Meditation, Downward Causation, Neuroplasticity and the Quantum Zeno Effect.

Recent research has shown that Buddhist meditation can not only affect long-term behavior, but can actually alter the structure of the brain (1, 2, 3,  4).

So how does something as non-physical as the attention developed during meditation affect physical structures of the brain?  According to the mechanistic materialist worldview, this sort of 'downward-causation' (mind over matter) shouldn't happen.  To a materialist, mental activities result from physical processes, not vice versa.

One possible mechanism for downward causation has been suggested by physicist Henry Stapp, who proposed that the Quantum Zeno Effect  allows the observer to hold patterns of energy states in a stable condition where they would normally, if left unobserved, decay randomly .  

The Quantum Zeno effect (also known as the Turing paradox) is a situation in which an unstable quantum system, if observed continuously, will never decay. One can "freeze" the evolution of the system by measuring it frequently enough in its known initial state. 

A watched quantum state never changes

The prolonged processes of attention in Buddhist meditation are good candidates for the kind of mental activities that could affect the physical state of microscopic brain structures.


Related Articles

Buddhism, Quantum Physics and Mind

Quantum Buddhism

The Mind-Bending History Of Buddhism And Psychedelics

Opening the doors of perception?  Go ask Alice

by Carolyn Gregoire

In the Huffington Post

"The history of Buddhism and of psychedelics in American culture follow a surprisingly similar trajectory from the 1950s through the present-day.

But perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise, given that they share a common aim: the liberation of the mind.

Many of the thinkers who turned to Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies in the 1960s -- including Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass -- were influenced in some way by their experiences with LSD and other psychedelic drugs.

American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield said that LSD, "prepares the mind for Buddhism," while Allan Watts described both practices as being part of a comprehensive philosophical quest.

Now, more than 60 years later, we're seeing a resurgence of popular interest in Buddhism -- with mindfulness meditation now firmly entrenched in the cultural mainstream -- and also in psychedelics, which are being investigated as therapeutic agents for mental health issues including depression, anxiety and addiction.

The intersection of these practices raises a number of questions: Are psychedelics an obstruction to a Dharma practice, or a helpful accompaniment? Are mind-altering substances a legitimate means of personal transformation..."    Read it all here  

 
See also Can you trust your brain?

and  Buddhism, Shamanism and the use of Hallucinogens   

THE STRUCTURE OF BUDDHISM

Aspects, components and interfaces

Buddhism - a religion, a philosophy or a psychology? Or all three?

Most religions have no foundation apart from the ‘truths’ revealed long ago by the voices of the gods to a collection of prophets. 

When different voices of different gods say different things to different prophets, then the only way to determine which version is correct is by war,  persecution and terrorism, as the Islamic State so effectively demonstrates.

Thankfully, Buddhism is different.   The Buddhist religion is based on two rational and verifiable foundations - a philosophy and a psychology.    And the psychology is itself founded upon philosophy, as shown in the diagram. 

So whereas other religions can only support their tenets by reference to ‘truths’ revealed to an exclusive group of long dead people who heard voices in their heads, Buddhism can appeal to rationality and shareable, reproducible experience.


Components and interfaces

The diagram illustrates how these three major domains of Buddhism - Philosophy (blue), Psychology (green) and Religion (orange) - fit together, with their components and interfaces.

LOGIC
The foundation of Buddhist philosophy is a logical analysis of phenomena, which radically deconstructs how things exist, and also how we think things exist. 

Deconstructing how things exist reveals that all phenomena are ultimately processes, and no thing or substance is capable of permanent existence, or existence 'from its own side'. This is the basis of Buddhist METAPHYSICS.

This conclusion immediately raises psychological implications. If everything is impermanent, then why are our minds so biased in favor of viewing the world as things and substances, rather than processes?    This is the main topic of Buddhist EPISTEMOLOGY, which interfaces philosophy with psychology.  An important concept in this epistemological analysis is the theory of the two truths - the contrast between the ‘working approximations’ we use to find our way around the everyday world, and how phenomena truly exist when we analyze them in depth.

The conclusion reached from the study of epistemology is that our distorted view of the world gives rise to DELUSIONS, especially the three mental poisons of aversion, attachment and ignorance.   Eradication of these three biologically based poisons, and prevention of their resultant actions, is one of the principle aspects of Buddhist ETHICS.   One of the main ways of reducing and eventually eradicating delusions is by the practice of MEDITATION, especially meditation on emptiness.

ETHICS and DELUSIONS are thus at a triple interface between philosophy, psychology and those aspects of Buddhism that people from Judeo-Christian cultural traditions would more readily recognise as religious.

Interfaces between psychology and religious practises are provided by RITUALS (such as sadhanas, pujas, mantras, mudras etc), ART (including numinous symbolism) and TANTRA.  

Unlike other religions, rather than aiming to placate or appease jealous gods, ritual practices are intended to produce changes in the minds of the practitioners, resulting in the ability to step outside the system of the Samsaric world (TRANSCENDENCE).  

Thus Buddhist art and ritual practices are intended to facilitate mental realisations, mystical experiences and ultimately the recognition of ones own Buddha-nature. Hence they are each shown as interfaces, with one end in religion, and the other in psychology.

Components which are primarily religious are the SANGHA, which is the community of Buddhist practitioners in its widest sense, including both ordained and lay persons organised as traditional congregations in dharma centers, or increasingly nowadays as online communities of people who may not have easy access to a center.  These geographically scattered Sangha often meet up for FESTIVALS.
 
Another major component of Buddhism is the large collection of NARRATIVES, ranging from historical accounts of the lives of major Buddhist teachers, including the Buddha himself, to the various parables such as the Jataka tales and Zen stories.

For a detailed discussion of the rational foundations of Buddhism see Buddhist Philosophy.


- Sean Robsville


 

Mindful Eating for Weight Loss and Other Health Benefits

From Global Times 

"Li Shanshan, a 29-year-old girl in Beijing, sat quietly on the ground in a dimly lit room with light music floating through the air. Holding the plate in front of her, she opened her eyes. With a deep breath of the aromatic air, she grasped some food from it and took her first bite.

While she ate, she did not think about anything else. She put all of her attention toward the food. She takes her time to chew slowly, sense the vegetable's flavors and textures and observe how her body reacts to the food.

"It feels really different when I eat my food this way. I feel so relaxed and pleased. I can actually feel which food my body wants, if the food can give me more strength and if I want to eat more," Li said.

Li experienced this on Tuesday at the Beijing Mindfulness Center (BMC) in Dongcheng district, which provides classes and workshops on meditation to seek awareness of one's body and mind. Li first started to practice the method in September, and lost five kilograms after the first week.

"It's not just about losing weight. I am also healthier and in a better mood since I feel more in control of myself," Li said.

The practice of mindful eating has existed for over 3,000 years within Buddhism. Recently, it became more popular as a secular practice as the latest research has shown that practicing mindful eating has been directly related to the regulation of weight and fighting obesity, according to Dalida Turkovic from Serbia, the executive coach and founder of the BMC... "

Read it all

The Unconditioned

From Beliefnet 

   "...Buddhists believe that Siddhartha attained a state that was free of conditions—things like upbringing, psychology, perceptions, opinions, presuppositions, and so on. To be Enlightened is to be Unconditioned, and a Buddha is free from conditioned responses such as prejudice, hatred, and greed. Rather, a Buddha is characterized by wisdom, compassion, and freedom. To be a Buddha is to see reality as it truly is. The word Buddha, in fact, is a title which means “one who is awake”—in essence, one who has completely awoken to reality..."


See also  Can you debiologize your mind? And if you do will anything remain?

Buddhist meditation helps kids unplug from their online world

From the Telegraph

"Children should be taught Buddhist meditation techniques and yoga in schools to help them "unplug from their online world", a minister has said.

Edward Timpson, an education minister, said that schools across the country should start teaching "mindfulness" as a "normal part of the school day".

The meditative practice, which has its roots in Buddhism, encourages people to focus on the present, rather than on the anxieties of the past or future.

Speaking during a debate in Parliament, Mr Timpson warned that “children cannot unplug from their online world, and that is changing the shape of many of their relationships and the pressures that they come under at a much more tender age”.

He said that mindfulness is “a modern innovation born from the deepest traditions of meditation” and that schools and colleges using the technique will “to enable all children to enjoy good mental health and emotional wellbeing...”.    More


See also  Number of calls to Childline from children experiencing suicidal thoughts doubles in five years

 

Graham Priest on Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhism & Philosophy - an interview with Graham Priest




see also Buddhist Philosophy

Can mindfulness improve high school students' concentration?

From the BBC Magazine

"...The practice of mindfulness - which draws on Buddhist thinking - has become increasingly popular in recent years. There have been calls for brain-training techniques, using breathing to achieve mental clarity, to be introduced in schools.

In October, the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group said the practice should be made more widely available and recommended the Department for Education designate three schools to "pioneer mindfulness teaching and disseminate best practice".

Political author and former head of Wellington College Anthony Seldon has called for daily "stillness sessions" in schools, saying a decline in traditional religious assemblies has left students with little space for reflection in the school day.

So can mindfulness meditation really help pupils concentrate amid the distractions of 21st Century living? A group of BBC School Reporters from Connaught School for Girls in Leytonstone, east London, decided to investigate... "

"... At the end of the two week experiment, the results were positive. Those who had taken part in mindfulness meditation successfully completed the concentration task an average of 2.15 times more than before, while the results of the control group improved by just 0.69 times..."

Full report here

 

Be mindful when you smoke and booze.

   

A simple way to break a bad habit - Judson Brewer at

TEDMED 2015

Can we break bad habits by being more curious about them? Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School studies the relationship between mindfulness and addiction - from smoking to overeating to all those other things we do even though we know they're bad for us. Learn more about the mechanism of habit development and discover a simple but profound practice that might help you beat your next urge to smoke, snack or check a text while driving.

Watch Dr. Brewer's presentation at TEDMED, November 2015

Tonglen Meditation - Mutually Assured Destruction of Bad Karma

Meditation environment

To perform this meditation it helps to be in a suitable environment and maintain a correct posture.

Suitable Environment
Find somewhere crowded, noisy, hot, stressful and generally frustrating.  A packed commuter train or bus is ideal.

Correct Posture
Check whether you're sitting comfortably. If so, you're doing it wrong. Get up off your ass, hang on the strap and let someone who needs it have your seat.


The correct frame of mind
Concentrate on your own frustration, stress, boredom, discomfort and low-level hostility to the passengers around you who are swaying and bumping into you and crowding you in.   Visualize these negative feelings as a cloud of acrid black smoke swirling around your heart.

Next, imagine all your fellow passengers are experiencing the same hassles. 

On an in-breath, breathe in all their irritations as black smoke which mixes with and annihilates your own swirling black smoke in a burst of white light.

The light purifies and calms your body and mind.  Imagine the irritation of yourself and the irritation of others as antimatter meeting matter in a burst of mutually assured destruction, producing vast amounts of pure positive energy. 

As you breathe out, imagine this pure white energy radiating out into the hearts of all those around you, remaining in the form of a globe of white light, an abiding centre of calmness and clarity in their hearts.



Karmic supernova
Now repeat the procedure, but this time the energy release is going to be HUGE, like a karmic supernova.

Imagine all the problems and sufferings of your fellow passengers: sickness, pain, sick relatives, financial worries, work problems, loneliness, insecurity, fear, relationship breakdowns, legal hassles, mental illness, addictions and so on.    Then reflect that you yourself have the negative karma to experience all this, and much worse, for life after life.   This negative karma  swirls around your heart like a thick cloud of hot, acrid, black smoke.   

On the in-breath, breathe in all these present and future sufferings of your fellow passengers in the form of black smoke, which mixes with, and annihilates, the negative karma at your heart in an ENORMOUS release of energy in the form pure white light. This reaction utterly destroys the sufferings of others and your own bad karma like matter meeting antimatter.

On the out breath, imagine that this colossal burst of purifying energy radiates in all directions through everyone around you, cleansing all their negative karma, and their potential for future sufferings, and sweeping it all away, utterly destroying it never to be seen again.

Finally, dedicate any merit you may have created from this meditation to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

More meditations

What is truth?

Philosophy is the search for truth, which is founded on the premise that there is at least one true statement that can be made about life, the universe and everything.

But how can we prove that there exists at least one true statement? 

Well, consider the negation of ‘There is at least one true statement.’

That negation is ‘All statements are false.’

But if all statements are false, then ‘All statements are false’, being a statement, must also be false.  So at least one statement must be true.  

So we have proved that ‘There is at least one true statement’ by reference to another statement.  Which means that the foundational statement of philosophy is not inherently existent, but is dependent for its veracity upon its relationship to another statement.

But the statement which it depends upon has no inherent existence either, because it’s false.

Very odd.

Mindfulness may get UK Government cash

By Abi Jackson in The Northern Echo

"... I'm in a small room off Westminster Hall in London's Houses of Parliament, along with a few other journalists, mental health charity bods and various MPs - all also sitting, eyes closed, hands on laps and breathing deeply, as Rebecca Crane of Bangor University's Centre for Mindfulness guides us through.

Never in a million years would I have imagined I'd be indulging in a spot of deep breathing in Westminster, with a panel of MPs - and yet here we are. And do you know what? It feels good.

We're here for the launch of the Mindful Nation UK interim report. The Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group, co-chaired by Conservative MP Tracey Crouch, Labour MP Chris Ruane and Lib Dem MP Lorely Burt and in collaboration with The Mindfulness Initiative - which brings together a number of leaders in the field and key mindfulness training and research centres; Oxford, Exeter, Bangor and Sussex, as well as the Mental Health Foundation - have spent the last eight months looking at the benefits of mindfulness, evidence backing up these benefits, and how it might be incorporated across a range of UK services and institutions, mainly education, healthcare, work and criminal justice.

The hope, in a nutshell, is for the Government to recognise the importance of wellbeing in society, the role mindfulness could play, how this could follow through into policy, and how those holding the budget-strings could give it some funding..."

"... One of the things we need to think about is how this works long-term, not just short-term, which is what governments tend to think about, and that is pays to focus on prevention rather than cure," he says. "Nearly all these interventions require spending by one department, and will see gains elsewhere, and that's the bit we need to crack."

A pound spent on mental health, he notes, is "at the margin, hugely more productive than a pound spent on physical health", and yet that isn't reflected in the current system..."

"...For example, mindfulness in schools may or may not have a significant immediate impact on exam results - one of the key things currently used to measure success in education - but it could hugely improve harmony in classrooms, behavioural problems, stress among teachers, sickness rates, self-esteem - the list could go on and on. These things will then have a positive snowball effect through years to come, including, ultimately, less strain on the NHS and welfare budgets..."     Read it all   

Mindfulness at risk of being 'turned into a free market commodity'

From The Guardian
by Harriet Sherwood

"The mindfulness movement is in danger of being turned into a commodity, “a product to be bought and sold on the free market”, a Buddhist Society conference was told.

“People are becoming professionally mindful,” Steven Stanley, a social psychologist at Cardiff University, told an audience of Buddhists and secular mindfulness practitioners on Wednesday.

It was possible to make a living from mindfulness, with growing opportunities for research, teaching and speaking, he said, adding that it is becoming an “increasingly professionalised domain” with a tendency towards standardised instruction.

The conference, Mindfulness: Secular, Religious, Both or Neither?, heard that more than 500 scientific papers on mindfulness were being published every year, and that more than two dozen UK universities now offer mindfulness courses. Global corporations such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and American Express have introduced mindfulness training for their staff.

However, amid the extraordinary growth of the secular mindfulness movement, there was rising concern about lack of regulation of the training of meditation teachers, the conference heard..."


"...An all-party group of MPs last week urged the government to fund the training of 1,200 new mindfulness teachers over the next five years to meet sharply rising demand for the technique in both the public and private sectors. This number of teachers would cover 15% of the 580,000 adults at risk of recurrent depression every year, said their report, Mindful Nation UK.
Advertisement

“The training of teachers is critical,” it added. “There is considerable and justifiable concern about the quality of teachers and how to ensure integrity.”

An estimated 2,200 mindfulness teachers have been trained to minimum standards over the past 10 years, but only about 700 were both active and had professional clinical training that qualified them to teach mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to people with depression, said the report..."

Read it all here

 

Iraq's leading Shia cleric declares jihad against Buddhists

Never mind the spelling - it's the thought that counts

From Jihadwatch

'During a recent televised interview with Grand Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi, the leading Shia cleric of Iraq made clear why Islam and the rest of the world can never peacefully coexist.'

"...As for the polytheists [Hindus, Buddhists, etc.] we allow them to choose between Islam and war!  This is not the opinion of Ahmad al-Husseini al-Baghdadi, but the opinion of all five schools of jurisprudence [four Sunni and one Shia]."

Read it all here  

 
See also Islam will destroy Buddhism

Buddhism, David Hume and the Delusion of the Self

In this modern era of instant global communications, it's easy to forget just how difficult the transmission of ideas was in earlier times.  Indeed, the present global free marketplace of ideas has only become universal since the widespread adoption of the internet, so nowadays totalitarian regimes and repressive ideologies can no longer keep people in the dark.

Alison Gopnik gives a fascinating account of her investigations of how Tibetan Buddhist ideas about 'the self' reached and influenced the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume, despite the obstacles of geography, and censorship by the Vatican's thought-police.

It's easy to see why the Vatican tried to suppress Buddhist philosophy: the process view of the mind seems, at first sight, to totally contradict Catholic dogma on the immortal soul.    This willful ignorance of Buddhism among Catholic philosophers has continued into modern times, with some of the more traditional ones making fools of themselves among a modern and better informed audience.

Read Alison Gopnik's article here

Why Materialism is Crap

Catholic philosopher Ed Feser has published an excellent critique of materialism at the Claremont Review.
 
The points he makes are valid from a conventional and substantialist viewpoint, though a Buddhist might additionally question whether the very concept of materialism is fundamentally deluded and incoherent (perhaps, in the final analysis there are no such things as things - see later section of this post). 

Some quotes from Feser's article...

"Contemporary materialists ... routinely denounce Cartesian dualism, Descartes’s famous bifurcation of the world into mind and matter—or more precisely, into res cogitans or “thinking substance,” and res extensa or “extended substance.” And they do so in the name of science. Yet they remain essentially committed to Descartes’s conception of the material world; indeed, modern science would not have been possible without it. What they forget is that the res cogitans they deplore was necessitated by the res extensa they maintain. Hold onto the latter and you are implicitly committed to the former, whether you like it or not. This is the source of the perpetual failure of materialists to come up with explanations of consciousness, meaning, and morality that are convincing."

"To understand the problem requires going back ... to the beginning. Like Francis Bacon, Descartes wanted to make of modern science an instrument by which we might predict and control natural phenomena and develop new technologies. What he saw more clearly than Bacon was that mathematics was the key to realizing this aim. Hence he adopted a purely quantitative conception of the natural world, treating matter as entirely definable in terms of the geometrical property of extension or spatial dimension. Descartes’s successors would put less emphasis on extension, specifically. But the idea that what is material is what you can capture in the language of mathematics is still with us, as a glance at any physics textbook will show.

Now, where does this leave the qualitative aspects of the world of our experience—colors and sounds, tastes and smells, heat and cold, pain and pleasure? Where does it leave the meanings and purposes we see in the world around us, and the thoughts and choices we find within ourselves? Descartes embraced the obvious implications of the exhaustively “mathematicized” notion of matter he had introduced into Western thought, which the scientific revolution took and ran with. If matter is purely quantitative, and the qualitative features of reality cannot be reduced to the quantitative, then they cannot be material. And if these features don’t really exist in the material world but do exist in the mind’s experience of that world, then the mind itself must not be material.

Hence, Cartesian dualism was by no means a desperate rearguard action against the scientific revolution; on the contrary, it was the logical outcome of the scientific revolution. Matter, on the scientific conception, is comprised of colorless, soundless, odorless, tasteless, meaningless particles in fields of force, governed by mathematical laws which describe how these particles happen to behave, but no purposes for the sake of which they behave. To be sure, we might, when doing physics, redefine certain qualitative features in terms of some quantifiable doppelgänger. Color, for example, can be redefined in terms of a surface’s reflection of light of certain wavelengths. Sound can be redefined in terms of compression waves in the air. But these redefinitions, which even a blind or deaf person can understand, do not capture the way red looks, the way an explosion sounds, and so forth. Color, sound, odor, and taste as we perceive them can—given the scientist’s essentially Cartesian conception of matter—exist only in the conscious experiences of an immaterial mind or res cogitans. Meaning can exist only in this immaterial mind’s thoughts. Purpose can exist only in its volitions."

"...having followed Descartes in defining matter in so thoroughly “mathematicized” a way that irreducibly qualitative features, meanings, and purposes are excluded from it, modern science itself effectively closes off the possibility of a scientific explanation of these features. Thus while materialists are right to complain that Cartesian dualism leaves mind-body interaction obscure, dualists are right to complain that purported materialist explanations in fact ignore, or even implicitly deny, the existence of mind."

"Cartesians and materialists alike are correct to regard modern science as having given us a very penetrating grasp of part of the natural order, namely the part susceptible of analysis in purely quantitative terms. Where they both go wrong is in supposing that modern science gives us the whole of that order."

"It is the way modern science characterizes matter, and not particular gaps in current scientific knowledge as described by Wilson, that leaves us stuck with Descartes’s dualism. Given this characterization, we may find ever more detailed correlations between the mental and the physical, but we will never be able to reduce the mental to the physical. Two celebrated recent books by philosophers—Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011) and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (2012)—see the problem more clearly than Wilson and other contemporary scientists tend to. Rosenberg’s mad but intellectually honest solution is to conclude that if matter as physics conceives of it is all that exists, mind must really be an illusion. Nagel’s sane but no less intellectually honest solution is to conclude that since mind and matter both exist but mind cannot be assimilated to matter as conceived of by physics, it follows that physics does not give us a complete account of matter. There must in Nagel’s view be more to matter than physics reveals, some additional ingredient that could account for the origin of consciousness, meaning, and value."   Read it all here  


The Buddhist critique of Cartesianism

While not disagreeing with Ed Feser's analysis of the implications of Cartesian philosophy, as carried to its illogical conclusions by eliminative materialists, a Buddhist might question the ontological primacy of both res cogitans and res extensa, on the grounds that the underlying nature of reality is process and change, rather than stable entities. 

Buddhists divide all processes into two categories -  mental processes ('nama')  and physical/mechanistic processes ('rupa').  Hence nama is the dynamic equivalent of res cogitans, and rupa is the dynamic equivalent of res extensa.

Parallelling Feser's analysis, Buddhists believe that although mental processes and physical processes interact, mental processes are not reducible to physical processes.

According to Buddhism, the basis of reality consists of ever-changing processes rather than static ‘things’ or substances.  If any ‘thing’ is analysed in enough depth, and observed over a long enough timescale, it can be seen to be a stage of a dynamic process, rather than a static, stable thing-in-itself. 

This becomes obvious when we remember that the universe is itself a process (a continuing  expansion from the Big Bang), and so all that it contains are subprocesses of the whole.

Mechanistic processes (which include anything that can be modelled by algorithms) explain the working of all machines including computers, and all the classical laws of science including biology, chemistry, and physics.

In contrast, mental processes consist of irreducible aspects of consciousness that have no mechanistic or algorithmic explanation, for example qualia (qualitative experiences such as pleasure and pain) and intentionality or 'aboutness' (the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs).    For a more detailed discussion see Buddhist Philosophy  

Quantum Physics - excellent TV program by Jim Al-Khalili

 
Einstein's Nightmare by Jim Al-Khalili on BBC 4.  Do we create reality? Fascinating TV program on quantum physics

This is the most readily understandable and accessible treatment of 'quantum weirdness' I've seen.   

Please note that this TV program will be unavailable after mid September.  Watch it soon, then check out Quantum Buddhism, Buddhism, Quantum Physics and Mind  and Buddhist Particle Physics.

Can you debiologize your mind? And if you do will anything remain?

 

The Seven Deadly Sins

Religious traditionalists have criticised scientists who study the physical effects of spiritual activities, such as meditation, as “biologizing the religious response”.

Which got me wondering, if you can biologize mental activities, then can you do the converse and debiologize them?  In particular can you completely debiologize your entire mind, and if you do, will there be anything remaining?

If, as a thought experiment, I took away all the biologically determined aspects of my personality (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony), would there be anything left whatsoever?  Richard Dawkins certainly thinks so: 

''We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."  - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)

This 'pure, disinterested altruism' sounds rather like the Bodhicitta that appears when our mind has been freed of delusions.  

So is defiance or eradication of gene-based biological delusions and memetic mind-viruses the way to progress along the spiritual path?  

Dawkins' claim raises a few questions...

(1) If I removed everything biological from my mind, would there be anything left at all? Aren't we just biological mechanisms - biophysical 'gene machines' and nothing more?

(2) Are these genetic drives really tyrannical delusions, or do they serve some useful purpose?   

(3) Are the traditional biologically-based 'seven deadly sins' of Christianity all that I need to eliminate, or is their something deeper that gives rise to them?     

(4) How do I go about eradicating these biologically based delusions?  If I try to repress them will they just do something Freudian and reappear in other, nastier forms - like Islam?   Rather than just trying to hold down the lid on innate genetic drives, is there any way of transforming or transmuting them?

(5) Assuming I could analyse and eradicate all biologically based delusions arising from my selfish genes, and all the garbage from malignant memes, would I automatically become enlightened?  Or are there still other factors holding me back?

So let's examine each of these questions in turn... 

(1) We are nothing but biological machines. If we completely debiologized there'd be nothing left.

This assumes that our behavior and mental activities are completely mechanistically determined. Buddhist philosophy rejects this view.  Removing all biological mechanisms from our mental processes will not remove the 'nama' processes that are the non-biophysical basis of our minds. See Buddhist Philosophy.


(2) Are these genetic drives really tyrannical delusions, or do they serve some useful purpose?

All animals, including ourselves, have genetically programmed drives to eat, reproduce, fight for territory and mates, kill prey, help our kin and so on. These drives appear to our mind as attachment and aversion.

Manifestations of attachment include sexual desire, hunger and the need for security. Manifestations of aversion include fighting, fleeing and avoiding painful and dangerous situations. All these mental reactions have evolved because they gave our ancestors a selective advantage. They are, or were, essential for preservation of the individual and procreation of its genes.

We humans can to some extent distance ourselves from these drives. We can examine them and if necessary rebel against them. From the Buddhist point of view this is especially significant when these instinctive drives become pathological and turn into harmful 'innate delusions', giving rise to mental states such as anger, hatred, sadism, jealousy, greed, miserliness, sexual abuse and so on.



(3) Are the traditional biologically-based 'seven deadly sins' of Christianity all there are to eliminate, or is their something deeper that gives rise to them?    

In Buddhist ethics, aversion and attachment (and their associated thought patterns such as anger and greed) are two of the Three Poisons. The third poison is ignorance, which consists, among other factors, of being unable to separate the true nature of ones mind from the delusions which afflict it (especially the delusion of inherent existence).   

If we look at the seven deadly sins we see that five of them are in the attachment category (greed, pride, lust, envy and gluttony)  and two are in the aversion category (wrath being a strong aversion to people, and sloth being an aversion to effort).  None could be classed as ignorance, except possibly pride, which since it is an excessive attachment to self-image, necessarily assumes a distorted view of the self (which doesn't actually exist in the way we are accustomed to think of it).

The Buddhist view is that all manifestations of aversion and attachment arise from ignorance of the way that things exist.   This mistaken view regards things, phenomena and people as being inherently or essentially good or bad. So as well as getting rid of the seven deadly sins, we also need to cut their root, which is ignorance of the true nature of reality.

This 'ignorance' of the true nature of reality is also biologically based, and is a result of the limitations of our perceptual and neural systems.  See The evolutionary basis for the delusion of inherent existence in  Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Brain

 
(4)  Repression versus transformation. 
Repression won't make biological delusions go away. It will just bottle them up until they eventually explode.   That's why Buddhist psychology uses 'tantric' techniques to transform attachment into the spiritual path, see  Tantric Sex,  Tantra: Transforming enjoyments , Gruesome Tantric Visualizations and Attachment and Tantra 



(5) Assuming I could analyse and eradicate all biologically based delusions arising from my selfish genes, would I automatically become enlightened?  Or are there still other factors holding me back?
 
If simply debiologizing ourselves was enough to ensure enlightenment, then we'd  all become enlightened as soon as we died! However, according to Buddhist beliefs, as soon as we die, uncontrollable forces (karma) start to work to draw us into future rebirths in biological bodies.

Unfortunately, the ordinary mind has very little choice in its rebirth and will be drawn to an environment determined by its imprints and habitual tendencies.

If we recall the symbiotic minds hypothesis, we can see how this makes biological sense. A biophysical body inhabiting an environmental niche of extreme aggression and violence will be at an advantage if it can attract and capture a mind well acquainted with anger.  One which lives in an environment of severe scarcity would do well to attract a mind which is greedy and miserly. An animal which lives a sedentary boring sort of life, for example chewing the cud, will not benefit from a mind which has its thoughts on anything other than the mundane.   

Minds which are habitually angry, miserly or deliberately ignorant will be captured by inhabitants of  the environments to which they are best adapted.  The others may stand a chance of human rebirth. (In Buddhist beliefs, there is no guarantee that a human mind will be reborn into the human realm - there are plenty of other vacancies to be filled by suitable candidates)

'Sow an action, reap a habit.
Sow a habit, reap a character.
Sow a character, reap a destiny.' 

So as well as rebelling against the tyranny of the selfish replicators, we also need to purify the imprints and habitual tendencies that our minds have accumulated over millennia of being reborn into the biological realms. 


...AND, CAN YOU DEBIOLOGIZE GOD?

Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism - anger, hatred and attachment as divine attributes?
 
Returning to the subject of memes, it's interesting to note how biological and memetic delusions can interact and synergize each other. 

By attributing two of the three poisons (attachment and aversion) to God, theologians are indulging in anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to God), and also zoomorphism (ascribing animal characteristics to God). 

Dogs can show jealousy, bulls can show anger, even ants can show tribalism. All animals show attachment to something - mates, food, territory and status (pecking order).

Sunday School T-shirts?

The three poisons are products of biological evolution. Their purpose is to ensure the best chance of survival of the individual's genes in the natural world 'red in tooth and claw'.

The three poisons persist in humans because our bodies are products of evolution, and our minds have spent long aeons attached to the bodies of animals. 

But the belief that these biologically-based delusions form a part of the psychological make up of the Abrahamic Gods (who presumably have never been biological beings) is itself a delusion caused by anthropomorphic projection of the three poisons of the human mind on the cosmic scale. Man makes God in his own image.

Buddha never ruled out the existence of God as a philosophical concept. Subsequent Buddhist teachers have however warned against worshipping vindictive, jealous, angry, sadistic, possessive faith-based 'samsaric' gods such as Jehovah and Allah, who are merely the omnipotent and eternal mental projections of the worst aspects of human tyrants... 

"But as for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them; boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads.   Whereby that which is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted; And for them are hooked rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they would go forth from thence they are driven back therein and (it is said unto them): Taste the doom of burning."
 
...not exactly what you'd think of as Enlightened Beings.

So an anthropomorphic, zoomorphic or 'samsaric' God could be defined as one who shows one or more of the following features, or encourages them in his devotees:

• Attachment to being flattered/worshipped.

• Hatred of those who don't flatter him, or even worse, cartoonists who draw satirical caricatures.

A Samsaric God

• Jealousy of other Gods (Jealousy = Attachment + Hatred). Professor Dawkins quoted a passage from the Bible that commanded that if a friend or member of your family should try to persuade you to worship another god - "You must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death because he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God."

• Anger when his wishes are unexpectedly thwarted (though if God were really omniscient and omnipotent then he would know in advance that his wishes would be thwarted and could stop it happening because ... oh anyway..)
  

• Tribalism to encourage attachment to the Chosen Ones ('The Saved' or 'The Umma') and hatred of 'the other'.  Religious tribalism is rapidly assuming the form of Global Divisiveness - dividing the world into Us and Them, God's Warriors versus God's Enemies, Dar al Harb versus Dar al Islam...  But if God is almighty, why are his enemies still allowed to exist. Why does he need bombers to kill them? Can't he do it himself?
  

'There is no compulsion in religion'

• Lust (for 72 virgins).

To a sex-starved, socially-inadequate shaheed, the prospect of sexually enslaving 72 virgins by blowing himself up and killing kuffars in the process may indeed seem like paradise. But consider how attachment may change into aversion over the course of eternity:

Each girl will need to be pleasured at least once a day, and anything less than 15 minutes is going to be a disappointment and reflect badly on your manhood. You'll also need a few minutes for changeover and foreplay before you get stuck in to the next one. So its humping three virgins an hour, every hour, with no rest...

Heaven, Hell or an eternity of aversion therapy? After two weeks even the most pious shaheed would wish he'd been gay. Or maybe he'd just settle for a bowl of raisins.  

Nevertheless, it is blasphemous to examine such beliefs logically.

More at Buddhist Philosophy

 

Vatican Calls on Buddhists and Christians to Stand Up Against Modern-Day Slavery

From The Christian Times
by Monica Cantilero

"The Vatican is encouraging Buddhists and Christians to work together to end modern-day slavery, maintaining that the latter is an affront to human dignity and basic rights, a statement from the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue of the Roman Curia said.

The Council issued the statement, titled "Buddhists and Christians, together to counter modern slavery," during the Buddhist holy month of Vesakh (April-May) when Buddhists commemorate Gautama Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death.

The Vatican council emphasized the common respect that Buddhists and Christians have toward life.

"As Buddhists and Christians committed to respect for human life, we must cooperate together to end this social plague," the Council said. "Pope Francis invites us to overcome indifference and ignorance by offering assistance to victims, in working for their psychological and educational rehabilitation, and in efforts to reintegrate them into society where they live or from which they come."

The Council recounted that Buddha himself opposed trade using human beings. Citing a section of the "Eightfold Path," the Council said Gautama Buddha regarded trading in live beings such as slaves and prostitutes is one of the five occupations that should not be engaged in. According to Buddhist teachings, possessions should be obtained peacefully, with honesty, and through legal means, not in a way that causes harm or suffering and without coercion, violence or deceit, the Council noted.

The Council also blamed corruption as an impediment to seeing other people as one's equal.

"Human hearts deformed by corruption and ignorance are, according to the Holy Father, the cause of these terrible evils against humanity. When hearts are corrupted, human beings no longer see others as 'beings of equal dignity, as brothers or sisters sharing a common humanity, but rather as objects,'" the Council said.

In his message during this year's World Day of Peace, Pope Francis said historically, slavery causes the "rejection of others, their mistreatment, violations of their dignity and fundamental rights, and institutionalised inequality."

The Pontiff noted that even though the international community has already adopted several measures to end slavery, there are still "millions of people today – children, women and men of all ages – deprived of freedom and forced to live in conditions akin to slavery."

The Pope cited the following instances of modern-day slavery: "Men, women and child laborers; migrants who undergo physical, emotional and sexual abuse while working in shameful working conditions; persons forced into prostitution, many of whom are minors, as well as male and female sex slaves; those kidnapped by terrorists and forced to be combatants, and those who are tortured, mutilated or killed."

The Emptiness of Emptiness

The Two Truths of Buddhism and The Emptiness of Emptiness
From an excellent article by Susan Kahn    

"...Nagarjuna’s doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness involves many reasonings that interrelate in deep and comprehensive ways.  To begin with, to be empty is to be dependently arisen and emptiness is no exception.  Ultimate truth is fully dependent upon conventional phenomena to perceive their emptiness.  And as entities are ultimately unfindable, this absence that is emptiness, cannot be non-empty and findable.  This recognition uncovers the ultimate truth that emptiness is empty.  But there is more to the argument.

It can also be deduced that if the emptiness of inherent existence is ultimately true, then emptiness must also be empty.  If emptiness existed in the independent self-established sense, then emptiness would not be empty but inherently existent.  And since everything is empty, that would make everything inherently existent too.  So if phenomena were empty but emptiness was non-empty, the ultimate truth of the negation of inherent existence would itself be negated.  Instead, the teaching that emptiness is empty is consistent with emptiness as an ultimate truth.

Nagarjuna’s reasoning extends into an eloquent somersault that completes the analysis.  If emptiness is empty, as in an absence, then it can only conventionally exist.  For there is nothing that can be identified about the emptiness of things, as in the example of elephantlessness.  What is not conventionally designated does not exist in any positive sense, is not an object, hence its emptiness. 

Therefore, to be empty is to only conventionally exist and likewise, to conventionally exist is the only way to be empty.  Furthermore, as there are no true objects to know, conventional truth is also the only truth there is.  This is the ultimate truth of emptiness and thus, a conventional truth.  The doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness culminates in the insight that the two truths, the ultimate and conventional are ontologically the same, like two different sides of the same coin.

To recognize emptiness as conventional is to thoroughly refute inherent existence and to underscore the recognition that emptiness is the emptiness of conventional phenomena, nothing more substantive than that.  This insight undermines a contradictory and dualistic reality where emptiness is totally real, while the conventional is totally unreal.  Nagarjuna’s doctrine negates ultimate truth as an independent base from which to assert an objective, non-empty view.  All views can only be conventionally true.

“Therefore it is said that whoever makes a philosophical view out of emptiness is indeed lost.” - Nagarjuna    read it all


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy