My response to the post: “MASTERING THE CORE TEACHINGS OF MASTERING THE CORE TEACHINGS OF THE BUDDHA, by Shane Lindsay”, which was posted on the Speculative Non-Buddhist (SNB) site in late December, 2019.
By Daniel M. Ingram
“SL:” demarcates text by Shane Lindsay
“DMI:” demarcates text by Daniel M. Ingram
DMI: The post I respond to here was taken off the SNB site after Dr. Shane Lindsay saw a draft of response I was about to post there and which I now post here. It is not surprising that this gave him some pause. Shane Lindsay attempted something like a weak apology, noting that the post was perhaps “uncouth”, at least showing a talent for euphemism. However, I know that lots of people have already read that post, as I have gotten a number of comments on it, and plenty of people tweeted about it when it came out. It is entirely possible it has been copied and will be passed around, as such is the digital world we inhabit. While I appreciate them taking it down, the damage has been done, so this response stands.
For those not familiar with the tone and character of https://speculativenonbuddhism.com, its rhetorical culture is a no-holds-barred, cage fight of toxicity and brutality which yet offers some useful criticism at times mixed in with its bile and venom. I am relatively ok with this, just so long as they are ok with me giving it back to them in kind and degree. Said another way, this post is likely to offend some people’s sense of Right Speech if you take it out of context, just as being punched in the face might seem strange if you hadn’t stepped into an MMA ring. This post was designed to be posted there, but it is now posted here, though it still has that SNB/MMA ring style and aesthetic, and still thinks of itself as having been posted on the SNB site in spirit. If flame wars don’t appeal to you, you probably should stop reading now, as this is what this is.
If you are unfamiliar the SNB site and its culture, might look here first: https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/for-critics-a-rough-guide/
Dr. Shane Lindsay https://www.hull.ac.uk/Faculties/staff-profiles/Shane-Lindsay was a member of the Dharma Overground (DhO) and actively posting from 2013 to 2015, I believe. His posts were under a pseudonym that, lucky for Shane Lindsay, is so different from the pseudonym he uses to post on the SNB site that nobody reading this who is as smart as Dr. Shane Lindsay thinks they are will ever be able to figure it out. During that time, Shane authored some 507 posts, being one of the most frequent posters during that time, as well as still being one of the most frequent posters of all time to the DhO, despite only being engaged with the forum for two years. He was willing to engage to a degree of intensity and effort rarely seen on the DhO yet while remaining all the while abjectly skeptical of some, nay, most of the general core tenets of the place.
Imagine a person who spent two years faithfully reading the Bible and attending Catholic masses regularly, only to spend every Sunday school gathering period, potluck, dinner, and confessional session actively decrying essentially every Catholic doctrine. One would have to wonder at what exactly was going on, what would drive such behavior, and what his eventual goals were. One would have to wonder why he chose Catholicism vs some other Christian or Abrahamic church to obsess over yet decry, or any church for that matter, as all likely offend some of his fervently articulated views.
Superficially, one could suspect that he was simply a concerned citizen who appeared to believe that he held the correct views on all topics debates (namely some variant of Scientific Materialism mixed with stock rigidly secular Psychology and a touch of neuroscience) and he felt it was his duty to fight delusion wherever he found it and save posters from being tricked into believing views he felt were simply crazy. However, given the extremely large number of places on the web that Shane likely finds abjectly crazy, his focus on the DhO, and me in particular, is curious.
Shane was also instrumental in DhO reform, being one of a few key individuals that ended up radically shifting the moderation culture and rules for forum posting, though I don’t believe this was his intended goal, as the culture shifted specifically to deal with posters such as him and be much more quick to moderate and ban them. On reading a long string of extremely angry emails I received in early 2015 after getting off a retreat in Scotland about Shane from a wide range of DhO regulars and moderators, I am reminded of the chaos and anger he was causing on the forum highlighted the stark lack of sufficiently stringent moderation to keep the forum and community functioning well. So, reluctantly, the moderation culture was overhauled, we brought in moderators known for much more engaged heavy-handedness, changed the rules of the forum, and banned Dr. Shane Lindsay. Through this episode, the DhO grew up, lost a certain wild innocence, but gained some more mature, if somewhat more boring, stability.
So, here we are, over four years after the whole Shane Lindsay debacle on the DhO, with more focused criticism at one of many traditions and communities that, curiously enough, are not even close to the worst offenders of a Shanian point of view, even within Buddhism, and even within the end of it he seems to focus on. Over the years, I have often pondered why he focused on us and my work and have reached out at points. In 2014, we had a polite email exchange about whether or not powerful and unusual spiritual experiences were related to epilepsy (probably aren’t, is my conclusion at this point, as I have had a lot of EEG time since then without any seizure activity noted), as well as considering the possibility of an in person visit when I was in the UK. That same year, he politely offered to provide a contrarian view to any new MCTB2 section on the psychic powers. I have never gotten a clear answer as to why he finds us and my work in particular so interesting, but clearly he does, as he is willing to spend what appears to be a striking amount of time dedicated to thinking and writing about it.
Ok, enough background, and on to the point-by-point (well, not quite, as I let a reasonable amount slide, and plenty of his points are just straightforward facts and not really that amenable to critique or needing comment), as is my habitual, also somewhat obsessive style. As this is the SNB site, I post with all the tact and decorum expected of this place.
As an aside, my response to Shane Lindsay’s review was sent to by Glenn Wallis, who runs the SNB site, to Shane to comment on before it was posted, a courtesy that wasn’t extended to me before Shane posted his review of MCTB. I responded by revising the review, toning it down just slightly and being a touch less exposing of Shane’s privacy, as Shane reasonably requested, and I can truly sympathize with why he wishes so strongly to preserve his privacy, as I would also, were I Dr. Shane Lindsay. https://www.hull.ac.uk/Faculties/staff-profiles/Shane-Lindsay
As noticed before, those on the SNB have a clear home-court advantage in these sorts of situations. Were they on the DhO, a similar advantage would be shown to me, so I can hardly complain. Still, it does fly in the face of the promise of a level playing field to all who attend the SNB Great Feast, with all stripped of artificial advantage, which, while often mentioned, has yet to be delivered.^p
SL: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by Daniel M. Ingram (henceforth MCTB) has been an influential book for Western Buddhism. It serves as a key text in the development in a version of Buddhism known as Pragmatic Dharma (see here for a description of its core features), and helped popularise the idea that Buddhist Enlightenment (or “Awakening”) as an achievable goal. Pragmatic Dharma has had considerable influence shaping recent Western Buddhism, through the work of Buddhist teachers such as Kenneth Folk (one time teacher of Ingram), Vincent Horn (a one time student of Folk and Ingram) and his “Buddhist Geeks”, Shinzen Young, and John Yates/Culadasa. Within the loose umbrella of Pragmatic Dharma, MCTB delinates a sub-brand of “Hardcore Dharma” mentioned in the book’s title. It perhaps provides the most unique, coherent and strongest identity of the Pragmatic Dharmas. While I focus on MCTB here, I will attempt to make some generalisations beyond the Hardcore Dharma of MCTB to broader themes in Pragmatic Dharma, which may not applicable to all of its incarnations.
In examining Pragmatic Dharma and MCTB, I do so through the approach of a rhetorical critique, by providing a deconstruction and analysis of the book title “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by the Arahat Daniel M. Ingram”. A focus will be to understand the book’s relationship to Buddhism, and how it works to ensnare its readers to the Buddhist faith.
My goal here is to peel back the curtain behind Pragmatic Dharma in order to examine how it operates behind the scenes, rather than just relying on its own claims and professed logic. I see this as consistent with the goals of the Speculative Non Buddhism project, which asks the question of what are we to make of Western Buddhism, as a necessary precondition of what might come next.
DMI: I am not sure that he knows much about what happens behind the scenes, as he has certainly never spent time with me personally behind any “curtain”, nor am I aware of him having done so with many core practitioners influenced by MCTB, though perhaps he has and just doesn’t mention that.
SL: I am writing assuming an audience oriented who might have come across Pragmatic Dharma outside of a long history with Buddhism, or at least Theravadan Buddhism. A secular reader, where Pragmatic Dharma, and MCTB in particular, could operate as a “gateway drug” to the Buddhism within.
DMI: Ok, we get a bit of a possible window into his motivations. I wonder what he thinks of “gateway drugs” themselves, and if he spends time on, say, Erowid, posting about how marijuana and psychedelics will necessarily lead people to meth, heroin, and crack. If he does, I hope their moderators are patient and steady. As I have stated before, the SNB site and my own work actually share a lot of the same genetics, the same aesthetics, and the same critiques of much of mainstream and traditional Buddhism, as much as the SNB kids often don’t like to admit it. As I have stated before, this often seems a bit like Holland and Belgium feuding with each other over their perceived extreme differences when outsiders often can’t tell any major difference. I again often wonder if the rhetoric gets pointed at me rather than the many Buddhist authors and teachers who commit far greater offenses against those sensibilities we share as I will actually engage whereas they not only wouldn’t but wouldn’t likely even take the time to try to understand what the SNB site was about. Ok, back to Shane’s points…
SL: Those more familiar with Buddhism, and especially critiques found elsewhere such as through the Speculative Non-Buddhism project will likely be familiar with most of the points made.
Let’s now dive in, and see what makes for a “Dharma book”.
“…DHARMA BOOK”
A religious book
Unlike some of his contemporaries, as a Buddhist teacher Ingram is not financially dependent on Buddhism. He offers MCTB for free on the internet. Testament to its popularity and loyal readership, translations are offered in Russian, French, Swedish, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. But MCTB has a promotional title that at first blush (barring the potentially ominous and subversive “hardcore”) fits with self-help books in the Western self-help industry, alongside such “idiots guides” (found on Amazon) as Buddhism in a nutshell: A Quick Beginner’s Guide For Mastering The Core Teachings Of Buddha To Live A Happier & More Meaningful Life and No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners: Clear Answers to Burning Questions About Core Buddhist Teachings.
Given the marketing employed in the title we can ask the question of what is being bought and sold. As Wallis points out (2018) that while Buddhism is a religion that claims to be built on the extinguishing of desire (as one of its “noble truths”), Buddhism is adept in the proliferation of desire.
DMI: Well, yes, that is true. This is true of nearly every tradition, including the work of Glenn Wallis himself. The SNB site promises a “Great Feast”, a removing of the false Warrants, a dismantling of absurd teachings, a “Real”, an elite philosophical clique whose semi-proprietary lexicon serves as a steep barrier to entry, and an aesthetic of vicious but poignant “Ruin”, among other things. Shane Lindsay promises the joys that come with skeptical materialism and the possibility of inoculation against the evils of gateway-drug-like dharma books. So, yes, we are all promising something that we believe some will find appealing. Welcome to the club.
SL: The desirous product on offer in MCTB is the promise of “Enlightenment” or alternatively “Awakening” – an end to human suffering; what Pragmatic Dharma teacher Kenneth Folk describes as a “happiness that is independent of conditions”.
DMI: If you will be so kind, please let’s avoid mixing in the teachings of Kenneth in ways that are not present in MCTB, as we are not on all of the same pages, and it might be confusing for readers when you lump us together without nuance. I personally never promise a “happiness that is independent of conditions”, and, in fact, go far out of my way to smash such beliefs with all the rhetorical force I could muster, though I see that, in this, I have clearly not gone far enough, as a diligent and intelligent reader, Shane, has obviously failed to notice this wide gap between our takes on this particular point.
SL: It becomes eventually clear in MCTB that such a final end to suffering is not possible, as it does not survive “reality testing” in the words of MCTB.
DMI: As to “eventually”, I start dismantling those myths in the Foreword and Warning and continue in early chapters of Part I (of VI parts). If it took him a long time to notice that message, which I believe is presented more strongly and repeated more often than in nearly any other major dharma book you will find, perhaps he should read more closely. Again, when my book is one of the few that goes out of its way to make points that he and I agree on in this regard, it is odd to start off his criticism with that point. That I apparently didn’t get to that point strongly enough and fast enough for Shane still misses the larger point that I find nearly no other dharma books that make that point at all as mine does. So, why focus on my work again? How many other reviews of other dharma books has Shane written, I wonder? Perhaps, if he is so keen to have a book that makes the point faster and stronger, he should be the change he wishes to see in the world and write it.
As a refresher, or for those who haven’t read it, I clearly state on the second page of the Foreword and Warning:
“Frustrated, I turned to books, reading extensively, poring over texts both modern and ancient looking for conceptual frameworks that might help me navigate skillfully in territory that was completely outside my previous experience. Despite having access to an increasing number of great and detailed dharma books, I found they left out lots of details that turned out to be very important. I learned the hard way that using conceptual frameworks that were too idealistic or that were not fully explained could be as bad as using none at all. Further, I found that much of the theory about progress contained ideals and myths that simply did not hold up to reality testing, as much as I wanted them to. The complexities of exactly how this conflict between ideal and reality has morphed over the years are worthy of commentary, and I will discuss this later, after I have set up some important terms and concepts.”
SL: However, the book advises this goal is still “highly recommended”. So much so that Folk advocates that if the path to enlightenment “takes twenty years it will have been worth every minute.”, and Ingram gives some life and career advice in MCTB encouraging his readers to:
“Take more vacations, back off the career climbing a little, and make time to really bust out some serious meditative accomplishments. The Buddha was known for saying that there is nothing so valuable in this world as mastering the dharma. I could not agree more.”
In offering its prize, MCTB has to strike a balancing act to demythologise enlightenment by making it seem real and achievable to a secular audience.
DMI: It doesn’t “have to”, which implies some nefarious marketing motive, it just does. My book is not wildly popular, known only to a small group of somewhat unusual meditators in a somewhat unusual corner of what is already a pretty small world. It makes little money, all of which I donate to dharma projects. The tiny amount of fame I have is more than I need, finding myself unable to adequately meet the demands of people who want my time. I have no power except the ownership of one of many small forums on the web that make no money. I take no formal long-term students. I only wrote the book as those who should have written it died before they could or felt they should keep these things secret. I never wanted to be an author. Nobody writes a 320,000-word tome of hardcore obscure meditation esoterica thinking, “Ok, this is going to be a big hit, and I must achieve this delicate balancing act to increase its vast popularity even further!” Wikipedia (perhaps rightly) keeps deleting attempts by enthusiastic fans to post something about me on it due to my lack of fame and relevance, when we find entries mind-bogglingly obscure ancient authors who only a few scholars have heard of or ever read. So, let’s keep all this in appropriate perspective. Few will even make it through this long response, let alone the great hog MCTB is, so fears of mass conversion, damage, or both are wildly misplaced.
SL: At the same time, it needs to be sufficiently attractive to operate as a carrot, as the most valuable thing in the world for a human to achieve.
DMI: I actually do believe it ranks in that category, yes. Such is my opinion based on experience of the results. While Shane clearly is willing to be extremely critical, I offer these time-tested techniques freely for his own empirical, empirical experiment, and he seems unwilling to actually try it. In the scientific academic world, the greatest honor is to have someone attempt to replicate an experiment to see if it actually provides the results reported. I realize that, in the liberal arts world, this isn’t actually possible, so we get attacks like we find here. I find it curious that Shane is so willing to be scientific when it suits him and liberal-arts-focused when it suits him, but, I personally would prefer that he reverse his tactics and, instead of launching a liberal-arts style attack that he actually go scientific and seriously try to replicate the experiment and then report his own conclusions.
SL: While the audience for a book like MCTB might be diverse, the enlightenment carrot is extremely appetising for those with the highest degree of suffering. MCTB does go to some pains to provide warnings that those who do not have their “psychological trip together” should avoid the path to enlightenment until these problems are addressed, such as through therapy.
However, it is noteworthy that teachers within Pragmatic Dharma have reported their own challenges with severe depression, anxiety, drug addiction and bipolar disorder, and the role they have played a role to dedicating themselves to Buddhism and the enlightenment cure.
DMI: What is frustrating is that, whatever else one thinks of Shane, he is clearly intelligent. Yet, he knows full well that MCTB doesn't promise that anything in there will cure any of those conditions. In fact, it strongly states that severe depression, anxiety, bipolar-like symptoms, relapsing drug-addiction, and the like might unfortunately result from some of the techniques and high doses discussed in MCTB. It also very explicitly states a near complete inability to address the troubling Cluster B symptoms that cause so much complexity in the world. So, he brings in other teachers and their issues, as if that has something to do with MCTB. It is disingenuous, and hopefully, those reading the SNB site, who have a high capacity to smell bullshit when they encounter it, will be willing to apply that talent to this particular attempt at deceptive rhetoric.
Dr. Shane Lindsay, what are you doing and why? I have seen you be more careful, precise, and skillful than this before on the DhO. This is clearly not your best work, not that your best work was typically that good. Care to try again here?
SL: That they report from the front lines success with this cure puts Pragmatic Dharma in an awkward spot for role models of psychological health for those starting off on its spiritual path. And throughout MCTB there is a tension and incongruity between acknowledging the risks and potential damage that an enlightenment quest can entail, while at the same time providing considerable spurring on to follow that path of the author.
DMI: That tension is real and is explicitly addressed many, many times in MCTB. Still, name another dharma book that is that honest about all that can go wrong and how human and down-to-earth the realities of the path can be?
SL: We have addressed the primary goods being being
DMI: Might remove the second “being”. (Actually, might try insight practices and remove the first sense of stable “being”.)
SL: sold in MCTB. Now let’s consider who or what is doing the selling. I find a helpful answer here comes from treating Buddhism as a cultural virus – as a “Buddheme”. In other words, to employ a memetic approach to religion (Blackmore, 2000). A meme needs to infect human hosts in order to replicate. In spreading across cultures the Buddeme mutates and adapts to its particular contexts, and the needs of its hosts. As a system of thought, belief and practice, Buddhism propagates, and through individual minds, Buddhist copies are spawned. In the case of MCTB the book begats more Hardcore Dharmaists into the world. As a missionary for Buddhism, Ingram needs to multiply, and Ingram does have the zeal of a missionary, as described in MCTB:
“I do have the explicit goal of facilitating others to become living masters of this material so that they may go forth and help to encourage more people to do so.”
DMI: Well, that is true, at least within the careful and qualified bounds noted in the book. Still, few zealots will go so far out of their way to detail all that can go wrong and warn people off the path to the degree that I do. The problem here is that Shane is one who has read at least parts of the cookbook but shows no hints of tasting the results of any of the recipes. Thus, it is a one-sided critique that objects to the results on theoretical, not experiential grounds. It would again be very interesting to see if Shane were able to actually get some of the results if he would find them of value or not.
Perhaps, having gotten to some accomplishments that were beneficial, he would still react as did Failed Buddhist and write, “This leads us to the cultivation of pleasant states more broadly, which is the same form of passivity formation. This fetish is present in all of x-buddhism, but it is especially characteristic of pragmatic dharma (just spend five minutes on the Dharma Overground forums). I want to argue that any focus on the cultivation of “positive” states is the highest ideological crime.”
Apparently, some people abjectly do not like states that are clear, calm, pleasant, spacious, healing, positive, or any of that. Perhaps a more balanced critique from Shane would involve an appreciation of this sense of diversity of reaction and taste. Perhaps he could state, “Though I haven’t actually gotten into any of the states, stages, or accomplishments mentioned in MCTB, I surmise that if you, like me, don’t like states that are pleasant, in which perception that seems enhanced or clarity seems increased, avoid MCTB and its practices.” In this, we would be on the same page. We all have our own kinks, and who am I to criticize those of others? However, I do wonder why Shane persist in his curious focus on criticizing what might be considered a clariy, pleasure, and mental mod kink my friends, readers, and me.
I am guessing that, were Shane to, say, go on some long-winded rant on some BDSM forum about how those who liked latex were horrible people, as it was a gateway drug to, say, diapers or whatever, then people might find that a bit weird and wonder why Shane was engaging in that sort of reaction formation, I mean dialogue. I ask you to simply let us have our clarity, practice, jhana, insight knowledge, and perceptual mod kinks and leave us in peace to enjoy them. If they are not your kinks, I am totally cool with that. Can you be cool with us not having a rigid Scientific Materialist kink, for example? I wonder.
SL: The sleight of hand in MCTB, in common with other ostensibly secular brands of Western Buddhisms, is the necessity to disguise its religious nature as a religious text.
DMI: Again, we see a clear implication that MCTB is deliberately attempting to deceive. It explicitly talks about the tensions he mentions, explicitly has the name of a religion in the fucking title, has a picture of the Buddha on the front cover (as he gets to in a bit), explicitly uses tons of explicitly religious terms (as he mentions shortly), states that it explicitly is highly influenced by specific religious traditions and names them, and references lots of specifically religious works. How is this some sneaky attempt to bring Buddhism in through some sneaky back door? Here, Shane has clearly had a moment of, well, less than clarity. Hopefully, this weird rhetorical ploy will be immediately seen for what it is. Imagine if I stated something like, “Speculative Non-Buddhism is really just trying to repackage Buddhism in a French Deconstructionist wrapper and sneak old-school religious Buddhism back into intellectual cynics through this clever disguise!” How would the SNB site feel about that? While one could actually find evidence to support that argument, I am guessing you would feel it entirely missed the point and react in a similar way as I did to Shane’s critique.
SL: For the secular culture of the West, a religious identity clashes with secular values. Buddhism has to transmutate to replicate in such an environment, and is extremely adept in doing so. On the one hand, the “Buddha” of the title might be a give away, and the book is replete with Buddhist teachings and what it refers to as the “Buddhadharma”. But in the introduction Ingram laments the:
“significant downsides to having the title of this book include the name “Buddha”, as it will likely alienate lots of people who could benefit from the techniques and technical information about the cool, useful, and profound things they can learn to wire their brain to do and perceive.”.
DMI: Well, that is true. The techniques work regardless of the religious trappings, yes. It would be a bit like if one stated that “The gallbladder is really just Greek religion repackaged, as Galen was a Greek who worshiped Greek gods.” Hopefully, any reader of the SNB site is sufficiently sophisticated to see the issue here.
SL: Here it is clear that MCTB is being positioned not as a Buddhist religious book, and MCTB repeatedly distinguishes its practices with more obviously religious forms of Buddhism.
DMI: No, it is an explicit, non-deceptive attempt, as is hopefully the SNB experiment, to sort out what is helpful, verifiable, useful, and true from what isn’t. While we might differ in our opinions of how to differentiate those, as well as differing somewhat in our methods at times, but the core goal remains.
SL: Instead, it is described as a spiritual training manual, a practical guide to techniques that are a form of brain training, universal to human beings, that stand outside of cultural traditions.
DMI: It is not “instead”, it just is that also.
SL: Ingram sees himself not so much as a Buddhist, but as a “practitioner”.
DMI: Just as you see yourself as a scientific psychologist materialist more than a Buddhist, yet you do spend a staggering amount of emotional and intellectual time wrestling with and reacting to things Buddhist. Like many on the SNB site, you present in a way that reminds me of friends I have been who were in cults but, despite having left those cults years or decades ago, still basically talk about those cults all day long and filter their world through their reactions to the cult, finding some powerful sense of calling and charge in that reaction. A rose by any other name? Plenty of people react badly to various teachings, religious, doctrines, etc. as they play to some deep trigger in that person. Clearly, Buddhism, and the particularly obscure strain of it that I write about, triggers you to an unusual degree, as my friends who were in cults get triggered. Clearly, this “cult”, if you will, is not for you, and I personally wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who reacts to it the way you do. There are books that can help with this sort of thing, but it first requires the problem first, as the AA kids say.
SL: Is it therefore appropriate to call it a religious book, if the author might not describe it in this way?
DMI: Again, how is it not explicitly a religious book in many ways, as stated above? Anyone who thinks it is an attempt to sneak Buddhism through some back door is missing it charging in the front door.
SL: Instead, might it be better to describe its practices as secular but spiritual? As here Ingram is comfortable within MCTB invoking its reader to join him on a “spiritual quest”, to take part in a “spiritual life”, and “spiritual practice”.
DMI: Yes, clearly. That’s what it is in many ways, hence the frequent use of those words you mention. Again, this is not deception, obviously. This is just straightforwardly what it says it is. That you don’t like what it is is one thing, but that you try to pretend it is pretending to be something other than what you don’t like is weird.
SL: The approach taken in MCTB is to describe world religions like Buddhism as starting off as a spiritual or mystic practice. Over time, these practices take on the form of a religion, and collect a lot of cultural baggage and lose the original spiritual teachings.
DMI: I don’t mean to needlessly reduce the intellectual range of those reading the SNB site, but I do believe that nearly everyone here at the SNB site is going to agree with that, yes? Please correct me if I am wrong.
SL: The goal in MCTB to return back to the “core teachings of the Buddha” and its origins as a spiritual path. This notion of spiritualism aims to “establish universal truth by direct encounter, thereby establishing a language of truth that transcends the plural and parochial truth-claims of the religions.” (McMahan, 2008).
DMI: I attempt to do that to the same degree that one could still delineate a gallbladder as a gallbladder without resorting to Greek gods and myths to do it. We might disagree on the decision about where to draw that conceptual line, but we are both, I believe, attempting to draw it, so at least, in that, we are on a similar page.
SL: In line with the view that Buddhism is a religion that is adept at transformation to suit cultural norms and needs, we can understand this claim of Buddhism as a spiritual path by looking at how Buddhism adopted Western conceptions of the spiritual and how these became entwined with secularity.
This has been well articulated by McMahan, who has documented the rise of what he calls Buddhist modernism, where Eastern Buddhism adopted various trends in Western thought, including Transcendentalism, Scientific Rationalism, Perennialism, and Romanticism (all themes found in MCTB),
DMI: Given that, as you rightly point out, those are strong conceptual and paradigmatic trends that we have as our foundation for approaching this material, to not address them explicitly, as MCTB does, would be weird. The problem with addressing those is what again?
SL: even before transmutating to what we find in modern Western Buddhism. One of these blends has been the combining of secularity and spiritualism, which is important to the quasi-secular approach adopted in MCTB, described by McMahan as “Transtraditional spirituality” (McMahon, 2012). McMahan reports how modern conceptions of spirituality/mysticism – an “experiential-cum-cosmic reality to which no religious tradition has exclusive claims” – only really arrived in the 19th century
DMI: No. Buddhism even in its oldest forms we have textual access to had explicitly this baked into it. If you imagine this is purely some revisionist reading, perhaps go back and read, say, the Abhidhamma, and see if you really think we are purely retrofitting our current paradigm on their old, purely religious, entirely sectarian, entirely un-Empirical views. The Buddha makes numerous statements that demonstrate that he shares our strong elements of our “experiential-cum-cosmic” ethos, such as stating that any tradition where you found the elements of the Eightfold Path would be a tradition with the capacity to produce similar results. Further, one can’t easily read a text such as the Abhidhamma and come to the conclusion that Buddhism was attempting to describe some religious doctrine regardless of experientially verifiable truths, but instead taking on the project of deep Empirical Ontology. We can disagree to which we think they got their doctrines and terms right, but the ethos of attempting, however oddly at times, to describe what they felt were Universal, verifiable truths, attentional embryology and development, and the phenomenological elements of human experience in the sort of taxonomic way of the Naturalists is clear.
It is also obviously part of the promise that drives the SNB experiment, which, in its trajectory, envisions at least at times pulling the Universal, the Useful, the Real, and the True from the Ruins of Buddhism Deconstructed. Why would any of you would be bothering if you didn’t also believe somehow deep down that those elements existed in the Grand Old Thing we call Buddhism and in its contemporary variants, such as MCTB, in some way that will survive the Purging Fire of the SNB flamethrower?
SL: and were quickly co-opted into modernist Buddhist thinking, as described by Mcmahan:
“If the quintessential method of the secular sciences was the experiment, the parallel concept in the spiritual was experience. The first was testable, leading to knowledge that could be observed and proven to all regardless of culture—that is to say, it aspired to universality. The second was private, belonging to the newly constituted private realm of religion. Yet, bolstered by the various discourses of the autonomous subject, which in turn entwine with the meditative disciplines of Buddhism, experience becomes the “spiritual” counterpart to the experiment, and like the experiment also aspires to universal, verifiable knowledge—its own “facts.” Like the experiment, spiritual experience was conceived as a way of directly investigating reality in a manner that transcended doctrine and authority. It belonged to no church, was beholden to no authority, tradition, or institution, and was committed to free-form discovery of truth. The spiritual, therefore, emerged as the mirror-image of the newly constituted space of secularity.”
This appropriation of science by Buddhism is found even more explicitly in other key texts of Pragmatic Dharma, as can seen from the titles of Shinzen Young’s “The Science of Enlightenment” and Culadasa’s “The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness” (which like MCTB has a great self-help title). Both these books have close to zero science contained within, but the science marketing helps to “increase [Buddhism’s] prestige and legitimacy” (McMahan, 2004) in order to spread the Dharma for a Western 21st century audience. In comparison, you can’t find any Christian or Muslim guides to brain training on Amazon.
DMI: I do at least agree with you that the science contained within those two books is sparse at best. One reading them would be hard-pressed to claim otherwise. That you appear to continue to pour through such tomes despite your clear disparaging of them does indicate that you must yet hold out hope that somehow they will be other than you find them. That Faith, however tempered by stark and often appropriate cynicism, is interesting.
SL: To understand what makes this co-opting possible is to understand the “Dharma”, and therefore what is a “Dharma book” in the title of MCTB. The Dharma is a slippery word to get to grips with, but close examination of the usage of the concept of Dharma within Buddhism gives crucial insight into the operation of Buddhist machinery, how it grips its human subjects, and how it came to be that “Buddhism is a world-conquering juggernaut from which nothing can escape” (Wallis, 2011).
DMI: Well, that’s characterization does clearly have a bit of the delightful, theatrical, hyperbolic quality of some of the SNB material, and it is always curious to see the rhetorical techniques used to make points and to attempt deconstruct the underlying motivations based on the techniques used. Try reading the SNB material through that lens, the lens that attempts to see below the flash and spectacle to the underlying human needs and feelings that fuel the emotional charge.
SL: Dharma spectacles for seeing ultimate reality
Let’s see how this term is described in MCTB. Through the process of meditation described in MCTB, the meditator gets to see “ultimate reality”, a phrase that reoccurs throughout MTCB. In making progress the meditator begins to understand:
“what our actual reality is, we can get down to the good stuff: knowing the truth of these things called, appropriately, “investigation of the truth” or “investigation of the dharma” (Pali dhamma). Dharma here just means “truth”, and it is sometimes used to mean the specific truths the Buddha taught.”
Adopting the language of the scientific method, MCTB regularly extols the reader to “try the experiment”, to see for oneself the effectiveness of the practices and hence the truth of the Dharma, rather than accept any of its tenets as religious dogma. However, on reading this quote, it might seem odd for the secular reader to equate the same word for “truth” as “teachings of the Buddha”, as this means Buddhism and truth are therefore one.
DMI: No. In this case, it means the Three Characteristics are experientially verifiable to be true. Remember, MCTB by this point has very carefully set up a set of flexible, practical pseudo-ontological lenses with the explicit notion that they are disposable lenses that simply turn out to be helpful for certain practices. In the specific case here, he context is that, when doing insight practices, one presumes that one’s sensate experience is a the frame of reference for reality that yields the best results. Shane takes pains to detach this advice from this carefully constructed conceptual context, and so attempts to make it appear that I am saying something like, “Experiences come and go, so everything the Buddha said is true.” I do nothing of the kind, and, if you read MCTB, the section on the Three Characteristics, you will see that he has again attempted a truly disingenuous attack based on what he knows to be a false reading of what I have written.
SL: Ever more slippery, Dharma can also mean “experience” or “phenomena”.
DMI: That words are used to mean various things in various contexts is, to those who like precise language, unfortunate, and, on this, we agree. However, the point is that, back in the day, in Pali, such was the case. We can attempt to bring forward this linguistic problem and blame it on me and Buddhism, or we can, as MCTB does, attempt to elucidate that one has to watch for this and take the meaning of the term in context. If one is talking about the teachings of the Buddha broadly as the Dharma, one hopefully wouldn’t confuse that with the use of the term in the Adhidhamma that talks about momentary dharmas, or individual experiences. Shane takes something I am explicitly attempting to make clear and reversing it to pretend that I, and thus Buddhism, are taking a linguistic limitation and using it for mass advertising purposes. These sorts of attacks get tiring to keep debunking. If you want to debates points of real substance, please do so, but to keep going for more below-the-belt punches gets old and presumes a readership that will be taken in by this sort of rhetoric. How do you feel, dear reader, that Shane is doing this and presuming that it will work on you? I would personally feel insulted, but you will have to judge your own feelings here, obviously.
SL: This means that wherever you look in the world you see the teachings of Buddhism reaffirmed. The experience of reality itself is the experience of Dharma. The Dharma spectacles makes everything Dharma coloured. Wallis (2011) refers to the circularity of the Dharma like this: “the Dharma is the Dharma becauses it mirrors the Dharma” (see also Wallis, 2019, for an extended discussion).
DMI: Except that, in the specific chapter of MCTB he is criticizing, I am not sure you need fancy, distorting, deceptive Buddhist spectacles to notice for yourself what every single person I have ever talked to when they start to meditate has noticed for themselves, that sensations come and go, there is little willful control of experience, even of things that really do appear to be “us”, such as thoughts, and that the experience is unpleasant. When framed like that, as MCTB explicitly does, do Shane’s critiques that this is all Buddhism and a purely religious distortion seem valid? Is this just some artificial mirror?
Luckily, you don’t have to take Shane’s or Wallis’ words for it, as you can do the experiment for yourself: sit down for 10 minutes. If you find a sensation that is truly permanent rather than just recurrent, believe you really have total control of everything you think is you including your thoughts and your body, and don’t notice that the experience has aspects that are clearly unsatisfactory, you will be the first person I have ever met who had that reaction. You don’t need Buddhism to notice these straightforward aspects of human. I didn’t have any idea what Buddhism was when, in second through fourth grade, I had to sit with the rest of the Quaker school my mom sent me to for 10 minutes in silence each day before our first lessons, and yet even I, a child, noticed that this was my experience. This isn’t something culturally constructed, it is just what people experience. Shane apparently really doesn’t like this, as he goes on about below. Well, sorry that this just is as it actually, verifiably is. I get how disappointing that is to you. What will help you move through the Stages of Grief from the Denial, Anger, and Bargaining you demonstrate for page after page to healing Grief and Acceptance?
SL: This might help explain why, despite its claims to be a practical guidebook, free from dogma, MCTB is oddly comfortable as presenting Buddhist religious tenets as dogma. MCTB describes the three characteristics or marks of existence – impermanence (aniccā), suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anattā), which can be compared to the Holy Trinity within Christianity as part of a core religious doctrine. In MCTB, Buddhist enlightenment is achieved through entering through one of these doors. Why? As Ingram puts it:
“Because there are only three doors to ultimate reality, that’s why…“Only three doors? But there are thousands of practices, many traditions! How can you say there are only three doors?” There are only three doors, that’s how. I don’t care what tradition you subscribe to, what practice you do, or who you are, there are only three basic ways to enter the attainment of fruition, nirvana, nibbana, or whatever you want to call it…This is just the way it is. It is not negotiable. The natures of the mind and reality are just the natures of the mind and reality. You cannot change this, but you can realize it”.
How is it possible that a book devoted to uprooting “standard Buddhist dogmas” can become so explicitly dogmatic?
DMI: Again, I recommend you actually do the experiment. Luckily, exactly how to do it is laid out ad nauseum in MCTB. Get what MCTB describes as stream entry. It is definitely doable and verifiably so. Get really good at micro-phenomenology. I would truly be happy to freely help you with this project. Notice how the Three Doors present for at least a few hundred Fruitions. Catalogue each and every presentation carefully. See if you come up with any others than those I mention. If you can, you will have truly added to the phenomenological literature, and I will sing your praises if others can confirm what you have described.
Otherwise, it is like discussing harmony with someone who is totally tone deaf. Imagine someone stating, “How can you state with such certainty that a note combined with its major third and perfect fifth sound ‘happier’ than a note with its minor third and diminished fifth? That’s just dogma!” Except, as everyone who can hear tones will tell you, a major chord does sound happier than a diminished minor chord, and, as those with really good pitch will tell you, if you tune that to the specific scale you are using rather than equally tempered tuning, that major chord will sound even happier. One who can’t hear this is not a proper critique of music theory or varieties of tuning. In that same way, and to the profound annoyance of those armchair critiques of meditative phenomenology, to criticize the chapter on the Three Doors without actually having the microphenomonological chops to see it for themselves is just not someone you should believe.
Unlike Shane, I am willing to put my money where my big fat twitching pie-hole is. I have recently purchased a $20,000 Cognionics Quick-20R portable dry EEG which I am flying now with to a eventually be on two meditation retreats where I believe that I can demonstrate that the Fruition Three Doors Entrances have specific EEG signatures that are unique, measurable, correlate with practitioner descriptions, and am following that up with a study with some highly skilled neuroscientists at Harvard and a few others on the same topic using a top-of-the-line 7 Tesla fMRI and high-density EEG with top data analysts across multiple adept meditators as well at substantially large cost, half of which I funded myself.
Obviously, I just bet tens of thousands of dollars of my own money and so far hundreds of hours of my own time that I am right and willing to try to prove it. What are you willing to bet that I am wrong? Talk and text are cheap. Willing to really play ball? So confident your positions? I would truly be delighted to refer you to the Harvard Medical School funding office where you can step up as I have done and let’s let the Great Feast be supported to the degree required to sort this all out. Our Phase Three trial still needs more cash, actually about $300,000 more. That’s the sort of Real Great Feast you were promised by this site. Please, join me there! I ask for no money for myself, just support for those dedicated, skilled scientists who can actually try to sort this out and help paying for Real science that costs Real money. Otherwise, consider auto-copulative acts or at least appropriate agnosticism and reserved silence until the best results that we can come up with currently available technology are in. See, I can be polite, even with those as rhetorically vile yet empty-handed as Shane. Not interested, cool, but perhaps realize this is not a game you are playing seriously and accept your amateur status as being what it is.
Don’t like my experiment? Design your own and make it fair. Pound the pavement to find funding for it, as I did. Give some of your own cash to make it happen. Have some skin in the game. Get it performed by top scientists with best-in-class tools and techniques. Present your data for peer review. Anything else is just idle bullshit at this point.
SL: MCTB is rooted in the practice of Vipassana which can be translated as “insight into the true nature of reality”. A master of these meditation practices experiences the truth of reality better than anyone else, and therefore can lay an authoritarian claim to its nature. Dharma glasses provide the power that allows all other religions and all experiences of the “spiritual” to be sucked up into the path of the all conquering Buddhist juggernaut. MCTB then becomes not a “religious book” because it transcends religion. It describes methods to see reality as it “truly” is, for those bold and brave enough to explore it. This reinforces how science can be so easily appropriated for the Buddhist cause. If the Dharma is truth, and science is a truth-generating machine, then science and the Dharma will get along very well.
DMI: Yes, I think they have the potential to do so, though, in truth, much of the science done on meditation and Buddhism so far is pretty weak, as it was done on weak practitioners using weak techniques in low doses by non-practitioners (read equivalent of tone-deaf, see above example) who knew little of the real depths of what these techniques are capable of. As I actually review articles sometimes for a major scientific meditation journal, I know the range of the quality out there, and it is disappointing. I aim to be a small part of a new wave of better science that will change that.
Spent the weekend with two leading neurophenomenologist scientists working on how to make this happen, and scheduled for more time this coming Spring, Summer and Fall.
Spend a bunch of October and November trying to find the millions of dollars that will be required to do better than what has come before, and hopefully will have the health and good fortune to be able to continue to do so for the coming new decade.
Did you do anything this year like that to help verify that your views are true or refute them if they are not by more objective methods? If not, why not, when you clearly appear to care so much about this topic.
Want to have a hand in actually designing, funding, and implementing the rigorous, sound studies that might have the capacity to satisfy the need for verification or refutation of various claims? Please, join us, if you are actually able and willing to be fair and even-handed in your judgements, design, and analysis rather than so scathingly and obviously slanted in your attacks, as you have so far been in this review. This is an open offer to any reader that has the qualifications, true interest, and ability to be appropriately objective in the face of a subject that clearly elicits strong and biased reactions, as demonstrated again here.
SL: Pragmatism: Buddhism is true because it works
Like the concept of the Dharma, the concept of pragmatism within “Pragmatic Dharma” also works to ensnare belief in Buddhism. Pragmatism as a philosophy holds that what works is what is true.
DMI: No, pragmatism is a philosophy that what works works. It explicitly and meticulously avoids ontology to the degree that it is able except where temporarily adopted ontologies are functionally useful to some pragmatic end. Even the rigorous neuroscience we are doing and will do is only provisionally true at best, actually, extrapolated from Experience, and more Predictive than Absolute, as the great Empiricist David Hume would argue well, and I refer you to his works for more on his views. However, at some point, practically people adopt various things as true enough to take as a sufficiently valid oracle to promote action and a sense of certainty. Questions of epistemology are obviously key here. Want to believe Shane’s armchair review of these techniques or your own sufficient experimentation with them as your source of what is sufficiently true? Want to help fund top neuroscientists to give their best shot as exploring these as true or false or just want to take Shane’s word for it? Your call.
SL: Buddhism through the vessel of Pragmatic Dharma becomes true because it works. Faith in the Dharma is strengthened. A quote from MCTB that shows how this made explicit in listing rough synonyms, in how it sorts out the:
“pragmatic, universal, applicable, technical, helpful, useful, and true from the dogma, proprietary branding, obscure and alienating terminology, religious craziness, ancient taboos, archaic paradigms, primitive and inaccurate biological assumptions, needlessly rigid frameworks”.
DMI: Well, yes, which is, in some ways, what a lot of the SNB project is about, at least as I read it. Even if you disagree with my characterization of the goals of the SNB project, you hopefully agree that it is in the same philosophical neighborhood. The problem is what again? Why shouldn’t consenting adults be able to do those explorations? As ways to pass one’s time, I will claim it is relatively benign. I daily see large amounts of evidence that there are plenty of behaviors far more deserving of criticism, but to teach their own. Should I attempt to convince you all that you shouldn’t be doing the SNB project based on the same sort of logic?
SL: As seen here, MCTB contrasts itself from what it views as irrational and non-pragmatic Buddhism. Buddhism that is not “true”. The pragmatism of MCTB is very explicitly goal-orientated. The proposition is that the Buddhist path describes a path to some non-crazy real and achievable goal, and the MCTB is pragmatic in that it focuses on the most efficient and effective means to achieving this goal. In keeping with its claims to non-dogmatism and its Westernised consumerist orientation, this also can involve picking and choosing outside of practices outside of Buddhism, but it also fits with its perennialist credo.
DMI: Well, actually Buddhism also has that sort of feel to it going back to the earliest forms we have of it. It borrowed heavily from what came before it and what was around it that it found useful. Curiously, nearly everyone in every field of life does this also, so the problem is what again? It momentarily sounded like you were in one sentence arguing against traditional Buddhism in the dogmatic sense then, a sentence later, arguing for traditional preservation and authenticity rather than perennialism? I may have misread you here.
SL: One consequence of this approach, and through the mechanism of pragmatism, MCTB creates an auto-immunity to critique.
DMI: No, pragmatism is intrinsically hard to critique, hence is popularity, even in those who somehow decry pragmatism while yet obviously being pragmatic, at least as they see it. You yourself are also attempting to be pragmatic, as apparently your cynicism and twisted rhetoric are working for you and you believe they will work for someone else or you wouldn’t have bothered to post it on social media. Attacking a pragmatic book’s pragmatism based on pragmatism is shakier than the ground of just attempting to be explicitly pragmatic.
SL: Now, critique can be found within MCTB, and extensive criticisms are provided of other spiritual paths compared to the one advocated by the author. But criticism cannot exist of its own axioms.
DMI: Here’s the best line of the whole essay! Yay! Check this out, “Criticism cannot exist of its own axioms,” is an axiom that is explicitly doing what it says it cannot do. It doesn’t get better than that.
SL: By leaving its foundational axioms unstated they can seen to be self-evidently true and not worth examining, rather than be seen as the product of the particular American milieu and the historical contingencies of the Buddhisms that influenced its author.
DMI: Actually, MCTB goes far into detail about the problems with its underlying axioms and assumptions to a degree that I find in nearly no other dharma book. Please, delight me with specific examples in a reply such that I can respond to each and every one of them with MCTB quotes. Give me an example of a practical Buddhist meditation manual that has more self-criticism or that points out more of its own complex underpinnings.
SL: Instead we are left with the starting point of MCTB that there is a Buddhist path that is worth pursuing as its fruits are “highly recommended”. But the particular Theravadan Buddhist path contained within is taken as the best and most efficient means of achieving perennial spiritual goals. Other paths and approaches are devalued or discounted as they are not good pragmatic means to obtain the particular goals described within MCTB.
DMI: Which paths specifically are devalued and discounted as they don’t lead to the which specific goals? Again, please provide definite examples so I might address them. Do you mean, for example, that existentialist philosophy won’t lead to jhanas, or what? Help me out here rather than simply being what I believe is intentionally vague, as I have seen you get specific when it helps your argument and vague when it helps your argument, and here I believe the statements are deliberately vague.
SL: They are not pragmatic as they don’t lead to the particular “truth” of Pragmatic Dharma.
It has been highlighted on the SNB blog how Western Buddhism has anti-intellectual strains. This is expressed in MCTB with its appeals to introspection and phenomenological reports, as opposed to discursive thought and argumentation.
DMI: Have you seriously noticed a lack of argumentation in MCTB or in my own well-known, flagrantly extroverted-appearing style? Really? We battled with heated rhetoric for many threads on the DhO back in the day. You knew the moment you wrote and posted this piece how I was going to respond before I even did it. MCTB and I have been called lots of things, but non-argumentative is not one of them. In fact, most people find it too argumentative for their tastes, a trait that alienates a many mainstream Buddhists and other practitioners from reading it.
Hey, SNB kids who know my previous posts here: do you believe Shane when he tells you that I am anti-intellectual and non-argumentative? You might not like everything I do with my intellect, and you might not like my interpretation of your favorite philosophers, but seriously, non-argumentative? This gets weirder and weirder as we go. Anyone still believing this guy?
SL: It is strengthened through the rhetoric of Pragmatic Dharma that it cares most about what works,
DMI: I know, that is so crazy, right?
SL: and hence any discussion which takes us away from what works would not be in the spirit of pragmatism. Take Dharma and Pragmatism together, and it creates a virulent strain of belief propagation in the effectiveness and truth of the Dharma and of Buddhism. This “Dharma book” is a very pragmatic Buddhist-creating machine.
DMI: Actually, the number of Buddhists that the book has created is likely extremely small to the point of statistical insignificance in comparison to the large industry we might call McMindfulness. It is over a billion-dollar-a-year industry at least in the US alone, which dwarfs what, say MCTB makes by a factor of about 500,000, if that is any indication. The notion that it is churning out large a number of seriously deep practitioners is a fantasy, and this in a guy who claims to be all about busting fantasies. Hundreds at best perhaps, not thousands. So, in, say, the US, let’s say there are 300 truly serious practitioners that are really going for it with all that is involved, including long retreats and serious long hours of daily practice sustained for years to the level that achieves the book’s stated goals, or at least some reasonable fraction of them, that got into this based on MCTB: that’s less than 1 in 1,000,000, not any great success rate, whereas it is estimated that now tens of millions of people meditate at least occasionally. Let’s try to keep our discussions on the thin rails of reality to the degree that we are able. Those following along at home will notice that, yet again, Shane hopes you will fall for his exaggerated metaphor without grounding it in numbers, a common tactic of those with weak arguments.
SL: Let’s now look at the role and benefits of “mastery” of the Dharma within MCTB. What is the truth of the experiment advocated that we should master?
“MASTERING…”
Pragmatic Dharma is a very Americanised form of Buddhism which has deep roots in very American values.
DMI: Actually, nearly all of the goals, tech, lists, concepts, prescribed doses, maps, warnings, ethics, ethos, and the like in MCTB come straight out of Myanmar, and before that Sri Lanka and before that what is now known as India, though it wasn’t then. I realize that to someone who wasn’t paying attention mid-20th century Myanmar, Sri Lanka in the 100-500 CE range, and India some 2,000-2,500 years ago might seem like contemporary America, but they are not. Again, simply wrong.
SL: As an offshoot of Buddhist modernism, and in the tradition of Protestantism and consumerism, it links personal worth to productive achievement.
DMI: Again, anyone reading along at home will notice that one can’t possibly read the Pali texts without getting the powerful sense that achievement was baked into the original, though it is clearly anti-consumerist. Anyone thinking that a massive tome that I give away that is read in its entirety by perhaps a few hundred people a year is rampantly consumerist should definitely avoid going into business and seek the advice of experts when investing. If you think that these achievements, which nearly none of your friends or family will understand (and are likely to be creeped out by) and which you would be basically crazy to mention at nearly all jobs, are likely to lead to some great increase in your sense of worth to anyone but perhaps your dwindling sense of yourself, I have land in Florida to sell you. Vastly more likely is that you will get to know something about the mortal peril of your condition, a powerful sense of how utterly non-conforming your mind and heart are to your ideals, however humble, and how much meditation is painful, frustrating, and involves substantial opportunity costs of many varieties.
SL: A recurring and central theme in Pragmatic Dharma and in MCTB is that of empowerment, which is a key mechanism of its self-help technique. This fits with American values of self-reliance and individualism, along with neoliberal governmentality (e.g. Bondi, 2005) and help link MCTB with the American self-help movement.
DMI: The notion of self-help being intrinsically aligned with neoliberalism is wrong, though there are many good arguments that plenty of “sit quietly in your cubical working out your own problems while we pay you little and treat you like a unit” are on solid ground. However, plenty of people who meditate also have spines, stands up for themselves, and don’t let the possible shadow-sides of these techniques fuck them up.
SL: Empowerment means individual control, rather than submission to a higher power or authority that is found in most religions, including some forms of Buddhism such as Shin Buddhism. Buddhism is a messy creature, but one recurring theme is realising a state of “non-self” (Anatta). While MCTB describes how its practices lead to a phenomenological change in the experience of selfhood, much of the language of the path within MCTB is framed in terms of self-improvement, and of attainment for the self.
DMI: You see, if you read MCTB and pay attention, you will notice that it makes a few key points here. The first is that the use of language such as attainment and “I” and “Me” and “Mine” and all of that are unavoidable. Imagine trying to write a practical meditation manual without using any terms like that or talking about attainments. Try to write a few paragraphs of instructions, descriptions of possible results, reasons to do the practices, and the like without talking in relative terms. It would be mind-bogglingly awkward, terrible writing, stilted to a profound degree, and annoying to read. Try this example: “The transient sensations will appear sit down for no reason. Effects will appear to occur. Mindfulness might appear to apply itself. When things appear to happen, that’s simply that….” Blah, blah, blah. Seriously? In this case, Shane’s critique sounds like a critique, until you actually start imagining what the remedy might be, and they it is exposed as as crazy as it actually is.
The second point has to do with the entirely different frameworks and assumptions found in each of the Three Trainings of Morality, Concentration and Wisdom. The first two explicitly presume a self that can make decisions and take actions, and the third training uses those assumptions to finally focus on the quality of things happening on their own. Given that nearly everyone picking up MCTB has a functional, working sense of themselves as a being in time that has goals, the book works with that, as do nearly all other works.
I could state in this situation, “Shane assumes that you, the reader, are a self who is reading this for some goal that relates to your life being better by avoiding the evil book MCTB, lets you accidentally fall into its horrible web of deception and fool you into paying attention.” Anyway, you see the problems.
SL: Rather than self-dissolution, MCTB has more focus more focused on self-aggrandisement, and realisation of a specialness of the self through the success that mastery brings. Those that read MCTB are described as now being “in the know”, in comparison to the “cozy little lives of the unenlightened”. Given that so few people have achieved the state of the author’s Arahathood, the narrative tells us that if you make it that far you can join a unique and global elite, an exalted status which few throughout history have achieved.
DMI: For a bit of good-old reality testing, I sit on a small toilet in a small, cramped hotel room alone in an airport on New Year’s Eve as I write this thinking about how I really should have washed the grease from the airplane food off of my hands before handling my keyboard. I assure you, debunking the absurd rhetoric of one such as Shane has no glamor to it. It is like trudging through drizzly rain. However, in general, is a good life, and I have few real complaints, at least at a personal level, but this life in general is not an exalted one, and it would be hard to describe most of the realities of my current experience as grand unless you are coming from true poverty, in which case, yeah, an upper-middle class American existence is pretty exalted. However, arahatship didn’t make it more or less exalted, though it did solve one particular aspect of the relationship to it, and that does have real, obvious value.
Yes, it is true that studying a subject to an unusual degree makes one increasingly in a small club of people who know that thing. This is true of all endeavors. When I was frying fish in a fish restaurant in my 20’s, those who had been there for years and who had gone to cooking school were clearly more in the know and more exalted than I was. As I enter the world of academia and research, there are people who have vastly more knowledge of things like EEG and fMRI and the literature on those who have degrees from vastly more prestigious universities than mine, so, in comparison to me, feel exalted, though they struggle for grants and are fighting to get by like most of the rest of us. So, yes, studying a subject for thousands of hours over decades and training for many months on retreats does make one in some sort of small club of people who know that, but that is true for anything, so this argument is hardly special.
If, when Shane says “unique and global elite” you are imagining some glitzy secret lounges hanging out with some laughing bunch of arahats in gold hot tubs drinking exotic beverages and laughing at the masses, think again. Curiously, most of us don’t really get along that well. Most have thoroughly unglamorous lives. Most people who care about these things will still react oddly and unnaturally to you. It can be isolating and alienating. Essays like that demonstrate this point in spades. The projection flies thick and fast, as it does here in this essay. If Shane is conjuring dreams for you of anything other than a loosely-associated bunch of somewhat odd, mortal, mostly-ordinary, sometimes not very pleasant to be around, mostly middle to lower-middle class people when he spins his metaphors of elite clubs, don’t fall under his illusion.
SL: The mastery in the title of MCTB ostensibly refers to mastery of a spiritual path and associated meditation practices stemming from the Theravadan Buddhist tradition, principally the practice of Vipassana, or “insight meditation”, following 20th century Burmese Buddhism, and its translation in the American Vipassana movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Following this tradition, MCTB privileges a meditation technique of carefully noticing perceptual experiences, called “noting”. The honorific “Arahat” in the title is a term taken from Theravadan Buddhism and positions Ingram as a recognised and verified master of these meditation practices, one who has achieved enlightenment.
DMI: But again, even the use of the term “enlightenment” needs serious qualifiers not to be the monster it nearly always it without a lot of grounding in reality testing.
SL: MCTB follows a Theravadan doctrine called the “Stages of Insight”, providing a guidebook for navigating these stages all the way to enlightenment. This is complicated to describe see a summary from Ingram here, but a useful way to understand the “spiritual quest” described in MCTB is to see it akin to a computer game, and Pragmatic Dharma as a gamification of Buddhism.
DMI: No, those frameworks came straight out of the ancient Pali Canon and Abhidhamma from over 2000 years ago, were refined in the commentaries, and are experienced with freakishly predictable reproducibility by meditators from a wide range of traditions today and even people not practicing in those traditions. The notion that Pragmatic Dharma has gamified Buddhism which had none of that is a fiction that Shane apparently hopes you won’t recognize as such. The oldest texts we have clearly show the Buddha was all about verifiable stages of progress, and we find that people go through those stages today as they did then. This is not something about Buddhism really, just as the gallbladder is not about Galen or Greek Mythology. It is simply a good, verifiable description of aspects of progressive attentional development. Want to see for yourself? Do a two-week meditation retreat and follow instructions, if you are able, and see what happens. You can confirm these things for yourself.
SL: There are initially 16 levels in the first path of the enlightenment game. Skilled meditation and “insight” allows you to progress until you reach level 16. On beating level 16 you complete the first path, called “stream entry”.
DMI: Ironically, by adding in gaming language and an attitude that is not found in quite that way in MCTB 1 and 2, it is Shane that is gamifying Buddhism while trying to pretend it is me. While I myself do also use some gaming metaphors, I employ them to different entirely purposes: see the The Analogy of Shootin’ Aliens in MCTB2, page 48.
SL: By unlocking this achievement you become a “stream winner”, and you level up,
DMI: Again, this is Shane adding further gamification language to Buddhism beyond even what I do, just so we are clear on where terms like “level up” are coming from and you don’t blame this on me.
SL: with new abilities. Along the way are skill-enhancing sub-quests, a key one being progressing through 4 advanced meditation levels called Jhanas. Unlocking first path allows access to an additional 4 more advanced Jhana levels.
DMI: Well, yes and no. Some who gain first path don’t really get much jhanic ability, but some do. It is not as black and white as Shane paints it, but, were he accurately representing MCTB, I wouldn’t have to mention that. Again, he needs to exaggerate his arguments to try to make his points because his arguments are demonstrably weak.
SL: Following unlocking the stream entry path accomplishment, the 16 levels are repeated again 3 more times (called “cycling”), unlocking accomplishments through completing each path, until you complete the game at the 4th path, unlocking Arahat, and achieving full enlightenment.
DMI: Well, in practice it doesn’t really work that way most of the time, as MCTB says. There are typically more cycles than 4, sometimes apparently a lot more. Also, MCTB explicitly states that arahatship is not full enlightenment, Buddhahood is, at least in the dogma, a subject better described in MCTB1 in the chapter “So What’s Full Enlightenment?”. Were Shane being honest, he would have told you that, but he isn’t, so he didn’t.
SL: Part of this appeal of this gamified version of Buddhism is a clear structured curriculum, and the gamified rewards of new “insights” and achievements as you make your way through the levels. Unlike other forms of Buddhism where paths are not described, or described very vaguely (e.g., the ox-herding pictures of Zen), following these maps can provide a sense of progress and sign-posting to guide practice.
DMI: Yes. Cool, huh? It seems a weird thing to complain about, particularly given the relatively small amount of time and effort it takes to confirm at least the early to middle insight stages for yourself. Most go have gone on a 10-day Goenka retreat have chanced into at least the first 3-10 of them.
SL: But another key function of the curriculum is to reinforce faith in the Dharma. If you follow the practices, carry out the Buddhist “experiment”, and have experiences matching the described path, then it verifies the truth of the Dharma.
DMI: Again, Shane is trying to make the false implication that I believe that because an insight retreat will very likely show you the first 3-10 insight stages or so that everything in Buddhism is correct. I say nothing of the kind, and, in fact, spend at least as much of MCTB stating where I think Buddhism both ancient and contemporary needs questioning and appropriate skepticism. Truly, I invite you to read this corrupting, deceptive, brainwashing gateway machine to confirm this for yourself: www.mctb.org
SL: An alternative perspective on the path is to place emphasis on its social-cultural construction. But to do so would lessen the force of Dharmic hold. Important to the development of faith in the Dharma is the belief that these stages are a natural part of human development. As Vincent Horn puts it, that “the underlying pattern of spiritual development appears to be hardwired into our biology and psychology”; Ingram reports in MCTB “it appears to be a hardwired part of human physiology”; Kenneth Folk states that enlightenment is a “natural aspect of human development that is available to everyone”. This last quote reveals a common trope in spiritual circles that achieving enlightenment is natural, and leading to experiences of “naturalness”. For example, in MCTB:
“With systematic debunking through insight practices of the illusion of some sense of a permanent, separate, independently existing self, we learn to perceive things as they are naturally.”
“However, as we become better meditators, we can learn to relax into what is happening and still be present with it more naturally”.
DMI: Curiously, even beginner meditators with few hours of meditation under their belts report these sorts of effects, that is, an increased ability to be with sensate experience more calmly, clearly, and naturally. It is not strange to imagine that by trying to practice this, one might get better at it.
It is hard to argue with naturalness. Natural is equated with goodness, a consequence of our biology. But the idea we have to spend thousands of hours sitting still with our eyes closed to experience life more “naturally” might seem odd to some.
DMI: Just like spending thousands of hours to learn to read might be weird to some, and yet, when we learn to read, we can perceive and understand things that those who are illiterate might not appreciate in the same way unless they are able to have text read to them. It might seem odd to spend thousands of hours looking at black and white pixels on a lighted screen when we might be experiencing reality some other way, but here we are.
SL: Furthermore, given our 21st century knowledge of human evolution, cognitive development and cognitive neuroscience, the elaborate stages and paths of Pragmatic Dharma to an outsider could seem rather preposterous, the product of an “archaic paradigm” (a term used in MCTB to describe non-pragmatic Dharma). Given our knowledge of the historical contingencies on how these came to be described, a reasonable explanation of why we have 16 levels, with 4 paths, 4 Jhanas, and the 4 noble truths of Buddhism, is not some aspect of our shared human genetic heritage and human potential, but a product of monks in an oral pre-modern religious tradition who used numbered lists as a memory aid and were incredibly fond of the number 4.
DMI: First, might check out the Chanting Together Sutta (DN 33) for more on the wide range of numbers they liked: http://www.suttas.com/dn-33-sangiti-sutta-the-chanting-together.html
Second, if you have done lots of retreats and talked to plenty of other people about what actually happened on retreats, and gotten to do this for 25 years, then you start to get bored. Why? Because you hear the same stuff in the same order again and again and again.
It is clear Shane hasn’t done this, as, if he had, he would know what those of us who have done this for thousands of people across decades know, that keeping your ear fresh is really hard. In the same way that radiologists get film fatigue, particularly towards the end of the day, and find it hard to stay really noticing everything going on in the 100thchest x-ray they have looked at that day, so it is with dharma teaching. Why? Because your spiritual journey sounds nothing resembling unique or even that interesting to a seasoned teacher. It is one in 100 that I hear anything surprising at all from.
It becomes like emergency medicine, where soon enough you don’t even remember the severe gunshot victims the next day unless there is something really odd about their presentation. So, given that every single meditation teacher who deals with people on going on retreats of greater than 7 days I know reports the same thing, one can either conclude that Shane is not that experienced in talking to people about their meditation reports or somehow is talking to an extremely unusual population of meditators whose experience routinely falls far outside of the same, boring boxes the rest of us hear about again and again. I am betting on the former, but perhaps Shane will enlighten us in the relative sense with a rough count of how many hundreds of people he has had long, in depth conversations about the unfolding of insight on longer retreats with so we can judge his expertise on its contemporary utility and predictive value. Shane?
SL: For the stage and path doctrine to be effective in capturing belief it needs to have a basis in the reality of meditators. But crucially, descriptions of what the stages of insight refer to are extremely porous. MCTB talks about their fractal nature, which means that stages can describe experiences at different temporal frames and in different life circumstances.
DMI: Except that fractal nature comes with serious warnings in that section about how problematic it is to attempt to apply it in practice, is much more useful for those of at least second path, for whom it can be a complex problem if they are not aware of it, and it isn’t actually that porous. Most insight stages are straightforward to diagnose in practice. Still, not keeping a wide differential diagnosis and not observing things over time and asking good questions can lead one astray, as the maps sections clearly explain.
SL: They can refer to experiences both on and off the meditation cushion. Stages can be traversed in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. Stages across paths are cyclic. Positive experiences are part of the path, negative experiences are part of the path, neural experiences are part of the path. What this means is that whatever paths refer to become unfalsifiable.
DMI: He is correct until the last line. His rhetorical tactic in this case is classic: true statement, true statement, true statement, true statement, false statement that might plausibly be true if you didn’t know better. Always a good one to watch for. In this case, it is typically pretty easy to distinguish the insight stages, but the maps are mostly for hindrance correction, to keep people from being thrown off of their game when strongly positive, neutral but weird, or negative experiences arise. They also help with normalization, which itself helps with embracing what is going without having some bad or unhelpful reaction to it.
In terms of unfalsifiability, remember that Scientific Great Feast we discussed earlier? I have some preliminary fMRI and EEG evidence from some work I did some years ago with a leading neuroscience research group at Brown/Yale/UMass that shows that the stages of insight are probably measurable and definable with contemporary imaging technology and should have more within a year or two, so stay tuned. Again, if you want to help fund this sort of crucial research that is clearly on even Shane’s mind, then please get in touch with me and I will send you to the right university office. So, at least preliminary results show that Shane is simply wrong, and hopefully there will be more soon to definitively answer the question. Shane, if you are so concerned about this, want to contribute something meaningful and supportive to the project? If not, consider how much comfort you might enjoy if you were able to settle into not caring so much about a field you don’t understand that well and don’t have the functional level of interest that actually answers the key issues you raise with such fervor here.
Further, mapping in the middle paths, where things really get complicated, cyclic, and all of that, is difficult, and I don’t know what to say except that it is. However, other factors come on-line, such as the skills that one has typically accumulated by that point, which can help compensate for the complexities. The middle paths are along topic that deserve their own discussion, but I will get back to Shane’s warped rhetoric.
SL: Along with scripting, coupled with cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, we can see how evidence to support faith in the Dharma will be very forthcoming. In line with mechanisms of auto-immunity to critique, doubt can occur through the “dark night” stages of insight (the “Dukkha nanas”), but this is seen as an obstacle to be overcome to progress. Once overcome, a diagnostic sign of reaching the first path of Theravadan Buddhist enlightenment – becoming a stream winner – is removal of the “fetter” of doubt.
A further mechanism for lock-in and commitment to Pragmatic Dharma is the concept of a “Dark Night Yogi” in MCTB. As part of the stages of insight, it is claimed that a spiritual traveller can get stuck in negative “Dark Night” stages, which include the unappetising names of Fear, Misery and Disgust.
DMI: Again, those names not only are straightforwardly descriptive of the dominant emotion that most experience as they go through them, they are also from texts about 2000 years old, not made up in MCTB.
SL: As described in MTCB:
“Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anywhere from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses”.
Ingram describes that can once these stages are reached, the only way to escape is through further meditation practice, otherwise:
“if meditators stop practicing entirely at this stage, they can get stuck and haunted for the rest of their lives until they complete this first progress of insight.”
DMI: You can’t know the degree to which I wish this didn’t seem to be the case for plenty of people. I will claim that the SNB site would be nearly empty were it not for the Dark Night. The DhO would have few to no members, and delightfully so. I wouldn’t have had nearly as much impetus to write my book, so it probably wouldn’t have been written. However, such appears to be the physiology of the thing. I have another research project that I started during my summer at Cambridge designed to get better population-based and longitudinal data, but that’s going to take a lot of time, and I haven’t found the funding for that one yet. Again, if you care about these issues and obtaining better data on them, please lend a hand. I can get you in touch with top-level researchers that would be delighted to be properly funded to study these obscure and taboo topics.
SL: Here you can see a significant incentive for “mastering the core teachings of the Buddha” described in MCTB, as you might be predisposed to avoid the consequences of a living nightmare that can last until your dying breath.
DMI: Again, for those not well-versed in MCTB, Shane is trying to trick you and/or scare you through exaggeration. As it clearly states in MCTB2, page 238, “there are people who breeze straight from the Arising and Passing Away through the whole of the Dark Night in as little as a few easy minutes or hours and hardly notice it at all, so don’t let my descriptions of what can happen script you into imagining that the Dark Night has to be a major suffering event. It absolutely does not. These descriptions of what can occur are merely there to help those who do encounter these sorts of problems to realize that these things do, occur and can be skillfully addressed.”
SL: Faith in the Dharma and the practices that enact it can instead lead you to your salvation. As well as keeping you in the faith, the description of the dark night can also help to hook those coming from outside Buddhism. Experiencing depression and anxiety? You might be suffering the dark night – welcome to the enlightenment cure!
DMI: Well, as noticed by literally thousands of people on the DhO, some people are in these stages, and, when they are mastered, some reasonable proportion get substantially better. It is not a cure for all depression, nor does it guarantee success in the Dark Night, but it does provide pretty straightforward, sensible, non-weird, non-expensive, non-proprietary time-tested solutions that you can have and use for free, and they do help some people. I have literally hundreds of emails from people I have gotten over the years that basically said, “I crossed the A&P, had no idea what it was, hit the Dark Night, had a hard time, a friend showed me the maps and some simple solutions, I applied them and was vastly better, often within hours or days, and am so happy that such things exist.” You can rag on all of this, but it does help some people. I get it, Shane, that somehow this stuff is not at all helpful to you. That it creates these strong reactions, fears of a machine pouring out Buddhists, of severe deception, of plots to sneak Buddhism in to a book on Buddhism, of jealousy of a club of elite exalted arahats somewhere in gilded robes, and that this is a toxic mix that doesn’t work for you, but do you need to indoctrinate others to your extremely unusual reaction to this stuff and justify it all? Instead, thought about talking to someone about it? I think your profession has a lot to offer you.
Curiously, if you look at the assumptions about readership, Shane presumes that you are not that smart, as, not only will you believe his poor rhetoric, you are in some significant danger of not being able to read MCTB2 without ending up damaged by it. I take the opposite assumption, namely that readers are intelligent and mature enough to be able to come to some reasonable, skillful, adult reaction to the material fond therein.
Which do you, as a reader, prefer we presume about you, that you are intelligent and mature enough to make up your own mind or not smart and mature enough to handle reading MCTB2? Oddly, if history is any guide, stating that people shouldn’t read a book due to its inherent dangers is a great way to get people read it and even help make it more of a cult classic. www.mctb.org ;)
SL: “THE CORE TEACHINGS OF THE BUDDHA…”
As a quasi-secular form of Buddhism, MCTB promises core spiritual truth of a religion without cultural baggage and dogma,
DMI: No, without some reasonable proportion of it. It is entirely impossible to simultaneously cover the material properly, to reference its origins, to do this for contemporary humans with their own culture, and to have no cultural baggage and dogma come in along with it. However, one can try, and I have tried.
SL: such as the Buddhist eight-fold path. MCTB describes how Buddhism can be boiled down into three components: sila (“ethics)”, meditation (“concentration” in MCTB) and wisdom (or “insight”, primarily gained through meditation).
DMI: MCTB simply follows stock and standard traditional and contemporary Buddhism in this regard.
SL: While MCTB provides caveats that morality is important, it isn’t so important that it gets more than a couple of pages in a rather long book (600+ pages in the first edition).
DMI: No, the first edition was about 400 pages in its medium-sized format. The second one is about 600 pages not counting the length index, though, at 320,000 words, really, were it in some smaller page format with larger test, it could easily be a 1,000-page book. It is possible, even likely, that Shane hasn’t read the second edition, which came out about 1.5 years ago, and is freely available here: www.mctb.org. It is much longer than the first edition and talks about morality on 90 of its 600 pages. It also references numerous books that go into more detail about Morality and do it quite well, so I saw no reason to replicate that already well-written material in an already way-too-long book. As you will notice, 90 is more than “a couple”.
Again, Shane clearly needs to resort to distortion by over an order of magnitude to make his arguments, as they are weak. What is weird is that he knew I would respond, knows my meticulous nearly point-by-point, line-by-line response style well, as I have demonstrated it a number of times here on the SNB site and with Parlêtre, and he could have easily looked up things like how many pages MCTB2 discussed morality on, and so apparently was more doing this more to get attention and a rise out of me, as why lie about things that are easily verified with a few key strokes? Shane, care to comment on this weird behavior? Is it all SNB style drama and distortion to “kick the bear”, are you just sloppy, or did you somehow actually want to just look bad in public?
SL: For some Buddhists, this would be sacrilege. And indeed, MCTB has been a controversial book within Buddhist communities, particularly through the taboo breaking Arahat claim of its author.
DMI: Yes, which is weird, given that plenty of them are all into Mahasi Sayadaw, who would sign books “Agga Maha Pandita”, which means “Arahat with serious mastery of Pali Scholarship as well”, and reference books like the Vimuttimagga (Path of Freedom), signed by “The Arahat Upatissa”. Most of the people who were and still are outraged themselves sell enlightenment and the effectiveness of their techniques like used car salesmen, so it is weird to complain when they actually work for someone following those same methods. So, yes, controversy occurred, true, but it might have made as much sense for Shane to turn his critical eye to how hypocritical that controversy was, but, instead, he selectively ignores that and turns it to me. Why? A target who will actually respond as opposed to most of those he mentions criticizing me who yet are vastly more flagrantly hypocritical and easy targets for his zeal yet would entirely ignore his writings? Some people prefer bad attention to no attention, so perhaps this yields some shaky clues as to aspects of Shane’s attachment style, but, as is well-documented, it is hard to diagnose people based on their internet posting style, as it typically is a vastly different picture from how they would actually converse with someone in person.
SL: It is an audacious claim to know the teachings of the Buddha, though many Buddhisms lay claim to authority on what these were. The teachings of the Buddha are normally thought to refer to what is described in the Pali canon, a heavily edited oral tradition thought to have been written hundreds of years after the emergence of the Buddha figure. However, we will never know whether the Buddha even existed or not, as the historical evidence is weak. Glenn Wallis describes him well as “a ghost”. But Buddhists like to hear about the Buddha. And even if you are not a Buddhist, it can help to have a Buddha in a book title for marketing purposes, despite the risk of putting off some readers.
DMI: It is worth knowing that MCTB clearly references a lot of books that discuss the origins of those texts, so, were one to even read the introductions to the books that MCTB exhorts them to read, one would be disabused of the historical illusions that Shane is accusing me of perpetuating. MCTB also states in it a few details of the origins of these teachings, so there isn’t as much mystery about their origins as Shane is trying to imply. Even if the historical Buddha didn’t exist, the tech that we have from the tradition still works. So, here we have the curious mix of arguments in one short space from Shane that I will summarize as, “MCTB is scandalous to traditional Buddhists, so MCTB is bad, yet these same traditional Buddhists are delusional, as the Buddha might not have even existed.” It is an odd juxtaposition of shifting sources of validity for criticizing MCTB. Perhaps, Shane, from a purely rhetorical point of view, you should space those out a few paragraphs so that your readers doesn’t realize that you are using the point of view of people you consider dangerously delusional to support your arguments.
SL: The “teachings of the Buddha” is then worth the cost as this is a call to authenticity, to authority, and to tradition. This isn’t a book about the teachings of a mere man! No, as the rhetoric goes, this is a direct transmission of the Awakened One, the living message of an ancient and venerable tradition, a guide to recreating the original and non-diluted practices of the original Buddha and his followers.
DMI: Perhaps you will recall this section of MCTB2, from page 378-379, which I quote at length, as is my habit, section on Radiance Models in Chapter 37, describing the Buddha shortly after the King of the Gods had convinced him to go teach:
“He took off walking down the road between Bodh Gaya and Gaya, and the first person the Buddha talked to after his awakening who wasn’t a god or a giant talking snake was the monk Upaka. I quote the Buddha as he tells the tale, as rendered in Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi’s English translation of The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, sutta 26, as it is so priceless, containing such a wealth of information about the origin of these models and ideals.
[Upaka said], “[f]riend, your faculties are clear, the color of your skin is pure and bright. Under whom have you gone forth, friend? Who is your teacher? Whose Dhamma do you profess?”
I [the Buddha] replied to the Ajivaka Upaka in the stanzas:
“I am one who has transcended all, a knower of all, Unsullied among all things, renouncing all,
By craving’s ceasing freed. Having known this all For myself, to whom should I point as teacher?
I have no teacher, and one like me Exists nowhere in all the world With all its gods, because I have No person for my counterpart.
I am the Accomplished One in the world
I am the Teacher Supreme.
I alone am a Fully Enlightened One
Whose fires are quenched and extinguished.
I go now to the city of Kasi
To set in motion the Wheel of Dhamma. In a world that has become blind
I go to beat the drum of the Deathless.”
[Upaka replied], “by your claims, friend, you ought to be the Universal Victor.”
“The victors are those like me
Who have won to destruction of taints. I have vanquished all evil states, Therefore, Upaka, I am a victor.”
The passage is remarkable in that it sets out so many criteria and specifics about what awakening means to the Buddha and to Buddhism in such a short space. Further, what is interesting is the number of times the word “I” appears. In fact, “Buddha” means something like “awakened one”, or “I am awake”. Thus, we see that the Buddha had no trouble talking about what he had done and who he was, nor did he have trouble thinking the thought “I”. While it is entirely possible that these are not the actual words (or translated words) of the Buddha, it still tells us much about how the early Theravada tradition viewed the Buddha and what he had done.
We note his remarkable presence and skin, and so have the first of the Buddhist radiance models and physical models. We note that he says he is superior to the gods, which is sort of a God model in and of itself, except one better. He describes being free of all the taints and evil states, which is a complex mix of emotional and psychological models. He also mentions the drum of the deathless, and here we have hints of an immortality model or an extinction model, and while formally Buddhism would reject both of these associations, aspects of both show up often in the texts anyway. There is also a transcendence model, as he says he is unsullied by all things, and a specific knowledge model, as the Buddha says he is a knower of all. In short, he says he has accomplished something remarkable, and asserts that he is going to go tell others how to do the same thing he did, or is he?
In case anyone is wondering, I am a huge fan of the Buddha. I apologize if my parsing his purported and translated words through a hyper-analytic and reductionist postmodern filter comes across as disrespectful or in some other negative way. Might the Buddha’s choice of words, metaphors, and similes have worked perfectly in that context, inspiring practitioners to excellent practice without undue confusion? This is entirely possible. However, today, as his words have come down to us translated into this cultural context over 2,500 years later, the results are often delusional chaos.
I put textual selection and commentary here merely to demonstrate that we have lots of places in the Buddhist texts from which we can draw various conscious or subconscious models of awakening, not all of which are helpful. Still, the Buddha inspires the heck out of me, and you gotta appreciate his purported moxie! I recognize that systems of thought and practice that may not be helpful in our current cultural context might have been very skillful and appropriate in another cultural or temporal context, and bringing the East to the West has shown this in abundance.
The question of how the Buddha’s realization relates to what he was trying to teach others is a complex one. There are numerous passages where he says he is quite different from and superior to all other awakened beings, and draws a clear line between himself and other arahants as well. Thus, we must look carefully at what his claims about himself have to do with others, and I devote the whole next chapter to this complex issue. Suffice it to say, the problem comes when the ideals the Buddha discusses as applying to himself (however mythologized and posthumously augmented by creative authors) are applied, without careful investigation, to awakened beings of theoretically inferior degree.”
You will notice that I am clearly well aware of issues of mythology, textual problems, and the like, and use in an attempt at humorous effect.
Shane apparently didn’t notice that even a relatively unsophisticated reader should get the numerous jokes about this in this and other sections. Again, not much of an appreciation of the reader’s level of sophistication, and he apparently believes he needs to save readers from their own stupidity by making what are clearly not very sophisticated rhetorical arguments that also largely presume the reader’s stupidity.
SL: Now, despite the title, MCTB doesn’t devote much ink to describing the teachings of the Buddha as recorded in the Pali Canon.
DMI: Clearly not true. It routinely exhorts its readers to reference original suttas and to read the Pali Canon itself, as well as quoting from many suttas. In fact, it specifically references 24 Pali Canon suttas and quotes from a reasonable number of those. Its entire structure is based on the suttas of the Pali Canon. Its attainments are all mentioned in the Pali Canon. Its techniques are based on the Pali Canon.
SL: Instead, the core teachings are more informed by the Abhidhamma, which includes the origins of the “Stages of Insight” doctrine. The Abhidhamma followed on from the creation of the Pali canon, where Buddhist monks developed a more condensed commentarial tradition.
DMI: I do love it when Shane makes it so easy. What he means when he says the Pali Canon apparently is not the complete Canon, but just the Sutta Pitaka. You see, for those who aren’t familiar with how this works, such as Shane, the Pali Canon is also called the Tipitaka/Tripitaka (Pali/Sanskrit), or “Three Baskets”, which are the Vinaya (code of conduct for monks and nuns), the Sutta Pitaka (basket of discourses, of which there are many), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (basket of analysis). You can see this easily found article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripiṭaka
Shane it attempting to point out in his inaccurate way that the Suttas are generally older than the Abhidhamma, though there are possible exceptions, such as the possibility that some parts of the Khuddaka Nikaya (a division of the Sutta Pitaka) are approximately as old as the Abhidhamma or some even possibly older than it. He is thus using the traditionalist argument of those who state that the older the text, the better it is. I personally often prefer the technologist’s argument, that the more developed and refined a technology is, the potentially better it is, though this clearly needs to be verified. I can already hear the voices of some of my colleagues that don’t like this view, and I will certainly pay some political price for mentioning it again.
SL: Ingram describes this as one of his favourite books. But “Mastering the core teachings of the Abhidhamma, a commentarial text on the teachings of the Buddha” is a less snappy title.
DMI: Except that, not only is it not that, there is ample evidence from suttas considered among the oldest that much of MCTB’s core tech is “authentic”. For example, it derives its primary arahat criteria from the Udana, a book of the Sutta Pitaka that is considered among its oldest. Shane either isn’t aware of this or selectively ignores it for rhetorical points.
SL: While the “teachings of the Buddha” within MCTB are described as following a 2500 year old tradition, the tradition which MCTB is more directly linked to (along with its parent tradition of what David Chapman calls “Consensus Buddhism”) is 20th century Burmese Theravadan Buddhism, a reinvention of Buddhism, as part of Buddhist modernism (McMahan, 2008).
DMI: Just so you don’t imagine that MCTB somehow doesn’t say this, I quote from the Foreword and Warning, page xvii, “Like my own practice, this book is heavily influenced by the teachings of the late, great Mahasi Sayadaw, a Burmese meditation master and scholar in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, and by those in his lineage and outside it.” However, the notion that Mahasi’s teachings are some gross reinvention of Buddhism, it is very easy to find his techniques and emphases in the very Sutta Pitaka that Shane selectively uses as a source of authority but only when it suits his needs. For example, as noted in MCTB, which Shane even read, we can clearly find that Saripitta noted just as Mahasi Sayadaw recommends in MN 111, One by One as They Occurred. We clearly find the mindfulness of breathing and walking in numerous suttas, particularly the Mahasatipatthana Sutta, widely considered the core instructional sutta of the Theravada. To imagine that this is all some rogue departure from traditional teachings and practice is actually quite problematic.
For all the flack that some habitually fling at Mahasi Sayadaw, he was a profoundly adept scholar who actually chaired the Sixth Buddhist Council (there have only been six in ~2,500 years). Apparently, Shane has a secret love and loyalty to the particularly Thai strain of Buddhism that is prone to Mahasi’s selective persecution and denigration.
SL: While MTCB is written as a practice guide rather than a history of Buddhism, it is clear that full acknowledgement of the recently developed and constructed nature of its Buddhism would interfere with the function of the rhetorical presentation of the “simple and ancient practices of the Buddha and his followers” it purportedly describes throughout.
As described earlier, the concept of “core” in the title follows from MCTB’s spiritualist bent, in its goal to present a secularised Buddhist spiritual path that removes unnecessary (non-core) religious baggage. But we can also see how “core” in the title functions as a synonym for “true”. What is core is true. What is not-core is not-true. We need the Buddha to legitimise the practices, to provide a claim to authority. And we need the Buddha to instill faith in the Dharma. Remember, the Dharma is true because truth is the Dharma, and what better truth than “core” truth.
DMI: “Core” is definitely a reaction, but more to contemporary watered-down, highly sanitized, hyper-psychologized, very disempowering, very limited, idealistic Western Buddhism. It is to try to refocus meditation not on just psychology and feeling a bit calmer but on the deeper transformations that even the oldest suttas discuss that also hold up to reality testing today. If he had paid attention when reading MCTB, he would have noticed this focus, which is particularly explained in Part II. It is curious that the SNB kids rarely mention Part II, as it sort of blows their whole, “Daniel is just another x-Buddhist who has drunk the delusional Kool-Aid” schtick. However, were Shane to mention all of that, it would blow his argument of positioning himself as the person pointing out all of these things that, in fact, MCTB largely points out about itself. He needs to ignore these points to “legitimise” his value as critic.
SL: “AN UNUSUALLY HARDCORE…”
The “Hardcore” in the title performs several functions. We have Hardcore Dharma as a personal brand, that makes it a unique (and “unusual”) creation of the author and distinguishes it from other “Dharmas” such as its parent, Pragmatic Dharma. It makes it rather cool sounding, giving it a counterculture edge, that distinguishes it from non-hardcore Buddhist approaches, which according to MCTB are “fluffy” and pragmatically ineffective.
DMI: It is not just MCTB that has noticed their “fluffy” and “ineffective” nature, just FYI. Curiously, the SNB site also vamps hard on that counterculture edge. Yeah, look at all of us rebels out here on the wild edge, typing on our laptops, writing book reviews. Yeah, we are so badass out here on the fringe, the cutting edge of wordy existential pettiness. Hey, I have an old leather jacket in the closet from when I was 17 and had hair. Pretty rad, eh? Wow, we are such rebels, Dude!
SL: A further benefit is creation of the aura of exclusivity, and the revealing of secret knowledge.
DMI: How is quoting widely available suttas and free .pdfs secret knowledge or exclusive? Maybe 25 years ago, when obtaining a lot of these was a pain in the ass and expensive, but that was a long time ago in this business. The internet changed all that. Now, it is more a question of hopefully helpful condensed set of focused references, as we are drowning in information, not suffering from any lack of it.
SL: A recurring theme in MCTB is that mainstream Western Buddhism has created a “mushroom culture” surrounding meditation training, of keeping people in the dark and feeding them bullshit. Through revealing the hidden secrets of Buddhism, MCTB promises to provide an antidote, with the air of uncovering a conspiracy.
DMI: Well, yes and no. It is true that the vast majority of those meditating today will never be introduced to anything like the maps, goals, tech, and possibilities offered in books such as MCTB. That is still a valid argument. Even those who actually get into real meditative territory will not have it named or normalized, much less managed, and that still applies to some of the largest organizations with the most meditators, such as the Goenka organization, which is simply massive, or IMS and places like that.
It is also true that some of the tech, such as the Three Doors phenomenology and how to distinguish experiences such as formless realms from Fruition still is barely written down anywhere else still, 20 years after the first digital editions of MCTB came out on the web. You can’t know the degree to which this disappoints me. I would vastly prefer that I was not at all nearly alone in this, and that such helpful, verifiable information was widespread. There is still a strong movement to keep these maps secret, headed up by the likes of Joey G and his crew, as well as Goenka traditionalists and some Thai Forest devotees.
So, it Is unfortunately true that there are still vast swaths of the meditation world that are deliberately kept in the dark about plenty particularly the map tech and phenomenology found in MCTB. Do you disagree?
SL: Importantly though, as well as its marketing purpose, “hardcore” does serve a descriptive function. Hardcore implies radical transformation, rather than tweaking around the edges. In the case of MCTB the aim is no less than a complete transformation of the human mind.
DMI: No. MCTB does not promise a “complete transformation of the human mind,” and goes out of its way to explicitly not do so, as nearly all of Part V explains at length. Again, Shane clearly has to distort his arguments again and again to make them appear valid. Read Part V and you will see the great lengths the book goes to in order to not do exactly what Shane claims it does. Please, see https://mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-v-awakening/37-models-of-the-stages-of-awakening/
SL: Hardcore implies hard work, and MTCB stresses the importance of dedication, resolve, commitment and to “sit like your ass is on fire”. This hard work entails costs, described in MCTB:
“spent vacation time, financial difficulties, relationship issues, logistical complexities, difficulties with teachers and fellow meditator”
Given hardcore practice with the desire for hardcore results, MCTB provides warnings on risks, described as the possibility of “frying yourself”:
“people who do strong and intensive practice can hurt themselves and freak out. Just as serious athletes can hurt their bodies when they take a misstep or push themselves beyond their limits, just so serious mental athletes can strain their minds, brains, and nervous systems, and strained brains can sometimes function in very strange ways. To rewrite the operating system rapidly while it is running doesn’t always go so well in the short term or occasionally in the long term.”
“By “frying yourself”, I mean explicitly severe mood instability and psychotic episodes, as well as other odd biological and energetic disturbances, with some practitioners occasionally ending up in inpatient psychiatric facilities for various periods of time”.
These negative aspects of contemplative practice are becoming more widely known, and as discussed earlier, link to the “dark night” stages of the path described in MCTB. This also relates to the importance of intensive meditation retreats that involve “practicing hard and consistently eighteen hours a day with minimal breaks”, that may exacerbate symptoms of mental illness, and unusual states of mind. While warnings do abound in MCTB, the assumption appears to be that these risks are worth it. Hardcore practice is necessary to bring about hardcore changes.
DMI: No. Most people shouldn’t follow what MCTB is describing, and those that do should know the risks. I come from the medical model, which states that we should discuss Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives to treatments. MCTB is just that, a book for those who, for whatever reason, really want to master the deep end of Buddhist practice. If that truly is you, and, having been informed right up front of the large number of real risks, you still want to do this, here’s how. If you are like Shane and react this badly to these sorts of concepts and practices, as is common, you probably shouldn’t do this, but obviously the choice is yours.
Quoting from right after the quote Shane used, in the Foreword and Warning (how many other books have a Foreword and Warning?): “Some who have read this book apparently have only noticed the former message, that being to find the depths of power and resolution you are capable of (a message put in to counterbalance a culture full of people who are underutilizing or not recognizing their inherent potential), and they missed the parts that discuss how and when to back off, a message found in numerous places in this book, much to their chicken-fried detriment. Hopefully putting this here right up front will again help people to hear both messages and find the balance between the two that works, as I am a firm believer in people being informed not only of the benefits but also of the risks so that they can make informed decisions and practice accordingly. You wouldn’t want to \do power lifting without proper training, spotting, and technique, nor run marathons without lots of careful training, stretching, hydration, great nutrition, and the like: same with hardcore meditation practice. You also would be naive to imagine that you can push your body to its limits without risk: same with your brain and hardcore meditation practice.”
It is interesting that Shane, while clearly a scathing detractor from MCTB, is still clearly somewhat obsessed with it. Yet, to my knowledge he also doesn’t find himself actually doing the seriously intense techniques mentioned it. I find this really weird. Very simply, if MCTB is not your cup of tea, let it go and do something else. If it is, and you decide to seriously pursue what it talks about in terms of intense practice, best of luck, as you will need it.
As to hardcore practice bringing about hardcore changes, it is true that there is a correlation, but it is not absolute. I know people that don’t have huge practice histories who yet are very impressively accomplished, transformed meditators, and those who have huge numbers of hours of practice, sometimes in intense situations, who yet have little insight. Still, were one to bet on, say, power lifters, one would bet on those who do the most training (within limits). In the same way, it is not weird that those who train long hours to learn the deep end of what is possible with meditation are more likely to obtain stronger effects, both good and bad.
SL: “…BY THE ARAHAT, DANIEL M. INGRAM”
In more orthodox Theravadan Buddhism, becoming an Arahat is the penultimate goal. After countless eons of rebirths and most-excellent Karma, the lucky, industrious and virtuous few get reincarnated into human form one final time, and at death, they complete the endless cycle of rebirths, becoming null and void, sparking out the flame, reaching Nibbana, the ultimate state: complete cessation of experience, and escape from the horrors of Samsara and this worldly life.
DMI: That’s actually a description of parinibbana, not nibbana, just so we are clear. Again, Shane is a bit weak on his fundamentals, so we have to cut him some slack and help him out when we can. Here is the Wikipedia link to help him clarify terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parinirvana
SL: Within Theravadan folklore, Arahats are very special individuals that have many special powers, including taming demons, walking on water, and flying. They are very special wizards. For Western Buddhists, even those Pragmatic Dharma teachers that might be comfortable with dabbling in astral projection, remote viewing, telekinesis and past-life regression, flying wizards are a tough sell.
DMI: No. The old texts are clear on this. There are those without any stages of awakening who yet have powers. There are those with various stages of awakening who have no powers. There are also some who have various stages of awakening and some powers. Again, Shane should go back to his Buddhism 101 if he is going to attempt a critique of it. He should also read MCTB, which explains this point that he apparently missed in his zeal to create a version of it that doesn’t exist so he could tear it down. Hopefully, a reader interested in seeing the real thing will consult the real thing: www.mctb.org.
SL: Therefore Arahatship needs reconfiguration and redefinition for a modern audience, in order to describe what the Buddha really taught. For those that follow the Sutta tradition, Arahats have achieved liberation from Samsara, the endless series of rebirths, by removing the defilements: ill-will, ignorance, and desire. In MCTB, Ingram argues that because he is an Arahat, and because he still feels ill-will, the Suttas – the ancient and authentic teachings – must be wrong. Or, at least, they have lost their original true meaning over the years, as mythology and dogma have seeped in. So why does the Ingram need to claim the status of Arahat and now reject the venerable two thousand five hundred year old tradition of which is book claims to be core teachings of?
Here is a case of wanting your cake and eating it too.
DMI: Again, it is interesting the degree to which Shane waxes traditionalist when it helps him rhetorically then rejects traditionalists as delusional when it helps him rhetorically. While convenient, it presumes that the reader won’t notice this.
SL: To strengthen the sales pitch, Pragmatic Dharma incorporates historical claims to authority.
DMI: Though it does so with very careful explanation of the traditional counterarguments and their basis.
SL: However, when these are in violation of empowerment of the individual, tradition loses out to what is “pragmatic”, and “real”. What MCTB describes is no doubt more real than the flying reincarnating wizards described in more traditional Theravadan Buddhism.
DMI: Really? In what way do you think that what MCTB describes is more real than the flying reincarnating wizards? Please be specific. I am truly curious.
SL: And the popularity of this book has done much to demythologise the meaning of Buddhism enlightenment.
DMI: Anyone else notice what just happened here? In one paragraph, Shane goes from basically, “This is all delusional bullshit”, to, “I actually sort of believe in some of this delusional bullshit.” You can’t demythologize something that is not more than myth. If it is more than myth, as it can be demythologized, then it must be partly real. If it is at least partly real, what is Shane’s problem with people trying to attain it and people who have freely telling them how and passing on the instructions that were taught to them? Wow, I didn’t see that switch coming. Does Shane realize he just probably really lost some tiny bit of clout with the SNB kids who want to stay firmly on the “this is all delusional bullshit” side of the argument? Interesting.
SL: But there may be additional functions not explicit within MCTB on Ingram’s claiming of the Arahat title.
As a self-help book, to achieve legitimacy in the self-help tradition, authority is important, both in terms of tradition and personal authority. Use of the Arahat tag works like the title “PhD” found on self-help books.
DMI: True. The point is what again?
SL: But in addition, as a self-help technique, mastery is a mechanism by which self-help goals can be achieved. Achieving success in meditation, through hard work and perseverance, is a way of realising empowerment of the individual, and is equated with success in life.
DMI: No. It is equated with success in the very specific techniques mentioned in MCTB, which explicitly states that mastery of these very specific skills might not at all translate to success in any other area of your life and might very well detract from them. In fact, given that MCTB goes farther out of its way to make this point than any other dharma books I have ever read or heard of, it is weird to accuse it of doing the opposite. Shane, what’s up here?
SL: For those attracted to Pragmatic Dharma as a means of self-help, mastery is a route to increased self-esteem.
DMI: Ok, wait a second. How did I not see this before? If Shane feels that MCTB puts up at least a partially realizable demythologized goal of something that equates with success in life, with self-esteem, and he hasn’t achieved that, they he feels unsuccessful and so lacks some key piece of self-esteem, hence the uncomfortable rationalizations and obsession! Ok, as a working theory, that is better than what I was presuming about Shane before, which was not nearly so straightforward or generous.
As a practical aside, if you are wanting to conduct an experiment designed to test how thick your skin is and how much criticism you can withstand, put yourself out there as an Arahat on the internet. Imagine for a second that you did this for over 16 years how many trolls and other angry haters you would have dump their vitriol all over you. Compare that to the number of people who would really give you meaningful praise that didn’t come across as fawning delusion and thus beyond unhelpful and into the realm of, “Your best attempt to have that not happen with MCTB’s extensive qualifiers largely failed.”
One of my favorite Jack Vance quotes is from The Eyes of the Overworld, where Iucounu the Laughing Magician declairs, “I do not care to listen; obloquy injures my self-esteem and I am skeptical of praise…”
So, when people state that I am overly good, I know the human reality that contradicts this. When people state that I am a monster, similarly, the truth is far from that. In short, meditation, done well, will show you the ordinary, disappointing human realities of your condition even as you wake up to them.
SL: A related function of Arahat, and its claim to individual mastery by its holder, is its social function. To become a meditation master within Pragmatic Dharma is to become a member of a community of like-minded “skilled” individuals. Mastery confers status within this community, with attendant benefits.
DMI: Such benefits! Health insurance! A 401k! A pension! Ok, wait, no, not really. One can answer very long emails from people who didn’t bother to read your freely available book where you put the answers to their questions. You get to talk to people who are freaking out from meditation gone horribly but not entirely unpredictably wrong. You get to hear people going through the same problems again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, etc. Yes, you get to help some people, and that feel good. Yes, a very few of these people might actually become friends that can see you as an ordinary human with a few unusual skills and perceptual mods, but that’s about it. Yes, some charge for the dharma, but plenty of people charge for the dharma with no actual realization behind that, so the whole arahat thing is clearly not at all necessary to make $150-325+/hour as a pay-to-play dharma whore, I mean teacher.
SL: But this presents a challenge within Pragmatic Dharma to show evidence of mastery, given the products of such mastery are localised within the mind. There is no Buddhist Olympics, no objective means of publicly verifying achievements and comparing attainments.
DMI: Not yet, but working on it. If you see this as an armchair problem, one you don’t really functionally care about, then perhaps let it go. However, if you actually want to try to solve this, consider funding one of the various neurophenomenology studies that I am helping to coordinate and set up that will try to address that real problem.
SL: One could expect mastery of the mind to show evidence in enlightened behaviours.
DMI: Particularly if you didn’t read MCTB or didn’t believe it when you read it.
SL: However, there is a long tradition of both Eastern and Western high profile meditation masters involved in scandals (and now including Pragmatic Dharma) that suggest this might not be a good place to look .
DMI: On this, Shane and are have a rare moment of benign on the same page. Yay!
SL: Furthermore, those that claim Buddhist enlightenment, or awakening, sometimes lament that ordinary people do not notice anything different about them.
DMI: Actually, were it obvious, like, were there light shining out of my ass or whatever, that sort of excessive attention would get old quickly. I don’t get enough alone time as it is.
SL: Instead, mastery, and entering the ranks of what MCTB describes as “high-level practitioners” like Ingram, or becoming a “modern master of the mind” like Kenneth Folk, is reaching unusual states of mind. Proof of these attainments is won by an ability to describe these states to others, so they may be verified and acclaimed. These verbal descriptions of experience are therefore very important, and training in MCTB is provided on how to produce these masterly reports, following the footsteps of the mastery of the author, who is a phenomenologist par de excellence.
DMI: Well, yes, it so happens I am. I trained for thousands of hours to become that. Is it so weird that I did? It is becoming a great phenomenologist that will make possible what Shane seems to want, that this stuff could be measured. You see, as I just spent a few hours discussing with a top neurophenomenologist, if you don’t have good microphenomenology, then you have no idea what your fancy machines with a high degree of spacial and temporal resolution are measuring. If you don’t have people who are properly trained to describe rapid experience with a high degree of sophistication using terms that correspond to likely neural correlates, you EEG and fMRI scans data are mostly just expensive noise. So, if you actually want a solution to the problem of how to objectively measure this stuff, why do you mock those who have trained to a level that might actually make this possible and are willing to train others to do the same thing? That’s weird.
SL: This provides an insight into why phenomenology is so important to Pragmatic Dharma. It may have an intrinsic interest, along with the appeal of believing it gives you an insight into the nature of ultimate reality. But it also provides a currency for which mastery can be demonstrated and status and authority within a community of practitioners can be obtained.
DMI: What do I get for my status beyond mostly a lot of work and lost money and the occasional opportunity to really help someone with information not found in MCTB again? What are these mythical benefits you hint exist beyond the sense that there is some karamic benefit, a benefit you would likely decry as more dogmatic delusion? Ask my wife about all the benefits I am bringing home to the family. She would likely reply that it is entirely unclear why I put up with the large and obvious downsides of being public about this stuff, and her point of view is valuable in this regard and grounded in stark realities.
SL: BUT DOES IT WORK?
All comprehensive systems of thought have mechanisms of infecting and capturing human minds. Here we have focused on some of the ways Buddhism through the MCTB-vehicle achieves those aims. Tell tale signs of infection are describing the words of the Buddha as if they were a historical record, and reverential tones in describing the power of “the Dharma”.
DMI: Again, it is weird to describe the entire thing as an “infection” when parts of it do work and are testable today. Clearly, one person’s infection is another person’s interesting tech.
SL: If you are one of those who has been infected by the Pragmatic Dharma virus and the virulent strain found in MCTB and want a cure then I have some good news. The cure could be difficult and painful but you don’t have very far to look: a good starting point is the contents page of the Speculative Non Buddhism blog, and related works, such as Wallis (2018). Further essential reading is David Chapman’s series on Consensus Buddhism (the non-hardcore parent of Pragmatic Dharma). Some essential listening might be the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. I suspect that any honest and thorough examination of the methods of thought capture and control within Buddhism will not leave a relationship with Buddhism unscathed.
You might ask the question, especially if you are a fan, does anyone need to be disinfected from Buddhism and Pragmatic Dharma? Do you need a cure if Pragmatic Dharma “works”? Of course, for its adherents, Pragmatic Dharma is by definition “Buddhism that works”. But does it actually, really, truly, work?
DMI: Well, yes, it does for some, just apparently not for you. So, as Pragmatic Dharma highly recommends as its first core principle: find what works for you. If this isn’t it, find something else. Let it go, as those pesky x-Buddhist say. Move on. Get over it. Forget about it. Truly.
SL: So let’s finish off by examining if it works as claimed. Firstly, does it give an “enlightened” insight into the true nature of reality?
DMI: Of empirical, experiential, sensate reality, yes, it can show you things about it that are transformative and also fit nicely with the straightforward assumptions of the materialist science you so worship, I mean appreciate. ;)
SL: Secondly, does it lead to a “happiness without conditions”?
DMI: Again, Kenneth’s words, not mine. Please don’t confuse us or use quotes outside of MCTB that explicitly disagree with key points inside of MCTB to criticize MCTB. Kenneth is a 60-or-so year-old man who lives in New York. I am a 50-year-old man who lives in Alabama. We are not the same. We are, in fact, different. I get that this is hard for you, so I can repeat it is often as you need me to.
SL: A further question is whether this is a worthwhile goal to have, given arguments that a focus on individual suffering reduction may inhibit addressing non-individual causes of suffering. I won’t address this here other than to say this is a long standing theme of SNB (see here for a post in that vein specifically related to Pragmatic Dharma).
DMI: It would be interesting to be able to measure all of our efforts, to have Global Suffering-O-Meter. I do truly wonder about the grand balance. Has the open disclosure of the possibility of hardcore meditation practice harmed or helped more across all who have encountered it? Similarly, as the SNB experiment helped or harmed more of those who have encountered it? I honestly don’t know how to answer those questions. Both have obvious real toxicity. Both have real, helpful points to make. I suspect we will never know the answer to those questions.
SL: While we can debate the differences between religion, spirituality and self-improvement practices, a key argument here is that seeing MCTB as a religious instrument can help to explain its logic and operations better. This is to view Pragmatic and Hardcore Dharma as what Glenn Wallis characterises as instances of “x-buddhism”, that have appropriated spirituality and self-help discourses through its tailoring to a cultural (and neoliberal) milieu.
DMI: Really? MCTB is explicitly pandering to or promoting the views of neoliberals? You sure? I have some seriously far-left friends who don’t see that in it at all. They have attempted to brand me as some fascist, capitalist, right-wing something, but I don't recall that ever really landing well. Still at it? It is getting a bit old.
SL: From this view, we have to take the Buddhist claims of seeing or experiencing “reality as it really is” as a religious practice, and meditation practices with this goal forms of religious ritual. While meditation can give the meditator insight, it is insight into the reality of a meditator’s brain undergoing those specific meditation practices, conditioned by that brain’s life history in a socio-cultural matrix. You get what you use based on what you have. Rather than a truth-seeking practice, as socially conditioned human beings we are subjects to the operation of power; as argued by Robert Sharf the “Buddhist rhetoric of experience is both informed by, and wielded in, the interests of personal and institutional authority” (Sharf, 1998). Enlightened empowerment comes at a cost; be wary of those offering the gift of your empowerment.
DMI: What is there to fear here again? I am not taking your money, as I give away to dharma projects and the like that small amount of money I make on MCTB2, which, incidentally, will likely take more than a decade to make up for even the cost to edit it. I am not taking your power, as I truly don’t want to tell you want to do. I am not taking your freedom, as you are free to do as you choose to the degree that the mafia, I mean government of the country you live in allows. I am not going to have sex with you. I am not going to ask you to worship me. I am not going to ask you to join anything. I will ask you to fund scientific studies if you truly want answers to the questions Shane raises, but only if you wish and can afford it, and none of that will go to me, and you will lose nothing from me if you don’t. The danger is what again? I am creating no institution to have authority. I am creating no personal cult that wants anything from you or that you could officially join. If you forget about me entirely for the rest of your life, I know of no bad thing that will result from that. Seriously, what are you afraid of, Shane?
Also, this notion that all of this is purely socially constructed is not true. I got into jhanic states as a young kid with no social conditioning related to that. Had I told my family, teachers, siblings, or any of those about it, they should have had no clue. Again, as a child ignorant of Buddhism, I entered classic insight stages. I noticed the Three Characteristics. These were not socially conditioned, they just occurred. There is a difference, albeit a difference that some fervent intellectuals are oddly incapable of grasping.
SL: This view punctures claims of the enlightenment of the Pragmatic Dharmaists.
DMI: Ok, by what magic does some view do that again? Explain the fine details of your logic here precisely so that might be dissected properly.
SL: Awakening might be an awakening to a new way of looking at the world, but it provides no special access to “truth”.
DMI: And your source of certainty on this is what again? Your definitive ontology, your flawless epistemology: these are what again? How is it that you don't see the obvious hypocrisy of one who decries the truths of others yet is certain his truth about the falsity of their truths is certainly true? Describe precisely how you are positive that your truth is true and mine isn’t again?
SL: It is just a different view, a view that is Dharma-tinged, a world that is not the world but is the Dharma.
DMI: Again, a curious, Fox-news-like ploy. Cleverly make the word Dharma a bad word, and you have conveniently made Truth a bad word, and, at that point, anything goes. Do we really live in a post-truth, a post-dharma world where everything is truly socially constructed and all you have to do is believe Shane and it will all be ok, as you will have the real Truth purified of Dharma Truth? Wow.
SL: This could be acceptable for a pragmatist though.
DMI: Ignoring the obvious, “Well, if they are blissful in their delusion, then perhaps that’s ok for those poor idiots” insult, in truth, it is certainly acceptable to this ontologically agnostic pragmatic empiricist.
SL: While your motivation to practice might take a knock if you cancel Buddhism’s truth warrant, perhaps this awakening leads to a pragmatically better view, a view that can lead to a radical reduction in suffering.
DMI: Just as your ability to pay attention and learn something valuable about your own sensate experience, possibly be able to verify the claims made in MCTB, and thus discover capabilities you didn’t know you could access if you cancel Shane’s warrant of a claim to truth while again and again demonstrating a complex mix of exaggeration, distortion, fear-mongering, and deceptive rhetoric, however noble his motives to save you from the evil of a free book. I wonder if he would burn or ban it, given its terrible power? Shane, any thoughts on this?
SL: Buddhists of all varieties proclaim the benefits of meditation, just as a Christian or a Muslim might sing the praises of prayer.
DMI: Actually, Christian mystics and Sufis, as well as lots of other contemplatives, sing the praises of meditation.
SL: Outside of religion, you can read the reviews of any popular self-improvement book on Amazon and find advocates for a range of practices and philosophies, with 5-star reviews describing how the author completely transformed their lives, fixed long-standing treatment resistant mental health issues, and how they bought 10 copies to give to friends and family to spread the good word. All popular self-improvement programmes can be seen to “work”, through instilling the beliefs that a programme of study, practice and belief have worked for them.
DMI: The argument here is that, as self-help books are all scripting and belief, and MCTB is a self-help book, then it is all scripting and belief without anything physiological, perceptual, or neurological in any way beyond that. This is simply not true. We already have sufficient tech to demonstrate that long-term meditators are physiologically different from non-long-term meditators, though we haven’t yet answered all the questions that both Shane and I would like to answer. Again, if you want to support that Real Great Feast, happy to refer you to the appropriate university departments.
SL: In this sense, Pragmatic Dharma is nothing special; MCTB is another book on the self-improvement shelf.
DMI: See what he just did there? Can he demonstrate this with the same degree of scientific rigor that he wishes those of us on the other side to demonstrate? If not, that’s hypocrisy, plain and simple.
SL: But what makes Pragmatic Dharma relatively special compared to many self-help practices, and Hardcore Dharma in particular, is the level of commitment required. To bring forth the fruits of practice radical mental transformation is required.
DMI: Again, no. While there is clearly some predictable relationship between hardcore hours and practice and hardcore results, it is nothing resembling 1:1 or certain in either direction. MCTB states this explicitly, which Shane choses to ignore for rhetorical points.
SL: MCTB is playing for keeps.
DMI: No, it isn’t. It is often passing you on to other books, other traditions even, telling you to back off or not even do the thing in the first place, to quit if it causes problems, and the like. Again, Shane knows this, having apparently read it, but choses to ignore these aspects and hoping you, the readers, will also. That’s not very nice, is it?
As reality testing shows, most DhO members are not there for that long. Most people who email me only do so once. I personally take no long-term students and refer everyone who wants something longer to someone else who has a tolerance for that sort of thing, which I don’t.
SL: And I suspect the commitment required is hard to nigh-on impossible to achieve without a Faustian pact where “seeing reality” is subjugated to “seeing the Dharma”, and where it can only work if you have faith it works.
DMI: Again, got into some of these stages and states before I knew anything about them or had any faith in them, as have plenty of people I have talked with. This is not that rare or strange, and it doesn’t require faith to happen.
SL: Crucially though, those 5-star review leaving champions of self-help tomes like MCTB are the survivors, and hence any evaluation of the success of Pragmatic Dharmas from firsthand reports is subject to survivorship bias, along with a host of other biases such as confirmation bias.
DMI: That’s clearly true, just as your review is from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, someone for whom exposure to MCTB triggered an extremely rare, complex, pathological, long-lasting mix of obsession and loathing. That is also nothing like the typical reaction.
To be honest, I believe the typical reaction is, “Wow, this is long and hard to understand. I think I will go back to Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.”
SL: More objective means of evaluation are very difficult, not least due to ethical issues that stem from the non-trivial “brain-frying” risks. An example of an attempt of evaluation of less hardcore meditation practices from a clinical study of mindfulness (Pinniger, Brown, Thorsteinsson, & McKinley, 2012). This compared mindfulness meditation over 6 weeks with the equivalent amount of tango dancing. Both reduced depression compared to waiting list controls, with tango leading to a greater reduction in stress.
DMI: I, for one also highly advocate for dancing if you are physically up for it and love this cool Five Rhythms group in Cambridge, UK called CamsDance: super nice people!
SL: This leads to a hypothetical question: if you knew you could get roughly the same long-term life benefits from learning tango as from an enlightenment quest, what might be the better option? Well, on one level, Pragmatic Dharma is treating meditation as a hobby or sport, akin to something like mountaineering. And the world would be a boring place if tango was the only hobby. Different folks, different strokes.
DMI: See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?
SL: But in choosing a hobby it is helpful to know the nature of the undertaking, and Pragmatic Dharma is a slippery beast, hard to pin down. It is both a form of religion masquerading as spirituality or as a psychonautical hobby, and a form of self-help and self-therapy masquerading as spirituality.
DMI: I can see that this somehow was very confusing to you, but I don’t think it is that confusing for many, as I have heard many reactions to the book, and your particular reaction to it is very much an outlier.
SL: My aim here is to expose workings of its beastliness
DMI: “beastliness”: really?
SL: that might inform a choice to engage with it, conducted in the spirit of the SNB project that understanding Buddhism is a precursor to potential salvage.
DMI: See? There’s that tension again, that hook, that strange notion that, deep down, under all the crazy and delusion, there might just be gold there. Hey, what if we actually practiced and saw for ourselves? Will we become delusional, scripted, self-help junkie cult members also? Beware!
Actually, clearly Shane has a point. Just as the pharmaceutical companies hate to admit really bad side effects that happened to only one patient, just so, I must admit that Shane had exactly the reverse outcome from reading MCTB that was intended, a powerfully paradoxical reaction, as we say in the medical business: strong negative attachment to the book with no reported attainments or obvious benefits even after 6 years what appears based on this review to have been some degree of obsession with it. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The book clearly states that, if it doesn’t work for you, let it go and find something else, and that instruction clearly didn’t work for Shane. If there is an MCTB3, I will certainly put something in the Foreword and Warning that, yes, you too could possibly end up like Shane just by reading MCTB2, and, if he wishes, can post that now in the online version to protect the children. At least in that, Shane has some valid justification to write a review like this one.
This would actually not be the first time that Shane has appeared in MCTB2, as Chapter 62, Those Damn Fairies… had a footnote dedicating it to Shane that my publisher’s editor unfortunately removed, and the chapter was inspired by him.
SL: And while I have taken a critical stance, I do think there is much worth salvaging in Pragmatic Dharma, though that is a job for another day.
DMI: Oh, again, wow. Didn’t see that coming. How, pray tell, shall you save us from our delusional folly?
Alright, if you made it all the way to the end of this hog, your attention span is impressive. This started off as Shane’s around 7,700 words, and my reply takes that to over 24,000 words counting the quotes of his text, or close to 100 small novel pages. I wish you and yours a Happy New Decade! Best wishes!
-Daniel
SL: REFERENCES
Blackmore, S. (2000). The meme machine.
Bondi, L. (2005). Working the spaces of neoliberal subjectivity: Psychotherapeutic technologies, professionalisation and counselling. Antipode, 37(3), 497-514.
Ingram, D.M. (2018) Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book.
McMahan, D. L. (2012). The Enchanted Secular: Buddhism and the Emergence of Transtraditional” Spirituality”. The Eastern Buddhist, 43(1/2), 205-223.
McMahan, D. L. (2008). The making of Buddhist modernism.
McMahan, D. L. (2004). Modernity and the early discourse of scientific Buddhism. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 72(4), 897-933.
Pinniger, R., Brown, R. F., Thorsteinsson, E. B., & McKinley, P. (2012). Argentine tango dance compared to mindfulness meditation and a waiting-list control: A randomised trial for treating depression. Complementary therapies in medicine, 20(6), 377-384.
Wallis, G. (2013). Nascent speculative non-Buddhism. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 12(35), 222-247.
Wallis, G. (2018). A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real.
