Sam Harris in dialogue with Evan Thompson

You can find it here. Their discussion about pure, nonconceptual awareness as a phenomenological fact obtained through a sort of objective or scientific methodology seems to be Sam's position. Whereas Evan noted that there is a host of conceptual and soteriological programming that goes into that from the start which shapes and frames any such experience.

This issue we've explored ad nauseum in the Ning IPS forum, where I contextualized it as the difference between the shentong and rangtong approaches to so-called non-conceptual or pure experience. Batchelor also explores this and thinks that the former is a transcendent holdover from Hinduism that influences the Tibetan schools of Nyingma, Sakya and Kagyu, whereas the latter is more in line with the Gelug.

I also explored in depth this issue using Sonam Thakchoe's book The Two Truths Debate, where he makes a similar analysis in a much more rigorous, scholarly and philosophical way via his training inside the tradition as well as outside it from his western academic training. To get a small sample of his impeccable detail see his article here.

As might be obvious, I personally have taken the more Gelug or rangtong interpretation of Tsongkhapa, as has Evan. The likes of Wilber and Sam though take the more Dzogchen or shentong interpretation. This debate within Tibetan Buddhism has been raging for a long time and continues to this day in this conversation between them.

I admit that in the first part of the discussion I agree with Sam about the magical mumbo jumbo inherent to Buddhism. And why we must jettison it in a practical, contemporary Buddhism. I'm not sure yet where Evan is going in defending the traditional context as necessary to the overall interpretation of meditative states. I do know in his last book he was critical of some of those traditional magical myths as counter to a more scientific study of those states.

And I'm still curious why Evan is not a Buddhist aside from his complaint about the modern version being inadequate. Batchelor is clear about defending secular Buddhism in his latest books due partly to the magical mumbo jumbo.

I recommend Batchelor's essay Letting Daylight into Magic. E.g.:

"Buddhists know all these gods to be empty of any inherent reality. Everything, they would say, is merely an appearance as ephemeral and insubstantial as a dream. Such statements have led some in the West to assume that the gods of Tibetan Buddhism are no more than archetypal symbols: they perform a psychological function in the process of spiritual transformation, but only the naive would say they represent beings independent of the practitioner's own mind. Yet however useful this kind of Jungian interpretation may be, it is not how most Tibetan lamas understand the world they inhabit. For gods to be empty of inherent existence does not mean that they cannot be autonomous beings capable of making choices and existing in their own heavenly realms."

In the Intro to Evan's new book he gives some insight on why he isn't a Buddhist. When he studied the traditions he "kept encountering anti-intellectualism, sanctimoniousness, naïve reverence, and downright fetishism." His other reason is the modern, exceptionalist format as described.

Yet what he wants to retain from the traditions is the emphasis on ethical service to others and liberation from suffering, missing in the latest iteration. There are many other practices involving that socio-cultural context; Buddhism is far more than just personal meditation on either a particular focus or open awareness. The latter must be placed in relation to the former.

How does one then remain a Buddhist given those exclusions and inclusions? Batchelor's secular Buddhism seems to straddle that line fairly well, for me anyway. Then again, I don't consider myself to be a Buddhist either but rather the sort of cosmopolitan who finds some common ground from all traditions yet respects their differences and incongruities.

I know, there's a whole argument against that sort of thing, cherry picking and choosing a bit of this and a bit of that, not committing to any particular one.* Even that it is a sort of modernist or even postmodernist approach. I prefer to interpret it as an integral transformative practice of methodological pluralism and syntegration. One that an autonomous and unique individual must create their own style in the context of and relationship with his culture and environment, finding his niche in the grand design of the matrix.

Listening further around an hour in about the self, I find myself thinking that Sam over-intellectualizes and abstracts about these topics. Which to me is exemplified in his notion of self experience itself, particularly the notion of the self observer of experience in a particular form of meditation. It just seems to me like an abstraction of an abstraction, or as I said, over-intellectualizing.

It seems to remove one further from just the feeling of being in the moment, of unifying with what one is engaging in to the point that there is no such separation of self/other/activity. The latter is more of a feeling of embodiment rather than just in the head. Most of my 'meditative' training in that form, like martial arts and dance. More the 'flow' experience that Sam seems to devalue as not as important as this head trip type of self observation.

Evan describes the latter as mistakenly thinking that one is dropping the self away to the point or revealing a true self and/or how reality really is, the thing in itself. And that sort of 'revelation' is highly questionable and comes not from the experience itself but from the traditional religious setting that interprets it as such.** Which is quite a heavy interpretative, metaphysical overlay in Buddhism. Whereas us dancers who experience such dropping away don't engage in all the philosophical and metaphysical overlay to begin with. Since we don't then therefore our experience can't be as good or as significant or as whatever.

Around 1:20:00 Evan brings in pre-conceptual basic categories and image schema, how we 'experience' already based on these unconscious distinctions as part of our embodiment. Hence our feeling of nonconceptual experience is already loaded with nonconceptual categories and distinctions that we cannot consciously access and which frame such experience.

He then goes into embodied cognition, which explores how the above is so based on how we perceive and conceive using our full body in interactive relation with culture and the environment. Experience ain't just in the brain or our intellect or our putative 'self' observation.

(Around 1:35:00): In terms of neuro-correlates of consciousness, he notes that really doesn't tell us a whole lot. That we need a interdisciplinary team to explore consciousness, a multi-perspectival approach that is sounding something like what we might call an integral methodological pluralism.

Sam's thought experiment around 1:55:00 exemplifies the differences with Evan. Sam imagines someone isolated on a deserted island who doesn't have all the cultural overlays of the embodied model. That is the crux of the problem and a perfect analogy that I see with his approach to a strictly 1st-person, phenomenological approach to consciousness. It is divorced from body-mind-culture-environment interaction to the point of a kind of pure, idealized and abstracted mind of the Platonic variety. In layman's terms: an egghead. Which btw is a common criticism of Wilber's edifice, particularly by women.

Finishing the dialogue reminded me of why I no longer listen to Sam Harris. And likely won't spend that amount of time being tortured by him again. Going back to Sam's opening remarks, I agree it was not a fruitful dialogue but more like a waste of time.

It was constructive though in one respect for me to reinforce that I have no more need for that sort of egghead analysis of a natural human capacity for engagement with a so-called nondual experience. I'm going back to enjoying my transformative experience of the dance that requires no need for such rationalization and boring explication. Been there, done that and not going back.

*By the way, at various points in my life I have indeed gone all in on particular traditional paths: martial tai ji quan, hermetic qabalah, dance and academic scholarship. Hence the intro to my blog as "my idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of" the various disciplines that follow.

**Or the 'scientific' metaphysical overlay that one is experiencing objective reality as it is, a common notion in the scientific representational paradigm: we observe phenomena as they are free from subjective bias. Both engage in this metaphysical assumption. Hence scientific, modernist Buddhism.