Renouncing your Weltanschauung

Everyone has a world-view but many people are not conscious of having one. It is a comprehensive personal philosophy of the universe and of humanities relation to it. It is often referred to using the German word Weltanschauung

My Weltanschauung has its roots partly in the hard wiring of my brain (nature), partly in the processes that encultured me (nurture), and partly in a host of life’s serendipitous happenstances (chance).

The enculturation process can be viewed as a good thing (eg education) or a bad thing (eg brainwashing). In this age of globalization it might be good to avoid patterns of enculturation that result in xenophobic parochiality and in extreme them/us thinking. It might be good to encourage openness to and curiosity concerning other sub-cultures, cultures and their main ideologies.

Political science recognizes four main ideologies. They are shown below on a matrix with the horizontal axis going from political left to right and the vertical axis going from authoritarian at the top to libertarian at the bottom. This gives the four main ideologies of anarchism, socialism, fascism and liberalism. But the matrix is over simple. For example there are other authoritarian ideologies such as Marxism, communism, and religious fundamentalism. (For more detailed classification systems see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum )

The grander point about ideologies and Weltanshauungs is that people are prepared to kill and die in their name. This suggests that they serve some serious purpose. Presumably it has to do with a person’s sense of identity and their cognitive consonance. A popular and well endorsed world view offers relief from doubt, uncertainty and change.

Thich Nhat Hahn does not use the word Weltanschauung but he is very much aware of the concept. The first three of his fourteen mindfulness trainings tackle the problem of dealing with opposing world views. I have commented on the mindfulness trainings at some length elsewhere  so I will present only the first three here.

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The First Mindfulness Training: Openness

Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. We are committed to seeing the Buddhist teachings as a guiding means that help us learn to look deeply and develop understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill, or die for.

We understand that fanaticism in its many forms is the result of perceiving things in a dualistic or discriminative manner. We will train ourselves to look at everything with openness and the insight of interbeing in order to transform dogmatism and violence in ourselves and the world.

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My  earlier comment:

Individual human beings are conditioned in parts by nature, nurture and serendipity. Both the conscious and the unconscious mindbrain are conditioned. The conditioning fits the individual to operate in a hunting and gathering group of 50-100 in the African savanna. The conditioning process creates a world view rooted in myth and magic and normally includes a distinction between ‘me, us and them’.

The conditioning process has resulted in a wide variety of forms throughout history and geography. At the positive end of the spectrum the conditioning can be thought of as broad-minded and open-ended education and training; while at the negative end it can be viewed as narrow-minded and limiting indoctrination and brainwashing.

THEY are war-mongering, intolerant, idolatrous, dogmatic, fanatics and zealots irrationally bound to theories, doctrines and ideologies that are rooted in dualistic myth and magic. In short, they are parochial xenophobes. Note – there is a lot of this about. In evolutionary terms it is fit enough to survive.

WE are peace-loving, tolerant, flexible, reasonable and rational. Our world view is rooted in the experiential monistic concept of interbeing. Along with the rocks and stones and plants and animals, we are all citizens of planet earth. In short we are global co-operators and environmentalists. Note: this way of understanding things is catching on (eg green politics and MBSR). How might we work towards making this viewpoint fitter?

At the personal level there is the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that often while on the cushion, the darker side of my nature and nurture enter the attention centre. The good news is the fact of neural plasticity – it is never too late to change your mindbrain. Notice what arises, label it and let it go. More good news – having experienced and understood the bad stuff in myself I am more inclined to be compassionate towards other people who have still to get on top of their bad stuff.

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The Second Mindfulness Training: Non-Attachment to Views

Aware of the suffering created by attachment to views and wrong perceptions, we are determined to avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. We are committed to learning and practicing nonattachment from views and being open to other’s insights and experiences in order to benefit from the collective wisdom. Insight is revealed through the practice of compassionate listening, deep looking, and letting go of notions rather than through the accumulation of intellectual knowledge.

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My earlier comment:

In the late 1960s I was conditioned into thinking and writing like a scientist (Zoologist) and later (1980 and 1986) as an academic. My worldview was a creation of those times.

I read Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book -“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and thus knew that we were not dealing with ‘truth’ but rather with ‘the best working hypothesises in the light of evidence presently available’.

I also absorbed the scientific spirit of evidence-based, critical thinking where it was my duty to try and discredit the findings of fellow scientists. If the findings were insecure then it was for the greater good that this should be demonstrated. If the findings could withstand attack by the fiercest of adversaries then so much the better.

It sounds like a cool, rational process but emotions could run very high in opposing camps – scientists are also human beings and prone to cognitive biases. Groupthink is another ever present danger. Older and influential scientific brains often find it hard to shift with the paradigm and they come to be surrounded by careerist sycophants. “Max Planck … sadly remarked that ‘a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’” Passions can get the better of reason!

But the non-attachment to views brought about by mindfulness is a guiding star in the methodology of both meditators and scientists. And the methodologies lead to very similar insights and understandings related to (a) the workings of the mindbrain, (b) the psychology of perception, (c) the politics of environmental stewardship and (d) the commitment to life-long learning.

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The Third Mindfulness Training: Freedom of Thought

Aware of the suffering brought about when we impose our view on others, we are determined not to force others, even our children, by any means whatsoever – such as authority, threat, money, propaganda, or indoctrination – to adopt our views.

We are committed to respecting the rights of others to be different, to choose what to believe and how to decide. We will, however, learn to help others let go of and transform narrowness through loving speech and compassionate dialogue.

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My earlier comment:

We all hold views. The views we hold depend on our conditioning. Our conditioning is part rooted in our nature which is hard wired into our genes as a legacy from our ancestors. It is also part rooted in our nurture which involves the formal and informal myths and magic associated with our family and community during early childhood and then with our friends and fellow workers and bosses when we mature. And finally our conditioning is rooted in serendipity – in chance occurrences that are deemed fortunate or otherwise.

I was not born as a completely blank slate. But my nature is now intimately mixed with my nurture which is rooted in rural Scotland in the 2nd half of the 20th century. There are no completely correct views and those that exist can change. To some extent I grew out of my natal nurturing through living and working in seven different countries. I worked in the beginning as a teacher (sit down shut up and listen) but I gradually evolved to be a facilitator of learning (never mind the views of others, be mindful; what do you think and feel – and why?).

Is there a difference between human nature and Buddha nature and if so what is it and when did it evolve? And how does dog nature, fish nature or even plant and rock nature fit it?

The answer lies in the concept of consciousness which links to awareness. Rocks are not aware of what goes on around them. Plants are aware of, and react to, changes in their environment but they are not conscious of what is happening – they are on automatic pilot like robots. Fish and dogs are aware and reactive but, arguably, they are not self conscious.

Only humans are conscious of being conscious and some are more conscious of it than others. There are two levels of self consciousness (a) the impoverished which is characterised by the idea of “I” want” and (b) the elaborated which can gently ask “Who or what is the “I” that wants?” – and – “Why does it want this rather than that?”.

The historical Buddha said that he was different from others in that he was aware of and awake to what was going on both inside and outside of himself. He embodied mindfulness. He saw the impermanence of all created things and he could thus be effortlessly renunciant of the viewpoints of himself and others.

“We will learn to help others
to let go of and transform narrowness
through loving speech and compassionate dialogue”

“Tread softly for you tread on my jokes” (Malcolm Muggeridge)

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As I get older I spend more time being mindful of what is happening in the present moment. This leads to my being able to treat thoughts and feelings lightly and to know that they are mind made. On those occasions when they rush in and capture most of the attention centre there are small spaces where the ‘observer’ can make a stand and thus quickly defuse the situation.

Something along the lines of, “Ah, hello my little friend anger – and what kind of mischief are you up to today?” OR “hello my little friend lust – now is not a good time - so fade away.”

My default weltanschauung has a strong flavour of anarchy which takes in the concepts of elegant power and its hegemony. The spirit of Antonio Gramsci was part of my conditioning as was Paulo Friere.

My self image is as a facilitator of learning aiming to help people set themselves free of narrow parochialism such that they can be part of the global community of mindfulness practitioners.

If you would like to join then you will have to go about renouncing your weltanschauung.

Questions of consciousness

The soft questions have to do with the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).  The idea is that any subjective ‘thing’ that ‘appears’ to the mind (consciousness) will be associated with an objective activity in the brain. Neurologists now have a variety of brain scanning systems that make it possible to identify NCCs.

Note that the reverse is not true. There is an enormous amount of activity in the brain which does not register in consciousness. This raises questions about the decision making process that determines whether or not a brain activity will be made available to consciousness.

The hard question of consciousness deals with the physics of NCCs. Granting that the correlations exist, how does objective brain stuff (biochemistry) become subjective mind stuff (consciousness) and vice versa.

Note that this line of thought reflects the long standing philosophical problem of mind/body dualism. It also reflects the more populist notion of ‘mind over matter’ and its partner ‘matter over mind’.

Your mind decides that your arm should be raised above your head and it happens. That is magical. Even more magical is when your mind decides that somebody else’s arm should be raised above their head. This requires noises (words) to come from your mouth, pass through the air, and enter the ears of the other. There are then several rounds of coding and decoding in various parts of their brain that lead to a decision about whether or not to act.

Adolf Hitler was a talented speaker. His voice could make thousands of people raise their arms in Nazi salute. His mind was a prime mover behind the institutionalised gassing of Jews.

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was a talented speaker. His voice made thousands of people sit quietly and thus get to know the workings of their mindbrains. His mind was a prime mover behind the institutionalisation of mindfulness meditation.

I am minded of the UNESCO Constitution which includes the timeless realisation “That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

Facts will ding

Robert Burns 1759-1796

In 1786 Robert Burns reckoned – “facts are chiels that winna ding,/An downa be disputed” [‘facts are fellows that will not be overturned,/And cannot be disputed’].

I disagree with our national poet about this.

Facts exist in particular mindbrains and as such are subject to ongoing cognitive churn. They are thus readily overturned, disputed and subject to reinterpretation. There is nothing substantive about them. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould captured the deeper point in 1986 when he said, “The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind.”

But the supposedly hard nosed academics in the 20th century did not factor in the neurology and the evolutionary psychology behind thought and meaning in the collective, human mindbrain. The subjective nature of ‘truth’ was swept under the carpet.

Here are a few quotes that give the intellectual and objective flavor of the times:

(1912) Bertrand Russell - “We are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.”

(1949) Albert Einstein - “I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.

(1952) Albert Einstein - “I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”

(1975) Paul Karl Feyerabend - “Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.”

(1975) Paul Karl Feyerabend - “Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.”

(1987) Thomas Sowell - “Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

From this viewpoint it is as if facts existed and had objective locations in time and space.

Facts were talked about as if they were ‘things’ belonging to the category of ‘abstract’. The analogy was that as bricks make up a wall, so facts make up a theory.

I was encultured to that mechanistic scientific paradigm. I spent four youthful years training to be a Zoologist and my first Master’s degree dug the hole deeper.

However, the second Master’s degree opened doors to phenomenology, post-modernism and cultural relativism. It sparked an ongoing enthusiasm for thinking about thinking and for trying to avoid the conundrum of a mindbrain studying itself using a language that may not be up to the task.

These days I give the subjective unconscious a free rein to figure what is going on with the mindbrain wherein facts are chiels that div ding.

Verbal soup

There is always a need for people who stand out from the crowd by being out of step.

Psychologically they create cognitive dissonance by evoking uncommon sense and counterintuition.

Sociologically they are norm crackers and paradigm shifters.

Politically they expose the hegemonic nature of elegant  power and tend to promote subsidiarity if not outright anarchy.

They promote revolution by being radical rebels.

Language evolves

Language evolves. Old words and concepts go extinct and new ones arrive.

It is now 100 years since WW1. English and the many other European languages have changed in that time – especially in terms of politics and technology.

Here, for example, are a few WW1 words in chronological order -

Prussian military power, the Kaiser, the Boche; Triple Entente, enlistment, rationing, the front, trench warfare, chemical warfare, armistice, demobilization.

Nurturing Attention

There is a psychological and scientific technique that can bring about improvement in your sense of well-being, your ability to work with difficult feelings, and your likelihood of enjoying the rest of your life.

The essence of the technique is to keep paying attention to a particular thought, feeling or event. When attention drifts to the past or future, as it will, notice, and put it back on the chosen target.

The technique involves systematic attentional training. This involves focusing the mind and brain time after time and thus stilling the routine chatter.

The technique has been ‘discovered’ in many times and places and dressed up in a variety of exotic cultural costumes.

The omnipresence of the technique suggests that hard wiring must be involved.  Experienced practitioners explain that there is nothing that needs to be added. The task rather is to pull back the veil and wipe the dust from the mirror so that your light can shine. Enlightenment for the rest of your life!

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Goleman, Daniel (2013). Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine  www.NICABM.com

Awkward consciousness

People think about consciousness in many different ways. At the most basic level it equates with being sensitive to changes in your environment.

Single celled organisms like the Amoeba are aware of some environmental conditions (eg light, heat, chemicals) and react by moving towards or away from them. Some flowers track the sun during the day and fold their petals at night – so there is stimulus and response. But in these cases there are no sense organs or brains. So there is sensitivity but should we think of this as conscious activity?

When ordinary people talk of consciousness they are usually referring to self-consciousness which involves being aware of your own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc. Note that there is a non-egoic frame of mind which might be labelled as self-less-consciousness eg when musicians are in the groove, athletes are in the zone, poets hear their muse, and artisans flow.

Most of the activities of the mindbrain are not apparent to self-consciousness or self-less-consciousness and they are labelled as the unconscious. The unconscious has many modules and is in a constant state of flux so as to monitor changes in the internal and external environments and to organise reactions and responses to those changes.

There is also the concept of the sub-conscious. This can be thought of as a buffer zone between the conscious and the unconscious. It can be visualised as a channel through which the mind feeds the brain which in turn feeds the mind.

It is interesting to note that Buddhism recognises four type of consciousness – Mind, sense, store and self (manas) The following notes are based on http://archive.thebuddhadharma.com/issues/2006/summer/consciousness.html

Mind consciousness is our “working” consciousness that makes judgments and plans; it is the part of our consciousness that worries and analyzes … The brain is only 2 percent of the body’s weight, but it consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy. So using mind consciousness is very expensive. Thinking, worrying and planning take a lot of energy.

We can reduce the amount of energy needed by linking mind consciousness to mindfulness. Mindfulness keeps us in the present moment and allows our mind consciousness to relax and cut back on the energy used in worrying about the past or predicting the future.

The second type is sense consciousness, the consciousness that comes from our five senses. We sometimes call these senses “gates,” or “doors,” because all objects of perception enter consciousness through our sensory contact with them.

The third type is store consciousness which is the deepest and has three meanings. The first meaning is of a place, a “store,” where all kinds of seeds and information are kept. The second meaning is that store consciousness doesn’t just take in information, it holds it and preserves it. The third meaning covers the sense of processing and transforming.

Store consciousness can process information without much effort. So if you want to save your energy, don’t think too much, don’t plan too much, and don’t worry too much. Allow your store consciousness to do most of the processing.

Store consciousness can operate independent of mind consciousness. Store consciousness dictates many of the things we do, because it continuously receives, embraces, maintains, processes, and makes decisions without the participation of mind consciousness. So, as practitioners, we can’t rely on our mind consciousness alone; we have to rely on our store consciousness as well. Decisions are being made down there.

In store consciousness there are elements of ignorance—delusion, anger, fear—and these elements form a force of energy that clings, that wants to possess. This is the fourth type of consciousness, called manas, which can be translated as “cogitation.”

At the root of cogitation is the belief in a separate self.  This consciousness, the feeling and instinct called “I am,” is deeply seated in store consciousness and holds the idea that there is a self that is separate from non-self elements.

Whether we’re driving, manipulating a machine, or performing other tasks, many of us allow our sense consciousness to collaborate with store consciousness. This means that many things can happen without the intervention of mind consciousness.

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First there was sensitivity and then consciousness and now consciousness of consciousness and of unconsciousness.

SO consciousness is an awkward concept – but well worth unpicking.

>>>>> More … ‘Consciousness is an enigmatic beast.’ Scientific American Editors (2013). The Secrets of Consciousness (Kindle Edition.)

A little knowledge

Reality is complicated. So is the way we try to understand it. The way includes feelings, moods and motivations (intentions) and also thoughts, words and deeds. And these have to do with how we view and understand our inner and outer environments.

Our knowledge and understanding of the inner and outer environments is rooted in (a) nature -inherited modules in the mindbrain (hard wiring) and (b) nurture - inputs channelled through our various sense organs ie visible light, audible sounds, types of taste and smell, types of touch.

We understand reality using our mindbrains which have evolved through reptilian, mammalian, primate, hominid and now human stages. Our contemporary mindbrains have to deal with our being social animals who now use language. New adaptations have been and will be tweaked from existing and aging heritage systems – the stone age mindbrain contemporises?

As language users we clump and categorise reality into manageably sized things and events linked by cause and event chains. We tend to populate our realities with agents and patterns (Shermer).

Classic examples of classification include (a) the binomial system of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) – he arranged plants and animals into seven levels - Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, and (b) the periodic table of the elements drawn up by Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907 – his system predicted the existence of elements that were unknown in his time.

The above examples are standing the test of time. Other more common sense examples have now been relegated to that dustbin of history called myth and magic – eg

• arranged marriages
• atoms are indivisible 
• children should be seen but not heard
• every cloud has silver lining
• female genital mutilation
• heavier than air machines cannot fly
• honor killings
• human sacrifice to placate the Gods
• if a pregnant women eats boiled eggs the baby will be born bald
• intelligent design
• nature red in tooth and claw
• seeing is believing
• the divine right of Kings
• the lord helps those that help themselves
• watched kettles never boil

With the recent advances in neurology it is becoming clear that most (99.99%) of what happens in the mindbrain is confined to the unconscious; or to put it the other way round – self consciousness accounts for only about 00.01% of mindbrain activity - and most of that is after the fact of unconscious churn which is laden with cognitive bias and heuristics

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviant thinking where inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. But then again, some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. They may lead to more effective actions in a given context, eg by enabling faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics.

A heuristic is a mental shortcut that helps us make decisions and judgments quickly without having to spend a lot of time researching and analyzing information. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution via mental shortcuts to ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, or common sense

Most people exhibit what Hanson calls Negativity bias.  This is about pessimism and Velcro for the bad as opposed to optimism and Teflon for the good. This may be adaptive. Those who are easy going and freewheeling are more likely to be lion lunch than those who are restless and panicky.

According to Kahneman we are prone to thinking fast and slow and fast is the most common. Fast is adaptive in emergencies while slow is better when there is time for deep reflection. Fast thinking is riddled with cognitive biases and heuristics and much of it is intuitive and instinctive. Slow thinking is tougher as it involves paying more attention to the real evidence while analysing, planning, implementing and evaluating. When you are running on fast thinking you are on automatic pilot, when on slow thinking you are less habit bound and more authentic.

But it is not easy to be authentic rather than to be a creature of blind habit. We are both hard wired and culturally conditioned to run this way rather than that. There is, however, the option of mindfulness which involves being awake to and aware of what is going on in those parts of the mindbrain to which there is conscious access. By bearing witness to the stream of thoughts and feelings that are channelled through the attention centre we can realize that the mind has a mind of its own and that therefore our view of ‘self’ needs reworking.

BUT none of the above is cast in stone. There is neural plasticity which allows the brain to change the mind which in turn changes the brain.

I am minded of the Taoist insight that the reality that can be described is not the real reality. Reality is complicated, awesome and endlessly fascinating. Arguably if the mindbrain has a purpose it is to be conscious of its consciousness and thus to fathom reality in a way that ensures its survival in a post stone age, globalised world.