Transcription
I remember some years ago listening to a talk by a senior Western Buddhist nun in the Hīnayāna Theravāda tradition. She was talking about insight. She said, "You might sit out in the garden and look at the little birds there flying around, sitting on a branch of a tree, singing even. And you might think, 'Oh, how beautiful, these little birds, how graceful,' and feel touched by that. But actually, you're deluded. You're wrapped up in delusion, because look at them closely. Look how they move their heads, jerk their heads from side to side, always on the lookout for predators or for a worm to eat, always caught up, basically obsessed, programmed by the necessities of physical survival. This is the basic, harsh reality of their existence, which you are just not really seeing or are choosing to ignore."
The emphasis there is on this fact of dukkha, and this disenchantment with the world and with beings, in a way. That is a description of a view. Can you hear how that's a view? It's a concept, in that sense of 'view.' But it's a view as a way of looking. It's an interpretation. Can you also hear how, wrapped up in that view, in that interpretation -- in this case, of the birds -- is something akin to some versions of modern existentialism, but also a kind of reductionism? A reductionism to explanations according to biological evolution, or according to hardwiring of neurology in the birds' brains and nervous systems that make them act this way. Wrapped up in that, too, that reductionism to physicalism, evolutionism, and neurology, etc., implicit in what she was saying -- actually, I think it was more than implicit -- is, "This is reality. Get real. See this. See that this is actually the fact. Anything else you see is a superimposition, a delusion, an obscuration, a veil over that reality."
Explicitly and implicitly, there's a reality claim there. And that reality claim is a full and extensive one, a thorough one. In other words, "This is all there is to know. This is the most important thing to know and understand, and this is all there is to know. This is our explanation of what a bird is, why it behaves like it does, even why it sings." This overextension has been a big part of what I've been calling 'scientism,' as opposed to 'science.' Compare that view, that sense, that perception and interpretation, if you like -- implicit interpretation, conceptual and perceptual -- of the birds in the garden or wherever, compare that view with the view of the birds as angelic beings. What does that mean, angelic beings? As theophanies, as faces, as expressions of the divine. Two views, two different worlds, that are then felt, sensed, inhabited. In a sense, those two views are descriptions of, reflections of, and will give rise to, different worlds that we sense ourselves in and perceive ourselves and feel ourselves in.
This is really, really crucial. Of course, it's the main theme of the retreat, but it's crucial to everything. Nowadays, in Dharma circles, and in psychotherapy circles and all that, there's so much emphasis -- I mean, rightly so -- on our psychological growth, our healing, our human flourishing, the flourishing of my self and self-expression and all that. But in a way, most of it, whether in psychotherapeutic circles or in some spiritual circles, is happening within, or we could even say against, a background of a meaningless, a soulless, a mechanistic universe.
So here I am, pursuing diligently my growth and healing and flourishing, psychologically, so-called spiritually, and it's all taking place in a bigger context (literally a background, because it's not something I pay attention to) of this soulless, mechanistic, meaningless universe that actually doesn't care a damn, doesn't give a damn about your process, my process, psychologically. That background, and the fact that I'm not really paying attention to it, has an effect -- actually, whether I pay attention to it, or whether it's more subliminal. It's having an effect on me, on my sense of existence, on my actual psychological/spiritual growth, healing, flourishing, etc. It is not irrelevant. It is not without effect. Actually, I would say the effect is enormous.
So whatever we might mean by 'healing,' or whatever we might accomplish in our flourishing or my personal growth, my personal process, my healing, is actually quite severely limited. Whatever healing is possible is quite severely limited by that context of the world that I inhabit through my view, through my conception, through my assumption. The healing itself is limited. What we mean and what can be achieved in a healing, what a healing can encompass, what a healing can reach, flourishing can reach, growth can reach, it will be limited. In most psychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic circles, etc. (certainly not all, but many -- certainly the world of mindfulness, and quite a lot of the Insight Meditation world), the whole discourse, the whole conversation, the whole teaching leaves out this side about what the world actually is, or rather, how we perceive and feel the world and conceive of it. It misses the relevance of the effect and what possibilities there are there, or else assumes something and then gets locked into it. But generally speaking, it's not given attention. We don't realize, as I said, the effects that this has, or realize quite what we're assuming and how that ties in with notions of self-growth, and who I am, what a human being is, what's possible, etc. It's not included in the awareness too deliberately, or if it is, there's usually quite a narrow view that assumes a certain version of reality -- for example, that nun, or certain secular modernist types of existentialist versions of Dharma.
[9:05] Again, I'm pointing out something I think we said earlier, that the experience of self and the experience of world are always tied in together. Always. Self, world: co-dependent arisings. They influence each other, shape, fabricate, inform each other, the perceptions of both. So the healing of self, or the freeing or the liberation of self to whatever degree, and the re-enchantment of self, happens in mutual dependence with the re-enchantment of the world. Re-enchanting self, re-enchanting world -- they're actually aspects of one movement, really. We're separating them a little bit on this retreat, but as I said, at some point, that's an artificial separation.
And even more than that, the healing of the self and the healing of the world -- what does that mean, the healing of the world? What is the fullness of what is meant there? What does it mean to heal the world? What does it mean to free the world? The healing of the self and the healing of the world go together. When I heal the world, I heal my self. When I free the world, I free my self. What does this mean? What does it mean to free the world? As usual, there's this mutual dependency. I'm leaving those questions open; I think I've touched on them elsewhere. But to say there's a fullness of mutual dependent origination here. Self and world go together. Causality goes both ways as well. When I re-enchant the world, I will, inevitably, re-enchant my self. I cannot not.
Sometimes we break it down into stages, and that's just a sort of -- what's the word? -- educative tool. I've forgotten the word for that. But it's just how we're presenting practice. Yes, things can happen in stages, and sometimes they do; they evolve that way. For example, when we do a kind of deity yoga, or the imaginal figure where there's eros and love, and then noticing afterwards that here's this figure where the self is in relationship to an other, and a noticing afterwards, there's a sort of stage after that that the divinity of that image spills over in cosmopoesis to the world, to the cosmos, to a perception and a divinizing, a making divine, of the cosmos.
Similarly when we do the mantra meditation, hearing all sounds as mantra. We may start the mantra even with a sense of devotion to compassion, maybe even compassion for ourselves, for other. It's to do with self and maybe other. But as one way of opening up that whole practice with the mantra, as we're exploring on this retreat with that practice, is that it opens up beyond what the self wants for the self or for this other, and beyond even sound, etc. There's this expansion into a fullness, and a sort of all-pervasiveness of the cosmopoesis. Self and world. There's a direction of evolution there. But actually things can happen the other way around too. And they can happen together. They often do happen together; it's just that we don't quite notice, often, because, as I said, we're often a bit more indoctrinated and trained to keep the attention on the self, the self's growth, the self's freeing, the self's healing and all that.
Now, within this whole movement of re-enchantment and cosmopoesis, whether it's re-enchantment of the self or re-enchantment of the world, both together, I really want to stress again the crucial importance of this relative weighting between self and divine, of the orientation. Am I orienting practice and healing and growth and all these words? Is it actually oriented, or is it within a conception of self, self-growth? Is that the priority? Is that the orientation? Is that the intention? Is that the conception? Or is it more, if you like, weighted towards the divine, and the self really as a vehicle for the divine? Practice, path, life, existence, self-expression, so-called 'flourishing,' freeing, all of it, liberation, the whole thing is for God, for the sake of the divine, not for the sake of the self. That's a radically different view. Where am I generally in my life and generally at any time on this spectrum? For the self, or for God? I'm not just talking about words, or slipping back into a self-view. I want to pick that up again and stress how so much depends on this orientation or relative weighting between the self and the divine.
This applies not just to the re-enchantment of the self, but also to the re-enchantment of objects in the world. Just as much as it applies to the re-enchantment of the self, it applies to the re-enchantment of objects in the world. When there is some kind of enchantment with an object or a thing in the world, and that enchantment actually has more to do with the self -- it's more about the self, or oriented towards or from the intentionality of the self rather than the divine, that's more my interest, my thrust -- oftentimes we don't even realize this is going on, but when it's more about the self, this enchantment I have with this object or this piece of jewellery or whatever, then it's probably more akin to what we might call 'infatuation' or 'superstition.'
So things like this amulet, or this mālā or whatever, or these lucky charms, we're in the realm of that kind of magical thinking. Their purpose, these lucky charms, or this pendant I wear around my neck, or whatever it is that people do all over the world, the purpose of it is for the self. It's to give the self luck, or to give the self protection. It's all for the self. Versus, or in contrast to, seeing these objects -- this thing in the world, whatever it is, a natural thing or an artefact -- as theophanies, as faces of the divine. They're not 'for me' in any way -- or again, it's a spectrum here. But seeing them as theophanies, feeling them, sensing them as theophanies. Mostly when I use the word 'seeing,' I really mean 'sensing.' It's just a habit of language. There's quite a lot to say about that, but really hear the word 'sensing.' Sensing them as theophanies, seeing them as theophanies, rather than tightening it around self, self-protection, and lucky charms and all that, this thing becomes a gateway to opening, through which beauty is opened in this wide sense. There's a widening, a deepening of beauty, of meaningfulness, of the sense of divinity, and of course the sacralizing of that object, which is implicit in seeing it as a theophany anyway.
[17:38] And with all that, there's soulmaking. The soul-dynamic, if you like, of eros, psyche, and logos expanding, feeding each other, nourishing each other, inseminating each other, deepening, enrichening, widening together, pushing each other further, penetrating deeper, opening more. All that is made possible via the theophany, via seeing these objects as theophany, and much, much less so when they're seen from the point of view of self-investment and self-conception, for me rather than for God, as something for me rather than as a face of God or for God.
Notice, also, in that kind of superstitious or infatuated relationship with things and objects of the world that a kind of immature enchantment -- in that infatuation or superstition of things -- involves also a reification, often, of their magical power: I really believe that this thing is going to give me luck or protect me from evil. There's also reification of evil then. There is not, within that kind of immature enchantment, the seeing of image as image. There's what we would call an immature enchantment with certain things and certain objects in the world, and I'm not seeing image as image when that's going on. Not only is it about my self and for my self, I'm also not seeing image as image. So much hinges in this work -- and we don't often realize this -- on where I am at any time and where I am more generally in this relative weighting or leaning, so to speak, in the direction of or for the sake of self versus divine, in my conception, in my aspiration, in my intention, in all of that.
This whole question about worlds that we inhabit, or the world that we inhabit and the nature of that world, and the perception of that world, necessarily brings up the question, or integral to that whole meaning of 'world' is the question of matter, and again, the nature, the perception, the conception of matter. The world to us nowadays is a world of matter. And matter also implies 'body.' So matter, world, body are kind of completely integral to each other. The views, the conceptions, the sense, the perception of all that is tied together. This is absolutely crucial. Matter. What is the relationship with, what is the view, and what are the ways of looking -- or way of looking, if it's singular -- at matter? When people use that word, 'matter' or 'body' or 'world,' what do we mean? What is meant when a person says 'matter,' or 'world,' or 'body'? What is the conception and the perception?
Again, with 'matter,' a person uses it, and obviously mostly they do, and what's wrapped up in their use of that word, 'matter,' is the normal modernist view, underneath which, if you poke them a little bit and say, "What do you mean by that? What is it?", they would probably eventually, sooner or later, articulate a kind of high school version of classical mechanistic physics: "It's made up of atoms, which are a bit like billiard balls, and they sort of ricochet around, and they combine. None of which has any meaning or anything else going on. They form different things which disintegrate after a while back to the atoms," etc.
But 'matter' might also mean a sort of quantum physics understanding, a more current understanding of matter, where matter is not, if you like, anything. It's not reducible to subatomic particles as 'things' in the way that we usually conceive of 'things,' as independent of the way they're being observed, as being located at any time in any place with certain other properties that we just take for granted as being part of properties of things. Subatomic particles, in a quantum understanding, are not 'things' in the way that we think of 'things.'
There's a whole realm of difference there with what 'matter' might mean once we start getting more current with our scientific view. For another person at another time, the view, the conception of matter, if they've meditated in certain ways -- we've touched on this before; one of the lovely openings that can happen, mystical openings, and can become very much a regular, or not 100 per cent steady, but a very accessible and prolonged in time perception is that "all is one." (And again, different flavours of one.) "All is one. All actually is awareness in substance." So matter, or the way most people tend to perceive matter, in this view, the reality in this other view is that it's actually awareness, or it's actually love. There can be many kinds of oneness. But that's a different view of matter. For someone else who has explored a lot emptiness and dependent arising, and gone in different ways deeply into the whole question of "Is matter real in the way that we think it is?", there's a whole way that the perception and conception of matter and materiality -- when one explores that view, sustainedly, deeply, thoroughly -- that that opens up the sense of what is meant by 'matter.'
Or again, there's a kind of Neoplatonic view, and that has different versions, but the sort of matter as an emanation of the divine, in a kind of hierarchy in some formulations of it. So there's a kind of transcendent divine, and then a World Soul, etc., down to a divine mind, and then matter. But matter is, perhaps, imbued by the divine. It's a transformation of the divine. Also, perhaps a little more removed, in different psychotherapeutic paradigms, what one means by 'body,' or how one relates to that, or the conceptuality underlying body and matter, is also quite different depending on the paradigm. There are psychologies that attempt to be very biologically based. Talking about neural networks is very popular nowadays. What's underlying that? And others that relate to the body primarily acknowledging the fantasy with which body is seen through. Or body actually seen primarily as a field for that, and not acknowledged as a fantasy, but actually claimed as a reality. So 'body' means different things in different psychotherapeutic theories, and again, that can become very dogmatic depending on the view: "This is reality."
[26:30] Or again, when a person talks about matter, what are you actually talking about? What do you mean when you use that word? Do you mean the experience, the perception -- and wrapped up in that, the conception -- of solidity, of density? Is that what you mean when you talk about matter? Then there's the whole question of air and water, and how solid and dense, and of course that's matter as well. But if you're talking about the experience, or the perception, or the conception of something like solidity/density, are you holding that as a reality? Or as a phenomenon, which means appearance? Are you seeing there's an appearance, an experience, a phenomenality to solidity? It's a perception. It's a phenomenon, which means appearance/perception. Or are you just assuming there's a reality?
So these notions of matter, they're actually underneath, they influence radically, in terms of as a basis, notions/senses of the world -- as I said, it's wrapped up in that -- and also reality. It's massively significant. One thing to notice here, as well, is the word -- I'm just pointing this out -- the word 'matter,' and the word māter, which is a Latin word and means 'mother*,'* they're actually related, I think, etymologically. There's something about this, matter and mother, matter and māter, in terms of how we relate to that. Very often, the fantasies and images of matter (in other words, what we're conceiving of, but also our whole imaginal sense of matter), and of māter, meaning 'mother,' meaning also 'origins*,'* the birth of things, what gives birth, or to do with motherhood, the fantasies and the images of all that -- which, nowadays, especially in a lot of psychotherapies, these are very central to a lot of the thinking and a lot of the assumptions of those paradigms. It's interesting. Paradigms about trauma, about perinatal psychology and influence and what happens in embryonic stages, or just about motherhood and a person thinking about themselves as mother or potential mother. Just the whole area of developmental psychology that has to do with māter, 'mother,' 'origins*,'* and also 'matter' -- all this is woven together. Or the origins in terms of the origins of Buddhism, and this kind of historical fantasy of getting back to the basic Pali Canon Buddha and exactly what he said and the origins, and the origins being 'better.'
Notice with all of that, those kinds of ways of conceiving and really fantasizing and imaging matter and māter, mother, origins, all that*,* it seems to me those kinds of fantasies and images which imbue all of that -- thinking about developmental psychology and all this stuff -- there is almost an intrinsic tendency to concretize, to not see image as image. These fantasies are going on, and somehow because of the matter, in fantasies about matter, there's a tendency not to see image as image and to connect it. It's a fantasy, but it presents itself or there's an assumption that this is reality.
So whether we're talking about actual matter or whether we're talking about fantasies of origin -- whether it's historical fantasies, or developmental fantasies, or biological fantasies of origin and mothering and all that -- why is it concretized, not seeing image as image? It's partly to do with the subject matter. The nature of fantasies of matter tend to be made more solid, concretized. It's an interesting kind of psychological phenomenon, I think.
Can we recognize as we inquire into this area, and as we inquire as practitioners and as human beings interested in existence, interested in our existence and our life and this world, can we recognize that there are, operating for us (often at a subtle, unconscious level, and with huge effect) conceptions, perception, fantasies and images of matter? These, as I said, have a great effect on how we conceive, perceive, feel, imagine, and fantasize about body (ours and others), about the world, about life and the whole notion of 'being with' life, 'being with' this or whatever, and sometimes giving rise to more existentialist perspectives and philosophies. All of that is grounded, if you like, based on conceptions, perceptions, fantasies of matter.
If we talk about re-enchantment, the re-enchantment of the world and matter, what's involved in that is, almost by definition, I need to see it not just according to the modernist view, not just this view of flatness: "Matter is all there is. The meaningless movement of atoms is all there is. There is no other level of things. There's no other level of materiality. There's no other level of anything. It's all just matter," and that's the exclusive perception and deemed 'real.' Re-enchantment needs an opening up of all that: it's not just that.
We can talk about (I'm repeating now) spiritual re-enchantment, where that perception of matter opens up and includes other views. They're recognized. There's a multiplicity of views, that "Yes, and I can also see matter as awareness. All matter shares in the substance, the essence of this oneness of awareness or oneness of cosmic love," or can be, as I said, many different kinds. There's a spiritual re-enchantment. And there's also the possibility of what we've been calling, slightly clumsily, this mature imaginal-based enchantment. That implies the multiplicity or the availability to perception of, if you like, more than one dimension. It implies this matter, this object, or the world as a whole, as theophany, in and through the particulars. That's different than this more general, universal, impersonal, spiritual re-enchantment. It's in and through the particulars that the theophany of this thing or that thing or this object or whatever manifests.
[35:12] We'll get into this more and more as the retreat goes on, and we've touched on it already, but just like the self, just like desire, just like will, just like our emotions, and even our suffering and our difficulties and our difficult histories, just like our images, just like ideas, just like all of those aspects or dimensions of our existence, matter, too, in the re-enchantment of it, according to the mature imaginal kind of enchantment that we're talking about, just like all of that, is seen as divine, as theophany, and as having, if you like, divine roots, if you want to use those words that I've been using. But this is in and through matter, in and through the object. When you say 'levels' or having 'divine roots,' this is not separate, or something only separate or only transcendent to the appearance, something else that I can't see, something outside of experience, something beyond form and matter. All that is necessary, if you like, in this kind of enchantment that we're emphasizing on this retreat.
It's difficult with language. It's difficult to come up with language that makes a coherent system but also that describes well the subtleties of what we're talking about here and what's available. Sometimes I'm aware the language, perhaps, that I'm using will rub certain people the wrong way, or they'll take it to mean something that I'm not quite implying. If that's the case -- or anyway, more generally -- I think it's a really interesting exercise to actually inquire into your experiences of enchantment. When you feel an enchantment with things, when you feel that sacredness or beauty, to inquire into: what actually is involved for me in that experience, perceptually and conceptually?
Now, we can have experiences of everything is equally enchanted, but oftentimes -- it's interesting -- some things seem to be more enchanted or enchantable, if you like, than others. For example, plastic artefacts that are made without seeming care for the aesthetics or anything, they're just functional, just convenient or whatever, versus, say, a flower -- it's easier to have that sense of sacredness (for most people) and enchantment with the flower. Or in nature or wilderness as opposed to in a busy city street, or a rundown city street (not always, but). With the spiritual enchantment, it's more possible to have everything equally enchanted. But sometimes -- this is just a suggestion, which I think is very interesting and can be subtle and difficult to actually find out, to discern -- if there's a sense of divinity, what conceptions are wrapped up in that perception of divinity for you at that time? Hard to articulate, hard to discern. I'm just mentioning that as a possibility.
It's probably obvious at this point, and I've mentioned it before, but wrapped up in this whole question of this world that I inhabit is related to the question of matter, and all of that has very much to do with science and typical scientific thinking that has imbued our culture. So wrapped up in this whole practice of cosmopoesis and re-enchantment is the whole, if you like, question of and questioning of science, or rather, the relationship with science.
Again, I want to quote from Nietzsche, who writes about science as a prejudice. He's really talking about this faith in scientism, this overextension, this exclusivity, this claim of scientism that everything can be reduced or explained in terms of a certain kind of reductionist scientific thinking. Partly there's a sort of delightful -- what's the word? -- delightful ranting and vitriol in the way he writes sometimes, so you might react to that, but you can also just enjoy it. It's a little bit theatrical. It's one of the selves he inhabits as theatre -- consciously so, I would say. He's talking about
the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays [in other words, unquestioned], the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations -- a "world of truth" [again, there's that truth claim, the reality claim] that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason. What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this -- reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity.[1]
Again, there's this call to the multiplicity of perception, the multiplicity of the possibility of interpretation, this rich ambiguity. He goes on:
That is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon.
Rather than circumscribing things in this neat little view, thinking there are just a few more discoveries to make, but essentially this is the reality, what's beyond that horizon? Is there something in us that wants to push through and beyond, and expand that horizon, that has reverence, as he says, for that? He talks then about
[justifying an] interpretation of the world ... [that] permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more. [He says,] That is a crudity and a naïveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy.
[laughs] He goes on: "Would it not be rather probable that, conversely, precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence -- what is most apparent, its skin and sensualization" -- in other words, what is empirical, and the scientific is based on the empirical, this seemingly obvious experience, and the whole notion of positivism, so we can only understand things in terms of the empirical experience and the science that comes out of that.
Would it not be rather probable that [what is most apparent in this way] would be grasped first -- and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped? A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning.
We've touched on this in the retreat. He's explaining things in ways that we've already talked about, or similar to what we've already talked about.
This thought [he continues] is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor. [He's saying what we've been talking about, just in different language.] But an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a "scientific" estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is "music" in it!
He's making very similar points to what we've said, but in a very colourful, theatrical, and sort of vital language -- very cutting in his critique.
[45:22] So as I said, this relationship that we actually have -- whether it's something we realize or not, whether we think about it or not -- the relationship we have with classical scientific, meaning Newtonian, mechanistic scientific ideas, and scientism, all of this is crucial. Crucial to our sense of existence, our life, what our practice is, what the path can be, this whole notion of the possibilities of re-enchantment, or non-possibilities -- all of that. Philosophy of science becomes important, curiously. It's not at all abstract, because so much of our assumptions, so much of our perception, our sense of existence and the world, so much of what's called in German the Weltanschauung, the world-view, is informed by, influenced by, indoctrinated by certain outmoded scientific assumptions. We don't realize that. We don't actually realize what our assumptions are, often. So this philosophy of science, to me, is really important and really interesting nowadays. There may be at some point another talk, not on this retreat, but another talk devoted to that, because it's not abstract. "What the hell has this got to do with the Dharma?" It's got everything to do with it nowadays. It's got everything to do with Dharma, got everything to do with my sense of existence, and liberation, and possibility -- all of that. I'm repeating now.
I don't know when it was, maybe about a hundred years ago -- I can't remember -- the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a book together called The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 'Enlightenment' in this case meaning Western Enlightenment, post-Scientific Revolution, etc. Again, they're critiquing the assumptions of science that have come to pervade our culture, and still so a hundred years later. They point out that this classical scientific approach and the mechanistic assumptions and all that's involved in all that cannot accommodate everything about existence. It cannot explain that in trying to reduce and approach the whole of our existence as if its reality is best and most truly explained (or at the sort of ground level) by this classical mechanistic scientific approach, that's actually one-sided. It provides only an incomplete, diminished understanding of nature, and an understanding of nature as an object to be controlled and manipulated. This was something that Theodor Adorno stressed quite a lot. You see here the beginnings of a critique about our relationship with the environment, of course.
Nature, through this view, becomes an object to be controlled and manipulated. [I would say he emphasized that a lot as part of the problem. They write,] Men pay for the increase in their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power.[2]
So yes, science and technology have enormous power over nature, through this classical scientific mechanistic paradigm, but we pay for it with alienation from nature. As the Scientific Revolution gained steam, and the ideas of the Enlightenment became more pervasive over a couple hundred years (it wasn't like an immediate thing), as they became more the dominant view in our Western culture, and that ostensibly rational movement was intrinsic to the Western Enlightenment -- ostensibly rational, seemingly rational movement to try and eliminate all forms of prejudice and dogmas. That's the whole principle of the classical scientific approach: "Let's get to some kind of objective, unbiased reality. We can do that through the scientific approach. That's what science does. It gives us an objective view without bias, without prejudice. We have faith in that. We believe in that."
So even then, as this was gaining steam in the culture and came to be the most predominant view, that kind of philosophical positivist reasoning -- which is just another word for saying that, based on what we can sense, empiricism, and the science that comes out of that -- the positivist reasoning, it still remains (this is what they [Horkheimer and Adorno] write) "engulfed in mythology." You haven't actually got rid of a mythology there. You think you have, you believe you have, but you haven't. By 'positivism,' again, I mean a sort of dogmatic assertion. There's a dogma involved in the philosophy of positivism. It actually just asserts, as a dogma, nature must always be understood in terms of quantitative categories. It's tied up with that whole notion of measurement that I mentioned on the opening evening: if something can be measurable, that's a sign that it's real. Measurement and reality go together. All this is wrapped up in this scientific view. Horkheimer and Adorno write:
But the process [this is the mythology] is always decided from the start. Mathematical procedure [including the procedure of measuring everything and construing what is measured as real] becomes, so to speak, the ritual of thinking.
Again, tied up in the whole assumption we have of things, the way we think about things, is what they're calling a mythology, ritual and mythology, and it's not realized.
[52:12] So there have been lots, in modern Western philosophy, lots of critiques from lots of different directions and starting positions beginning to see that we cannot just adopt the classical mechanistic Newtonian view or assumptions of the Scientific Revolution. They just do not fly, for lots of different reasons. What I'm really emphasizing here is how much that underpins our sense of things in the modern culture.
Just to repeat, what liberates that? What opens it up? It might be an approach through Western philosophy. It might be that some of us just have a more poetic attitude to existence, and to things, and to life and selves. It might be through a deep exploration of the teachings of emptiness, and the practice of emptiness, and seeing dependent arising. It might be through a deeper understanding of quantum physics: actually through science itself, it starts to subvert, if you like, the very principles or assumptions on which science was initially based. But that's an interesting one, because still most scientists, and oftentimes a lot of quantum scientists, just ignore the more philosophical implications or the philosophical questions that come up. They know that they're there, but they just ignore them, or it makes no impact in their lives.
But as I said, why am I harping on about this? Because it has implications for the sense of the world that we live in, and that has all kinds of implications for self, path, practice, existence, possibility -- all kinds of things. Even such fundamentals of existence as time and space -- and, again, maybe on another retreat, I'd give whole talks about time and about space -- you know, that's part of the way of filling out world. World involves time, sense of time, assumptions about time, and assumptions about space. They're fundaments of when we say or feel or sense 'world.' But what is the relationship with all that, what is the perception and the conception? Even our notion and sense of space comes to be questioned through modern science itself. The usual understanding, again, it's a cultural modernist understanding of space. It's the most obvious thing: "Space is a kind of empty, neutral, meaningless vacuum, if you like, that's then filled with stuff at certain locations in space." That's, funnily enough, quite a modernist view -- that it exists objectively and that's the reality of things. We don't realize it, it's so intrinsic, so woven into our very sense of existence and what the world is, but that's actually a culturally conditioned, culturally constructed modernist view. It was not always the view, everywhere and for all time, that humanity had, human beings had.
With the rise of both relativity and quantum physics, we start to see that space is not actually independent of matter and energy. Again, the usual view is, "There is space, and matter is the lumps of matter here or there or moving around. Space is something separate from matter. Space is just a context, if you like." But with Einstein's general theory of relativity from 1916, actually space and time, in fact, are not independent of the matter in it. The matter is not separate from it, and actually shapes space and time, as does the energy. In quantum physics, there are also notions of, actually, if you like, at a quantum level, space is nothing like what we conceive of it as. It's more like what they call quantum bubbles, or quantum foam. (Actually, there are all kinds of theories.) Things that are so obvious, like "Things are separate in space. So there's this end of something and that end of something, or there's this corner of space and that corner of space of a room or whatever it is. There's a beginning of something and an end of something," these seemingly so obvious notions of separation and continuity don't actually hold. They're not, so to speak, fundamental realities as the quantum world gets probed.
Most people these days have heard of the idea of wormholes. They're popular in sci-fi movies and novels. You go through a wormhole in the universe, and you suddenly end up on a different side of the universe, or a different time, wormholes in space-time, etc. What a strange idea. But even more than that, or much stranger, much more challenging to our usual notion of space, our habitual notion of space, is the whole idea of non-locality. Maybe it's a little unfair of me to mention all this stuff and not really go into it and explain it. But this is something that has been proven as a sort of undeniable fact of nature, through a whole bunch of experiments. It came out of something called Bell's theorem, and then a French scientist called Alain Aspect. So whatever future theories of reality come out of science, this idea that actually two particles can become entangled and influence each other instantaneously, even if they're at different ends of the universe. The whole idea is like, "This place is different from that place, and what happens here takes time to get to what's over there." The whole notion of, "Are they really different places? What's going on there?", it's called non-locality. It's a radical challenge to our whole notions of space and time.
John Archibald Wheeler, just to give one more example, had a theory -- now we're talking in the realm of theory -- of what's called 'geons.' What subatomic particles are is not so much a lump of something, a billiard ball of something or a point of something moving in space, but actually a particle is a hole in space-time. This is a theory, and hasn't been proved yet, but it's a way of conceiving, so that matter and space both are not at all, not really how we assume them to be. All of this is getting challenged through science. A whole other level here, wrapped up in that, is what the status of scientific theories is. That's a whole other question. But I won't go into that now.
So the typical view, the typical conception of matter, world, space, time, body, etc., is fine. It's completely fine. It has its validity. Clearly it's functional. What I absolutely want to object to and raise my voice to is the insistence that it is true, and that it is the only reality: "This is reality, and anything else is make-believe or delusion" or whatever. Of course it's fine as a view, and it's fine for someone to spend most of their time in that view. Of course it is. This insistence that it is true, that it's only true, and explicitly or implicitly, then, founding a total sort of philosophy, or a kind of Dharma, or a path that's somehow limited to that and limiting in that way, and founding that on its supposed truth -- whether it's an explicit or implicit claim -- this, I do have a problem with. It's something not conscious, not thought through, not aware, maybe dishonest, or maybe just lacking in insight. Going back to what Blake said, "Save me from single vision." If that's the single vision, and then it's asserted dogmatically in what I was calling this aggressive secularism, this I must, we must raise our voices against, open up through questioning and through insight. As I said, that can happen in all kinds of ways.
