On top of the whole business of moving house, I’ve been trying to get some writing done. And here, amid the many distractions offered by a life that is currently in transition, I have been relishing the wonderful piece of software that is JDarkRoom. JDarkRoom is inspired by the Mac program WriteRoom (see the link here), and is, in essence, very simple. It is a full-screen text editor that offers a distraction-free writing environment. It is only when you actually use such a thing that you realise how distracting using a standard word-processor actually is, with all of the bells and whistles, not to mention all the other things that may be open at the same time on your desktop.

JDarkRoom, on the other hand, just provides green text on a black background (although you can change the colours if you like), a few keyboard shortcuts and that’s it. Writing in text files allows you to concentrate on the content and structure of what you are writing, rather than on fancy formatting. I am astonished by how effective it is as a writing environment. If you are fed up with the way your mind flits around whilst writing on your PC, JDarkRoom is the tool for you. Hell, it’s almost as good as using a typewriter. And not only is it a pleasure to use, reducing both distraction and eyestrain, and allowing for a calm and concentrated space in which to write (and one should, to paraphrase the great Leonard Cohen, choose the rooms one writes in with care), but it also feels pleasingly retro with that green on black.

If you ever go to an author event or reading, during the questions somebody will almost inevitably ask the writer what they actually write on: ‘Do you use a pen, a typewriter or a computer?’ I don’t know why this question is always asked, but it is. But, just for the record, this is what I use to write at the moment: jDarkRoom coupled with LaTeX to typeset and structure my documents – which makes writing and editing a pleasure and also produces documents of aching beauty (although it is regrettable how many in the humanities insist on MS Word documents for submissions). To these two, you only have to add the wonderful JabRef for managing citations, and Zotero for collecting bibliographic information from the web, and you have something close to writing heaven. These days, I hardly have to open MS Word (or that lumbering great beast Open Office) at all, aside from filling in those pesky job application forms…

The reason that I am telling you all this is that I’ve just finished reading Pleasurable Kingdom by Jonathan Balcombe, a book about pleasure in the animal kingdom. The basic thesis of the book is simple and seems relatively uncontentious: animals experience pleasure.

Ethicists are used to talking about animal pain, but the discusison of animal pleasure in ethics is much more limited. Balcombe’s book looks at a whole range of behaviours from animal relationships to food to friendship to surprisingly creative approaches to sex (research into which puts paid, as this week’s New Scientist editorial points out, to the idea that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’: it’s certainly more ‘natural’ than driving a car or surfing the internet…), and attempts to put discussions of pleasure back at the centre of our thinking about animals. And it does quite a convincing job of it.

It is, in fact, curious how reluctant we are to grant that animals (the lizard basking in the sun, the flying fish leaping from the water) experience pleasure even when we are willing to grant that they experience pain; and the claim that, for example, cats might enjoy lounging in the sun is often seen as anthropomorphism, sometimes considered as amongst the worse of scientific sins. Yet Balcombe points out how weird this is: after all, we are a part of the animal kingdom, and so to extrapolate cautiously from our own experience seems like a sensible thing to do, rather than to rule out of court such possibilities. And the more we find out about the complex ethology of the animal kingdom (I love the example that Barbara Smuts gives of baboons ‘meditating’, which I posted about here a couple of years back), the less tenable the idea of animals as pleasureless beings looks.

The implications of this are rather far reaching, however; because whilst granting pain to animals implies a certain basic level of moral concern, to see animals as capable of more complex pleasures is to permit the possibility of an intrinsic value to animal life that goes beyond the instrumentality that underpins a lot of our practices, and it forces us to start to think about animals as individuals rather than just as species. What if the pig we are tucking into (or the fish, for that matter) is not just one member of the class of objects denoted by the word ‘pig’, but a creature with an inner life, with its interests and pleasures and with its own sense of the value of life?

Balcombe also hints at wider implications, and these, I think, are very interesting. He maintains that our view of life is unremittingly gloomy, that we see nature red in tooth and claw. We watch wildlife documentaries of animals being torn to bits by other animals, we see everything in terms of a perpetual struggle for survival. But what if not everything is struggle? After all, says Balcombe, that antelope we are watching being torn to pieces, like the rest of us, only has to die once, and up until then it may have had a pretty good time: we love drama, so we show the dramatic bits; and then we tell ourselves that this is all there is. This, however, is a mistake, one that gives us a seriously skewed view of the world. It would be like watching a TV documentary about human existence that dwelt only on misery. Or it would be like watching the evening news. In other words: profoundly misleading.

If Balcombe is right, perhaps we should be cautious of the rhetoric of misery that often swamps us, as we should be cautious of philosophies like that of Schopenhauer. To be sure, there are sufferings in the world; but to recognise the pleasures of existence is not to deny the miseries; indeed, my hunch is that in the end it is only through recognising the pleasures alongside the miseries that we can act well in the world.

So that’s enough for one evening. I’m going to sign off here, so I can hang out with the cat…

Image: Byeon Sangbyeo – Cats and Sparrows. 18th Century. Wikimedia Commons

The idea of public understanding of science is one that is the subject of increasing attention, and for good reason: more than ever before, we live in a world in which scientific advances are demanding renewed ethical reflection, and the wider an understanding of science there can be, the more informed public debate can be. So I am all for the public understanding of science. It seems something the importance of which should not be underestimated.

The web-page of the Charles Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, a post currently held by Richard Dawkins, provides the following uplifting view of what such an understanding might be able to do:

The goal is for the public to appreciate the order and beauty of the abstract and natural worlds which is there, hidden, layer-upon-layer. To share the excitement and awe that scientists feel when confronting the greatest of riddles. To have empathy for the scientists who are humbled by the grandeur of it all.

A common trope in discussions of the public understanding of the sciences is the idea that the public are uninformed or otherwise ignorant, and that better dissemination of information – either through an improved education system, through greater efforts on the part of scientists, through increased responsibility in what is no often doubt deeply shoddy media reporting in relation to the sciences, or through (although this is rarely said directly) a bit more effort on the part of the general public – would solve the problem. The argument is simple: the public fear science because of ignorance; and that this fear can be driven out by greater understanding. This is echoed in the volume I am reading. ‘Many’, one contributor in the book writes, ‘are the uniformed or the mal-informed; many are scared.’ The fear, we are to infer, is a result of misinformation, and nothing else.

And yet, what this view of the public understanding of science leaves out, very frequently, is an appreciation of the broader political and ethical issues that are involved in scientific research. It takes, that is to say, scientific research as a good in itself, and the problem is considered to be only that of communication. Yet I’m not sure if this is really a sustainable view. There are deeper structural problems here that raise serious ethical questions, questions that are often ignored by public champions of science. Take, for example, president George W. Bush’s announcement of increased funding for scientific research in 2002. As reported in the New York Times, a large proportion of this money was funneled towards defence-related projects. More recently, in 2005 the Guardian newspaper reported that a third of UK public spending in science was funded by the Ministry of Defence (see the link here). Indeed, for scientists working in some fields – robotics, for example – it is hard to find projects that are not directly or indirectly related to defence interests. Whilst we should indeed celebrate the “excitement and awe that scientists feel when confronting the greatest of riddles” – and how I wish that this was the main thrust of scientific endeavour in the world – we should also address the uncomfortable truth that a serious proportion of the research that is carried out in our universities and our laboratories is not about this excitement and this awe, but is about working on specific problems relating to specific, and frequently questionable, defence interests. And whilst there may or may not be legitimate concerns with defence, at the very least it would be profoundly naive to consider the defence industry as one that is straightforwardly concerned with the greater welfare of humankind. There are questions here that it is right and proper to ask.

Even if we leave to one side these defence interests, there are many other areas of research which raise similarly troubling questions. Given the range of commercial interests that lie behind scientific research, we cannot assume that this research is motivated by benevolence or a desire for the greater welfare of all; and in an age of ever closer relationships between university science departments and these commercial interests, there are many questions that should be a part of public discourse, but that frequently are not.

The advocates of the public understanding of science are frequently silent on these matters. This silence does nothing to help their avowed aim of increasing the public’s understanding and appreciation of the sciences. Being uninformed or mal-informed may indeed give rise to irrational fears, and these fears can certainly be dispelled by an improvement in communication. Yet there are other more rational fears, fears that are rooted not in ignorance, but in a cooler appreciation of the reality of how scientific research actually works, both socially and economically. To address these fears, the scientific community need to do more than simply put their case better to an ignorant public. They need to engage more deeply with hard political and ethical questions about the motivations and interests that lie behind the research with which they are involved; and they need to address some of the deeper structural problems that arise as a result of these motivations and interests.

I am, as I have said, all for the public understanding of science. But if we are genuinely interested in such understanding, then we cannot leave out these difficult questions about the uses to which our research and our public money is ultimately being put.

See also: Scientists for Global Responsibility.

What has been interesting in this whole unhappy business is the response from Buddhist commentators, who have almost unanimously claimed that Ms. Stone has misunderstood or misrepresented Buddhism. But is this the case?

The traditions of Buddhism are many and varied, and theories relating to karma are similarly diverse in these different traditions and texts and teachings. And whilst it is no doubt true that there are some of these traditions, texts and teachings clearly at odds with Ms. Stone’s comments, there are many that are uncomfortably close.

An example of this came in an interview between with Lati Rinpoche, the eminent Gelug lama, and Richard Hayes. In the interview, Hayes asked how Buddhists could explain the suffering of the Jews in the Second World War. The answer was troubling.

Rinpoche: The proper Buddhist answer to such a question is that the victims were experiencing the consequences of their actions performed in previous lives. The individual victims must have done something very bad in earlier lives that led to their being treated in this way. Also there is such a thing as collective karma.
Hayes: Do you mean that the Jewish people as a whole have a special karma?
Rinpoche: Yes. All groups have karma that is more than just the collection of the karma of the individuals in the group. For example, a group of people may decide collectively to start a war. If they act on that decision, then the group as a whole will experience the hardships of being at war. Karma is the result of making a decision to act in a certain way. Decisions to act may be made by individuals or by groups. If the decision is made by a group, then the whole group will experience the collective consequences of their decision.

Lati Rinpoche is no renegade, as his biography makes clear. As spiritual adviser to the Dalai Lama, one would imagine that his words carry at least a little weight. And the claim that he is making in this interview is substantially no different from that made by Sharon Stone. It would seem, in the light of this, that her comments are reflective of the most orthodox and learned of sources.

It is possible to claim that Ms. Stone’s comments were profoundly wrong-headed; it is also possible to argue that this retributive view of karma is not only nonsense, but also dangerous nonsense; it is possible make the case for some kind of theory of moral consequence, and to argue that certain Buddhist understandings of karma may help us to formulate such a theory; or it is possible to make the claim that perhaps the theory of karma is so compromised that we’d be better off without it.

What is it not possible to do, however, is to credibly argue that Sharon Stone’s comments were entirely misrepresentative of certain Buddhist ideas. There are many figures and texts of influence in the Buddhist world that have claimed no more and no less than Ms. Stone herself. Would it not be better if those Buddhists keen to dismiss Ms. Stone for her lack of understanding were to turn their attention to the traditions that they revere, so that their own houses might be put in order?

“Not many people actually do meditation techniques as they are taught. If anybody.”
Ajahn Sujato

For a long time, now, I have been aware that when I get out of bed in the morning, head to the back room where I have my cushions set up, throw open the window (I like a bit of fresh air in the morning, even when it is cold) and sit down to meditate, what I’m actually do whilst sat on my cushions is somewhat idiosyncratic. There is certainly nothing as systematic or as purposeful as a technique going on when I meditate. It is more ad hoc than this, a rather more shambolic affair, a bit of this and a bit of that, whilst my mind does whatever it is doing that particular morning: doing, that is to say, all the usual kind of stuff that the human mind does.

The idea that what we engage in on our cushions are meditation techniques is one that is very common; and yet I’m not sure it is really like this. So the quote from Australian monk Ajahn Sujato (the clip is here) certainly struck a chord. After all, when I ask myself when I last took one meditation technique and applied it systematically for one whole sitting, the answer I come up with is months, if not years.

Of course, there are lots of techniques out there, a veritable marketplace of techniques. Some demand rigid adherence, others demand that most puzzling of skills, the ability to just do nothing and be natural; some are brazen in the way that they promise the loftiest goals (eternal happiness, liberation from all suffering, a New You), others promise nothing at all, instead preferring to tease the consumer with tantalising paradoxes.

There was a time when I took a much keener interest in this marketplace than I do now. But these days, I have little interest in many of the goals promised by the purveyors of meditation, nor do I have much of a taste for the mysticism of endless paradox. So instead, I just continue to meditate in my own shambolic fashion, and sometimes I wonder why it is that I do it at all. I suspect that the answer is quite simple: that – whatever the possible benefits (or otherwise) of meditation – I simply like it. I’ve found a way to a kind of meditation that suits me. So I continue to meditate.

It has not always this straightforward. My first few years of meditating were, now I look back, a not particularly satisfying experience, the determined application of a too-rigid technique that felt hardly my style. But it’s important, in the end, to find one’s own way, because I suspect that when it comes down to it, meditation is too intimate a business to really be just a matter of technique. Sujato refers to a passage in the Visuddhimagga that I haven’t yet been able to check out (all of my books being currently in cardboard boxes), which says that if you want to learn to meditate there are two things that you can do. First of all, ask other people how they do it. And secondly, go to the scholars and see what is written in books.

All this is perhaps useful. But in the end perhaps meditation really gets going when you go beyond technique. Then you are on your own: with the mysterious and shifting contents of your mind; with the comings and goings of feeling and sensation in the body; and with the riddles with which, day by day, your own life presents you. And that is when the fun starts.

In response this somewhat baffling question, Vimalakirti received thirty two answers (not one of which was that all one has to do is turn the Dharma-handle of nonduality and give the said door a bit of a shove). When they had given their answers, the gathered bodhisattvas turned to ask Manjusri for his opinion. The text reads as follows (in Robert Thurman’s translation):

Manjusri replied, “Good sirs, you have all spoken well. Nevertheless, all your explanations are themselves dualistic. To know no one teaching, to express nothing, to say nothing, to explain nothing, to announce nothing, to indicate nothing, and to designate nothing – that is the entrance into nonduality.”

Now I am sure that all of this is extremely clever. Or I imagine that it is, but I can’t be sure because I don’t really have a clue what any of it means. But the text doesn’t end here. Instead, it continues in this fashion:

Then the crown prince Manjusri said to the Licchavi Vimalakirti, “We have all given our own teachings, noble sir. Now, may you elucidate the teaching of the entrance into the principle of nonduality!”

Vimalakirti the householder now trumps Manjusri’s ace like this:

Thereupon, the Licchavi Vimalakirti kept his silence, saying nothing at all.

All of which reminds me of a nice story at the beginning of the book I was recently reading by Bernard Faure about four monks meditating in a mountain temple. In the story the temple lamps are about to burn out, so one monk cries, “Attendant! Raise the taper!” Another monks replies, “There is to be no talking in the hall of silence.” A third monk, annoyed at their speaking, mutters, “You have lost your senses.” Then a senior monk smiles smugly and says, “I alone have said nothing.”

So there you have it. Make of it what you will. But it is good to have broken my (almost certainly ignoble) silence of the last couple of weeks. And it’s nice to see you all again!

Download: emergency appeal.pdf [869.31KB]

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The idea of existence as a sea is one that, for me, captures something of the sense we can have – whether queasy or exhilarating – of the profound instability and uncertainty of life, the ebb and flow and swell of our day-to-day existence. This ebb and flow has been recognised in the West ever since the days of the pre-Socratics (Πάντα ῥεῖ – panta rhei – Heraclitus is supposed to have said), but also it can often seem as if the Western tradition has sought to tame the flux, or else has sought to cross over this ocean in the Good Ship Philosophy to attain to solid ground.

At times it seems as if this longing for solid ground – a longing that seems to me to be antithetical to a good deal of Buddhist metaphysics – leads us to see the end of Buddhist practice as equivalent to putting into safe harbour. This is an idea that is not unprecedented in the Pāli texts, but it does not seem to me to be a particularly appealing prospect. After all, what would one do once one arrived at this safe port? Put up one’s feet and spend one’s days puffing on a pipe? And to stake our hopes one some promised land of solid ground that lies over the horizon is, to say the least, something of a gamble.

I prefer a different image. What if there is nothing other than the ocean? What if there is no safe harbour to be had? Here, out on the high seas, we were born; here we live; here we will die. Then perhaps what we need to do is give up hope of dry land, and get to know the movement of the winds and the tides, the ebb and flow of the ocean.

The Udāna has an image that I prefer. Those who have attained to understanding are not likened to sailors who have crossed the ocean and returned to dry land, but instead to great sea monsters who roam the endless depths, who sport and play in an ocean without any shore. They are those who have given up on land-lubber hopes and dreams for good.

(These reflections come from an article I’ve been writing for The Pragmatic Buddhist. I’ll post a link when the article goes online)

This makes a lot of this research both fascinating and rather melancholy reading. An exception is last week’s New Scientist interview with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered an enormous stroke the size of a golfball in her cerebral cortex in 1996. The stroke left her with virtually no cognitive functioning, but in the years that followed, she systematically rebuilt her brain from the inside out, painstakingly bringing neural functions back ‘online’. This process, however, was not merely one of reconstructing what was there before, but instead (to use what is perhaps a crude metaphor) of taking advantage of the earthquake to do some serious rebuilding of the property.

When the anger circuit wanted to run again, I did not like the way it felt inside my body so I said “no” to its running. Every time it tried to get triggered and run again, I brought my attention back to it – I did not like the way anger felt so I shut it down. Now that circuit rarely runs at all, mostly because I feel it getting triggered and nip it in the bud.

Dr. Taylor herself recognises the connections between this kind of retraining and meditative practices of observing but not engaging with neural circuitry; but along the way, the interview also raises raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the relationship between mind, awareness, the body and the stories we spin about ourselves.

You will need to be a subscriber to New Scientist to read the interview, but you can go to her website here to find out more, or else have a look on the TED website at her interview. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting hold of a copy of her book, My Stroke of Insight.

There’s a link here.