👈🏼 previous note, 00.03. Fallbacks
No matter how shakey my saddhā might be, my faith in hedonistic materialism is shakier. I have been disillusioned with regular materialism as well as metaphysical materialism for a long time, not to mention hedonism.
Here we are in the twenty-first century wondering, If science and rationalism and medicine and technology and ‘representative democracy’ are so great, why are there so many and various epidemics, so much disparity, so much insanity, so few authentic solutions to what is now being called the polycrisis? The future we were promised has not been delivered ~ must have got stuck in the mail ~ and instead someone left the head of a dead horse on the doorstep.
Reading Harpur and other forays into subjects like philosophy of science has helped me to understand that materialism and post-Enlightenment rational literalism are a dead-end, having stripped the world of half its reality - leaving us dangling in a (linear) perception of spacetime arbitrated by the ‘scientific priesthood’, with nowhere to go but the grave, or an eternal afterlife that is not guaranteed to be pleasant. scientism scientific-priesthood
I have been looking for an alternative for a long time, and have known that Buddhism offered one. I suppose the decision to ordain kicked things up a notch as well, and the general dhamma study I was doing already might have triggered a Dunning-Kruger effect: the more I learn, the more I know I need to learn. And it seemed the further I looked into the suttas the more I saw that my inherited worldview might be subtly undermining my effort in practice.
Essaying about this all has left me confident I have enough saddhā to keep my practice afloat for a good while - and not just mundane saddhā, but saddha in full liberation.
There is nothing liberative, that I know of, about the dominant worldview of modern Western cultures: if there were, we wouldn’t be neurotically ferreting our way around the planet, eating everything we hope will displace, even just for a few moments, the discomfort of being unsure and afraid and human; the sort of rampant consumerism we have somehow normalised wouldn’t get a foothold in a culture whose dominant worldview included a means of (a psychological technology for) training one’s mind and heart to be liberated from suffering.
I have solid faith that Buddhism does provide this means to actualise the human potential to transcend suffering, but understanding what phrases like ‘transcend suffering’ actually mean according to a Buddhist worldview is an essay that will keep on giving. A starting point for that, is the Upanisa Sutta, about which Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote a brilliant essay called ‘Transcendental Dependent Arising’.
In this discourse the Buddha presents a classic formula of dependent arising (or dependent origination) as a chain of causality for suffering ~ followed by a formula of transcendental dependent arising (or 08. Dependent Liberation), which is a set of instructions for how to transcend suffering.
That is, I sincerely believe that the Buddha’s dhamma presents a robust psychospiritual methodology for training the mind to see reality clearly so that we don’t repeatedly suffer the mistake of conflating the mirage with the oasis.
Hedonism, on the other hand, is failing us, clearly 👈🏼 not liberative.
Eudaimonia is an upgrade, but still not the whole package: flourishing is a legitimate option, now that transpersonal psychology has hit the scene. But even the most cutting-edge new-paradigm psychological modalities of the West do not cut the mustard (seed) when compared with the potential that Buddhism offers.
I know I am starting to sound like a zealot now, and I am okay with that in the same way science zealots are okay with being that: it’s a matter of conviction, of faith, of saddhā (which has not been monopolised by Buddhism: saddhā just happens to be the same idea expressed in Pali).
Up next in the ongoing attempt to get this garden into shape is a survey 👉🏻 of what I have learnt that supports saddhā.