Last time we finished our look at the Axial Revolution in India. We took a look at what was going on in the Buddha’s state of enlightenment. We took a look at some of the cognitive science in such awakening experiences and then we moved to interpret some of the Buddha’s pronouncements, following the sage advice of Batchelor, trying to get beyond interpreting his pronouncements as propositions to be believed and instead understand them as provocations so that we may enact enlightenment.
That means enacting the threat that we are facing, and then enacting the psychotechnologies that can respond to it. We took a look at this in terms of ideas of parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, addiction (the opposite of anagogic acceleration!), and creating a counter-active dynamical system, the Eightfold Path, for successfully dealing with parasitic processing.
So we saw that these higher states of consciousness can bring about transformations that alleviate modal confusion, parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, many of the ways in which we fundamentally lose our agency in the world in a self-deception and self-destructive manner.
This was a very short summary, but I think both things it brings up are key:
1. Things like Buddhism were not ‘belief systems’ (which Vervaeke calls a ‘post-Christian’ way of looking at it) and instead were practices. Like, you could imagine people of the future trying to understand football propositionally, and they sort of could, but it’s mostly not about the propositions, for the athletes or the spectators. It’s about enacting the football game. They were transformative practices—you should be able to see the difference between someone before Buddhism and after it (at least if they did it right).
2. The in-depth look at a problem that Buddhism was trying to be a solution to (parasitic processing).
Plato tells us a story about anagoge; Buddhism tells a story about its opposite, and how to avoid that.
Episode 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing
This was a very short summary, but I think both things it brings up are key:
1. Things like Buddhism were not ‘belief systems’ (which Vervaeke calls a ‘post-Christian’ way of looking at it) and instead were practices. Like, you could imagine people of the future trying to understand football propositionally, and they sort of could, but it’s mostly not about the propositions, for the athletes or the spectators. It’s about enacting the football game. They were transformative practices—you should be able to see the difference between someone before Buddhism and after it (at least if they did it right).
2. The in-depth look at a problem that Buddhism was trying to be a solution to (parasitic processing).
Plato tells us a story about anagoge; Buddhism tells a story about its opposite, and how to avoid that.