In Praise of Failure

Failure allows us to see our existence in its naked condition.

 “It is entirely impossible for a thinking being to think of its own non-existence, of the termination of its thinking and life,” observed Goethe.

Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being, and that’s precisely the moment when, properly digested, failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For it is this lurking, constant threat that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of our being: the miracle that we exist at all when there is no reason that we should. Knowing that gives us some dignity.

Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are.

It is crucial that we remain fundamentally imperfect, incomplete, erring creatures; in other words, that there is always a gap left between what we are and what we can be. Whatever human accomplishments there have been in history, they have been possible precisely because of this empty space. It is within this interval that people, individuals as well as communities, can accomplish anything.

Ultimately, our capacity to fail makes us what we are; our being as essentially failing creatures lies at the root of any aspiration.

No matter how successful our lives turn out to be, how smart, industrious or diligent we are, the same end awaits us all: “biological failure.”

The more essential question is rather how to approach the grand failure, how to face it and embrace it and own it.

We will all end in failure, but that’s not the most important thing. What really matters is how we fail and what we gain in the process.

by Costica Bradatan

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/in-praise-of-failure/?_r=0

Embracing Life and Death - Adam Frank @ NPR 13.7

While I'm willing to put my bets down against an immortal soul ascending to heaven or descending to damnation, I'm simply agnostic about the fundamental nature of awareness as a phenomenon in the cosmos. Given how little we understand about the roots of consciousness, it simply doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to make commitments one way or other when it comes to questions of what exactly dies and how.

 the real question before us today is not what happens after we die but, instead, how do we approach death now.

 We are here for such a short time, surrounded by questions both intimate and vast. For some questions we have definite answers. (Why do stars shine?) For some we don't really know what an answer should look like. (What is the meaning of life?) And for some questions we are just going to have to wait to find out. 

 In the face of that inescapable truth, what else is there to do but remain true to ourselves and stay radically open and deliciously curious?

 Through sorrow and joy, gain and loss, we can always keep asking that one question: what is it like to experience this life right here, right now?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/11/19/245996903/embracing-life-and-death

John Searle on the Problem of Free Will

The special problem of free will is that we cannot get on with our lives without presupposing free will. Whenever we are in a decision-making situation, or indeed, in any situation that calls for voluntary action, we have to presuppose our own freedom. 

given the structure of our consciousness, we cannot proceed except on the position of free will.

in the old mind-body problem we have the belief that the world consists entirely of material particles in fields of force, but at the same time the world seems to contain consciousness, an immaterial phenomenon; and we cannot see how to put the immaterial together with the material into a coherent picture of the universe. In the old problem of skeptical epistemology, it seems, on the one hand, according to common sense, that we do have certain knowledge of many things in the world, and yet, on the other hand, if we really have such knowledge, we ought to be able to give a decisive answer to the skeptical arguments, such as, How do we know we are not dreaming, are not a brain in a vat, are not being deceived by evil demons, etc.? But we do not know how to give a conclusive answer to these skeptical challenges.

when it comes to explaining a certain class of human behavior, it seems that we typically have the experience of acting "freely" or "voluntarily" in a sense of these words that makes it impossible to have deterministic explanations. 

On the one hand we have the experience of freedom, and on the other hand we find it very hard to give up the view that because every event has a cause, and human actions are events, they must have sufficient causal explanations as much as earthquakes or rain storms.

The terminology of mental and physical, of materialism and dualism, of spirit and flesh, contains a false presupposition that these must name mutually exclusive categories of reality — that our conscious states qua subjective, private, qualitative, etc. cannot be ordinary physical, biological features of our brain. Once we overcome that presupposition, the presupposition that the mental and the physical naively construed are mutually exclusive, then it seems to me we have a solution to the traditional mind-body problem. And here it is: All of our mental states are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are themselves realized in the brain as its higher-level or system features. 

However, the philosophical solution kicks the problem upstairs to neurobiology, where it leaves us with a very difficult neurobiological problem. How exactly does the brain do it, and how exactly are conscious states realized in the brain? What exactly are the neuronal processes that cause our conscious experiences, and how exactly are these conscious experiences realized in brain structures?

there is a striking difference between the passive character of perceptual consciousness and the active character of what we might call "volitional consciousness"

I find a feature of my experiences of free, voluntary actions that was not present in my perceptions. The feature is that I do not sense the antecedent causes of my action in the form of reasons, such as beliefs and desires, as setting causally sufficient conditions for the action; and, which is another way of saying the same thing, I sense alternative courses of action open to me.

In typical cases of deliberating and acting, there is, in short, a gap, or a series of gaps, between the causes of each stage in the processes of deliberating, deciding and acting, and the subsequent stages.

There is a gap between the reasons for the decision and the making of the decision. There is a gap between the decision and the onset of the action, and for any extended action

The gap, as I have described it, is a feature of our conscious, voluntary activities. At each stage, the conscious states are not experienced as sufficient to compel the next conscious state. There is thus only one continuous experience of the gap, but we can divide it into three different sorts of manifestations, as I did above. The gap is between one conscious state and the next, not between conscious states and bodily movements or between physical stimuli and conscious states.

This experience of free will is very compelling, and even those of us who think it is an illusion find that we cannot in practice act on the presupposition that it is an illusion. On the contrary, we have to act on the presupposition of freedom.

The conscious experiences of the gap give us the conviction of human freedom.

A basic feature of our relation to the world is that we find the world causally ordered. Natural phenomena in the world have causal explanations, and those causal explanations state causally sufficient conditions. Customarily, in philosophy, we put this point by saying that that every event has a cause

An interesting change occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the most fundamental level of physics, nature turns out not to be in that way deterministic. We have come to accept at a quantum mechanical level explanations that are not deterministic. However, so far quantum indeterminism gives us no help with the free will problem, because that indeterminism introduces randomness into the basic structure of the universe, and the hypothesis that some of our acts occur freely is not at all the same as the hypothesis that some of our acts occur at random.

Without the conscious experience of the gap, that is, without the conscious experience of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will. We have the conviction of our own free will because of certain features of our consciousness.

the psychological experience of freedom so compelling that it would be absolutely astounding if it turned out that at the psychological level it was a massive illusion, that all of our behavior was psychologically compulsive.

According to the definitions of these terms that I am using, determinism and free will are not compatible. The thesis of determinism asserts that all actions are preceded by sufficient causal conditions that determine them. The thesis of free will asserts that some actions are not preceded by sufficient causal conditions. Free will so defined is the negation of determinism.

some of the most worrisome questions about how we as human beings fit into the rest of the universe. Our conception of ourselves as free agents is fundamental to our overall self-conception.

Indeterminism is no evidence that there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom that can move molecules in directions that they were not otherwise going to move. So it really does look as if everything we know about physics forces us to some form of denial of human freedom.

if there is any fact of experience that we are all familiar with, it's the simple fact that our own choices, decisions, reasonings, and cogitations seem to make a difference to our actual behaviour. There are all sorts of experiences that we have in life where it seems just a fact of our experience that though we did one thing, we feel we know perfectly well that we could have done something else.

it is just a plain empirical fact about our behaviour that it isn't predictable in the way that the behaviour of objects rolling down an inclined plane is predictable. And the reason it isn't predictable in that way is that we could often have done otherwise than we in fact did. Human freedom is just a fact of experience.

if on the other hand he freely acts, if he acts, as we say, of his own free will, then his behaviour is free. Of course it is also completely determined, since every aspect of his behaviour is determined by the physical forces operating on the particles that compose his body, as they operate on all of the bodies in the universe. So, free behaviour exists, but it is just a small corner of the determined world – it is that corner of determined human behaviour where certain kinds of force and compulsion are absent.

The problem about the freedom of the will is not about whether or not there are inner psychological reasons that cause us to do things as well as external physical causes and inner compulsions. Rather, it is about whether or not the causes of our behaviour, whatever they are, are sufficient to determine the behaviour so that things have to happen the way they do happen.

I said that we have a conviction of our own free will simply based on the facts of human experience. But how reliable are those experiences? As I mentioned earlier, the typical case, often described by philosophers, which inclines us to believe in our own free will is a case where we confront a bunch of choices, reason about what is the best thing to do, make up our minds, and then do the thing we have decided to do.

But perhaps our belief that such experiences support the doctrine of human freedom is illusory.

Now the interest of these cases is that the patient always gives some more or less adequate reason for doing what he does. That is, he seems to himself to be behaving freely. We, on the other hand, have good reasons to believe that his behaviour isn't free at all, that the reasons he gives for his apparent decision to crawl around on the floor are irrelevant, that his behaviour was determined in advance, that in fact he is in the grip of a post-hypnotic suggestion.

'Is all human behaviour like that?' Is all human behaviour like the man operating under a post-hypnotic suggestion?

The thesis of psychological determinism is that prior psychological causes determine all of our behaviour in the way that they determine the behaviour of the hypnosis subject or the heroin addict. On this view, all behaviour, in one way or another, is psychologically compulsive. But the available evidence suggests that such a thesis is false. We do indeed normally act on the basis of our intentional states — our beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, etc. — and in that sense our mental states function causally. But this form of cause and effect is not deterministic. We might have had exactly those mental states and still not have done what we did. As far as psychological causes are concerned, we could have done otherwise. Instances of hypnosis and psychologically compulsive behaviour on the other hand are usually pathological and easily distinguishable from normal free action.

That is, if determinism were true, then the world would proceed pretty much the way it does proceed, the only difference being that certain of our beliefs about its proceedings would be false. Those beliefs are important to us because they have to do with the belief that we could have done things differently from the way we did in fact do them. And this belief in turn connects with beliefs about moral responsibility and our own nature as persons. 

if libertarianism, which is the thesis of free will, were true, it appears we would have to make some really radical changes in our beliefs about the world. In order for us to have radical freedom, it looks as if we would have to postulate that inside each of us was a self that was capable of interfering with the causal order of nature. That is, it looks as if we would have to contain some entity that was capable of making molecules swerve from their paths. I don't know if such a view is even intelligible, but it's certainly not consistent with what we know about how the world works from physics.

Mental features are caused by, and realised in neurophysiological phenomena, as I discussed in the first chapter. But we get causation from the mind to the body, that is we get top-down causation over a passage of time; and we get top-down causation over time because the top level and the bottom level go together.

But the top-down causation works only because the mental events are grounded in the neurophysiology to start with. So, corresponding to the description of the causal relations that go from the top to the bottom, there is another description of the same series of events where the causal relations bounce entirely along the bottom, that is, they are entirely a matter of neurons and neuron firings at synapses

What is it about our experience that makes it impossible for us to abandon the belief in the freedom of the will? If freedom is an illusion, why is it an illusion we seem unable to abandon? The first thing to notice about our conception of human freedom is that it is essentially tied to consciousness.

The second point to note is that it is not just any state of the consciousness that gives us the conviction of human freedom. If life consisted entirely of the reception of passive perceptions, then it seems to me we would never so much as form the idea of human freedom.

The characteristic experience that gives us the conviction of human freedom, and it is an experience from which we are unable to strip away the conviction of freedom, is the experience of engaging in voluntary, intentional human actions.

certain bodily movements occur, and that they occur as caused by that very intention in action. It is this experience which is the foundation stone of our belief in the freedom of the will.

the difference between the experience of perceiving and the experience of acting is that in perceiving one has the sense: 'This is happening to me,' and in acting one has the sense: 'I am making this happen.' But the sense that 'I am making this happen' carries with it the sense that 'I could be doing something else'. In normal behaviour, each thing we do carries the conviction, valid or invalid, that we could be doing something else right here and now, that is, all other conditions remaining the same. This, I submit, is the source of our unshakable conviction of our own free will.

try to imagine that a portion of your life was like the Penfield experiments on a grand scale. Instead of walking across the room you simply find that your body is moving across the room; instead of speaking you simply hear and feel words coming out of your mouth. Imagine your experiences are those of a purely passive but conscious puppet and you will have imagined away the experience of freedom. But in the typical case of intentional action, there is no way we can carve off the experience of freedom. It is an essential part of the experience of acting.

But we can't similarly give up the conviction of freedom because that conviction is built into every normal, conscious intentional action. And we use this conviction in identifying and explaining actions. This sense of freedom is not just a feature of deliberation, but is part of any action, whether premeditated or spontaneous. The point has nothing essentially to do with deliberation; deliberation is simply a special case.

In fact we can't act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom, no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical system. there is a sense of 'could have', in which there were a range of choices available to me, and in that sense there were a lot of things I could have done, all other things being equal, which I did not do. Similarly, because the psychological factors operating on me do not always, or even in general, compel me to behave in a particular fashion, I often, psychologically speaking, could have done something different from what I did in fact do.

for reasons I don't really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour. For that reason, I believe, neither this discussion nor any other will ever convince us that our behaviour is unfree.

It is tempting to think that just as we have discovered that large portions of common sense do not adequately represent how the world really works, so we might discover that our conception of ourselves and our behaviour is entirely false. But there are limits on this possibility. The distinction between reality and appearance cannot apply to the very existence of consciousness. For if it seems to me that I'm conscious, I am conscious. We could discover all kinds of startling things about ourselves and our behaviour; but we cannot discover that we do not have minds, that they do not contain conscious, subjective, intentionalistic mental states; nor could we discover that we do not at least try to engage in voluntary, free, intentional actions.

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/searle/

Art Over Biology

Art Over Biology
Adam Kirsch
The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/104870/charles-darwin-evolution-art-kirsch


For the artist to deny any connection with the enterprise of life, then, is to assert his freedom from this universal imperative; to reclaim negatively the autonomy that evolution seems to deny to human beings. It is only because we can freely choose our own ends that we can decide not to live for life, but for some other value that we posit

The exhilarating assault on bourgeois values that was modernism, in all the arts and in politics too, rested on the assumption, nurtured through the nineteenth century, that there was nothing enviable about what T.S. Eliot bitterly derided as the cycle of “birth, copulation and death.” Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today,July 22, 2012 9:20 AM  is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own

Denis Dutton’s much-discussed book The Art Instinct, which appeared in 2009: For Dutton, the exposure of the Darwinian origins of art was meant to build a case against the excesses of postmodernism. If human aesthetic preferences—for representation in visual art, tonality in music, and narrative in literature—are the product of hundreds of generations of evolutionary selection, then it follows that art which rejects those preferences is doomed to irrelevance

As Dutton put it: “The universality of art and artistic behaviors, their spontaneous appearance everywhere across the globe ... and the fact that in most cases they can be easily recognized as artistic across cultures suggest that they derive from a natural, innate source: a universal human psychology

Stephen Jay Gould suggested that art was not an evolutionary adaptation but what he called a “spandrel”—that is, a showy but accidental by-product of other adaptations that were truly functional

Boyd begins with the premise that human beings are pattern-seeking animals: both our physical perceptions and our social interactions are determined by our brain’s innate need to find and to make coherent patterns. Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding

human art refines our performance in our key perceptual and cognitive modes, in sight (the visual arts), sound (music), and social cognition (story

The problem, for Boyd as for Richards before him, is that there is not the slightest plausibility to the claim that art renders us more “organized” or more “fit,” and there is considerable evidence to the contrary

As Kant famously taught, the very definition of the aesthetic is that it is disinterested, that it has meanings but not utilities, that it suspends our involvement with practical and goal-oriented life, that it puts life at a distance so that we can judge it and escape it and even reject it.

Shakespeare had three children, one surviving grandchild, and no great-grandchildren: he singularly failed to perpetuate his genes. Yet he is regarded as one of the most successful, the most worthwhile, the most consequential men to have ever lived, because his spiritual children have thrived beyond measurement

Pagel argues that “culture became our species’ strategy for survival, a biological strategy, not just some bit of fun and amusement on the side.” This argument involves the vexed question of “group selection”—that is, the problem of whether evolution can select for traits that benefit a group while being detrimental to an individual

Pagel argues that so-called “cooperative altruism” can succeed if each of its participants and recipients share a gene for it. In this way, my death allows copies of my altruism gene to go on living in my neighbors’ bodies

the use of the arts is indirect: they promote group cohesion, and the survival of the group in turn promotes the survival of the gene

But what cannot at all be explained in this way is any art that works to separate the individual from the group—which is to say, most art, and certainly most modern art

much of the greatest modern art proclaims the value of the individual in direct opposition to the group, ruthlessly interrogating tribe, nation, class, and family sentiment

Kandel recognizes that between our genes and, say, our enjoyment of a painting there intervene two levels of experience that cannot be paraphrased away in Darwinian language. The first is intellectual: what we see in a painting is determined by our knowledge of art history and artistic convention. The second is neurological: what we see in a painting is determined by the way different parts of our brains respond to visual stimuli

Perception, Kandel shows, is not a matter of the brain passively receiving information about the outside world. It is, instead, a highly active process, dependent on the particular capacities our brains have evolved. This is not a new idea—Kant, again, explained how our knowledge of phenomena is inevitably structured by the categories of our understanding—but new advances in technology make it possible to locate the brain’s capacities with amazing precision

neurological analysis of our experience of art tells us as little about the meaning of that experience

Today’s Darwinists treat the aesthetic as if it were a collection of preferences and practices, each of which can be explained as an adaptation. But the preferences and the practices are secondary, made possible only by the fact that the aesthetic itself is a distinct dimension of human experience—not the by-product of something more fundamental, but itself fundamental.

George Santayana - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Science provides explanations of natural phenomena, but poetry and religion are festive celebrations of human life born of consciousness

philosophers have to take off the bandages of epistemology and metaphysics altogether, accept the finite and fallible status of their knowledge claims, and get on with confessing their belief in the things that make life worth living

Drawing attention to what is given in an instant of awareness (the smallest conceivable moment of consciousness), he maintains that any knowledge or recognition found in such an instant would have to be characterized by a concept (or “essence” to use Santayana's term). Concepts cannot be limited to particular instances; rather the particular object is seen as an instance of the concept (essence). Thus, pursuing doubt to its ultimate end, one is confined by the “solipsism of the present moment.” That is, in a single instant of awareness there can be no knowledge or belief, since both require concepts not bounded by a moment of awareness

Philosophy must begin in medias res (in the middle of things), in action itself, where there is an instinctive and arational belief in the natural world: “animal faith"

Ours is a long-standing primitive credulity, and our most basic beliefs are those of an animal creed: “that there is a world, that there is a future, that things sought can be found, and things seen can be eaten

there are certain inevitable beliefs; they are inescapable given nature and our individual physical history. And like Wittgenstein, he maintains that these beliefs are various and variable. They are determined by the interplay between environment and psyche, i.e., between our natural conditions and the inherited, physical “organisation of the animal” (the psyche).

The environment determines the occasions on which intuitions arise, the psyche — the inherited organisation of the animal — determines their form, and ancient conditions of life on Earth no doubt determined which psyches should arise and prosper

the origins of all events in the world are arbitrary, temporal, and contingent. Matter (by whatever name it is called) is the principle of existence

Matter is the non-discursive, natural foundation for all that is. In itself, it is neither good nor evil but may be perceived as such when viewed from the vested interest of animal life. Latent animal interests convert matter's non-discernible, neutral face to a smile or frown. But “moral values cannot preside over nature"

An essence is a universal, an object of thought, not a material force. However, consciousness of an essence is generated by the interaction of a psyche and the material environment

Santayana uses the term “spirit” to mean consciousness or awareness

Awareness evolved through the natural development of the physical world, and he demurs to scientific accounts for explanations of that development. Almost poetically, he sees spirit as emerging in moments of harmony between the psyche and the environment. Such harmony is temporary, and the disorganized natural forces permit spirit to arise “only spasmodically, to suffer and to fail

Accepting the world's insecure equilibrium enables one to celebrate the birth of spirit. Reasoning, particularly reasoning associated with action, is a signal of the nascent activities of the psyche working to harmonize its actions with the environment, and if successful, reason permits individual and social organization to prosper while spirit leads to the delight of imagination and artistry

His view of consciousness is more celebrational, as opposed to being a burden or eliciting action. Spirit is “precisely the voice of order in nature

explanations of human life, including reason and spirit, lie within the sciences. The nature of truth simply is correspondence with what is, but since humans, nor any other conscious being, are able to see beyond the determinant limits of their nature and environment, pragmatism becomes the test of truth rather than correspondence

Pragmatism is rooted in animal life, the need to know the world in a way that fosters successful action

Most commentators classify Santayana as an extreme moral relativist who maintains that all individual moral perspectives have equal standing and are based on the heritable traits and environmental circumstances of individuals. This naturalistic approach applies to all living organisms

The moral terrain of animals, viewed from a neutral perspective, places all animal interests and goods as equal. Each good stems from heritable physical traits and is shaped by adaptations to the environment

There are specific goods for each animal depending on the specific heritable traits and interests of the psyche and on the specific circumstances of the environment. Self-knowledge, then, is the distinguishing moral mark. The extent to which one knows one's interests, their complexity and centrality, will determine whether one can achieve a good life, provided the environment is accommodating

Self-knowledge requires a critical appreciation of one's culture and physical inheritance, and the ability to shape one's life in streams of conflicting goods within oneself and within one's community

His basic contention that individual suffering is the worse feature of human life, not social inequality, causes him to focus more on the natural dilemmas of the individual rather than on social action

Santayana's focus is on the individual, and the role of the state is to protect and to enable the individual to flourish

it is the celebration of life in its festivities. It is Aristotle's practical wisdom: structuring individual life as it is, living it joyfully, and assuring that one's commitments are conducive to the delights of the intellect and consistent with the demands of the time and tradition

Consciousness essentially is only awareness, an attention to what is given, rather than being an instrument in reshaping the world. Consciousness, emerging late in the evolutionary pathway, is a flowering of happy circumstances that celebrates what is given, and when truly recognized, does only that. It is joyful, delighting in what is presented, and not troubled by where it leads or what it means

Spirit, or consciousness, is momentary, fleeting, and depends on the physical forces of our bodies and environment in order to exist. Shaping one's life to enhance these spiritual, fleeting moments, extending them as long as is practical, is one of the delights of living  George Santayana. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/

Buddha

The image that stays with me at the end of Karen Armstrong's Buddha is Ananda's tears. Ananda was Siddhatta Gotama's cousin and one of his earliest followers, accompanying Gotama through his long career. But Ananda did not reach enlightenment during the Buddha's life, and he openly wept when he realized that his friend Gotama had finally laid down to die. "When the Buddha heard about Ananda's tears, he sent for him. 'That is enough, Ananda,' he said. 'Don't be sorrowful; don't grieve.' Had he not explained, over and over again, that nothing was permanent but that separation was the law of life? 'And Ananda,' the Buddha concluded, 'for years you have waited on me with constant love and kindness. You have taken care of my physical needs, and have supported me in all your words and thought. You have done all this to help me, joyfully and with your whole heart. You have earned merit, Ananda. Keep trying, and soon you will be enlightened, too.'" So why, in a book about the Buddha, is it Ananda that I most admire? Why does he feel more fully human?

This is my third time through Buddha, and even though it is a slender book trying to capture the life of Siddhattha Gotama, it spoke more to me now than through my first two readings. Of course, trying to judge the accuracy of the book when Gotama's life is shrouded in even more legend and mystery than most biblical characters is virtually impossible. The first written accounts come at least 400 years after he died, and estimates for the dates of his life range from as early as about 570 to as late as 400 BCE. A number of historians question whether he even existed. From what little I know, however, Armstrong's take on his life seems a good place to start.

I especially appreciate her characterization of the social and intellectual milieu of the “Gangetic plains” around the time of Gotama's life. Developing iron age technologies allowed for the cultivation of more land and the production of surplus grains, stimulating trade and an increase in wealth. New social conditions called for increasing specialization, a growing merchant class, and a much more mobile society. These conditions set in motion a growing dissatisfaction with the established Vedic tradition that emphasized social caste, animal sacrifice and Brahmanic domination of ritual. "Since [the] new men fit less and less easily into the caste system, many of them felt that they had been pushed into a spiritual vacuum."

Two main trends began to fill the void. Along the western areas of the Ganges, thinkers reinterpreted the Vedic texts and ideas as emphasizing individual spiritual realization. These ideas eventually coalesced into the Upanishads, giving rise to Vedanta and other schools of Hindu thought. In the forests to the east of the Ganges, more emphasis was put on spiritual liberation through renunciation of the householder's life, living in small communities (sanghas) of beggar monks, and engaging in extreme ascetic or yogic practices.

The spiritual anomie caused by disillusionment with traditional answers reflected a much broader spiritual crisis and awakening during the first century B.C.E. that Armstrong, following Karl Jaspers, calls the Axial Age. Traditional ritualistic religions gradually yielded to ideas of individual responsibility, guilt and salvation in different areas of the world from about 700 to 200 BCE, giving rise to Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, the Hebrew prophets and the Ionian enlightenment. "The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we know it. During this period, men and women became conscious of their own existence, their own nature and their limitations in an unprecedented way. Their experience of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest goals and absolute reality in the depths of their being.” This concept of the Axial Age has been roundly criticized by a number of historians as overlooking too many differences between the different traditions and encompassing too broad a span of time to be meaningful, but a number of other scholars, notably Robert Bellah and Jurgen Habermas, have found the idea to be useful in exploring the nature and evolution of religious practices.

The Buddha's message, then, begins with the "inescapable reality of pain"--dukkha. It is the first of the Four Noble Truths--"suffering...informs the whole of human life." The cause of our suffering comes from desire, which "makes us grab or cling to things that can never give lasting satisfaction." These were common assumptions among the forest monks, but Gotama said that the way out--Nirvana--was not through the extreme ascetic or yogic practices which he had tried and eventually abandoned but through a "middle way"--the eightfold path--that emphasized morality, meditation, and wisdom. Gotama taught techniques of mindfulness and awareness that stressed intense examination of thoughts, emotions and actions, leading to realization of the truths of anicca (impermanence), anatta (non-self)--the ego and the self had no reality but were just streams of sensations and thoughts held together out of fear. Contrary to other schools of thought, Gotama did not posit an eternal Self or soul or any other kind of metaphysical entity. (One recent commentator stated, "The Buddha was an atheist. There's no getting around it.") Nor did he insist on the infallibility of any of his teachings. His Dhamma (instructions or methods) were to be judged only by their consequences--how well they worked. But he felt that the monks who followed his path would find that "by meditation, concentration, mindfulness and a disciplined detachment from the world...it was possible to live in this world of pain, at peace, in control and in harmony with oneself and the rest of creation."

Which brings me back to Ananda’s tears. Since all living beings suffer, Gotama extended his compassion to the four corners of the universe, but it was a “wholly disinterested benevolence, “an attitude of total equanimity,” which “demanded that he abandon all personal preference.” Here was the one man, Ananda, who had accompanied Gotama on his journeys for over 40 years, shedding tears for the loss of his beloved companion and teacher, and the Buddha chided Ananda for his grief, in essence saying to him, you still don’t get it, do you. Gotama could not deal with his best friend’s sorrow (well, ok, he did not allow himself to have a bff), and that’s where Mr. Gotama and I begin to part company.

I have been a fellow traveller with Buddhism for, what, close to 45 years now. I have had a great affinity for the ideas of Buddhism, especially the radical agnosticism that seems to underlie much of Buddhist thought. Anatta and anicca seem to be truths that fit comfortably with the findings of science and can even accommodate the weirdness of quantum mechanics. As I keep track of the current debates over personal responsibility with the current findings of neuroscience, Buddhism made the same points about 2500 years ago. Gotama could have agreed with Michael Gazzaniga's "left brained interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative and the self image, taking the information from various inputs, from the neuronal workspace, and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input." And, certainly, as I grow older, the concept of dukkha fits with the decay and the suffering of old age.

But I never took my Buddhism to the next level, to that of practice, and as Armstrong really makes clear to me this time, it don't mean jack shit until then. Ideas don't mean nothing in the Buddhist scheme of things until they have been thoroughly and totally assimilated through the full acceptance and practice of the Eightfold path and the incorporation of samadhi, jhana, and praja--meditation, concentration, and wisdom. Only those people who have taken the vows to triple refuge--to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha--can hope to get there. "The full Dhamma was possible only for monks---the Noble Truths were not for laymen; they had to be "realized" and this direct knowledge could not be realized without yoga, which was essential to the full Buddhist regimen....the laity were never able to graduate to serious yoga." The "full Buddhist regimen," then, eventually means "going forth" (taking the vows) and renunciation of the self--a renunciation of who I am and what I have stood for. And that ain't going to happen.

I guess when it comes down to it, my Buddhism has been more about self actualization rather than self renunciation. It's been more related to sports psychology or the path of achievement than to the eightfold path, more about trying to remove limitations, doubts, negativity than about acknowledging suffering and seeking release. I wanted more tools in my mental arsenal to help me deal with my own problems. I don’t want to give up my best friends, my goals, my values, my personality

Perhaps it’s my inability to accept the centrality of suffering as the main fact of life. Armstrong begins her narrative of Gotama's life with the premise that, "the spiritual life cannot begin until people allow themselves to be invaded by the reality of suffering, realizing how fully it permeates our whole experience, and feel the pain of all other beings." Or as paraphrased by Diarmaid McCulloch in his review of The Great Transformation, "Life is a bastard, and then you die."

Well, frankly, I've spent the better part of my life trying to hide that little nastiness from myself. You would have thought that wallowing around in my own shallow mediocrity would have driven that point home by now, but somehow I've managed to keep hold of the hope that life is good, still trying to escape the limitations that time, place, age, and circumstance have laid on me, trying to be better than I am even though the energy and the physical presence have inevitably started draining away. It's kind of like what Waldo (Mr. Emerson) said as he came towards the end of his life, "One of these days, before I die, I still believe I shall do better." Probably it's all delusion. Or as my man Michael (Mr. Montaigne) might have said, I'm really pretty fucking lucky to have gotten this far, I guess, without undue suffering and hardship. It doesn't feel very noble or heroic, but well, it’s all I’ve got. "I grow old...I grow old..."

So, I guess I'll continue to be a fellow traveler, and maybe even spend more time on my zafu, waiting for my meditation app to tell me that I've done enough for the day. But I have no hopes about reaching any kind of enlightenment, and a whole lot of doubts about how desirable it even is. I'll just kind of muddle along and grow older and suffer--and then die, as confused about it as ever. So be it.

Self Reliance

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. loc: 7416

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; loc: 7417

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. loc: 7421

is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; loc: 7426

nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. loc: 7449

But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. loc: 7453

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. loc: 7459

would be a man must be a nonconformist. loc: 7463

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. loc: 7464

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. loc: 7468

truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. loc: 7475

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim loc: 7477

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. loc: 7494

I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. loc: 7496

you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. loc: 7498

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. loc: 7498

objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. loc: 7501

But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. loc: 7504

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. loc: 7509

There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. loc: 7513

nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. loc: 7517

the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. loc: 7520

other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. loc: 7526

Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? loc: 7529

foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? loc: 7534

will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, loc: 7547

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. loc: 7550

Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. loc: 7551

Be it how it will, do right now. loc: 7552

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. loc: 7562

Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. loc: 7566

magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? loc: 7592

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. loc: 7595

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. loc: 7599

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. loc: 7601

Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. loc: 7613

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. loc: 7618

is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. loc: 7621

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. loc: 7625

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. loc: 7633

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. loc: 7638

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. loc: 7642

only avails, not the having lived. loc: 7646

This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. loc: 7647

is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. loc: 7655

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. loc: 7659

we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. loc: 7676

I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. loc: 7682

But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. loc: 7688

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. loc: 7705

We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. loc: 7709

Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. loc: 7731

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. loc: 7739

Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. loc: 7741

men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. loc: 7747

The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s mind. loc: 7754

But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. loc: 7756

In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, loc: 7764

He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, loc: 7770

At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. loc: 7773

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. loc: 7778

on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; loc: 7786

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. loc: 7791

never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. loc: 7798

civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. loc: 7805

The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; loc: 7808

No greater men are now than ever were. loc: 7813

is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. loc: 7826

so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. loc: 7828

a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, loc: 7831

Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. loc: 7836

It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. loc: 7840

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. loc: 7849