barriers to learning and communicating in the manner of the elite loom so high. Stamp reminds us, from her canvassing: "The left has broken down into separate interest groups. We have to find ways that we can work across them, ways we can unite."

Matthias Steingass reminds us of the imperative we face, speaking of unity beyond slogans or cant. Red Dust comments, responding to him: "People who are ready and open to your message will get it. My only advice would be keep it simple and talk to people at their level of understanding and don’t take joy in pointing out people’s faulty views. Most folk are like me, not that well educated and get anxious trying to talk to well educated people. The really hard nuts to crack are the well educated."

There's no room for navel-gazing or seminar slouching when "the planetary capitalist hegemony," as Steingass phrases the threat (Carrette and King will label its reification as the Borg) looms. He cites Craig Hickman's "Global Resistance and the Collapse of Civilization: Berardi, Deleuze, and others" and I add a book I'm studying now by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, Debt: the First 5,000 Years; this exposé may have energized the subsequent OWS movement itself the year it appeared. (When I raised what I contemplated as connections between homelessness, Occupy, and bhikkhus, I found at a sitting that most preferred to keep that dharma-talk focused on the existential self.) Participating in Occupy L.A. in fall 2011, I "meditated" on disparities between those agitators who trafficked in theory and those who attempted praxis--as well as how barter or a cash nexus reified into a novel market, where neither milk nor cereal could be exchanged, but plenty of 40 ouncers and pot. 

I'm reminded of the Marxist pamphlets I saw, scattered underfoot and presumably discarded, when I hauled books to the makeshift library at Occupy L.A. Whether or not those encamped dithered over dialectics spurred me to review Jonathan Sperber's 2012 Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. After all, Stamp asked for practical applications rather than theoretical discussions, to fight the powers that be. This revisionist study shifts Marx into a backward (to 1789) looking idealist more than an "intransigent revolutionary" idolized posthumously by Engels. Sperber scrutinizes MEGA archives opened after the Cold War. He observes how Marx's concept of an Hegelian proletariat emerges more as Marx's invention to advance the dialectic materialism he concocted rather than a milieu within which he moved at ease. He made enemies, to whom he attributed many of his own discarded ideas. He crammed his journalism so full of erudition that the laborers it meant to direct found it too heady to figure out. As to alienation, his letters display a dominance by ideology, via score-settling.

Here, a connection can be forged with Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. Packer, by highlighting Stamp's frustration, articulates the need for moral action, and the dangers of bickering or solipsism. Considering this, I drafted this well before catching up with the comments on Patrick Jennings' "Where We Are. Where We Might Go" so it may run at cross purposes rather than merge with psychology not to mention neurobiology; my own orientation centers on literary and cultural critique. (In my defense, I note that while my favorite book is Ulysses, I prefer over the effluvia of the Wake the astringency of Beckett. After all, he chose the sparer vocabulary of French to hone in on.)

In my local if attenuated, unaffiliated sitting group which discusses Buddhist concepts, the day after I finished both Packer's and Carrette and King's books, we shared a section from David Kalupahana's A History of Buddhist Philosophy commenting on the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta. In summing up the Middle Way, he opines: "Thus the difficulty in perceiving and understanding dependence is due not to any mystery regarding the principle itself but to people's love of mystery. The search for mystery, the hidden something (kiñci) is looked upon as a major cause of anxiety and frustration (dukkha)." (59)

I reckon this resists reduction to a Principle of Sufficient Buddhism. This feels our primal plight, our existential yearning, hard-wired despite our denials, as inherent pattern recognition tangled into clan cohesion and personal solace, as scientific writer (non-believer) Nicholas Wade charts as The Faith Instinct. We inherit it: Beckett stared this down, dismissing liberation while exposing our endgames.  Yet, he risked his life to resist hate. When evil arrived, he fought it, until another liberation arrived.

Is religion another evil? Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell for me reiterated the conclusions of Sam Harris' The End of Faith. Harris urged idealistically that if only all parents told their children only the truth, the future could be secured for rationalists. Dennett too places his trust in the secular. That's about it for big answers. These are so simple, yet so elusive: do not many true believers of gods or God or no gods think exactly that? That we no matter what we preach have a handle on the truth, and that we mean best for our progeny as we raise them in the light of our own understanding; all the while, however, unable to step out of our own limited perspective of the universal and the eternal?

While diligent deniers of the transcendental still search for meaning beyond our own ken, as Peter Watson's new The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God confirms, many of us still indulge this persistent itch to scratch, to reflect upon our mysterious kiñci and ponder if it's accidental or intentional. Watson considers the shortcomings of science and religion in soothing our troubled minds. Carrette and King, revolting against the legacy of Thatcher two decades earlier, sustain in their book a like-minded entry into "new configurations of resistance -- in terms that are not blinded by the modernist separation of the religious from the secular." (180) Perhaps this may nudge a few into the wedge where a secular-religious divide since the Enlightenment has widened. This figure may, after capital's global triumph, sharpen and alter itself into an edgier shape.

The authors encourage a Marxian critique, to "go beyond" Marx. They diagnose the damage done by many opiates, peddled by psychiatrists as well as priests. While unfortunately they do not detail a Marxian alternative in what remains a brief survey, they seek to "reclaim the ground of social justice" from fundamentalists (faith-based or free-market), and to seize the debate. Patrick Jennings has provided much on The Non-Buddhist for this reclamation, introducing a human Marx. Carrette and King similarly (but see my endnote citing Ann Gleig's recent riposte at SNB) suspect any nostalgic claim to revert to religious tradition; they remind us that religions in turn have "also moulded our civilisations, our sense of ethics and community and our concern for social justice." (181) As they scan a de-sacralized atmosphere from Northern Europe, they demur from commitment to "a similarly materialistic and economically oriented heresy." If they urge--if as an aside--going beyond Marx, we're left to wonder how their final suggestion of "spiritual atheisms" might spark our future. (182)

This raises the prospects of where secular-minded activists may ally with similarly minded believers. Of course, the separation of church and state, so to speak, endures, but if we contemplate how in our daily lives and work, odds remain some of us mingle and may live with those who do believe, in religious or "spiritual" senses as well as relentlessly rational manifestations. Carrette and King, from their residences in Canterbury and Paris respectively, may relegate to the venerable facades of Christian Europe in these cities the endurance of any medieval sensibility, but even in Western Europe, if my own extended network stands as verification, believers endure alongside us skeptics.

Do, then, those who promulgate a rejection of traditional religious or modern spiritual affirmations deny those who practice them or pledge fealty to forces at which "postmodern anarchists" scoff? How far, if one pursues a rigorously non-theistic or non-spiritual response to faith, does the denier go to cut him or herself off from the rest of the community? As Stamp reflected at OWS, class divisions deepened by the "very educated" may discourage those who seek less lofty and more direct actions.

As professors, Carrette and King offer no remedy to the plight of those who, like Stamp and another man (once a techie, now homeless, he leaves Seattle with a duffel bag to sleep at OWS; after police crack down, he wonders where to go next), may sympathize with secular and radical movements, but who may lack the wherewithal in terms of academic preparation or financial resources to sign on as fellow travelers. As with many such tracts, Selling Spirituality sketches out a faint path to pursue. In closing, it vaguely advises Michel Foucault's strategy to resist: "move strategically and then wait for the next assertion of power," given resistance may be futile to a corporate, shape-shifting Borg. (172)

They advocate anti-capitalist, social justice, and compassion-based movements. They also realize most people who may need such movements to lessen their burdens are not secularized. Therefore, they advise strategic alliances by progressives with principled religious organizations as practical methods of opposition to capitalist spirituality. While they remain committed to study religious and spiritual impacts, and never advocate belief, the authors, rejecting retreat into texts, understand the limits of a lasting, convincing appeal based on only a secular disenchantment of the spirit. Instead, they seek to align radical factions to the faithful majority, who still believe, but who may be open to engagement, in solidarity against what Noam Chomsky calls "the control of the public mind."

(Amazon US 3-24-14, in far shorter and non-non-buddhist form. I learned of this book on a SNB thread "Why Buddhism?" via Ann Gleig: "Historically, I would argue anatta has shown little or no signs of manifesting a politically robust subjectivity reflexive of its own ideological constituents. By the way, Carrette and King made the same argument in Selling Spirituality in 2005 but with an explicit concern of having a stake in protecting traditional Buddhism". After my reading of it, I conclude that the authors wish to advance a engaged, ethical, and subversive Buddhism as committed to radicalism aligned with anti-capitalist global movements; how "traditional" this leaves that system is open to debate. As non-buddhists discuss, such "buddhemes" as traditions may be moot by now.)

[As above to The Non-Buddhist 3-27-14 as 'Money Is Not Our God': Selling Spirituality"' Occupy L.A. photo by Arkasha Richardson at the Bank of America standoff downtown, 11-17-11. Use the Occupy L.A. keyword to search this blog for my own reflections from autumn 2011, and afterwards.] Thanks to Patrick Jennings and Ann Gleig for the incisive comments in response to this at TNB.]

Lawrence R. Samuel's "Death, American Style": Book Review

We lack an ability to cope with death. As ten thousand baby boomers will daily turn sixty-five for the next nineteen years, Lawrence R. Samuel warns of the “social crisis” Americans face unless they come to terms with mortality. In this cultural history from the 1920s to the present, he compresses summations and paraphrases and many quotes from a variety of primary sources. Gleaning data from magazines, movies, government and medical reports, and popular culture, Dr. Samuel compiles how Americans have resisted a confrontation with death. 

While the nineteenth century found many Americans still familiar with death as people often died at home or at work, and were waked and buried by the family, this cyclical understanding of how the dead returned to the earth faded as urbanization and capitalism combined to encourage the death industry. Progress urged Americans to look forward, as a linear orientation replaced the cyclical model. This led to what Dr. Samuel laments as he begins Death, American Style: “We are surprised when it takes place, an ironic thing given it is the only certainty in life. Like our national debt, perhaps, we have borrowed against the moment, making our dying that much more difficult when it does come due.” Trying to enhance our lives by ignoring death, we lose the rich appreciation of life gained by an honest assessment of its fragile duration. 

In 1929, Bertrand Russell classified human reactions to death three ways. People ignore it, they obsess over it, or they assert a religious belief in a superior hereafter. The problem remains. Belief persists as a mostly “conscious mechanism” while “fear of death resided in the much deeper unconscious”. Dr. Samuel often quotes Freudians; repression appears to dominate the academic explanation popularized for many Americans during the past century. While this aspect subsists as more contextual than as examined (often, the reliance on rephrasing sources as the author’s own words occludes what the author adds to shape or interpret his digest of diverse sources from his wide research), it fits into the detachment Americans after WWI began to adapt as they drifted away from encounters with death firsthand. 

Undertakers became morticians; coffins transformed into caskets. Mortuary science replaced the family who interred a loved one in their local graveyard. Stress during the Depression, Dr. Samuel observes, weakened many generations; death often accompanied or hastened hard times. With WWII, “violent death” returned, inescapable in headlines and on broadcasts. Families received a dreaded two-star telegram: “The War Department regrets to inform you…” 

However, as Lawrence Samuel sifts through the responses of insurance companies, widows, grieving parents, curious children, and dogged Freudians, he demonstrates life’s persistence. Between 1942 and 1945, for every battle death, twelve births occurred, an increase of thirty percent in fecundity. The facts of life dominated; mourners found themselves marginalized. Death’s segregation in the post-war years showed a “social pressure to quickly move on from the unfortunate experience”. 

Optimism reigned. In 1958, Dr. Joseph Still argued, as many of his colleagues specializing in the “disease of aging”, against death’s inevitability. Dr. Samuel acknowledges the difficulty of defeating such “circular logic”: as Dr. Still insisted: “The only factor which prevents our living forever is death.” In a secularizing and rational mindset, positive thinking’s power directed medical training: “a cured patient represented success while a dying patient signaled failure, a strange point of view given the inevitability and normalcy of death”. Contrarily, a subsection titled “Death Watch” documents in unsettling fashion the routines by which a city or county hospital’s harried staff hastened (one wonders if the past tense is all that is needed) the demise of patients judged near their end. As technology improved, the rush for organ transplants accelerated the demand for a post-mortem grab of coveted body parts from many of these admitted one final time. 

By the 1970s, social and scientific tensions worsened. The longer people could be kept alive, the greater the anxiety became for both staff and loved ones charged with making tough decisions. Individualism weakened the comforts many Americans once cherished about the immortality of the soul, and progress brought threats of environmental degradation and technocratic dominance. Life and death, thanatologists argued, might not be a continuum; death-with-dignity and a right-to-die became catch phrases. So did Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ “five stages of dying” and the plight of Karen Ann Quinlan, trapped within the competing decisions of the law, medical machinery, and her family’s wishes. 

Demographics began to shift, and boomer families grappled with how to care for their children and their parents at the same time. Lawrence Samuel reminds us how insurance companies long have taken advantage of a child’s birth to initiate a sale of a policy. The emotional and financial tensions stoked by the competing demands of parenting and dealing with parents reduced often by medical advances to childlike regression complicate the situation for millions who must work and raise families on both sides of middle age, far greater than ever before. 

AIDS, “conscious dying” advocates, the battle over “death education” in schools, “living wills”, hospices speckle the chronicle of the 1980s and 1990s. The Me Generation acted the same way about death as it had about sex. As if nobody had discovered either one before.  Hollywood, always attentive to popular culture’s unease, capitalized on films promising “the green pastures” of the hereafter and near-death experiences resulting in fulfillment. Widowed dads, also a mainstay of Disney product as a reliable plot device, starred in four television series.

Near the millennium, as sexual taboos diminished, those shrouding death demanded a warmer, fuzzier affirmation of life. New Age caregivers, “funeral webcasts”, online immortality by undead accounts, “death bonds” on Wall Street, “creative disposals of ashes” as cremation took hold, and boomers’ reliable “self-absorption” might tempt satire. Yet, Dr. Samuel comprehends our current, eternal difficulty with our common fate, unimaginable for many of us, always inevitable. 

While today’s “radical life-extension” promoters peddle another version of miracle cures, the majority less able to afford such nostrums must get over any expectation of special treatment, Dr. Samuel concludes. No longer avoided by the “eternally young”, he sketches (yet frustratingly, he leaves all but blank this last storyboard) a dire fate for American society if it refuses to deny death’s arrival. (7-14-13 to New York Journal of Books)

"Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics" Book Review

Huston Smith's preface confronts us: "Entheogens have entered Buddhism to stay; there can be no turning back from the point that has been reached." (14) Stephen Batchelor notes in his forward the crux of the Buddhist proscription against "intoxication"--some interpret this as to the "point of heedlessness." "Although certain ecstatic Zen masters and Tantric yogins may be deemed sufficiently awakened to be exempt from strict adherence to this precept, there is no discussion about the role that drug use might play in propelling someone onto the path in the first place." (10) 

Editor Allan Hunt Badiner promotes the individual's empowerment, freer of mediators or power structures:
"The democratization of psychedelics, however, and of Buddhism to a similar extent, has been very much about the breakdown of this restricted access to the divine. In Buddhism, as in psychedelics, the individual takes responsibility for their relationship to the source of their being, and for access to the highest states of spirit mind." (16) Contrary to two superficial reviews of this anthology preceding this one on Amazon, a careful reading of primary material, let alone the thirty or so essays, reveals their nuances.

"While psychedelic use is all about altered states, Buddhism is all about altered traits, and one does not necessarily lead to the other. One Theravadin monk likened the mind on psychedelics to an image of a tree whose branches are overladen with low-hanging, very ripened, and heavy fruit. The danger is that the heavy fruit--too full and rich to be digested by the tree all at once--will weigh down the branches and cause them to snap." (17)

Arts editor Alex Grey brings in many illustrations. Few of these wowed sober me, but your reaction may differ. A related article by Claudia Mueller-Ebeling and Christian Raetsch argues for a Nepalese and not Tibetan, shamanistic as well as Buddhist, explication of thangka paintings. The contents of the volume originated in the Buddhist American magazine "Tricycle" in Fall 1996. Those familiar with its readership and approach will find many representatives of what's now mainstream forms of Western practice within these pages. Although the lack of an index and the lack of a paginated reference to the illustrations detract from its usefulness, I found this to be more substantial than the small-coffee table format and the generous margins (with some odd typographical choices) suggest.

Section one explores intersections. Roger Walsh's "Mysticism: Contemplative and Chemical" compares and contrasts them efficiently, summing up Smith's defense of entheogens, Stanislav Grof's research, and qualifying assertions and denials made for the efficacy of drug-induced experiences. Rick J. Strassman weighs in with a report from a New Mexico clinical trial of DMT. Rick Fields engagingly relates "A High History of Buddhism in America"; while this accurately conveys some of the air of privilege or leisure which surrounds some of the more comfortably placed  practitioners. I note one editor lives in Big Sur and the other Brooklyn, tellingly. Robert Forte interviews Jack Kornfield, and that psychologist's caution about an unstable, or unsustainable, experience based on drugs serves as a smart balance to the more (literally) enthusiastic advocates. Peter Matthiessen offers a typically fluid essay on his and his lover's "shadow paths" as they wander into early-60's lysergia.

In section two, "Concrescence?" enters more personal accounts. One of the liveliest shows observer-participant San Francisco Zen Center's David Chadwick reflecting on himself--in retrospect long after his be-in--a babbling adept, in ecstasy: "No wonder so many people were irritated by hippies." (119) Not all report success--one telling factor; even those such as Chadwick write that the odds of a "bad trip" were one in five. Trudy Walter recalls her tougher encounters championing marijuana,  filtered through such alcoholic proponents as Chogyam Trungpa. While Badiner relates his DMT-laced yagé concoction in Hawai'i, China Galland counters with her careful decision to resist the entreaties of her companions. Committed to a twelve-step program, she decides not to ingest ayahuasca.

The third portion, "Lessons," provides its own variety. To name a few, you can choose from Terence McKenna's interview, John Perry Barlow's "Liberty and LSD," or Lama Surya Das (who coins "premature immaculation" as the temptation of too much too soon with drugs as a shortcut) as their firsthand testimonies mingling with more academic accounts by Charles Tart or Myron Stolaroff which fairly examine the need or not to keep taking drugs. Erik Davis, whose "The Visionary State" ( see my review) on California's "spiritual landscapes" compliments his essay here well, compares the flight simulators for the bardo" of earlier psychonauts with today's more jittery attitudes towards what  Mircea Eliade titled "technologies of ecstasy." (160) 

It closes as Badiner leads a well-chosen roundtable of Joan Halifax, Ram Dass, Robert Aitken, and Richard Baker. They square off, mostly Dass gently and teasingly favoring how drugs toy with the ego and nudge the mind; the other three edge towards caution. Halifax from her work with the dying figures they have enough to deal with already regarding sensation; Aitken relegates the golden age of experimentation to the height of the counterculture and its own awkward adventures; Baker reasons that Buddhist territory rests more in the "neutral" where neither good nor bad are to be grasped, whether as meditative states or drug-induced visions. These insights expand the scope of what's not a caricatured (i.e., entirely pro-plant based or chemically induced by artificial means) selection of contributors. (4-9-13 to Amazon US)

P.S. Book website w/ full forward, preface, and introduction texts, links, and contacts. Zig Zag Zen