Wednesday, March 21, 2018

God Gets Skin in the Game

Jordan Peterson recently mentioned on a podcast that, “I do believe there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.” This was in reference to a question as to where he stood with the Resurrection of Christ. He expounded that “the material reaches up to the spiritual, and spiritual reaches down to the material, and they touch! And I do think that happens.” He didn't completely commit to an answer towards his Christology, but he acknowledged there is a mystery and miracle to all of it.

It took me years to understand what this meant, and Peterson himself noted that he will need further inquiry to the question of the Resurrection also.

What helped me with this is the idea that certain spiritual teachers have become ill by taking on the karma of their students. It's like a tonglen practice that goes awry. (In the Tibetan Buddhism, tonglen is a practice to connect with the suffering of others by taking in the suffering and giving out compassion.) So when Peter says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed”, it's not that much different ...except Christ takes on the karma for the entire cosmos! Such a sacrifice could only be encountered by a brutal death to such extremes as Jesus had. Yet, His Resurrection transforms the sacrifice to one of Eternal hope.

Another way of looking at it came to me from Nassim Taleb, whose new book is aptly titled Skin in the Game. Taleb is big proponent of the idea that real evolutionary progress can only come from agents who have skin in the game. You have to be fully accountable for your bad ideas, so those bad ideas don't inflict a culture for future generations. You must take the hit, so your idea can die for the greater good. (Keep in the mind the reverse is true for the ideas that do work!) As he would say: “If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.” 

In regards to the consequences of Christ, Taleb remarks,
“This allowed me to finally figure out this business of the Trinity. The Christian religion, throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and other ecumenical councils and various synods of argumentative bishops, kept insisting on the dual nature of Jesus Christ. It would be theologically simpler if God were god and Jesus were man, just like another prophet, the way Islam views him, or the way Judaism views Abraham. But no, he had to be both man and god; the duality is so central it kept coming back though all manner of refinement: whether the duality allowed sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), the same will (Monothelites), the same nature (Monophysites). The trinity is what caused other monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity, and caused many Christians who fell into the hands of the Islamic State to be beheaded. So it appears that the church founders really wanted Christ to have skin in the game; he did actually suffer on the cross, sacrifice himself, and experience death. He was a risk taker. More crucially to our story, he sacrificed himself for the sake of others. A god stripped of humanity cannot have skin in the game in such a manner, cannot really suffer (or, if he does, such a redefinition of a god injected with a human nature would back up our argument). A god who didn’t really suffer on the cross would be like a magician who performed an illusion, not someone who actually bled after sliding an icepick between his carpal bones. The Orthodox Church goes further, making the human side flow upward rather than downward. The fourth-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God” (emphasis mine). It is the very human character of Jesus that can allow us mortals to access God and merge with him, become part of him, in order to partake of the divine. That fusion is called theosis. The human nature of Christ makes the divine possible for all of us.”
So what a better way for God to show his Eternal love than to get skin in the game Himself. “The reason why the second Person of the Trinity entered human nature was to achieve a face-to-face, peer-to-peer relationship with humanity, a perfect act of empathy arising out of His unconditional love” (Spitzer). It's actually quite brilliant; as an act of love or even as a mythological idea.

It worked so well, it got many others to get their skin in the game. It encouraged many of the early Christians to risk their lives and to make their “suffering a self-offering in order to bring healing, light, and love to others” (Spitzer). And this continues to this day as a beacon to aim for.

Friday, March 9, 2018

Is Reality Empty or Real?

The Rangtong / Shentong debate in Tibetan Buddhism is a particular interest of mine these days. And I sort of know why: it's a desire for coherence between systems. The Abrahamic religions certainly believe in the distinction of God and world. Yet, most Buddhists are not theists, and many are purely idealists. In other words, the Rangtong view holds that all phenomena is empty of inherent existence, or an enduring essence. As such, all phenomena are constructions of mind. Conversely, the Shentong view holds that only relative phenomena is empty but what remains is absolute. 

And here's why even in an experiential path you can't escape metaphysics! Francis Tiso remarked about this in his book about Tibetan Buddhism:
“Granted, in a nondualistic system, perceiver, act of perception, and the one perceived are considered unitary— a moment in a flow of perceptions. Perception, too, is linked to the notion of the perceivable attributes of a particular phenomenon. One of the ways to deconstruct the notion of a phenomenon’s “existence” is to argue that once the attributes are removed, there is no phenomenon. Thus, there is thought to be no need for a metaphysical substrate to which attributes might “adhere.” In any case, this is a classic Buddhist argument. Nevertheless, when an action takes place subsequent to a moment of perception, conditioned by that act of perception, even a nondualist system will have to acknowledge a flow of causality at least on the relative level. This analysis of course proves nothing, but it does suggest that the interpretation of a phenomenon depends on reflection, knowledge of what system we are using to interpret it with, and what intention we are advancing in our interpretation.”
So who is correct? The mainstream interpretation of Nirvana for most Tibetan Buddhists fall into Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika (or Middle Way) camp. This philosophy is aligned with the Rangtong view that, “Everything—meaning all phenomena in all states—exist conventionally, or nominally, or provisionally, but not inherently. In other words, whatever exists, exists, or co-arises, interdependently with other phenomena. This dependent co-arising, or interconnected origination, is called “emptiness,” because it implies that whatever arises has no independent self-existence or self-nature; therefore its “essence” is emptiness” (L. Ron Gardner). 

But are all things really reduced to emptiness?

Let's first acknowledge that 'emptiness' is an unfortunate word. Emptiness does not mean nothingness, but rather the recognition and direct experience of the true nature of the individual and world that is merely a representation. All such phenomena is ‘free from permanence and non-existence'.

When we see things as empty, there is an opening. Eventually, it all opens itself onto it-Self.  We are no longer entangled with the contents of our consciousness. Yet, something remains.

Indian sage Shankara would often debate Buddhists around this issue, and hold to the idea that Brahman, not emptiness is Ultimate reality. For phenomena to have impermanence, something must remain the same. As such, there exists an all-pervading, spaceless substratum underlying phenomenal existence.  

The Yogacara (or Mind-only) school of Buddhism, which arose subsequent to Madhyamika in India, likewise rejected Nagarjuna's metaphysics by emphasizing Consciousness as the Essence of all phenomena.

Ultimate reality is not dependent origination, but an uncaused cause. The Unmade, Unborn can not be an empty, essenceless, no-thing that creates something. Something must come from someThing, that is not a thing, but the Self-Existing, Self-Radiant Self-Awareness known as many things: Absolute, God, Tao. 

The metaphysical implications are significant, since the transcendent allows us to have an ontological standard to order the good, true, and beautiful. 

Self-evidently, Reality is real, and therefore I side with the Shentong view.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Modern Times, Better Times?

I came across an older post from David Bentley Hart chiming in about Steven Pinker's pollyannaish views on the Western Enlightenment. This post was a response to Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, although his follow-up book is in a similar vein.

Pinker obviously believes we live in better times, and in many regards he is correct. I am very happy that my dentist has novocaine or that I am not a slave to anyone but my mind parasites.

So while we cheerlead for Enlightenment ideas that made us seemingly more civil and advanced, maybe consideration is needed towards our simplistic notions around civility and progress. 

Hart notes, “It is perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to the many brutal features of much of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his evenhandedness if he acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved despite its material privations.”

And that's one good point: our ancestors achieved much (morally and socially) considering how little they had at their disposal.

When it comes to violent deaths, there are fewer when comparing the past to today as a percentage of global population.  Nevertheless, it is also about how we statistically view it. “Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens” (Hart).

In absolute numbers around the count of human massacre, we aren't doing that well. Let's recall how bloody the 20th century was. 

Lest we forget, while the gang of Bacon, Descartes, and Kant get much of the credit, “The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is the direct outgrowth of cosmological speculations in what we currently label the High Middle Ages — built upon the Christian theological insight that the universe God created must make sense” (Warren). 

But now we lack those Christian insights that once augmented the moral underpinnings to the scientific revolution. Western Enlightenment “reason” will only get you so far. As Thomas Merton once said, “the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice.” 

As with any meta-narrative, the shortcomings often come more with omission than commission. We can all point to the material prosperity that has ensued over the last couple centuries, but we should also not forget how our new era brought on many murderous secular ideologies, destructive and addictive technologies, and the continuing lapse of hard virtues.

We are probably better in some ways, but not as great as we'd like to believe. Perhaps that's partly due to the fact we have lost some of the depth that would have given us better standards to see that.