Scope
Buddhist practice may not lead us to insight into the nature of all reality, but it leads us to direct insight into the nature of the mind - which might be the same thing. These limitations impact faith for me, because if I want certain answers that Buddhism doesn’t address then I need to either abandon those questions or complement my practice with other modalities of esoteric inquiry/investigation, such as shadow work.
Reading Harris has helped me understand more clearly what I already suspected, which is that 🎯 not all spiritual practices ‘point to the same underlying reality’, and the ‘esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights’. I would add that neither does science - for all its powers in certain areas, there is no confirmed theory about the nature of reality. So it’s not like I need to abandon science altogether - it just happens to be limited in its scope, and I need to adjust my expectations, the same as I need to adjust my expectations of Buddhism, knowing that all of these traditions are limited in what they investigate.
I suppose Buddha knew (as he stated many times) that by teaching the truth of the end of suffering he necessarily wasn’t teaching, or making claims about, other truths, such as metaphysical truths. Knowing the limitations of what the Buddha taught is going to support one’s practice if one is curious about things like metaphysics - it will help to know which curiosities do not lead to liberation.
One such curio: How does Buddhist meditation create change in society? This can become a source of doubt that can creep in easily, under the I should be helping guise, if one is not clear on how getting one’s own house in order first is always the priority, the way of supporting the welfare of gods and humans.
One benefit of spiritual practice though, is that where science relies on abstraction1 to describe reality, spiritual practice (or ‘psychological technologies’) gives the individual direct access to certain aspects of reality that is more empirical than the abstractions of science. Although the teachings generally rely on abstractions, their intention is to catalyse the insights of spiritual practice that can be experienced directly by any individual who puts in the right effort - paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhīti, (able) ‘to be individually ascertained by the wise’ is one of the six qualities of the dhamma that we contemplate in dhammānusati.
Harris writes (20) his version of this, about how individuals ‘of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths’, and that ‘any view of consciousness and the cosmos that is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone’.
Anyone having such an experience would find it difficult to articulate their findings to another, but they are individually transformed, and their alternative way of being inspires others to enquire about how they might apply the same teachings that lead to those findings and a similar transformation. This is how our practice influences society.
Scientific method is not easy to teach, and most of us don’t have access to the sort of technology required to enter the game. The insights or conclusions vary depending on which abstraction the current scientist relied on. And the scope is limited, partly by ideology and partly by technology, but mostly by the simple truth that not everything can be observed at once - we can never know the whole directly, and that is not a limit of metaphysics, just of reality itself. The classic Zen garden gracefully refers to this.
So neither science nor Buddhism or any other spiritual practice leads to an understanding of ultimate reality - that is my current position. But what Buddhism does offer, as Harris writes (20), is a ‘truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind’. In Buddhism we have the idea that the whole world is (within) the fathom-long body and the mind is the forerunner of all states: if so, then understanding the mind equals understanding all reality?
I really need to explore this more - get my head around it, so to speak. I would confidently say at least, that such understanding of the mind was the explicit limit of Buddha’s scope: he taught an understanding that would lead to liberation from mind-made suffering; he didn’t speak about other aspects of metaphysics because they didn’t serve this goal - whether he knew about those aspects or not is irrelevant.
All that’s relevant is whether Buddhism addresses the concerns I have or solves the problems I think we need to solve. This is where my faith is sometimes impacted, because for example, Buddhism doesn’t promise to operate on the level of the personality - as I said above, meeting purported arahants whose behaviour was uninspiring to say the least, would sometimes leave me doubting the sangha and the dhamma: If these are the results, I’m not interested.
That he didn’t teach psychotherapy doesn’t undermine or misrepresent the efficacy of the dhamma - it just means I need to complement my practice with modalities that do take a healthy self as their end goal, because I believe such a healthy sense of self is required for transcendence.
If I find out that Buddhism also doesn’t address metaphysical questions I think are important, that is less a limitation of Buddhism than a limitation of my own capacity to curb my curiosity.
Circling back to the spiritual experiences that anyone can have, which Harris describes as psychological experiences and Buddha described as paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhī ti, ‘to be individually ascertained by the wise’, and the fact that such experiences can be replicated - it is my hope, from this, that we limited humans will continue developing a form of something like transpersonal and experiential psychology that will help us transcend the differences of interpretation that result from divergent metaphysical worldviews.
Any individual can have these experiences with appropriate training and guidance, and I suppose that dualistic or monistic beliefs become irrelevant in the direct experience of our shared ground. Harris (21) discredits Aldous Huxley’s Leibnizian perennial philosophy on the grounds that Abrahamic religion is dualistic while Eastern traditions transcend duality, which is not enough to convince me that there isn’t common ground in some form of universal experience - what Huxley called the ‘highest common factor’.
But meanwhile I need to get my own house in order, which includes limiting myself to those areas of metaphysics that make the difference between suffering and flourishing.
- What are the truths of Buddhism, and how do they compare with the glimpsed truths Harris mentions?
The Ten Unprofitable Questions
asking these will not lead to liberation, and may drive you mad
It looks like these troublesome questions are addressed (and the simile of the poisoned arrow) in MN 63.
Knowing these questions are irrelevant to the goal helps me to reduce my curiosity about metaphysics, which means I suppose that I can stamp some of my doubts as 🟠 *inconsequential* or *extraneous*.
Trying to find the edges of such enquiry has been a necessary part of exploring saddhā for me - What can I know? and What questions does the dhamma answer? have been burning questions for a while now. How much metaphysical knowledge do I need to practice?, and at which points do I get bogged down in irrelevant metaphysics just because I am fascinated by these questions. Like, what happens to consciousness after we die?, and after an arahant dies? 🤯 Who knows 🤷 One way to find out.2