Craving and Aversion as Addiction and Denial:

Buddha's Eightfold Path as a Step Program



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Abstract



Dhamma-Vinaya, or Doctrine-and-Discipline, was Buddhism's name for most of its long history. It has been called a religion and a spiritual discipline, even though it has no concept of a god or of spirit. More than anything else it is an array of ideas and exercises aimed at eradicating the internal causes of our suffering, our painful dissatisfactions. Three of the primary causes, the three Unwholesome Roots, are craving, aversion and delusion, each of which goes by many names. Recovery from addictive behavior in the West is concerned with patterns of addiction and denial. Addiction is simply a more entrenched and intractable form of craving, primarily due to the behavior's immediate effect on the evolved reward circuits in the brain. Denial represents a formidable combination of aversion and delusion that forms the armament and defense of addictive behavior. It is the assertion here that the ideas and exercises of Buddhism are perfectly applicable to recovery from our addictions and have been available as such for a very long time. No modification of the system is necessary, except that the specific applicability of some elements of the doctrine might be pointed out in this context, and augmented with some of the further knowledge we have gained in the last twenty-five centuries.

Despite the contributions of alternatives to 12-Step programs, there is still an insufficiency of recovery approaches which avoid religious or spiritual indoctrination, and the adoption of a victim or disease model of addiction. Most alternatives which do exist have borrowed heavily from Buddhism, with or without due acknowledgement. Yet Dhamma-Vinaya remains the most highly articulated and time-tested methodology. Many have tried to rephrase the twelve steps in more Buddhist-sounding terms, but this is a disservice to both. This book presents Buddhism strait up, but interpreted here as a path to recovery, from addiction and denial, as well as from our more garden-variety sufferings.







Preface



To the Reader

This book is not intended to be an easy read with mass-market appeal: that book is for somebody else to write. Neither is it written for a majority of the people who are trying to recover from addiction. It is presented for the non-theist or a-theist who is ready to claim personal responsibility for both addictive behavior and its correction. Sobriety, especially the kind that will put the problem behind and get on with life, is a lot of dedicated, hard work. This is written for someone either intelligent or patient enough to read it through, or else for their therapist's benefit. It's also written as a broad introduction to Buddhism, since the doctrine has not been altered to fit the subject at hand. There exist several attempts at developing a Buddhist Recovery program, one for those without a deity to fall back on, but most of these try to rework Buddhist doctrine to fit into the 12-Step model instead of regarding the Middle Path in and of itself as steps along an ancient path that leads to the elimination of suffering due to craving, aversion, and delusion.

Where I use the words drink or alcoholic here, this is meant to stand in for all forms of addictive behavior. Whether substance abuse or behavioral, all addiction is ultimately chemical addiction, a feeling-seeking behavior that has employed the organism's evolved chemistry, the endocrinological reward systems, in cementing and armoring itself into place. Addiction also implies that the behavior is a problem, and not something like basic needs for oxygen, water or coffee. Drink is also a reference to the Buddhist word tanha, one of its many words for craving: its primary meaning is thirst.

It is not the goal of this work to convert anybody to Buddhism, or even from alcoholism. As Buddha said, "Let him who is your teacher remain your teacher" (DN 25). While I personally feel affinity with the doctrine, I would not call myself a Buddhist unless the name was inserted into a much longer string of labels. There is nothing easy about being a real Buddhist. Eight steps instead of twelve is not an indication. It's even more than the work of not having an imaginary deity helping you, or the placebo effect that that entails. Salvation in Buddhism is a matter of lifelong diligence and heedfulness, and you don't even get an eternal or immortal soul for a reward. And what rewards there are you aren't even allowed to hang on to, although it's OK to enjoy them while present, even as they are slipping way. At least all of the work you get to do here will help keep your mind off the the thing that you used to think you needed.

Buddhism is a first-person investigation of whatever may prove to be true, a first-person science. The states of awareness that are needed to reprogram one's views and intentions and thereby transcend addiction, call them apotheosis, epiphany, gratitude, awe, forgiveness, compassion, patience, equanimity, etc., may be arrived at by any number of routes. This particular path, and the techniques for attaining these states, has undergone considerable testing over the centuries. But, with that said, yes, I am aware of a number of important popularizers of Buddhism in the West who had serious problems with alcohol addiction. The method here is not automatic: it still has to be applied specifically to the problems at hand. The practice of Buddhism is not a guarantee of sobriety, well- adjustedness or of mental health. The talk must be walked, and this is a fundamental part of the teaching.

I have written this from some experience. I had a 15-year drinking habit and a 25-year tobacco habit, both fairly heavy, now broken, 22 and 20 years ago respectively. Being an atheist with a background in science and an inclination to stay grounded, I had great philosophical difficulties with the 12-Step model as I was groping for a way out. I know that I was not alone in this: I met many along the path with similar problems with god and his inscrutable plans. I tend to regard the 12-Step paradigm (and the DSM's as well) as a toxic model insofar as it promotes the victim and disease mentalities over the taking of full personal responsibility and the diligent practice of correcting our defects. If I did have a disease it was a disease of the values that I was holding. I could in fact help myself, but I needed to learn the keys for doing that effectively, and replace some toxic values with wholesome ones.

I intend to base this on the general structure of Buddhist doctrine, and adhere as closely as I can to the original teachings, which means using the Theravada school and its Pali-language terminology. There is a good chance that this approach will be a lot more critical and less squishy than the forms most Westerners are familiar with. It might even be that some hapless spiritual fellow who thought he was a Buddhist finds out he was really a Hindu. At any rate, I have also taken care to omit some of the more hyperbolic nonsense that all wisdom teachings are inclined to attract. Clearly, we have learned some useful things about our addictive behaviors in the 25 centuries since these teachings were first spoken. We have learned several from psychology, biology and recovery that the Buddha never articulated. Many will be introduced in the course of the discussion, even if they seem to be square pegs in round holes. Others will be offered in their appropriate appendices.

The Buddha as presented here, and generally in the Theravada school, was simply a man who woke up. In doing so he became humanity's first true psychologist, but one who had a particularly strict and challenging definition of mental health. The normal human state of mind is far from mentally healthy. It's important to note that this strict definition need not be fully realized in order to mark real progress along the path that leads to suffering's end. It might even be enough for now to simply stop killing ourselves for things that we don't need.



Disclaimer The reader is responsible for anything he or she does with any of the information contained in this book. Accepting personal responsibility for our own cognitive and affective states, accepting ownership of the consequences of our actions, the ownership of our own kamma, is a fundamental premise of Buddhism and of this book. If you cannot accept this, read no further: there are plenty of alternative approaches, and books that are written specifically for the victims of disease, circumstance and persuasive suggestion.







Introduction



Recover What?

How far you want to go with recovery might say something about whether you belong here. To simply recover from an addiction leaves you the same person who got into trouble in the first place, though somewhat further damaged and with some makeup work to be done. At a minimum, new behaviors need to be learned to avoid relapse indefinitely. This is recovery from, "the action or process of regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost" and a return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength. It is frequently claimed that Buddhism cannot be considered therapy because it starts with a psychology of the normal and proceeds towards more extraordinary states. It shares this with today's "Positive Psychology." While it is understandable, knowing humans as we do, that most people would regard the normative state of human experience to be the baseline for measuring mental health, or simply that normalcy defines mental health, there are other points of view. The Buddha took a harder line: normal is a long, long way from healthy, and it is a grievous error to state that a mental phenomenon cannot be a mental illness simply because a majority of people suffer from it. This recalls Jiddu Krishnamurti's quip: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." A Buddhist approach to addiction, once withdrawal is out of the way, is not simply a new habit of abstinence. Sights are set on becoming healthier than normal. Health is more than the absence of disease. And freedom is a lot more than freedom from unmanageable craving.

Suppose you were to see some hapless fellow fall ten meters from a third-floor roof. There are a large numbers of moves he could make on the way down. Suppose he made precisely the right moves at the right time, and striking the ground sent him into a horizontal roll from which he emerged like a circus gymnast. Instead of a ten-meter fall he has made a ten-meter flight, nailed his dismount, and made a nice "recovery." We want recovery in this sense. But one thing that this requires is something Castaneda called "using all the event," investigating and accepting all of the things that happened on the way down, as givens, as momentum, to serve the transformation of disaster into victory. This sort of acceptance is not the same thing as approval: it is simply the conquest of denial. All of the component factors are a part of the reality to be taken as a given. If there is a need, the dark times being salvaged and redeemed can be called something else. In my own case, this was time spent "integrating my shadow" and credit for "time served." It is a lesser-known principle of Buddhism that suffering itself, and not ignorance, is the first step in a second chain of conditioned arising, one which leads to freedom. We will be looking at this important insight shortly. Suffering then, given the appropriate wisdom or guidance, can be made into a growth experience.

We know that to move ourselves in new directions we need either a new obedience or a new motivation and discipline. Obedience comes from respect for, or at least acceptance of, an authority, while discipline comes from an inner valuation. We also know that addicts, as a class, are some of humankind's less obedient folk. Court-ordered sobriety doesn't work any better than broken kneecaps from the bookie's thugs. That leaves motivation, which in turn wants a new set of values, which in its turn wants a new world-view. Values are soluble in alcohol, so here's a head start: the old ones are less likely to stand in the way, having already proven themselves to be worthless. Old world-views can be a little more stubborn, but their failure too can help clear the mind of some rubbish. Salvation is salvage, recycling, the act of obtaining useable substances from what seemed unusable sources.

Redemption can mean being saved from sin, error, or evil, or the action of regaining or gaining possession of something in exchange for payment, or clearing a debt. You know what the payment has been. In our case this is the discharge of a debt, the debt due to the accumulated consequences of our intentional actions, or kamma (the Pali version of the better known Sanskrit karma). This is not a retributive justice, but simply the harvest of things sown. Harvests can be hard but rewarding work. Salvation, to the Buddha, was a question of diligence and heedfulness. So there are lots of things that can be recovered here other than your normalcy: the original promise of youth, whatever remains of your years, and even a meaning to your lost years.



Which Buddhism?

There are four major schools or divisions of Buddhism. Only one, Theravada, will be developed here at any length. The reason for this is a need for structure and consistency that is specific to the recovery process. Combining the four introduces too much internal contradiction. These four schools are often referred to as vehicles or rafts for crossing the Stream. It is most important that an awareness of their instrumentality be preserved, lest any one become an end in itself. The Buddha had this to say on the impermanent utility of the method used to wake up:

“Then the man, having gathered grass, twigs, branches, & leaves, having bound them together to make a raft, would cross over to safety on the far shore in dependence on the raft, making an effort with his hands & feet. Having crossed over to the far shore, he might think, ‘How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the far shore. Why don’t I, having hoisted it on my head or carrying on my back, go wherever I like?’ What do you think, monks? Would the man, in doing that, be doing what should be done with the raft?”

“No, lord.”

“And what should the man do in order to be doing what should be done with the raft? There is the case where the man, having crossed over to the far shore, would think, ‘How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the far shore. Why don’t I, having dragged it on dry land or sinking it in the water, go wherever I like?’ In doing this, he would be doing what should be done with the raft” (MN 22, tr. Thanissaro Bikkhu) .

Buddha is reported to have lived eighty years, from 563 to 483 BCE . Several councils were convened in the centuries following his death to examine the state of the doctrine and counteract the natural tendency to schism. The 3rd Council was held in 247 BCE , during the reign of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka (304-232 BCE ), by which time there were already a number of factions. One of a few Fourth Councils, held by the Theravada sect in the 1st century BCE, committed a Pali-language version of the formerly-oral doctrine into writing. It is claimed that this followed the teachings agreed upon in the 3rd Council. This was the massive Three Baskets or Tipitaka. Other versions of the doctrine would follow, most notably the canon of the Mahayana sect, beginning in the 2nd century CE . The term Buddhism is a late invention by the 19th century West. Until that time it was known by the Buddha's own label, Dhamma-Vinaya, Doctrine and Discipline. These two terms will be used interchangeably throughout this book.

The Theravada school is the last thriving version of Indian Buddhism, but this, too, generally migrated out of India, to take lasting root across Southeast Asia. Because of its antiquity and conservative approach to the doctrine, it is generally assumed to have the most faithful representation of the actual words of the Buddha. A lot can happen, however, in just a couple of centuries of oral tradition, even when transmitted religiously, or especially when transmitted religiously. The Buddha himself had a great deal to say about what the inner proclivities of our needy minds and our insistent feelings could do to objective understanding. Most systems of thought and practice involving human followers make use of hyperbole, exaggeration, myth, embellishment, false attribution and glamor. Only a few, notably Zen, have described the glamor of spiritual accomplishment in terms of such mundane activities as chopping wood and carrying water. Even the Buddha made ample use of myth in his teaching. It is unlikely that this mythology is completely a later fabrication of his followers, but it is also possible that he still saw some kind of reality in them. Why do speakers of truths venture so far from truth? In Nietzsche's words: "At bottom, it has been an aesthetic taste that has hindered man the most: it believed in the picturesque effect of truth. It demanded of the man of knowledge that he should produce a powerful effect on the imagination" (WTP #469). The glamor of it all seems to hold great sway over human perspective. There may be in this some dim appreciation of the fact that learning that really comes home personally, that is felt with some depth and a perception of personal relevance, is somehow more complete than learning done only in theory, without any affect attached. The challenge, then, is having the depth of feeling without getting attached to the lies. At any rate, with regard to the transmission of Buddha's teaching, successive generations might easily have given additional color and structure to the doctrine for the sake of improved memorization, or altered the nuance of words and phrases to improve upon the teacher's dignity, impressiveness and impact. But, with that understanding, the doctrine presented here will generally follow the Theravada version.

I do have one real issue with the Theravadan approach, however. Like many Westerners, my introduction to Buddhism was through the folk art, particularly the seated and laughing Buddha statues, and the rice paper paintings of eccentric Buddhist and Daoist monks caught in mid-guffaw. Then came the friendly phrasings of Alan Watts and all the volumes of largely humorous teaching stories from Zen lore. But these led to college courses and then exposure to the utterly serious, stoic and seemingly pessimistic side of the story. Buddhism as a Downer was soon confirmed in my first encounters with real-life religious renunciates and cloistered Zen monks, who showed no inclination whatsoever to laughter, or even to those wise and twinkling eyes. I thought I had resolved the discrepancy in understanding the difference between religious believers and wise men, between the seekers and the finders, between the teachers and the lifelong learners. Surely the Buddha must have laughed: this was a necessary part of wisdom's perspective on life. Maybe he didn't go in for the mean stuff and the schadenfreude, maybe he grudgingly groaned at the occasional pun, but certainly he found a laugh when life's absurdities came together perfectly in a higher understanding. Then I read the Suttas of the Pali Canon, where there is only one mention of the Buddha even smiling, and this is noted by a disciple with surprise bordering on shock. Is it possible that, in the four centuries between the original teaching and the first permanent recording of the doctrine, all traces of laughter were edited out of the story, perhaps for the sake of dignity and sobriety? Or is this my own denial at work?

The Theravada doctrine is largely concerned with the development of the individual, or more precisely, what is experienced as the individual. Ultimately, the full scope of the Dhamma or Doctrine (Dharma in the better-known Sanskrit) was intended for "beings whose eyes are only a little covered with dust: the[se] will understand the truth" (MN 26). There is, if you will, a Buddhism Light, which consists of those portions of the doctrine and its precepts which can be practiced by the householder, the person who is not yet ready to renounce the everyday world to follow the path into the dark forest. Worthwhile attainments are still available to the householder, though, and progress to within a few lifetimes of distance to a final liberation. This is not regarded as insignificant. But the extremely intricate and highly articulated psychology of the "Third Basket" of the scriptures, or Abhidhamma Pitaka, and the intricately developed code of monastic behavior of the First Basket, or Vinaya Pitaka, are essentially for the renunciate who is beset with fewer distractions. The focus of the Theravada program is ultimately on the liberation of the arahants, the worthies or the accomplished ones. Their program demands a lifetime of "striving with heedful diligence," Buddha's final words. Their instructions from the Teacher: "You should train thus: We shall be wise men, we shall be inquirers" (MN 114).

The teacher's ongoing challenge is to "speak to each in accord with his degree of understanding" (a directive first attributed to Mohammed). Any attempt to package up a monolithic teaching applicable to the whole of humankind will have to resist the forces pressing for schism, and it must eventually succumb. The dimmest of familiarity with the mindsets of the masses of mankind in any epoch will evidence a resistance to the notion that any "spiritual" salvation is a lot of hard work, and worse, that this is really only available to a select or more evolved elite. Thus, an egalitarian revolution was inevitable, in which all beings could partake in an easier salvation. The Mahayana school filled this much larger niche and soon it became Buddhism's most popular form, particularly from the 2nd century CE onward, when it spread northward into China with a growing set of newer scriptures that broadened the appeal of the teaching. Mahayana means Great Raft or Vehicle, alluding to its expanded accessibility, and it adopted the derogatory term Hinayana, meaning Small Raft or Vehicle, to refer to the rival and more elitist Theravada sect. The Mahayana sect is much closer to what we normally think of as a religion. It has a much broader lay appeal, a more pervasive use of ritual, and a stronger tone of reverential prayer and devotion. Mahayana does, however, maintain its own versions of most of the critical aspects of the Buddha's teaching, even some of those regarding the ultimate non-existence of an eternal spirit or soul.

In Mahayana teaching, salvation is open and available to all sentient beings, not merely to the more developed and diligent. Or at least this liberation is available with far less work and in a much shorter series of lifetimes. It is a Mahayana tenet that all beings possess Buddha Nature and so are ultimately destined for enlightenment. This is not a part of Theravada doctrine, which would therefore be less impeded in embracing evolution's idea that selection and extinction can help move the parade or stream of life forward. The Mahayana ideal, then, is the Bodhisattva, as contrasted with the Arahant: this is the practitioner who vows to embrace the whole of sentient life and not fully attain his own final liberation until the last blade of grass is enlightened. The Theravadin also has many uses for true selflessness, loving-kindness, empathy and compassion, and has plenty of reasons on his own path to help others along, but the crux of his help is to lead by deed and example. "You yourselves must strive. The Buddhas are only teachers" (Dhp 276). This is a Mahayana doctrine as well, from the Dhammapada, but you nevertheless see the Teacher cast in a role there that looks similar to that of Savior, at least until you read the words in the hymnals.

The original Dhamma teaching is referred to as the First Turning of the Wheel of Dhamma. The development of the Mahayana school, with its additional scriptures, is called the Second Turning. The Third Turning was the development of the Vajrayana school, the Diamond Vehicle. It began to emerge with its texts out of India in the 4th century, eventually spreading to Tibet, Bhutan and Japan (as Shingon), and it developed gradually over the next eight or so centuries. Its scriptures are referred to as Tantras, hence the alternate term Tantric Buddhism, which can lead to some confusion with Tantric sexual yoga practice. This sect is best known for its ritual practice, called upaya, meaning skillful means or method. These methods, which often involve mantra, mudra and mandala (chant, gesture and design) will generally take the place of the more abstract and communicable forms of meditation that were developed in Theravada and Mahayana. Upaya is a Mahayana term, where it is regarded as one of the paramitas or perfections, but it also carries the negative connotation of attachment or over-involvement, and this suggests caution, as upaya can tread a thin line between empty ritual and effective method. Over-reliance on the forms, clinging to rules and rituals (silabatta upadana), thinking that the rituals alone can "take you there" without making fundamental changes within, was regarded by the Buddha himself as one of the Ten Fetters (samyojanas), one of the four kinds of unwholesome clinging (akusala upadana) and one of the four types of bondage to the material world (kayaganthas). But we should probably make a distinction here between ritual and the sort of orderly behavior that lends consistency to meditative practice. Given the nature of these rituals, together with the language in which they are performed, Vajrayana is not regarded as a path to be walked or learned alone. It is esoteric and its methods are passed on by initiation through a line of transmission. This is one of several reasons that it will not be discussed here at length, even though some of the ritual methods that are used here have attracted the attention of neuroscientists researching neuroplasticity, the ability to reprogram the brain that is such a fundamental part of an effective recovery process.

The fourth major school of Buddhism, known as Chan in China and Zen in Japan, also developed out of the Mahayana teachings, this time in the 6th century CE . But something curious happened in its creation. The teachings collided and merged with the Chinese Daojia or Philosophical Daoism. In the process, a lot of the dogma, doctrine and ritual from both sides got knocked loose. Depending on your definition of silliness, it also lost or gained in silliness. What was left was left relatively speechless, relying more on direct experience. The word Chan is the Chinese for the Pali Jhana and the Sanskrit Dhyana, meaning absorption. The Theravadin Eightfold Path's Samma Samadhi or Right Concentration, develops eight forms of concentrative absorption. Zazen, the Chan or Zen form of meditation, is just one single form of straightforward alertness. It is not meditation upon anything but the arising and falling of it all, up out of and back into the stream. The optimal state of mind here is neither overly calm nor hyper-vigilant: maybe the word readiness best describes it. The objective (with the understanding that this misuses the term objective) is understanding that comes through a direct experience of the transient nature of all things, including the mind that seeks to grasp them. While Chan and Zen have their forms, rituals, lines of transmission, reliance on interaction with an accomplished teacher, and even a little bit of basic doctrine, they really don't provide the kind of structure or discipline that is useful for our purposes here. Simple Zazen, however, is worth doing a little research and finding some instruction, as it can be readily included as a ninth form of meditative practice in Samma Samadhi, the Eighth Step on the Eightfold Path.



Problematic Conflations

In general, Buddhism and belief are not very compatible, a trait held in common with science. Our minds are not developed enough to lay such serious claims on truth. We are too emotionally scattered, insecure and impatient. We cannot turn our perceptions into perfect objective visions as long as our suffering and our neediness are so ready to twist what we see and hear to placate our various anxieties and neuroses. The highest priority on the Buddhist path is the correction of our minds, the cleaning of our lenses, the cleaning of our hearts, so that bad ideas and theories and emotional resentments no longer confuse our experience. This is what we put first. You must get your mental health before you get your answers. In the Buddha's own words:

"Malunkyaputta, if anyone were to say, 'I won't live the holy life under the Blessed One as long as he does not declare to me that "The cosmos is eternal,"... or that "After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist,"' the man would die and those things would still remain undeclared by the Tathagata.

"It's just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me... until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored... until I know his home village, town, or city... until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow... until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated... until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.' The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him....

"So, Malunkyaputta, remember what is undeclared by me as undeclared, and what is declared by me as declared. And what is undeclared by me? 'The cosmos is eternal,' is undeclared by me. 'The cosmos is not eternal,' is undeclared by me. 'The cosmos is finite'... 'The cosmos is infinite'... 'The soul & the body are the same'... 'The soul is one thing and the body another'... 'After death a Tathagata exists'... 'After death a Tathagata does not exist'... 'After death a Tathagata both exists & does not exist'... 'After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist,' is undeclared by me. And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, unbinding. That is why they are undeclared by me" (MN 63).

Buddhism is impressively adaptable and protean with respect to the cultures it enters. This is in part because it doesn't carry the baggage of a metaphysics along with it. Even the occasional and relatively enlightened Christian monk has put its methodologies to good (if incomplete) use. As this has come to the West, it has been repackaged to suit more Western sensibilities. This frequently involves the deification of the individual or the self as it appears to extend into larger frames of interconnectedness, oneness or oceanic feeling, which the Freudians liked to call infantile self-grandiosity. This trend has been nowhere more apparent than in its introduction to the self-improvement movement. A real Buddhist, upon hearing "One day my soul just opened up!" might wonder how many hungry children got fed by way of that, or if anything useful got learned. As central elements at least, feelings of interconnectedness, wholeness and ecstatic loving are more of a projection of the West onto Buddhism. So is the anti-intellectual cast that Buddhism tends to be given in the West, even though Zen had already gone a long way towards repudiation of the rational or discursive intellect, and Mahayana represented a serious veering away from more rigorous thought towards the more pleasant or immeasurable states. Given this, it might be of some use here to distance Buddhism from some of the areas of study, philosophies and religions that it has recently been conflated with. The following paragraphs are fairly negative in tone because some bubbles need to be popped. More positive associations to developments in Western psychology, philosophy and neuroscience are developed in the Appendices.



Hinduism

While the Buddha himself emerged out of the Hindu, Vedantin and broader Indian traditions, he repudiated a number of the fundamental tenets. He never, for instance, asserted that reality was an illusion created by a consciousness that was fundamental to the structure of the universe. There exists a real world. Human beings are just particularly inept at perceiving it accurately. There is also a real self, but this resembles a verb more than a noun. Self is just a process that emerges out of numerous preconditions. When the necessary preconditions go away, so does the self. At death, the self goes to the same place your lap goes when you stand up, where your fist goes when you open your hand, where your consciousness goes when you sleep. It's perfectly permissible to perceive and work with the conventional self, as this is, in all the worlds, the "thing" that most needs improvement. However, this improvement is most authentically made without the hope that some divine spark at your inmost center is preparing to unite with a god like Brahman on its way to living forever in light and perfection. Yes, it is true that all things are so interconnected that even the notion of a conventional self is at best a convention, but this does not turn our dissolution into a divine ascension with a higher cosmic awareness. The great old gag about Buddha asking the hot dog vendor to "make me one with everything" is better applied to Vedantins and Yogis.



The Perennial Philosophy

The point of view of Perennial Philosophy or Perennialism is that each of the world's religious traditions is a local cultural expression of a larger, single, universal, underlying religious truth. The apparent diversity and contradiction is thought to be relatively superficial. At bottom, the highest good is the union of the inmost core of the self with a supreme, divine being, that must, if everybody is to be correct, be both immanent and transcendent. The Buddha is dragged into this by virtue of his silence on the metaphysical questions (well, he doesn't deny it). The also-a-theistic Rujiao (Confucianism) is similarly volunteered. Although the term and idea is centuries old, it was popularized recently in the West by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, published in 1945. As much as I enjoy Huxley's writing, I have to call this idea a great disservice to human culture, analogous to a reduction in biodiversity in the biological sphere. Evolution has given us a great many points of view, but it doesn't move forward through time without selection being applied to that diversity, and thinning it out again for fitness. Without selection in the world of cognition we are left with a cluttered metaphysical and moral relativism that suggests everything and every point of view is equally valid and true. This is most emphatically not the case in Buddhism. The great bulk of what we experience in these religious realms is ultimately ignorance and delusion. The experiences that we associate with our notions of a soul are real enough, but they are not fundamental properties of an all-knowing entity: they are emergent properties conditioned by a recognizable pattern of causes and they do not exist in the absence of those causes. Neither are those causes to be considered divine, except in the context of our own capacities for reverence. In effect, the Buddha taught that psychology preceded philosophy: we fathom the world best when we first fathom our own motives for perceiving the world as we do, when we have examined how and why we would twist the truth to suit our desires and dislikes. This approach is not more "advanced" than religion. It does not go as far as religion. It doesn't even get off the ground. Buddhism just sticks to foundations.



Theosophy

The word theosophy, uncapitalized, is an ancient term for any wisdom regarding the divine. It goes back to the early centuries of the current era. It developed throughout the middle ages and the enlightenment, accruing wisdom from a wide range of sources, religious, alchemical, theurgic, qabalistic and hermetic. In the late 19th century it began to incorporate material from the mysterious East, particularly from Hinduism, Vedanta and Buddhism. The Theosophical Society, formed by Helena Blavatsky, has codified much of the doctrine now referred to as capital-T Theosophy. Because the subject is rooted in Theos, or divinity, the word being cousin to Deus and Zeus, most of the focus of the philosophy is upon the divine, divine nature and humanity's divinely ordained place and purpose within this. Citing the Society's own Encyclopedic Theosophical Dictionary: "Theosophy [from Greek theosophia from theos god, divinity + sophia wisdom] Divine wisdom, the knowledge of things divine; often described as attainable by direct experience, by becoming conscious of the essential, divine part of our nature, self-identification with the inner god, leading to communion with other similar divine beings. Theosophy actually is the substratum and basis of all the world-religions and philosophies, taught and practiced by a few elect ever since man became a thinking being.” Buddhism, and particularly Theravada Buddhism, does not fit this description even remotely. Buddhism's immense vocabulary is selectively raided for philosophical support, and some of it's sects and schisms are exploited for their proximity to the Theosophical doctrine. Theosophy isn't a bad thing (and its Theosophical Glossary is a truly precious resource), but one still does not find much of the Buddha's unadulterated teaching there.



New Age

The New Age, from an outsider's perspective, is a loose collection of world and self views which appears to be centered around the repudiation of critical thinking skills in favor of "positive feelings" and metaphysical relativism. This is deemed to be some sort of victory of the right brain over the left, or the heart over the head, according to an assumption that thinking people somehow feel less. It is averse to judgment, except in response to skeptics and its detractors, or generally to people who think. It is prone to narcissism, and a normally-sublimated auto-eroticism in which the higher meditative states are reified as metaphysical realities and then united with in ecstasy. Apparently, excessive economic well-being is also central to the core beliefs, both to the marketers and to their marks. While there are numerous texts, it appears to be largely platitude-driven, by such meretricious statements as "everything happens for a reason." It has adopted a goodly number of Buddhist ideas and ideals, several of them correctly, such as the importance of good karmic practice and the need to develop karuna or compassion. It has, however, misinterpreted the Buddhist notion of rebirth as meaning reincarnation, which is not the case. Another characteristic belief is that we are all somehow entitled to unconditional love, to self-esteem and self-acceptance, even if our actions would define us instead as inferior and unprincipled people. Buddhism, in contrast, is judgmental, discriminating and discerning. In order to save yourself from suffering you judge thoughts and feelings and behaviors to be unwholesome or wholesome. You get rid of the bad ones and develop the good ones. Self-esteem is conceit to begin with. The positive feelings associated with higher wisdom are not centered in a self. All of the sentient beings' truths are not equally valid, and most are better described as ignorance and delusion. A Buddhist can begin with low self-esteem as an honest appraisal of his present state and transform this into a true humility, which can in turn be transformed into reverence and growth. This cannot be done with unearned self-esteem.



Romanticism

Romanticism, as a reaction to the industrial age, mechanization, and the materialistic reductionism of science, is an important reassertion of human intuition and emotion. In seeming contrast, emotional self-control, detachment and distancing hold a prominent place in the methodology of Buddhism, as do rational analysis and critical decision-making skills with regard to what is worth accepting and doing. However, it is a mistake to think that feelings are therefore not welcome in Buddhism. Feelings are not the problem. The craving of feelings, the clinging to feelings, the mourning of the absence of feelings, the pursuit of feelings, the denial of unwanted feelings: these are the problems. That feelings appropriately come and then appropriately go, spontaneously, without the excessive over-dramatization associated with self-obsession: this is where we want to be as sentient beings. What we don't want of feelings and emotions is unnecessary pain and self-destruction. Buddhism is a middle path. Mind, cognition and perception are complex compositions. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, imaginations, motivations - all are components of mind, without which there is less mind and less mindfulness. Many of those who have sought to import Buddhism to the West have correctly seen past the interpretation of Buddhism as being pessimistic and overly rational, but have gone too far the other way and envisioned a Buddhism where we are all one loving heart, feeling the interconnectedness of all things, and the drama of this deeply-felt emotion is what carries us aloft to Nirvana. Buddhism isn't all that interested in the drama of the personal story and in how deeply and uniquely one feels, but neither is it cold. Feelings are important components of mind, but they are not the true and authentic inner self that they seem to claim to be. Personal experiences, the qualities of subjectivity, mental analogies and conceptual metaphors, are a lot more important to science than most of science knows or admits, and perhaps some reassertion of this is in order and long overdue, but let's suggest that this be done "within reason." There is a useful online essay on this subject by Thanissaro Bhikkhu entitled "The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism," here.



Transpersonal Psychology

Transcending the person, getting beyond the person, getting over the person, must be regarded as one of Buddhism's main goals. Transpersonal psychology is also concerned with expanding the sense of identity beyond the individual and embracing greater realities, the human family, the web of life, the cosmos evolving to study itself, and exploring our more distant horizons, from the depths of experienced time up to the higher orders of trans-human awareness. Perhaps the biggest difference between these two is that Buddhism is not "spiritual" in any strict sense of the word. Within these greater contexts, which may be real enough, our spirit is not at the center or heart of them. At best, what we think of or experience as our spirit is just some humble little node in the web, a place where some energy has gotten knotted up for a while, off in some nondescript corner of things, having come and soon to go. The Universe is not the story of me and you. The two disciplines aren't antithetical: as sentient beings evolving along our paths, it is a healthy thing to get beyond or outside of ourselves. It is even a good thing to occasionally feel ourselves at the very center of the larger realities, from one point of view among many. Expansion of the mind is good for the practice of mindfulness. Working diligently on personal growth, detailing the factors and experiences that have held us back, spending long stretches of time in self-study, all have important places in Buddhism. But the autoeroticism and narcissism of these self-centered alternative states are not dwelling places. They are experiences to acknowledge and then learn from in passing. Having the experience that proves to you once and for all that "we are all one and interconnected" is not a spiritual attainment. It is merely a little piece of ground to stand on and another place to explore. It is a place to begin, and not the final goal of wisdom.



Buddhism and Religion

Most religions come to us as packages. This is much like being given a lovely wooden box with a glass lid, and below the glass are arranged gold and platinum nuggets and beautiful gems for study and appreciation. But the box is always sealed and one is sternly advised against unprescribed methods of inquiry, such as opening the thing and examining the contents one item at a time, studying each piece from all sides, and weighing them. But, religions being by nature parochial, much of the gold is invariably fool's gold, and most of the jewels paste. It takes a special kind of seeker to crack the box open, assay the contents, pocket the good stuff and then abandon the rest, and travel lightly on, to raid some more boxes. Let's call this kind of seeker a finder.

If you can find a definition of religion that hasn't been deliberately contorted to include clearly non-theistic disciplines like Confucianism, Buddhism, and in some cases, Yoga, you get something like: "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods." Objections are made that such a definition fails to include the diversity of religious thought and experience, but this does nothing more than beg the question. Adding the word spiritual does nothing to reach out and embrace Buddhism, as the existence of the spirit is specifically denied in the doctrine of anatta. For our purposes here, Buddhism is simply Dhamma-Vinaya, Doctrine and Discipline. To call it a religion is an error attributable to ditthi or wrong views, born of ignorance and delusion. Neither morals nor the so-called religious or spiritual states of mind require a religion, or a deity, or even a conception of spirit.

An honest look around will show that, despite all of the laws, religion has very little to do with the development of truly ethical behavior, and only contributes ineffectively to morality. For our purposes here, we will use the term moral to refer to behavioral choices guided by social mores, or peer pressure, and the term ethical to refer to behavioral principles that have been investigated or examined, since ethics is properly understood as a branch of philosophy. Buddhism finds an ethic in its investigations, an appropriate way for human beings to treat fellow human beings and other sentient life. Both neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are now converging upon these findings as well, and with more objective evidence to substantiate them. Certain behaviors are known through investigation to be unwholesome, unprofitable, or unskillful, leading to suffering and unhappiness. But this is learned by inquiring into the nature of things, by watching kamma in action, at work according to natural law. It is not learned by examining divine decree or scripture. According to the 7th century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, the criterion of truth is causal efficacy. You do this, that happens. If you don't want that, don't do this. The concern for efficacy also suggests remaining open to situational ethics, which are not normally discussed in more generalized religious decrees. All of the permutations of situational ethics just won't fit on the tablets. There is even an ethic to be drawn from the existential fact of our finitude: "There are those who do not realize that one day we all must must come to an end. But those who do know this settle their quarrels at once" (Dhammapada).

In performing a number of the practices and exercises of Buddhism, numerous kinds of mental states are reached, momentary conditions of mind which are claimed to be fundamental to one or more of the world's religions: cosmic consciousness, awe, reverence, gratitude and grace, for example. The sense of self vanishes, or expands to fill the universe. States of mind may be entered into which might be described as "spiritual," and certainly altered or alternate. These experiences might have been given special names, and mythical or metaphysical explanations, within the various religious traditions. But this does not make them the exclusive domain of religion. That some of the states attained in meditation are described in religious texts does not mean that a technology for attaining these states is a religion. That logic doesn't work. Nor can we say that it is religious behavior to seek the states of mind that happen to be found at the core of certain religious beliefs or narratives. It might only be a kind of first-person scientific inquiry. We are merely seeking to be wise men and inquirers. These experiences are known or generally assumed to be important portions of the inherited human repertoire, as evolved cognitive capabilities. We simply want to verify this. We have no real need to draw great and impressive conclusions from these experiences about the nature of the world. We are not wise enough for that yet.

Many myths and stories of deities and demons survived in the Pali Canon. It is difficult to guess how far and in what way these were taken seriously by the Buddha himself, or how many were embellishments or artifacts of the transmitters of the teaching. In these stories there are many kinds of beings, both above and below us in evolutionary terms, different in physical or immaterial composition, in longevity, in wisdom, in ethical sensibility, and so on. But even the wisest deity here is still unenlightened and still subject to kamma. It's hard to guess what Buddha might have said in private to someone he knew to be his equal, or how he might have discussed his own use of myth and fable. But like all myths, these will have angles of interpretation that are strictly allegorical and can be read completely free of literal interpretation, so the question can remain open.

It is as incorrect to describe Buddhism as materialist as it is to call it spiritual. Buddha, or at least his earlier interpreters, did happen to offer some general thoughts on the irreducible nature of reality, even though they weren't heavily stressed as doctrine. These generally resemble the Panta Rhei (everything flows) of Heraclitus and the atomic theory of Democritus and the Epicureans. There are also many similarities to the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. The substrate of existence is in perpetual motion, with nothing fixed and eternal, with nothing perfect or perfected. This is called a Stream, and the mind that attends it is also a mindstream, and the relatively evolved sentient beings who have begun to actualize this discovery in their lives are called stream-enterers. Some sects argue that Nibbana (Sanskrit: Nirvana) is an unconditioned state that is somehow unmoved and above all of this, but for our purposes here, Nibbana is a state of being that is simply unconditioned and unmoved by the sheer terror of this. Beyond that, let us not pretend to know what Nibbana is. Whitehead came close to this basic idea in describing this Stream as process, and all things within it as being in process, and while he departed from the Dhamma in calling this process God, at least he suggested that this God never stopped changing and never grew all the way up, that its evolution went on forever. Whitehead concurred with Buddha in rejecting the mind vs. body or spirit vs. matter dualism that characterizes most of Western religion. Obviously your own constituent factors are a part of everything, and this same everything just goes on and on and doesn't die like all things within it do. This is only a simple truism that you can make into a religion if you want to, but we are just not going to do that here.

The bottom line with regard to religion is this: We have got no business laying any sort of claim to metaphysical truth. As long as we are suffering we will only see what we want to see, as long as we are craving, detesting and suffering, our perceptions of a deity are going to be an untrustworthy mess of wish-fulfillment and revenge fantasies. We will be biased towards what is most comforting to believe, unless we are guilty masochists. And our suffering is a proof of our inability to see correctly. Social consensus means nothing: "Just like a file of blind men, clinging to each other, and the first one sees nothing, the middle one sees nothing, and the last one sees nothing" (DN 13).



Buddhism and Psychology

Poor psychology. It has struggled so hard for so many decades to win respect and esteem as a real science, without even knowing what sort of science it is destined to become some day. So far it has been like the blind men and the elephant, many limited points of view, each arguing that its own find is either the whole of it all or the very center. More than any discipline except education, psychology has made itself prey to fads and shortsighted arguments like nature vs. nurture. Too few can meet in the middle, or look to the synthesis of the disparate factions. Mind is a very complicated process, and mind looking at mind is more so. How far has the discipline come? It seems at least to have convinced courts of law that experts do in fact exist, but phrenology also did that at one time.

Originally, of course, psychology was the -ology of the psyche or soul, whatever that might mean. We should perhaps start with its own, most- consensual definition: "The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context; of the mental characteristics or attitudes of a person or group; and of the mental and emotional factors governing a situation or activity."

First question: What is science? Is it some pure, detached objectivity, wherein all things are subject to measurement? But even physics isn't that: at least half of its concepts are analogs of subjective human sensory experiences called sensory or conceptual metaphors. And don't let's get started on measuring the quantum events. Psychology has resisted being lumped in with the other social sciences, with all their probabilities and deviations and fuzzy, indeterminate edges. Eventually, that's where it's headed, but the probabilities will at least work better, the deviations will at least be more standard, and the fuzz on the edges might have more of the fine detail of fractals. This clarity is not just around the corner. This science still has big pieces missing, with many to come along fairly soon out of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, and who-knows how many other fields, some still uninvented. In the meantime, this science may need to get patient and work less ambitiously, perhaps concentrating on such scientific values as predictability and repeatability instead of the digital measurements. That the field's future cornerstones are not yet fully identified is not really psychology's fault. The current field is much more to blame for its presumptions and pretentiousness than for its ignorance and self-delusion.

Second question: What is study? Can this only study the measurable things? Should it concentrate on things that are billable to Blue Cross and Medicare or have pharmaceutical protocols? This is where the APA and its DSM are wholeheartedly headed, even in the face of much criticism. Can one study oneself in the first person? What things can be done with phenomenology, the study of the qualities or the qualia of first-person subjective experience? Maybe the single greatest embarrassment that psychology has been [sic] is during its behaviorist period, where it tried seriously to ignore the relevance of the emergent, subjective dimensions of life, even in the driving, control and adaptation of behavior. If you, the reader, are anything like me, the writer, you probably have, at least in the conventional sense, some psyche. You, like me, probably think that that's somehow relevant to the study of one. How is it that these fools could pretend it wasn't even there? Of course, to the Buddha, the conventional psyche was a process, not a thing, a verb instead of a noun, but that's still behavior, isn't it? Do mental phenomenon and qualia somehow become more legitimate when they can be causally tied to specific behaviors of the organism? The integration of those may be the route it will take. It is often assumed that everything about the mind and mental processes must finally be explicable in terms of brain and other neural events, but this gives us a poor explanation for self-directed behavior, of agency, of the behavior we need to exercise in order to deliver ourselves successfully from addictive behavior. We need to jump to software metaphors for this, but this leaves us without the use of sensation and affect. To the Buddha, the mind and its will are determined but capable of being free. Freedom emerges out of conditions that we are able to alter and adjust, but the cognitive tools that it uses do not originate entirely or directly out of our biological processes. They are conditioned. Biology can learn them, but ultimately they are emergent properties of the mind.

Third question: Why study just the human mind? Why not incorporate sentience in general? Is it still because the animals don't have souls and won't go to heaven? Did all those monkeys and lab rats suffer and die in vain? Modern biology and Darwinian medicine are busily painting a much different story of mind, one that increasingly includes more of the organism and its zoological relations. The brain extends all the way out to the fingertips, to the wingtips and the flippers as well. We live one life, scientifically speaking. The jaguar on the hunt is consummately mindful. Therefore it might be a good idea to specify what is meant by mind here. Throughout we will use the word mind in the sense Buddha intended, which will tend to integrate cognition, affect, feeling, sense perception, apperception, memory, imagination, intention, attention and self-aware sentience. The mind is a whole team of generally identifiable processes, and neither consciousness nor a rational intellect is team captain. There is no team captain, and no one process remains in charge. In a way this mind is closer to the sense found in the question "do you mind?" It is certainly not the mind of the Cartesian mind-body dualism.

Fourth question: What of the second person in psychology's science? Phenomenology has ventured off into this, in part to corroborate its first-person research. Intersubjectivity is now being used to understand how humans understand. We build on our confirmations as well as go astray. Unlearning, relearning, personal transformation and the rewiring of our behavior can be dramatic in person-on-person encounters, even with a psychotherapist involved. A good part of the primate brain just seems to be built for the interpersonal encounter. Can't this be part of the science? Including the relationships between human beings has certainly played a role in the social sciences, which have had their own problems with objectivity and cultural differences. While neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are quickly rescuing us from the delusion of human as tabula rasa or blank slate, and beginning to articulate the dimensions of human nature that underpin our cultural differences, sociology is showing us that verstehen, the understanding and use of empathy, has a useful place in the social sciences. It is now permissible to try to relate to that unfortunate savage as a fellow human being with a similar neural architecture to the researcher's own. First there is our common human ground and then there are the cultural differences.

One of the things that psychology seems to have perennially failed to learn, whether it was studying behavior or the mental functions affecting behavior, is that psychology itself is a form of behavior, particularly a cognitive and linguistic behavior. Human behavior is driven by various motivating forces. A science of behavior that doesn't start by seeing itself as behavior, may fail to question its own motives and wind up seeing only what it wishes to see and taking too much for granted. A philosophy which never asks why it would want to see things in a certain way is subject to some quite vast and complicated unconscious influences. A true science that addressed this first would thereby aim more true, as your better archers will look first to their posture or stance. Psychology is still much in need of good rules for assigning words, both nouns and verbs, to functions and processes that are meaningful in both the subjective and objective worlds, mental objects that are functionally related. Sweet, for example, will refer to a specific neuron that is structurally different from the one that tastes sour. Our personal experience is biological as well as phenomenological. How marvelous it will be to have a language connecting the two. My id may be out of control and bringing forth monsters, and my superego powerless to stop it, partly because I just don't have a good cognitive understanding of what's really going on down in there. The devil is working me overtime.

In all the above, Buddhism offers some too-long-ignored contributions to psyche's -ology. Of particular importance for our purposes here is its offering in the various arenas of self-efficacy and self-directed behavior, cognitive self-control, emotional self-control, behavioral self-control or self-modification, intentional neuroplasticity or cortical reprogramming, and widening our experiential repertoires, extending our horizons, to facilitate better choices. In a sense, the Buddha developed his psychology as an operating system for the mind. It was meant to be a psychological therapy, for the cure of normalness, but this required deep, subjective examination that would lead to altered cognition, altered affect, and altered behavior. It was techne, it wasn't just something recited in praise of a deity. With regard to Buddhism as a therapy, it is important to stipulate that it's goal is not to help the individual to adapt, adjust or conform to society at large. The Buddhistly well-adjusted might easily find themselves at a still greater distance from normative human social acceptability than where they began.

The preoccupation of the Western world with individuality and self has given Buddhism-as-therapy a bit of a chasm to cross. Dhamma-Vinaya as originally presented doesn't spend much time fussing over whether my mother breastfed or hugged me enough, or whether my father berated or abandoned me. My specialness can be largely ignored unless somebody is helping me with a very particular problem. How much the method was meant to be personalized or customized to cultures and individuals is not really clear, but mindfulness is an exploration of our own minds, not of our neighbors', and maybe this brings in the balance we want. There are universals in human nature. Any competent neurosurgeon can identify the corresponding endocrine glands in each of us well enough. We have the same neurotransmitters. Where does our specialness, our self-esteem, our self-actualization, our individuation, belong in a Buddhist context? Well, maybe that's worth meditating on.



Buddhism and Science

Einstein is alleged to have said: "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal god and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism."

For a definition of science we can start with the New Oxford American Dictionary's: "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment" and add: resulting in testable explanations and repeatable predictions about the universe. Science isn't just knowing or learning facts and equations. Scientes, Latin for knowing and the word science's root, was know-how, reliable knowledge, reliably knowing. And reliability usually means predictability and repeatability. In the human mind, things only tend to work in certain ways, and are only generally predictable or repeatable. Sometimes science must look at fuzz that it cannot resolve into finer lines, or look at a range of things or a spectrum. But that's what the mind is: a moving process, a spectrum and range. The mind is not entirely digital, and it's only half third-person.

In Theravada, the Buddha recognized that the world or world-stream was bigger than the mind or mindstream. Sentient beings are only a part of a greater whole. This observation is not always shared in other forms of Buddhism. While the various sentient beings are made up of their own components (called khandas), the world too had its constituent factors, such as the dhatus or elements, which constitute rupa or physical form. The Buddha lived in India, in a cultural climate full of wild and rampant metaphysical speculation, as between competing schools of eternalism and nihilism. He noted frequently that most of these raging debates went nowhere. The various beliefs did nothing to improve the lives of their champions, or their ethics either. He would view the great bulk of this as sophistry, and distraction from the higher work that we need to do to beat suffering. He noted how people were only seeing what they wanted to see. He also noted why they wanted to see things in these ways. We can ask, however, what he might have thought of knowledge gained by more reliable means, and tested, as science does. Clearly, science is not free of human and personal bias, but let's call it generally so. Buddha's big thing was teaching what was true, which he called the Dhamma (or Dharma). He would likely agree that the Dhamma was more closely tied to what was true than to the words of doctrine he spoke. So what about world that is independent of human mental processes?

The issue of the relevance to liberation and an end to the suffering of sentient beings would still hold fast. But pondering the size and wonder of the macro universe makes a great exercise in both mindfulness and concentration. The story of evolution is not at all inconsistent with the Buddha's account of the sentient beings undergoing millions and billions of years of rebirth into a world that is the result of their intentional actions or kamma. It is not necessary to think of kamma in terms of retributive justice. It is our intentional action, actions out of want, need, motive and drive. A few generations long ago decided they wanted that new kind of mate, without the tail and all that hair. That soon became the predominant mate, except for the real losers. Such want or intentional action drives evolution and conditions rebirth. It is likely that Theravada could more easily accept the benefits of natural selection than other forms, since it takes a harder line on unwholesomeness. Since Buddha's express aim was to get at any doctrine or truth by way of direct personal investigation, it is permitted to investigate any science that meets its criteria and adopt what meets its objectives.

If demonstrable truth is the criterion, then reality or nature would be the scripture, not dogma about the nature of reality. This was actually held as a tenet by Islam, during its golden age when it kept the fires of science alight. Sadly, it disintegrated. We will want to find and read this scripture of reality without twisting it all around with our biases and preconceptions. Ergo, any insight that is grounded in reality and provable is also Dhamma, with a capital-D, even if it is the product of subsequent centuries, and even if this happens to be the accidental discovery of a relatively unenlightened being. Further, if a particular teaching of the Buddha was shown to be untrue, that teaching would need to be replaced or amended. Buddhism also has much to offer science since, in Manly P. Hall's words, "it has found the weak point in most schools of Western philosophy: namely, the failure to analyze the analyzing power." It doesn't matter at all if a living being flinches or cringes when reading the truth. It isn't tailored to that being's comfort. Truth and adaptation to truth is the being's problem, not that of the universe. As Darwin noted: "We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it."

Clearly, cognitive neuroscience, in addition to evolution, would be a Buddhist's first focus: they are the same inquiry, only from different but complementary perspectives. Both, for example, have an interest in the physical, chemical, electronic and experiential dynamics of our emotional arousal or in the allocation of attention to a sense object. This is not to say that they cover the same ground in the same way. Buddhism is allowed to look for the first-person counterparts or experiences of the processes that neuroscience uncovers, and then adjust its models accordingly. Similarly, neuroscience is challenged to find samadhi, or karuna, or a higher state of mental health, or the structures of cognitive and emotional self-control. Both are interested in neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain and mind to change. Together they can define science away from 1st-3rd person debate. What is known? What is predictable? What is repeatable? What hurts? How can we stop hurting ourselves and each other?







Suffering



What use is your braided hair, oh witless man? And your garment of antelope skin? Within you is ravenousness, but the outside you make to look clean. (Dhammapada)



The First Noble Truth is:



Dukkha Nanam, the Knowledge of Suffering

Dukkha is called the most pressing fact of human existence. Although this is normally translated as suffering, it is a word richer in meanings, including unsatisfactoriness, imperfection, inability to satisfy, frustration, vulnerability, unease, stress, pain, hardship, deprivation, discomfort, what is hard to endure. It is being made aware that we don't occupy the very center of a universe created just for us. Dukkha is our constant whining about being given the gift of life. There is an irony to the verb suffering: since it's a verb it refers to something that you do. This comes with an implication that it is something you may not really need to do. Much of Buddhism is about how to not do this, how to stop doing it and then how to stay stopped. Much suffering has its beginnings deep in the darkness, long before we are aware of its emergence, so it isn't always easy to catch it before it gets going, but there are techniques taught here, preemptive strategies, even for this. Sometimes, too, it can seem that we suffer by choice, in part because we do this so consistently. Some of this is due to the unforeseen consequences of our choices. Sometimes we really have no choice that does not lead to suffering. Sometimes we suffer on purpose because we choose to feel guilty or because we want to feel alive, or feel at the center of things, or feel what we think of as deeply, or simply feel some dramatic effect in being moved about by our circumstances. And sometimes we suffer because bad things happen to good people for no reason whatsoever, not even from our personal karma. Although believers might want to disagree on this last point, we do live one life, scientifically speaking, and our own karma gets all tangled up with others. As usually understood, suffering is something that is done unto you, the helpless victim. It speaks of passivity, of not rising up and taking a stand. I once heard an anecdote in AA where someone who was asked how he was doing replied "OK, under the circumstances." "What are you doing under there?" was the reply. To be so passive is to be subject to circumstances, to be inanimate. To be a subject is the opposite of being a noble. It is to have no say in the matter. The Buddha further subdivided Dukkha into three parts that he called the Tilakkhana, the three marks or characteristics of our existence: Anicca or impermanence, Dukkha or hurt feelings, frustration and disapproval of reality, and Anatta, the nonexistence of the eternal and perfect spirit that would be the core of our being. These three words are used throughout the doctrine and are worth remembering.



Anicca, Impermanence

Nothing holds still. Truth be told, one cannot step into the same river even once as long as our stepping takes any time at all. And eternity, for humankind, is the briefest flash of all. But boy do we love to pontificate on how much we know of eternity and perfection, and how superior that is to the inferior, ordinary reality that moves the ever-changing galaxies around. The concept of anicca is one of humankind's first philosophical statements of the second law of thermodynamics: that order is local and limited in time, and ultimately must give way to change. This is not a problem that the universe has. Impermanence doesn't even need to be a problem for us. The real problem that we have is in our obsession with permanence, our grabbiness towards it, and our resistance to the natural order of things.

After waiting for years to have a child, a Japanese feudal Lord was at last blessed with the birth of a son. A Zen master who was renowned for his exquisite calligraphy was commissioned by the Lord to create a fine work of art as a blessing for the birth. It was to be presented at a grand celebration. The Master arrived at the festivities three days later and unrolled a small scroll that read: "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies." The Lord was enraged and had the Roshi seized and dragged before him, demanding either a satisfactory account or a severed head. The Master explained "Sir, the greatest blessing is to be in accord with the natural order of things, but I can write these in any other order you might prefer."

We have all known pleasure, but with the exception of any pleasure we are currently enjoying, all of these pleasures have now passed. We have all known pain as well, with the same result. The inevitable coming and going of pleasure and pain has got to be one of the most consistent and reliable experiences we have in life. What keeps us from accepting this? All it takes is some tiny external thing changing, something insignificant going right or wrong, and within a few seconds, we are suddenly either unreasonably ecstatic or unreasonably upset, and with the sense that that feeling could go on forever. Imagine if we listened to musical symphonies like that. All of a sudden we reach a perfect moment where the note of every instrument pleases us beyond reason. We would freeze the thing right there, with everybody holding that one particular note. How exciting would that be! The junkie chasing his dragon will continue his elusive pursuit of that first high that just will not stand still. I drank trying to snag that perfect bliss that lasted for two minutes halfway between drinks two and three, but I never could get it to stop running.

That your own mind is capable of change, and in fact, that change is fundamental to the very nature of mind, should come as welcome news, particularly if you have been suffering from one of these fixations. But first you need to come to grips with the nature of mind. The fundamental cause of all these problems is in the way mind reacts to change, so the fundamental solution is to adapt, to learn resilience, responsiveness and flexibility, to learn a healthier way to respond to changes. But here's the rub with recovery: if you want to put some problem behavior behind you, you will want to put it permanently behind you. Any true sobriety is a permanent solution. This makes people anxious and crazy. Most recovery groups try to soften this with advice to just stay sober one day at a time. Rational recovery, on the other hand, insists that this one-day-at-a-time thinking only allows you to entertain thoughts of some future relapse. But this problem is ultimately topographical or geographical. Saying "never again" assumes in a way that there is only forward and back, progress and backsliding. What it doesn't see is there is also moving on sideways and diagonally, never to pass through these parts again, not because of anxiety or fear, but because the world that has just opened up is just too damn big to waste time retracing your steps in either direction.

Ultimately it's not that you can change, but that you must. For someone who is suffering, thoughts of impermanence can offer hope instead of fear and anxiety. As much as beliefs like to stay put and hold fast, these are specifically the beliefs that need to go, the ones that hold you stuck here. We just need to look at them differently.



Dukkha, Painful Imperfection

"Life in any world is unstable, it is swept away. It has no shelter and no protector. It has nothing of its own, but must leave all and pass on. It is incomplete, insatiate, the slave of craving" (MN 82).

The price of knowing what pleasure is is knowing when it is missing or unattainable. The price of knowing how precious a gift life is is knowing that it has to end in death. But this sort of knowing is done backwards, and this is why it seems like there is a price. In fact, any chance to know pleasure in life is a gift. From a more noble perspective, the whining done over the pleasures of life coming up short of our prayers and expectations is really nothing more than an ignoble ingratitude. We seem to have the wrong default setting for our approvals and satisfactions: these should be set at the minimum levels that are needed for continued existence. Then everything else is a gift. We feel as though we are entitled to pleasure and happiness, to life and all of the good things it has to offer. Given this, we can only fall short of what this delusion seems to promise. It's as though we believe we were made by a god in his own image, with no reason to struggle to survive or do anything to merit the good things in life. It really isn't that surprising that we blunder so badly. There is nothing wrong with either pleasure or happiness. They are in fact superior states- and worth enjoying. The mistake is in pursuing them, particularly in pursuing them directly without the intermediate step of doing the work needed to merit them and bring them naturally about. This is especially true of our addictive behavior: we skip the part about deserving our happiness. The rest of the mistake is in trying to cling to them when the time comes for them or us to move on.

We have evolved the ability to shift our sense of identity around, to locate ourselves in a thought, a feeling, a sensation, a memory, or a plan. A feeling that we are having, as of deprivation, frustration, unhappiness or revulsion, seems able to hijack who we feel we really are. We don't seem to know why, but we tend to prefer identifying with passing and vulnerable states, while deluding ourselves into thinking that they will last. One of the most important techniques in Buddhist psychology takes charge of this assignment of identity. Whenever we get an unpleasant or unwholesome feeling, such as craving, or hatred, or disgust, this "wants" to fully occupy our sense of identity, and our personal feelings, almost by definition, feel intimate enough to convince us that this speaks for our inmost and most-authentic self. But these things are not our authentic selves, they are nothing more than feelings. When we are taken over by them everything is always always or never: you always think of yourself first, you never respect my feelings. They always come and go, and never last. The Buddha offered us a useful mantra for this, applicable to any thought, feeling or sensation that enters our awareness: "N'etam mama, n'eso'ham asmi, na me so atta. This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my spirit." This is not inauthentic since the identification in the first place is mind-made out of false or arbitrary ideas about how things are or how they should be.

I have always been amused by the Western theologians' opinion on the almighty with respect to change and imperfection, to anicca and dukkha. Their initial or a priori assumption was that divinity had to be perpetually and eternally perfect: "He" could not simply be moving in that direction. To them, this meant that if he was in one place he could not then move to another, because he must already have been in the perfect place. If he was in a particular state of being he could not change into another state. If he knew one thing he could not then learn another thing that was different. He was denied the ability to move, to change or to grow. The theologians apparently made him in their own image. What the Buddha tried to teach us to do is to begin with the assumption that changes and imperfections describe the natural order and proper state of things. If we want to be in a different place, we can begin by taking an honest and unflinching look at where we stand because this is the place where we begin to move our feet in order to travel to someplace else. We learn to accept reality as it is, not necessarily because we approve of it, but because we want to work with it in something other than our fantasies and delusions.



Anatta, We Imaginary Beings

In the Indian context in which Buddhism arose there was (and remains) the widespread belief that the essential part of sentient beings was a spirit or soul called the Atta or Atman, each spirit a spark of an infinite divinity called Brahman that dreamed existence into being so that it might play hide and seek with itself. These spirits or souls would learn whatever they could learn, and find whatever they could find, over the course of their many lifetimes. At death they would transmigrate into new bodies, over and over again, until they learned or found out all the secrets and hiding places of the divine, at which point they would be liberated and reunited with Brahman, the game of hide and seek being over. Etymologically the word reincarnation means "going back into meat." It implies that there is some thing to do this going back. The Buddha rejected this idea with his doctrine of Anatta, meaning "no spirit (or soul)." What we sentient beings perceive, think of or feel as such an identity is a process that emerges out of the interplay of the component processes that condition or form us. These components provide the necessary conditions for this new spirit or soul-like process to emerge into our awareness, just as heat, oxygen and fuel provide the necessary conditions for flames to exist. At the same time, the Buddha elected to confuse everybody by talking about how we are reborn again and again, according to kamma, the laws of cause and effect, until we wake up and set ourselves free. We do not survive death and transmigrate as spirits, but somehow there is a continuity of process that is transmitted from lifetime to lifetime, and, significantly, this felt sense of continuity, and even a persistence of memories, is somehow able to cross this gap between a moment of death in one place and a moment of conception in another. The flame often provided a useful metaphor:



King Milinda questions: “Venerable Nagasena, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating?”

“Yes, O King. Rebirth takes place without anything transmigrating.”

“Give me an illustration, Venerable Sir.”

“Suppose, O King, a man were to light a lamp from another lamp. Pray, would the one light have passed over to the other light?”

“No, indeed, Venerable Sir.”

“In exactly the same way, O King, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating.”

“Give me another illustration.”

“Do you remember, O King, having learnt, when you were a boy, some verse or other from your teacher of poetry?”

“Yes, Venerable Sir.”

“Pray, O King, did the verse pass over to you from your teacher?”

“No, indeed, Venerable Sir.

“In exactly the same way, O King, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating” (Tr. from the Milinda Panha, Burmese KN 47a).



Phrased a different way by Peter Santina in The Tree of Enlightenment: "Where is this from? - when we light one candle from another candle, no substance or soul travels from one to the other, even though the first is the cause of the second; when one billiard ball strikes another, there is a continuity - the energy and direction of the first ball is imparted to the second. The first ball is the cause of the second billiard ball moving in a particular direction and at a particular speed, but it is not the same ball."

So, if you were to take two candles, one lit and one not, light the unlit one and blow out the first, and ask whether the new flame was the same flame, the answer would have to be no, even though you could say that the flame was as if reborn. Further, "the extinguished flame cannot be described as having gone to any direction" (MN n723). To the question "where does the soul go when the body dies?" Jacob Boehme answered, "There is no necessity for it to go anywhere." The new flame is the same process and uses the same kind of fuel, and oxygen from the same room, and heat from the old flame. There is still continuity there, in the actions of the transference, in the starting of the fire, and in the manufacture of the candles. This characterizes all intentional acts or kamma. The sense of continuity that we have, including the survival of memories, is never fully explained in complete and satisfying detail. In Theravada, the continuous part of the "rebirth" process is called the patisandhi vinnana, the relinking consciousness, or the linking-up-again consciousness. Today we might liken it to an upload and subsequent download of information from the web (of life). Other forms of Buddhism elaborate more on this web or "cloud" idea, retaining versions of the Hindu Akashic Record or a Storehouse Consciousness that supports the upload and the download during the transition. It may not be necessary to postulate this much before we are able to move on. Occam's Razor suggests that we look for the simplest solutions, perhaps a simple transmission or signal. It still might suggest some sort of living field or equivalent of the old luminiferous ether. This has no answer yet. As to the conditions which create a specific perception of a particular self, these can persist across lifetimes because kamma is rich in patterns that repeat with regularity across many lifetimes. At a minimum they persist in this both genetically and culturally.

Reincarnation is usually used (or abused) to rationalize the injustices of mortal life, why bad things happen to good people, or good things to bad, or why events in life appear random when somebody is trying to tell you instead that there are rules that ought to be followed. But the fact that all things ultimately have causes does not mean that all things happen for reasons, or are unfolding according to some law or plan. It is perhaps a lot more sane to admit that not everything happens to us by means of some moral law. Good or ethical behavior increases our odds of living a better life, this we can see, but, like Zhuangzi said, "perfect sincerity offers no guarantee." The little girl playing in her sandbox, who gets killed by a stray bullet from a gang fight happening two blocks way, is not playing a part in some larger divine plan. That thinking is pure, clinical paranoia, plain and simple. There is much in life over which we have no control, even by the circuitous route of becoming ethically perfect, but a truer or more authentic personal and ethical development will arm us against our own self-destructive reactions to life's little surprises and injustices. There are evils that we cannot control, but the appropriate response to them can often turn them around and press them into the service of the good. This requires accepting them first, instead of denying their existence. None of our rewards are guaranteed. We can only improve our odds. Obviously, those who are clinging to the law of kamma as retributive justice will take exception to this idea.

We seem to betray our illusions a little every time we say "my spirit" or "my soul." If this spirit or soul is who we really are, then why are we making our inmost being an extraneous possession like this? Shouldn't the first person be the spirit itself? Or are we admitting that we are living our lives at some distance from our real nature? If this were a mere trap of language, why have we not rebelled against this and created a popular grammatical form for the "real" me and you?

A great deal of the effort spent in a human life is an investment in the continuity and integrity of one's perception of a fundamental self. There are investments in finding it, in keeping it going, in keeping it the same, in keeping it protected from challenging information, in keeping it from not feeling wrong or ashamed, in maintaining its sense of sovereignty or independence. Now the Buddha suggests that it may not be desirable for us to protect this fundamental self from change and eventual dissolution, especially dissolution into wiser ways of seeing things. The fundamental self is little more than a mental image produced by a stream of mental experiences upon attending a stream of physical experiences. It is one that costs a great deal of energy to maintain. If we were to recognize our sense of being a fundamental self as no more than a constructed mental image, perhaps given to us by millions of years of evolution to perform specific cognitive tasks, and admittedly useful in addressing many of our various physical and social needs, we could still make use of it in conventional ways to perform whatever functions it does best. Also, to recognize it as a construct would help set us free to do some useful re-construction. We could then free ourselves from being its slave or servant, and begin to adopt new notions of who we really are that lead us into less trouble. We could then begin to get over ourselves.

Self is not precisely an illusion in Buddhism, as it is in the Maya and Samsara concepts of Hinduism. It's a convention. It's not unreal, it just isn't what we'd like to think it is, and it certainly isn't going to last. It's a sense of something real, but it's distorted. This conventional self cannot exist without any of its components, particularly the body. Neither is the world an illusion. The world of Samsara is as real as Nibbana, and not a bad dream. Nibbana and samsara ultimately refer to the same world, the real world, just experienced differently. What is unreal is the world that we think, feel and perceive it to be. If you have tried to imagine a world that is stripped of our organic sensations like sight and touch, perhaps as a vast, moving field of full-spectrum energy, in varying densities, streaming through time, always changing, with countless nodes or pockets of self- organizing energy feeding on energy gradients, you likely have at least a closer picture of reality than the one our senses give us, even though the best you can do is still laden with sensory and cognitive metaphors.

We hold beliefs about what we are, and the nature of the world that we live in, that turn us into whining and ineffective participants, obsessing on this or that, throwing our lives away for things we are only told that we need. Yet we are also able to hold views that include a self that sits near the center of our world and is able to correct most of these difficulties. The Buddha referred to himself in the first person. He recognized that the sentient beings who came to him were people, who had boundaries. Self is formed from our experiences in the world. We are genetically evolved to make and use these constructs. They have uses, and these allowed our progenitors to survive and breed our ancestors. But the self does not come into the world to collect experiences. It is the experiences that give rise to the self. As Dogen put it, "To carry the self forward and realize the ten thousand dharmas is delusion. That the ten thousand dharmas advance and realize the self is enlightenment." (Little-d dhamma or dharma refers to any object that can be grasped by the mind, including beings). Buddha never said that the self did not exist. But he "found that, when the inner world is studied closely, all that can be found is a constantly changing flow and what is taken for an intrinsic self or soul is just the sum of certain factors of the mind that are all impermanent and in constant flux. He also found that attachment to any of these impermanent factors inevitably leads to suffering, so the way to internal freedom and happiness that the Buddha advocated was to learn to accept and live in the face of impermanence without clinging to anything." (Fredrik Falkenstrom, "A Buddhist Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Psychology of Self").

All individual phenomena, all dhammas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, plans and ideas, can be contemplated, examined, re-envisioned and revised using these three points of view, in terms of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self. Sammasana-nana is the exploration and contemplation of individual phenomena in terms of these three marks. The three Liberations, or vimokkha, are counter-meditations on the three marks, doorways out to a broader perspective. Animitta is a meditation on signlessness or formlessness, contemplating how all things must pass. Appanihita is a meditation on desirelessness or dispassion, contemplating how all compounded beings are ultimately unable to attain any lasting satisfaction or happiness. Finally, Sunnata is a meditation on emptiness, contemplating how all compounded beings are without a substantial or substantive core, without any individuality that is independent of the conditions which led to their emergence. Deliberately inviting these three into our awareness might be seen as "just asking for it," standing up to and staring down the nearly suicidal existentialist's nausea, angst and sickness-unto-death. But Buddhism isn't for sissies, and it's better to get this over with sooner than later.



Khandas, The Five Aggregates

The Five Aggregates (Panca Khandas) are the factors or constituent processes comprising the perceived individual identity of living beings. Collectively the five are also called the existing person (sakkaya), the current assemblage or identity, and alternately the five aggregates affected by clinging or grasping (panca-upadana-khandha). What appears to be an integral self is really a compounded thing, or more correctly, a complex, interwoven, multidimensional and ever-shifting process. It does have a conventional reality, but not a fundamental, substantive or lasting one. We are aggregate beings and can't separate who we are from the combination of our organism, behavior, sensations, emotions and narratives. Identity jumps around from part to part. Sometimes it's an action, sometimes it's a feeling, sometimes a sensation, an emotion, a motive, a behavioral script or a story. Identity grasps or clings first to one then another. We think we derive our identity from what we experience: it lights us up, gives us the sense of being this or owning that. But this always passes. Everything that we find in the mind is just a weave of physical reaction, affect, sensation, remembrance, motivation, cognition and awareness. But there is no pure and disembodied witness, no doer apart from things getting done, no feeler feeling, no thinker thinking. Self is something like a running poll or vote of these many components, and the locus of whichever component is currently drawing the most attention. Self is like a colony or a hive mind of lots of little identities and identifications. Self is the squeakiest wheel at the moment. You are the thought while the thought is attended, or as T. S. Eliot said, "you are the music while the music lasts." The quintet of constituent processes described by the Buddha were physical form (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), volitional formations (sankhara) and consciousness (vinnana). These simple, one-word translations don't do the ideas justice. In a little more detail:

Rupa refers to the physical organism, the organization, the structured matter obedient to the laws of the elements, material qualities, form or shape, corporeality, what makes phenomena sensible, the basis for figure-ground perception, out to the boundaries where the qualities change. It is the sensible, including the physical structure of the senses themselves, the nervous system and the physical modules of the brain. Rupa is in turn constituted from the four elements (in Buddhist doctrine), and kamma , or consequences of intentional action. "This body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. It is old kamma, to be seen as generated (abhisankhata) and fashioned by volition (cetayita), as something to be felt (vedaniya)" (SN 12).

Vedana refers to feeling, sensation, receptiveness, the sensory and affective reactions to contact. This was largely understood in Buddha's time in the very simplistic terms of pleasantness (sukha), unpleasantness (dukkha), and neutrality (adukkhamasukha), neither-painful-nor-pleasant. This is the beginning of wanting more and wanting less, feeling whether to open up or close down, whether to approach or avoid. Today we would say that there is much more to this than just plus, minus and neutral. One common but still simplistic classification of feelings assumes that each affect has a combination of pleasantness (pleasant or unpleasant) and activation (high or low). Excitement is a combination of pleasantness and high activation, while tranquility is a combination of pleasantness and low activation. Rage would be unpleasant with a high activation, while depression would be unpleasant with low activation. Ambivalence would be high-activation neutrality, apathy would be low. Further articulation of the dimensions of feelings could go on and on. We also bring our pre- existing and longer-term affective states, like moods, dispositions and temperaments, into our experiences. Hormones and neurotransmitters are at the heart of awareness of these affective tones, s