Meditation and Non-duality

Waterway near Lower Holbrook, Suffolk. Photo by catward.artist

Like so many people in the troubled West, I came to meditation a few years ago for reasons of mental health. For me, meditation was not only immediately enjoyable and helpful, but it also generated interesting insights, insights which started me thinking philosophically again. I found that just to sit still or lie on my back with my eyes closed and no particular stimulus, observing what was there to be observed, was a positive experience, and this is already revealing: it suggests that once we can let go of the ways we torment ourselves with our narratives about the future and the past then the baseline or background of our conscious existence, the bare experience of awareness, is not an experience of suffering or even of neutrality but is peaceful and pleasurable. (I know this is not everyone’s initial experience of mediation. But I think most people who practise meditation for any length of time find sooner or later that this is the case.) As every meditator also finds, once I opened my eyes and re-engaged with the world again, that peace and pleasure would evaporate, as the usual functions of the egoic self came back online, or were triggered by something in my experience. But the states of mind I came to in meditation somehow percolated into life in general, so that I became, in incremental but unmistakable progressions, less reactive, and happier.

However, there was some part of me that wanted more than this gradual incremental improvement in mental health, so I kept exploring different styles and methods of meditation. In doing this I came across the world of ‘non-duality.’ ‘Non-duality’ is a translation of the Sanskrit ‘Advaita’, one variety of ‘Vedanta’: a way of reading of the sacred Hindu texts, the Vedas and Upanishads, which made up one of the classical schools of Indian thought. ‘Advaita Vedanta’ draws on hints and suggestions in these and other texts to develop a philosophy in which the self (‘Atman’) is seen as in no way separate from a divinity that encompasses all Being, sometimes called ‘Brahman’. This view draws its support not just from this exegesis of sacred texts but also from experience, and in particular the kind of experiences that are encountered in meditation. If you simply introspect with no further goal, so the view says, you will find perceptions, thoughts and feelings, but you will not find a hermetically sealed self that holds it all together as one consciousness isolated from others and from the cosmos as a whole: in fact you will not find a separate self at all. In this, non-duality agrees with Buddhism and with the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and these connections are often remarked on. What you will find instead, according to non-dual views, is a ‘self’ that extends endlessly without limits, and that encompasses all of existence. Individuation and separation, on this view, are surface phenomena with no underlying reality.

This may all sound implausible to the average reader, but there is nevertheless a modern vogue for ‘non-duality,’ and you can find hundreds of non-dual practices on the Internet that conduct simple meditations and inquiries intended to bring about these kinds of experiences and insights. These practices were what I began to discover: once again, I found these kinds of exercises enjoyable and beneficial; and I even began to feel that I could access states in which many aspects of the individual self seemed to be suspended. Perhaps I even thought, initially, that I was going to have some sort of “awakening” experience, a breakthrough to a different kind of non-dual consciousness. However, today I am sceptical about the meaning of these kinds of experience: however powerful non-self experiences may be – and there is no doubt that people have such experiences – I am not convinced that these experiences mean that there really are no separate selves. In some cases, either suddenly or gradually, individuals seem to experience a shift in which the sense of self is apparently entirely dispelled, or weakened to such an extent that it will never return in a strong form again: this is what is called “awakening.”

Despite this scepticism, I am profoundly grateful for discovering non-duality. Not only do I think that there is great therapeutic value in weakening a strong sense of self, but there is something about non-dual experiences and how they are communicated which is genuinely revealing. We do tend, especially today, to have an overdeveloped sense of self, and many aspects of it are both harmful and false, such as the stories we constantly tell ourselves about the kinds of people we are, why we are destined always to fail and to be unhappy. Anything that loosens the grip of these kinds of narratives is to be valued; insight into these kinds of narratives provided by mindfulness is one of its great benefits. But I also value non duality because it does encourage genuinely philosophical interrogations of and reflections on the self and reality, and it does provide genuinely profound insights. In some sense we are profoundly connected with each other and with the world that surrounds us; but in another, equally real sense we have private experiences and separate, individual lives to lead. What I have come to think is that in a sense the whole beauty and profundity of our lives is to be found in the way we have to span these two dimensions.

Cartesian Experiment

Cartesian Experiment – Let us repeat Descartes’s thought experiment, and ask once again what there is of which we can be indubitably certain. We will bear in mind all of Descartes’s arguments about the possibility of illusion and of deception by an “evil demon.” But we will also bear in mind the critique of Descartes made by Husserl and others, that while there is undoubtedly thinking going on in our experience, it is not legitimate to conclude from this that there is a “thinking thing” here, cogito as a noun. What is here? There are, as we have already intimated, thoughts, but there are also bodily sensations and external perceptions. It may be that we are being deceived by the demon with respect to what is really out there, a la The Matrix, but we will leave this question aside: there are nevertheless these sensations and perceptions. It is tempting to add that there is the experience of a world and also the experience of a self. However, Buddhism and David Hume in particular invite us to doubt the latter: isn’t there just the experience of certain sensations and perceptions, without any need to attribute these to a “self”, or find the self “in” the sensations and perceptions in some way? Others will argue very creditably for the latter, but let us keep the possibility open that we cannot be sure of the experience of the self. Also thinking of a Buddhist perspective, we might doubt that there’s necessarily the experience of a “world” here: some Buddhist traditions, such as Zen, claim that at least some experiences are experiences of a kind of nothingness, where there are no separate “objects” and nothing seems “solid”, where none of those rules that need to be in place to make up a “world” inhere. These traditions even tend to value these experiences as being the most veridical we could have, whereas our experience of a rule-governed spatio-temporal reality is illusory. So do we definitely encounter the experience of a world? For the time being we’ll also cede this point to the Buddhist and leave the experience of a “world” out of our account of what is indubitably, certainly “there” in our conscious experience.

As “non dual” and other mindfulness and meditation traditions rightly keep reminding us, there is also a perpetually present awareness: in fact this is the one thing that is constantly here in our experience, whereas sensations, perceptions and thoughts are constantly changing and in some cases may not be there at all. (This may be questioned in the case of sensations, but it is certainly conceivable. Most of those who have spent some time meditating will know that there can be awareness present and yet an absence of thoughts.) Thoughts, sensations and perceptions are themselves of course experiences; in other words, we only have thoughts, sensations and perceptions by way of awareness. All we can be sure of is that there is an awareness and that it has these different kinds of experiential contents. It is of course the matter for endless debate what manner of thing this “awareness” is, in the Eastern traditions and in Western philosophy (and no doubt elsewhere as well): for example in the phenomenological school of Husserl and his successors.

At this stage all possibilities remain open to explain the origin of these contents, including the possibility that there is no real world “out there” independent of the experience of it (idealism), the possibility that all of this experience is generated by fundamental physical properties such as atoms, quantum fields etc. (physicalism), and the possibility that there is a world out there, independent of us as individual consciousnesses, but which nevertheless conveys itself perfectly in our perceptions (realism). What we will subsequently discover is that one part of what we experience, the part which is perceived as an external world, behaves in a way that has a certain regularity to it; science is the name which will be given to the study of this regularity, and physics the name of the science that that maps it in its most general forms.

At this point, however, I want to move out of the experimental situation and make some decisions, based partly on the consequences of adopting certain kinds of metaphysics. Specifically I want to rule out some options: firstly physicalism itself, which we can see, approached from this angle, looks distinctly unpromising. For physics only really deals with one part of this realm of indubitable reality, that concerned with the perception of an external world, and while it may be very successful in giving an account of the behaviour of the forms of that world, it does not thereby acquire the right to say anything about the real ontological status of that world. Even more damningly, there is no reason to think that physics or any other science can tell us anything about the nature of thoughts and feelings, and it is also incapable of explaining how anything like consciousness can emerge from the purely physical world it posits: the famous hard problem of consciousness.

But I also want to rule out the Kantian move of asserting that all of our experience, including our internal experience of the self, is just the experience of the kind of world, with its determinate categories, that a finite self-conscious creature must necessarily create, out of the intuitions it receives, and inhabit, so that any experience of a world as it is in itself is decisively ruled out. Such a move leaves us gesturing towards a “thing-in-itself” which no cognition of ours can ever approach and which lies in a relation to the world of experience that we can never clarify. Kantian transcendental idealism has had a deadly effect on the subsequent history of Western philosophy, so-called continental philosophy in particular.

What options remain open to us, as plausible ways to do justice to what we discover through this simple Cartesian thought experiment? Idealism certainly. And also direct realism: for any kind of realism which isn’t direct opens up the way for some form of transcendental idealism to enter back in. If there is a gap between our apprehension of the world and how that world is in itself we are once again in the ambit of the thing in itself. I have a lot of respect for both positions. In fact I sometimes feel that what I am searching for is an idealism that is also and at the same time a direct realism. Would anyone join me in this venture?

Brighton Springboard Festival

I hardly ever play in public these days, but Brighton Springboard Festival provided an opportunity yesterday morning for me to do some collaborative playing in a (fairly!) non-pressurizing environment. As I also don’t put much pressure on myself these days in terms of playing, I rather enjoyed it. Some things came off better than others as always, but I was pleased with Manuel de Falla’s Jota (with Jan King), which I find a challenging play. (I very much appreciated the kind words of Birgit Rohowsky about this and my playing in general at the Festival.) Congratulations to Rod Edmunds, Jan King and Frances White for their impressive singing, and to Daria Robertson for her really committed and polished performances, which won her several well-deserved first prizes! All Saints Church in Hove made a good venue for this, with a real ‘concert’ feel. Thanks to Springboard for putting on such a good show, and a great job adjudicating from James Oldfield.

The kind of ‘flow state’ I always want to achieve in collaborative musicianship with singers is when my mind is on nothing other than what the singer is doing with the words of the song in the moment, and as other collaborative pianists will probably recognize, it happens less often than I would like. (Working with instrumentalists the equivalent is something like being focused on what they are doing with a melodic line or with a particular rhythm etc.) But I did feel I got into that frame of mind when I played for Rod’s lovely heartfelt performance of Vaughan Willliams’s ‘Whither Must I Wander,’ and at other moments today. When it happens, somehow the technical aspects of playing, including just getting the notes right, and even attention to the tone colours you’re producing on the piano, somehow take care of themselves. Makes me think I should get back to doing more of this…

Lindy hop

Cathy and I are thoroughly enjoying lindy hop lessons with our wonderful teachers Alan Hands, Tish Mos and Mandy. When I was young, I was someone who refused to dance in any way, shape or form. I’ve heard Henry Shukman on YouTube somewhere talking about this very English phenomenon of the inability to dance as originating in being alienated from your body, which is seen in our culture as something to discipline and subdue, rather than something to allow to move freely. It’s Cathy who’s encouraged me to try to overcome this, initially by learning a first dance for our wedding.

These classes suit me very well, since they involve learning set moves: I’m much happier, as with the wedding dance, when there’s a fixed routine and I know what I’m supposed to do in advance. What’s still a nightmare for me is being told I can do whatever moves I want – that’s when I’m liable to freeze. Cathy and I can now dance with one another, in the safety of our home, with some freedom and without existential dread, so that's quite an achievement. My goal for the classes is what Alan, Tish and Mandy are always encouraging: relaxing enough to listen to the music and respond, rather than just robotically learning the sequences. But it’s still a wonder to me that I can now go to these classes and dance with all of these friendly and helpful followers without destroying everyone’s evening. My higher goal is to feel that I can go to a social dance, and ask someone other than my wife to dance without being haunted by feeling that for them this will be three minutes of their evening they can never get back. Wish me luck! #lifegoals

Happiness

Happiness – Sometimes, when things are going well, you feel you could be quite happy just repeating the same familiar routine with the same little round of sights and experiences, that you need nothing more than the view from your back window, the bike ride through the local park to work etc. – that all this quite enough, since each of these experiences contains in its way an infinite wealth. And then you hear someone singing a Piaf song, and you remember that there is a place called Paris to which you could also travel, by train, just to enjoy its teeming life – and it seems like a kind of miracle of good fortune to find yourself living in such an unimaginably varied, rich and beautiful world.

Idealism

Idealism – One of the reasons that students of philosophy generally find idealism a repellent position is to do with the way we are naturally inclined to conceive of it, on the basis of a hegemonic realism. The conception of idealism we are liable to form is as follows: that all of this stuff, this world that we experience, which seems so independent of us, so rich and so surprising, so satisfyingly alien to us, is really something that is just inside my head as it were, generated by my own limited psychic capacities. This is what scares us: it then seems that according to idealism there is nothing in existence that amounts to more than the creations of a limited, erring individual mind, or that has the robust autonomy that we would want of it. And it does not help much if someone then explains the Berkeleyan line that the existence of the world is not dependent on my head or on any finite number of heads, but instead subsists permanently and securely in the infinite mind of God – or in some sort of universal mind, if we want to leave Berkeley’s God out of it. For on such a view, reality is still seen as having a kind of ‘inside a head’ quality, since we model the idea of God’s mind or even of a universal mind at least partially still on a human mind and what that can produce. So the reality generated on such a view is something conjured up within a divine ‘head’ as it were, and still lacking the kind of solidity, majesty and autonomy we thought reality possessed.

However, if one really takes seriously the proposition that ‘consciousness is all that exists’ then of course reality is not something ‘inside of a head’: rather the ‘head,’ or the ‘brain,’ is itself nothing but one particular manifestation of a universal consciousness.

Such a universal consciousness is something which encompasses all heads, and which is just as surprising, rich and autonomous as we could want it to be. The problem with the former view of idealism, as something ‘inside of a head,’ is that a latent materialism is hidden within it, a materialism according to which the human brain is thought of as just one particular product of physical forces. According to this kind of materialism, consciousness is seen as emergent from and epiphenomenal to the real matter of the world. So on this view it of course seems bizarre and paradoxical that consciousness can somehow be thought to be responsible for the whole of that world. In other words, in this case idealism is seen from a perspective which has already presupposed materialism, rather than from the perspective that is really required here: a thoroughgoing ‘deconstruction’ of the opposition between materialism and idealism. (Some idealists continue to operate on the basis of this opposition, insofar as they will insist that reality is, for example, ‘immaterial.’ But we should realize that, once this deconstruction is really thought through, the reality we are left with is neither ‘material’ nor ‘immaterial,’ and it might partake just as much of those qualities we think of as ‘material’ qualities as ‘immaterial’ ones.) Once we really work out the kind of reality that might emerge from this deconstruction, the way is clear for a cogent form of idealism, such as that espoused by Bernardo Kastrup.

According to this idealism, there is nothing outside of consciousness. I am not concerned here to argue for all of the reasons this might a good view to adopt, but the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is one of them. There can never be a good explanation of how consciousness emerges from matter; it makes much more sense to suppose that matter is just one way in which consciousness manifests itself: the conscious experience of things having an underlying ‘substance,’ of being robustly independent of us as finite beings and of our individual finite minds. (The Indian tradition of Vedanta, and many of the classical Indian schools of thought, are in agreement on this). The one absolutely untenable hypothesis is materialism in the following sense: what the world fundamentally consists in is matter, where matter is understood as something fundamentally different from consciousness, something non-conscious and ‘outside’ of consciousness.

I say all of this, and yet I am not an idealist. If there were no other alternatives than the usual versions of realism, physicalism and transcendental idealism, I would have to espouse idealism (in some sense other than transcendental idealism). However, there is one other metaphysical view that makes even more sense to me than idealism…

On being with others

How many of us feel that we spend quite a lot of our time in the company of people with whom we feel that we have nothing in common and very little to talk about? For those of us who experience a certain amount of social anxiety this can of course be quite a trial. It can lead us to feel that after all there is very little common ground between vast swathes of humanity, and on a personal level that there are very few people we can spend time with without worrying what we can say once the obvious topics of conversation are exhausted. This can lead to a feeling of alienation and separation, between groups as well as between individuals. But at times I glimpse the truth: that in fact every person on this planet has things to communicate that will mean something important to me, which will resonate in me and elicit a natural response. Being alive in the way that we are, being the sort of being for whom its own being is a question, to put it in Heidegger’s terms, is an immensely complex and infinitely rich business; everyone can speak to that, and by remaining open to the possibility of this kind of communication it’s surprising how easily, on some occasions, the ice can melt and those anxieties disappear.

Of course this doesn’t happen through having existential conversations explicitly about the meaning of being. Rather it happens through realizing that for everyone there are things that really matter to them, many of which in fact coincide with the usual recommended topics of conversation: family, work, their past life, their future life, where they live, the culture they identify with, etc. All of these are the kinds of arenas in which everyone explores the meaningfulness of life. These are the things people care about. It’s worth remembering another proposal of Heidegger’s: That our manner of existence can be spoken in a single word as “care” (in German “Sorge”): we are beings that care about what will happen to us and those we co-exist with. Realizing all of this and somehow letting it embody itself in our interactions can make even a comfortable kind of being silent together possible.

In reality, I will more often than not sit there both with friends and strangers finding that communication is awkward and resort to ‘making conversation.’ But for all of those I meet and interact with day to day: know that I always have faith that a richer mode of being-with-others is possible, a mode which I have experienced on a few occasions, which may be just as comfortable with silence as with speech. Perhaps the best name for it is love.

My lovely wife Cathy: The one person with whom, happily, I have the kind of fuller human relationship I've described at the end of this post.

Setting off

Diversions on the way — What way is this, where am I headed? If anywhere? I have in mind here, as well as the “way” of Daoism, some of those familiar Buddhist formulations of a “pathless path” that might even take us through a “gateless gate”: a gate where we discover that we never needed to take a single step in any direction because we were already precisely where we needed to be. I think these much quoted lines of T. S. Eliot are worth putting out there again:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Nevertheless I have a sense that I am on the way somewhere, and for the most part I enjoy the journey, and find that the journey is itself worthwhile. Perhaps the journey even is the destination in some sense. And the diversions, in the sense both of what feels like getting “sidetracked,” but also of a kind of enjoyable distraction, what are called “divertissements” in French, are perhaps also the destination.

I once worked in the academic world, in philosophy. It’s thanks to my immersion in the Western philosophical tradition that I feel that all of the great questions of life are forever up for grabs and that nothing has been decided in advance. One of the things I took from those years was that in the most fundamental questions no definite ‘progress’ has been made since the days of the ancient Greeks; rather what happens is an unfolding of these questions, opening up new dimensions of them in new terms but never moving beyond the infinite profundity of that initial questioning. It is for this reason that we always have to go back to, for example, Kant, but also to Descartes, to St. Augustine, and of course to Plato, and read them anew. So it is the most arrant naivety to believe that, for example, anything modern science has to tell us can in any way bypass the need to re-engage with these questions. And now I realize that it is, of course, also a question of going back to the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, and no doubt to African and other indigenous wisdom traditions.

As a tribute to what I owe to Western philosophy, and because I would love to re-engage in this tradition, I would like one day soon to again put together something sufficiently scholarly to pass muster in the academic world: that would be a return to a kind of home for me. But for now, just this ragbag assortment of diversionary thoughts.