Response & Responsibility

I am beginning to get some intriguing responses to these essays, allowing the potential for conversation. Response invites responsibility in responding to the response – a syntactically rather irresponsible sentence for which I accept full responsibility.

I shared with one fellow artist a draft manuscript of my next book (Driven Sane), and he responded to my suggestion about the nature and purpose of the koan. He recounted that as a practicing meditator, he had gone to a local Zendō where he was invited to study a koan. He had no idea how to go about this, but found it unsuccessful trying to navigate through the instruction to ‘go and think about it’. The whole point of a koan is to demonstrate that there is no answer to the paradoxes involved at the level at which they arise. They are not meant to be interpreted at the intellectual level, but to demonstrate that the intellectual domain itself is limited and wholly inadequate to the task, thus helping the seeker towards Transcendence, not just of the self, but of the entire domain that recognises it as separate. In other words, you have to transcend intellectual interpretation and directly experience the Transcendent, or Enlightenment, before you can get the message of the koan. The koan itself is the messenger, the message is ‘skip the interpretation and go straight to the Transcendent.’ The koan is specifically designed to be paradoxical in the hope that, in considering the paradox, one comes to realize the essential limitations of the entire realm of linguistic interpretation.

The koan is not unique to Zen Buddhism in Japan; it was adapted from its Chinese interpretation in Chan Buddhism, where it was known as gongan. It is also reflected in Hinduism with a system of debate where unanswerable questions were devised to the same end. The koan is a teaching tool. Once you get the message, you can dismiss the messenger. But the Western mindset tends not to get that too readily, which is why it took the West a century to grasp the distinction between Duchamp’s upturned pissoir and its meaning.

A follow-up email with my artist friend raised the issue of the difference between the Eastern and Western worldview; the underpinning, socio-cultural basis from which we interpret reality. This is a fundamental part of my Existential Field Theory, which transcends the distinction between our two entirely separate ways of knowing – the intellect and the Transcendent. The two may be incompatible, but they are complementary – the two sides of the coin of meaning.

With our two ways of knowing, the reliance upon one to dominate the other is not only confusing, it can never fulfil consciousness and the perennial human quest for something more meaningful than the separate self. Neither way of knowing is autonomous, both are essential; their integration is our only path towards fulfilling consciousness. The Western world view is wholly different from its Eastern counterpart because it relies upon the intellectual domain to be the principal arbiter of the whole, including that part that is necessarily beyond its reach. This results in perennial confusion and, in the West, manifests itself across multiple fields.

An analogy might help here. Imagine being convinced that a game of football needs only one team. The game becomes so meaningless that we have to invent endless different interpretations of what it means and how to play it, then imagine a celestial referee who presumably understands it but, moving in mysterious ways, hasn’t been able to explain it clearly to us, so there are multiple interpretations of what the game is all about. That is the equivalent of the intellect reaching for autonomy and tyranny over the entire process of evolving consciousness.

Today, the distinction between East and West has blurred with growing globalisation, but the fundamental differences remain, even if national borders no longer define them. The results are reflected in the cultural bias of each. Because of the nature of the intellectual domain favoured in the West, it prefers binary, dichotomous determinations of meaning – good or bad; moral or immoral; right or wrong – leading to a more fragmented, dogmatic approach to meaning. The East is far more inclined to syncretism, where the response would allow for something to be both right and wrong depending upon context. We see the Western approach to this in the frequent and entertaining debates between atheists and monotheists, which are nearly always presented as a question of whether religion is beneficial or harmful, good or bad. The more syncretic answer is that religion is neither one nor the other, it is simply a reflection of human nature – a symptom.

In Ken Wilber’s Up From Eden - A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, the author analyses the phases that consciousness has passed through. He names the uroboric phase, where our ancestors were in complete harmony with nature, then a progression through the typhonic (mythic) through to a ‘great mother’ phase. There follow various stages of fragmentation, leading to the relatively recent stages of egoic separation. The point he makes is that, because of the Western mindset, as we progress from one phase to the other, rejection is the norm. Each phase rejects the previous one and is, thereby, disassociated from it with a tendency to vilify it. Thus the typhon – half animal, half human – becomes a devil figure; the Great Mother is rejected, vilified in some respects, and replaced by the patriarchy of the last few thousand years. In the Eastern way, dissociation becomes integration; each phase builds on all previous ones rather than discarding them as outmoded fragments.

That dichotomy separates East and West and has done for millennia, clearly visible historically from the third millennium BCE to the present. It is the reason why the West ended up with the god religions and fragmentation, while the East had non-god religions. Though, regardless of their philosophical origins, both tend to produce very similar institutions to explain the mystery to the mystified.

Religious structures are a response to human doubt, fear, and aspiration, East and West. But the Western mindset over the centuries created a gathering advantage, materially and technologically, over the rest of the world, particularly noticeable in the past few hundred years as it began to export its hubristic beliefs on the wings of hegemony. It also exported its worldview of the supremacy of the fragmenting intellect.

The point in realizing the perennial aspirations of our species, of completing and fulfilling the bandwidth of consciousness, is to keep one’s eye on the goal, on the Meaning sought. Take into account the means of reaching the goal, as advice, not as dogma, but try to avoid getting distracted or diverted by them. It isn’t football, there is no referee other than the self, and when you get there, when you transcend the need for the koan, you will be Absolutely certain and realize that the historic Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who is said to have eschewed any attempt to define or explain Nirvana, might well respond to the koan with ‘never mind.’

I would suggest that what all these essays share as a foundational question is ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ We are, as humans, a questioning species, that is what unifies us; what divides us is the answers.

If you are interested in the difference between Western and Eastern mindsets, I also recommend The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why by Richard E. Nesbitt.

One hand clapping? (credit: Vecteezy)