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.

Forgiveness

Ethics, Middle Way Philosophy, Practice

As Barry is undertaking a podcast interview with a member of the Forgiveness Project, he suggested to me that I should write something about forgiveness in relation to the Middle Way. This is something I am glad to do, especially after looking at some of the inspiring material on the Forgiveness Project website. I hope that forgiveness is something the Middle Way Society can actively promote, because it seems to me central to the practice of the Middle Way and of integration. All I am going to do here is offer an explanation of why I think this is the case – i.e. to relate the ideas of forgiveness, integration and the Middle Way.

Forgiveness is something that people often think they offer to others who have wronged them. I’m not so sure that this is the main significance of forgiveness. I’d suggest that it would be better to understand forgiveness as a process of integration overcoming a conflict that is both external and internal. The internal representation of the conflict seems to be the one that is most at stake in forgiveness, because bitterness can linger long after overt conflict has finished. What we need to reconcile, primarily, is the part of ourselves that is in conflict with another person with the part of ourselves that is in sympathy with them. If we didn’t have such a rigid view of ourselves to begin with, it would not be a matter of “me” forgiving “you”, or “you” forgiving “me”: rather, we each need to forgive parts of ourselves. Of course external reconciliation can play a powerful part in that, but it may not necessarily be the most important part.

Let’s consider an extreme example: suppose that a child is murdered. It often seems that few voices are more rancorously unforgiving than the parents of a murdered child, such as the parents of Jamie Bulger, who were opposed to the release of the killers eight years later, even though they were only ten at the time of the killing – see BBC article. It’s not surprising that such an event produces huge and violent conflicts in the parents that are still going on eight years later. Any compassion for the killer (who may be in a very confused or brutalised state) is repressed under the power of protective rage and desire for revenge. Yet that compassion for the killer is still present, together with a recognition that the killer is a human being not so different from the victim. The power of the repression may even be expressed through language that denies the human status of the murderer.

Forgiveness can only happen when that compassion, opposed to the protective or retaliatory feelings, is accessed and reconciled with those feelings. When that happens, the protective feelings can finally be channelled in a productive direction that values the welfare of the offender as well as that of the offended. If we think about what might create barriers to that process, the relevance of the Middle Way also becomes evident, for it is metaphysical views that block that integration process. Those views might take the form of absolute beliefs about retaliatory justice in the case of a criminal offence. But there are also beliefs about the self that lead us to identify what we have lost as ‘me’ or ‘mine’, Forgiveness_Barkamenbeliefs about the other as absolutely evil, or even beliefs about God, or other religious or political absolutes. These might stand in the way of forgiveness, because they stop us incrementalising our loss and considering it is the same terms as the losses of those who have wronged us.

Of course there’s also an alternative extreme – that of denying one’s own feelings and engaging in false and premature forgiveness. Forgiveness is not just a matter of telling people we forgive them, or even of telling ourselves we forgive them, but of reflecting both on our own feelings and on the grounds of compassion for the other, whilst cultivating a more generally integrated state of mind in which reconciliation can occur and the two impulses can unite. The same point would apply if it is ourselves we need to forgive – the process of shame or guilt being a similar matter of inner conflict.

If I consult my own experience, I am fortunate not to have ever been wronged in the kind of profound way Jamie Bulger’s parents were. Perhaps the biggest point requiring forgiveness from me involved being wronged by an employer, nearly ten years ago now. I think at that point I was too much concerned with immediate harmony and reasonableness, and should have stood up for myself more at a crucial point. As a result of my not doing so, I felt I was left with no alternative but to resign, and I started to feel my teaching career was over. Forgiveness became necessary for all the wrongs I started to load onto this incident , but it took me a long time to reach. The marker of forgiveness for me was no longer encountering hatred for this former employer in my meditation, but for years I would suddenly encounter it without warning, and realise that it was still there. The forgiveness could not be forced.

It is the Middle Way that makes forgiveness possible – or perhaps, conversely, also forgiveness that contributes to making the Middle Way possible. By avoiding both positive and negative dogmas surrounding wrongs that we have either done or had done to us, we can also avoid either premature and superficial forgiveness or a rigid failure to forgive. Whenever we forgive we need to address the conditions of our own hurt, but forgiveness is surely promoted by the practice of the Middle Way at all levels – for example by critical and reflective thought, by meditation, or by art that expresses and channels our anguish. Forgiveness is never easy, and neither is the Middle Way.

 

Picture: ‘Forgiveness’ by Barkamen (Wikimedia Commons)

Meditation 7: The Hindrance of Sense Desire

Meditation, Practice, ,

The Buddhist tradition has identified five types of hindrances that get in our way when trying to practise meditation: sense-desire, ill-will, restlessness and anxiety, sloth and torpor, and doubt. The point of this list is to help people identify particular kinds of appropriate remedies for the kinds of problems they might meet in meditation. However, this list is also very useful beyond formal meditation, as the five hindrances could also analyse the kinds of distraction that stop us attending to any focused activity. For the next five of my contributions to this meditation series, I’ve decided to focus on each of these hindrances in turn, and particularly to explore the remedies recommended for each of the types of hindrance, assessing whether they seem to work. As always, I have only my own experience to go on, and will be glad to hear others’ perspectives in comments.Fantin_Latour_The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony

Sense-desire (or ‘greed’) is perhaps the classic caricature of a hindrance. When someone is seriously distracted, we might easily imagine that they were having a sexual fantasy, or drooling in anticipation over their lunch. The numerous depictions of the temptations of St Anthony in Western art (such as this one by Fantin Latour) show this caricature. In my experience, however, this kind of caricature of sense-desire is fairly rare in practice. When they have sat down to meditate, most people don’t immediately go into something quite as obviously irrelevant and self-indulgent as a sexual fantasy. The kinds of sense-desire we’re actually more likely to meet are more subtle and more likely to sneak in looking initially a bit like part of the meditation. Perhaps we anticipate the approval of the person leading a meditation class, or return to some activity we have been doing regularly in recent hours, such an engrossing novel, a film, a game, or a conversation.

Sense-desire, like the other hindrances, seems to be just a matter of habit. If you don’t spend your days having non-stop sexual fantasies, then you’re not too likely to start when you meditate. If, however, you are very used to being stimulated by a particular kind of experience and responding to it – whether that’s a colleague’s words, an idea in your mind, your Facebook messages, or whatever – when you withdraw that stimulation your mind will carry on with the habitual response regardless. But these habits then get into conflict with the part of you that wants to meditate.

How can we resolve such conflicts? Traditional Buddhist sources give five kinds of possible response, which are explained very well in Kamalashila’s excellent book Meditation. These are:

  • Cultivating the opposite quality and/or re-directing the energy
  • Considering the consequences of indulging the hindrance
  • Sky-like mind (observing passively)
  • Suppression
  • Work on changing habits outside meditation (e.g. being less self-indulgent)

These are all possible strategies, and I wouldn’t want to rule any of them out. However, suppression (which needs to be distinguished from repression) is a relatively uninteresting one that’s less easy to reconcile with balanced effort (see previous post). Changing your habits outside meditation is also too big a topic to tackle here, so I’m going to focus on the first three.

Cultivating the opposite strikes me as a classic Middle Way strategy, as long as you interpret it as reminding yourself about the opposite perspective and making it meaningful, rather than reacting against your hindrance merely to adopt the opposite extreme. The opposite of sense-desire is ill-will, but you only need to cultivate it to the same extent as your hindrance if you want to avoid over-shooting the mark. So, for example, if you keep thinking about that novel you’re engrossed in, cultivating the opposite might mean, not thinking how much you hate the novel (which would be rather forced, to say the least), but rather what might be drawbacks or limitations of it as a pursuit. Very often, this is just about giving yourself a wider perspective.

A more basic way of cultivating the opposite is to think of the ‘opposite’ in direct physical terms, so rather than pursuing a high energy hindrance like sense-desire ‘in your head’ you could concentrate lower in your body to try to connect to more basic experience. This kind of approach fits well with the embodied meaning thesis. In a sense, here, you’re dissolving the metaphors that have become over-important and bringing them back into central experience. Personally, I’d say that this is by far the most successful strategy for me with any kind of obsessive, high-energy hindrance.

Considering the consequences works less well for me. It involves thinking through what will happen if you carry on with this hindrance, the patterns that you will help to set up, how it will be harder to change them in future, etc. However, it’s difficult to stop this turning into a Jiminy Cricket superego figure wagging his/her finger at you. It might also distract you from the meditation and lead you down quite different trains of thought involving further conflicts.

The ‘sky-like mind’ option is the zazen-type approach to hindrances. You stand back (as it were) and merely note each passing sense-desire as a cloud in the sky, letting it float off. My experience is that this approach requires you to already be relatively concentrated. If you’re stuck in sense-desire you are unlikely to be able to carry this off. But perhaps it’s a more successful approach deeper into a meditation, when you’re already quite concentrated but a hindrance starts to rekindle. If you have a basis of awareness, it may be possible to just let go in this way.

So, my personal verdict from experience is that breathing low in your body and returning gently to the object of concentration is far more likely to start integrating sense-desire than any other approach. But I’m sure others must have rather different experiences, or the diversity of approaches listed wouldn’t have developed. Also, sense-desire isn’t my main hindrance – ill-will and anxiety tend to loom larger. Those who encounter sense-desire as a major problem may well have a different view of how to approach it.

Critical Thinking 8: Ad hominem

Critical Thinking,

Ad hominem is a Latin phrase meaning ‘to the man’, and it is the label for a particular kind of fallacy in Critical Thinking. Sometimes this is known as “playing the man, not the ball”. It consists in an irrelevant appeal to the nature of a person to either support or dismiss their argument (usually to dismiss it). The following video gives some different types and examples:

The following video gives a great example from a US election campaign.

Here the argument is against Dan Quayle, comparing him unfavourably to Jack Kennedy even though he never claimed to be like Jack Kennedy, but merely compared his degree of experience to that of Kennedy. This is a kind of reversed guilt by association, dismissing Quayle’s argument about his suitability to stand in for the president through an irrelevant personal comparison.Sniper

However, there are some circumstances where it is relevant and appropriate to judge an argument by the character of the arguer. This is obviously the case if that person’s character is the subject of the discussion. So, if, for example, someone boasted in a job interview that they would make a good manager because they used to captain their school football team, it would not be ad hominem to respond that their criminal record undermined this claim by showing other characteristics that would not fit being a good manager. On the other hand, if someone said “The Scots won’t vote for independence: I saw a poll showing the majority were still against it” it would be an irrelevant personal observation to say “You’ve got a criminal record, so I don’t think you can offer any acceptable view of political matters.”

A person’s character may affect their credibility (which I discussed in Critical Thinking 7), but credibility gives an argument incrementally more or less weight. It never justifies the absolute acceptance or dismissal of an argument on the grounds of character. So, to spot an ad hominem, look out for sweeping dismissals (or occasionally, sweeping acceptances) without any incremental engagement with the complex inter-relationship between character and argument.

Exercise

Are the following fallacious ad hominems, or reasonable and relevant comments on character, or somewhere in between?

1. Harriet Harman has recently been in dispute with the Daily Mail over allegations that her past involvement with the National Council for Civil Liberties, at a time when the Paedophile Information Exchange was an affiliate of NCCL, meant that she was an “apologist for paedophilia”. Harman posted a tweet, in which she included a picture from Mail Online showing three bikini-clad girls (all under 18), and asked: “When it comes to decency and sexualisation of children, would you take lessons from the Daily Mail?”

2. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, because I have justice on my side, I am sure you will not be influenced by this gentleman’s pretended knowledge of the law. Why. he doesn’t even know which side of his shirt ought to be in front!’  Abraham Lincoln

3. David Cameron was elected promising “the greenest government ever”, but the number of international flights taken by the Prime Minister with his entourage is just as high as the number taken by his predecessors.

4. The baby boomer generation, who have benefitted massively from rising property prices without lifting a finger, have no right to tell younger people that they will have to work hard for a decent living.

5. George Osborne has a 2:1 in Modern History from Oxford. That hardly equips him to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post that obviously requires a profound grasp of Economics.

Critical Thinking 7: Authority and Credibility

Critical Thinking,

The Middle Way involves the avoidance of absolute authorities, but also the avoidance of the converse – dismissing all authority. In between we have the idea of justified authority that can be based on experience. Recognised fallacies in Critical Thinking, such as the irrelevant appeal to authority or the genetic fallacy, reinforce this need to avoid dogmatic extremes in thinking about authority. John_Caird_(theologian)Cognitive biases such as the authority bias also reflect psychological evidence of our tendency to uncritically obey authorities, especially reflected in the famous Milgram experiments.

The basic fallacy recognised in Critical Thinking in relation to authority is the irrelevant appeal to authority. This involves the assumption that an authority figure must be correct in whatever they claim, whether or not it is relevant to their particular expertise. Many adverts trade on this by using celebrities to endorse products that they have no particular expertise in. The following US commercial from the 1950’s is a classic example:

Nevertheless, because doctors are probably not a relevant authority to consult on which brand of cigarette to smoke, this does not imply that they do not have any authority. I am likely to rely on my doctor’s authority if he prescribes me a drug for a serious condition – not because I think him/her infallible, but because experience suggests that doctors are the best available source of information. The justification is largely second-hand, but no worse for that: the experience of most other people, that they have communicated to me, is that doctors are the best available guides to the complex field of medicine. To dismiss this authority on the basis of some mistakes made by doctors (even some serious ones) would be to make the reverse fallacy.

Another way of putting this more positively is that doctors have credibility. We are obliged to make judgements of credibility constantly, when deciding which books to read, which experts to consult, whose advice to heed etc, when (as often) we have no direct understanding of the issues. There are various criteria you can consciously apply to reflect on credibility: reputation, ability to gain information, vested interest, expertise, corroborating or conflicting information, and previously-known tendency towards bias. None of these are decisive by themselves, but they can be weighed together to try to reach a justified judgement.

It would be unjustified to give a huge weighting to one way of judging but ignore the others. For example, people often have some kind of vested interest in your acceptance of the information they offer (e.g. now, if you read this blog post, I have some vested interest in the shape of a vague hope that this will encourage you to buy one of my books in future). However, vested interest does not necessarily mean that the information should be treated with suspicion, or that the person’s motives are dominated by it, and if we dismissed everyone with a vested interest, we would never consult any experts about anything. Similarly, we often over-rate the effect of one well-known event on someone’s reputation: but if someone made a mistake or even committed a crime in the past, this might just as well be taken as a sign that they are likely to avoid that mistake in the future than that they will repeat it.

The authority bias, then, is like a single over-rated criterion of credibility. If, as in the Milgram experiments, you’re prepared to give painful electric shocks to others because a man in a white coat tells you to do so, you’re assuming that they have absolute authority because of their apparent expertise, and not considering the possibility of a problem with their moral judgement. Similarly, in a religious context, if you think that the fact that the book of Leviticus forbids homosexuality offers a relevant moral command for today, you are effectively taking the reputation of that religious text within a certain limited group and using this as your sole criterion for its credibility, whilst ignoring the lack of relevant expertise of the people who created the text, and the conflicts with other more recent sources of information.

Appeals to authority at their broadest are genetic fallacies – that is, the assumption that a claim is absolutely right because of where it comes from. This can apply to people, texts, governments, traditions, supposed intuitions and supposed observations. The basic problem is that wherever you think it has come from, you are still responsible for interpreting it and judging that it is justified and credible. If we take responsibility for our own judgements, the authority bias becomes much less likely.

Exercise

Do the following appear to be justifiable uses of authority? Why/ why not?

1. A father tells his three-year old daughter to stop slapping her sister. When she asks “Why?” he replies “Because I said so.”

2. A traditional Thai Buddhist buys a caged bird and releases it to gain merit. When questioned about this by a Western visitor, he explains that this is supported by Buddhist tradition and obeys the precepts of the Buddha.

3. A Member of Parliament votes against her conscience. When questioned by a constituent she explains that she was pressured by her party whip, and risked being de-selected by her party if she refused to vote with the party.

4. An amendment to the law in Afghanistan restores the right of a husband to use violence against his wife. The amendment is justified with reference to the Qur’an.

5. A disruptive student is told to leave the classroom by a teacher. The student refuses to leave, on the grounds that the teacher “Can’t just boss me around – I’ve got rights”.

6. A doctor gives advice on diet to an obese patient, which the patient refuses to follow. The patient points out that the doctor is overweight himself.

7. A husband had an extra-marital affair which was discovered, apologised for and forgiven a year ago. Since then his relationship with his wife has been good and trust seems to have been restored. However, now she is again suspicious about his fidelity (though the evidence is ambiguous). When the husband protests his innocence, she refuses to believe him, on the grounds that she was deceived before.

Mysticism

Religion, ,

Following my post on dhyana last week, I thought I would expand this into a discussion of mysticism. Mysticism is a phenomenon that has been misunderstood and treated with prejudice on many sides – particularly by scientific naturalists and by traditional Protestants, who often seem to use it as a pejorative term. For these people, ‘mysticism’ often seems to mean something like ‘supernaturalist obscurity’. Presumably they see mystics as cloaked dogmatists who confuse the issues through too much emphasis on ambiguity. For me, however, the term ‘mystic’ is overwhelmingly positive. Mystics are the heroes who have stood out against dogma and continually laid the emphasis on genuine experience in all the world’s religious traditions.

Mysticism begins with dhyana-like sublime experience, a type of experience available to anyone and not at all tied to religious beliefs of any kind. Here is an example from the autobiography of Jane Goodall (the chimpanzee expert), ‘Reason for Hope’:

Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral
was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a
wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D Minor. I
had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire
vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was at though the
music itself was alive. That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity,
was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy
of the mystic.

This is a modern example, but experiencesAngel like this have been recorded across cultures and religions. In Hinduism and Buddhism mystical experience is actively cultivated in meditation and is part of the mainstream tradition. In Islam it is an important part of the Sufi tradition, and in Christianity you can read the experiences of a succession of mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Richard Rolle and Jacob Boehme.

What these people had in common was that, having experienced temporary integrated states, they could see beyond the rigidities of metaphysical belief. Often this put them into conflict with the metaphysical mainstream of their religions (for example, the persecution of Sufis has been a regular feature of fundamentalist phases in Islam). More often, however, mystics have been happy to pay lip-service to the metaphysical pieties that surrounded them, whilst actually being largely indifferent to metaphysics. At the same time they have earned a far more profound respect from those who experienced their genuine degree of integration, and the wisdom and compassion that flowed from that.

Mystical experience is sometimes treated as a subset of religious experience, or sometimes identified with religious experience as a whole. I am more inclined to the former, as there are many types of experience that can be called ‘religious’. Some other forms of religious experience are also recorded by mystics – particularly visions. Visions, however, like dhyana-type experiences, can be recognised as powerful and valuable experiences without being attached to metaphysical beliefs. The significance of a vision can be implicitly or explicitly recognised as archetypal rather than conveying representational truths-out-there.

Of course, mystics in the theistic religions have often talked about God. However, for them God seems to have been an experience of uncertainty rather than the dogmatic basis of certainty that assertions about God and his revelations seem to have been for others. Where they express apparent certainty, it usually turns out to be a recognition of how far their lives had been changed by mystical experience, rather than any assertion about propositional ‘truths’ behind that experience. Where mystics have written about their experiences, they have often used language that may appear vague. They were writing, after all, about the cloud of unknowing (the title of a fourteenth century English mystical text of anonymous authorship), so their degree of vagueness was entirely appropriate to their subject matter. When it comes to advice on mystical practice, on the other hand, they are quite capable of precision. It is those who write about uncertain matters with a misleading amount of precision that we should be more suspicious of than of the mystics.

The mystical traditions of the world offer a huge resource of inspiration for the practice of the Middle Way. Of course, past and present mystics are each limited in their assumptions by their historical and religious circumstances. They can also be one-sided because their openness is so much concentrated towards the emotive end of the spectrum of meaning, so that they are not very likely to show deep critical thought or an investigative attitude to the world. Nevertheless, the mystics have absorbed and kept alive an important element of the spirit of agnostic scepticism through the ages, and we can still benefit from that spirit today.