Episode 8 - The Buddha and "Mindfulness"
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Episode 8 - The Buddha and "Mindfulness"
NOTE: If you’re a new subscriber to my substack, I’d invite you to start at my review of the first episode of this lecture series.
In the last episode, John Vervaeke went into detail about what an agent-arena relationship is. More specifically, he defined an “existential mode” as the process of co-identification in the agent-arena relationships that we’re currently engaged in.
Existential Modes - Having versus Being
According to Erich Fromm and others, humans dwell in two broad existential modes. Each is organised around a core set of needs. In the having mode, needs are met by having things. In the being mode, needs are met by becoming something (e.g. becoming more mature).
The having mode revolves around a categorical understanding of things. For example, imagine a specific cup. This specific cup is an instance of a category of cups. It functions like all the other cups in that category. In some sense, it’s fungible with other cups in that category. So if it gets damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Ultimately, we need to drink water to live. But also, we need to drink water conveniently to live a life of ease. We can learn exactly what operations to perform on a cup to drink water and quench our thirst. In order to meet our needs, our relationship to the cup is oriented around efficient and effective control. In the having mode, we rely on our capacity for intelligence and control to solve problems.
The being mode revolves around an expressive understanding of things. For example, let’s imagine a loving relationship with a romantic partner. Or a fulfilling platonic relationship with a friend. We’re trying to become something, and we’re trying to afford them the opportunity to become something. We’re trying to meet our needs of meaning, maturity, growth and development. John mentions that love (or really any reciprocal interpersonal relationship) is a process akin to anagoge. The other person in the relationship isn’t a fungible object that’s identical to all other objects in that category. Telling our partner that they’re fungible, or relating to them from a place of problem solving/control doesn’t improve our relationship to them. It potentially ends it instantly. The being mode isn’t oriented around solving problems. It’s oriented around trying to use reason to make meaning in life.
The broader point isn’t that one mode is good and the other mode is bad. It’s that we have a tendency to get these two mixed up, and subsequently experience “modal confusion”. It’s this modal confusion that fosters foolishness and suffering. For example, bad advertising relies on this sort of modal confusion. Most people feel a deep need to be connected with their community. Many beer commercials often feature lots of people drinking beer and having a great time. But drinking beer doesn’t reliably satisfy our need for connection, or adaptively heal our feelings of alienation. If we believe the commercial, we end up having beer in an attempt to be more connected. Believing this bullshit causes us to experience modal confusion. In our attempt to escape this confusion encourages us to sink deeper and deeper into maladaptive loops.
The mythos of Buddha’s awakening
Our inability to easily escape our modal confusion is one of the hallmarks of the meaning crisis. There’s a deep thirst for psychotechnologies that afford us the ability to afford this escape. This partially explains the “Mindfulness Revolution” in the West, since Buddhism provides a number of psychotechnogolies for this specific issue.
In fact, the Buddha’s myth is an excellent example to unpack the differences between the having mode and the being mode. Remember, myths are not irrelevant stories from the past. They’re attempts to capture perennial patterns afflicting the human condition. Let’s consume the Buddha’s myth in that light.
The Buddha’s myth
There isn’t a single canonical account of the myth. But the one we’ll use goes as follows. When Siddhartha was born, his father invited many sages and wise men to come to his birth. They prophesied that the boy would have one of two futures. He would either become a great king, or enter religious life and become a great teacher. The king was archetypical of a pre-axial age monarch, and strongly preferred the former. To guarantee this, he removed from Siddhartha's life anything that might stoke his curiosity in religion. Or as we might put it, axial age thinking. So the king gave the young prince all the benefits of the pre-axial world. That is, the king ensconced the prince in power and prosperity. He was always surrounded by lots of food, beautiful women and healthy people.
Eventually, the prince’s curiosity got the better of him and he went to explore outside the palace. First, he met an old man and saw that our lives continuously leak away without pause. Then he met a sick man, and saw that all beings experience some suffering and discomfort in their lives. He eventually saw a dead man, and realised that all beings that experience a birth must eventually experience a death. This created such a deep existential shock in the prince that he instructed his driver to race back to the palace. But on the way, the prince came upon a mendicant with a deep sense of peace and ease in his eyes. The mendicant helped him realise that there’s a way out from the anxiety induced by old age, sickness and death. Essentially, that there’s a way to achieve a deep connectedness and peace with the world, untouched by the vicissitudes of our mortality.
The awareness of old age, sickness and death shattered his model of the world. The serenity of the mendicant provoked his existing narratives about his life. Shaken to his core, the prince attempted to forget what he saw back within the pleasures of the palace. Of course, given the profundity of what he saw relative to all he’d known until then, this proved to be impossible. He felt deeply alienated and disillusioned by his palatial life. He knew that old age, sickness and death would eventually come for him. Palatial life provided no answers to him, because it was designed to obscure the very existence of those problems.
Ultimately, he decided to cut his hair and to follow the path of the renouncers. He studied under various teachers and mastered many meditative techniques. But none offered him the peace and freedom he sought. He then attempted to submit his body to tremendous pressure and pain. He practised brutal forms of self-denial. His body became so emaciated that it was possible to see his spine through the front of his stomach. Yet he found himself no closer to the freedom that he originally sought.
Eventually, he was sitting on a riverbank and saw a large barge float past. On it, a musician was telling his student the right way to tune his lyre. “Listen! Strings can’t be too tight, nor can they be too loose”. This is when Siddhartha discovered the middle way. It implied a radical transformation away from self-indulgence and self-denial. It didn’t mean some kind of compromising middling solution, but rather an optimization of finding the right way to be connected with the world.
When this realisation struck him, he was so emaciated that he tumbled into the river and started to drown. Eventually, he was saved by a little girl. Within the cultural context of the time, it would have been extremely demeaning for a man to be saved by a little girl. Especially since the man was once a prince. But he allowed himself to be saved. This speaks to the radical transformation that happened within him.
As an antidote to the anxiety of old age, sickness and death, he resolved to teach others this middle way. He taught people four truths known experientially by the “awakened ones”. That is, there’s a seemingly infinite amount of dissatisfaction in life. But this dissatisfaction has causes and conditions. And that the cessation of those causes and conditions produces a cessation of the dissatisfaction. That the eightfold path of the right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration provides a way to eliminate the causes of dissatisfaction.
Deconstructing the Buddha’s journey
For our purposes, the palace is a metaphor of residing within the having mode for all aspects of life. Again, it’s not that the being mode is good and that the having mode is bad. It’s that we often get the two mixed up. Viewing his whole life through the having mode could never have buttressed him against the anxiety of old age, sickness and death. He was overcome with a profound existential surprise/shock when he saw the old, sick and dead people. This is similar to the idea of “awakening” in various axial traditions, where we’re suddenly able to access new patterns of reality via new modes of being. The peace in the medicant’s eyes was a direct confrontation to Siddhartha, because it invited him to consider residing in the being mode.
So it’s no wonder that Siddhartha couldn’t find any peace within the palace. That entire structure wasn’t fitted to this new mode of existence that Siddartha yearned for. Or rather, Siddhartha did not yet understand how to access this mode from within palatial life. It makes a quote from Marcus Aurelius all the more profound - “It’s possible to be happy, even within a palace.”
When we talk about someone being “disillusioned”, we often charge it with a negative inflection. But in this case, we could argue that it was ultimately a positive for Siddhartha. By breaking through the illusion of palatial life, he began to break through his modal confusion. He tried to make the palatial mode of existence work. But he was just too alienated from it. This tends to happen often with people that have had “awakening” experiences. They feel an unquenching yearning to transform their whole lives based on what they’ve realised. There’s a strong sense of not being able to go back to their old mode of existence.
So he decided to leave. But the harsh asceticism of his new teachers failed to appease him. How could it? He was still modally confused. He’d merely gone from self-indulgence to self-denial. That is, he’d gone from one extreme on an axis of “having” to another extreme. But the issue was never his specific location on that axis. It was the axis itself for those specific needs. That is, dwelling within the having mode to find meaning in life, and to find freedom from his anxiety. His experience is relatable to many of us that have been modally confused at one point in our lives. There’s a temptation to wildly swing back and forth to address our discomfort. But it never works. Because we’re attempting to meet our need for meaning from the wrong mode of existence. Self-denial is merely the negation of self-indulgence, but not its transcendence. When you negate something, you’re still framing it in the same old way.
The middle way that Siddhartha discovered should remind us of the golden mean when we learned about Aristotle. It’s not some compromise middling solution. It’s an active optimization process to find the right connectedness. That’s what the being mode is all about. It’s about trying to be connected in the right way to the world.
The middle way was his framework for attempting to optimise his cognition in such a way that transcends and rediscovers the missing mode that he remembered within the eyes of the mendicant. It’s not merely intellectually or factually remembering that mode. It’s an experiential or modal memory.
Sati and “mindfulness”
“Sati” is a Pali word that means “memory”. In the context of Buddhism, it refers to an experiential recall. For example, imagine that we’re at a college reunion after many years. As we immerse ourselves in the reunion, we start to take on pieces of an identity from our days in college. We can start to remember what it felt like to be a student at that college. It’s not a mere factual recall. It’s a very experiential and participatory recollection. That type of recollection is what the word “sati” is trying to capture. In the west, sati is often translated as “mindfulness”.
But we don’t just want any old recollection. As described above, the eightfold path stipulates a right, or correct sati. That is, a way to remember or recover the peace Siddhartha saw in the eyes of the mendicant. Even the word “remember” sort of captures this. “Re-member” means to regain membership of something. When an individual perfects the process of correct sati, they’ve unlocked the ability to remember their intrinsic identity in the world. That’s what it means to “awaken” in Buddhism. “The Buddha” isn’t a name. It’s a title which literally means “the awakened one”. Buddh-ism is actually “wake up”-ism.
The psychotechnologies of meditation were specifically constructed a few thousand years ago to help people find meaning in their lives. Specifically, by helping people to remember the being mode experientially. So it’s no surprise that as our society starts facing a crippling crisis of meaning, there’s been a surge of interest in them.
Understanding mindfulness scientifically
If we want to awaken from the meaning crisis, we need to understand what mindfulness meant to the Buddha. Or more specifically, we need to provide a scientific account of how these practices work and the functional role they play in the overall ecology of Buddhist practices.
Separating the language of teaching from the language of explanation
Most descriptions of mindfulness are actually unhelpful for our discussion, since they often use the language of teaching. We need to distinguish between the language of training someone to use a tool, and the language of explaining why the tool works. The former can easily mislead us in our attempt to provide the latter.
For example, we can explore our need for a different language for teaching and explanation by considering how human memory works. The method of location is an effective ancient technique. The method involves creating a space in your mind that has a collection of topically themed rooms. In each room, we place objects relating to the things we’d like to memorise. When recalling these objects, we can reuse our faculty of spatial recollection to recall collections of facts. Ancient orators like Cicero used this technique to memorise extremely long speeches.
The spatial nature of this technique might easily fool us into believing that our memories are spatially stored in our psyche. That is, when we need to recall something, a little person in our head sifts through lots of different “rooms” to try to find what we need. However, we have compelling scientific evidence that this is almost entirely wrong. But we don’t even need that literature to demonstrate our point. For example, what colours are associated with the colour red? We might answer blue or green. The word “shoe” is close to “red”, in that red shoes are common. But when we think of “green”, it’s not clear if most people would immediately think of shoes. These sorts of transitive relationships can’t be easily captured by a spatial model of memory. Another example is our ability to rapidly know when we don’t know something. If a little person in our head is responsible for sifting through our memories, how can we instantly know whether we know something or not? It turns out that the machinery of memory is a lot more mysterious than the method of location implies. That language is excellent at training us to effectively use our memory. But it starts to break down when we try to scientifically and critically attempt to examine how that machinery works.
“Pay attention to the present moment” or “don’t judge your experience” can be useful cues when teaching someone mindfulness. But we shouldn’t carelessly import this language in our attempt to explain and understand how and why mindfulness works.
A schema for mindfulness
It turns out that we already have some tools/concepts to perform this investigation. We talked a lot about the structural-functional organisation of things in a previous episode. Specifically, a list of features isn't sufficient to capture the essence of an object, and that we need to understand the deeper structural-functional organisation of those features. For example, a bird is more than just something that has feathers, wings and a beak. If I slap those things onto a table, it won’t suddenly become a bird. We need a deeper through line that informs our understanding of how these features are connected and organised within the thing.
Looking at scientific articles on mindfulness yields the following common features. That is, mindfulness involves:
Being present
Non-judging
Cultivation of insight
Reducing reactivity to the world
This feature list is okay. But it’s missing the structural-functional organisation that ties them all together. We need to turn this feature list into a “feature schema”, that groups features together and affords a more systematic investigation.
Looking at this feature list again, it seems that “being present” and “non-judging” are states that we can engage in. Whereas “insight” and “reduced reactivity” are traits that we can cultivate. Moreover, they seem to be outcomes of performing the previous two features. This sort of grouping allows us to ask more interesting questions about the causal relationships of these features. For example, how does being present foster insight or reduce reactivity? We can also ask constitutive questions (i.e. part-whole questions). For example, is non-judging a part of being present? Is reducing our reactivity to the world part of cultivating insight?
Notice what we’ve done here. By framing things into the language of explaining, we’ve given ourselves a stable ground to uncover the structural-functional organisation of mindfulness.
Cultivation of insight
The language of “being present” is sort of useless for our purposes. For example, what does “being present” even mean? Does it mean being present to this nanosecond, this second or even this hour? Or is it talking about our room, our city or country? Or some combination of time and space? It can be a useful language for teaching mindfulness. But it’s woefully inadequate for our investigation of the mechanics of mindfulness.
“Right concentration” in Siddhartha's Eightfold Path implies that there is a wrong concentration. Or an incorrect concentration. Mindfulness isn’t about concentration per-se. It’s about getting the right type of concentration and the right kind of attention to work together.
It’s easiest to demonstrate this with a physical example. Let’s hold up a finger right next to our monitor for a second. When you look at the finger, try to concentrate as hard as you can at it. And as you’re concentrating at it, try to gradually concentrate harder and harder. Let’s try to do this for thirty seconds. Most people would find this exercise at least somewhat unpleasant. That’s because we’re concentrating our mind into a tunnel and sticking it onto our object of attention.
Let’s hold up our finger next to our monitor another time. Now instead of concentrating as hard as we can, let’s try to pay attention to the nuances of the finger. Let’s get playful and curious. Let’s notice if the finger is straight like a line, or if it’s a bit bent or crooked in a few places. Does the texture of the finger change across the finger? Is it uniform? What’s the lighting like on the finger? How many creases are there on the finger, and what’s the difference between one crease and another crease? Let’s try to do this for thirty seconds.
That’s usually a very different experience for most people. That’s what Susan Wolf calls a “soft vigilance”. That’s because we’re not hardening our mind and sticking it onto something. We’re constantly trying to renew our interest in the object, by examining different nuances of the object. We’re trying to conform to the object to afford a better discovery of its eidos. We’re trying to constantly explore the object and allow it to unfold in our minds. As we get deeper into this, our finger starts to have a musicality of intelligibility to it.
This example raises really interesting implications on the nature of attention. We tend to believe that attention is like a spotlight. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening at all. Attention is actually more like an optimization process. It’s a process of tuning like the lyre from Siddhartha’s story. It’s about finding the sweet spot between too tight and too loose. It’s about getting interested in whatever we’re attending to.
It’s true that a spotlight is sort of what our attention does. That is, it’s true that our attention changes what is salient in our environment. But that metaphor leaves behind all the rich optimization that’s happening under the hood.
Although “attend” is a verb, it isn’t something we can directly do. If we’re asked to “walk” or “run”, we can instantly get a rough idea of what needs to happen with our bodies. But if we’re asked to “practice”, we’d ask what we should be practising with. Attention is sort of like that. We don’t directly pay attention. We pay attention by optimising some other process. For example, if we’re asked to “pay attention”, it might optimise our watching, our listening or some other faculty. But it’s never decoupled from another activity.
So when we’re paying attention, we’re running an optimization process under the hood. We’re coordinating various processes in our cognition to align towards the same goal. This is actually similar to Plato’s idea of optimising our internal conflict to cultivate wisdom. It turns out that this is a clue on how mindfulness can be used to cultivate insight.
The next episode goes into more detail on the process of generating insight.