Wes Nisker

I was disappointed with this book. There are great opportunities for lively expression and exploration of Buddhism in the contemporary industrial - scientific context. But this book misses the mark.

What really irks me is that this book approaches things from a scientific perspective. Perhaps it belongs in the same bucket with Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs". The back cover describes the author as a Buddhist meditation teacher. I suppose there are teachers of Buddhist meditation and then Buddhist teachers of meditation and the two aren't the same! The scientific outlook is a sort of materialistic nihilism that is actually the opposite of Buddhism. Certainly there is plenty of room in Buddhism for science as a practical tool for getting things done. But this is relative truth and the heart of Buddhism is ultimate truth which is inseparable from compassion which is an all-embracing sensitivity to consequences, the true antithesis of nihilism.

What are useful ways for a Buddhist to understand biological evolution? Clearly the realm of biology is the greatest example of interdependent origination, the play of causes and conditions. Individual species can indeed be divided on the one hand and on the other hand are not utterly distinct from neighboring species. Biological evolution is an awesome example of the complementarity of emptiness and interdependent origination.

But where in all this can we properly find our selves, who we really are? Certainly the brain - mind relationship is one of the greatest puzzles. Can we expect neurophysiology finally to break through and uncover the mechanisms underlying consciousness?

Reading this book, one gets no hint of the paradox here, what is perhaps the greatest joke of our time. Nisker tells us he has studied Dzogchen meditation. I find this disturbing. It isn't so much that a person can study Dzogchen meditation and yet come away with a notion of a neurophysiological mechanism for consciousness. But if this sort of thing gets widely publicized and distributed... that such confusion could begin to spread and multiply... this is a tragedy!

Here is the secret, out in the open: the mind is not out there! The mind is what observes. If a scientist is looking at MRI scans, the mind at play in that situation is the mind of the scientist!

The paradox involved was actually brought up but then quickly dismissed in E. O. Wilson's Conscilience. It is certainly grand fun to play scientist, to put on the hat of the evolutionary psychologist, and to belittle all of human culture as nothing more than the selfish gene at play, the grandest peacock's tail yet. But, professor scientist, what of science itself? Isn't science really the ultimate power display, with no more legitimate claim to ultimacy than the color rear end of a rhesus monkey? Wilson stammers, bu... bu... bu... but Galileo created a method, the scientific method, that breaks through such limits.

That, right there, is the Cartesian split in action. The boundary between the mind and the world. Now, with science, the scientists are the observers and the rest of us and the observed. Of course, who are the scientists and which of their actions are really science and which are just animal mastication and defecation in the same worldly class as the rest of us overgrown chimpanzees?

This is the great paradox and joke that this book is just blind to. Each of us harbors a secret hope that we will be on board the space ship that escapes this planet of woe and founds a new paradise on a fresh clean new planet. This identification with an objective uninvolved perspective is the modern scientific version of the ageless delusion of a separate self. Somehow this book failed to bring me any closer to realizing my actual total inseparable engagement with the world.… (plus d'informations)