Comment 19 on Mindfulness

I should be doing some work;-)

So my views of religion are a bit peculiar. Just as I imagine I can find truth and beauty in Christianity I imagine I can find truth and beauty in Buddhism. Does that make me a practitioner?

My sister and her children used to visit here in the summer. They are grown-ups now. They lived in Florida so the rolling hills around here were something they noticed, especially when riding in the car. Once when my niece Priscilla was very small, 3 or 4, we set off in the car to the store or for some errand. Just out the driveway and Priscilla asked me: "John, do you believe in God?" I proceeded with a fake answer along the lines of "Some people think..." She cut me off and said:

Well, I do, except God is nothing real because God doesn't die.

I was astounded by her insight.

Buckminster Fuller is quoted as saying:

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

Well, to me it seems, I don't know very much about God. Still my conception is more along the lines of God as a verb. But when we think of verbs we think of doing, and the sense in which God as a verb most interests me is in being. Being it seems is essential to mindfulness. In meditation thoughts are allowed as simply thoughts, meditation isn't simply thoughts, but appreciating there's something more than thoughts. It's that being of myself, others and God that seems important.

There is matter and energy, stuff. It also seems to me there is something other than stuff. Consider a group or an organization of people. Now the individual people might be said to be made of stuff, but can the same be said of the group? Is a group stuff? Economics certainly pays attention to stuff, but much of the study and attention is not about stuff but forms of organization which aren't stuff.

Buddhist speak of illusion. My sense of it is that Buddhism is pointing to all the not-stuff that makes a difference to us. When we talk of not-stuff, the talk is riddled with metaphors of stuff; for example "psychic energy." One illusion is that ideas, patterns, form, follow the same rules as stuff (matter and energy). To see beyond the illusion must mean at least in part understanding that in the fundamentals of knowledge there is a dichotomy between fundamentals of matter and energy and fundamentals of form and pattern.

How to study and talk sensibly about matters of form rather than substance don't have the same sort of consensus that exists among the physical sciences. It's not that there are no ways of talking about matters of form and pattern in a rigorous way, rather not such a firm consensus such as in the physical sciences.

Another word, besides God, about which my views are rather heretical is the word values. Values it seems to me are an important subject for economics. What interests me is not values as nouns but the process of valuing.

Values draw attention mostly when we think of how they are imparted. And for the most part it seems we imagine that values are inculcated.

Back in the early days of college, Louis Rath's book, "Values and Teaching" was one of a handful of seminal books. Raths emphasized valuing rather than values. Values Clarification seems like a short movement in education circles barely worth a footnote. I guess it's interesting to me because I was learned about it when I was young and tried to find out more. In the process I encountered the very strong push back of social forces which viewed the approach as moral relativism. Ten years later when getting my teaching credentials much of the same sort of push back was voiced in the warfare against reading instruction: Reading textbooks were the product of radical "homosexual deconstrutionists." Like most teachers the passions seemed a bit inflamed. Teachers are quite aware how conservative a practice schooling is and textbooks are hardly ever radical!

Raths clearly was influenced by American Pragmatists, notably John Dewey. Dewey it seems to me is relegated to about the same place in education as Freud in psychology: A name to remember, but ideas it's safe to forget. Call me old-fashioned, but I find myself still intrigued by Pragmatism and their approach to knowledge, especially how we might come to understand all the important not-stuff of the universe.

Matthew Fox was a Dominican priest important to Creation Spirituality who is now an Episcopal priest. He was forbidden to teach theology by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) when he served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It appears the final straw was over attitudes towards homosexual people--an issue that puzzles me how divisive it is within Christianity. But the theological differences are stark between Fox and Pope Benedict going much deeper than surface the surface issues about gay people and other despised groups.

Pope Benedict gave an address which seemed offensive to many Muslims. No doubt that he is a very learned man. I'm not sure I really get all that he's saying in the lecture, but the subject of the address seems very relevant to what I'm trying to say now about trying to study rigorously the not-stuff. It seems to me that a major difference between Fox and Ratizinger has to do with how they imagine God: whether as a noun or a verb. Creation Spirituality emphasizes in creation, whereas Benedict emphasizes the creation.

I'm not a Roman Catholic, but have many friends who are. Pope John Paul II was viewed by many , not just Catholics, as a very holy person. I don't mean to be crass in this, but I can saw it. One way to put it is that I would have willingly handed a baby for Pope John Paul to hold. Now some Catholics are very glad for Pope Benedict, seeing him sort as a "law and order" pope. I might be reluctant to hand over a baby to Pope Benedict afraid he might scare the child. In a way I don't see that as such a bad thing because it rather forces a person to listen and watch Pope Benedict rather than to ascribe some ethereal quality to him. There is no question that Ratzinger is an intellectual. At least I can understand my heresy when he describes it. Take for example these notes on Liberation Theology

Benedict and wide swaths of the Christian community it seems to me think of God as a proper noun. The word Bible is always capitalized, I learned in elementary school. The Bible contains the Word of God. Whereas Fox thinks of God as Verb, God's "is-ness" which is not contained. It seems that Buddhism is more in line with Fox's views.

Fox looks over the history of Christianity and sees two main streams: Original Sin and Original Blessing. But as Karen Armstrong notes compassion is one essential that all the Abrahamic religions agree is at the root.

How much then does it matter how we get there, that is, how we come to a compassionate understanding? Laing notes: "Only when something has become problematic do we start to ask questions." Economics has become problematic. On one hand our attention is drawn to the twin conundrums of peak oil and global climate change, and on the other hand the economic growth. We have a problem. It seems to me that these are fundamentally problems of life, not-stuff. What we know of the physical world cannot be denied, it's just that the solutions are not primarily physical. What is essential to religion is not stuff.

Gregory Bateson liked to remind people that he was a fourth-generation atheist. But his father had them read the Bible at the supper table so they wouldn't become "empty-headed atheists." He also made the point "God is not mocked" quoting Saint Paul. Bateson thought that looking at feature of human religions with an eye to what can become intelligible in light of systems theory and advances in epistemology is a good idea because people have been thinking deeply for centuries and we're bound to discover important insights there.

After Bateson's death his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson gathered together his work on the book he was working on to see about making them available in a publishable form. One of the techniques she used was to intersperse chapters of his writing with chapters of her writing on the topics of those chapters. Some of those were in the form of metalogue: a defintion from here:

A "metalogue" is a conversational exchange that embodies and offers a clear example of the subject matter being discussed.

Here's part of one metalogue:

Daughter: Yes, but...but it's different. Every time I lecture about the Gaia hypothesis I find myself warning against the danger of thinking of Gaia as a vis-avis. You can't say, "Me and Gaia," or "I love Gaia," or "Gaia loves me." And you can't say, "I love Eco," either, can you?

Father: They are not the same. The notion Gaia is based in the physical reality of the planet--it's Pleromatic, thingish. When I ask people to think about a god who might be called Eco, I'm trying to make them think about Creatura, about mental process.

Daughter: The word "process" is important there, isn't it?

Father: And also the fact that the interconnections are not entirely tight, and that all knowledge has gaps, and mental process includes the capacity to form new connections, to act as what I have called self-healing tautologies.

Daughter: So..tragedy and opposites and the total fabric? And Eco as a nickname for the logic of mental process, the connectedness that holds all life and evolution together? And It can be violated but cannot be mocked? Perhaps It really is beautiful rather than lovable.

Father: Beautiful and terrible. Shiva and Abraxas.

I'm afraid I've contributed more mush to my already mushy thinking, but I'll post this anyway. I did find a delightful Web page while I was looking to see if Warren McCulloch's "What is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man that He May Know a Number?" or any part of it was online. I was looking for context for McCulloch:

What do we think a man is? What is it to be human? What are these other systems that we encounter and how are they related?

The page is a wonderful remembrance of Warren McCulloch by Heinz von Foerster. There's a cartoon of McCulloch with a balloon that reads:

Don't bite my finger, look, where I am pointing.