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"I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the 'Numen ineffabile' who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the 'Ratio aeterna'." - Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
Four mornings a week I sit in (online) meditation with a local Zen Buddhist group. It's a good practice with a good group of people, and it is one of the many ways I am trying to keep up a sort of spiritual momentum that was set in motion in 2017. Perhaps in time I may even become good at it, but for now I will content myself with a state of perpetual mental tinnitus while on the cushion.
However, there's a wrinkle in this that comes up now and again that I want to remark on. Here is a sample of a comment one practicioner made:
"Over this last weekend I took a trip with a scientist friend and we got to talking about the big things. You know, meaning, life, those sorts of things, and I said, 'Well, everything is one.' And she turned to me and said that she didn't believe that; that she was an individual and that she didn't think there was any evidence for unity. It took me by surprise because I'm used to such statements going unchallenged as self-evident within our community."
Or another that was part of a talk by one of the roshis:
"...and then this mathematician walked out of the talk being given by the Zen master realizing that everything she knew didn't really matter."
I paraphrase from memory but I believe I have captured the gist of both. I have a problem with them. The issue lies not with their content, which in many ways I agree, but with the framing: there is secular knowledge and there is sacred knowledge, and of the two the former is limited and potentially blinding while the latter is limitless and of ultimate value. This sentiment is not an uncommon religious one, that things of the world pale by comparison to the things of Heaven, and I think in some ways it has only gained subtle strength as we have discovered that our vast information civilization has not delivered to us the happiness and fulfillment we desire. Clearly, something is missing. Yet our attempts to make a rational religion have by and large failed, precisely I believe because ultimate reality is transrational.
A brief aside on the terminology of 'transrational.' We tend to classify things as rational vs. irrational, as though the two categories were sort of equal complimenting pairs, and that everything in one category is in a crucial sense similar. However, I believe a better way of viewing it is that there is irrational (a failure to apply rational principles), rational, and then transrational (a realization that rational principles have limits). Something being irrational is not the same as something being transrational, and to put them together in the same category gives a false sense of similarity. And in the case of the rationalist, a false sense of superiority. But as Huston Smith notes:
"However much the rationalist may begrudge the fact, paradox and the transrational are religion’s life blood, and that of art as well."
I have been thinking on this for years. It's not a view I wanted, as my own nature is analytical, but it is one I have tried to digest as best I can if simply because I myself found the end of the road and realized I could either be stuck forever or strike out in a new direction. However, there is a worry that comes to me and that is when people try to take either the rational or the transrational and go to extremes. Either continue the modern habit of attempting to make everything rational, by which the West has now brought upon itself a mental and moral fracture, or to gleefully embrace the existence of the transrational as an excuse to bypass the rational.
When you take note of how rapidly Buddhism has grown in popularity in the West, you're forced to ask yourself why it has been more successful at filling the void Christianity left than other religions. There are likely several reasons, such as its associations with pacifism as well as its "East Asian Wisdom" exoticness that give it great appeal, but I think that among the more thoughtful people who nonetheless wish to be religious it is attractive because of its perceived status as pro-science while being non-doctrinaire.
Whenever I think about the modern mind, the title of The Who song, We Won't Get Fooled Again comes to mind. Christianity's fall has thoroughly disillusioned the intelligentsia of the West with the result that we don't want to put our faith in anything that would ask us to believe in the falsifiable. We've seen what happens when that falls through. Here then Buddhism, and especially Zen Buddhism, seems to be an answer; while it certainly has its doctrines, in the end it seems like all you have to do is engage in a practice while assenting to none of the theology. The ultimate truths are ones that are transrational and therefore safely beyond the grasp of science to disrupt. In this way the believer is safe once again, at peace with the knowledge that they've got The Answer (I suspect this is why "don't know mind" must be emphasized again and again by the teachers; it is so easy to have confidence in your knowledge of not knowing and fail to recognize the irony).
That said, this doesn't prevent people from feeling bolstered when they hear that modern physics or neuroscience has made statements which back Buddhist beliefs. A conversation from my previous zendo comes to mind, where somebody had brought up how a popular science article had likened the brain to a pilotless plane: we can't find the center and our sense of self is likely a construct. The implication of this tidbit to the speaker being that it was nice for science to finally catch up to what Buddhism has known for millennia. Despite relying on the transrational, we just can't help looking for reinforcement; science is so dominant a cultural force that it really is comforting when it convinces us of what we already believed.
But things aren't always as they seem, either, and I would like to take a moment to illustrate this.
Impermanent Pleasure (The Hypnotized Never Lie)
"Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing." - Shakespeare
Spend any time with Buddhism and it won't be long before you run into impermanence. The world is impermanent. All composite things are impermanent. And of course, pleasure is impermanent. It's the natural followup; once we understand this one great principle we grasp this particular instance as well: our futile grasping to keep pleasure continuing is one of the causes of our own suffering due to our failure to align with the nature of the world (which is in large part what my recent freedom essays have been circling around).
Science in the last few decades has made great inroads on the topic of pleasure as well. It ends up that the dopamine reward system that activates whenever we do pleasurable things is perhaps not really a reward system, at least in the implication that it gives us a reward at the end. It is perhaps better seen as a seeking system, and an evolutionary solution to a crucial problem: how is it possible to keep an organism which is capable of only living in the moment engaged in a beneficial, but protracted, and hence delayed benefit, behavior? Let us use eating as an example.
We all know that eating is pleasurable. That makes perfect evolutionary sense: eating keeps us alive, is generally a beneficial behavior, and hence something that we ought to be prompted to do by our nervous system. But what about before you get to eat? You have to go looking for something to eat. As humans it seems no mystery that we can imagine that at the end of our search there will be food, and that that is what maintains our interest. However, this is us just fooling ourselves with our consciousness-centric view, and to see why we need to go down the evolutionary ladder a little.
Imagine a cat hunting for its food. Unlike us, it cannot imagine a future in which it has a mouse in its paws; it exists almost exclusively as a creature of the present moment (speaking of Zen...). As a result it can do little but make rudimentary connections between present behaviors and future rewards. That is, if it sees a mouse it will react. Or, as anybody who has owned a cat knows, it can learn to meow until it is fed because it has learned through trial and error that brushing up against you and meowing makes food appear within minutes. But this linkage is very short-lived. In order for most organisms to learn the connection between a behavior and its results it can only be separated by a few minutes at most; beyond that it will be unable to bridge the gap. And returning to the wild, leaving the den and searching for food takes far longer than a few minutes, and you probably want to do it before starvation prompts you to do so. The cat might not be hungry now, but it will be hungry in a few hours by the time it's gotten something and it might not want to wait like that. So what is evolution to do? The answer is to make hunting itself pleasurable. Of course, not as pleasurable as eating or else it would only want to hunt and not eat, but give it a steady enough trickle of dopamine to signal it that it is doing right and then end with a burst when the task is accomplished to ensure it isn't prolonged. Problem solved.
Returning to humans, then, this is the same system that operates in us, and we demonstrate a similar tendency to being unable to connect actions and rewards if they are too separate in time. It's a weakness of the criminal justice system that in an organism which relies primarily on swift and certain reinforcement that we make it protracted and debatable (not that I'm advocating we start hanging everybody at the drop of a hat). It takes real practice and often a strong will to bring our actions into alignment with rationally forecast results, and those who can do so reliably are really quite extraordinary. The rest of us get by being cats.
Now, this seeking system explains two aspects of pleasure in the human experience:
First is that working toward something is more rewarding than the thing itself. Our conscious experience of our unconscious workings causes us to fixate on the burst at the end, but despite that being the highest peak of pleasure it is not the bulk of it. That comes from the seeking. Yet of course we are seduced by instant gratification even as it short-changes us. It makes me wonder if this is why cooking for yourself you tend to eat less; whenever we just take something out of the microwave and gobble it up, only to still be hungry, perhaps we are trying to make up for the loss of anticipatory pleasure. This is why I'm hardly alone in my dislike of consumer capitalism as it thrives on monetizing people's misery-producing self-misunderstanding, and why the recent rise of binge-watching seems to me particularly unhealthy.
The second issue is that pleasure of the reward never lasts long. This would make no evolutionary sense either. If an organism ate once and was sated for the rest of its life, the rest of its life wouldn't be all that long. The system has to forcibly reset itself, and usually reset fairly quickly, because it needs us to keep doing new things. As Jonathan Haidt observed well, we're evolved to survive, not be happy, and a contented organism doing nothing is generally best not staying that way for long. As such, while we can imagine feeling pleasure forever the system is wired to keep that from happening. Pleasure is programmably transient (I'm aware I'm conflating pleasure, happiness, contentment, etc. here; I just don't have space to delinate things for now).
At this point it may seem that I've just reinforced the conclusions that I derived above: science is just finally giving us a mechanistic underpinning to what the Buddha (and Shakespeare) already knew. But look closely and you'll notice something quite crucial in the explanation above: the transience of pleasure has nothing to do with the transience of composite things. Yes, perhaps in an ultimate sense we as a whole organism are transient, but there is no cosmic principle which dictates against pleasure extending from the first moment after birth to the last moment before death. It is only our quirky evolutionary wiring which prevents this, and that is only one of many possible solutions to the issue of survival.
One of the oldest habits in human thinking is to relate our structure to the cosmic order. The Godhead has three parts, therefore man has three parts. There are four fundamental substances and four humors that correspond to them (also four directions). There are seven celestial bodies and they of course represent an endless constellation of traits. I'm sure there are plenty more, and should anybody ever read this some day and know of some particularly interesting correlations please let me know.
Now, as we read these above we shake our heads at the simplemindedness of such equations. It's so obvious that this is just brittle anthropomorphization. That what we had desperately wanted to do was link ourselves to the order of the cosmos, using our supposed understanding of ourselves to interpret the universe. I would say that the two halves of the transience equation have better grounding (I agree that all composite things are transitory and that much suffering comes from wishing pleasure were not transitory are true), but the linkage between them I do not feel is any more substantial than the examples above. We can't blame cosmic principles for not enjoying our evening meal for the rest of our lives, let alone any more substantial achievement. Yet this linkage would never have been challenged otherwise, continuing to be passed off as a self-evident moral observation that failure to align one's self with Reality results in suffering (which, again, I don't debate; it's the ethical precept being derived from the cosmic one that I do).
This is the kernel that inspired this freeform essay. It's not that I'm personally insulted by thinking I am being "talked down to" as a scientist, but the fear that in the end people are sitting complacent in the transrational and so skipping a study of the rational which ultimately informs us in important ways. Even if it is a hypothetically pro-science position, in truth it is more a science-tolerant one, and it doesn't look too closely because it already has the answer.
I am of the absolute belief that any viable religion of the future will have to be based on the science of today. Not totally circumscribed by it, for as I noted above I think that rational religion fails for good reasons, but it must actively engage with it. It's what religion has always done in the past, where as new scientific discoveries updated our view of the world from three-level-dome to globe-with-spheres our interpretation of religion had to change with this (but TASFAD, and an important one). Trying to skip to the back of the book for the answers using an old religion with no updates is moribund.
Wrapping this up, I want to reaffirm something I just mentioned before in my Religious Freedom thoughts: I think that temporal and the spiritual need each other in some paradoxical way. I don't know exactly why or how, except that it seems whenever one becomes too dominant the human spirit suffers as a result, too obsessed with or too dismissive of the experience of being human (another TASFAD). This is why I believe the Otto quote at the top has it right: try to use rationality to grasp things as best we can, but acknowledge both.
