Thinking as Spiritual Practice

8/9/2019 Thinking as Spiritual Practice

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PATRICK JENNINGS

NON + X

CRITICAL THINKING AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE


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CRITICAL THINKING AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

PATRICK JENNINGS

Perhaps we ought to relearn how to enrage ourselves, to explode

against a certain culture of docility, of amenity, of the effacement of allconflict even as we live in a state of permanent war. It is not because

the struggle has changed form, it is not because it is no longerpossible to fight a boss, owner, or father that there is no struggle to

wage against exploitation. To ask what should we do with our brain?

is above all to visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflictingeconomic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the

triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who have nogreater merit than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a

smile. Catherine Malabou (1)

I call him free who is led solely by reason. Baruch Spinoza

To think or not to think

To be a thinking x-buddhist is problematic; you are always up against it;

imponderables, implausibility, unreason. The only way out is to give up on

thought. To decide to give up on thought is, of course, a thought; a decision toabandon thought, with thoughtful implications. But the decision to give up on

thought, or more precisely, to give up on the effort to push one s ability to engagein rigorous thinking, might be a reaction against the difficulty involved, thefrustratingly modest result, and one of the possible outcomesthe beginning of along and painful process of abandoning the thoughts that allow one to live in a

state of stress-free delusion.

Consider this from a text on Mahamudra practice.

Practitioners may experience an undefinable state imbued with

mindfulness and a sense of certainty. Eventually this is experienced asa resplendence which cannot be described and an even stronger

confidence. [...] Students should be encouraged to continue with theunity of resting mind and insight practices by maintaining mindfulness

of things as they are, completely without any essence. One works onmaintaining this view without distraction until it is present in a

completely effortless fashion [...] (2)


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Imponderables! You can find texts like this at the drop of a hat. For the non-

thinking x-buddhist grist to the mill. The instructions are straightforwardlypractical and described in detail. No problem here. Fuse the grammar and

terminology of ineffability-effortlessness, completion, non-distraction,emptiness, bliss-with the grammar and the terminology of method or skillful

means-effort, procedure, maintenance, sequencing, verification. Result? The

explanatory gap between them is erased. You simply assume that persistenteffort, and a sort of virtuoso fluency, will result in the proper state ofmind. (Note that, if you consult the Marga texts on the stages of the path, they

explicate the proper realization for that particular stage in very fine detail indeed.The practitioner interjects this explication whole before any attempt at

meditation.)

There is a radical assumption at work here that augurs well for the persistent

practitioner-the promise of a reward for, not an effort at thinking,but a stubbornindifference to the implications of thought. The confluence of method and state is

already given; one has simply failed to realize the identity of method and the

ineffable state; to cultivate the practice of resting in the nature of mind is to restin the nature of mind. This, then, is the view. A form of knowinganepistemology; and yet also how things arean ontology. The view abolishes the

categories of knower and known, of subject and object. Finally the view is therealization that this was already and always the case.

How foolish not to have seen it; and how blissfully lacking of effortful tension isthis relaxation into the infantile state of not having to concern oneself with the

implications of thought. Ones worries have, after all, been dissolved, along withthe very self prone to worry, into the blissful primordial bliss-clarity-voidness of

no-thought-at-all. Which is why most x-buddhists are enamored with this idea;isntthe ineffable experience just that necessary, and necessarily, reductive move;

religion essentialized; devoid of ritualization, effort-full engagement with thought,and an overbearing, suffocating and irrelevant tradition. Religion democratized;

the triumph ( x-buddhists dont push the thought this far) of theBourgeois Idea!

What, one might wonder, sustains the x-buddhist in this abandonment of thought?

One answer might be; she/he ignores logic(or the illogic) in favour of a decision

for something beyond logic; something unexamined becauseunexaminable.Although ineffablewithout form, duration or any definable quality whatsoever

the view is maintained; we can be mindful of it. This easy acceptance of grossillogicality is possible only because she has already decidedshe has established

a faith in the sufficiency of the view. Decision is the condition for the erasure ofany concern about the fact of conditionality. It affords her the luxury of being able

to ignore the decisional nature of the move. The Subject of such a decision is afaithful subject, ready to ventriloquize the antidote to doubtthe all-round elixir

for those afflicted by the sickness of thought; by the melancholic affliction of toomuch thoughtnon-conceptuality.


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Re-enactment

This obsession with inner experience needs careful examination as a socio-

linguistic phenomenona formulation in language of ones perceived relation to

ones condition. But dont take the inner/outer or the effable/ineffable terminologyat face value. Language is a carrier of meaning, and meaning is concretized in

particular linguistic, social and material structures and processes; in verbal orvisual discourses, collective formations articulating a whole range of dispositions

towards the worldthoughts, opinions, theories, intuitions, felt evaluations,inclinations, biases, misapprehensions, worries, hopes. Dispositions towards the

world that are also ideological discourses functioning in the world, and mostlyalways in ways we are not aware of, unless we commit ourselves to push thought

and to take into account the implications of thought.

For instance:

Within classical Buddhism levels of attainment were not (primarily) construed as

discrete states but as stages of a path. (Perhaps the thinking classical Buddhisthad it better then). The Marga literature dedicated to the precise sequencing

of the stages of the path, functioned as a way of satisfying the demand forverification of a hierarchical monastic system. Who was the Master? He was theone who had most assiduously enacted the meditative procedure. The Margaliterature was a way of sequencing a series of events across time; of departing

fromand arriving at; of stagesbetween; a script.

In etic terms buddhist meditation might best be seen as theritualization of experience: it doesnt engender a specific experientialstate as much as it enacts it. In this sense Buddhist Marga treatises

are not so much maps of inner physic space as they are scripts for theperformance of an eminently public religious drama.(3)

This religious drama was the re-enactment of the actions of the founder, now

explicated in the form of a sacred text recapitulating the exact procedure by whichshe made the mythological journey from ignorance to enlightenment. The

enlightened one, the master, was the one who dedicated his life to this

conspicuously public and verifiable re-enactment of the actions of the founder, in

the context of a monastic system in which ones every act was a form of ritualizedchoreography amenable to scrutiny by ones peers.

This public enactment took place against the backdrop of a rigid system ofhierarchical authority, embedded within a set of social relations, and a discourse

that justified and preserved the inequitable structures of the economy, and theregulation and distribution of political power within the social order. Any claims

about realization made in this context were assessed in the light of the Marga


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there is no doubt that, especially in the case of the Zen, Mahamudra and

Dzogchen, there is an emphasis on the non-conceptuality of realization. Thequestion is this; did the literature referencing inner states arise as the result of an

account of such experience, or as script for the re-enactment of the actions of amythical founder believed to have had such experiences. Are ancient meditation

commentaries maps of inner states or guides to action in the context of a

hierarchical monastic structure? And are states of realization simply theimaginative corollary of stages along the path leading from the base of ahierarchical system to the summit; from monk to Abbot, from neophyte to Master,

from ignorance (listed, unsanctioned, and verifiable negative behaviours,) toenlightenment (listed, sanctioned, and verifiable positive behaviours). The Tantric

or Zen master would often, playfully, give his own behaviour a twist, but onlyrarely did his playfulness result in anything more than an increase in his prestige

and that of a discourse that was able to absorb many a twist indeed, including theproduction of one such as he!

Ideology

What the historical evidence does show is that the majority of monks did notpractice mediation, or practiced sporadically. But, supposing there was a hard

core of mediators within the monasteries or among the Tantric groups, thequestion arises; exactly what is such a one doing. In the context of the monasticsystem and the Tantric life (or in the context of late capitalism for that matter)

what does it mean to meditate?

In the first place it is necessary to state the obvious; a human being meditatesfrom and at the centre of a world. This world is complete. It extends outward in

space and back in time. This situation of a monk meditating presupposes auniverse that conspires to hold her in being; a religious institution, a theology, a

philosophical perspective, a language, a religious heritage, a culture, a history, asocial system, a biological process, a natural environment, an evolutionary niche.

Most importantly it presupposes an ideological perspective on how the personrelates to all of this, a perspective into which he grew, as it were, in the ordinaryprocess of living his life. This perspective is pre-given, he may, of course add to it,

subtract from it, react against it, personalize it, but he will do so within the broadlimits within which it has evolved as a collective social formation. In other words

he will not have to re-invent the wheel.

This ideological perspective, however, does not hang in mid-air. It is concretized invery particular ways; in the context of classical Buddhism in the form of

monasteries, hierarchical structures, rules of conduct, ethics of behaviour, rituals,injunctions, routines, texts, religious artifacts, visual images, dance, music, oral

traditions, architecture. And these are intimately bound up with the social andeconomic structures and processes out of which they emerged during a long

historical process. When the monk sits, he sits within this ideological perspectiveand views his condition through the screen of the ideological belief system hearrived atas a matter of ordinary human experience.


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All of this is lost on theun-thinkingx-buddhist. Difficulty (of thought) rolls off him

like water off a duck. (I know. I was one!) For the thinkingx-Buddhist, to see theways in which ones understanding of the conditions of ones life are socially

formed and mediated by language is to allow the arrow of thought to find a chinkin the x-buddhist Dharmic armor. The dissonance that results is an opportunity to

embark on a process of questioning that might be the beginning of a new practice.

References:

(I) Malabou, Catherine: What Should We Do with Our Brain?New York: Fordham

University Press 2008.

(2) Peter Barth:A Meditation guide for Mahamudra,1998.[web site]

(3) Robert H. Sharf: Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative

Experience, p. 269. InNumen 42, no. 3 (1995), pp. 228-283. [pdf]

(4) Ibid., p. 265.

T H E A U T H O R

Patrick Jenningsis a practicing visual artist (painting) with a degree in fine art.His other interests include philosophy, the intersection between spiritual practice,

critical thought and social action, art discourse, radical politics, literature and

meditation. He is the co-founder, with Matthias Steingass, of the blog The Non-Buddhist.

Originally published atThe Non-Buddhist.

non + x

issue nine2014
http://www.mahamudracenter.org/MMCMemberMeditationGuide.htm#_Toc420995641http://www.mahamudracenter.org/MMCMemberMeditationGuide.htm#_Toc420995641http://www.mahamudracenter.org/MMCMemberMeditationGuide.htm#_Toc420995641http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf1995,%20Buddhist%20Modernism.pdfhttp://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf1995,%20Buddhist%20Modernism.pdfhttp://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf1995,%20Buddhist%20Modernism.pdfhttp://thenonbuddhist.com/http://thenonbuddhist.com/http://thenonbuddhist.com/http://thenonbuddhist.com/http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf1995,%20Buddhist%20Modernism.pdfhttp://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf1995,%20Buddhist%20Modernism.pdfhttp://www.mahamudracenter.org/MMCMemberMeditationGuide.htm#_Toc420995641

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