All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Life and death

Middle Way Philosophy, Religion, ,

I am sometimes asked whether Middle Way Philosophy offers a meaning of life, and what it has to say about death. I have often been hesitant in trying to offer perspectives on these kinds of questions, because there is such a long tradition of unhelpful metaphysical speculation about them. However, I think the Middle Way can be applied helpfully here, if only to challenge that tradition of speculation and point us back to experience. This post is the final chapter of my new introductory book, Migglism, which should finally be published within a week or so now. I have added it to the book recently in response to a useful suggestion from Mike Fedorski.

If we are to avoid metaphysics, there can be no meaning to life as a whole beyond the meaning that we experience. That may sound like a familiar truism – that the meaning of life is just what we make it. However, the Middle Way implies a couple of other points here as well. Not only is there no absolute metaphysical meaning to life, but there is no denial of meaning either – life is not meaningless, but rather full of the meaning we find in it. The other crucial point is that meaning is an incremental matter. We are not going to find meaning all at once, as a solution to all our struggles to find meaning. Rather, we can gradually increase the meaningfulness we encounter in life.

I suggest, also, that this incremental meaningfulness is found with our degree of integration. The meaning and value we find in life as a whole, after all, need be no different from the meaning and value we find in different specific things in life: for example, the momentary value we find in stroking a pet, or embracing someone we love. The problem with getting a meaning of life as a whole from these experiences is not that they are not meaningful in themselves, but that this meaning is momentary, and perhaps in conflict with the lack of meaning we may experience at other times. When I’m feeling frustrated in the office later on, the embrace of the early morning is already gone from my awareness.

Thus it seems that we should gradually find more meaning in life the more we become integrated, whether that integration is of desire (bringing our energies together), meaning (bringing our sense of significance together), or belief (bringing our views of the world together). The more we are integrated, the less likely we are to be caught up in inner conflict and frustration, and thus the more likely we are, on average and on the whole, to find life unified, meaningful and fulfilling.

This fulfilment is always relative to the circumstances we find ourselves in. If, for example, you are a citizen of Aleppo being constantly bombed by Syrian government forces during the Syrian civil war, you will spend most of your energy just dealing with extremely difficult and stressful external conditions. However, there will still be more or less integrated ways that you can respond to these conditions. The meaningfulness of your life in such circumstances could only really be measured against what it might have been in different circumstances, whether those circumstances were reasonably secure or even over-protected – not against some abstract absolute. Some people can be destroyed by difficulties, while others gain an intense sense of fulfilment by responding in an integrated way to them.

One of the basic conditions of difficult circumstances in life is the ever-present threat of death. Like other conditions in life, it seems that the key question is whether we can accept death and respond to it in a balanced way, rather than anything about death itself. Speculation about death itself is just a distraction from the Middle Way – whether such speculation involves beliefs about an afterlife (or reincarnation), or the denial of such beliefs. Our living experience gives us no purchase at all in justifying either affirmation or denial of afterlife beliefs, so, for example, the amount of debate about rebirth that distracts Buddhists who are otherwise interested in practising the Middle Way is rather unfortunate.

Death itself seems to be just a condition of life. It is something we are often inclined to forget that it is the temporariness of our living experience that makes it meaningful to us. An eternity of pleasure could be no more meaningful to a breathing, changing creature than an eternity of suffering, as we can only grasp the idea of pleasure or suffering in relation to an experience in which things change. The idea of such an eternity is thus just a symbolic abstraction. In practice, our pleasures are pleasurable and our pains painful only because they are impermanent, and the same could be said for life as a whole.Complaint_in_Hell

So, death is just a condition of life. It may be one that causes us anxiety, but anxiety is just another term for conflict between a part of us that is attached to living experience and a part that recognises the inevitability of death. If we can still that conflict, through integrative practice of one kind or another, there seems to be no reason why we should not make progress in stilling our fear of death.

I understand the sentiment that leads Dylan Thomas to write

Do not go gentle into that good-night,

But rage, rage against the dying of the light!

I read his poem as a protest against passivity and morbidity. It is possible to be too passive in the face of death, or too obsessed with the question of death. If we swap the immediate experience of living for a mere abstract idea of how we might adapt to death, we are merely distracting ourselves from the full use of the life that is available to us. However, I think Thomas’s mistake is to identify the acceptance of death with one partial feeling we have in life. Instead, I think acceptance of death probably comes through integration of our different desires in life. We do not have to fight against our fear of death, but rather incorporate the energy of that fear into an overall recognition that we can live life better in a full acceptance of its conditions – and those conditions include death.

Meditation 13: The Hindrance of Restlessness and Anxiety

Meditation, Practice, ,

So far in my look at the hindrances I’ve worked through sense desire (meditation 7), ill-will (meditation 9) and sloth and torpor (meditation 11). So now I reach the fourth hindrance, restlessness and anxiety. This might be especially timely, given that  we’re approaching the time of year when many students face the anxiety of examinations.

Restlessness and anxiety is the biggest hindrance for me, and, I suspect, for many other people. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that our age is sometimes described as the ‘age of anxiety’. As Steven Pinker documents, in most of the developed world outward conflict has declined. The long-term trend is for Phone_calls_can_cause_anxiety_in_select_individuals Nervous Nedless violent crime and fewer deaths in war. But perhaps that sense of safety has been purchased at the expense of anxiety, which is a sign of inner conflict. There is constant pressure on us to meet social expectations in a rather unpredictable environment, whether that’s through examinations, the market, sexual expectations, responsibility for vulnerable children, or the whims of powerful bosses. Our social environment is increasingly fluid, but also increasingly competitive, and competition breeds anxiety.

So, it’s not surprising that when we sit down (or even stand up) to meditate, anxiety is one of the things that readily surfaces. The distinction between restlessness and anxiety is an incremental one, resting on whether it’s more of a physical twitchiness or more of a mental rumination. The way I experience restlessness is just a sense that it’s impossible to stay on the cushion. Sometimes I even get up without reflection. Anxiety, on the other hand, is likely to take the form of a list of things to be done, or things that ought to be said, or other expectations that need to be met, all of which pile into your awareness, and make it apparently impossible to gain the basic stillness needed to settle into a meditation practice.

In my experience there is only one way of tackling this hindrance that has any chance of working, and that is physical awareness. The thing that can unify your divided, speedy, unreflective thoughts is simply the fact that you have a body, and that this body has sensations. Particularly, the centre of your experience in the lower middle of your body can act as a focal point for physical awareness. This might be aided by scanning all the parts of your body systematically and noting your sensations, or by focusing on the movements of your diaphragm as you breathe.

A good posture can really help this sort of awareness. Assuming that you are doing a sitting meditation, your sense of secure seatedness can also be given an edge of positive energy by aligning your spine in an upright but not rigid posture, and allowing energy to rise up your spine. In my experience, that energy by itself can begin to calm anxiety.

If you’re a bit more of a greed-type and less of a hate-type than I am, you might also find it helpful to reflect on something that inspires you. Rather than scrappy little ruminations that just reflect group pressure on your life, think about something that you really want and that nourishes you in the longer-term. It might be inspiring ideas, inspiring people, great works of art, awe-inspiring landscapes. If you realise that you’re anxious before you start meditating, reading a poem beforehand, or listening to exactly the right sort of calming music, might help you get into the right frame of mind.

Each reasonably successful meditation, where you find a centre, makes it slightly less likely that you will be quite so anxious next time round. But there are always still pressures of anxiety in our lives that make it likely that it will return. A lasting answer to anxiety requires heroic persistence and commitment.

Index of previous meditation blogs

Picture by Nervous Ned (Wikimedia Commons) – Creative Commons licence

Middle Way Thinkers 1: David Hume

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, , ,

This is the start of a new blog series on Middle Way Thinkers (the meditation series will continue, but with more varied contributors and less frequently). What I mean by a ‘Middle Way Thinker’ is a well known person of the past or present who has made a major contribution to our thinking about the Middle Way. There is already a page on the Buddha on this site but not much on anyone else. I’m going to offer a bit of background and a summary of some key ideas of each figure, and try to distinguish their ideas that support the Middle Way from those I think less helpful. It’s not going to be restricted to philosophers, but may include all kinds of thinkers from different cultures and times.hume1

I’m going to start with David Hume (1711-1776) because I have such a soft spot for him, and he made such a creative contribution to philosophy, despite his mistakes and imperfections. Hume was born to a family of minor gentry in the borders of Scotland and attended university in Edinburgh at the age of 12 (normal in the eighteenth century!). He was given to philosophical reflection from an early age, but also inspired by the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ that was taking off during his life. He lived at various times in London, France and Edinburgh, but his major work A Treatise on Human Nature, was composed while he was on a kind of study retreat at a rural French college called La Fleche. He poured his amazingly new ideas into the Treatise, but it fell ‘still-born from the press’, as Hume put it, gaining few readers. Although he then tried to present his ideas in new forms (his two Enquiries), he eventually got so disillusioned with the lack of public response to his philosophy that he turned to writing history instead.

What’s so thoroughly important to the Middle Way in Hume is his emphasis on experience as the basis of our judgements. Although there were empiricists (such as Aristotle and Locke) before Hume, they were not nearly as thorough and rigorous in their allegiance to experience as Hume was. Unlike his predecessors, Hume applied the criterion of experience to areas like the self, causality, ethics and religious belief. Where his predecessors had been patchy in their allegiance to experience, sometimes falling back on dogma when the going got tough, Hume followed it through all the way.

For example, Hume recognised that you cannot actually experience a cause – all you experience are two events that you generally assume are linked because they occur so frequently in succession. One billiard ball hits another and apparently causes it to move, but we only have the frequency of their interaction as the basis to call this a ’cause’. Similarly, Hume recognised that when we look inside our experience we don’t actually find a self, just a lot of experiences of thoughts, feelings etc. that we tend to assume are ‘ours’. The ‘me’ label that we apply to these is just a label, as we don’t find a separate ‘me’ amongst the thoughts and feelings.2-tined fork

But perhaps Hume’s biggest achievement, in my view, is what is often known as ‘Hume’s Fork’. You can imagine Hume’s fork as a binary choice, like a fork in the road, and it applies to claims. Either, he said, a claim tells us something relevant to experience, or it tells us something about the relationships between ideas. We can’t accept that claims about relationships between ideas tell us anything relevant to experience. Here is the blistering way he puts this in the rousing finale of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning of quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

I think this is the first attack on metaphysics in Western philosophy. He was basically pointing out that a claim that is only concerned with the ultimate and abstract zone beyond experience (what philosophers call the a priori) can do not more than tell us about the conventions that we apply when trying to understand the universe. It tells us nothing about the universe itself, or for that matter about ourselves or our values. To assert that it does is deluded in a very basic way that confuses the sign with the reality. In this sense he was independently revisiting some of the insights of the Buddha.

However, as with every other philosopher, there are also ways that I think Hume veered significantly from the Middle Way. I think his biggest mistake was the fact-value distinction, which he virtually invented. Hume assumed that because we need to justify our beliefs in terms of experience, we have to confine our beliefs to factual ones that can be justified through scientific observation. A justifiable ethics for him would also have to be based on factual observation about acceptable moral attitudes in society. This popularised the regrettable assumption, that haunts a lot of Western thinking to this day, that ethics is inherently subjective – in contrast to ‘facts’ which can be absolutely objective. This is a false dichotomy for which we have paid with much confusion.

Nevertheless, on the whole I tend to find Hume an inspiring figure. He was a courageous figure prepared to think things through, defy the establishment, and trenchantly reject dogma wherever he found it. But despite his free-thinking, he was no dour Scottish puritan – rather an imperfect human figure who liked a good dinner and enjoyed the pleasures of friendship.

Some web links on Hume:

Critical Thinking 13: Quality and quantity

Critical Thinking, Middle Way Philosophy, Science, , , ,

Can you measure love? Or happiness? Or objectivity? Are there some things we can’t measure, or shouldn’t try to? The issue of qualitative versus quantitative comparison is a matter of controversy in the social sciences. It is also often a source of false divisions between science (where everything is taken to be measurable) and the arts (where the values involved cannot be measured).

One area where science can become dogmatic is if it takes the attitude that all variables worthy of investigation should be measurable. To be able to measure something, it needs to be publically available, and there need to be agreed units in which you can measure it. However, not everything worthy of investigation is publically available (especially mental events such as desires, meanings or beliefs). Although we have agreed units to measure many physical properties, such as length, wave frequency or force, we do not have agreed units to measure, say, the strength of a belief.

However, this doesn’t stop a quality like the strength of a belief from being incremental (a matter of degree). The strength of a belief can be recognised as incremental, and thus within the sphere of experience, without being quantifiable. Rather, we can talk about the strength of a belief in qualitative terms, but incremental ones.  The language that makes it incremental is liable to be vague – but deliberately so. For example, you could say that “Fred tentatively believes that his cat is ill” or “Xavier is fairly happy”. It really wouldn’t add anything to these vague degrees if we were to impose a fake precision on them. “Fred has 0.36 of a belief that his cat is ill” or “Xavier is 69% happy” would just impose a dogmatic belief in measurability on material that is not accessible in that kind of way. It would convey the deluded idea of precision without applying any genuine precision. We don’t have to get into such fake precision to use incremental qualities.

We also need to recognise the provisionality and uncertainty attending even precise measurements of physical objects. You can measure the block and find it 32.5cm long and 12.34 cm wide, but this Measurements_US Fish and Wildlife Service SE regionmeasurement still lacks precision when considered much more closely. Different people might measure the same thing differently, even using the same instruments. We also cannot rely absolutely on the constants on which units of measurement are based (such as the speed of light), because these are only based on measurements so far, subject to human errors, false assumptions and further changing conditions. Practically speaking, these uncertainties are unlikely to make much difference, but they still justify us in maintaining a degree of provisionality when we maintain belief in any quantification.

At the other end of the spectrum are absolute qualities. One central claim in Middle Way Philosophy (which has been adopted from empiricism) is that no quality in experience is absolute. We can think absolutely about, say infinity, perfection, nothingness, or irreducibility, but we can only do this in abstraction. Such abstractions are meaningful to us, but we can’t justify any belief in their pure occurrence (or pure absence) in experience.

So, I’d suggest some principles can be applied to issues of quality and quantity using the Middle Way:

1. Qualities can and should be incrementalised if they have an application in experience.

2. Incrementalised qualities are still worthy of investigation, even though they are vague.

3. Precise quantification carries a degree of uncertainty that needs to be recalled.

4. Our judgement of each thing should be treated only with the degree of precision that the thing can bear in experience.

Exercise

Try to classify the following. Are they (a) precisely measurable (though with uncertainty), (b) vague incremental qualities, or (c) absolutes applicable only in the abstract?

1. The earth’s magnetic field

2. The beauty of the Mona Lisa

3. Tony Blair’s charisma

4. Logic (i.e. correct inference)

5. The energy contained in a cereal bar

6. The freedom we enjoy in a democracy

7. The goodness of God

8. The smelliness of a pair of dirty socks

 

Index of past blogs on the Critical Thinking course

Picture: ‘Measurements’ by US Fish and Wildlife Service SE Region (Wikimedia Commons)