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.

Meditation 5: Dhyana

Meditation,

Been in dhyana recently? No, I thought not: me neither. If you have, you’re probably on retreat somewhere rather than reading a blog. However, when I raised the subject of dhyana on the Middle Way summer retreat last year, I was quite surprised at how little people knew about it who were regular meditators. It’s a subject worth clarifying. What lies at the heart of it is this question: what sorts of states are we trying to achieve in meditation, and what value do they have?

Dhyana is a Sanskrit word (Pali equivalent being jhana) for a state of meditative absorption, as described in the Buddhist tradition. In fact, there are 8 different levels of dhyana as described in the Buddhist Pali Canon. As far as I’m aware, there is no equivalent description of absorbed states in other meditative traditions (except perhaps Hinduism, which has borrowed from Buddhism in this regard). Buddhism pioneered a vocabulary that we just don’t have anywhere else. It’s a vocabulary that does not seem to be widely known or used yet in the West: we talk about sublimity, rapture etc., but not in nearly as precise a way as the Buddhists have managed.Knott's_Yantra mojonavigator

The idea of ‘meditative absorption’ is itself a shorthand for a state that is, to put it mildly, difficult to describe. In the traditional description of the first level of dhyana, you start off with 5 factors: one-pointed concentration, initial thought, energetic initial thought, sustained thought, rapture and bliss. Then you lose some of these factors as you go into higher dhyanas (or at least they become so subtle that you don’t notice them any more). This description at least gets over some of the main points: that in dhyana, concentration, intention and positive emotion come together and melt together.

How do you know when you’re in dhyana? I don’t think there is any easy way to tell with certainty, but there are some signs that are all a matter of more-or-less. Your experience gains stability – not fixedness, but a lot more continuity. Your body gains a strong sense of balance, with both uprightness and groundedness in equal measure. You’re likely to have a sensation of energy rising in your spine. The object of meditation becomes a very subtle internal version of itself called the nimitta.

It’s a truism of meditation that the point of meditating isn’t to experience dhyana, or indeed to have ‘good meditations’. There’s certainly a danger of meditation turning into a sort of trippy yearning for dhyana – and never getting it. Wanting dhyana too much is probably a good way of losing the balance and groundedness you need to make progress in meditation. However, one can also go too far with this way of talking down the importance of dhyana. There is a sort of ‘effort’ involved in meditation (see the discussion following Meditation 3), which is about maintaining continuity of intention. This continuity of intention needs goals of some sort to relate to, and if we want a specific goal rather than an incremental direction, dhyana is a good goal to have. It is, after all, a genuine and attainable experience, and thus a far more appropriate goal than a remote ideal like enlightenment. The important thing is not to let rumination about such a goal dominate your experience.

It’s also important not to confuse dhyana with metaphysical over-readings of it. It may make you feel that you’ve gone to the gods, or penetrated to the supreme truth: but actually you’re just having an experience. That experience may be unusual and supremely inspiring, but it’s not an insight into the universe itself. That point is underlined by the scientific evidence from biofeedback machines which seems to identify dhyana with high-amplitude alpha waves in the brain. Of course the experience is not to be reduced to a brain-state, but it is dependent on it. Western philosophy and religion, from St Augustine to Schopenhauer, is littered with people who experienced dhyana (or something like it) and thought it was some kind of ultimate ‘truth’. The Buddhist analysis is a very good corrective to such assumptions.

Using the concept of integration, you can describe dhyana as a temporary integration. Energies that were previously divided and in conflict with each other are, for the time being at least, working together. However, this experience of temporary integration is entirely dependent on the conditions of your meditation, and will rapidly change when those conditions change.

For my own part, I think I have only experienced dhyana a few times, usually on retreat. I will close with a poem I wrote more than 25 years ago, which attempts to describe one such experience. You may just not have a clue what I’m on about, in which case that’s OK, or perhaps you may be able to relate the imagery to your own experience of meditative absorption.

A silver tension stills

between the water’s gulf and air above,

holds, as the skin of milk

the fat of fearlessness.

Even a knife’s blade stabbed

into a lake is suddenly enamelled

with shining mother-of-pearl

as the tension stretches,

sure as elastic armour. And my fist

grasped out into the air above runs

bright with the clarity of it.

Standing above, the fear is far

like something vague behind a mirror

while the body lying shell-clear in bare water

basks in the sunlight streaming through.

And the mud has sunk, and the silver burns.

Picture: Knott’s Yantra by Mojonavigator (Stephen Slade Tien) (Wikimedia Commons)

Critical Thinking 6: Fallacies and Cognitive Biases

Critical Thinking, Psychology,

There are a great many different fallacies and a great many different cognitive biases: probably enough to keep me going for years if I was to discuss one each week on this blog series. What I want to do here, though, is just to consider the question of what fallacies and cognitive biases actually are, and how they relate to each other. This is a contentious enough subject in itself.

A fallacy is normally described as a flaw in reasoning, or a type of mistake whereby people draw incorrect conclusions from the reasons they start with. This would be correct when applied to formal fallacies, but I think incorrect when applied to the more interesting and practically relevant informal fallacies. Here’s a simple example of a formal fallacy (one known as affirming the consequent):

Good Catholics attend mass regularly.

Bridget attends mass regularly.

Therefore Bridget is a good Catholic.

You might think this was quite a reasonable conclusion to draw from the reasons given. However, it is not a necessary conclusion. You don’t have to be a good Catholic to attend mass regularly, and it’s quite possible that Bridget is an uncertain enquirer, or a bad Catholic trying to keep up appearances, or a Religious Studies scholar doing field research into Catholicism. A conclusion that is not necessarily true is not valid, and thus a formal fallacy.

However, it may be reassuring to reflect that the vast majority of arguments we actually use in practice are formal fallacies. Many of them are inductive (see Critical Thinking 2), and even those that are not inductive may be deduction (like the example above) of a kind that is formally invalid but actually reasonably enough most of the time. Formal fallacies are thus of little interest from the practical point of view. Informal fallacies, on the other hand, tell us much more about unhelpful thinking, even though they may actually be formally valid in some instances.

Informal fallacies are just unjustified assumptions: for example, the assumption that some objectionable personal attribute in the arguer refutes their argument (ad hominem); or that there are only two choices in a situation where there is actually a spectrum of options (false dichotomy); or the assumption that using your conclusion as a reason provides an informative argument (begging the question). What is objectionable about arguments involving these moves often depends on the circumstances, and it requires thoughtful judgement rather than just applying black-and-white rules. But that’s also the indication that these fallacies actually matter in everyday life.

Informal fallacies are unjustified assumptions identified by philosophers. The only genuine difference between informal fallacies and cognitive biases, as far as I can see, is that cognitive biases are unjustified assumptions identified by psychologists and often tested through experiment. Psychologists may explain our tendency to make these particular kinds of unhelpful assumptions in terms of the physical, social and evolutionary conditions we emerge from, but in the end these kinds of explanations are less central than the identification of the bias itself. Usually cognitive biases can be ‘translated’ into fallacies and vice-versa. For example, the in-group bias (tendency to favour the judgements of your own group) is equivalent to the irrelevant appeal to the authority of the group (or its leaders), irrelevant appeal to popularity within the group, or irrelevant appeal to tradition in the group, all of which are recognised informal fallacies. The outcome bias, whereby we judge a past decision by its outcome rather than its quality at the time, involves an irrelevant appeal to consequences.

Philosophers and psychologists thus both have very useful things to tell us about what sorts of mistakes we are likely to make in our thinking, and insofar as their different contributions are practically useful, they tend to converge. I would also argue that this convergence of useful theory relates closely to the avoidance of metaphysics (see cognitive biases page). Despite the widespread idea that fallacies are faults in reasoning, they really have nothing to do with reasoning in the strict sense of logical validity. They are all about the unhelpful assumptions we often tend to make.

Exercise

See if you can identify  and describe the type of unhelpful assumptions being made in these video clips. You don’t necessarily need to know the formal titles of the fallacies involved to identify why they are a problem.

1.

3.

4.

Practical ethics using the Middle Way

Ethics, Middle Way Philosophy, , ,

There is no podcast this week because Barry is away. Instead, here is the latest instalment of the series of talks and discussions recorded on last year’s retreat. This one is of great practical importance, as it discusses how we can make practical moral judgements justified by the Middle Way, and includes example issues like cannibalism, vegetarianism, euthanasia and abortion. If you’d like the opportunity to discuss this live, do sign up for the online discussion group at 6pm on Sun 30th March, when we’ll be discussing ethics. In the meantime there is also the comment function.

The rider and the elephant

Ethics, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Psychology, , ,

Can we actually change our moral responses? Much debate about moral issues is fruitless because, however well-justified the reasons given for one position or another, they make no difference to our position. Rather than changing our position in response to strong evidence or argument seen overall, we tend to focus on minor weaknesses in views we intuitively oppose (or minor strengths in views we support) and blow them out of proportion.  I’ve recently been reading Jonathan Haidt, who encapsulates this situation in the image of the rider and the elephant. Elephant and rider Dennis JarvisThe rider thinks he’s in charge, but most of the time he’s just pretending to direct an elephant that is going where it wants to go. He gives lots of psychological evidence for the extent to which we rationalise things we’ve already judged, rather than making decisions on the basis of reasoning. This is the whole field of cognitive bias. For example, people experiencing a bad smell are more likely to make negative judgements, and judges grant fewer parole applications when they’re tired in the afternoon than they do when they’re fresh in the morning.

However, too many people draw a cheap moral determinism out of this. That’s a determinism expressed by Hume in his famous line “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Fortunately Haidt, who’s a professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, recognises that Hume’s position is over-stated, and that it is based on a simplistic false dichotomy between reason and emotion. Just because the rider tends to over-estimate his influence on the elephant, doesn’t mean he has no influence at all. Rather, someone controlling a beast with as much bulk and momentum as an elephant needs to develop skills to encourage it in one direction rather than another, and to set up the conditions that will encourage it to go one way rather than another rather than just telling it and expecting it to obey instantaneously. Nor are the rider and the elephant  to be equated to “reason” and “emotion”: each uses reasoning, and each has motives and starting points for reasoning, making a complex mixture of the two in both rider and elephant. The elephant would be better described as an elephant of intuition and the rider as conscious awareness.

Haidt, like most scientific or academic commentators on this kind of issue, also makes certain questionable assumptions. One of these is that of the essential unity of the rider and of the elephant (particularly the elephant). If it was true that the elephant definitely wanted to do one thing, and the rider another, it would be pretty much impossible to steer the elephant in any sense. But this is an over-simplification of the physical intuitions we get from our bodies. We may intuitively judge one way, but there is also an intuitive sympathy to some extent for the opposing approach. Perhaps we should not think of the rider so much as astride one elephant, as leading a herd of them. To lead the herd you find the elephant who is pre-disposed to act in the most objective way, encourage it, and (because elephants are herd animals) the rest are likely to follow.

That’s where integrative practice comes in. In the over-specialised world of academia, it seems to often to be the case that those engaged in crucial and ground-breaking research in psychology (such as, say, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt) have evidently never experienced meditation, and completely ignore the potential of meditation and of other integrative practices to modify our responses. There are, of course, other academics investigating meditation, but these usually show little interest in ethics or judgement. Cheap determinism seems to rule, for the most part, because over-specialised people don’t join up the evidence in different quarters, and the incentive system could hardly be better geared to discourage synthetic thinking.

In meditation, one can become more aware of that variety of possible responses. Meditation is, in effect, a close scrutiny of the elephant on the part of the rider, from a sympathetic inside viewpoint. The better he knows the elephant, the more he can skilfully manage it. He can rein in the elephant a little so it has more time to listen to the other members of the herd. He can make it more aware of ambiguity using humour, art or poetry. He can give the elephant a wider range of options by educating its sensibility. He can help the elephant  become more aware of the rider, and cultivate its sympathy for the rider.

That doesn’t mean that the elephant will ever cease to go where it wants to go. The question is just what it means to ‘want’. Wanting is never simple. We have lots of wants, and it is the integration of those wants that helps us steer the elephant in a more acceptable direction – indeed that helps us see what that better direction is. The rider really needs the elephant, and no merely abstract morality can be justified that does not take that elephant into account.

 

Picture: Rider and elephant by Dennis Jarvis (Wikimedia Commons)

Critical Thinking 5: Ambiguity

Critical Thinking,

Arguments are, of course, made out of language, and language is always ambiguous to some extent. If you apply the embodied meaning understanding of the meaning of language, there can never be any precise equivalence between the meaning of a word, sentence or other symbol for any two people. Each understands that meaning in relation to their own body. We do manage to communicate, but only on a more-or-less  basis. If your language means something similar enough to you and to your audience, you will communicate to an extent. The same problem applies between you and your past or future self. The words you wrote in your diary ten years ago may not mean the same now.

However, issues of ambiguity are more striking in some cases than others, and where they arise more strongly in argument they are more likely to create misunderstandings and conflicts. There are two types of problematic ambiguity: ambiguity proper, which is multiple meanings for the same word or term, and vagueness, which is the lack of clear boundaries on the application of a term.

Very often, but not always, ambiguities and vagueness are just resolved by contextual judgement. For example, if I say “I’m going to the bank” and I’m carrying a chequebook, you don’t think I’m going to sit by the side of a river; and if I’m carrying a picnic basket, you don’t tend to think I’m going to have a relaxed picnic inside my local branch of HBOS. Vagueness also often does not matter: if I tell you I’m going for “a short walk”, you don’t need to know exactly how many metres I will be walking – and indeed, nor do I.

Ambiguity that affects the justification of an argument is known as equivocation. If you use the same term in a reason and a conclusion, but don’t realise that they have an importantly different meaning in each case, the justification of your conclusion is likely to be seriously undermined. Abstract words are most prone to this: for example, life, civilised, natural, beautiful, meaning, good, art, and (oddly enough) logical. Equivocal arguments often have a baggy abstract term in the middle of them that is in need of a bit of clarification, and if it’s not clarified needless disputes can ensue. Here’s an example of a dispute between Ken and Thelma:

Ken: Wind turbines are a natural way of generating energy without burning fossil fuel, so the government should be investing in them much faster.

Thelma: Natural! You’ve got to be joking! They’re the most artificial monstrosities you ever saw! A blot on the landscape!

Here Ken is using the idea of the “naturalness” of wind turbines as the basis of his argument for them, but “natural” obviously means something quite different to Thelma. They will not be able to make progress in resolving their disagreement until they have resolved what they mean by this deeply ambiguous word. They can do this by defining what each means by the term. Let’s imagine that the conversation continues in a helpful direction.

Ken: So what do you mean by “natural”, there, Josh? Is it to do with what wind turbines look like?

Thelma: Of course! It can’t be natural if it’s a big noisy metal contraption sticking up on a green hill, can it?

Ken: So “natural” means not noisy and metal? What does it mean more positively?

Thelma: In harmony with the landscape. Trees and pastures are natural, but wind turbines aren’t.

Ken: What about buildings? Are they natural?

Thelma: Most of them aren’t, but the more traditional buildings like stone barns are more natural-looking than modern buildings.

Ken: So, by “natural” you mean that it has an appearance that you feel blends harmoniously with the landscape?

Thelma: That’s right.

Ken: Well, that’s not what I meant when I said that wind turbines are a natural way of generating energy. I meant that they are sustainable and don’t cause pollution. They cause much less disruption to the eco-system as a whole when you compare them to a coal-fired power station, for example.

Whether or not Ken and Thelma can now resolve their disagreement about wind turbines, at least now they have clarified what they are arguing about.

Exercise

Identify the ambiguous term or terms in each of these examples, and clarify the likely meanings of it for each person.Fontaine_Duchamp

1. Jake (looking at object pictured on right in an art gallery): How can that be art? This guy has just bought a urinal and stuck it in an art gallery!

Sandip: That’s precisely it. He’s stuck it in an art gallery. That makes it art.

2. Mother: I thought you were going to go to bed early tonight! It’s 11.30 already!

Teenaged son: But I went to bed at 12.30 last night.

3. Unionist: The management’s pay offer is only a 0.8% increase on last year’s pay, when the inflation rate is 2.3%. Some other workers in the same group are getting 2.7% rises. That makes the offer both unfair and unreasonable.

Manager: The pay offer is in line with the going market rate in the industry. That makes it perfectly fair. It is all that the company can afford without threatening its competitiveness. It would not be reasonable to expect the company to go out of business to meet an excessive pay settlement. 

4. Camilla: The Quakers are not really Christians. They don’t believe in the Trinity, or that the Bible is the Word of God.

Billy: But they have an idea of God, and they come from the Christian tradition. They rely on personal experience of God rather than on the Bible or doctrines, that’s all. 

5. Rosie: Your directions were rubbish! You said to go straight ahead by the Dog and Duck Inn, but there isn’t any road straight ahead at the Dog and Duck Inn, just left and right. I didn’t know which way to go! I was wandering around for ages!

Lee: The directions were perfectly clear. You just have to interpret them with common sense, that’s all! There’s a staggered junction by the Dog and Duck Inn, which means you go left and then right, but that’s practically the same as straight ahead. It should have been obvious!