Rumination, the Stress Response, and Meditation

I'm sure I've told this story before, but in sixth-form biology (some 35 years ago now) we studied a plant and an animal in some depth. For our animal we followed Charles Darwin in studying the earthworm. I gained a new appreciation of these creatures through studying their physiology and behaviour. One of the experiments we did was a bit cruel. We studied the stress response of earthworms. I want to begin this essay on rumination by outlining what happens when you pretend to be a predator to an exposed earthworm.

The Stress Response

Earthworms may be exposed on the surface during daylight for a number of reasons. For example rain-saturated soil forces them up to breathe, or some chemical or mechanical irritant may make then break cover to escape it, despite the risk. Not only does sunlight kill them, through exposure to UV light and dehydration, but being on the surface also leaves them vulnerable to one of their principle predators - birds. Back in 1982 we collected earthworms by introducing a chemical irritant into the soil and grabbing them as they popped up, then we rinsed them and kept them in a dark moist environment. After they had time to acclimatise to their new environment, we stressed them by poking them in a way designed to mimic a bird attempting to eat them. Stressed in this way an earthworm goes into a frenzied writhing motion which is obviously designed to make them hard to grab hold of. Once they stopped we poked them again, producing more writhing. And we repeated this several times. On the third time the writhing was noticeably less vigorous. On the fourth time the poor worm was lethargic but moved around slowly. And after that further poking did not seem to produce any response at all.

So what does this tell us?

The father of modern stress research, Hans Selye (1907 – 1982), did much the same thing with rats and outlined threephases of response to a stressor that seemed to apply to many organisms. He defined these largely in glandular terms, i.e. in the type and amount of hormones produced. Nowadays we might characterise the response in terms of the autonomic nervous system (ANS).

1. Alarm reaction. These is an immediate reaction to a stimulus or stressor. In humans the ANS initiates a series of changes: The sympathetic side of the ANS acts rapidly to produce changes: the release of stress hormones such as epinephrine (aka adrenaline) and cortisol flood the blood with glucose, raise our blood-pressure, increase our heart rate. The bronchioles in the lungs expand. Blood is diverted away from the gut, toward the skeletal muscles. The pupils dilate. In the gastro-intestinal tract, sphincters tighten and peristalsis is slowed or suspended, In other words we prepare for action (another term for this is arousal). These preparations are for in-the-moment reactions such as "freezing" and the "fight or flight" response.Without further stressors this reaction is short-lived and the body soon begins to restore normal operating conditions, reversing the changes that arousal produces through the actions of the parasympathetic side of the ANS. Relaxation takes longer than arousal. Short lived stressors may be positive, such as the anxiety preceding a performance (be it sporting or artistic) that allows us to achieve something out of the ordinary - a gold medal winning time in the Olympics or a recital that gains a standing ovation. Selye called this positive side of stress eustress and the negative kind distress.

2. Resistance.With continued exposure to stressors, the body's ability to respond to stimulus changes. We may begin to experience fatigue, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, sleep and appetite disturbance, and problems with homoeostatic regulation, such as high or low blood pressure. We may also begin to experience mood disturbances, such as mood swings, low mood, or anxiety. There may also be impairment to the immune system. This corresponds to the third and fourth stimulus in the worm where the response to the stressor was attenuated and the ability to avoid the threat was significantly degraded.

3. Exhaustion. Finally, prolonged exposure to stressors (or an intense short-term stressor) can cause a complete breakdown in our ability to response to stimulus. Like the earthworm, the behaviour that protects us from threats simply ceases. Glands that produce the hormones become depleted and receptors become unresponsive. Such exhaustion may manifest as what we call "major depression" (sometimes lay people call this "clinical depression"). People suffering from depression typically experience overwhelming fatigue, appetite disturbance, a tendency to sleep too much or too little. They begin to avoid social interactions. Stimulation of any kind may be experienced as painful. The classic image of depression is of someone unable to get out of bed, lying in the dark, unresponsive. Another less known aetiology, particularly amongst men, is of a kind of "always on" anger, an emotional response to stimuli that is stuck on one setting. One suspects that this process may also be implicated in a number of other disease syndromes (i.e. illnesses that are a cluster of symptoms with no known cause) such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.

Modern urban life is increasingly stressful. City living is already stressful for us as social primates, because we are crowded in with a lot of strangers. As well as being surrounded by strangers, increasing numbers of people are socially isolated for one reason or another. We don't get enough of the right kind of contact with human beings. Older people in particular may never experience physical contact with another human being except the functional touch of carers (who are also likely to be strangers). Loneliness is epidemic in modern life. For many people social bonds are weak, a vulnerability and a stressor for a social primate.

In modern cities we are hammered by sights, sounds, and smells. Everywhere we go there is noise pollution, visual pollution, air pollution and so on. Teams of psychologists work to tune advertising to grab our attention and manipulate our emotions, often utilising highly sexualised images. News media focus on stories that will elicit the basic emotions of fear, anger, and disgust, making news a stressor. Too many of these stimuli are noxious and trigger our alarm reaction too often. Everything in modern life is designed to cause arousal and this can leave us in a state of hyper-alertness. Or in Selye's terms, leaving us in the state of resistance or exhaustion. The body's natural relaxation response (mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system) is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of arousing stimuli that we meet in a day).

Almost nothing is designed to help us get back to a resting state. Indeed many of us attempt to do this through drugs and alcohol. This is problematic in many ways, but in the case of alcohol, being a poison, it is also a stressor! Clearly the inability to self-regulate emotions and to relax back to a calm resting state is a serious problem in modern urban life. Another way people try to calm down is through eating.

In the UK 24.3% of men and 26.8% of women were obese in 2014 (Public Health England). By 2050 these figures are predicted to be 60% and 50% respectively.Every day I see children being unconsciously being taught to use food as a means of regulating their levels of arousal, i.e. being given food to quiet them down and get them stay calm while strapped into a pushchair. I suspect that this is partly why we see more and more fat people who find dieting almost impossible. They've learned from infancy that eating is a way to regulate emotions, to calm down. And this is true to some extent, the satiation response that comes after eating does relax the body, causing what is sometimes called the postprandial dip. On the other hand, dieting is a powerful stressor, partly in its own right and partly because it removes one of the most effective means people have of calming down. Exercising is also a stressor, at least until one can build up the intensity enough to reap the reward of endogenous opioids,. It may be some time before an obese person can achieve this and in the meantime it's just painful and stressful. So I imagine that the average obese person is caught in a vicious cycle of eating as a first choice aid to deflating arousal and being stressed by the supposed cures for obesity (dieting and exercise).

For those of us who are hyper-stimulated, sleep may become elusive or ineffective. We may wake without feeling refreshed, use coffee of some other stimulant to try to spark ourselves into action and stumble through our days without ever feeling fully awake. Along with depression, anxiety and obesity, insomnia is a major problem in urban populations. Chronic stress leads to all kinds of illness, often with no obvious cause and no consistent aetiology, which thus leaves the medical profession scratching their heads.

If all this external stress were not bad enough, many of us use our imaginations in such a way that our own thoughts become stressors. And this brings us to the problem of rumination.

Rumination

bovine stomach

The word rumination comes from rumen,a word of uncertain origin. Some animals, often referred to collectively as ruminants, have a multi-compartment stomach and typically eat grass and leaves. Food from the oesophagus goes into the first chamber, or rumen,where it is fermented by microbes to break down cellulose. No animal can digest cellulose, the major constituent of plants, without help from symbiotic microbes living in their gut. After fermentation the wodge of partially digested food, or cud, can be regurgitated to be further chewed. This act of re-chewing food is called "chewing the cud" a characteristic of ruminant animals. When it is re-swallowed it carries on through the alimentary canal.

For obvious reasons this process has been seen as analogous to cogitating on something repeatedly or continually turning a thought over in the mind. And thus we metaphorically call this process rumination. Rumination refers to a particular type of mental process. For example when we turn over a problem and work through it, this is not really rumination. Nor is it rumination if we plan out an event or period of time. The crucial feature of rumination is repeatedly going over the same thoughts, particularly memories of past events. Like a cow chewing its cud - swallowing and regurgitating.

When we recall a memory, the content of it may be impressions from any of our senses: visual, aural, tastes, smells, and tactiles. But along with these images come the associated emotions. When we recall a pleasant meeting with friends, we experience a measure of the joy and happiness that we experienced during the original event. Equally, if we remember some unpleasant event then we will experience the associated emotions, such as fear, anger, or disgust. In other words thoughts and memories can lead to arousal, can be stressors.

Some people are prone to rumination, prone particularly to bringing to mind the unpleasant events of their lives. Events may haunt them. They may endlessly relive past shame, humiliation, fear, or helplessness. And with the memories come the emotions associated with these events. Such memories and emotions are stressors. While an event such as an assault produces very strong emotions, bringing to mind the assault can be almost as intense if the memory is vivid. And though perhaps less intense than the original experience, when we repeatedly bring these events to mind, time and again, one after another, or when they persistently intrude seemingly of their own volition, the repeated stimulation of our alarm reaction can lead to exhaustion.

A related problem is worry. Worry about what might happen in the future can create chronic anxiety. This can sometimes be a problem if our past experience means that we expect our future experience to be stressful. Especially if we have a good imagination, we can create vivid scenarios in imagination that also give rise to emotions and act as stressors. When we allow them to play out repeatedly, they may tax our ability to respond and eventually lead to exhaustion.

Although depression may have other causes, these two routes to depression—through rumination on the past and worry about the future—seem to me to be especially significant. For example the correlation between depression and low serotonin levels is often assumed to be causal in a particular direction: low serotonin causes depression. In fact it may be the other way around, that depression causes low serotonin. The body chemistry of someone suffering from an overload of stressors, from distress, resistance and exhaustion may deplete serotonin leaving the person with low serotonin levels. Even so, serotonin ought not to be seen in isolation because it is involved in a complex, highly interrelated system of internal regulation. If one part of that system is malfunctioning then chances are the rest of the system is also malfunctioning.The relation between neurotransmitters and depression is in fact poorly understood and messing with neurotransmitters always has unpredictable, unintended consequences.

Medications which raise serotonin availability are often seen as the first line of treatment for depression even though there is now serious doubt about their efficacy. The historical non-reporting of negative trials made anti-depressants seem much more effective than they are because when it came time to do review studies they only considered published rather than unpublished results and these were very heavily biased towards positive results. The movement to pre-register all drugs trials and to publish negative results has altered how we see the efficacy of these medicines. When we add in all the trials in which anti-depressant medications had no discernible effect beyond what might be attributed to the placebo effect, then the picture changed. This seems not to have filtered down to the GP level were anti-depressants are still the first line treatment for depression as well as being liberally prescribed off label.

Buddhists often see Buddhism as a panacea for stress,. One prominent translator of Buddhist texts goes so far as to translate dukkha as "stress" making stress the fundamental problem of human existence. So next I want to look at meditation from the point of view of someone suffering from rumination and/or depression.

Depression and Meditation

As well as the symptoms described above, depression often manifests in a distorted inner-dialogue. The depressed person may experience feelings of worthlessness accompanied by self-talk that reinforces this feeling. It may also distort a person's sense of perspective, so that the present seems unrelated to the past or future. One may find it difficult to recall things ever being different or to imagine them getting better. The combination can be unbearable and result in thoughts of suicide, though the suicidal thoughts themselves may be a symptom of depression.

If a person suffering from depression induced by the chronic stress of rumination and/or worry takes up meditation the results can be disastrous. Attempting meditation while being prone to rumination can bring on or exacerbate any problems they may be experiencing. Without considerable experience of dealing with the hindrances the mind simply goes to its well worn habits of rumination and worry. Only now in a more intensive way than usual because meditation encourages us to focus on the object of awareness. Focus on rumination or thoughts of worthlessness or even suicide may lead to acute distress as a result. Going on retreat with this habit is like being in a pressure cooker and can lead to severe acute distress. It's important to begin breaking the habit of ruminating before setting out to do any meditation practice, be it concentration or just awareness based. One needs practice stabilising the mind and dealing with the hindrances or one simply dwells in negative states. Rumination will subvert this practice unless it is addressed directly. Simply trying not to think about something for someone in the habit of ruminating won't work. They will be drawn inexorably back to the same old subject. There is recent research which supports this conclusion.

"The results suggest that, contrary to expectation, strong concentration on the present, perceived as an important and unique time area, by highly neurotic individuals intensifies the negative relationship between neuroticism and self-esteem, satisfaction with life and life engagement." (ScienceDirect pre-pub)

When we add some of the more nihilistic Buddhist doctrines such as non-self or emptiness then we can create real havoc in a person's psyche. Of course such doctrines are not intended as nihilism, but they are so often interpreted and taught nihilistically that they are worse than useless and can be positively dangerous to someone prone to psychological distress. To some people these doctrines say "you are nothing", which is just what their depression-influenced inner-dialogue is telling them.

In a religious context, especially in a Buddhist context, the conversion to and practice of the religion are supposed to cure one of psychological distress. That's what it says on the tin. If someone does the Buddhist practices, but they still get depressed then that threatens to undermine the faith of the rest of the community. It intimates the fragility of some of the claims made by Buddhists. The religious whose faith is threatened by the mere existence of another person can react unpredictably. They may angrily reject the depressed person in a catastrophic way, pushing them out of home or religious community for example.

Another area of confusion is ethics. Buddhists of my acquaintance are both too slack in their own practise of the precepts and too rigid when viewing the practice of others. The result is a kind of lazy hypocritical judgement and criticism of others. The precepts are phrased as personal undertakings, not externally imposed rules. We undertake to practice them, usually because we see mentors exemplifying the practice and being attractive as a result. If we fail to uphold our precepts then this is not an opportunity to put the boot in, for the Buddhist this ought to be seen as an opportunity for offering a helping hand. Someone committed to ethical behaviour is unlikely to suddenly act unskilfully for no reason. In fact it may be the environment the person is in which is undermining their practice, in which case the community ought to be doing some soul searching rather than sitting in judgement. All too often Buddhists use the precepts as a stick to beat someone with or to place an unbearable burden on them. Most of us are at least as likely to be responding to our social environment as acting on some internal motivation. Unfortunately Freud and other Romantics have rather blinded us to our social nature and the importance of environmental factors in determining behaviour.

If we are suffering from stress to the point where it affects our behaviour, then it is deeply unhelpful for our friends and mentors to sit in judgement and criticise our ethics. Of course there may be a need to set limits and boundaries. Simply tolerating destructive behaviours is counter-productive. But there are ways of achieving this without cutting off from the person. The most important thing a community can do is let the suffering person know that they are loved and appreciated. In my experience Buddhists can be quite good around people who are dying or severally physically ill, but they are crap, really crap, at responding to severe psychological distress. Death is something we want to face with grace. It's the ultimate test of our test of our faith. We can feel good about ourselves if we face death with equanimity. Depression and other forms of psychological problem seem to be something we don't want to face at all. Since happiness is said to be the result of being a Buddhist, then a Buddhist suffering from distress is a kind of anathema. The reaction seems to be to pull away and isolate the person, perhaps with a sense of preventing the spread of the negativity contagion. Fear is a common reaction.

The point is that traditional approaches to meditation assume fairly good mental health from the outset. And it's doubtful at best to assume that everyone who signs up for a meditation course at an urban Buddhist Centre is in good mental health. In fact I would say that many people sign up for meditation precisely because they are not in good mental health and have been told that meditation is the cure for what ails them. And that is confusing for everyone involved.

Conclusion

My view is that this kind of problem is widespread. Modern urban life is organised in such a way that many people suffer from hyper-stimulation and chronic, generalised stress reactions. We are constantly being intensely stimulated and don't know how to effectively calm down. In addition many of us develop the vicious habits of rumination or worry which are themselves stressors. We may not have enough resilience or know ways to calm ourselves down. Without acknowledging this, Buddhism as widely taught is unintentionally creating a significant amount of confusion and misery. It is a significant barrier for many people who might otherwise benefit from our practices. And the idealism of Buddhists, who tend to see meditation as a kind of panacea—saving not only individuals, but the cosmos itself—doesn't help matters. For many people attempting meditation does not bring any of the promised benefits and but contrarily introduces new stressors and/or intensifies old ones. We cannot continue to teach as though we are living in pre-modern Asia. Unfortunately the negative changes are ramping up as time goes on and we need to adapt to rapidly changing times.

Fortunately there are a number of auxiliary practices that are also frequently taught alongside Buddhism. I'm thinking of yoga and taichi for example, both of which indirectly enable a person to manage their mental states better by grounding them in the bodily experience (I've praised cultivation of the body previously). But I'm also thinking of what we call mindfulness (in the John Kabat-Zinn sense). With this kind of practice of paying attention to our bodies and our movements we prepare the ground for going deeper by allowing ourself to experience a stable mind. The physicality of bodily awareness often short-circuits rumination and worry. We enable a person who is prone to rumination to stop the vicious cycle and experience themselves anew. Recent research has shown that paying attention to the body increases resilience, where resilience refers to the body's ability to rapidly return to a resting state after encountering a stressor. See for example:To Better Cope With Stress, Listen to Your Body. (New York Times, 13 Jan 2016)

Another task I find helpful is writing. This forms an integral part of my strategy for avoiding rumination and worry. The linear nature of the process of writing about ideas is perfect for preventing the downward spiral of negativity. Always having something to think through that I can switch to if I notice an unhelpful trend building up in my thoughts has been essential to my well-being for over a decade now. I heartily recommend this practice to anyone who is thoughtful, but struggles with rumination or worry. Creative writing may suit other people better. But writing epitomises an approach to moving away from vicious spirals into more virtuous progression.

Knowing, as I do, the pitfalls of rumination and worry, I'm in favour of these auxiliary practices becoming much more prominent in our teaching. My opinion is also that we ought to teach very little theory to beginners and focus on mindfulness practices, particularly related to the body. All one needs to do, initially, is to start paying attention and to note what happens when we do pay attention. Everything should be based on this. Once someone achieves a measure of success in this, then we can move them onto more intensive practices. New techniques should only be introduced on an individual basis, by an experienced mentor, when the practitioner is ready. Indeed I would advocate that everyone be introduced to these practices by a mentor who can function a bit like a sponsor in AA. Someone who is experienced enough to offer guidance, but also sufficiently available for the guidance to be timely. Someone who can take an active interest in that individual's life. As it is I suspect many Buddhists are way ahead of themselves and floundering because the foundations of their practice are not sound. Any theory that we do teach should tie directly into experiences we've already had rather than hypothetical. Buddhists should not be allowed to teach what they do not know from personal experience. We need fewer teachers and more demonstrators. More people who show us what to do, and fewer who can only tell us. 

Simplicity and experience ought to be at the heart of what and how we demonstrate Buddhism. If we much teach "History of Buddhism" we ought to structure our approach to highlight experience and draw people into paying attention to their experience. We should never teach anything that is not part of a coherent program of taking people towards insights into the nature of experience. We must refocus on what Buddhists do rather than what they believe - it's only by doing what we do, that what we believe what happens becomes relevant. And we should be guided by critical scholarship rather than traditional accounts of history. Of course to some extent this horse has already bolted. There are uncounted books describing Buddhism, its history and practices to anyone with the money and time to read. Books that are often simply parrot the traditional stories and/or are misleading. Chances are that new people are showing up at our centres having crammed their heads with useless information about Buddhism that gets in the way of their understanding the Dharma.

I think this means starting from scratch and redesigning Buddhism. Including, I may say, the approach of the Triratna Buddhism Movement. Unlike most religious groups, for example, we use our centres primarily as classrooms. Events are almost always structured with active teachers and passive students. I personally find almost no opportunities to engage. There is almost no opportunity to simply socialise with experienced Buddhists for example. If I could go back, I would do everything differently. If I could advise my younger self, I would be emphasise physical cultivation, mindfulness, and sustaining social connections. Meditation was not what I needed back then. Had I established better foundations, my life might be very different now. The most effective practices I have are not ones that I learned from my Buddhist teachers, but one's I figured out for myself based on wide reading and reflection on my life. It was difficult and took a long time to get this far. And most of the time enlightenment is not at all relevant to my daily practice. I'm working at a very different level. Everyone ought to be aiming to work effectively at the level that they are at, rather than getting caught up in the interminable babble about enlightenment.

So much for my opinions on Buddhism. But make no mistake. Rumination is a serious problem. Having our own thoughts as a constant stressor can have serious health consequences. It can be debilitating. And I don't think it is widely enough understood by those who merely "teach" Buddhism.

~~oOo~~

Update 25 Jan 2016

“Pathological anxiety and chronic stress are associated with structural degeneration and impaired functioning of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, which may account for the increased risk of developing neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression and dementia.” - The Independent. 

update 24 Jan 2016

In case anyone is in any doubt, please see the UK National Health Service's definition of depression. It's quite important when considering this discussion to have a clear idea of what I mean by the word. And I mean what the Brits call Clinical Depression or what the DSM-IV calls Major Depression. It is a profound disease that manifests in changes to thoughts, emotions, and bodily systems. It represents a powerful perturbation of our homoeostatic systems. And it can be fatal. 

update 23 Jan 2016.

As it happens the day after I published this essay, the Guardian newspaper published one of their regular scare stories, this time about mindfulness. 

Is mindfulness making us ill? It’s the relaxation technique of choice, popular with employers and even the NHS. But some have found it can have unexpected effects. by Dawn Foster (23 Jan 2016)

My view on the UK press is that they thrive of fear, anger, disgust. It's an extreme form of entertainment which is not peculiar to this country, but does exist here in a particularly refined form. They tailor their stories to produce these emotions in their readers - different types of reader respond to different stimuli. One has to take this into account reading newspapers. They will always pitch the information in a way designed to elicit fear, anger, and/or disgust. All the UK papers are extremely unethical in this sense. They fuck you up.

However my attention was also drawn to this article in The Atlantic which comes closer to some of my concerns. 

The Dark Knight of the Soul. For some, meditation has become more curse than cure. Willoughby Britton wants to know why. 25 Jun 2014. 

As far as people having psychotic breaks after starting meditation I think this must be read with caution. As I understand it, someone prone to have a psychotic break was going to have one anyway. I've certainly found myself in some extremely painful and distressed states while trying to meditate, especially on retreat, but I don't think meditation is a practice that by itself will cause a psychotic break in someone that was otherwise unlikely to have one. Again The Atlantic is a newspaper.

Readers who find this material rings bells may also like to look at the story of Sally Clay, particularly her story The Wounded Prophet.

If you have a psychiatric diagnosis then meditation may not be for you. You need to work closely with your support people and a mentor who has some experience in mental health. And most meditation teachers have no fucking clue. So be warned.

If you are prone to rumination and/or worry then you really need to address that before taking up meditation and, again, work closely with an experienced mentor. Something I wish I had done. 

I would also add that despite having some very difficult experiences around meditation and particularly retreats, I still think of meditation as an extremely positive and helpful practice on the whole. I see it as essential for the process of awakening (however we interpret that). Everyone needs to have good foundations before they dive into practices that can disrupt their sense of identity and embodiedness.

Reasoning and Beliefs

In a desultory way I have been articulating a theory about religious belief over the last few years. As someone interested in factual accounts; as someone who's worldview has been changed by new facts on several occasions; and as someone who regularly spends a fair amount of time amongst credulous religious believers, I've been fascinated by the relationship between reason, factual information, and beliefs.

So for example, following Mercier and Sperber, I understand reasoning to be a function of groups seeking optimal solutions to problems. M & S argued that reasoning has confirmation bias as a feature when putting forward solutions to problems and that critical thinking, generally speaking, only works well when criticising someone else's proposed solution. The individual working in isolation to try to find the truth using reason is at a considerable disadvantage. Similarly, others have found that reason does not operate as predicted by mainstream accounts of it: "We’re assuming that people accept something or don’t accept it on a completely rational basis. Or, they’re part of a belief community that as a group accept or don’t accept. But the findings just made those simple answers untenable." (When it Comes to Accepting Evolution, Gut Feelings Trump Facts)

Furthermore I apply results published by Antonio and Hanna Damasio which suggest that emotions play a key role in decision making. (I outlined this idea in a blog called Facts and Feelings). Most real world problems are complex and making decisions about them, including deciding what we think is true, requires us to sift and weigh up a broad range of information. Before we can make a decision we have to assess the relevance of the information or category of information to the decision at hand, i.e. what is salient. Most of this process is unconscious and is based on emotional responses. Or in other words emotions function to help us decide what is important in any decision making situation. Decisions are then made by comparative weighing up of our emotional responses to the solutions we are aware of and have judged to be salient. Once a decision is made it is then rationalised to fit an existing personal narrative. This insight was also outlined at a library marketing seminar I attended almost 20 years ago.

The ability to unconsciously determine salience is what we often call our "gut feeling" or "intuition". This type of unconscious information processing seems to rely on pattern recognition and considering many options at once (parallel processing). The end result is decisions made with no conscious awareness of the process of thinking it through. Indeed the result often comes to us in a flash or after a period of sleep. The speed of this type of processing seems to contraindicate the usual cognitive processes of conscious problem solving, so that the answers that come via this route may not be fully integrated into the sense of self - spatially the answer comes from nowhere, or from outside us. Thus this kind of information process can coupled with views about metaphysical self that is not tied to the body and become "divine inspiration". (See Origin of the Idea of the Soul which relies on work by Thomas Metzinger).

The cognitive gap that opens up when we set aside information as non-salient is often filled by what neuroscientists call confabulation. Oliver Sachs poignantly described a man with no ability to make or retrieve memories (see Oliver Sach's Confabulating Butcher). Asked why he is present in the hospital or engaged in an activity he cannot say, but instead confabulates - he produces a plausible story and presents it as truth. There is no conscious lie, and the patient is not trying to deceive his interlocutors. He is presenting the most plausible account of himself that he has, despite being aware of inconsistencies, because he has no other account and the state of not being able to account for himself seems to be unacceptable at an unconscious level. Something similar happens whenever we have a flash of insight or intuition. The thought pops fully formed into our heads and then we confabulate a story about how it got there, and this generally speaking has nothing to do with how the mind or the brain works. Thus conscious thought is not a good paradigm for how the mind works. It is the just the tip of the iceberg.

Now this theory is still rather nascent and a bit vague. I'm still getting up to speed with the literature of evolutionary approaches to religion, though my views seem to have much in common with scholars like Ara Norenzayan. The theory does make an interesting prediction. It predicts that where people have strong existing views they will treat new contradictory information in a limited number of ways depending on how they feel about it. Where a view entails a major investment of identity and social status (e.g. a religious view) a person will tend to judge contradictory information as not salient and reason in such a way as to set aside the new information without having to consider the real implications of it. My idea was that this could be tested at some point on people with religious beliefs. On paper it does seem to account for some behaviours of religious people with respect to new information, for example the Christian fundamentalist confronting the facts of evolution.

With all this in mind I was fascinated to read an article by Steve Keen describing something very similar in the field of economics. Keen highlights a paper by Dan M. Kahan et al. "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government" Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307. Keen, formerly Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, is best known for his vehement polemics against the Neoclassical consensus in economics, epitomised in his book Debunking Economics. Neoclassical economics is what is taught to virtually all economics students at all levels across the world and has a monopoly over economics discourse that is disproportionate to its success as a body of theory.

Keen is one of a small number of economists who predicted the economic crisis that began in late 2007, and probably the only one who did so on the basis of mathematical modelling. One of his main criticisms of Neoclassical economists is that they ignore debt in their macro-economic models because aggregate debt cancels out: if I borrow £1 and a bank lends me £1 then the balance is zero. On the face of it this seems reasonable because our view of banks is that they lend out deposits. But in fact banks lend orders of magnitude more money than their actual deposits. When they lend they, in effect, create money at the same time. Problems occur when too much debt builds up and the repayments become a burden. For example private debt in the UK soared to 500% of GDP or five times the annual economic output of the whole country. Conditions may change and render debtors incapable of repaying the debt, which is what happened on a huge scale in 2007 and the sub-prime mortgage scandal. The levels of debt at that point meant that banks started to become insolvent as their income from interest payments plummeted and their own ability to service debts was compromised. From their the crisis spread like toppling dominoes.

Thus banks and debt are far from neutral in the economy. Perhaps in a post-crash world in which the role of banks in creating the crisis through a massive over-expansion of the money supply is public knowledge, the theory might be expected to change? But it has not. A global economic crisis has not caused any great soul searching amongst macro-economists who did not see it coming. Tweaking is the main result. 

Keen predicted the crash on the basis of the rate of change of debt. As we take on debt (private rather than public debt) growth ensues and , for example, employment levels grow. As shown in this graph there is a tight correlation (0.96) between changes in debt and the employment rate. 

Thus when the rate of change of debt began to fall sharply in 2006 it was a harbinger of collapse in the economy. In the USA employment levels fell from 95% to 90% and have yet to fully recover. 

This mathematical analysis ought to have been of interest to people trying to predict the behaviour of economies. Especially in post-crash hindsight it ought to be interesting to those whose job was to predict how the economy would perform and utterly failed to see the worst economic disaster in a century coming. As late as mid-2007, just months before sub-prime began to kick off, the OECD were still predicting strong economic performance in their member countries for the foreseeable future. However Keen's work, and the work of other economists who were successful in predicting a major recession/depression has been roundly ignored. Keen also argues that mainstream economic models are incapable of predicting a recession because it is not a possible state in those models, whereas his models do allow for recession. 

Not a man to mince words, Keen has been highly critical of the mainstream of economics. But now he puts that failure to react in the context of a theory of belief and decision making similar to the one outlined above. In the paper by Kahan et al, the participants were given tasks to assess their "ability to draw valid causal inferences from empirical data." The results were counter-intuitive and surprising. Numeracy – skill in understanding numbers – was a negative predictor of performance on these tasks if they conflicted with existing beliefs.

"It seems that when an issue is politically neutral, a higher level of numeracy does correlate with a higher capacity to interpret numerical data correctly. But when an issue is politically charged – or the numerical data challenges a numerate person’s sense of self – numeracy actually works against understanding the issue. The reason appears to be that numerate people employed their numeracy skills to evade the evidence, rather than to consider it." Steve Keen (emphasis in the original)

This is consistent with Mercier & Sperber's account of confirmation bias as a feature of reasoning. And it is consistent with my Damasio derived theory about the role of emotion in decision-making, if we read "politically charged" as signifying strongly held political beliefs, and associate that in turn with strong emotional responses to the issue. The authors tied this in with personal and social psychology:

Individuals, on this account, have a large stake – psychically as well as materially – in maintaining the status of, and their personal standing in, affinity groups whose members are bound by their commitment to shared moral understandings. If opposing positions on a policy-relevant fact – e.g., whether human activity is generating dangerous global warming – came to be seen as symbols of membership in and loyalty to competing groups of this kind, individuals can be expected to display a strong tendency to conform their understanding of whatever evidence they encounter to the position that prevails in theirs. Steve Keen (emphasis added).

Kahan et al. extend the problem of salience of information to the social setting. Professed beliefs are often explicit markers of group membership and being well versed in group jargon and able to articulate group beliefs is part of what determines one's status in the group. In an economic setting, mainstream economists are able to ignore facts (such as a very high correlation of the rate of change of debt to the employment rate) that might change their worldview (particularly the way they view the role of debt in economics) because their status as members of a group requires them to conform to norms which are in part defined by holding a particular worldview. They are blind to facts which challenge their views. Keen points out that this is not a new observation and that some years ago that the great physicist Max Planck, who had struggled to have his work accepted by his peers, quipped that knowledge progresses "one funeral at a time".

This result reinforces the limitations of thinking of human beings in terms of individual psychology. It's a hard habit to break in the West. We are influenced by Freud, the Romantics, and the various revolutionary thinkers who championed the rights of individuals. Of course to some extent we are individuals, but not as much as we make out. Much of the inner life that appears to make up our individuality, is in fact determined by conditioning in various groups (family, peers, nation, religion, education) and by our place within these groups. We simply do not exist in isolation. 

Any philosophy of consciousness, mind, or morality which sees individuals as the main subject for study is of limited value. And the practice of trying to make valid inferences from the individual to the group is less likely to be accurate than the other way around. At the very least individuals exist in a series of overlapping gestalts with various groups. 

This view of people will most likely conflict with what we know. Most of us are convinced that we are individuals, who make our own decisions and think our own thoughts. We live in a society which highly values a narrative about "reason" and about what a reasoning individual is capable of. However, very few people are convinced by facts because that's not how reasoning works. That view of reason is isolated from other aspects of humanity such as emotions and our behaviour as social primates.

Those people who bombard us with facts fail to convince. By contrast the advertising profession has long understood that in order to change minds and behaviour one must change how people feel about the facts. Half the ads I see nowadays have almost no intellectual or factual content. It's all about brand recognition (familiarity) and a positive emotional response. One might say that for advertising the facts are now irrelevant. And so, liberals campaigning for protection of the environment, say, often fail to convince a sizeable proportion of the population or indeed anyone that disagrees with them to start with. Meanwhile advertising is a multi-billion pound industry, consumerism is rampant, and the environment is daily degraded in the direction of being unable to sustain human life.

Most people cannot be reasoned with, because neither people nor reason work the way they are popularly conceived to work. Those of us who want to make the world a better place must pay close attention to these issues of how people's minds actually work. If we want to convince people that we have a better solution it cannot be through facts alone. They must feel that what we say is salient in the context of their existing values. And even then, if what we say conflicts with strongly held beliefs then we can expect to be ignored. We tend to get so carried away in our enthusiasm for our own values that we fail to empathise with those whose minds we really need to change in order to change the world: i.e. political, military and business leaders. 

.

~~oOo~~

The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor

"Whatever complex biological and neural processes go on backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence, where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed."

Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

ONE OF THE MOST fundamental metaphors we use when talking about mind is: the mind is a container. The container prototype is very important in terms of how we interact with the world. A container is a physically finite and bounded space, with a clear distinction between inside and outside. Containers often, but not always, have lids which seal the inside from outside, or vice versa.

Our body is a physically a container with a sealable opening at either end: a mouth and an anus. We put food into our body via our mouth. The mouth itself is a container, because we put food into it as well. Various things happen inside our body And shit comes out of our anus. Similarly we breath into our lungs (which are inside our body) and out. Virtually all other animals follow a similar body plan, and set of biological processes.

But these metaphors have implications which go well beyond the way we talk. George Lakoff and his colleagues, especially Mark Johnson, have shown that abstract thought is always metaphorical, and that the metaphors we draw on for abstract thought are often based on how we physically interact with the world.

So when "a thought comes into our head" there are two metaphorical processes happening. Firstly we are allowing that our head is a kind of container. This might be obvious because physically our skull is a hollow chamber of bone filled with our brain. It also has some extrusions attached and several openings. But the head here is also standing for the what goes on 'in' the head, a form of metaphor called metonymy: where a part stands for the whole, and sometimes vice versa. Our head is the container of thoughts; that is the head here stands for the mind as the container of thought: the thought is in [the container of] the mind, which is in [the container of] the head. The head is a particular kind of container, more like a room which we inhabit. Experientially when the thought comes into my head, I become aware of it because it enters the space "I" also occupy.

The second metaphorical process that is happening is that both "I" and the thought are (metaphorically) solid objects with shape and mass. We can take an idea and turn it over in our heads, kick it around; we juggle priorities, manipulate data and crunch numbers; we weigh alternatives, and can be weighed down by our cares. "I" am the same kind of object because I exist in the same domain as the ideas - thinking goes on in my head, and I am thinking my thoughts.

As metaphors there is absolutely nothing wrong with these abstractions. Abstraction allows us to be much more sophisticated in how we interact with the world and each other. Abstraction allows us to use our imagination to consider how things might be, to think about new ways of using tools for example, or new ways to modify tools to do a certain job. In part at least this ability to abstract is related to a set of neurons called mirror neurons. These neurons are active when we do an action, but also when we see an action being performed by someone else. If the action is a facial expression, then something interesting happens: observing the action our own neurons become active and we have a sense of what it would be like to have that facial expression. This allows to know how someone is feeling by observing their face (and their body language and listening to the tone of voice). This is a very useful facility to have.

However we are not usually aware of what we are doing: we have the result without understanding the working. In fact the working only became visible when we started to use powerful real-time brain scanning techniques. When we respond to a smile we aren't aware of the mechanisms that allow us to parse the visual information, recognise the face and the expression, and translate that into an internal state that we can feel, and then formulate a response. We just smile back or mutter humbug or whatever.

Similarly when a thought comes into our head we see this is a naive realistic way: just as though something with shape and mass has entered a room in which we were already an occupant. For many centuries philosophers took this metaphor as real and asked a lot of questions about the container and the nature of the container. Alternatively as the ODP definition says we think of consciousness as a special kind of room (a theatre) in which we observe the experiences we have, with the implication that we are the audience watching the action on the stage. Since we started to learn about the function of the brain we have extended the metaphor to make the brain the container of consciousness or personality.

But as comfortable as this way of referring to our minds it's still just a metaphor, not a reality. Remember that a metaphor is when you explain one thing in terms as though it were something else. It's very important to remember what it is you are describing, which is a hard thing to keep in mind. The mind is also sometimes a leaky container!

Most people, I think, would be surprised to learn that this metaphor is not universal. Luhrmann (2011) surveying the ethnographical literature on hallucinations, notes some research conclusions: "The Iban [tribe of Borneo] do not have an elaborated idea of the mind as a container". (p.79) In the context of research on psychosis this means that "the idea that someone could experience external thoughts as placed within the mind or removed from it was simply not available to them."

We also know that people experience the complete breakdown of the sense of in-here and out-there under certain circumstance (e.g. Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke). So the metaphor is not universal, not hardwired. It is a culturally conditioned aspect of a virtual model which our organism generates for the purposes of optimising its interactions with the environment. But the metaphor is so pervasive in English that it's very difficult for me to write a sentence about the virtual model without referencing the mind as container metaphor.

I might add that all of the aspects of consciousness are similarly contingent and plastic.

I came across a quote from Wittgenstein recently which seems apposite: "meaning is use". By this he seems to have meant that a word takes it's meaning not from a relationship with the object it names, nor by the ideas the objects engender, but only from the way that speakers use the word. There is something in this. However I would add some caveats because the study of sound symbolism, and embodied cognition don't allow for a strict application of 'meaning is use'. Research in sound symbolism tells us that the sounds we use to make words are symbols, and that there is a relationship between the symbols we choose and the objects and events we are observing or thinking of. The case I've been making above is that how we think, the very metaphors we use to represent abstract ideas are based on how we physically interact with the world. So, yes 'meaning is use' but use is not arbitrary, it is motivated (to use de Saussure's term) by these existing relationships, i.e. it operates within limits and tends towards pre-determined states.

The thing I wanted to draw out is that the question 'what is consciousness' might not be a sensible qustion. We might accurately answer that consciousness is the experience of being aware, of having a sense of agency and a first-person perspective. In effect there might be no 'Problem of Consciousness'.  There is certainly an experience, but does it point to a real container, a real theatre in which we experience consciousness? The answer would seem to be that is does not.

I think this would be the Buddhist answer as well, or it would be outside of Western Buddhism. As I suggested above it's very difficult for use Westerners to think of consciousness at all without unconsciously invoking a metaphor which we habitually take to be real. The very terminology we use asserts the reality of the abstractions and metaphors we use to describe the experience. In a targeted, but not comprehensive search I have not found viññāṇa being used in the sense of a container of experience in Pāli. Indeed just what viññāṇa refers to is not entirely clear to me except that it is an essential component of perception; and that it is consistently distinguished from the sense objects (rūpa, sadda, etc) and from the sense organs (cakkhu, sota, etc), and that it comes in six varieties (cakkhu-viññāṇā, sota-viññāṇa, etc.) including mano-viññāṇa. So the one thing this does not look like is the theatre of experience. If, for instance the Buddhist texts say that we experience vedanā in viññāṇa, then I have yet to find the passage where they do. In what sense does viññāṇa resemble our Western conceptions of consciousness at all? My response would be that it doesn't resemble it at all.

One can broaden search quite easily by looking for viññāṇasmiṃ/viññāṇe (the locative singular), which we would expect to translate 'in consciousness' if viññāṇa were a container. We find many examples of this grammatical form in Pāli. One of them is indeed treating viññāṇa a metaphorical container. At M iii.18 and many other places the assutavā [i.e. the ignorant, or uninformed person] seeks (in vain) for self in viññāṇa and viññāṇa in self. But it's clear that the view being described is not one that the knowledgeable Buddhist would subscribe to.

At M i.139 we find another use of the locative (with the sense of 'with reference to'). Here it is the well-informed (sutavā) disciples of the nobles, and they become fed up (nibbindati) with reference to rūpa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra and viññāṇa. At M i.230 a materialist says of the khandhas: With viññāṇa [and the others] as self (atta) a person (purisapuggala) from resting in viññāṇa (viññāṇe patiṭṭhāya) produces merit or non-merit. Gotama proceeds to demolish the views of the materialist, treating the khandhas as he customarily does: not mine, not me, not myself.

And that accounts for all of the occurrences of viññāṇāsmiṃ/viññāṇe I found in a brief survey of the nikāyas. No doubt there are others, but they don't stand out. Buddhist texts, so far as I can tell, are aware that some misguided people do use the 'mind as container' metaphor, but the Buddhist Theory of Mind does not. For Buddhist thinkers there is no theatre of experience, there is just experience. The implication for us is that the experience of being in a theatre of experience, is just another experience. Perhaps the difference lies in the lack of theatres in Iron Age India and the largely outdoor lifestyle of the Buddhists. Virtually all of the action of the Pāli Canon takes place outside.

In any case we think very differently from the ancient Buddhists about the mind. Recall also that they did not see emotion as a separate category of experience but lumped it in the citta. (Cf Emotions in Buddhism) Judging by their language we can see that they lived in very a different world to us. Our conceptions about the world, the mind, and life generally are often not applicable to the past; nor theirs to the present. Our scientists and philosophers have spent time and resources looking for this theatre, and ironically neuroscientists seem to be confirming that our ancient forebears were right: mind as a container is a figment, generated by hypostasizing a metaphor we once used to describe the experience of having experiences.

~~oOo~~

This essay was inspired by reading: On Containers and Content, with a Cautionary Note to Philosophers of Mind, by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Mind Metaphors in Pāli

seed

iti kho, ānando, kammaṃ khettaṃ viññāṇaṃ bījaṃ taṇhā sineho... hīnāya dhātuyā viññāṇaṃ patiṭṭhitaṃ (AN i.232 )
Thus, Ānanda, action is a field, cognition is a seed, and craving is sap... cognition is established on a low level. 

lamp

Seyyathāpi bhikkhave, kūṭāgāraṃ vā kūṭāgārasālā vā uttarāya vā dakkhiṇāya vā pācīnāya vā vātapānā. suriye uggacchante vātapānena rasmi pavisitvā kvāssa patiṭṭhitāti. (SN 12.64 )
Just as if, bhikkhus, a roofed house or roofed hall with windows in the north, south or east. When the sun rises where do rays land when they come through the windows? 

fire

Yaññadeva bhikkhave paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ tena teneva saṅkhaṃ gacchati... Seyyathāpi bhikkhave yaññadevāpaccayaṃ paṭicca aggi jalati, tena teneva saṅkhaṃ gacchati. (MN 38)
Bhikkhus, whatever condition cognition arises upon, it is called after that... just as whatever condition fire burns, it is named after that.

Magic trick

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ vedanā bubbuḷupamā
Marīcikupamā saññā saṃkhārā kadalūpamā,
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ dīpitā diccabandhunā. (SN 22.95)
The kinsman of the Sun has taught that:
form is like a ball of foam, sensation is like a bubble,
perception is like a mirage, intention is like a plantain,
cognition is like an illusion, 

The World

IT'S BECOME ONE of the staples of my writing that what the Buddha means by loka 'world' in the Pāli Canon is not simply 'the world' as we usually understand it. The word loka is undoubtedly used a number of different ways, very similar to how we use it in English, but it also has a technical meaning that is bought out in three suttas from the Saṃyutta Nikāya.

In the Lokantagamana 'Going to the End of the World' Sutta   (S 35.116), the Buddha is cited as saying: "I don’t say, bhikkhus, that the end of the world  might be known, seen or attained  by [physically] going.  However I also say that one can’t make an end of disappointment without having attained the end of the world."

Since this is unclear to the bhikkhus who hear it, they ask Ānanda for an explanation. After the stereotypical reluctance he says that he understands it to mean:

"That by which one is a world perceiver, a world conceiver in the world; in this ideal discipline this is called 'the world'. By what one is a world perceiver, a world conceiver in the world? By the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body; by the mind one is a world perceiver, a world conceiver in the world."

 The Buddha endorses this statement saying that Ānanda is very wise.

As Buddhaghosa says in his commentary loka here refers to saṅkhāraloka ‘the world of constructs’ (SA 2.388) that is to say the world of experience arising out of sense object and sense faculty in the light of sense cognition.

Ānanda's statement is a little cryptic from our point of view. In Pāli he refers to "lokasmiṃ lokasaññī hoti lokamānī". Here lokasmiṃ ‘in the world’; saññin ‘having perception, a perceiver, perceiving; mānin ‘having a mind, having a though, thinking’; both in the nominative singular; note that this sense of mānin is not recorded in PED, but the word comes from √man 'to think' which gives us the verb maññati 'thinking', and the noun manas 'mind'. Both lokasaññin and lokamānin seem to be tatpuruṣa compounds: ‘perceiving the world, perception of the world’. The resulting English is awkward, but other translators have not been able to find a more felicitous reading. In any case taken as a whole Ānanda's explanation is understandable. He is emphasising that the Buddha is not talking about the world in the ordinary sense, not being paradoxical. The world of experience is not one that ends by physically travelling (gamanena); and here we add that in Iron Age India it was thought one could get to the end of the physical world by physically travelling.

The Rohitassa Sutta (S 2.26) also mentions going to the end of the world, though here as place without cyclic rebirth:

“However I say, friend, there is no making an end of disappointment, without reaching the end of the world. And, friend, it is right here in this arm-span measure of body endowed with perception and cognition that I declare the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world”.

 Again this reinforces the idea that 'the world' is one which we create. It comes into being right here in our body and mind - in our arm-span measure of body endowed with perception and cognition. Mrs Rhys Davids translated byāmamatte kaḷevara as ‘this fathom long carcass’ which is certainly a striking rendition, but byāma refers to 'an arm-span' which is typically somewhat less than a fathom, and carcass though allowed by the dictionary is usually a word for a dead animal body. No doubt Mrs Rhys Davids was trying to make a point here, I'm trying to understand the text, not Mrs Rhys Davids.

The last text which I'd like to draw attention to in this context is the Loka Sutta (S 12.44). This text tells us that ‘the world’ arises as a consequence of the nidāna chain, making it synonymous with dukkha! This relates to a point made by Sue Hamilton about the khandhas. These three terms dukkha, loka, and khandha are part of a set of interlocking metaphors for unawakened experience. It's not that unawakened experience makes us suffer, it is that awakened experience is dukkha. This is partly why I choose to translate dukkha as disappointment. Because clearly some experiences are pleasurable. It's not the everything is painful per se, but that nothing lives up to our expectations. Even the pleasurable is ultimately disappointing because it is ephemeral. Biology has programmed us to create experience worlds, in which we seek our pleasurable experiences and avoid painful ones. This works well for us in our natural environment, but no one reading this has lived in their natural environment for about 10,000 years since the dawn of agriculture and high density living. Our internal worlds are out of sync with the world as it is.

One last little observation about this text is that Buddhaghosa makes a comment: "Thus he should see: 'I do not, friend, declare these four truths in grass and wood, but I declare them only in this body of the four great elements.'" This is presented as a quote from the Buddha, although it does not seem to occur in the canonical texts that have come down to us. Buddhaghosa appears to be saying here that paṭicca-sammupāda applies only to one’s world of experience, rather than to external objects.

One of the difficulties this reading of loka presents is reconciling it with the reading of the Pāli texts which say that the nidānas describe an actual rebirth process and that rebirth is essential to Buddhism. There's such strong textual support for these two approaches, one which understands that the Buddha was only talking about our experiential world, and one which understands that the Buddha was talking about the world in a more Realist sense. Citing suttas is certainly not going to resolve such a dilemma. But it does show that my views are not heterodox with respect to the Canon: my view is firmly based in sutta readings that try to make clear that the context of all the teachings was the world of experience rather than the 'real' world (in which one might be physically reborn). Equally, as Thanissaro has showed there is ample textual support for taking rebirth as physically being reborn with some kind of continuity between lives, despite all of the philosophical problems this continuity causes, and the many different ways that Buddhists have tried and failed to resolve them over twenty five centuries.

Untangling the two contradictory views is impossible because from our point of view they have equal antiquity. There is no empirical way of giving one priority over the other. But only one of these views is compatible with a modern view informed by two or thee centuries of science, philosophy, and especially history since the European Enlightenment. So for me there is no dilemma and no difficulty in deciding which of these views I accept and which I do not. My criteria for making such a decision were in place by the time I left primary school. The other view is interesting from the point of view of the history of ideas and anthropology, but it's not something I could base my life on.

That other people have different criteria is not necessarily problematic; but looking at the world around me I do see a problem if the mainstream of Buddhism is seen as upholding beliefs such as rebirth. The problem being that the people who are willing to have blind faith in religious dogmas in the modern world is shrinking, and the hostility toward organised religion is increasing. Our disappointment with organised Christianity generally turns to anger when we see religious fundamentalists trying to impose their views: especially in the area of evolution in schools, or the imposition of forms of law which undermine such important principles as non-discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, and which impose barbaric punishments. Our liberty, equality and fraternity were hard won, and we would be fools to give them up.

~~oOo~~

23 June 2015. I sometimes get some funny looks when I talk about this view of the world. It's not familiar despite being fairly obvious in the Pāḷi texts, because it's not central to the teachings of any modern teachers. But I recently found a passage in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā which confirms this view (as well as confirming some of my suspicions about the Aṣṭa itself) (Vaidya 126)

atha khalv āyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavantam etada vocat - yad bhagavān evam āha - prajñāpāramitā tathāgatānām arhatāṃ samyaksaṃbuddhānām asya lokasya saṃdarśayitrīti, kathaṃ bhagavan prajñāpāramitā tathāgatānām arhatāṃ samyaksaṃbuddhānāmasya lokasya saṃdarśayitrī? katamaś ca bhagavan lokas tathāgatair arhadbhiḥ samyaksaṃbuddhair ākhyātaḥ? 

Then indeed Elder Subhūti said to the Bhagavan, "Bhagavan has said that, 'prajñāpāramitā is the teaching of the world of the tathāgatas, arhats, perfect Buddhas. What, Bhagavan, is prajñāpāramitā, the teaching of the world by the tathāgatas, arhats, perfect Buddhas? And what, Bhagavan, is the world declared by the the tathāgatas, arhats, perfect Buddhas.

evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmantaṃ subhūtim etada vocat - pañca subhūte skandhāḥ tathāgatena loka ity ākhyātāḥ / katame pañca? yaduta rūpaṃ vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārā vijñānam / ime subhūte pañca skandhā stathāgatena loka ity ākhyātāḥ //

That said, the Bhagavan said this to Elder Subhūti, "Subhūti, it has been declared that 'the five skandhas are the world according to the tathāgatas'. Which five? Form, sensation, apperception, volition, and cognitions."

subhūtir āha - kathaṃ bhagavaṃs tathāgatānāṃ prajñāpāramitayā pañca skandhā darśitāḥ? kiṃ vā bhagavan prajñāpāramitayā darśitam? 

Subhūti said, "How does the Bhagavan teach the five skandhas with respect to the prajñāpāramitā of the tathāgatas?"

evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmantaṃ subhūtim etad avocat - na lujyante na pralujyante iti subhūte pañca skandhā loka iti tathāgatānāṃ prajñāpāramitayā darśitāḥ / 

When this was said, the Bhagavan said this to Elder Subhūti, "they are not destroyed, they don't break down. Subhūti, 'the five skandhas are the world' is taught with respect to prajñāpāramitā of the tathāgatas.

*lujyante is a Prakrit form of the passive of Sanskrit √ruj. The l for r swap is also seen in many of Asoka's inscriptions e.g. lāja for rāja. Pāḷi has rujati but lujjati. 

tat kasya hetoḥ na lujyante na pralujyante iti darśitāḥ? śūnyatāsvabhāvā hi subhūte pañca skandhāḥ, asvabhāvatvāt / na ca subhūte śūnyatā lujyate vā pralujyate vā / 

What is the reason for this teaching of 'they are not destroyed, they don't break down.' Because of the state of lacking self-existence (asvabhāva-tva), Subhūti, the five skandhas have a self-existence which is emptiness. And, Subhūti, emptiness is not destroyed or broken down. 

Cf. Conze's translation p.173 which consistently mistakes the grammar of tathāgata so that the tathāgatas are bring instructed, which they are not! 

Papañca 2: Understanding Papañca

LAST WEEK WE SETTLED on a serviceable translation of the term papañca, but it's clear that in a Buddhist context simple translation is far from the whole story. Papañca is clearly a negative term in Buddhist texts in contrast to the usually positive sense more generally. We have to keep in mind that in the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta papañca-saññā-saṅkhā (whatever they are) are said to assail, beset, or befall (samudāsarati) a man.[1] The word papañca shares this negative connotation with words that also draw on the metaphor of separating out: e.g. vikappa (Skt. vikalpa) where the vi– suffix indicates separation and it means to mentally separate things out, to discriminate, or distinguish. In general this process is seen as having a negative impact on us.

In the texts and commentaries there seem to be 4 distinct ways of talking about papañca:

1. papañca as result, perhaps the sum total, of the perceptual process: e.g. in M 18, S 35.94 A 3.294, Sn 4.11, Sn 3.6.
2. papañca as metaphysical speculation: e.g. in A 4.173
3. papañca in relation to 'I am': e.g. in S 35.248, Sn 4.14.
4. papañca = kilesas e.g. S 35.248, SA 2.381 (commenting on S 35.94). UdA (commenting on Ud 7.7)

The Perceptual Process

These texts are variations on the process by which contact with sensory perceptions is the basis for the process of perception and leads to cognition of the attractiveness or repulsiveness of sensations, and behaviour in response to this cognition. Here papañca can be the end product of the perceptual process (M 18) arising particularly from thinking (vitakka), or it can more general apply to the whole perceptual process (Sn 3.6, 4.11, S 35.94). Some of the references in which it's not clear what papañca refers to (M 11, Ud 7.7, Dhp v.195, 254) seem to draw on this sense. This approach seems to have the most weight in the suttas because it is the most common, and these references are relatively clear and unequivocal.

However there is a serious problem with these texts as they flatly contradict each other as to the order of the process, particularly M 18, Sn 4.11, and D 21. M 18 has become the standard Theravāda model of perception, and perhaps the best organised of the three. Sn 4.11 by contrast is poorly organised, and uses terminology which becomes superseded (such as sāta/asāta instead of sukha/dukkha). Sn 4.11 also places saññā at the root of the perceptual process, preceding phassa; whereas M 18 has the more familiar sequence phassa > vedanā/vedeti > sañjānāti. D 21 appears to reverse the order of parts of M 18 so that we have these three sequences:

Sn 4.11
saññā > nāma & rūpa > phassa > sāta & asāta > canda > piya > macchara etc.

M 18
rūpa + cakkhu + cakkhu-viññāna > phassa > vedanā/vedeti > sañjānāti > vitakka > papañca.

D 21
papañcasaññāsaṅkhā > vitakka > chanda > piyāppiya > issā-macchariya > verā etc.

There is no easy way to reconcile these different models. If one is right, then the other two are wrong, and no two agree on all particulars. Is phassa the condition for saññā or vice versa? Similarly with papañca and vitakka. However both the commentary and sub-commentary on D 21 ignore the reversed order and treat the subject as vitakka being the basis of papañca as in M 18. So perhaps it is not surprise that only one of these models survived to become orthodox: M 18. However in terms of a model it is very much over shadowed by the twelve nidānas which became the standard way of describing how dukkha arises.

In any case the meaning here seems to be that the complexity of our human responses arises from sense experience. The role played by vitakka (Skt. vitarka) in the M 18 model might help to elucidate this process. The word literally means to 'twist apart'; takka is cognate with English torque, turn and distort; from PIE *terk or *tork 'to turn, twist'. Figuratively applied to the actions of the mind it comes to mean 'thought' itself in Pāli, though MW definition of the Sanskrit vitarka gives a broader sense in that it specifies: 'conjecture, suppositions, imagination, opinion; reasoning, deliberation; and doubt, uncertainty.' Pāli gives vitakka a special sense as one of the factors of absorption (jhānaṅga), that of mental attention which is directed towards its object. In this sense vitakka is a positive factor in our awareness. In the production of papañca one applies vitakka to the products of sensing (vedeti) and perception (sañjānāti). Since those products are already distinguished according to their desirability and identity, perhaps vitakka here means that we apply out attention to what is desirable and there by sustain the production of dukkha? In the long run, we can see that papañca and dukkha must be closely related if not synonymous.

Metaphysical Speculation

A 4.173 = 4.174 seems to stand alone in defining papañca in terms of speculation. Here the term is used to refer to the asking of questions which speculate on what happens after the "remainderless cessation and fading away of the six spheres of contact." Since contact and proliferation operate in the same domain—i.e. are aspects of the perceptual process—then answering a question about what happens after contact ceases is proliferating the unproliferated. Clearly this application depends on the notion that papañca refers to the perceptual process, but the phrase proliferating the unproliferated, suggests that speculation about the afterlife might be intended as a specific application.

Ego

This is the aspect of papañca which seems to fascinate modern Theravādin commentators, and yet it rests on a less sure foundation than the first, and one of the two key texts also seems to rely in part on papañca as the perceptual process.

Much is made of the somewhat cryptic passage in Sn 4.14 which appears to say that 'I am' (asmi) is the root of papañca. Modern commentators, especially Bhikkhu Thanissaro, have taken this to mean that the 'I am' conceit is in fact the cause of papañca. However this not the conclusion of the traditional commentators, nor the obvious conclusion to draw from those texts, which happen to be in a majority, that see proliferation in terms of the perceptual process, either as a product or a general description. Indeed it would be more conventional, and more in keeping with the majority of texts to see 'I am' as a result of the perceptual process, and therefore as a result, rather than a cause, of papañca. This supported by S 35.248 which labels asmīti as papañcita 'proliferated' (past tense) and also an opinion 'maññita' which has the added implication of being the product of mental activity.

Thanissaro, as he often does, comes out of left-field with his rendering of papañca as 'objectification', but he highlights an important facet of papañca. From his notes on the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta his translation seems to be strongly influenced by his reading of the Tuvaṭaka Sutta (Sn 4.14; Sn 915ff). There is some merit in his approach. He translates Sn 916 as:

"He should put an entire stop
to the root of objectification-classifications:
'I am the thinker.'
He should train, always mindful,
to subdue any craving inside him."[2]

Compare Norman's translation:

"Being a thinker, he would put a stop to the whole root of what is called "diversification" (i.e. the thought) 'I am'," said the Blessed One. "Whatever internal cravings there are, he would train himself to dispel them, always being mindful." (p. 151)

Despite the differences of interpretation it is apparent that Sn 916 takes "I am" (asmi) as the root (mūla) of papañca, and Thanissaro sees "I am" as an objectification of experience. Clearly "objectification" is a way of conveying how Thanissaro sees the psychological process under consideration; it is not a translation of the word papañca. It is quite legitimate to approach a text in this way, especially if the individual words do not directly communicate the sense of the text, but to my mind it obscures too much when we merge the two stage process I'm describing in this post and the last one.

Piya Tan attempts to take the equation of papañca and asmi further by drawing attention to the Yakalāpi Sutta (S 35.248) which lists a series of propositions regarding selfhood, beginning with the statement amsīti 'I am' or 'I exist', followed by variations on asmi 'I am' or bhavissāmi 'I will be'. Each statement is to be understood as is an opinion (maññita), an anxiety (iñjita), a writhing (phandita), a proliferation (papañcita),[3] a state of conceit (mānagata and all of these are to be regarded as "a disease, a boil, an arrow".

The explanation rests on the past participle papañcita. The commentary at this point relates these qualities to the presence of the kilesas (i.e. lobha, dosa, moha). But it does not define papañca, and in fact if we did not already have an opinion about papañca it would be very difficult to form it from this text. Of the qualities maññita and mānagata are obviously mental activity, and iñjita and phandita are, on face value at least, bodily (though they probably refer to states of anxiety). It's not very clear how papañcita fits into this list of terms. The text clearly says that asmi is an example of papañcita, and undesirable. The formula is: asmīti papañcitametaṃ i.e. "'I am:' this is proliferated." or perhaps "this is a proliferation" since the participle can act as a substantive. Perhaps the sense of this text is how concerns about 'I' proliferate once the thought 'I am' occurs. If we hypostasize our first person perspective then it generates a great deal of 'I' centred thoughts and anxieties.

Does 'I am' constitute objectification in the sense that Thanissaro suggests? Can we objectify ourselves? When we think 'I am' do we really convert ourselves into a thing? Self-objectification seems typically to refer to seeing oneself from another's point of view as an object. It is implicated in body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders for instance – and therefore is concerned more with the identification of the self with the body. I can't really make an object of my self: the thought 'I am' does not make me an object, it makes me a subject. I think what Thanissaro means when he treats proliferation as objectification is the split into subject ('I am') and object ('that is'). The Kaccānagotta Sutta (S 12.15) points out that is usual for people to think of the world (loka) in terms of 'it is' (atthi) and 'it is not' (natthi)--the fact of arising and passing away of experience shows that neither of these concepts apply. On the other hand the Buddhist model of cognition depends on objects of perception as its foundation: As the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta itself says: on the basis of form and eye, eye-consciousness arises and the three together constitute contact.

Thanissaro notes that M18 uses verbs which may indicate an agent. The key phrase being:

Cakkhuñcāvuso, paṭicca rūpe ca uppajjati cakkhuviññāṇaṃ, tiṇṇaṃ saṅgati phasso, phassapaccayā vedanā, yaṃ vedeti taṃ sañjānāti, yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vitakketi, yaṃ vitakketi taṃ papañceti, yaṃ papañceti

"Eye-consciousness arises on the basis (paccaya) of the eye and form; and the three together constitute contact (phassa), from the condition of contact there is a sensation of experience (vedanā). Where there is experiencing (vedeti) there is awareness (sañjānāti); with awareness there is thinking (vitakka); where there is thinking there is proliferation (papañceti).

Ingenious as Thanissaro's interpretation is there is no reason to assume an agent here. The verbs indicate, as in my translation, that a process is occurring. In his translation choices Thanissaro emphasises the agent:

What one feels, one perceives (labels in the mind). What one perceives, one thinks about. What one thinks about, one "papañcizes."[4]

However if we compare the same terms in the Mahā-Vedalla Sutta all of these terms, with the addition of vedanā, are defined in terms of verbs which undermines Thanissaro's conclusion because he specifically excludes vedanā from having an agent, whereas the Mahā-Vedalla Sutta suggests it too must have an agent if the others do.

In fact there is no agent in Buddhist psychology. There is no "one" however much we feel as though we are an agent: "what one feels" assumes "I am". Thanissaro's interpretation is somewhat paradoxical: for if an agent is required for the process to continue, and there is no agent, then how does it continue? If we commit to the implications of the Buddhist model, we cannot posit an agent. No one perceives, there is just perceiving; no one thinks, there is only thinking; and no one papañcizes, there is just papañcizing. Each active process, as indicated by the locative absolute construction, forms the basis for the next active process. Perceiving is an emergent property experiencing sensations. Convention almost requires us to posit a metaphorical container for this process, for instance we might say that perception takes place in the mind. But in the Buddha's psychology there is no container for this process, because the container is, effective, a manifestation of the thought "I am".

The objectification that goes on is a mistaken perception: what Philosopher Thomas Metzinger has called naïve realism, or in colloquial terms: WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). That naïve realism is unjustified, is neither intuitive nor easy to prove. It only becomes apparent with the highly detailed and focuses study that characterises Buddhist meditation, and (just) in the last few decades through studying the way that our perceptual processes can go wrong and lead us astray.

If we go back to the Tuvaṭaka Sutta we may need to reconsider the idea that the text is saying that "I am" root cause of all papañca and see that "I am" is the root product of prapañca. In any case Thanissaro has strained a little too hard to make papañca fit into his program, and the translation as 'objectification' is misleading and infelicitous

Taint or Obsession

The commentarial tradition, including texts attributed to both Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla consider papañca to be synonymous with the kilesas. For instance the commentary on S 35.248 says: "the reason for the meaning of 'iñjitaṃ' etc., is that through the vices (kilesa: lobha, dosa, moha, i.e. greed, aversion, and confusion ) beings shake (iñjita) and writhe (phandita), and are proliferate (papañcita) because they are afflicted by states of carelessness." Similarly the commentary on Ud 7.7 says "Passion is a proliferation, aversion is a proliferation, confusion is a proliferation, craving is a proliferation, view is a proliferation, and conceit is a proliferation."

This is presumably the origin of the idea that papañca might be translated as hindrance or obstacle, since greed, aversion and confusion are the three main obstacles to progress on the Buddhist path. Early English translators followed the Pāli commentarial tradition in translating papañca as obstacle: c.f. Woodward, Buddharakkhita, Horner.

Conclusion

What my study seems to say is that the ambiguity of papañca allows it to be co-opted to suit the agenda of the commentator. Despite the relative importance of papañca in Buddhist doctrine, reconstructing it from the Pāli suttas is really very difficult because papañca and related terms are not used very often. On the face of it I think the best explanation is still that papañca is primarily the perceptual process which gives rise to unskilful behaviour based on the pull and push of our affective reactions to pleasant and unpleasant sensory perceptions. As such the traditional commentators are correct to relate papañca to the taints which underlie unskifulness. We can also see that the modern Theravāda commentators, from Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda on, are not wrong about the role played in this by seeing oneself as a subject and objects of perception as real objects, because this is all part of the process of creating dukkha. However Thanissaro in particular has over-emphasised the ego, and his translation of objectification is confusing since ‘I am’ represents a subject rather than an object.

It is puzzling, but perhaps not so unusual, to find so little foundation for such a well known doctrinal category, and such poor recognition of the flimsiness of that foundation in modern writers. Papañca occurs so few times in the canon that it does not take very long to read and consider all occurrences. It once again reinforces the adage that any one commentary is never the whole story.

~~oOo~~

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Notes

[1] In the text the verb is in the plural so we must assume that papañca-saññā-saṅkhā is also plural.

[2] Sn 916 pada a & b: Mūlaṃ papañcasaṅkhāya, (iti bhagavā); Mantā asmīti abbamuparundhe

[3] The word iñjita is a past-participle (used as substantive here) from iñjati 'to shake, turn about, move, or vacillate'. In Pāli trembling is often associated with fear.

[4] However one feels about neologisms Thanissaro has highlighted an important point here which is that papañceti is a denominative verb, i.e. it is a verb derived from the noun papañca, and so literally does mean 'to papañcize".