Awakening Betwixt Enlightenments: Towards a Secular Notion of Spiritual Liberation

My aim here is to shape a preliminary reply to aspects of the insightful critique of Buddhist modernism presented in Evan Thompsons’s book ‘Why I Am Not a Buddhist’. Specifically I reply to several points made in the fifth chapter, ‘The Rhetoric of Enlightenment’. I hope in doing so to clarify my own thinking on these subjects. If it’s helpful or interesting to anyone else so much the better!

Thompson opens the chapter with the prima facie contradiction between European philosophical Enlightenment and Buddhist modernist enlightenment.

Nevertheless, there is a striking discrepancy between the European and Buddhist modernist senses of “enlightenment.” The discrepancy concerns the self. For Kant, using your own understanding means not accepting someone else’s authority, but instead working things out for yourself, according to your will and reason. This requires having a heightened sense of self. You need to understand yourself as a rational agent, and you need to assert your personal and moral autonomy—your capacity to decide for yourself and your capacity to act according to the moral law, instead of following the directives of others. Buddhist modernists, however, typically describe enlightenment as the realization that there is no autonomous self or agent (and they’re often quite willing to follow the directives of others, namely, the commands of their Buddhist guru, roshi, or teacher). For example, meditation teacher Shinzen Young says that “you can think of enlightenment as a kind of permanent shift in perspective that comes about through the direct realization that there is no thing called ‘self’ inside you.

...

In short, whereas the European Enlightenment and its philosophical descendants, such as existentialism, emphasize freedom of the self, Buddhist modernist enlightenment is supposed to be freedom from the self.

The issue here is just what is functionally implied by ‘the realization that there is no autonomous self or agent’. He posits an incompatibility between perceptual acquaintance with the absence of a separate subject within one’s own experience (no homunculus inside the head, nor awareness apart from objects) and heightened cognitive, social, and moral autonomy at the level of the person. I think this is simply a mistake. The two Enlightenments may brighten together!

Personality does not erode as result of such realization, nor is functional autonomy in any way impaired. Rather, the self, or better the human process, is freed to contextually and appropriately respond with heightened agency in a functional sense. For the human process as a functional system, you can conceive of the usual structuring of the phenomenal field in terms of subject-object duality and rigid objectification as a kind of painful and impairing self-interference. At the descriptive level of phenomenology, I-making, mine-making, and reification are incredibly emotionally and existentially taxing, distracting, and detract from skillful action. People complain often of being ‘too much in their head’, of taking ‘things’ for granted. Exactly! If it were a designed rather than an emergent natural phenomenon we would swiftly recognize this all as a cruel goad serving the interests of survival and reproduction at the expense of everyone’s peace.

In the frequent disappearance and fluidity of the phenomenological self or its eventual final absence the human person, the ecologically and socially embedded human organism, is freed up to skillfully engage in the world without mis-taking itself to be a locus of awareness/attention separated out from its phenomenal field.

But isn’t this all a bit woo and woolly? Hardly! Subject/object non-duality and the dream-and-illusion-like quality of phenomena constituting an individual’s phenomenal field have a coherent and ready naturalistic interpretation if, as some contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science and neuroscience suggest, any individual’s phenomenal field just is the content of an internal generative predictive model as per predictive coding.

But is realizing this perceptually, intuitively, for oneself really what enlightenment in the Buddhist, or Buddhist modernist sense, means? Well, it depends on who you ask. I agree with Thompson’s sentiment:

I’m inclined to think that enlightenment is concept-dependent, or to put it more precisely, that any experience called an “enlightenment experience” is concept-dependent.

...

I’m not saying that “enlightenment experiences” or “experiences of awakening” don’t exist. I’m sure they do. I’m saying that calling an experience an “enlightenment experience” is to conceptualize it and that conceptualizing it shapes it.

If this is so, and I believe it is, then what are we to do with our own and others’ talk of awakening, enlightenment? Can we really take seriously claims of a non-conceptual epiphany into the nature of self and world? If we have such experiences ourselves how are we to frame them to ourselves and others? Do we adopt a posture of dignified quietism, retreating when asked to claims of ineffability? (Im)personally, I’d rather not. Thankfully, Thompson invites a productive alternative:

Finally, if enlightenment is concept-dependent, then modern Buddhists need to ask not just what it is but also what it could be. In other words, which concept of enlightenment is appropriate and worth elaborating here and now? Which concept and social practices of enlightenment or awakening are worth reaching for? In Kant’s words: “Dare to be wise. Have courage to use your own understanding.”

Invitation accepted. I’ll here address only the concept. I suggest we skillfully conceive of enlightenment as a human organism’s ongoing realization of the dream-like, non-dual, and constructed nature of its phenomenal field. This realization doesn’t need to bear any philosophical weight beyond its scope. Those who attempt to lade it with extra baggage give this sense of enlightenment and the endeavor to it an unsavory reputation for epistemic immodesty. It doesn’t afford privileged access to Truth or Reality, it won’t of itself without continued practice and intention necessarily transfigure the human person into a moral saint, though it certainly makes such moral improvement easier, and it does not reveal that ‘Everything is truly (in an ontological sense) Mind or Consciousness’. Finally, whether or not it cuts short a purported endless cycle of rebirth, it does genuinely relieve suffering.

This is by no means an original idea. Thomas Metzinger, in his book Being No-One, outlines just such a conception of ‘enlightenment’, one fully compatible with the European sense of the word. The passage quoted below is rather full of specialized jargon defined within the text, but I think you can get a sense even so:

Try to imagine a PSM [phenomenal self-model] that was fully opaque [introspectively apparent as an internally generated construct]. Imagine a system that—all other aspects held constant—is characterized by the fact that … the transparency constraint [introspective unavailability of the internally generated nature of phenomenal content], is not satisfied for its self-model at all. Earlier processing stages would be attentionally available for all partitions of its conscious self-representation; it would continuously recognize it as a representational construct, as an internally generated internal structure. The SMT [Self-Model Theory] makes the following prediction: Phenomenologically, this system would not have a self, but only a system-model. It would not instantiate selfhood. Functionally, it would still possess all the computational and informational advantages associated with having a coherent self-model, at the price, however, of a somewhat higher computational load ...

But possibly it could still operate under a centered model of reality, even if this model were not phenomenologically centered anymore. What the neurobiological characteristics of such a system would be is presently unclear. However, it may be interesting to note a specific phenomenological analogy. There is one type of global opacity that we discussed in our last neurophenomenological case study, namely, the lucid dream (see section 7.2.5). In the lucid dream the dreamer is fully aware that whatever she experiences is just the content of a global simulation, a representational construct. It is also plausible to assume that there are state classes in the phenomenology of spiritual or religious experience resembling this configuration—but only during the waking state. Now imagine a situation in which the lucid dreamer would also phenomenally recognize herself as being a dream character, a simulated self, a representational fiction, a situation in which the dreaming system, as it were, became lucid to itself...

I am, of course, well aware that this second conception of selflessness directly corresponds to a classical philosophical notion, well-developed in Asian philosophy at least 2500 years ago, namely, the Buddhist conception of “enlightenment.”

Dare to be wise. Have courage to use your own understanding. Let us lucidly wake together in the light of reason!