You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual - because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
(Walker Percy 1983: 76 cited in McGilchrist 2021: 1309)
I have recently taken a year off work and now find myself back in my role in the School of Health and Social Care. But after a year of spaciousness, with periods of intense meditative practice, it has not been possible to put my world back together again in the way it was. This is a good sign - that practices of meditation, study, and friendship are having an effect. If nothing changes then what’s the point? But curiously I have not experienced change that has led to resolution or completion. The questions become ever bigger, and the ungraspable, indefinable nature of things continually disrupts the confidence I once had in how I knew things to be. Things get simultaneously clearer and more mysterious, more deeply tender and more ecstatically joyful. As the certainties of my worldview fall away it is unclear whether it will be replaced and if so by what? And this has got me thinking about research on mindfulness and contemplative practice and how our ways of knowing may be impeding the questions being asked and the answers being found. Might our current framing be preventing us from understanding what matters? If this interests you, read on!
At first, meditation practice, and Buddhism in particular, felt like a relief - the answer. However, the more I practice the more I know it is not the ‘answer’ or even an answer. I seek the security of a ‘ground’, a destination, the moment where everything makes sense and falls into place. But that moment does not exist and facing this opens the possibility of nihilism with its dread, fear and panic. Yet on this edge of horror, awe and wonder are also revealed. Vervaeke (2019a) beautifully captures this in one his lectures:
‘…awe borders on horror! So there's a sense of the experience of sacredness that is supposed to take us to the very horizon of our intelligibility, the very, very precipice of our ability to make sense and make meaning of the world. It’s supposed to…take us towards horror until we experience that boundary between awe and horror, where we are forced into a situation of confrontation with a demand to change. A demand to change who and what we are… That no matter how much we grow, we can't grow enough to encompass the mysteries that we are confronting.
Touching into similar territory, McGilchrist (2021: 1284) points out that when we open to the love of truth we are shaken. It is not a comforting experience but a confronting one: ‘to be fundamentally open to transcendence, the radical astonishment of Being. Not to be astonished is not to be truly alive.’ The deep disruption of understanding of self and world can usher in the dark horror of meaninglessness and yet simultaneously permit access to illuminating insight which can be accompanied by a sense of belonging and love.
This disruption of taken-for-granted views about self and world is important in the development of wisdom. McGilchrist (2021: 1195) poetically captures the need for disruption stating: ‘For the surface-self, the limpet on the rock of the obvious, there is no mystery about Being: it is simply self-evident. But we must disturb its complacency.’ This ‘self-evidency’ prevents any deepening of understanding. Whilst hiding behind concepts and the comfort of ‘things’, made possible by realist assumptions, the mystery of Being remains veiled. Vervaeke (2019b) describes how subject-object dualism has become the basic grammar in our collective enactment of the world. In Life in Mind Thompson (2007: 164) outlines how phenomenology encourages us to trace concepts back to their cognitive source explaining that they:
‘…are not derivable from some observer-independent, indexical, objective, physico-chemical description, as the physicalist myth of science would have us believe. To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology we need concepts…but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with first-hand experience of its own bodily life’
In short, it is important to reconnect with ‘the basic experience of the world of which science is a second order expression’ (Merleau Ponty 1962 p. viii cited in Thompson 2007: 165). But why is this so important?
It is important because by paying attention to experience as lived, rather than as it is known, it is possible to sense that things are not as they immediately appear. McGilchrist’s recent work (2021) establishes that it is the left hemisphere of the brain that seeks to categorise and label our experience but in so doing it is not able to embrace uniqueness or wholeness. Both are lost in our literal objectification of experience in which parts are labeled and categorised, facilitating efficiency and control. The right brain, on the other hand, offers a different world that makes space for uniqueness, wholeness, complexity, and doubt. The two sides of the brain present two different worlds neither of which is ‘correct’ but it is the right hemisphere that understands. And when convinced by the propositions of the left hemisphere, which gives only a partial view, we can be dangerously induced to think that view is complete. McGilchrist (2021: 1294) states: ‘If you are convinced that in principle you can know and account for everything, you will see only what you think you know’ and in so doing lose any opportunity to understand what is not known or what lies beyond intellectual knowing. Deeper questions about Being become impossible.
From the perspective of cognitive science, Vervaeke et al. (2012) offer the concept of Relevance Realisation (RR) to describe the process by which human beings identify what is salient moment to moment and how this happens at a level that is ‘fundamentally deeper than belief’ (Vervaeke 2019a). It is the embodied process of enacting a world, forming the basis of a salience landscape, that presupposes learning. It enables the overcoming of the inevitable combinatorial explosion that would happen if it was necessary to pay attention to everything all the time. Through RR a ‘small world’ is created (Riedl and Vervaeke 2022) in which conscious cognitive capacity can then be used to problem solve. RR and the related concept of participatory knowing are predicated on the assumption of embodied and embedded beings and that meaning-making, the processes through which things come to be, are relational. Vervaeke is keen to emphasise that it is not possible to have a theory of relevance, in the sense of being able to identify what is relevant and what is not. Relevance emerges through relational processes that connect different levels of existence - physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and social processes.
What makes me mention the work of Vervaeke and McGilchrist in the same blog is that although they take different perspectives, they are both concerned with what matters and how what matters influences the thinking, speaking and behaviour of human beings. McGilchrist (2021: 1294) notes how the dualist, left-hemisphere dominant perspective brings with it important ethical implications:
‘We emphasise self at the expense of others, our rights rather than our duties, what we have rather than who we are, the material rather than the spiritual, and vaunt the reach of the unaided human intellect. In such a world God is a nuisance.’
Views and ethics do not arise out of a vacuum but are deeply conditioned by the processes of self-world enaction from which we emerge and then effect. No source of ethics sits separate from the relational unfolding of life. So, becoming more ethical, developing wisdom and creating a more compassionate world it is not about deciding who is ‘right’. It is not simply about logic, about weighing up evidence and changing beliefs, it is about changing how we understand ourselves and the world, a change which subsequently makes space for being different.
Vörös (2023) in a talk given to Mind and Life about the work of Francisco Varela, emphasised how throughout Varela’s work a central message was how ‘epistemologies matter’. He outlined the need to develop the capacity to recognise the pre-dominant context and recontextualise it so that we can develop beyond its constraints. Vörös described a need to ‘explore the cradle of contextualisation’ and establish ways of understanding that can ‘undo’ themselves as opposed to getting stuck in one context which then becomes invisible because everything is seen through it. I believe that the ‘cradle of contexualisation’ relates closely RR described by Vervaeke. Both point to the arising of self and world beneath the level of conscious cognition resulting in taken-for-granted ways of seeing and relating to the world. They point towards the fundamental process of arising, the process of coming into being that is hidden within the current cartesian dualistic context. Just as Vörös was keen to emphasise how Varela thought the process of decontextualization and re-contextualisation was crucial, Vervaeke also talks about the importance of ‘breaking frame’ and ‘reframing’. McGilchrist too, as already mentioned, values the disruption of what we think we know and how we think we know it.
Considering in more depth our current context, Varela et al. (2017) explain how objectivist science has tried to take up a position of ethical neutrality. In western education the link between who we think we are and what we think the world is and ethical behaviour is not overtly considered. This is impossible when how the self and world come into being and are known is not explicitly thought about. It just is. However, in Buddhism, these questions are seen as interpenetrating. As you start to see and experience the self-world as groundless, arising in dependence upon conditions, increasingly ethical behaviour is considered to be the appropriate response. Varela et al. (2017: 246) state:
‘Thus sunyata[1], the loss of a fixed reference point or ground in either self, other, or a relationship between them, is said to be inseparable from compassion like the two sides of a coin or the two wings of a bird. Our natural impulse, in this view, is one of compassion, but it has been obscured by habits of ego-clinging like the sun obscured by a passing cloud.’
So, decontextualising or breaking frame is not about being able to see something from someone else’s point of view. It is the process of revealing the framing through which ourselves and the world come to be. It lies deeper than the level of belief. It involves the participatory knowing of an embodied being within an environment. It comes before knowing and before language. It concerns being in the most immediate and intimate sense. Practices such as meditation [2] enable us to pull back the curtain of intellectual certainty to experience the relational ontology of existence. As I alluded to earlier on, this confrontation with existence can be startling. It is possible to access experience for which there is no language capable of expressing it. It cannot be known in the normal sense of the word. It is more intimate than the breath yet wonderous and infinite. Beyond time and space and yet here, right here.
What I have been trying to express is that epistemology, ontology and ethics are inseparable and the remembrance of this needs to become central in future research into the effectiveness and significance of contemplative practices. This has become clearer to me after a period of concentrated practice and through meeting, for the first-time, thinkers such as Varela, Vörös, Vervaeke, and McGilchrist. The importance of epistemological and ontological considerations in research on meditation and contemplative pedagogy, will help us move beyond dependence on religious framing to understand experiences such as insight and non-duality. I hope the greater clarity and transparency, facilitated by these thinkers, will help inspire new research questions and more robust debate and theorisation. Even simply acknowledging how poorly served contemplative science is by dominant ontological and epistemological framing feels important.
I hope that in exploring these dimensions of knowing we do not become ‘cleverer’. I hope instead that this thread of discussion will start to erode the dangerous sense of cleverness to which human beings are susceptible and initiate research into how we ‘break frame’, ‘decontextualise’ and come to appreciate the provisional, contingent nature of the world that we think exists in front of us.
References
McGilchrist, Iain. 2021. The Matter with Things : Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspectiva
Riedl, Anna, and John Vervaeke. 2022. “Rationality and Relevance Realization.” OSF Preprints. March 31. doi:10.31219/osf.io/vymwu
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life : Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.
Varela, Francisco J, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 2017. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Revised Edition. Cumberland: The MIT Press
Vervaeke, John, Timothy P Lillicrap, and Blake A Richards. 2012. “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science.” Journal of logic and computation 22.1: 79–99.
Veraveke, John. 2019a. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Episode 33, The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness. Accessed on 18th December 2023 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zkLevmQe90 Transcript can be accessed : https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-33-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-the-spirituality-of-rr-wonder-awe-mystery-sacredness/
Veraveke, John. 2019b. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Episode 31, Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI. Accessed on 18th December 2023 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfKcVbNd7Xc
Vörös, Sebastjan. 2023. Intimate Distances’: Reflections about, and with, Francisco Varela. Mind and Life Friends Webinar. Thursday 14th December 2023. Weblink not available a time of publication.
[1] Śūnyatā is a Sanskrit word often translated as ‘emptiness’ or ‘groundlessness’. In this blog I used the term groundless and groundlessness to reflect that used by Varela et al. (2017).
[2] Vervaeke talks about a range of ‘psychotechnologies’ which includes but is much wider than meditation alone. This may be a useful framing when talking about contemplative practices more broadly.
