This thread is a continuation of a conversation which emerged in my practice thread. I recently announced a blog, Mastering the Skill of Consciousness, in which I discuss the work of philosopher Leslie Dewart. His book, Evolution and Consciousness, has been an interest of mine for quite some time, and I believe it may be of interest to pragmatic dharma practitioners. Some discussion has already ensued. Here it continues:

Wow. I am really sorry for upsetting you. I'm sure I am wrongheaded in a number of ways, but it seems to me I'm just stating a fact of biology 101. It's really an academic point.

Good luck, Tarver.

The idea of 'Evolution' is an example of 'assertive communication talking on a life of it's own', as if it were indeed a 'real thing' having laws and rules, purpose and goals.

From my understanding of Dewart so far, this is exactly what he is saying holds us back, the fallacy in the communication is not that things exist, but that the exist to do something. that they must be 'verbing', 'to being' actioning if only in one place. We never leave them alone, they always have to be something to us.

the challenge as i see it is to let the verbal self drop away, drop the pretence of 'being' through seeing the progression of verbal self referencing built on the instincts, which are never questioned directly.

Which leaves of course the power of a question... (cue RATM- Fist Full of Steel- 'Cause I know the power of a question, da da da, da da da chikcoowww...)

Actually to bring it down to practice here is a good question;

If the majority of my speech is thematic, but this type of speech is built of assertive non-thematic speech, then in each verbal stream I should look for the assertion. As beneath this assertion will be something like an instinct I'm guessing, or what I have recently termed 'pure emotion'.

just a thought - haven't tried it out yet, just asserting it...




edited; spelling- ( I may have got 90% in human biology, but I barely passed english...)

Let me just riff on this a bit;

the world of humans, that 'exists' in our head, is indeed make believe. The world, (including the very stuff our heads are), is however very real.

We built this 'world in our head' out of thematic understanding, which was built on thematic speech, made possible by non-thematic speech, which in turn was, like my rabbits barely audible angry grunts, an expression of animal instinct.

We, humans, never considered the 'animal' as we developed themes, as the animal was us. It is our primary self.

so like my pet rabbit, I am an animal, but unlike him I have the unique (if 7 billion, plus those who gone befor can also be called unique) opportunity to question what I was angry about in the first place.

Squeak, grunt, grunt, howl....

And so, like Tommy recently discussed in a thread about some Circuit whatsy-ma-call-its, we have the choice to shut down the animal instincts if we choose to, though exactly how remains the question of practice.

J B, stripped of the statements immediately preceding and following the above quotation, which I even put in italics for emphasis, what I said there is, I fear, quite likely be taken out of context and misunderstood. The context was my practice thread, where I feel free to reflect on my personal process -- that's the place for that. I linked my practice thread, so any interested parties could look it up, but my feelings as such don't really belong here in T&T, at least not as the headline item.

Having said that, I don't mind that others know how I feel, and in fact maybe it will call appropriate attention to an important issue.

Even if this is "really an academic point", such points sometimes matter a great deal, and I think this is such a case. Here is an example of an analogous case: As recently as the century before last, "Biology 101" would have informed us that the basis of organic function was the system of humors described by Galen: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Medical best practice was bloodletting, which made perfect sense given the understanding prevailing. This is but one among many possible examples of how "everybody knows" something that turns out most emphatically not to be quite as true and useful as long thought. Although we have made great strides in many areas, we have not moved significantly past our thousands-year-old understanding of causality, projecting onto the world at large what is proper to our own consciousness. Thinking -- as many otherwise well-educated and intelligent people do today -- that evolution is a manifestation of any kind of inherent purpose whatsoever, is a conceptual artifact of an absent-mindedness which is as harmful to us individually as concerns our chances of individual happiness, and as much of a threat to the survival of the human species as a whole given our collective behaviour (environment, wars, nukes, etc.), as bloodletting was to the individual patient, even in the hands of the most caring and compassionate and best-educated medical practitioners of as recently as just over a hundred years ago.

Dewart's E&C could be seen as one long, extended commentary on this exact point, "academic" though it may be. The first chapter explains in detail how, even today, the vast majority of science and philosophy (let alone "common sense") entirely misses the significance of the appearance of Darwin's theory -- even Darwin himself seems not to have caught the full implications (see E&C, p. 4). Natural selection does not operate with any inherent purpose or force whatsoever. It operates in a purely factually, morally neutral way. This is very plain, and yet hard for many to grasp.

The operation of natural selection has given rise to a form of life which, due to the evolutionary appearance of speech and the further involution of speech with experience in a particular way which in one word can be described as "consciousness", only then in turn enables us to experience the world as purposeful -- not because it is, or ever has been, inherently purposeful, but because we humans have acquired the capacity to experience it as such. There are some further subtleties to this apropos the inherent purposiveness of all life, versus the integration of purposiveness with the exercise of efficient causality (but not necessarily force) proper to conscious life, and especially our propensity to distort our understanding of these sorts of emergent phenomena through reductionistic habits of thought, but unless and until the first point is conveyed that natural selection operates without purpose (or force), then anything else I (or Dewart for that matter) have to say on this is unlikely to make much sense.

J B, don't worry about "upsetting" me. You have given me a fantastic sample to work with of a well-meaning and "obvious" statement, just barely even worth mentioning, that points right to the heart of the matter. I am much more grateful than upset in any way with you.

At issue here is not what people may think about Darwin or biology or science. What is at issue is being happy and treating ourselves and each other well. But here at the DhO, where people aren't just looking out at the world for what might benefit from amendment, but actively popping the hood on their own minds, so to speak, these sorts of considerations become highly relevant. Many spiritual practices today, sad to say, are so flawed in their premises and their "View" that they are little better than bloodletting as a treatment for the suffering which afflicts those who turn to them. MCTB is a shining beacon, illuminating the "mushroom culture" and pointing the way past content and into insight. To pick out but one key example, Ingram refers to the Three Characteristics as "three qualities of all experience" rather than, as usually stated, three qualities of all existence. This is not the traditional Buddhist view, although it may in retrospect appear implicit there. It is a better, more accurate, more progressive and more fruitful view more likely to attain the stated goal of relieving suffering.

After all, why meditate, why bother? Well, for me it started because (there's that purpose, right there, in my experience!) I was not particularly happy, I was not treating myself and others particularly well in spite of my best efforts, and I traced the cause back to my own thinking and stumbled upon a set of techniques that led to progress. It gradually became clear that progress occurred in spite of -- not because of -- the various weird, conflicting, incredible, cryptic, ancient and modern explanations of what this was supposed to be doing and why. I happened to have access to a radically iconoclastic philosophical analysis of what's wrong with humanity and how it got that way, and I see strong congruence, convergence I hope, between Ingram's iconoclasm and Dewart's. Ingram focuses in, so to speak, on sorting out what's what with traditional practices in contemporary Buddhism which seek to address the problem of suffering; and Dewart comes at it from the other end, analyzing the evolution of human consciousness itself to discover what it is about us that inclines us to experience our own "existence" as problematic in the first place, "necessitating" such extreme efforts as many of us here feel motivated to undertake.

I hope I have addressed your point adequately in the comments above, J B. I plan to turn next to Stian's, and I hope Nick's also in the other thread before long.

Actually, it's pretty much what I was getting at. But survival is the engine. Survival and reproduction produce the outcome. Your mastery of the skill of consciousness won't change the course of evolution until you can pass it on to your offspring through a genetic mutation.

Meanwhile, if you hope to change the world through rhetoric, you might try a less forceful and condescending tone.

Not for humans, no! That's just it! Your ability to put your finger right on the key issues is uncanny. Thank you.

Consciousness is peculiar precisely in that it "transcends" the determinism of genetics. Humans kill and die and are otherwise motivated by reasons, good or bad, which have practically nothing to do with adapting to our physical environment or ensuring our organic survival. We adapt, rather, to our "inner environment" of self-definition and meaning. This is indeed because consciousness is not a result of the mere maturation of our genes, although without the appearance of an organism which can learn to experience consciously, of course, nothing interesting happens. Consciousness is not reducible to the organism which is genetically determined, and is its "material cause", so to speak. Consciousness is an acquired skill, which is perpetuated through socio-cultural means (principally learning to speak, as it turns out).

Case in point: meditation, say, with intensive noting (which is so effective precisely because it involves the experience of speech) can radically transform the way the mind functions, without any genetic mutation involved. If a practice such as this is institutionalized, say, by Mahasi Sayadaw, and latterly by websites such as this one, the alteration in the functioning of the mind is perpetuated by means of certain practices, again without any genetic mutation. This all happens on a time scale orders of magnitude faster than organic (genetic) evolution: it is the evolution of consciousness.

And yet, it still works even when the practitioners are oblivious to the mechanism -- the involution of speech and experience. How much more effective will these practices get when the actual mechanism comes into conscious purview? Quite a bit, I predict!

As I tried to explain above, this won't make any sense at all, unless and until one wraps one's head around the idea of emergent causality. Landing close to home, it may even seem threatening and weird. Threatening a human's sense of self is worse than threatening their organic survival -- but surely as serious meditators most of us are familiar with this, and I hope have learned to stare it down. Sorry if this conversation is having that uncomfortable effect on you. Sorry also if you don't like my tone. All I can say is you don't have to read it. There are plenty of other threads. I am doing what I can to be clear. If I could write without offending anyone, I surely would. I am doing my best, and I am really not trying to be offensive in any way.

To some degree, yes, depending on how you interpret the role of the brain. To some degree, the "evolution" of consciousness (in the sense of awakening) may be transmitted through culture, but this is distinct from the usual connotation of the word evolution.

I harp on the distinction because you're treading treacherously close to some fanciful new age ideas, and even Intelligent Design ideas to the effect that we were put here to evolve into perfection. I understand you don't think that now. It seems important to distinguish evolution from evolution of consciousness when you say humans have transcended natural selection. That's the point.



Ah, no. Telling me that my Wrong View is ruining the world for you children is simply impolite, not to mention improbable.

Edited for accuracy.

Hey Tarver, I'm still interested in this topic and it'd be nice if you could get around to addressing my questions. No pressure, just letting you know there's interest.

First of all, thanks for pointing out the review. I quoted it on my blog, as well as responding on the Amazon site; Nixon wrote back, and we have exchanged a few notes there. The initial reviewers within the obvious fields apparently relevant to the book (Religious Studies, Speech, etc.) when it first came out were a bit intimidated by the scope of the thing and put off by how it jarred with their preconceived ideas of how the world was supposed to work. Evidently, they could not grasp what it was saying, found it personally or professionally threatening at various levels, and failed to rise to the challenge that it offered.

The essence of Dewart's "discovery" is that the understanding of language, thought, mind, and reality passed down in our tradition from ancient times to the present, that is the conceptual house of cards, as you put it; Dewart offers an alternative interpretation to the "semantic complex" which is actually vastly simpler and more powerful, but initially counter-intuitive. I don't think his insights can be reduced to any single, simple aphorisms, although some may occur to me as I write. No powerful theory or explanation ever appears simple, except to those who first appreciate the complexity for which the theory accounts. Dewart is very "simply" extending the celebrated work of Darwin, Einstein, and McLuhan to the realm of our everyday experience. Is that simple, or complex? Well, it's both, depending on your perspective.

Let me preface this by pointing out that even among educated people, it is hard to find many who could if "spot-checked" give a clear and technically accurate account of precisely what each of those three above-named luminaries actually said, without mixing it up somehow or glossing over key aspects of their insights. This is because the advances of science, philosophy, and indeed any field take a long time to percolate into "common-sense" and some never do. In specialized fields such as biology, physics, or media studies, celebrated advances don't feel personally threatening because they are kind of "over there". When it comes to consciousness though, let me assure you from my own frustrating personal experience (in case you haven't noticed this on your own) that as soon as one starts to discuss the functioning of the human mind, suddenly, just because they can think at a functional everyday level, everybody becomes an expert and challenges every counter-intuitive nuance that might be relevant to an improved understanding of their own process. This is a very difficult space in which to maneuver. And yet, it is only by taking the observer into account that progress can be made here, and this is what Dewart does.

As Dewart extends them, the key insights of Darwin, Einstein, and McLuhan are as follows:

• The emergence of novelty can be accounted for in biological systems (such as species) not by applying deterministic causal rules, but by understanding the emergent properties of the system -- this is a causal, but non-deterministic and non-reductionistic explanation.
• The reality (and behaviour, etc.) of objects is not a property of those objects inherent to them with reference to an absolute space, but an emergent phenomenon proper to the relativity of objects to each other.
• Communication is not reducible to the contents of messages; the medium (or form) of a communication is relativistically interrelated to the experience of "transmitting" and "receiving" any message.

Now, if speech is considered a medium of communication, relativistic causality is accounted for, and the origin of human consciousness is queried in light of the known mechanism for the emergence of novelty in biological systems, all tempered with profound insight into the experience of being human... what you get is Dewart's thesis.

I have to say that this is a very-low resolution overview which doubtless misses a great deal of relevant material, but I hope is is helpful nevertheless. As I wrote on the Amazon review page:

Is it necessary to understand the whole "world view" to start making use of it? Most people, as I have argued above, don't really actually understand, for example, Darwin, Einstein, and McLuhan and yet this has not prevented wide-spread non-specialist use of metaphorical extensions of and riffs upon their ideas. Dewart's thesis has not even been honored by widespread misunderstanding, yet, as even those who can benefit (relatively) directly have not yet grasped what is available. However, in the case of meditation practice, this is a specialized application which I think can benefit from fairly direct applications of the theory.

Case in point: "apperception". There is obviously something reflexive, and/or circular, and/or self-contained, and/or pointing back to itself, and/or somehow recursive about consciousness. Yes, this has been observed countless times. The difficulty in understanding consciousness this way is the endless recursion problem: if consciousness is perception of perception, then at what level of nesting does this "spring to life," as it were, as consciousness?

(Every time I hear of meditators describing the so-called "attention bounce," I wonder if they are falling for this one.) Dewart spends the next several pages of the text distinguishing consciousness from "reflexion", the bending-back of experience onto itself. The "self-presence" of experience, in contrast, is the simultaneous presence of the object and the act in a conscious experience. If, however, experience in the first place is (mis-)understood as a reflection or repetition of reality in the mind of the experiencer, then this simple explanation breaks down as the number of "objects" quickly multiplies out of control.

I have not sat down to catalog them all, but my impression is that there are numerous points where the bleeding edge of dharma practice is both an illustration of, and a fabulously fertile field in which to seek applications of Dewart's theory. Examples:

I would bet that a close reading of Dewart would throw new light on "luminosity" as a roundabout way of describing assertiveness; not at the extreme end of esoteric practice, but right at the tips of our noses, so to speak, in our every conscious experience, where the most advanced mystics have insisted all along that it is to be found, surprise, surprise.

(Also, speaking of luminosity, if anyone is looking for a great PhD topic: what is the relationship of depositional-speaking Tibet to the peculiarities of the dharma that emerged there? The vibrancy and richness of Tibetan Buddhism has got to have something to do with the interplay of the ontic presuppositions of Indian Buddhism and the native phenomenal culture of the Tibetans. Dewart analyzes the better known case of Sumerian and Indo-European ontic influence on the depositional speakers of Hebrew and Arabic. Any prior scholarship on the topic that relies on linguistic evidence is now suspect because of the high probability of inadvertent ethnocentrism, failing to take into account the peculiarities of phenomenal speech, not Tibetan language. The same may be true, but a bit less dramatically, for all of Zen.)

The difficult doctrine of anatta is the most utterly simple of complete no-brainers from Dewart's point of view: the self is generated in the wake of the self-defining level of consciousness, in the "pocket" as it were, of the otherness which is other than objects of experience and other than acts of experience. (See E&C p. 61) That this should be so difficult for many to grasp today is an index of our absent-mindedness.

"Emptiness" is no mystery: reality is neither meaningful nor absurd, just apt to be interpreted -- of course it is all "empty". And yet the ontic preoccupation with objectivity, with what reality "really is," makes this very hard for normal people in our culture to grok on the basis of their own experience, relying either on the word of advanced meditation practitioners or the insights of science at the expense of their own experience. How odd is that?

Why is noting practice orders of magnitude more effective than other insight practices in maddeningly hard to qualify but subjectively easy to experience ways? Well, if speech is a consciousness-generating assertive form of communicative behaviour, and noting turns out to be a systematic way of training the experiential faculties with a rhythmic pattern of acts of speech, it should be no more surprising that noting transforms the quality of consciousness than that lifting weights builds muscle. Knowing the mechanism should lead either to improvements in the best practices of noting, or increased motivation to actually do it, or both.

And how about the religious tendencies of every group that cottons onto an interesting and effective way of growing spiritually? Once again, no anomaly: religions are plainly and simply institutions of self-definition, and even the (somewhat problematic) stated identity of "We Who Have Ditched Our Self-Identification" will still tend to function religiously if it functions well enough to actually start to affect people's self-definition.

If you don't like that tone, knowing the mechanism (again) will help you tinker with it; either to start a religion of your own, or to manipulate your self-definition around your problematic membership in any (religious?) group whose practices you like, for example, but whose wider identity you don't like.

That brings me to the psychological mechanisms of projection and denial. From Dewart's point of view, these are not peripheral anomalies to the human condition -- these are routine structural manifestations of consciousness's capacity for self-deception, which are integral to our capacity for generating meaning in the first place. Of course, suggesting to any given individual who is not ready to hear it that they may be in denial around Important Issue X accomplishes nothing except pissing them off. Still, reading or hearing about how other people have shadows can be entertaining. (Joke, get it?) Seriously, anyone interested in the psycho-spiritual transformation and maturation process conventionally known as awakening is going to hit a few of their own shadows on the way. This is never inherently pleasant, but understanding that this is absolutely normal, routine, expected, and even a sign of progress can leverage the experience away from a potential content trap and into a powerful insight experience.

Understanding meaning as the most fundamental human need (eclipsing even organic survival) accounts for the facts of the extremes of human motivation, from selfishness to altruism, much better than any genetic, reductionistic, or purely behavioral account ever dreamed of; and understanding consciousness as a learned skill accounts for how (yes, with difficulty and effort, but still) it can be re-learned in all kinds of interesting and useful ways.

So this was a very incomplete and preliminary sketch of some of the practical uses of Dewart's theory to insight practice, as I see them.

As it stands, Dewart's theory is not yet popularized or applied -- it is the philosophical equivalent of a research result from pure science waiting to be exploited on the open market. Until someone works it out and says "practice like this -- it works better, faster, etc." it remains theoretical. Once applications are developed, it may not even be obvious that they can be traced back to Dewart's theory. I may be utterly deluded (hey, it happens) but I really do think that some in this community will find this material richly rewarding once their attention is called to it and they take the time to work through it.

Hey Tarver. Thanks for the reply. I intend to reply to this