Non-Buddhism

(Stupidity: aka. voluntary ignorance)
Curriculum Elements

Read Part 1: Wake Up!

By Matthew O’Connell* 

I will be honest. I am not equipped to put together what this text claims to be. Especially not for many of those who stop by to visit at the SNB site, who are likely far better educated than I am. My only grace in this is that I care little what others think about my actions, at least until I know them well enough, so am happy to blunder, muck up and stumble through my own limits in public. In this, perhaps I am useful for other less formally trained souls and a reminder that intellectual culture need not be seen as elitist, but as locations that can be visited, or as a democracy of ideas, as Laruelle suggested: One available to anyone willing to apply themselves and follow where curiosity leads. 

What I attempt to do with what follows is to scratch the surface of some of the materials that might go into an anti-anti-intellectual stance on, or curriculum for, the practising life for the less intellectually trained, the newbie to thinking about practice and Buddhism at the Great Feast. We might think of it as a starter pack, or an introductory brochure for orientation to the big themes. This whilst attempting to bring those materials forth as practice items in the form of reflective questions. 

Many Buddhist traditions take contemplative reflection as fundamental to practice, and this is often missed by the tendency towards present moment fetishism and the negation of thought amongst western Buddhists. Of course, those invitations can all too often become mere indoctrination or the performance of decision. This is unfortunate. Bringing together meditative equipoise and the training of attention with explorative, critical thought is a great antidote to anti-intellectual approaches to the practising life, as well as to the aloofness that often accompanies the disembodied intellectual, who often goes too far in the opposite direction. 

Personal motivation

Part of my motivation for writing this is that I have long been fascinated by ignorance and the contours of confusion and their relationship to identity formation. The habit of seeking confirmation and validation of one’s ideas, current state and increasingly one’s identity has always struck me as telling and it has been key in my exploration of practices and theories relating to Buddhism and the therapeutic culture I dabble in. It is normal to seek acknowledgement and signs of approval or disapproval from peers, though the marriage of this social drive to hyper-reality, social media norms and the mores of late-stage Capitalism have turned it into a primary dysfunction of our age. When groups engage in such behaviour, forms of collective delusion and intellectual comfort food ensue. 

Ideology is central in the process of collective identity formation. Though predominantly used for defining and describing political or economic models by wider society, for me, ideology as a conceptual framework has been most interesting when used to unpack the formation of collective modes of self and the ignorance that surrender into such enclaves of human imagination requires. As a term for thinking about the collective psyche, ideology fills a glaring gap in the arsenal of Buddhist rhetoric, and acts as a diversion from the over-focus on the self of the last century in the West and its hypochondriac manifestations today. It is a means to discover what lies underneath, rather than within. Thus, in an odd sort of way, the concept of ideology offers a doorway out of the never-ending search for happiness within the individual, or tribe, and the chimera of the true self that continues to blight our age and that hides in the material of many western Buddhist teachers. 

How do we encourage a turn away from the unidirectional obsessions of practice as therapy, practice as self-discovery, practice as going within, practice as discovering the essence of the ‘I’? All this without losing the clear need to work with our experiences of selfhood as forever changing beings caught in confusion, ignorance and suffering? 

An ongoing engagement with intellectual culture coupled to contemplative practices has been effective in my own life. To deny my individuality is to find trouble fast, to remain in a solipsistic stance is to suffer the curse of narcissism and the confines of a very small existence. 

The way out of the dysfunctional mess that defines contemporary spirituality is through the collective resources of our species, and stepping out of the spiritual rat race for the next big answer that may finally resolve all problems and confusion. There must also be a strict rejection of the cheap payoffs of perennialism. The movement towards new forms of tribalism are not the answer either. They merely stretch the self into pockets of selves, which act as outposts for resisting the bigger concerns of our age, whilst reproducing the same patterns of dysfunction found in the individual self. In this, Buddhism remains relevant, though perhaps in its less popular wisdom. 

A harsh take on emptiness and anātman and a refusal to bring in ātman are disruptive tools par excellence. This move is painful, destructive, dismembering even, and requires death to become an ongoing companion; no wonder so many have turned the narrative of non-self into a heart-warming search for the true-self. Though promised and sold by Buddhist groups, challenging the illusion of a self-existing ‘I’ is far more complicated than much contemporary Buddhism lets on, and much of this is due to the role collective conscious, subconscious and unconscious plays within us. The role of western Buddhisms in forging new identities has been poorly elaborated and insufficiently critiqued, too. This is especially true with regards to its ability to inculcate new forms of ignorance, and inculcate followers into the decisional game. 

One consequence we might accept is that Buddhists caught in the decisional matrix need to be challenged, and their ideas, practices and claims led into dialogue with other insights, knowledge and practices from beyond Buddhism’s world. It is not such a hard thing to do and need not be merely an aggressive attack. The twist in this game is to find that sweet spot that non-philosophy and non-buddhism point to: fitting proximity. Recall: not too close to be blinded by the glare of brilliance, wonder and promise, not too far to lose the light and goods therein. 

Anti-intellectualism is expensive. When brought to the practising life, it disables the adult practitioner from maturing beyond the initial allure of the spiritual and gives licence to suppress any potentially subversive practice into the service of one’s ego obsessions and sense of identity. It kills curiosity and keeps the mind enclosed in matrices of self-serving intellectual limits. Offering a helping hand to folks addicted to such spaces could be considered a compassionate act. 

One often missed payoff of the painful route of challenging the self as Buddhism invites us to do is the room it affords for movement. The focus in on the self is suffocating after all and disidentifying with its obsessions creates room to move, room to breathe and room to think. The challenge is never to turn such space into iterations of finality, ultimate transcendence, or the completion of whatever we imagine the path to be. In this regard, Chogyam Trungpa’s concept of spiritual materialism remains a useful one reminding us that we clever fools are adept at turning our gains and insights into forms of self-aggrandisement. 

We practitioners

As practitioners, theoretical materials can be creatively harnessed into practices of contemplation, transformation of the material of the body (feelings, emotions, states, stance, perceptions), and aligned with goals or horizons that range from seeking the meaning of life or “enlightenment”, to becoming more patient with one’s own neurosis and obsessions, to becoming a better person, to developing clarity of mind or a stoic ability to face the horrors of the world. This is all part of the Buddha trip we all got on, right? In today’s world, coupling the contemplative to becoming better informed, more intelligent, and more capable of thinking the world are worthy goals, too. 

Everybody has got to eat

A feast is a disarming affair. Rather than an elitist enclave that the non-elite can feel instinctively excluded from or in conflict with, each diner is seated around a table, meals are served and eaten with the same type of cutlery and dishes. The alcohol more or less is the same, the water, too. And of course, we all have to head off to the toilet at some point. Wherever you are eating, the basic processes are similar if not identical. Treating intellectual culture in a similar manner resonates with me as it is essentially anti-classist. Of course, this is not to be a utopian fantasy. A three-star Michelin restaurant attracts a different crowd from the local chippie, but the unifying element, our basic humanity, unites diners across the financial divide. You and I can eat posh French food if a windfall occurs. Top managers will join the McDonald’s queue if the economy collapses or their job is eaten up by AI. In each location, mouths open and close, chewing and swallowing and sipping and excreting are the common ground that reminds us of our shared mammalian nature. 

Each of the topics that follow is accompanied at the feast by endless great minds, lineages of masters and gurus, a canon with more texts than anyone could hope to read, and a richness of thought, application and debate. It is worth remembering this on occasion. We have access to a mind-blowing wealth of human creativity and it is a thing of wonder. This richness makes any area of human knowledge absurdly complex, rich, and beyond our capacity to master fully. To think is a relational practice and to engage these thinkers, materials and enduring dichotomies requires a relational practice that makes sense to us, as we are in a given phase of our lives, and that speaks to and challenges our limits, desires and natural ability. To non-academics like myself, I would encourage a sense of courage when dealing with overly-assertive intellectuals who claim they have it figured out according to thinker x. That is not to say they might not have, who knows, but there is no need to be bullied or silenced into obedience to their claims. Find your own way through. Ask for help when you need it. 

Relief is provided by the recommendation to follow what drives us and acts as curious attraction. Beware the claimants that their favourite thinkers are all you need! Avoid the ideologues who insist the world is forever a mirror to their pet beliefs; they are everywhere these days. A basic grounding in the big themes – a comprehensive education of sorts (another anti-classist idea) – is recommended. The curriculum thus ought to consist of big picture concepts that allow for orientation to the human condition beyond Buddhism’s concerns or spirituality’s obsessions, but includes them. This is what makes it an antidote to the problems mentioned above. It ideally serves the function of an anti-self-help plan for unthinking practitioners to start to critique their comfy conclusions. Such a view serves as a way into practice for the intellectually savvy, too. In this, the dual purpose is to help thought and the body, contemplation and concepts, to find a more functional relationship.

For on the other side of this messy situation is the addict of thought as refuge. The anti-practitioner stance that has dogged a half-decent turn towards the practising life for intellectuals has tended to ignore the rich history of the philosopher as practitioner, often treating such folks with scorn as if their bodily engagements betrayed their intellectual heights. Anyone reading up on Nietzsche’s troubled life would find it hard to separate his intellectual gifts from his suffering and attempts to forge practices that would allow him to work through ill health, failing eyesight, and eventual descent into madness. The aloofness that accompanies the safe space of abstract thought, intellectual reason and logical argument has often been in service to prudishness on the part of the intellectual who has been all too willing to discount the body’s needs and the necessity for emotional catharsis, rupture and ecstatic expression. Those messy, irrational aspects of human nature have been too readily dismissed. Fine if that is all you can manage, but not if it is mere cowardice. 

For what drives intellectual pursuit beyond the professional spheres? Is it not the stuff of desire, fear, curiosity, pain and joy? What’s more, why should we leave such sites of practice to the therapeutic and spiritual folks out there? Or the religious? Or the occasional philosopher mystic? The oddities of the physical, emotional and sexual are part of our human inheritance after all. Once they are accompanied by epistemic curiosity and a commitment to refining intelligence as an ongoing practice rooted in the body and our shared material existence, there is really no need for the aloofness to continue. 

Curriculum Ahoy!

As practice items, what follow designate terrains of practice, or if you prefer, grounds of intellectual exploration (as embodied practice preferably). What I give is a cursory take on some curriculum items with a contemplative question or two to consider where appropriate. I would dare say we are required to learn about them if we take the practising life seriously. 

Items

I could start off by listing the key themes that overlap with Buddhism from academia. Starting with philosophy it might include the following; theories of knowledge, ethics, mind, religion, hermeneutics, politics, and so on. The crossover with science would include; physics, cognitive science, biology, etc. The humanities and social sciences would have to include; linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics – just to name the most obvious ones. But this is already too much for most and where would they even start to unpack such broad fields of human knowledge and struggle. How much of each would be enough? If we take our understanding of those we know a thing or two about, then perhaps we can personalise what stands out as important as themes that impact our lives as practitioners, and start there. That is more or less the best I can do. 

You will note a lot of overlap between the categories I have chosen below and it ought to become obvious why as you read on. Let’s see if it works. If not, please do better, and share. In fact, if you can add in good practice questions of your own in the comments section, I would really encourage you to do so. If you can manage to consider them as practice items, rather than theory only, I would appreciate it. 

Realism and Idealism

With its long history, this philosophical debate has occupied much of the history of western philosophy. For practitioners, it is an essential dialectic to engage with – to what degree do I commit to a world ‘as it is’ or attempt to imagine a world that is better, desirable and to be sought after? Our age continues to struggle with the consequences of this dynamic and its impact on how we see ourselves socially, and as practitioners. Whether it be science’s dominance of material discourse, or the tendency for groups to retreat into idealism to justify their utopian or dystopian fantasies and desires, these two operate in the background of much of our current social discourse and sit at the base of our mountain of concerns about the practising life and what it can or should do for us. From the political to the personal, from the economic to the educational, we ignore the tension between what is perceived as real and what is imagined at our peril.

1. What hope fills my practising life? Which desires feed my reasons for sitting and engaging in the practices I care for?
2. To what degree do I use goals with realistic ends to guide practice, or marinade in the conviction of good endings, Great Enlightenment©, or simply live inside the idea of a thing rather than venture into its real world demands?
3. Do I hold to the idea that there is a greater reality beyond this material, physical existence? What are the payoffs in doing so? What do I pay scant attention to by holding onto an invisible possibility of more?

Objectivity and Subjectivity

For spiritual practitioners more broadly, this is a key area for investigation. As non-buddhism has shown, Buddhists claim to trade in reality and the harnessing of meditation to gain objective understanding of the nature of reality, yet subjectivity dominates more often than not. In fact, the next pairing demonstrates how most of what we think is an attempt to interpret rather than describe and confusing the two leads to all kinds of delusion.

This is not an invitation to anything goes, however. The age-old challenge of navigating this dynamic is to see it as such; a movement towards or away from one or the other. No absolutes, merely more objectively located or more absorbed by the subjective. The two must meet at some point and regular dates are preferred if we are all to get beyond our narrative takes and learn from the complex world around us. This may not be a technical description of the topic, but it avoids the usual beliefs that can dog this dichotomy by treating them as a relational pair precisely because doing so disrupts the silly notions that we can know objectivity fully in some sort of final state of liberation from confusion and ignorance, or that all we can ever know is our own mind. 

1. What happens if I take my claims about life that are phrased as objective statements and rephrase them as ‘I currently believe, think, assume that..’ and then entertain the idea that at best they are probably only partially true?
2. When I perceive the world, to what degree are my perceptions caught up in familiar, interpretative patterns? Can I suspend such subjective interpretations for periods of time? What changes if I do? 
3. Do I believe the line that I will eventually see reality as it is if I just meditate enough? What ideas might challenge this belief? 
4. What implicit values form my habits of subjective over-interpretation? 

Hermeneutics and motivated story telling

As with all these items, there are those who draw totalising positions from which to pontificate and assert a story. Even those who trade in hermeneutics are guilty of narrative over-reach at times, specifically those who claim “It’s all stories mate”, and presumably we can but interpret; the objective, the real, are forever beyond our grasp. The mere fact that over-interpretation is a thing is a reminder that there are degrees to this. Were there not, our legal system would crumble and we would all be lost in solipsistic realms of heaven and hell.

At a simple level, we interpret everything, meaning we try to make sense of our experiences in the world. If we consider this process interpretative, then we can relax out of the dichotomy of right or wrong, true or false and see that there is a lot of room to move between those opposites, or that we are in relation to them, more or less. This is not a call to relativism, but rather a recognition that we never possess a complete picture of what we interact with. Our perspectives can be correct, true and right, but they always remain positional and to some degree interpretative. Again, the problem lies in our tendency towards over-reach and our inability to see the world as not centred around little old me. 

1. Which parameters designate the confines of my perceptual interpretations?
2. How willing am I to interpret from other perspectives?
3. Which stories do I hold onto and which ones do I resist? How do they open or close my ability to see more, learn more and experience more? 
4. If my life were a story, what would its title be? What might happen if I changed the title or rewrote from another’s perspective?
5. Which stories about meditation, Buddhism, the Buddha do I believe in? What are the consequences of doing so? How active am I in their interpretation into my life?

Absolutes and their allure

Imperfection is a statement on the precarity of absolutes. Yet, we forever find new ways to lust after them. Total answers, black and white ontologies, metaphysics, religious certainty, scientism; we are beset by calls to end the confusion, clear away the doubt, and get with the programme, my programme, my guarantees. Yet, time and again we find our gurus fail us, our politicians’ promises fall flat, and the overly-confident boasting is yet another snake oil salesman selling empty promises. The X = everything crowd are eternally caught in the decisional trap of over-reach and you may want to develop the habit of always taking such claims with a pinch of critical salt. 

The idea that God is mum or dad and that all of our would-be gurus are parental figures is not a bad one for understanding the absurdities of investing in other folk’s promises of finality. 

1. How do I sit with the uncertainty that nags away at my conviction that X is always Y? 
2. What would happen if I gave up my utopian desire for…?
3. What would happen if I gave up on absolutes? 
4. How does the allure of an absolute infiltrate the space of practice? 
5. If we were to entertain the claims of Buddhism regarding final goals as far more earthbound, what might they look like? Are we left with just mindfulness and a bit more patience, or do more ambitious goals still make sense? 

Infinity and Finitude

This topic pushes our dharmic boat out into the waters of physics. Yet philosophy posits the challenge of the possibility of infinity as a question. What changes if its presence or absence is real? Emptiness, God, Buddha Nature are all attempts at conceptualising what are absolutes, aspects of infinity, or that which is beyond an end point.

Finitude is the great disappointment: The reminder that we hang around for a while and then we are gone, that we cannot all be fully realised. We all barter with our inevitable demise, whether that is ignoring it, turning it into an object of desire in the form of a better rebirth, a trip to heaven, or an opportunity to practise the rainbow body or phowa, or striving after radical life extension and in the case of techno-utopians, the development of technology that will allow them to live forever. 

These two refer to the way we orientate ourselves to the world, too. Is the world fully open, or closed? Where do the imaginary confines of ‘my’ world lie? This also means challenging ideologies that are reconfigurations of monist desire. The singularity is an upcoming one for the fanciful dreamers in Silicon Valley. Absolute DEI is one for the new Left. 

1. How much infinity is enough?
2. What payoffs does believing in forever provide?
3. How fully do I accept the real world confines of my existence? Do I even know what they are?
4. Total, complete enlightenment is what exactly? What would its consequences be? 

Critical Thinking beyond Logic

Critical thinking is all too often taught as a set of techniques, taken from philosophical logic, and presented as a tool kit. Once you have them, you possess critical thinking. But what is that supposed to mean exactly? It is similar to handing over a book on BJJ and assuming a black belt will be owned soon. 

To think critically is to test our attachment to the materials of culture, intellectual or otherwise. It represents a long-term commitment to test what we hold to be true and self-evident, through dialogue, analysis, critique, and questioning. It applies to our emotions, feelings, perceptions and sense of self as much as it applies to identifiable patterns of thinking and beliefs. A recent study on its application in school programmes here in Italy showed that without it becoming an ongoing practice, critical thinking is merely a nice idea that produces nothing much at all.

One way of considering critical thinking is as open exploration coupled to good questions, rooted in epistemic humility. The world of coaching is rooted in appropriately timed questions that open up inquiry, experience or possibilities and when it works, it is an enactment of critical thought as practice. Much of it though is really just developing the habit and persisting with it and keeping good company that can help you along in the process. For the practitioner, an added element is the discomfort factor;

1. What will I not think critically about? 
2. Where do I refuse to critique, question, analyse and risk destabilising? 
3. Where am I too comfortable in my assumptions? 
4. What would happen if I took seriously the critique out there of my beliefs and assumptions? 
5. What might happen if I were to entertain the thought experiment that my most cherished beliefs were totally wrong? 
6. What happens to Buddhist ideas and claims if I genuinely interrogate them and maintain a more critical engagement? 

Ignorance and Epistemic Humility

These are among my favourites for they allow the others to be seen. Buddhism has a thing or two to say about ignorance but heaven forbid we stop there. The degree with which we enact and cultivate ignorance in ourselves, groups and societies is impressive: Our species deserves a gold medal in the art of ignorance, and even our intellectual class has developed the habit of late of becoming, oddly enough, anti-intellectual: Hence my use of the phrase ‘voluntary stupidity’. I guess the excuses will come out at some point, “Ideology told me to do it.” “My dog ate my critical thinking skills.” Or, “I thought I was on the right side of history and therefore it was permissible to push my non-obedient colleagues under the bus.”

Epistemic humility is in many ways the natural outcome of thinking ignorance as a topic, for there is no end point for us in which we could ever reach something akin to omniscience. This may seem obvious but the consequences of this recognition are an appreciation of finitude as an existential condition, and an acceptance that we will always be confined by our ignorance, even as we strive to learn more, and see more. How can that not inspire humility? We are forever confined by our lives, and the humility to recognise how we are always partial observers, partial experiencers, partial knowers is essential for avoiding seduction into ideological stances of certainty, over-confidence and over-reach

1. Have I really reflected on what I do not know? 
2. How would I go about doing it? 
3. Can I sit with the feelings that accompany this recognition and allow them to destabilise any wishful thinking I might have been holding onto with regards to the limits of what I can know?
4. Could we accept the Buddha was not omniscient? What might that tell us about the stories around this archetypal figure? 
5. If I cannot eventually know reality as it truly is, what am I doing here? How should that recognition impact my sense of the practising life? 

Freedom and its critics

Entrapment does not equal no room to move. This could be an Orwellian phrase from 1984, but it is not a paradox. A society may be authoritarian, but some degree of movement will be possible. A prescribed writing task may be highly constrained, but we may find a creative response to its limits nonetheless. 

Just as spiritual folks romanticise freedom in a variety of neurotic ways, so do many give up on the concept and miss out on the wiggle room it affords. Freedom as an absolute is a return to square one of the disembodied Platonic ideals and abstract absolutes that drive so many Buddhist practitioners onwards forever towards impossible goals. I prefer to think of freedom as freedom from or freedom to. We may possess or earn the freedom to do something, or gain freedom from something. That is generally where the individual practitioner has room to move. It applies ot groups as much as individuals and a lot of time would be saved if we would only define the containment of what freedom we are trying to obtain or cultivate. 

Metaphysically, the issue often comes down to free-will. Any cursory review of the topic should rid most of the silly idea we have complete free-will, or none at all, so the question, as it almost always does, comes down to degrees. A tension that emerges and that once again picks up on wider social themes is between freedom or rights, and duties and responsibilities. Each side is held dysfunctionally by the right or the left and this tends to dichotomise further what should be a ripe, fascinating ground of exploration on and off cushion. This area covers what might be the major emergence of a practitioner friendly movement in 20^th century philosophy: Existentialism. For free-wheeling hippies and Libertarians, a visit to their table at the Great feast may prove fruitful.

Within the practising life, it also raises questions of individuality, the freedom to experiment, and conformity to in-group social norms in this Buddhist group or that. 

1. What degree of control do I have over my thoughts, feelings, bodily functions?
2. To what degree am I caught up in habitual reactions to events? 
3. What changes for me subjectively if I hold to the idea I have no choice but to run through life as if it were all predestined?
4. What changes for me subjectively if I hold to the idea I have the complete freedom to do as I please? What weight does more free-will have on me? 
5. If absolute freedom does not exist, what am I to make of notions of complete enlightenment, total liberation, full Buddhahood: What could I replace them with whilst dreaming big? 
6. To what degree do I permit myself to experiment with practices, suspend belief in core principles of Buddhism, my teacher, this book or that?

Immanence and Transcendence

Immanence and transcendence are less statements on preferred ontologies than indicators of the terrain of practice. Change equals the movement we undertake in exploring both meaningfully. Movement towards what you may ask. Do we go in, or out? Towards, or back to? Do such movements operate within a hierarchy, or act as a return to some pre-existing state? These are wonderful, and in many ways, impossible questions to answer. They describe the contours of practice. Do I meditate to ‘be here now’ or to reach some objective? The former reflects a practice of immanence, the latter some form of transcendence. If neither are end goals or absolutes, then what are we actually doing when we tell ourselves we are signing up to one, or the other? Beyond stories of this or that goal being desirable or the core practice of tradition x, we are humans establishing relationship with forms of practice and we incubate ideas that shape, effect and lead those practices. Progress, whatever that might mean, is all too often hindered by our inability to shift out of the stories surrounding a practice and our emergent and necessarily intimate relationship with it. 

Though I may choose to settle more on an imminent reading of the world of practice, transcendence by its nature means that change goes beyond whatever is current. As mere mortals, the juice is in the ways we entertain ourselves by indulging in the excesses of each, or use either to fortify our imaginary defences: I believe this, so it is so! The world is this way! Buddhism is this, not that! That is where the questions lead me at least. 

1. Which of these two do I believe I am committed to? What ere the consequences of both the choice made and my belief that that is what I am doing?
2. How does my commitment to one or the other shape the kinds of questions I ask and the expectations I have of the practices I engage in? 
3. Does the often dysfunctional side of transcendence (some form of escapism) play out in my practice?
4. Does my commitment to an ideal of immanence mean I merely marinade in my own perceptual and experiential limits?

Social Constructivism, blank slate theory versus Innatism; nature versus nurture

This is the most political of my interventions. For one could argue that our inability, especially on the Left, to make peace with this dichotomy is at the heart of much of the culture war and the new forms of ignorance that characterise the stupidity of the excesses of identity politics in the 21^st century. It is also where change will need to take place for the Left to evolve beyond its worst instincts. Its insistence on forever mutating identities stands in contradiction with its obsession with racial essentialism and its new form of obsession with the primitive other i.e. minorities as noble savages that need saving from the evil white man. That’s without touching on the minefield that is gender and the contradictory activist claims that jump schizophrenically from one side to the other of these two. 

I tend to see wokeism as the next step in the evolution of the New Age with its gurus, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, and desire for pure origins to be reclaimed from evil society and its dehumanising effects; cue bloody Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who I cannot help but consider responsible for the root myth of the progressive Left. Pointing thus to capture, predominantly, by the myth of blank slate for the American and British Left. 

At its heart, the blank state theory is a desire to transcend our shared, flawed humanity. It seeks to escape the body, history and our social experiments and it blames society, the family, Capitalism and other external forces for the ills of the moment. As an extreme of a dialectic, it is an indulgent fantasy and belief in the innate purity of children and a desire to return to an infantile state of innocence prior to society’s corruption. It is also the ground of myths around freedom that are in desperate need of interrogation. Politically, it can be found in the utopias of Communism, Nazism and their assorted friends. In each of these extreme examples, our shared humanity is pushed aside in the race to remake humans in the image of the top ideologues.  

At its most extreme, innatism claims there is no room to move. It appears in the over-bearing desire to fix the world in predictable patterns that produce stability, reliable reality and order. On a personal level, it is heard in the voice of those who claim that this is simply who I am. That change is bullshit. That those silly folk over there on diets, going to the gym, attending protests, and campaigning for environmental justice are wasting their time. Where belief in blank slate can produce naivety, innatism can lead to cynicism and resignation to a world that we simply cannot work with, change, or improve for those suffering far too much. Needless to say, I consider both to be shit and in need of serious interrogation.

You might read all this and be chaffing at the bit because I said a few unkind words about the Left, of which I have always been part. Or you might be thinking this is not how I understand this pairing at all. Intelligent folks who have thought about all this or studied it should do so. For those who have not, one or the other of these two generally lie in the heart’s desires, and instinctual sense of the world that we carry around. They could even be argued to be at the root of the pessimism or optimism that grips many. Either way, when they exist as assumptions that the world is simply this way or that, they operate as soldiers for one side of the debate and turn those soldiers into reactive militia for the dominant ideology of the time and place they are in. Look around you to see the consequences of investing unconsciously in one of these positions. We are not looking at abstract theory, but theory in practice and it is taking place across the political spectrum as I type this. 

In terms of practice questions, it can be fascinating to contemplate the full realisation of each position. It can be helpful to follow this up by interrogating where we hold onto one or the other position without even realising it. Needless to say, I consider both inherently dysfunctional. Neither is sufficient for explaining the human condition and both tend to dehumanise in increasing degrees as the ideologue grips onto them and the echo-chambers and tribalism increase: This is one reason why many more measured intellectuals are deeply worried about increasing polarisation taking place. If English language readers an set aside their parochialism for a second, and look at European countries and their recent history, domestic terrorism from both sides is often the result of losing touch with shared reality beyond these two positions. 

In returning to the practitioner in their homes or dharma halls, we might ask ourselves which spiritual and social practices do I engage in that encourage me to invest in one or the other as an absolute truth? How much damage does doing so do? What opportunities are open or closed by each position? What utopian ideals are you trying to bring about or protect by doing so? 

Start there, and interrogate away. 

1. What would happen to my ideas of practice, or activism, if I were to abandon the position I am naturally fond of; innatism, blank slate? What changes in how I exist in my world?
2. To what degree do I believe there is a pure or true me, or other, that merely needs to be discovered, or given room to emerge? 
3. To what degree do I hold to the idea that we are born a certain way and remain thus and therefore change is more or less impossible, or merely superficial: we always end up returning to the way we were? 
4. What can you learn by imagining either is totally true for you and others? 
5. Do I hold to the idea there is an essential Buddha nature somewhere? How does that fit with current understanding about this dichotomy?

Ideology as person forming; ideology as systematic means for orientating consciousness to the world, ideology as the refusal of ambiguity, pluralism, and diversity of thought

I started out in the introduction considering ideology. I will end with this same topic because I continue to believe that it represents one of the most powerful disruptive tools for the practitioner and for groups engaged in any sort of practice. It is a key antidote to spiritual solipsism, the over-sacralisation of the self, and the myth that going within will reveal all the great treasures a person could ever need. That said, I am not against the notion of the individual, a well-managed turn within, valorising intuition as personally important, instinct and the need to sort out our personal history and know ourselves as best we can. The simple point to make is that it does not stop there and that that is not all there is. We are complex creatures after all. The Great Feast reminds us there are endless models describing what it is to be a person in the world. From religion to psychology, from philosophy A to philosophy Z, there are countless voices telling us what we are and what we are not. 

This in itself is a site ripe for interrogation. 

For western Buddhists and the spiritual but not religious crowd, the gaping hole regarding the self has long been the role of society and the context in which we live in shaping the perpetual apparatus that we operate within, in determining to a great degree the ideas available to us, or at the very least, that dominate the ideational landscape we inhabit and move around in. Since we are tribal creatures, and finite, and interpreting mammals, and driven by the familiar, the shared context has a far greater role in shaping our subjective world than most of us will admit. The individualism of the last decades has sold the story that we are all unique and special and who would not want to be so, right? 

An exploration of ideology is a sobering wake up call for the practitioner focused on the self and bathed in the mores of a Buddhist tradition. 

1. What are the givens that operate in my sense of self? My identity as practitioner? My role as x?
2. How has the world I grew up in formed me differently compared to someone in context, country x?
3. What are the assumptions operating in my family, relationship, work, social group, city, country that I rarely consider, critique or examine? What might happen if those assumptions, and their values, were suspended for a while? 
4. How does Buddhism function as ideology for me?
5. What happens if I see Buddhism as one ideology among many?
6. How have I been shaped by the underlying assumptions of my sangha, Tricycle, group of intellectual or spiritual friends, etc?

End

As this is the last item I will add, the rest is up to you, at least for now. I would encourage you to continue what I started: Make each item a practice item as you go. Construct good questions that provoke thought, reflection, contemplation and exploration. Concoct questions that challenge and open up new spaces of thought and feeling. The impact on the practising life must transcend mere intellectual speculation: contemplation suggests we experience, or feel the power of a good question as much as reason with it. Take that as you will.

Since I am writing for an American site, however atypically American it might be, I shall ditch my Britishness for a moment and engage in shameless self-publicity. 

I coach, mentor, give a helping hand to those seeking to construct a practising life, aid in deprogramming out of ideological capture, happily tackle Buddhist and spiritual taboos and more. Get in touch if this text speaks to you and you would like a hand in exploring the interplay between good questions, practice and inquiry.

oconnellcoaching@live.com 

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* Matthew Joseph O’Connell is founder of the blog Post-Traditional Buddhism and co-founder, along with Stuart Baldwin, of the New Books Network podcast Imperfect Buddha (“going where other Buddhist podcasts fear to tread”). Twitter. Facebook.He also offers coaching “for Buddhists and ex-Buddhists who wish to find balance and evolve their practice” and beyond.

See Matthew’s other posts on SNB:
* Wake Up!
* Realizing Awakened Consciousness:
* Interviews with Buddhist Teachers;
* Buddhism, Mindfulness, Neoliberalism;
* You Need Non-Practice!
* Interview with the Imperfect Buddha Podcast

Image: From: Zachary Fruhling, “Three Arguments Against Identity Politics.”