No Soul for Westerners - Part 2

Implications of Anatta for Parapsychology

In Part 1, I outlined what the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (no self or no soul) mean in terms that people raised with classical Western educations could understand easily. In Part 2, I promised to discuss what implications anatta might have for Western parapsychological theory and research. Since I’m only a casual student of parapsychology, I’m going to confine myself to a few casual observations.

First, let’s consider why we should even care. Isn’t anatta a matter of religious belief that applies only to Buddhists, like the belief in transubstantiation applies only to Christians? That’s easy. No. Like many other aspects of Buddhist teaching, the doctrine of no self is a matter of empirical observation. It may come in various foreign-looking or sounding trappings, but ultimately it’s about discerning the true nature of reality by use of a standard set of methods available to anyone (broadly speaking, meditation). Even from a purely intellectual point of view, the concept of anatta is not that difficult to translate into Western understanding and experiences; it’s just that in Western culture there is pressure to continually reframing the discontinuous nature of lived experience into culturally sanctioned concepts such as the eternal soul.

Second, let’s consider self and soul. I’ve been using the terms interchangeably, but in fact they are not quite the same. The standard translation of anatta is no SELF. I often replace SELF with SOUL simply because the notion of a soul is a master category for organizing personal and social identity in Western cultures; it tends to subsume and/or imply self. The notion of anatta in Buddhism is NOT equivalent to the lack of a belief in a soul, i.e., a materialist or atheistic standpoint (well, at least not a materialist one. You could probably argue the atheism point until the cows come home, but that would be time better spent meditating). What it does mean is that there is no single personality, identity or soul that exists either during this lifetime or after this lifetime is over. There is reincarnation, but what gets reincarnated is not a specific person – it’s just random clumps of karmic flotsam floating on the sea of compassion. Like my favorite quote from RM Jiyu Kennett says, the bag that carried fish in it once still has a strong smell of fish about it even after it has been emptied.

Which sets us down squarely on the parapsychological doorstep of research done by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues on reincarnation. Stevenson’s work is interesting; a typical case would be a young child spontaneously making detailed statements about persons and events he or she could not know about, which then are shown to be understandable as the memories and concerns of someone who died nearby recently. If we believe Stevenson’s cases to be valid, in Western terms we might say the soul from a dead person was reborn in the young child, resulting in the child’s out-of-place memories. This interpretation fits what many Westerners think they know about karma, reincarnation and Buddhism, all of which somehow turn out to fit nicely into a comfortably familiar, mostly Judeo-Christian belief system with a reincarnation twist.

On the other hand, there’s no compelling reason to invoke the concept of a soul, self or personal identity as an explanation for Stevenson’s data. The bag smelling of fish (anatta) model would in fact work equally well. That is, if we accept Stevenson’s case data as valid, the child’s out-of-place memories could just as easily be interpreted as the left over, unresolved karma from some dead person’s life, now attached to a new human form so that it has another opportunity to be converted – that is, to have an act of agency expend its unresolved force and so come to rest in the ontological reality labeled as the Cosmic Buddha.

With something like Stevenson’s research, what’s important is that the data were collected at all. He didn’t attempt to create or sustain a religion or a system of political power with the information he searched out. Something was going on; he collected data as best he could and tried to generalize from it. Is there some kind of real phenomenon behind the type of cases Stevenson collected? I would argue yes, on account of various types of circumstantial evidence - but I really don’t know for sure. Does it have anything to do with reincarnation? I doubt it, at least as we use the word in my culture. Similar arguments could be made for the collection of ‘evidence’ in ‘ghost hunting’ ‘expeditions’ (a veritable firestorm of implicitly biased terminology).

In my effort to understand the Buddhist concept of anatta, I came to realize that rebirth and reincarnation are different things, particularly as culturally and historically understood (see Part 1). Lawrence Sutin documents how Westerners did not let partial or flawed understanding of foreign concepts prevent deploying those concepts for their own sociocultural ends. Here I argue that including anatta, understood accurately, in one’s theoretical toolbox can contribute to thinking about weird phenomena -  if only for guarding against cultural bias by asking what happens if we DON’T take the self or soul as the unit of analysis.

Of course, the negation of the self is exactly what strikes at the heart of parapsychology. Some parapsychologists want to reduce weird phenomena to perceptual anomalies while others are willing to admit there might be self-based psi abilities, but at its conceptual heart parapsychology takes the person as the unit of analysis. I don’t have a problem with either of those approaches except as totalitarian, reductionist agendas. I am an educated Western person myself and admire the methodological chops of parapsychologists. They are some of the very best academically credentialed, intellectually rigorous, open-minded and honest people when it comes to wrangling the weird into some kind of accountability. But if you take away from them the individual sense of self, body, personality or individual as the unit of the study, what will they have left?

Identification of strange personal and interpersonal phenomena, meticulous data collection and record-keeping, and careful, well-informed and broad-minded theory development and testing, I would suggest. But that sounds hard, and there’s always YouTube.

UFO data and its discontents

My response to the November 2 post at http://ufocon.blogspot.com/

“Can an accumulation of data . . . BIG data, as corporations and internet enterprises use it . . . bring UFOs to heel?”

Talk about big data in relation to ufology misses the crucial point that big data involves billions of widely valid, diachronically reliable data points. Everyone tends to agree on what a date of birth, a point of sale, a calendar date, a credit score, etc. is and has done so at least since the invention of the internet. Big data is not the same as the kind of information processing models that Vallee worked with or suggests now. Nor is Michel’s orthoteny an example of the use of metadata. Michel sought to find intelligibility in the phenomenon by presenting a hypothesis based on observational data. That’s plain old everyday use of data. (Shocking, I know.)

Ufology is not in any danger of having to deal with big data, even if Jacques Vallee himself returned and programmed a database for MUFON. I for one would be particularly interested in how any such database dealt with Simonton’s pancakes. Were pancakes present? Yes/No. Were they offered? Yes/No. Was the offer accepted? Yes/No. How did they taste? (Look what happened to Proust with the madeleine.) There are a million equally weird, equally significant variants on Simonton’s pancakes; databases are not designed to keep track of that kind of information.

If metadata or big data or the gestalt or big picture or whatever you want to call it has had anything at all to say about UFOs and suchlike, in my opinion it’s that that a trickster element is frequently involved and that no single explanation for any collection of cases will be satisfactory. I tend to think it’s more useful and interesting to look at UFOs etc. in terms of social/psychological construction and, for when you want to get esoteric, co-creation with an as yet undefined Other.

Reading UFO texts is very much like reading scripture; lack of sourcing or references to original data in a potentially high-stakes field rife with known frauds and fakes leaves the reader in about the same position as if they were reading the Bible. Hermeneutics, not big data, might be a better approach.

The End of the Witch's Grave

I grew up in a semi-rural area in the Northeast. As a teen, a really exciting evening would consist of walking down to the creek to sit on the stone bridge and gossip. Once we were old enough that at least some of us had cars, our adventures would take us further afield. A favorite destination, especially for me and my particular group of friends, was The Witch's Grave. This was in a very remote location down a series of dirt roads in a large state game preserve way out in the countryside. It was actually one of those old graveyards that are fairly common in the Northeast - consisting a dozen or two stones with dates no later than the 1800's set in a clearing of woods somewhere and surrounded by a hand-built fieldstone wall.

The exact grave of interest to us was made evident by the fancy, unusual-looking iron railing set in slate all around it and the fact that the head stone faced opposite from all the others. Those differences were all it took to make the young woman buried there into a witch and a fetish for night-traveling teens from all over upstate New York.

Me at Eva's Grave, late 1980s

The groups of teens that frequented the spot at night vandalized the grave. Over the years, the fancy iron railings were destroyed and the headstone was smashed. When I first visited the grave in the early 80s I recall those being intact, but in the photo above, which must have been taken a little less than a decade later, you can see the damage that has been done. The original iron railing consisted of several prong-topped uprights connected by links of forged chain. It was absolutely special and significant, and part of the attraction the grave had for one and all.

While the remote graveyard had been a destination for adventurous young people since at least the 70s (according to Eva's Facebook page) it seemed the bulk of the damage happened in the mid-80s. That's right around the era when nutjob Christian fundamentalism started coming into its own as a cultural force in America. One of the ways it did so was to whip up hysteria about satanism, witchcraft and the occult - resulting, ultimately, in the satanic panic of the early 90s, which destroyed entire lives. Maybe those cultural forces encouraged people visiting the grave of an alleged witch to vandalize and treat it with disrespect. But I digress.

Eva's grave, rebuilt by locals

At one point, locals repaired the stone walls of the cemetery and also place a stone covering over Eva's grave. Remember how I just said these walls were hand-built out of field stone? Maybe you're not familiar with field stone.

Cows and field stones

This guy is pretty happy. He's got land, he's got water, he's got timber, he's got a barn even. But farming in this area is notoriously difficult because of all the stones in the soil. In this picture, you can see them scattered about. They are useful for stepping over mud, but not so good when you want to plant crops. If you want to plant crops, you have to dig out all the stones and, oh, I don't know -- 

Another pic stolen from Eva Messer's Facebook page

Maybe build a wall with them? (This guy is also happy. He's holding what is basically the latest version of the iPhone in his hands.) Or at least get the space aliens to build a wall for them; space aliens seem to like working in stone.

Anyway, back to Eva's grave. 2015 has seen the culmination of a lot of activity around researching Eva's life and restoring her grave. For instance, we now know that Eva was a young woman who sailed from Bavaria to the United States at the age of 19. She married a farmer in upstate New York, had a child, then died at the age of 21. The unusual iron work and orientation of her grave were the traditions of her culture and religion; to me, the attention to that level of detail by the people who buried her suggest that she was a valued person, not a pariah.

This has all come to light through the work of local people who have researched her history and have just now actually rebuilt Eva's grave with historically accurate ironwork and a new headstone:

Eva was not a witch. She was a brave, adventurous young woman and mother who was clearly loved by those who knew her and somewhat more obscurely loved by those of us who came to celebrate her grave after she died. Kudos to the Berne/Turner Graveyard restoration team and the Eva Messer Friends group on Facebook who gave me closure on something I didn't even know I needed closure on. Check out their cool video:

Happy Day of the Dead

House of Kariz and Other Exotic Wonders

I was working in a bookstore when I happened across a biography of a Christian monk, Charles de Foucauld, who lived among the Tuareg in the North African Sahara. Foucauld was a fascinating character and if you are on the lookout for a gripping read, I would suggest finding a biography. You don’t want to just skim the web on this guy; get something you can sink your teeth into. Anyway, reading about Foucauld triggered in me an intense interest in the Taklimakan Desert that has lasted to this day.

Even at the time, I was aware that the connection didn’t make any sense. All I can say in my defense is that I was working in a bookstore; wishing further tales of lives spend amidst the sands, I had many choices. Since I was already reading Chinese history and classical literature and studying Mandarin, it made more sense to focus on that part of the world, so I ended up in the Taklimakan, a huge desert between China and Central Asia. Also, it turned out there’s this thing called Central Asia that I didn’t really know much about – and here was me, thinking I was an educated person!

It also turns out I’m not the first Westerner not to know about Central Asia or, for that matter, China. There’s a whole literature of exploration dating from ancient times onward about the rare and extraordinary contacts between what today we casually call East and West. Happily, I live in an age when much of this stuff has been translated into my language and is often even available through the public library system. This literature is delightful fodder for the armchair explorer; here is one scene that has stuck with me for years.

The Road to Oxiana (Robert Byron, 1937)

The year is 1933. Robert Byron and his companion Christopher Sykes started out from in Europe, traveling in search of the architectural splendors of Central Asia. Now they are in Murghab, Tajikistan, trying to get to Maimena in Afghanistan (Turkestan). This excerpt has been lightly edited, mainly for punctuation.

Three cars stood in the Governor’s garden at Murghab. One was the lifeless body of a grey Ford coupe. The others were Vauxhalls, new, dark red, and closed; when it rained, they were covered with tarpaulins. Early in the morning after our arrival the Governor and his son drove away in the Vauxhalls to Maruchak on the Russian frontier. We looked forlornly at the Ford’s engine scattered over the surrounding vegetable beds and ordered horses.

“I can take you to Maimena in the car if you like,” said a Persian boy named Abbas, plucking the radiator out of a bush. “We will start in an hour.”

The likelihood of covering more than two or three of the intervening hundred miles in this preposterous vehicle seemed so remote that we took none of the usual precautions before starting, prepared no food, disdained, if only out of a courtesy to the driver, to count the car’s spare parts, and even went so far as to wear our so-called best suits. The luggage was put into the back, where it reached to the ceiling. When Christopher and I stepped into the front, the chassis subsided a foot, as if we had been the mother-in-law in a slapstick film. Abbas was winding the crank handle. Suddenly his arm flew over his head, the noise of a blacksmith’s shop proceeded from the now collected engine, and we bounded across the Governor’s flower beds while Abbas, in flying pursuit, just reached the wheel in time to turn us through the gate.

Down the main street the population fled; in a minute we were through the town and tearing up a deserted valley. The luggage fell out of the unglazed windows. The radiator, playing fountains to the sky, first declined to the earth in front then fell backwards on top of the engine, entangling itself in the fan, till we roped it up with our bedding cord. The sound of the machinery became apocalyptic, clanking and fizzing without any sort of rhythm till at last, with a final deafening cannonade, it ceased altogether. Abbas beamed at us with the expression of a conductor laying down his baton after an applauded symphony. A sympathetic report from the rear hind tire, though a beat late, announced that it also needed rest for the moment. We had come ten miles.

There was no spare tire. Gathering up the shreds of the outer cover, Abbas produced a patching outfit while Christopher and I, still determined that fate should look after us, lowered our best suits on the grass some way off. The afternoon shadows were lengthening. It remained to bring the engine to life, but this was quickly accomplished by a few random blows with a hammer, as one beats a child, and we jumped in just in time. We now began to realize that the kangaroo paces of our vehicle, though not so comfortable as the glide of [our] old Chevrolet, were taking us over a road which the Chevrolet could never have tackled at all.

The valley we were following was about two miles broad. A river ran along it on the west, confined in an earth cutting. On either side rose earth hills, whose boneless green contours, rounded and polished by the weather, had the glossiness of a horse’s flanks […] Valley and hills alike were covered with a pasture of waving golden green, so rich that we could scarcely believe it had not been specially sown; until, when we came to crops, they seemed bare and thin by comparison. This wonderful country, with not a pebble in it to impede the plough or seedling, was hardly inhabited.

Not a pebble assisted the surface of the road, either. When we left the valley, turning form the north to northeast, the track was marked simply by two ditches, dug for that purpose, which wound in and out of the troughs of the downs. The grass, which had looked so smooth from a distance, was full of holes and hummocks; every bump threatened to annihilate us. But imperceptibly the distance to Maimena grew less, and we had come about forty miles when Abbas, seeing two turf pillars by the road, suggested that though his headlights left nothing to be desired we should stop here for the night. Feeling we had tempted fate enough for one day, we agreed.

A side track from between the pillars led us over several humpbacked bridges to a solitary house and yard overlooked by a grove of poplars. Its owner came out to greet us, a man of middle height dressed in white with a white turban, whose smile, framed by a curly dark brown beard, has the innocence of a child’s. He showed us to a carpeted room furnished with a sliding wooden window, a fireplace, and a lot of old books in a niche over the door. It had the smell of an English drawing room, exhaled by a potpourri of rose leaves that were drying in another niche. Children staggered in with the luggage. Others brought us tea as we sat in the grass outside, gazing at the cool serpentine shadows among the green hills smeared with gold, above which rose the abrupt lilac peaks of the western Hindu Kush.

By supper time, horsemen were arriving from the neighboring villages to have their ailments treated. One had fever, one sores on his nose, which had been slit as a punishment; one headaches and vomiting in the morning; one a pestilent skin disease all over his back, which had lasted a year and looked like syphilis; but what could we do for him? We doled out aspirin, quinine and ointment, all we had, and now deliberately assumed the witch doctor’s air of mystification, saying the medicine would not work, at least in the case of the sores, unless accompanied by repeated washings in boiled water – yes, boiled, we hissed – as though it had been a toad’s liver. This morning there were more of them.

I went for a walk after breakfast in the poplar grove. Sparrows were twittering in the upper branches. Below, it was shady and damp and smelt of an English wood, which caused me a stab of homesickness. Then our host took us to see his walled garden, a vineyard with a watch tower in the middle where he sits to enjoy the view and see who is arriving. A dank dell in one corner contained a tangle of big crimson roses, of which he picked us an armful each.

We asked if we could pay for our shelter or at least for the food we had eaten. “No,” he said, “you cannot. My house is not a shop. Besides, you gave the people your medicines.”

“He is a holy man,” explained Abbas as we drove away, “who receives all travelers on this road. That is why he puts up these things” – pointing to the grass pillars – “so that they shall know his house is there. The name of the place is Kariz.”

The car smelt of roses as we crossed the frontier into Turkestan.

Anniversaries

It was just about this time of year almost 30 years ago that I arrived in California. At first I was still traveling up and down the state, visiting grad schools and living in campgrounds; the one thing I remember in particular is the smell of the air at night. It was quite different from the place I had just come from; there, while the smells were sometimes intoxicating, here they seemed more radically real and bracing—as if I had finally come awake in a dream. From the North down to the South and back, the night air always seemed full of whispered secrets and life.

No matter what else changes – and everything else has – when later October rolls around and the air takes on this mood again, time collapses around me. Breathing in, I stand lonely and aloof in my oratory, looking out over all the different Sues as they stumble and curse their way along the path. Breathing out, I speak for all of them in speaking the name of love, in saying the journey is still worth the costs. Then I hurry to reassure my cats that I love them just as much as I do California.

Many years ago, I traveled to a martial arts get together up in the pine-clad mountains. A few of us were housed for the night at a teacher's house in the woods. Over coffee in the morning, as we admired the pine trees outside the windows, one of my training partners said, "You know that feeling, how sometimes if you see a pine tree, it's like you're seeing all the other pine trees you've ever seen or all the other pine trees that ever existed and they're all in the same place at once and you can get from where you are to any of those other places when that happens?"

"No," I answered. I had certainly never had that experience, and I was someone with extensive knowledge of conifers and even many deciduous trees. Also, my training partner was entirely the wrong person to be making that kind of observation in the first place. As far as I knew, her priorities were chasing girls and her career as an journeyman electrician; she had never evinced a single mystical bone in her body.

Being the remorselessly rationalizing creature I am, I attempted to pin her down about exactly what she meant regarding this aspect of conifers that I was completely unfamiliar with. I was genuinely curious about what she meant.  However, the coffee had not yet kicked in, and maybe it could never kick in enough for someone like me. My companion refused to elaborate. She said something like, "Well, if you don't know it, you don't know it" and refused to talk more about it. I tucked the experience into my anomaly box, where it sat until I finally saw one of my own personal pine trees. It turns out they do exist.

http://bushwhackingfool.com/page/2/

I've had place and time collapse in on me to expand infinitely more than once since first hearing that peculiar story about the universal pine tree - or, perhaps more accurately, I have been more cognizant of it. The late October, California air flowing in through my window is one of these transport devices for me.The zafu (a species of plump flying carpet) is another and the Sonoran desert with all its denizens, seen and unseen, calling out to me is a third. They apparently do exist, but heaven only knows what yours might be.

Personal Best

This morning Rey called to inform me that in addition to picking me up to go for our usual day at the dojo in San Francisco, we would be performing at the Fil-Am festival in Daly City afterward. Daly City has a large Filipino population and holds a Fil-Am festival every year, with various booths, activities and performances - music, martial arts, dance. Last year there was no stage, just a bare area on the floor. The green room was wherever we stopped to put our stuff down - part of the beauty of traveling light.

The day was fraught for a drive into the City, though. President Obama AND Kanye West were just leaving downtown as we were trying to traverse it; the Blue Angels were performing for Fleet Week, and traffic reports were warning to expect major delays as crowds fought for the best viewing locations. Oddly enough, traffic was much better than usual and we slid past Market Street with nary a presidential motorcade in sight.

This year the festival was in the same gym but had a stage set up (way down at the end where you see the three guys are standing. You can't hear it, but they're rapping in Tagalog and English). 

Being on the stage makes it a little easier for people to see what you're doing; having weapons go flying off into the audience every so often helps keep them alert. The occasional scream of pain from the stage is also a great way to win back an audience's wandering attention and often results in additional applause. However, I am particularly pleased to report that this was the first performance I have done where I did not get injured. This is a real personal best.

Having written that down, I realize it will mean nothing to most people. Let me put it another way: I've been doing martial arts of one kind or another for about a quarter of a century. At a certain point I stopped being motivated by gaining rank, since it was really training I was after. I often wonder how good my training is, since I can't devote nearly as much time and energy to it as I would like. However, today for the first time since I began in this art five years ago I managed to take on my teacher without getting injured. It may be a fluke, but it's still my personal best so far.

For our efforts we got meal tickets to the assembled food trucks. Roll Revolution promised something called a mac and bacon roll, which appealed to my Berkeley sensibilities and love of cheese. It also had the shortest line. This is what I got:

In my defense, I would like to point out that I had gotten up early that morning to make a very healthy slow cooker vegan casserole with stewed atragalus root, shiitake mushroom, yam, winter squash chunks, etc. However, the salty fries with ketchup on them were just what the doctor of divine dining experiences ordered. Those little eggroll-looking things actually had mac and cheese with flecks of bacon inside and were insanely delicious. The little pot of yellow is actually warm, melted cheese food product, which sent this child of Velveeta over her own gustatory waterfall. For desert, there was that long thing wrapped in white. It was basically cinammon, sugar and carbohydrates - sort of a snickerdoodle gone wrong. Called a churro or something.

Whatever it was, I had earned it.

After hanging out for a while after our performance, we headed back to the East Bay.  Traffic on the highway was strangely smooth for a Saturday afternoon. On Highway 80 coming up on the bridge to the East Bay, the Blue Angels were going directly over us. Being the passenger, I got some really good looks as the planes screamed overhead. For one of the passes they were low enough and I was in the right position to see just how close together they fly those planes. Let's just say it was extremely alarming and made me want to jump up and down and shout.

No Soul for Westerners

An Exploration of the Buddhist Concept of Anatta

Modern Western culture is rooted in beliefs about jealous gods, personal saviors, souls that survive death and the implicit primacy of the individual over the group. Without the self, we’re lost. Unlike in Christianity and much of the conceptual and philosophical basis of Western society, Buddhism teaches that there is no such thing as an individual soul. For a long time I had an intuitive feeling that the doctrine of anatta (no self or no soul) was ‘correct’ (whatever that might mean), and when I became an official, card-carrying Buddhist I set about trying to understand the concept by reading various ancient and modern scriptures and commentaries.

The direct impetus for writing this piece was a MOOC in parapsychological research and theory I took in 2015. On the one hand presentations in the course supported, for example, the reality of extranormal powers gained by assiduous training in modalities like yoga or meditation, while on the other hand the theoretical framework of parapsychology implicitly takes as a fundamental unit the self or, more esoterically stated, the soul. In Buddhist training, meanwhile, extranormal powers are acknowledged to be a byproduct of a meditative practice also held to reveal insight into anatta or no soul. The subtle but important difference between these theoretical models can be illustrated by the following rhetorical question: How can you have a good ghost story if there’s no Uncle Freddy to haunt the house until the secret location of the lost will is revealed?

As a final project for the MOOC I proposed to explore the concept of anatta and its implications for parapsychology; that work is what I present here. I did not present it in the context of the course because in the end I felt my discussion was bit more personal and spiritual than I felt was appropriate for an international scholarly audience. However, if you are someone steeped in Western cultural and social tradition who is curious about how this whole no soul thing works, especially with respect to the afterlife, reincarnation and the paranormal, this blog post is for you!

Although I have a fairly extensive background in comparative religion and Western esotericism, it’s not until recently that a garden-variety Caucasian American like me could get access to not only fairly good translations of Buddhist teachings but also the institutional framework (sangha) that makes it possible to bring such teachings into one’s life. Lawrence Sutin’s All Is Change: the 2000 year journey of Buddhism to the West makes for fascinating reading on the many ways in which Western understandings of Buddhist concepts have been shaped to fit various Western political, religious and sociocultural agendas. He writes:

“There have been many obstacles to the understanding of Buddhism in the West – language, geographical distance, religious and cultural differences, colonial and postcolonial politics.”

The concept of no self is a particularly difficult one for people raised to believe in individual identity and personal soul. This is reflected specifically in how concepts like karma and reincarnation are interpreted in the West, an issue I will return to below.

Main Flavors of Buddhism

·         Theravada

·         Mahayana (including Zen)

·         Tibetan (aka Vajrayan)

Buddhism has been around for about 2500 years and comes in many different flavors. All Buddhist lineages are rooted in India, but probably the most well-known in the West are Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is heavily influenced by pre-Buddhist shamanic culture and, needless to say, the unique historical and social circumstances of the Tibetan diaspora. Zen is a subset of Mahayana Buddhism that came out of China. It has two flavors: Soto and Rinzai. My sangha (think church or congregation) is Soto Zen and was founded by a British woman, Reverend Master (RM) Jiyu-Kennett. An extraordinary trail blazer, she undertook rigorous training at temples in Malaysia and Japan before founding the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC) in the United States. Much of the material I draw upon here comes from RM Jiyu or her students. I feel I can rely on this information because from what I have seen I respect the integrity and sincerity of training in the OBC sangha.

While aspects of Buddhist practice like mindfulness have been exported to the West as self help techniques stripped of any cultural or spiritual context, the concept of anatta is central to Buddhism. It’s an experience that those who train in Buddhism will, after a while, experience as a truth about reality. Formally, anatta means that:

• neither within the  bodily and mental phenomena of existence nor outside of them can be found anything that in the ultimate sense could be regarded as a self-existing, real ego-identity, soul or other abiding substance; or that
• while there is continuity (after death), but there is no special entity (that continues)

In order to get from here to there, however, we have to first understand how our sense of self works. Where do we come from? According to Buddhist understanding, our sense of a unitary self arises from the operation of [drumroll]  . . .

The Five Skandhas

·         Form

·         Sensation

·         Perception

·         Mental Formations

·         Consciousness

Skandhas offer an alternative schema for organizing the concept of the self, versus relying on Western notions like the big five personality traits and the five senses in psychology and physiology. Skandha translates as aggregate, heap or bundle; it refers to categories of perceptual events which we tend to cling to and identify with, as in you are conscious, you are thinking your thoughts, you perceive some things and feel others, and all this is somehow taking place in your very own mind in your very own body.

The difficulty for a Westerner in applying these categories is that it’s not at all obvious how skandhas are psychophysical processes apart from ourselves in addition to being, in fact, fundamentally impermanent. The Buddhist explanation for this is the observation that we cling onto our perceptions and thereby make them more real than they would otherwise be. Meditation can clear away some of these cobwebs of delusion. Theravadan nun Sister Khema offers an example of how during meditation the functioning of the skandhas may be unraveled:

“But if meditation has any benefit and success, it must show that first of all there is mind and there is body. There isn’t one single thing acting in accord all the time. There is mind which is thinking and making the body act. Now that is the first step in knowing oneself a little clearer. And then we can note, “This is a feeling” and “I am giving this feeling a name” which means memory and perception. “This is the thought I am having about this feeling. The feeling has come about because of the mind-consciousness has connected with the feeling that has arisen.” This illustrates how in meditation one becomes aware of the different skandhas operating.”

Skandhas are not problematic in themselves; they are a variety of sub processes that more or less come together at birth and separate at death. The self and identity exist due to our clinging to skandhas, but there is nothing fundamentally real or permanent about either; it is continually being brought into being and dissolving. Ideally, the concept of anatta should not be understood as annihilation of the self but in terms of the ability to perceive the self we identify with as a creation in (non-teleological) progress.

Even if that’s the case, what’s so bad about identifying with the experiences of the skandhas? The problem is that our experiences of identity are unreal and impermanent; worse yet, our attachment to them is why we suffer and cause suffering. Buddhism calls these three facets of reality or “Marks of Human Existence” anatta (no self), anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering).

If our experience of identity and selfhood during life is due to a delusion based on clinging to the experiences of impermanent skandhas, what is the self or soul after death? RM Jiyu's understanding of Buddhism led her to teach that the self is an impermanent combination of several components. One component is personal (ego, sense of self, body image) and does not survive death. Another is Buddha Nature and, while it survives death, does not do so on a personal or individual level. A final part of the living person is their karma, that is, spiritual force set in motion by volitional action.

Ontological Components of Human Being

·         Personal identity

·         Buddha Nature

·         Karma

We have already talked about how the self is a delusion caused when we identify with or cling to the routine operation of the skandhas; let us now consider what Buddha Nature might be.

Rather than being a god entity identifiable in terms of a culturally articulated location in a social hierarchy, Buddha Nature is an ontological state that can be accessed or at least approached through meditation and contemplation practices. Training that results in understanding that you create your perceptions yet not are the creation of your perceptions, or becoming aware of your awareness versus your personality, are pointers to the realization of Buddha Nature. Those who may be impatient with meditation will still come to understand, by aging, that while memories come and go, awareness is self-sustaining.

A verbal expression of the experience of Buddha Nature is “I create the perception, but not what is aware of the perception.” Perception is human and temporary; awareness of the perception is Buddha Nature. In 1938 J.W. Dunne, famous for writing about dreams and completely ignorant of Buddhism, advanced a rather curious mathematical proof of awareness of consciousness which I encourage people to look more at: “We are self-conscious creatures aware of something which we are able to regard as other than ourselves.” (The Serial Universe)  What I find interesting about his work (which I can barely follow, but seems logical as far as I can follow it) is the idea that self-awareness and other awareness are both complicit in the human experience of being. But I digress.

What about Karma? Karma is a concept that seems to fit in nicely with certain Western moral tendencies and as such is perhaps the easiest for Westerners to think they understand. Forget all that. Karma is the force set in motion by any volitional (willed or intended) action, good or bad. Good volitional action or positive karma (based on compassion or non-deluded understanding) gets reabsorbed into Buddha Nature and causes no further karmic ripples. Bad volitional action (based on delusion, hatred or desire) creates negative karma which will continue after a being’s death and result in the birth of a new being or beings.

To summarize, what Westerners think of as a unitary, transcendent individual identity, Buddhism breaks down into 1) a delusion of permanent personal identity, 2) the transcendence of the Buddha Nature component of identity, and 3) the continuing consequences of volitional action, almost as if they could be mapped as vector forces.

In The Book of Life, RM Jiyu gives her own explanation of what might survive after the death of a being:

“Nor is just one being likely to result from the death of a previous being. An unconverted carnal lust may be reborn in an animal form. An unresolved confusion at the time of death may be reborn in a muddle-headed human. A secret and hidden evil act may cause the birth of a fixed or wandering ghost, just to give a few examples. Thus, the death of one human could result in the rebirth of an animal, a human and a ghost all out of the unpurified karma of that human’s karmic stream.”

Not believing in personal soul, Buddhism also does not hold with reincarnation as popularly conceptualized in the West. From Zen is Eternal Life:

“The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth should be distinguished from the theory of reincarnation, or that of transmigration, for Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging or eternal soul. The forms of man or animal are merely the temporary manifestations of the life force that is common to all.”

Initially I was surprised to learn that Buddhists don’t believe in reincarnation, and worked on the problem long enough to distill my understanding into a tweet: ‘Put in a body once a life/Reborn with every passing thought.’

On the other hand, memories of past lives pop up in meditation and unusual dreams; they are even reported in research. What’s up with that? When I asked the head monk at my temple, he said it’s as if karma tends to collect in clumps that float around together until a suitable being is ready for birth and then latches on to it. It made me think of the stories you hear about the big floating garbage area somewhere out on the Pacific, but he may have been thinking of a story our teacher RM Jiyu told:

“Imagine you have a bag in which you’ve brought home some fish. You eat the fish, but you carry the bag around and it still smells of fish … We all carry the impregnations of past lives, but they’ve got nothing to do with us.”

 (Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, quoted in Meetings with Remarkable Women (Lenore Friedman, 2000) pp 191-192)

Karma is about volitional action. There always choices. They’re not always the ones you want.

In part two, I’ll discuss implications for parapsychology and put in references.