Category: Religion

Is meditation political?

police-meditationThis evening I overheard a conversation in French on the benefits of meditation. A young French philosopher was inquiring with a woman who regularly practices meditation whether for her there was also a political dimension to it. I soon realised this was a very interesting question which has never received serious attention.

For me meditation has always been something which comes and goes in phases of my life. Sometimes, I meditate for more than an hour every day for an extended period of time. Sometimes I even meditate for almost ten hours on Vipassana meditation retreats. Also, I have participated in Zen retreats.

Currently though, I am more involved with the political questions of religious diversity (Who decides what’s orthodox religion? Who decides whether (a) religion is wrong or not?) and the politics of objects (Why do things not participate in the democratic process?). This also means that my dialectic mind so to say is a little stronger, though my mindful mind might be weaker. Nevertheless, that’s both a great starting point for social engagement and for dialectical reasoning.

When just doing a quick google query about meditation and politics I came up with a couple of hits. First, there were hits about politicians who meditate (in this context they usually mean mindfulness, I will come back to that distinction). Second the question was whether meditation makes you more liberal or more conservative. The neuroscientific odds appeared to be in favour of liberalism, although the effect waned away after a while.

Nevertheless, both hits did not answer the question as I meant it, so my question became, what do I actually mean by this question? The only answer to the question I found somewhat satisfying was a blog post which quoted Osho on this topic, a spiritual guru from the 70s who’s take on spirituality I usually find very inspiring, despite the controversial character this guru had. “Can I be revolutionary and a sannyasin at once?” is the question asked in this blog post. For Osho, politics is about competition, and polar. Meditation for him is about accepting the polarities, therefore he states that meditation and politics cannot happen at the same time. “Meditation is like light. When meditation comes, politics disappears.”

Now this understanding of Osho feels to me a little dissatisfying. In the first place, it compares meditation to “light” and politics with “conflict” and darkness. Not only do I think this understanding is very dualistic, it also begs to be deconstructed. Maybe meditation is darkness and politics is light? I know many marxists who would readily agree with that statement.

But Osho is a little more nuanced than I account him for now. He rephrases the question whether meditation and politics go together by saying: “Can I choose to change the world and change myself at the same time?” Osho answers: not possible. But he explains it as follows: “When you change yourself you have started to change the world – and there is no other way. If you start changing others you will not be able to change yourself, and one who is not able to change himself cannot change anybody.”

This explanation makes me even more interested. In one sense, Osho appears to acknowledge a kind of non-dualism between self and world (when you change yourself, you change the world). But there is also a kind of dualism in the sense that he rejects the possibility to change others. The hidden premise here of course is that politics means that you want to change others. Although I’m sympathetic with Osho’s non-dualism, I suspect he discards “politics” as dualistic too easily. Certainly, dualistic politics and meditation won’t go together, but is politics necessarily dualistic?

Let me elaborate on how I understand meditation, to see if that would clarify the issue here. As a practice, the most easy way to describe meditation is to sit still and be aware of your sensations. There are many different ways to emphasise elements of this practice. A famous essay by the Zen philosopher Dogen, is sometimes translated as “How everyone can sit”, and describes in detail how you should sit. This description is all you need, according to Dogen, to know how to meditate. A more classical text, the Maha-satipatthana Sutta (widely used in Vipassana practice) focuses less on the way how to sit, but more on how you should direct your attention while sitting. It emphasises the focus on breath and by extension the awareness of the sensations in your body, to which you should practice to keep an equanimous mind and remember that all these sensations are impermanent. The practice of meditation has in the past decades been translated to a more popular and some would argue secular version, which is generally referred to as mindfulness. Similar to traditional meditation instructions, it emphasises to be aware of the present moment, don’t judge your experiences and bring your wandering mind back to the exercise of mindfulness, but with gentleness.

In my analysis, though superficially similar, Zen, Vipassana and mindfulness represent three very different takes on what meditation is about and are in a sense incomparable precisely for that reason. The main distinction lies in the purpose of the practice. For Vipassana, the goal of meditation is “enlightenment”, which is the ultimate liberation from suffering which is inherent to all living beings. Meditation is the final enterprise you can undertake to relieve yourself from the illusion of being alive, which is the result of the attachment to our desire. The idea meditation is the tool to reach this liberation is ultimately a matter of faith, although the practice is so thoroughly described that if you follow it correctly you will very quickly notice tremendous change, which will definitely enhance your conviction that you are on the right track. In Vipassana, the meditator is not enlightened, but strives to become enlightened (Arhat). As I see it, Vipassana is therefore a dualistic practice. There is a clear distinction between non-liberation and liberation.

In this way it is distinct from how I understand Zen. According to Zen, meditation cannot lead to enlightenment, because everybody is already enlightened. It might be that you don’t realise at the moment you are enlightened, and meditation can certainly assist in realising this, but ultimately there is no difference between the state when you realise this and when you don’t. This is non-dualism. One of the central debates in Zen history was fought out between proponents of gradual enlightenment, who say that this realisation comes gradually as a result of your practice and the proponents of sudden enlightenment, who will say this realisation will just strike you, more or less independent of your practice. In Zen, meditation is beautifully purposeless. Just like Dogen says: everybody can do it: just sit! You can already do it! It’s universal. Even if you don’t sit you’re enlightened. Enlightenment is not hard, it is instead very easy.

The discourse of mindfulness then, does not hide the fact that its practices are derived from these Buddhist traditions, though it usually emphasises strongly that mindfulness is not a religious practice, that it has all kind of benefits to people in contemporary society, that you don’t have to “believe” anything, and that it’s benefits are backed by scientific evidence. Furthermore, the practice of mindfulness is supposed to improve connectivity in your brain. A big hurray for this great non-religious practice. Hurray.

Let me be clear: mindfulness and politics are for me indeed completely disconnected. Politicians practicing mindfulness might help them making better decisions, very admirable in itself, but that does not imply the same as saying that mindfulness is political. The only way I might think of mindfulness as political is as part of a liberal secular ideology, which is opposed to for example a communist ideology. Nevertheless, I don’t see any wars being fought over mindfulness any time soon. Mindfulness is about as political as going to the movies, which is in my opinion not very political.

My focus would be on Vipassana and Zen. Vipassana I have identified dualistic while Zen I believe is non-dualistic. The next important question is how we are going to regard politics? The central question of politics, I’m suggesting is who does decide on collective action? Let’s focus on this action first. The assumption in action is that the reality is at present in a certain state and that it would be better if it would transform to another state. This “utopian moment” which appears central to all political deliberation is without doubt dualistic. At present, the world is grim, but as a result of (collective) action, it becomes bright. Important here is the question whether political action needs to be understood in a dualistic way? Is the goal of politics enlightenment (utopia)? In that case it would be similar to Vipassana. Or, this would be the other option, maybe society in itself is already a utopia, but we just don’t realise it yet. That is how I imagine a Zen politics. (The third option is that politics does not strive for utopia or any better kind of society, but that it just “fixes holes”. This would be – and I mean this pejoratively – “mindful politics”.)

The tension between meditation and politics, and the options we have available to solve this tension, shows me a very interesting trait about how we understand the political act. Because however the deliberation process develops, there is a very strong hidden assumption, that whoever makes decisions in name of whomever, these decisions should improve reality in a noticeable way. This assumption reveals a strong lack of acceptance towards reality as it is, precisely what meditation is trying to teach us.

At present, many often feel sad about the state of our world, they might even feel bitter or discouraged to change anything about it, they feel anger towards all kinds of suffering of human beings or grief about the loss of identity. It is this emotional feelings that become part of our political action: a deep feeling of dissatisfaction with the world in which we find ourselves. Meditation – both Vipassana and Zen – teaches us we might not be free to how we encounter the world (there is pain, there is suffering), we are free to react on it in a certain way. The meditation practice advises us to remain equanimous to what we experience, but just notice it and stay only in the noticing. If we don’t do that, we will fall back into the habit of reacting to what we experience, which is usually a judgment  – I don’t like this, I don’t like that – and then a reaction – I kill it -, which would be informed by our negative evaluation to it. Or, when we are extremely positive, our habit of judgment to our experience would be positive we say – I like this – I take it.

Now meditation does not necessarily teaches us that we should not act at all. Buddhism only observes that all reality arises in interdependence, meaning that everything is a reaction to something else, connected by desire or repulsion (I love flowers, I hate fascism). These distinctions fade away through the meditative practice, because you realise there are no flowers independent of your judgment of it, neither is there any fascism. Everything arises in interdependence.

In Vipassana now this situation is seen as burden from which we seek liberation. The politics of Vipassana would be: refrain from politics, because it only causes more misery. You cannot improve life, you can only liberate yourself from it. Meditation is the only and ultimate political act.

In Zen this is more complicated. The basic premise is that everything already is enlightened, as it is sometimes called “the Buddha nature”, but it is ignorance that prevents us from knowing this. When the veil is (partly) removed, you can see much clearer that everybody is suffering, not because they’re not enlightened, but because they don’t know they are enlightened. Therefore, Zen Buddhism invokes the ideal of the bodhisattva: a being that has become very close to full understanding of her enlightenment, and therefore realises that the reason so many beings suffer is their ignorance. The bodhisattva therefore returns to the world of suffering to guide other beings to lift the veil of ignorance. Of course, for every being this lack of understanding is different and should be relieved by different means. A wise bodhisattva knows how to lift these veils of ignorance a little more.

Politics is the collaboration of subjects towards a more common goal. The politics of Vipassana are easy: you meditate to liberate yourself from suffering. If your are persecuted and killed, before reaching your goal – don’t worry you’ll be reborn and start from where you left off. The suffering is only an illusion anyway. The politics of Zen are much more complicated. Since anybody can be a bodhisattva and anybody can be ignorant, you never know who to trust. Is the leader of this great political party a realised enlightened person, who acts by the best of her understanding to guide us towards liberation, or are you in fact following a current of ignorance? I believe here comes the important overlap between politics and meditation into play. Many politics as I have said assumes an imperfect world. Zen Buddhism understands everything in the world as enlightened, though ignorant of it, thus causing suffering. The only way, however, to act political from a meditative point of view is to act detached from the outcome of your actions. You don’t act to improve a situation in the world; the only influence your actions should have is on how reality is perceived by the actors in it, because it is precisely their ignorance towards it that causes suffering.

My conclusion is that a non-dualistic understanding of meditation is indeed very political, and also reinterprets the political as non-dualistic as well. I also argue that meditation in this sense should be political. Neither do I consider the political as something negative, nor meditation as something positive. Since any desire can be a cause of suffering and any attachment creates more suffering, both meditation and politics should remain detached from the result of its action. Nevertheless, meditation and politics can never be separate, because ignorance and the magnificence of power are one and the same.

Truth business

the force
Fiction is increasingly offering us the moral certainty science and religion are failing to

In an interesting recent blog post, theologian and philosopher of religion Dr. Taede Smedes tries to explain the anti-religious sentiments of an increasing number of commentators on the website Nieuwwij.nl, which aims at connecting people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds together. Smedes considers 2004 a tipping point concerning this development. He argues that the debates in the Dutch media about intelligent design in this period, changed the opinion of many people who from that moment on considered religion as irrational and backward.

The topic of the demarcation of science and religion is fascinating. Both domains are in the “truth business”: they are legitimated by the fact that they produce certain knowledge about reality, which can help people to ease psychological stress. Science was born as a result of the development of methods that attained more trustworthy knowledge than the religious institutions had done, which were from that moment on put in the defence. The reformation created the possibility of competing truth systems, and therefore in the early stages science can be considered as a deviant form of Christianity.

But recently, science is failing in its most important objective: to produce knowledge which enables people to ease their psychological stress. Since science does not produces certain knowledge which also contains moral certainty, people are becoming suspicious of science as well. Furthermore, the core of quantum mechanics – which is the most successful theory about reality ever developed by human beings – describes the foundation of reality as indeterminate. The threat of a statistical universe, which does not contain any certainty even metaphysically, but only possibilities, does not suit very well with the desire for psychological stability.

This week the box offices were crushed by the release of the new Star Wars movie (spoiler alert). If anything, Star Wars offers a universe with a clear moral distinction. The bad guys are depicted as fascists with a desire for order. If there has been any consensus about morality globally, it must be that the nazi’s were very bad. The desire for order contradicts the late capitalist demand for pleasure, consumption and exces. Very importantly: the public loves it in a way it rarely loved anything so unanimously.

I believe we are mistaken if we consider religion, science and fiction as distinct domains. They all do the same thing: generating knowledge to fulfil psychological needs. They do this by connecting us to a reality which transcends our everyday experience. Besides moral clarity, Star Wars alludes to the highly popular worldviews which assume “qi” or life force, there are practices of mindfulness and in a fascinating scene, time warps in a kind of shamanic travel of the main protagonist.

In conclusion: religion, science and fiction offer us stories – the kind of knowledge that has been structuring reality for human beings as long as we can remember. The demarcation between “religion” (and religions), “science” and “fiction” is ultimately just a conflict of stories. I see no objection to considering all stories true, even if they appear mutually exclusive. Every story is valuable, because all stories are the unique products of human creativity.

The Face of ISIS

Young-children-with-guns

On 29 June 2014, after a series of important conquests in the Syrian civil war, the organisation known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant declared itself to be the worldwide caliphate and named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi its caliph. On the same day, the Netherlands defeated Mexico two to one at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. It was this second event that made headlines in Dutch media. It was only one month later, in the midst of the komkommertijd, that ISIS gradually came to be reported about, when no important soccer matches fought it for attention.

In a brilliant analysis, Scott Atran argued this week that we are underestimating the revolutionary force of ISIS and that we do not acknowledge its idealism enough. Atran even dares to quote a reference to Hitler by George Orwell – thereby affirming Godwin’s law – who said that the writer of Mein Kampf had understood the people don’t only want comfort and safety; they also want struggle and self-sacrifice. ISIS, Atran argues, is giving its followers precisely that: a dream, purpose, the opportunity to create a new world order. In the words of Atran:

The violence of the Islamic State, like the revolutionary violence of many who came before, might be best characterised by what Edmund Burke called ‘the sublime’: a willingness, indeed need and passion, for the ‘delightful terror’ of a sense of power, destiny, giving over to the infinite, ineffable and unknown.

Before, I used to argue that ISIS had not so much to do with religion or Islam, but was basically caused by economic factors, and recruited their troops from the social and economic outcasts of the West. Theologian and politician Ruard Ganzevoort taught me that it is just as much a fallacy to consider religion the root of all evil as it is to consider religion as positive force of love. In his words: “Religion is ambivalent, just as life itself”. The argument of Atran adds to my change in perception on the phenomenon ISIS, that we should indeed look at the ideology and the religious motives at least as much as to the economic factors.

Some commentators already noticed that the rise of ISIS shows much similarities with the French revolution and the Dutch revolt. The whole foundation of the Dutch nation could be credited to the violent rise of religious extremists in a corner of the Habsburg Empire. This observation reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence. In this famous essay from 1921, Benjamin explores the justification for violence. States are defined by the fact that they have a monopoly of violence. When revolution occurs, the violence of the revolutionaries is justified by the fact that they strive for a more just society. When the revolutionaries succeed, they overthrow the current regime and install their own monopoly on violence.

According to Benjamin, all regimes have been founded on an act of original violence, which could also be considered as a divine legitimation of power. To maintain this power, when they are confronted with revolutionary movements, regimes have a notorious short memory with respect to their own foundational violence, which is very often not even that far in the past.

Atran very convincingly argues that the ideology behind ISIS does in fact legitimise its violence from the deeply rooted conviction that they are fighting for a better world order. The discursive strategies which are used by the adversaries of ISIS attempt to mask ISIS’ discourse for their legitimacy. Altran has very sharply noted that delegitimatising the Islamic State by calling them Daesh, won’t have much effect.

The question which nobody has been really able to answer yet about ISIS is: who are they? In almost every analysis, ISIS is treated as the ultimate Other, and any attempt to understand the movement usually describes them as violent lunatics. What are the possibilities from meeting the revolutionaries face-to-face? Would they kill me? Is there any possibility, as Levinas would phrase it, to meet the people in Raqqa while “inviting” them in my presence, without judgement, but simply as long lost cousins? Revolutions will always be repeated and successful revolutionaries will always rewrite history. But division of people is precisely what revolutionaries have always wanted – between religions, between social classes – and I think we should not accept the position we have been assigned, namely as adversaries. What if we would go over and ask: can we join you in your dream for a better world? The only way to defeat ISIS is through the exploration of the conditions to meet each other.

Ineffable

The Nova Effect

Especially with modernity, religiosity had become something suspect. According to the secularisation thesis, the rational advancement of societies will ultimately lead to the decline of religion. The contemporary situation in fact proves the opposite. After a decline of religiosity after the second world war, today we see how religion continuous to rise again.

After having studied religion for some years, I believe it is not really possible to make a relevant distinction between religious and non-religious people. So-called “atheists” often express a commitment to their beliefs, which also has an influence on the rituals they take refuge to. And even for the rest category of the “non-religious”, for whom religious questions are apparently meaningless, we see often how morality, meaning making and rituals also connect these people to a larger framework of ultimate sense. The only truly non-religious are therefore the nihilists and the depressed; true nihilists are hard to come by, and fortunately, depression is for many people a transitory experience, although it might stick for a very long time.

The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor has written a striking analysis of religiosity in our postmodern age with his 2007 publication A Secular Age. According to him, present day religiosity is characterised by what he calls the “nova effect”, in which the possibilities for individuals to give meaning to their lives has increased exponentially in the past decades. Since religiosity is no longer a public matter, but has been relegated behind the front door, the question how to understand our position in the world has become a matter of individual deliberation and therefore the options to do so have become vast.

Therefore, although “religion” in the form of institutional affiliation has been in decline, the individual expressions of religiosity have skyrocketed. I believe this evolution is an enrichment to society. If religiosity is not in the first place a public matter, this enables people to experiment with forms and expressions to connect to their perceived divinities. The diversity of people will lead to unexpected encounters when we inquire each other about our spiritual or religious rituals. No longer does modernity drive a wedge between institutional believers and the modernists; the postmodern playful human has claimed the spiritual for herself in order to create new relationships with others.

Ineffable

Daoism and climate change

The final negotiations of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, most likely concerned whether the long expected “final draft” of the agreement would contain a commitment to attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or stick with a phrase which would spin the commitments to “(far) below 2 degrees Celsius”. While the Western nations have the luxury to show off their moral superiority in forming a “high ambition coalition” (which also includes all nations so poor that they can only rely on moral superiority) which strives for the 1.5 degree ambition added to the final draft, countries such as China, India and Saudi Arabia have other interests to consider and decided to cool down (pun intended) the negotiations.

Meanwhile, I was taking part of a conference on the study of Chinese religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of Groningen University. At this conference, James Miller, a scholar of Chinese studies from Canada, presented a plea to think about the environment from the perspective of Daoism. One of his assumptions is that the common ecological perspective which frames our environmental endeavours as a desire to “save the planet” is part of a fundamentally Christian worldview and above all ultimately absurd.

Part of this common perspective in which the “protection of the planet” is central, Miller argues, is the idea that time evolves in a progressive and irreversible way. Our existence is meaningful because of this progressive movement. The natural environment is considered as the background on which we can project meaning. Furthermore, meaning is not part of the natural world. Human beings are assigned as “guardian” of the environment.

As opposed to this worldview, Miller puts forward a Daoist worldview, which promotes the idea of self-cultivation in relation to the natural environment. Furthermore, the flourishing of some things also requires the destruction of other things; the energy I obtain to live comes at the expensive of the death of many others. Miller argues we should be aware of the “transformational” character of the natural environment, which is an essential part to the Daoist understanding of the universe. Religion could therefore be understood as the negotiation on the economy of cosmic power.

The environmental crisis is thus not an appeal to save the planet, as the Christian/humanist worldview understands it, but rather challenges us to respond in a creative way. Miller suggests we should think of religion as the “collective representation of death and violence”. The environmental question challenges us to quantify human violence and to see how we can consume in a creative way, thus avoiding the destructive patterns we have developed in the past.

When we only think of climate change and the environmental crisis as a materialist problem, we fail to see the underlying worldviews that, first of all, identify the crisis as a crisis and secondly how the solutions which are the result of these worldviews might in fact aggravate the situation. I agree with Miller that the Daoist worldview offers an adequate alternative model, which focuses on transformation and vitality, but also acknowledges death, violence and destruction as part of nature. It also enables us to look at climate change as a challenge, instead of a crisis.

Ineffable