Goon Squad
As the program wrapped up today I found myself feeling remarkably unperturbed by the whole thing. It’s not that I didn’t care, just that I think it had essentially run it’s course and it had to come to an end at some point. Impermanence in action. I think a lot of that had to do with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction with the program and all that’s happened over the month. When I came to Dharamsala, I had almost no prior knowledge as to what I was about to experience and was relatively expectation-free. If anything, my main goals were to reexperience India and hopefully develop a more positive impression than I’d previously had, as well as to learn a bit about Tibetan Buddhism. While I imagine I’ll accomplish the former over my next week of traveling, I would say I achieved the latter and so much more. The opportunity to live in a community of monastics, surrounded by people with expert knowledge on the tenets of Buddhism and its philosophical system has helped expand my worldview in a way I ways I couldn’t have even imagined. While I feel that getting beat over the head with the whole “Buddhism is compatible with science” and secular ethics bit certainly helped drive this expansion, the environment was particularly conducive to reflection on the state of things within myself, both as I am in the U.S. and how I am in India, ultimately leading to a more positive vision of what I could be. While I think that there’s definitely an argument to be made for the dangers of belief in becoming (as I’ll hopefully write about in the future), I think it’s impractical at this point in my life for me to be completely satisfied with myself and what I do with my time. It’s really just a disservice to the world around me. I may be incredible cynical of many aspects of society, but it’s undeniable that it has produced me and, if for no other reason at all, I should give something back to it. As to what that is, some grand realizations on that are still forthcoming.
In general, this whole experience has really pushed me to think about a lot of things that I’d previously never even touched. I’m finding that my beliefs about most things are fluctuating between poles as I try and figure out what makes sense. As affected as I’ve been by many of the Buddhist concepts I’ve learned about over the past month I find the counterviews presented by U.G. Krishnamurti to be almost equally compelling. As I’ve been reading his book “Mind is a Myth” I’ve been grappling with a lot of his central ideas and what follows is basically my attempt to work it our stream of consciousness style, so it will likely be disjointed and not ever actually lead anywhere productive. It might actually end up sounding horribly cynical and depressing, so keep in mind that this doesn’t reflect my true views on things but just some ideas I’m trying to make more sense of and integrate into my personal ideology in a more palatable way.
U.G. rejects the idea of any truth-revealing system or ideology, holding that there is ultimately no great truth to be discovered. He regards these ideas as merely defense mechanisms created by fearful organisms as barriers to naked interaction with experience. He maintains that there is no Self to be separated from the Universe and experiences the Self claims to have; rather, we ultimately are only the experience of our form interacting in tandem with the environment. We use thought as a barrier between Self and the world beyond, constantly interpreting and filtering, never truly experiencing. By doing so, we deny our true nature: we are unimaginably complex automatons that perpetually live in the present but use thought as a way of constantly taking ourselves to another time or place. All of this is ultimately directed to the search for meaning in life, which is the most futile quest of them all. But by doing so, we ensure that we will never find it. By searching for purpose, we confirm that whatever we are currently doing is purposeless, always placing the goal in the future, and yet the future never comes, keeping purpose eternally just out of reach.
From this view, if there is any purpose to existence, it is the experience of life itself. This isn’t hedonism in any sense; it is only thought that can label one experience pleasurable and the other painful, one good, one bad, so when the barrier of thought is gone, hedonism cannot exist. Pure experience does not discriminate since each is as the next as at the one before, but it is also always new, as experience has no memory, no collected knowledge from one’s culture.
But U.G. even claims that living purely in the present is not the purpose of life either. So if experience isn’t the meaning of life, what other purpose could there be? (U.G. would say there is none but I think its worth at least considering some other views.) Buddhism would claim that it is genuine happiness for all sentient beings, but that would seem to deny our very nature as biological organisms, unable to ever be completely free of suffering. We strive for a state of oneness within happiness, but this is qualitatively impossible. We seek one sidedness but are far too multi-faceted for that dream to ever become a reality. We seek to eliminate all suffering through cultivation of the mind, but what is mind really? Do any of us truly possess our own minds? As creatures conditioned from the moment of conception, what could ever arise in man that is not part of the collective mind of mankind, which spans culture and history? Any thought you’ve ever had is part of a causal chain, however infinitely long and complex it may seem, that began with something received externally: “Your culture, your philosophy, your society has conditioned you, and now you think you can change or in some way modify that conditioning. It is impossible, for you are society.” So to be free in this sense, one would need to become entirely divorced from society and all knowledge of the past.
In the end, essentially nothing he says can be proven either way, since everything could be an illusion or psychological defense mechanism. Things really exist insofar as we devote our mental energies to them. Does the Mindnut exist beyond my own mind? Even “I” only exist within my thoughts. Cogito ergo sum. We fear the death of thought because it is ultimately the death of ourselves. We create this false continuity between moments to help strengthen the idea of a continuing Self, linking one moment to the next. What are we besides our perceived stream of consciousness, illusory pieced together moments, infinitely touching back to back to back, forever contorting a system that will always remain a system. Many people say that want to be free of this conditioning, but if they really wanted it, it would just happen. It cannot ever be achieved if it is kept as a goal to be reached in the future; this only strengthens the belief that you aren’t already there. Even the desire for that freedom is conditioned by society, further fueling a cycle in which escape must be both instantaneous and spontaneous. And once you understand, life is no longer suffering, it just is. This sounds somewhat nihilistic, but it isn’t really. There just isn’t any discrimination between anything because there are no thoughts to discriminate between. Maybe that’s the emptiness that Buddhism talks about?
Man, I think I need some lighter reading…
Even if U.G. is right about all of this, it doesn’t even really matter as far as 99.9% of the population is concerned. I originally had a difficult time trying to reconcile the desire to help other people live better, more satisfactory lives with many of his views. His stance is that no one can ever truly ever help anyone since his understanding is purely experiential and cannot be conferred on another, or even on one’s Self, by any means. This may be true, but I don’t think that level of understanding is what most people seek, and that’s the crux of the issue: it all depends on how you want to help and what you want to achieve. In the absolute sense, sure, maybe U.G.’s level of satisfaction is non-transferable as he exists outside of social reality. But most of us live within society in which that form of reality is about as real as it gets. It almost parallels the different goals between Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism: one seeks enlightenment for the Self for the sake of escaping the system of samsara whereas the other seeks enlightenment for the sake of others and sticks around within samsara to help, since it is ultimately only from within the system that one can help those that are trapped within it. So one may strive for perfect understanding and a clear vision of reality, but what good is that if it’s only used for egotistical purposes (though by that point there is no ego to boost, so the goal really just becomes understanding for its own sake.) Again, I think some lighter reading might do me good.
Back to the note of the program ending, I think another big reason for my lack of sadness regarding its wrapping up is the fact that I have another week left of traveling in India, for which I’m incredibly thankful. Although the program was in technically in India, it was undoubtedly far more of a taste of Tibet and Tibetan culture than the country that’s housing the exiled government. I didn’t have much of a chance to see India beyond Vizag the last time I was here so it’s going to be amazing to see a good portion of the North. The original plan was to do Naggar for 4 days with day trips to Manali and 3 days in Delhi but, writing this retrospectively, things (thankfully) didn’t work out like that at all.
Questing for the Mindnut 