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Integral Perspectives: From Kashmiri Shaivism to Tibetan Buddhism with Sean K. MacCracken
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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- [00:51]
Sean McCracken
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Sean McCracken
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:09]
Podcast Advertiser
Welcome to the East West Psychology Podcast, the forum for the exploration of psyche and spirit. Join our hosts, Jonathan Kay and Stefan Dulich and their guests as they delve into the intersection of psychology, philosophy, world wisdom, traditions, the arts and more.
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Jonathan Kay
All right, back with another East West Psychology Podcast. I'm here with Stefan and our guest today is Sean McCracken. How's everybody doing?
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Stefan Dulich
Hey, Jonathan. Well, Sean, how are you?
- [02:47]
Sean McCracken
I'm great.
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Stefan Dulich
Thanks for having me yeah, thanks for coming on. So Sean is teaching in East West Psychology this semester. Shantan, what's the title of the course that you're teaching?
- [03:00]
Sean McCracken
That's very important. So we called it Kashmiri Shaivism, a Supreme non dualism. And there's a really good reason to call it that. A supreme non dualism is just the English gloss that translates Parama Advaita, right? So a supreme non dualism that comes about with the Kashmiri Shaiva exegetes, scholastics, philosophers, Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta, the latter names a little more familiar to people often, and the former not so much. But Parama Advaita being this kind of new and easy path that's making explicit what was just heretofore implicit in the scripture, this idea. You know, we've had scriptures saying Caitanya Atma and Lakshmanju, the last living exegete in the tradition, 20th century, no longer with us, glosses this as awareness. Consciousness is of the nature of everything. So this is a higher non dualism, a more expanded, a more full or replete non dualism in that it can handle, it can encompass duality. It encompasses duality, it encompasses the material diverse world of existence. It comprehends, it takes, lays hold of all of the diverse world of existence and opposes itself somewhat polemically to the earlier Advaita, you know, Shankara, you know, Advaita, you know, form of Vedanta, you know, the, the end of the Vedas, right? And it's saying, oh, we are a higher non dualism because we're more all encompassing. And in fact this Advaita, Vedanta, you know, is not really non dualism. It negates the world, right? It's the world is illusion, there's only Brahman. And then there's a problem. It's either, well, there's. Are they essentially the same continuous in nature, Brahman in the world, or are they not? And if they're not, then you've set up a very basic dualism. And if they're continuous, well, we need to talk about that because that's kind of closer to their position. So it's Parama Advaita. And we put this in the system at cis and immediately, like in the short form, the system kind of uses a long and short form for the title. It just becomes Kashmiri Shaivism, non dualism, right? And the supreme is dropped. The distinction is dropped, right? And even on flyers and posters, somehow it became non dualism. But this is a funny kind of issue. And it actually kind of shows. I mean, the tradition talks about Shiva's like concealment and then revealment, you know, his obscuration and his disclosure, right? So Shiva the revelator, Shiva the divinity is really playfully making himself obscure only again to reveal. Right. And it was almost a trickster move like that, where the system is dropping higher non dualism and just making it Kashmiri Shaivism, non dualism and forgetting about the Parama Advaita altar together. It's a subtle concept. And we had to go back and do some damage control. The first day with the students live on zoom, it was like, well, listen, this is very important. This is very important because it's often been said to oversimplify the explanation. Advaita Vedanta, it's like the world is illusion. Fine, there's only Brahman. And then in Tantra, it's like, well, the illusion is separation. That's tantra. But very rare is it to have a course, an entire semester devoted to Kashmir Shaivism. And thank you so much to the department for allowing this. And I've kind of created the course out of mostly nothing, but really listening to the incoming students what they most wanted to look at what they most wanted to study, just designed it from the ground up. And we might add a kind of third definition, which to say for Kashmir Shaivism, specifically for this supreme non dualism, the illusion is even the difference between illusion and non illusion, the difference between difference and non difference. So it gets very subtle, right? It gets very tricky in that sense.
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Stefan Dulich
While you were speaking, I immediately went back to our beloved late Stephen Goodman. And I was just thinking of one of my favorite Goodman isms, I guess you could say, when somebody in class was arguing a point and was arguing with him about non dual. And you may have even been in the class when he said this. He said, yeah, non dual as opposed to what?
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Sean McCracken
Fantastic. No, actually, I don't remember that. Goodman, maybe you weren't in the class. As opposed to what?
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Stefan Dulich
As opposed to what?
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Sean McCracken
Oh, that's really excellent. Right, Because. And the question is pregnant. And we could sit with it and maybe better to sit with it, but of course, there is no opposition. You know, proper, a higher non dualism would be opposed to nothing at all.
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Jonathan Kay
Right?
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Stefan Dulich
Right. So he. He once was coming by, coming by, walking down the hall when I was sitting. I was the student assistant way, way back, like 2006 in East West. And we had our own little copy machine out in front of the office at that point. And I paper on non dualism on the Internet. And I Was printing it out just as Stephen walked by. And it was a 20 page paper. And here it is, it's come fresh out of the machine. And I handed it to Stephen. I said, take a look at this. And he looked at the COVID and then he turned a page and he said. And then he turned another page and he said, good joke, right? And I was like, what? And he showed me the paper there was nothing written on. And. The ultimate paper on non dualism. I said, man, if I had seen that, then first I would have submitted it to you for my paper to see if you would maybe give me an A. Oh, absolutely.
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Sean McCracken
It's just pure shinyata emptiness through and through. Yeah, yeah.
- [09:27]
Stefan Dulich
So we, for just a moment before, before we started, Sean, you and I were. We were talking a little bit about your coming back to the AAR after a couple of years. And I was really interested in what you were saying because we were talking. You were talking about the humanities and stuff that's happening kind of in socially, politically in our country right now. And I was wondering if maybe we could go back to that. I was. And then come back to what you're teaching.
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Sean McCracken
Yeah, absolutely.
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Jonathan Kay
Well, and just for our listeners, what's the A? And me, what's the aar?
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Sean McCracken
Right. So the last American Academy of Religion national conference happened to be in San Diego. And I went after years of being in dissertation land and being just absent from was very convenient to go. The other icing on the cake as far as going is that there's a brand new volume, the Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies, that's just come out. Glenn Hayes and the good people of the Society for Tantric Studies produced that volume. There was an amazing panel on that, a little storytelling about its history. Society for Tantric Studies history. In the 1980s, of course, when these elders, these senior colleagues of mine were active, you could not get a paper accepted at American Academy of Religion on any topic in the Tantras, anything Indian, esoteric. It was still stigmatized. It was still, you know, willfully misunderstood, you know, thought of as just kind of low occults, magic and so forth, and not worth anyone's time. So they had to pioneer and change that process. And now, of course, you know, decades later, and the timing was excellent, right, because the Oxford. Now, this is an unsubstantiated rumor, but I remember hearing that the Oxford Handbook series is fundamentally changing or is actually maybe being discontinued. They got it in really under this window of time where it would be possible to publish. So they faced decades of pushback on Indian esotericism not being welcome in the academy. And then they are going into this situation. We're looking ahead to this intensification of profit and what it means to be a publisher and so forth. They really got it in under the window. It's this fantastic volume, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And as one of the contributors said in the panel, it really goes far beyond the textualist focus that we've had up until now. There's been a specific kind of scholarly lineage looking into the classical Tantras as far as translation and now the kind of unspoken reality. Nobody said this, but I can see it. Who knows how far out we are from having competent machine translation, even from complex free word order languages like Sanskrit. It could be 20 years, it could be 30, it could be, who knows? But it's very prudent to shift the focus onto cognitive sciences, to shift the focus onto spending time with living exemplars of the tradition, because they're simply, you know, that is something that is kind of slowly vanishing and dying out before our eyes, spending time with real meditation teachers. So somebody said, you know, in that it was like, we've moved past the textualist, only we're looking now at cognitive sciences. We're looking at these other wonderful things. But to respond directly to your question, right, what we were talking about previously was this kind of twofold phenomenon that I saw at the national conference, one quite wonderfully, and as integralists, as transdisciplinarians, as you know, people interested in the transcultural, not just an I'm okay, you're okay, multi culty, but a real robust sort of coherent sense, cross culturally, cross disciplinarily to looking at problems. This really inflames my interest. We're seeing the American Academy of Religion Conference move away from a pedagogy where it's like, God forbid, I'm just sitting and reading a paper and defending an argument at a podium for 20, 25 minutes and then all of you respond and ask tough questions and there's a thrust and parry of exchange around that. No, there's much more roundtable discussion. There's much more like you do in a contemporary classroom where you speak a little bit, put the attendees in groups, have them work through the handout that you presented, come back together and see what everybody accomplished together. Really great pedagogies. And as a forefront extension of that, on the furthest edges, I saw some wonderful senior colleagues from my time at University of Virginia, folks who were in the PhD when I was in the Masters. They had this really wonderful grassroots approach that arose organically. It evidently arose from, you know, from getting drinks after, from socializing after one of the prior years. And they had said, for heaven's sake, isn't there a way that we can just not read the papers to each other? Right. How else can we do this? How can we ground this? And what I saw and witnessed and took part in was just a circle of people just kind of speaking out what they had assembled, what they were working on, where they hoped it would go, and responding to a couple. There were two folks that had contrasting methodologies, positions. And then the rest of the roundtable got a chance to respond. So it's really wonderful. Having been doing what you might call an integral project since I first read Ken Wilber in high school, it runs back a long, long way for me. And as we all can imagine, I've moved past Ken Wilber in many ways and come into other forms of integralism. But it was really wonderful to see the, you might say, mainstream academy, like this national, huge conference, hundreds, thousands of people, where there are kind of living examples of this kind of more organic, more grounded form of scholarship. And in that roundtable with my senior colleagues from University of Virginia, they raised this very pregnant point. This was during the holiday season this past year. Elections had just happened. It was like, well, with the rise of Christian nationalism or its resurgence, what do we do? How do we push back on the intensification of the vanishing of humanities or the marginalization of non Western religions, religions outside the Christian or outside the Abrahamic traditions, and what they might have to offer as conversation partners, like, how do we speak up for that? How do we articulate that? How do we advocate that to school administrators? Right, to people that have the dollars and cents, bottom line. And people threw out a number of great ideas that I jotted down in my notes. But it is our challenge and our responsibility, I think, being out on the outer fringes of an integral project, to really apply ourselves, like heart, spirit, mind to this question. Right? The academy is working on it. But surely we are in an excellent position to, if not supply answers, give some really generative questions, frame the inquiry, frame the line of inquiry in a way that it's productive over the years to come.
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Stefan Dulich
Sorry. You could take the papers that are written and feed them through AI and turn them into songs and then make visuals using psychedelic visualization simulators. That would be entertaining. That would get people to the conferences. I wonder about the future of knowledge, what is now being considered important and what's not. Being considered important. And there's so many. It's very polite, it's super politicized. But I was watching a YouTube content creator who's a physicist, Sabina Hassenfelder, right. Whose program I really like, I really enjoy. And there was one video, I guess, where she was arguing that there's too much nonsense being produced in the humanities, even in the sciences, there's too much money, is just. Is destroying scientific research because there's just so much garbage that's being produced. Or people are producing garbage, but they're getting money for it and they know that they're producing it. These are like scientists, good scientists that are just using the system for their own benefit and trying to keep themselves afloat. It's publish or perish or come up with some like novel nail, two things that have never been nailed together before. Right. That sort of thing. But she had particular, she had a particular animus towards the humanities. And there was, it seems like there was, I can't remember exactly, but there was somebody who was writing in the humanities who had just completed her dissertation and she published in. She posted it in Facebook or something like that. And she got attacked because she rang all of the kind of anti woke bells, you know, she talked about like in her title was gender and diversity and all of these things. So she wound up getting attacked for this. But Hassenfelder herself seemed to be saying that there's just a lot of pointless nonsense like this. I think that this study had to do with looking at some specific thing that you would find in characters within literature. And she was just asking what use is this to anybody except a small group of specialists? And I suppose you could say the same thing about Kashmir Shaivism, but you could say the same thing about anything where there's a small group of people who this is their passion. But there also has to be some positive value even outside a community of specialists who are looking at these things. Like there's some application to the broader human experience.
- [20:17]
Sean McCracken
Absolutely, yeah. That applicability, I think that's always a challenge. Looking at a discipline within Indian studies like Tantrism or Tantra or a sub discipline like Kashmir Shaivism or the doctrine of recognition school that is at its philosophical center. There's always that kind of sense of. As an inner inquiry. I was talking about generative questions. So how do I frame this kind of sensibility, even to myself? Well, what does this mean? What is its significance? Why delve into this? And why in particular engagement, whether it be Kashmiri Shaivism, Indian Esotericism Buddhism, which by the way comprises a massive portion of what, Kashmir Shaivism, Higher non dualism really essentially is why look at these things and why treat them as conversation partners? Well, as opposed to historical curiosity or just. This is just my siloed discipline. And I'm learning a lot about these philosophers that happened a thousand years ago and these, you know, very specific kind of textual, hair splitting moments in philosophy. Well, one of the reasons for me to even bother to embark on a study of Indian philosophy to begin with was the sense of continuity and continuity over time. Right? So that there's, that, not to say unbroken, but there's a sort of layer of imbricated, intersecting moments throughout a philosophical discipline that stretch quite a long way back. Right. And that Indian philosophy doesn't characteristically deal with massive ruptures where things are inverted, as you might see in Western, you know, or Anglophone philosophical tradition. Things are negated or thrown on their head or turned upside down. There's a lot of persuasion through inclusion and a lot of that sense of, to persuade by inclusion, I think reaches us, reaches all of us here and maybe many of the listeners as well who are interested in Integralism because that's a very mature form of a philosophical project. It's not metaphysical speculation only or it's not just nuts and bolts, you know, no forest for the trees, details only. But Integralism, we might say, at least the form I'm interested in, in is this cogent, coherent, non reductive approach to philosophy where you're incorporating different, apparently incommensurate views. Right? These things don't hang together. We kind of, we, I mean, those of us doing the Integral project could maybe demonize sometimes like a scientific reductionism or a dogmatic scientism. But if we're really serious, if we're really true to heart about this, we've got to find a way to include that sensibility or at least account for that sensibility and kind of fold it in. So when I, the more I pursued and pursued and pursued classical Indian philosophy, the more I was doing so having in mind this idea that we, so much of Integralism, we get directly from, from India, this, this ability, this kind of tradition to lay hold of a total sum and range of human experience and to be able to account for it in a way that doesn't kind of hack the limbs off in order to fit and stuff at, you know, ideas or worldviews in certain boxes, but can make sort of a cogent and coherent sense out of it. Now, you know, a lot of what we call Kashmiri Shaivism or Shaiva non dualism. It was occluded. It didn't really reemerge until manuscript publication form in the early 20th century and then only very slowly because again, up until the 1980s you couldn't really get a paper published if you were dealing with these kinds of things. So as a very slow progression, but it has a rightful place within integralism, that is to say, non dual Shaivism, pratya bigna doctrine of recognition. These traditions have a very natural place within integralism because of the comprehensiveness, because of this sense of a non reductive, higher non dualism that does not negate or dispel or get rid of phenomenal experience. Oh yes, yes. Well, it's just illusion. It's the reverse. It's a very much invested in the phenomenal world. It's very much invested, we might say ontologically in terms of reality, epistemologically in terms of knowledge and knowledge bases. It's very much linguistically, we might say in terms of the Sanskrit grammarians and then their resonance with the grammatical tradition in the West. Very much interested in these questions of how to coordinate knowledge. So when I go into thinking about the Shaiva non dualists as conversation partners, not just historical curiosities, you know, I'm joining an intellectual lineage. This has been done by David Peter Lawrence, who was on my committee as a friend and senior colleague. Very influential, wonderful, groundbreaking work. So I'm not making this up, but I am going into this. What I'm adding, I think what I'm kind of contributing in my understanding is that this is natively a form of integralism. You know, Chemaraja, one of the kind of late exegetes in this tradition will say, like, well, you know, listen, all these, all these different religions, all these different darshanas, all these viewpoints, perspectives are different facets of the one goddess awareness. He uses the feminine, he says goddess awareness. And so what could that possibly mean, right, that these are sort of partial facets. And of course, the ambition for him is the most subtle, to be able to lay hold of all of them and to account for all of them by saying, well, what we call divinity is none other than the individual self expanded is none other than pure content, less awareness. And I think for me, at least for my money, it kind of lays out this kind of really wonderful, already existing, already replete and powerful and established, though occluded base basis for conducting integral inquiry. Now there's a separate discussion, what that even means to the rest of the academy and even say integralism is like, well, what on earth does that mean? And it puts us in a box and it puts us kind of on the fringe. But I think there's nothing wrong with being on the fringe of the academy if we're able to articulate ourselves in that sense, to say we are contributing to projects potentially for which there are no existing or even conceived solutions, such as climate crisis, climate breakdown, climate justice. However we frame that there's really no horizon of possibility yet for adequately dealing with that. But if, you know, I think as a general statement, I could say in order to begin to approach that problem, problem, you would want to lay hold of every possible available discipline, whether established or experimental. And I'm thinking experimentally of things like cyber semiotics, bio semiotics, you know, Persian forms of semiotics. You'd want to be able to account for the total range of human experience from the subjective to the objective, and you'd want to treat every discipline that you possibly could as at least a potential good faith conversation partner and not just shut them down out of hand. So that's, you know, that's my kind of generalized way of saying how this is meaningful to me and not just a little narrow angle of specialization in the world. A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. 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- [29:28]
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- [29:58]
Sean McCracken
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- [30:26]
Jonathan Kay
Yeah, beautiful. Well said. You know, when you were speaking.
- [30:33]
Marshall Poe
What.
- [30:33]
Jonathan Kay
Came to my mind was something that Debashish, our department chair, had said in one of the classes that I was taing when he was kind of talking about what he describes as contemplative philosophy. And I'm just wondering how this sounds to you in terms of approaching like you're. You were bringing up like a robust transdisciplinary or trans cultural way of. Of approaching the problem of the integral. But, you know, this is a quote anyways. It's, it's very sort of invitation, I think, to thinking about philosophy in a different kind of way. In modern philosophy, Heidegger inaugurates a contemplative philosophy in the West. Contemplative philosophy is not a set of propositions that we are logically following to arrive at a certain. At certain metaphysical conclusions. But there is a performative function of language that makes us contemplate certain realities and arrive at a kind of experience of it. The whole notion of meditation in the Upanishads has to do with contemplative ideas that become the basis of an approach to reality and that open the doors of experience. And I thought that was a very interesting way to kind of frame, you know, and, and open up philosophy beyond the propositional and beyond the rational in a sense which is obviously required to, to engage with, you know, with the other or with the somebody that is from a different type of. A different type of cultural container or a different kind of perspective. But I just wanted your thoughts on that. And.
- [32:15]
Sean McCracken
Yeah, what comes up for you that's extremely rich. Well, it's interesting that Heidegger comes up here too, but I'm curious now. That's Debashisha's voice, and it comes straight from the class and not from a writing of his.
- [32:29]
Jonathan Kay
Yeah, he was, he was. It was actually on Post Humanism, and he was discussing the Western lineage of that in which Heidegger, Nietzsche play an important role. So that's why he's bringing in Heidegger here. That's the context of Heidegger.
- [32:43]
Sean McCracken
Interesting. And the Upanishads as well. There's so much there. I mean, that's. That's very rich. Well, it's an interesting, you know, you might even say synchronicity because, well, just to wind back a few steps and gratitude, by the way, for Debasheesh for allowing this course, which is in the Newish master's Contemplative and Transcultural studies. So I think a lot about those terms have thought and will no doubt continue to think about how that bears upon things. But just to wind back I mean, we recently lost the dear departed Mark Tchkovsky. So much to say. Right. So this is, you know, one of the great.
- [33:29]
Jonathan Kay
And Sean, just. Yeah, just a little bit more about him for people that aren't aware of that.
- [33:33]
Podcast Advertiser
Yeah.
- [33:34]
Jonathan Kay
Who are listeners.
- [33:36]
Sean McCracken
Oh, yeah, right. No, there's a lot that I now have to say in response to this very rich thing that you gave. Long story, short version, you know, Ditkovsky, three English words, Ditch, cough and ski, as he would say. Right. So Mark G, or Sadashaya, his dharma name, was one of those that made it to Varanasi, India, on the hippie trail and was kind of there ever since. Got the Red House on Narad Ghat was famous locally in the neighborhood for teaching sitar. But also much more importantly and beneath the surface was somebody who, from the beginnings of his time in India, had taken on these gurus, had taken on many Indian gurus in the tradition. Was the very first, actually, to complete a dissertation at Oxford with Alexis Sanderson, dissertation topic which, you know, at his wife Giovanna's prompting, became Doctrine of Vibration, one of the books that really cracked open this tradition for so many in the 80s and 90s. Published in the late 80s. But very early on in that book, and this is very typical of Mark G's pedagogy, he gives this kind of wonderful passage that I'll try to paraphrase, where he's only a short while in, and he's like, well, listen, I mean, this is an apsa vada tradition. This is a tradition that believes in appearances. And a relation to Heidegger might be instructive here. I think he brings up being in time specifically. And he's talking about this kind of impulse toward so much seeing, that much being, so much seeing, however much seeing, so too, that much being. Right. And there's a sense of that Heideggerian hermeneutic sensibility, that sense of circularity, of interpreting just by being in the world, by being in even the everyday world, being present with what is with other dasai and other beings and with how to sort of navigate a world of like, you know, functional use tools and this and that. Right. So. But Heidegger has this kind of sensibility where he's taking in, yes, contemplation, because he kind of narrowly dodged being, I think, a theologian, Catholic theologian, if I remember correctly. Narrowly dodged. Well, he took another path, you know, so the contemplative is very present for Heidegger. He's drawing on hermeneutic tradition, where there is a Powerful circularity that, you know, we interpret the whole in terms of the part, the part in terms of the wholes. This is all extremely resonant with Shaiva tradition, with Praktvignya. And then just to sort of almost prophetically add further momentum to it, as I got more and more and more into Utpaladeva and the specific text of Deva that I translated, he's very much concerned with being, and he's actually concerned with time very much as well, because they are, you know, just to back up a moment on the doctrine of recognition, the pratyabjna, it's been said kind of, you know, perhaps reductively, but more or less accurately. Look, all of these non dual Shaivas would be like Buddhist epistemologists. They would be like the great logician Dharmakirt or better, epistemologist Dharmakirti on the Buddhist side, if it weren't for Bartahari, the grammarian Bartahari. Because we can get into that, we can get into the specifics why. But basically, this is to say that there's a linguistic aspect, there's a grammatical aspect, there's a semiotic aspect to what the non dual Shaivas are attempting. Because for them, everything is continuity and everything, yes, is appearance. Things are real to the extent that they appear, they appear to the extent that they're real. This is inevitable when we say things like caitanya atma, consciousness, awareness is of the nature of everything, as Lakshmanju said. So there are tremendous resonances with Heidegger. If we pursue this, we'll be getting into unpublished material of mine, which is fine. Not sure where this would be proposed. I don't know if there will be a memorial volume for Tchkovsky, but it properly belongs to him, this parallel, this kind of sensibility where Heidegger as a modern, as somebody at the junction between continental and analytic philosophy, where they kind of part ways, has some really fascinating things to say that are not precisely analytic, that are not precisely epistemology or logic. He's kind of reaching into another domain. And it's inevitable, of course, that if we're talking Heidegger, we have to confront, and I say have to, I would like to, and I think I invite other integralists to also robustly face and lean into and confront Heidegger's very dark political philosophy, his alignment with Nazism, his rectorship that he was in and that he never in his life was committed to repudiating the political direction that Nazism unfolded upon the world. Many opportunities to do so, he never does. And I am actually deepening in engagement to Heidegger now, precisely with that awareness in mind. I'm going over being in time. I'm going over Introduction to Metaphysics, which further sort of extrapolates upon this question with that in mind, with. I would say everything I'm interested in on the political philosophy side is non authoritarian. Right. And I hesitate to even say anti authoritarian because I don't want to give the authoritarian personality that much power. It has plenty of power already. Right. So I go into these things kind of looking always for a thread of both personal and collective liberation. And I think within Heidegger's own philosophy we can find innumerable tools to push back on what became his political philosophy. So I'm not the sort of person who thinks that Heidegger should be rejected. You know, I think he should be read enthusiastically and with a wary eye towards the political philosophy aspect, towards, you know, has his. Some of his emphasis on the specific and emphasis on the embodied kind of leans toward the nation or leans toward those kinds of identities. We should be wary. But I think that one should enthusiastically look into the important works of Heidegger with a sense of like, how much richness is actually there. There's a lot going on there and it has much to offer. Absolutely. I mean, if we bring in the Upanishads as well, then that takes us in other directions further still. But I think what I'm really curious about in Being in Time and with Heidegger is this sense of trying to unfold what it is that being is. Translations, English translations, have obscured and complicated this matter by using a capital B like it's a supreme being or like it's, you know, Brahman or something like that. When really he is just he. It's. He's concerned, if I understand correctly, about what is embodied in the copula. We say it is this is this. And in the beginning of being in time, he even specifies and lays that out. Well, listen, nobody's dealt with being adequately because we all sort of pretend that we know what it means and we adopt that perspective that we need to function. Oh, this is being. That is, that is in a state of being, that's in a state of non being. However, if we back up to make a propositional, to have propositional content about it, we end up saying things like, well, being is X. Well, there's a huge problem because we're using is to define itself. So there's a logical circularity there and that presents any number of problems that really have to be talked about and that have to be talked about, you know, very seriously and robustly. You know, what does it mean when you're in a tricky situation where you're using something you're trying to put under definition in order to define it, right. And then I don't think there's any way into this except through a hermeneutic circularity. It's like, well, let's look at the.
- [42:36]
Stefan Dulich
Whole.
- [42:38]
Sean McCracken
Being, you know, let's look at the parts, you know, Dasein being in the world, and let's go back and forth right between the two and see what we can uncover. I mean, there are a lot of parallels too with Pratya Binya doctrine of recognition, because they're very concerned not to prove anything. They're not saying, well, listen, it would be foolish. We are saying that consciousness is the divinity is the fully expanded individual self. Well, that's nonsense to prove, right? Because you're presupposing it in what you're seeking to prove. It's nonsense. It would be as nonsense to try to establish it as it would be to disprove it. Oh, I don't exist, the world doesn't exist. These things are nonsense statements for them. But so too to say like I exist, the world exists. I mean, these are philosophically empty. These are useless, you know, non interesting statements. So it is a type of apasavada. It is a type of like, it is very close to Heidegger in this kind of sense. And it is really concerned with not proving at all by logical argumentation or propositional phrases, but trying to sort of uncover through Shakti's, through abilities, through a meditation on things like will, knowledge, action, trying to deepen an experiential meditation of those in order to kind of discover, we might say, what is always already existing. Like this identification or this continuity may be better said between individual self, world, divinity. So yeah, there's much more that remains to be said on this. And I think Debashish is on a really great track there, honestly.
- [44:30]
Jonathan Kay
Yeah, great. Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. That's really, really adds to the conversation, which I think, you know, this idea of a contemplative philosophy opening the doors to certain types of experiences is definitely something that's helped me engage in kind of the, the transcultural work in a way, because it's not, it's not about thinking about like one, about the other. It kind of problematizes the whole idea of like, like knowledge production. It makes it a problematic in a sense that you are obviously situated in a field that is, is also a field of contestation, and it's also an asymmetrical field in which one can't or shouldn't subsume the other in terms of how describing it according to its own categories and whatnot. And maybe I'm just, I'm just getting to a fantastic. I could bring in this article because you wrote a section called Understanding One Another Epistemic Categories, and that little section to your paper really kind of brought out a lot of this. So I'm talking about the article that you sent us to read called Regarding Humanism, Some Observations concerning the Tibetan Buddhist and Transhumanist Dialogue. And you know, I guess maybe this is just the time in the conversation when we get a little more specific into some of your work, your published work, so you can tell us a little bit about where this is published. I'll provide a link in the description, the episode description, notes for sure, as well to other work that you've, you've had published. But this is like that, that section is about the problem problematic of knowledge production and transculturality. And I thought that was really great. And I was wondering if you could maybe say a little bit about the article. And was this my. I was just going to ask about like, your intentions between putting the idea of transhumanism and Buddhism together into this, this article. Was this, was this intended to kind of bring into applicability, Buddhist, you know, ethics and epistemology and whatnot into like more of a, I guess a more like you say in the article, more of a mainstream discourse community like transhumanism.
- [46:59]
Sean McCracken
Right. Well, this, this book chapter from oh gosh, I want to say about 10 years ago now is one inflection point in a very much ongoing arc of thought. And when I say very much, I mean, I already mentioned reading Ken Wilber in high school. I think I was about 16 and around that same time. And this comes from having one of my parents who was an engineer at UC Berkeley Department of Engineering and you know, another parent who was a botanist. Actually, like, I have a way of approaching philosophy with hard sciences in the background or, you know, people now say stem, science, technology, engineering, mathematics in the background and wanting to build some bridges. But I also had a foil. And look, when you're 16 and you imagine you have a nemesis, Ray Kurzweil, and Ray Kurzweil of course, doesn't know who I am and I'm definitely not his nemesis, right. But Kurzweil is a good example of the side of the spectrum of transhumanist thought that I found suspect. And in a way, this is a little quaint to look Back to like 2015 or so before fascism or economic nationalism, as Steve Bannon calls it, that was very much trending in the United States since 2016 forward. I think this was right before that. But they're not unrelated because we've got Christian nationalism on the one side and then we've got a kind of soulless, dogmatic, reductionist, functionalist sort of scientism on the other. Now, just to wind back, I think why I have a personal vendetta here is that I was raised by a scientist and I was raised revering a scientific method where there's a hypothesis, there's data, hopefully there's a double blind experiment or there's something that confers a level of, kind of objectivity. Nothing's completely objective on the data. So there's good data and bad data and then conclusions therefrom, which is the inverse of a method that says we believe X. And so all of science, all of reality ought to bend to that. Right. This very hubristic, colonial kind of mentality creeps into the practice of the sciences quite often. That's not to let religious people off the hook, right? If we talk about contemplation, if we talk about the contemplative, that's an extremely rich tradition with a lot of intersubjectivity, with a lot of relationality. Other beings exist, right? But God forbid we descend into a type of. A type of solipsistic inquiry that's passing as contemplation. Oh, I'm really involved in my own existence. Maybe only I exist, right? And that's kind of an inverse of what the Kashmir Shaiva non dual philosophers are saying, because they are saying that everyone, everyone equally and in fact everything, every object participates in this total divinity, right? So what I'm pushing back on, and have done, oh, for decades now, is this kind of sensibility within transhumanism where they're kind of a formal functionalist. Oh, a system looks like this. It has these parts. Well, basically it is those parts, right? And dear Kurzweil, bless his heart, lost a father which is very powerful. I can now personally attest it's a very, you know, know it's an ordeal. It's a massive ordeal, and wanted to, so to speak, resurrect his dear father as a machine. As a machine awareness. Right. And I think the project had something of like, oh, well, we'll use the letters, we'll use the correspondence, we'll use an AI, and we'll fashion the bring back the dead father. Right now there's much more rigor to how that could be done with brain scanning and so forth. And, you know, there's wonderful, wonderful. Is it the film her that I'm thinking of, where there's a singularity point and all the operating systems, you know, there's like an Alan Watts that has generated a bunch of AIs get together and put together a simulacrum of Alan, right, so everybody can kind of enjoy his personality and so forth. Now, there's a very touching and beautiful side to this type of transhumanism, where they're saying the value to society is in the functionalism and the formalism. Well, if you need a person like Alan Watts around, and if you can bring him back, even if it isn't literally him, even if it's something a lot like him, or excitingly, maybe if it's him as he would be now, and he has the opportunity organically to respond, what's going on in the world as it is now? I mean, who wouldn't want to do that? But then there's another dark side to this, you know, with Kurzweil and others of these types of transhumanists, where they're saying, oh, it is not just the same in terms of external values. It is the same like, I am the same as the machine mind, and I will happily and willingly die and be deconstructed and taken apart so that this machine consciousness goes into the world and does its thing. Well, that's a type of egoism, and it's a very, like, entrenched, defended, guarded form of egoism, where normally we, you know, as human beings traditionally have maybe quaintly achieved immortality by great works or by our children or grandchildren or the people that we teach who carry on a legacy, carry on an intellectual project or a special project to us. Now, this reifies and solidifies the ego, where it's uploaded into the web and becomes this kind of perpetually crystallized, sort of egoic project. And I found that extremely dark. And during the time I was a teenager, up until, you know, Even like the 2015s, this was very much still present. And I thought it was very, very dark and very cynical. But rather than push back against it directly or to sort of put it down and say, oh, this is only modestly, philosophically formulated, they didn't think this through very well. They have one or two good philosophers among them. And those are just reading Parfit. Was it Derek Parfit, who's got this very reductionist set of arguments about what it means to be human. We're really just parts. We're nothing more than the parts. Well, those folks, if they're persisting in that they maybe ought to get in touch with Buddhists. They ought to get in touch with Buddhists. And I did that for two reasons. One is because it's very cool to be a Buddhist, quote unquote, cool to be a Buddhist practitioner scholar in the academy now, in a way that it is not cool to be like a Hindu scholar practitioner of any national background. Certainly not a Tantric scholar practitioner, heaven forbid. So, you know, people are willing to talk to Buddhists. They're willing to talk to observant Buddhists and Buddhist scholar practitioners in a way that they're really just too afraid or too, you know, it's just not cool to talk to the Tantric Hindu traditions. So that that book chapter process Century Press, was a way of trying to suggest and to outline a possibility for connection. And I think there are already transhumanists, and there are transhumanists who also work on negligible human senescence, who really want the biological human lifespan to be extended. I mean, there's concerns I have there as far as, like, the economics and who benefits and how elite this is and how accessible this is. But it to me is a much more wholesome project than trying to upload a machine mind. And there are also transhumanists out there that I think have more than a passing interest in meditation and Buddhism and so forth. So that article was just to be very suggestive in the beginnings of a conversation to try to bring them together. And the reason I bring up Pramana Buddhist epistemology, or really epistemology, Indian philosophical epistemology, which the Buddhists are really good at. You know, Buddhist Pramama, Pramana Buddhist epistemology, for lack of a better term. The reason I bring that up is that in order to agree or disagree, you have to kind of be on the same page with someone, right? And so in medieval India, the way this was done was to say, like, I can do an inference for myself or I can do kind of an investigation thought project for myself, or I can do it for someone else. If I do it for myself, no problem, right? I'm appealing to those knowledges, those ways of achieving knowledge and organizing knowledge. That makes sense to me. That makes sense to me. If I'm doing it to Someone else or with or for someone else, I should say then if I'm not inflicting it on someone, but if I'm actually winning somebody, bringing them along in my line of reasoning and argument, then I should be aware of, well, do they accept inference? Do they accept only pure perception? Do they accept their scriptures? Do they accept my scriptures, theirs, you know, ones that I maybe share with them. What are their sources of knowledge? And this is just by analogy because nobody knows or cares what Pramana is, you know, in English speaking world. But just by analogy to say, well, you know, if we go out there and we encounter formal functionalist, reductionist transhumanists, they may be very committed to that and they may have actually done none of the work of kind of the front loading of sort of ego reduction that you would do to, so to speak, earn that compassion. They're pursuing wisdom only or they're pursuing knowledge only. Without that compassionate sense of like tamping the ego down and saying, oh, okay, well, we're all just made of parts and so therefore we should be compassionate. No, they're kind of more saying, oh, there should be more me in the world. I should be immortal. And then you have the return and sort of resurgence of a transcendentalist, kind of immortalist, alchemical, western project. People are literally trying to live forever. That's what I wanted to mitigate. And I was seeing and observing that there are already. There's a transhumanist conference that happened in New York years and years ago now that had the likes of Robert Thurman and other amazing Tibetan Buddhists present. They were in conversation already, they were already in dialogue. But the difference is, well, there's a similarity with Buddhists where all Buddhists of all kinds going just about all the way back have made these observations and said, well, if you take a chariot apart bit by bit and reassemble it bit by bit, there's no original part left. Is it the same chariot? Well, you know, these myriological parts and wholes arguments, right? They'll use this all the time and they'll use that to kind of say, well, the part possessor doesn't really exist. It's like a story. What really exists are the parts. And this is why we can find no atman. This is why we can find no self. We're really just investigating and finding parts only. We're finding skandhas, little piles, little heaps of experience or matter. That's all we find. And we don't find a self. Now we could talk about Originally this was a project that I think this is fair to say, but lesser known. This was a technique, this was a practice, this wasn't an ontological commitment. And the Buddha himself is full of these sorts of wonderful statements where this is an upaya, this is a heuristic, it's not, well, listen, if I say, oh yeah, okay, fine, you know, there's kind of a self, people get really eternalist. And if I say, no, no, no, no, we're nothing but like constituent parts, people get really nihilist. And so the Buddha, to his credit, kept very silent on this point. It was like, no, no, we're not, we're not going to go there. But it is really easy for Buddhists to be in conversation with people that sound a little bit like nihilists, like these transhumanists, because they also have this practice and this kind of sense where they're looking for a deeper self and finding nothing and they say, no, we have only the parts. So that was the beginnings of an attempt to kind of generate or build sympathy upon an already existing conversation. And I frankly, I don't know if it's still taking place or not or to what extent it's taking place. But I think that it was really to get transhumanists interested in Buddhism, not necessarily the other way around.
- [59:36]
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- [60:38]
Sean McCracken
Oops.
- [60:39]
Podcast Advertiser
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- [60:46]
Sean McCracken
Mmm.
- [60:47]
Podcast Advertiser
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- [60:53]
Sean McCracken
Whoops.
- [60:55]
Podcast Advertiser
Lost my train of thought. I've heard of brain freeze, but brain cheese?
- [60:59]
Sean McCracken
Mmm.
- [61:00]
Podcast Advertiser
I'll just have one more cheese at cracker and then I'll get back to it.
- [61:05]
Jonathan Kay
Yeah, thanks for unpacking that. I definitely encourage the, the listeners to go and find that or read that article is really, really informing or informative. And also, I mean, just to quickly say, I already mentioned post humanism, but in east west psychology and through the work of Debashish, there is an engagement with, with post humanism, which is definitely different than transhumanism. And it's also an emerging field that is, you know, a site of. Of inquiry. And I think, you know, the way that Debashish approaches it, it's, you know, based on what we were speaking about, contemplative philosophy. But anyway, let's not get into that. I know that Stefan has a question, but thanks so much for talking about that article.
- [61:50]
Stefan Dulich
In a conversation with one of our, our students and also now teaching in our program, Dave Deep Ganguly, he was talking about how transhumanism has kind of been subsumed under the umbrella of post humanism by post humanists. We're looking at kind of like all the, all the various forms of post humanism. Transhumanism is kind of brought in under that. Although that might be news to transhumanists. You know, when you, when you transcend and in what does it transcend and incorporate? You know, that can be done from almost any standpoint. So I used to say when, you know, it's like you can say we transcend, we transcend into kind of non dual traditions and incorporate all of the lower forms of consciousness. But I think that any behaviorist that's worth their salt would say, yeah, I've transcended your idea of transcendence and incorporated it under my model. You know, it just doesn't exist. I think it does. So I guess that, I mean, I have a question that's kind of percolating and I don't know whether I can give it, say it in a coherent way, but I was just really curious listening to your discussion of Heidegger. And I've. Early on, when I started looking at Heidegger, I was really fascinated with his philosophy. And then I got hung up, up having, you know, Jewish blood in my family. And I understand that, you know, it's like, I mean, I could say, I could tell myself, don't be petty. You know, it's like, try and you know, look at this. You know, if you were 200 years in the future or 2,000 years in the future, things would look very different. But I'm, there's, there's an element of his, of his philosophy that seems to allow itself to be, to exist within the framework of fascism or totalitarianism. And because it doesn't take a stand, because it, because it's so, because it's so fluid. And I was thinking while you were speaking that there's a book by David Gordon White on sinister yogis, right, where he's talking about how these people who have really advanced, advanced cities, right, These people who are advanced practitioners could find themselves working for fairly, you know, unsavory people or behaving that way themselves because their positionality, their. I don't know how you would say it, where they, the, the, the way in which they see the world is much more fluid and does not conform to the morality that is an established morality. So I was just wondering if, how, how you read this like within, in the way that you approach Kashmir Shaivism. I mean, I suppose that this, you know, you were talking about how ultimately there's nothing, really nothing to say. There's nothing, nothing to say and yet we say it. And as soon as you begin talking about it, you can, you wind up arguing, you wind up finding yourself in an argument because in order to say anything, you have to kind of put it within very specific bounds. You have to use words, you have to use a logic in order to get your point across. And any logic that you present can be argued against. And so as I'm watching my country and other places in the world drift towards a way of using knowledge that I find really kind of abhorrent and a way of determining beforehand what are suitable avenues of research, suitable ways to use our minds and our money. I'm just, I'm wondering how you see the, the work that you're doing, the research that you're doing. Because you talked about being non authoritarian, not anti, but non. How does. There's a question in there somewhere. But I'm really curious about how this plays into your personal philosophy, your personal practices and how you see Kashmir Shaivism informing that in what I would consider to be maybe a more wholesome integral rather than one that lends itself to Ray Kurzweil's lawnmower man pretensions or, you know, or Heidegger's, you know, not, it's not even a flirtation, but his, his un. Spoken embrace of Nazism.
- [67:09]
Sean McCracken
Well, first of all, I mean, just heart to heart. Thank you for what you've shared about your personal reservations. It's always really moving and important to hear that, that sort of disclosure and yeah, absolutely. I have personal and familial reasons to despair at bullies and to despair at mass psychologies and movements that are so destructive. So not being a Heidegger expert, just by way of parallel, I'll speak to the Kashmir Shaiva side of this because ethics has been a huge part of this for me the entire time. I think it's a fair generalization within the Tantras, the non dual Shaiva tantras, certainly to observ. And I've heard this in practice communities articulated the most strongly and forcefully. Right. That all the tantras and Kashmir Shaivism included have a way of making the person more who they are. Right. And so that can certainly lead to situations where the person is more of a bully, more of a creepy and so on. I've heard also in practice environments that there's a tendency towards greater and greater integration. If the person is invested in doing that, I think that the will has to be there. Now this is the sort of emic testimony of my so called informers, practice participant informers. But there's also been a fair amount of work that's been done on how to. Utpaladeva saw this, Abhinavagupta saw this ethical engagement not as the boost would see it in terms of the cultivation of compassion for other beings, but starting from a process of just a replete overflow of ananda, so spiritual bliss. And I think somebody had said to me once that no amount of poga, that is no amount of just savoring or everyday experience, science converts over into ananda. They are differences in kind, not just differences in degree. So if somebody is really deeply in touch and the heart is the center of awareness in this tradition, so if somebody's really invested in that awareness center, then Abhinavagupta Utpaladeva are making the case that it becomes more and more difficult for that person to step outside of responsible ethical action because they're overflowing with the bliss of the divine. And that becomes their kind of point of savoring, that becomes their point of refuge. And actually it's Raphael Torella, the famous translator of recognition, who has a beautiful passage speaking almost in his introduction to verses on recognition of the Lord, where he says this is a higher non dualism. It doesn't need to fear what is other. It doesn't need to make a choice. It's not this or that. So there's a state of repose that gives way to ethical active participation in the world. So this is the kind of scholastic view on it, but the to step back broadly, not just in Kashmiri Shaivism, but in the Tantras, in the so called Hindu tantras, right? There's this kind of sense of it being a two way gate. We could say, right? We haven't accepted or the Shaivas haven't accepted an approach to theodicy, approach to the problem of evil where all the evil people are over there, all the evil actions and everything are over there. And we've kind of firewalled that and excluded all the bad people that don't agree with us or people from other countries, they're not good Brahmins, they're not Hindus or whatever it is. What would be the identity categories? There's not a Manichean dualism like we see so often as a pre verbal assumption almost in mainstream Abrahamic tradition. There's not that split, that fundamental split in the world world. There's no firewall. And what that means is that things are coming in from the other direction. So the people that we hate, the people that hate us, the people that want to destroy us, that disagree with us fundamentally, that are fundamentally other, that are maybe considered culturally untrustworthy and so forth, they are equally totally validly within our sphere of concern just as much as anyone else, which is a radical and maybe to some nonsensical proposition to kind of live out to its kind of full extent, right? And all due sensitivity to people who have suffered specifically Nazi genocide, right? That's very real and it echoes with us up to this present moment, right? But if we kind of reflect on how empires behave and how who is at the suffering end of imperialism, who is at the suffering end of global for profit war efforts and so forth. And if we really sit with that terrible and uncomfortable awareness, we're not kind of far right from the kind of sense of not to excuse anybody like Heidegger, not to make. I have no defenses of Heidegger whatsoever, right? But the degree to which we see people in their frail fragile humanity and in their ethical and moral, moral failings, right? And say this is a human situation, this is a human condition and we in the modern United States, I would offer under neoliberal accelerating colonial capitalism and so forth, we are in a very tenuous position to pass judgment, right? We're in a very tenuous position. I would stop short of saying that we absolutely can't Right. But we might do so with caution, right?
- [73:40]
Jonathan Kay
Yeah.
- [73:40]
Stefan Dulich
I mean, I have just watching the events as they're transpiring and having lived 66 years and long enough to kind of pay attention and to see these ebbs and flows in my own society and to have a sense in a way that everything is fluid and it can move in any direction. And sometimes it moves. It's like, if you're looking at the natural world, climate change is going to affect things. But even if the climate is changing naturally, just micro changes in the environment will have massive kind of butterfly effect on morphological changes in the individuals that are in that environment. And there'll be this kind of recursive kind of feedback loop, and things just keep changing. So I'm looking at what's happening now, and I'm thinking, although it's not inevitable because that's just another word that's thrown out there, it does seem to me that every. That there are seasons to everything, and we're passing through one of those right now. And I don't know where it came from or where it's going or why it's here. I'm fascinated with it, horrified by it. But personally, and I'm just wondering within. I mean, I think I already know the answer to this, but within Kashmir Shaivism, how do we, you know, if you take kind of like a wide view of just the passage of time and human behavior or history, what's happening within history?
- [75:28]
Marshall Poe
How.
- [75:29]
Stefan Dulich
How does Kashmir Shaivism look at that? And for the individual that's living through a time like this, what is. What is a. What makes sense in terms of your. Your positionality or your stance or how you engage it? Don't engage it.
- [75:51]
Sean McCracken
Well, I'm taking a page again from another practice participation informant, a really great meditation teacher who recently in a talk said something to the effect of we don't rail against the darkness, we seek the light. And this is a statement, I think, coming from his teacher. It's coming from the lineage. And listen, I mean, I'm somebody who will by nature rail against the darkness day and night, you know, all day long. I am very passionate about that. I'm very engaged in that by nature. Right. But I don't think that this dear fellow is offering a type of quietism that's for someone like me to disparage. I think it actually contains. I think I'm actually a really good audience. Audience for this type of invitation in many ways, because my railing against the darkness will still be there. Right. It's very much A matter of like my, my identity and, and who I am and so forth. But there is a kind of circuit that is completed, one might say, if that makes any sense. I complete a circuit when I'm willing to touch in, meditate, deepening and effortlessly allow myself to be fully involved, fully engaged, bearing witness to things exactly as they are. That's tricky. It's a balancing act, right? So there's a lot of interiority, there's a lot of going deep within and there's a lot of taking in and observing and being with what is. And that's the affirmative way of saying it, but the sort of negative way of saying it is that I am neither reacting nor not reacting nor reacting to the possibility of reaction or non reaction. Right. That there's really just kind of being with and these. I think that's a threshold from which to even begin to discover some of what the scholastics, utpaladeva abhinavagupta have in mind when they're talking about contacting an upwelling of infinite ananda, spiritual bliss. Right. That comes from within. That's not effortful. That's not something that we put into practice or bring upon ourselves. That's always already present. And it is there to uncover and discover just through the process of being willing to quiet and deepen ourselves and go into ourselves. Now, theodicy, of course, when you're in divinity school, theodicy is on the final test. Theodicy is one of the final bosses of becoming any sort of minister or anybody engaged in this kind of process. So the theodic legacy, the problem of evil question is going to be ongoing. And I think the key is to continue actively and mindfully and consciously and compassionately to engage with it, not to imagine that we finally kind of settled it in any way. I think the process is the product. There is no product, there is only process. And when we get into natural evil, when we're thinking about, yeah, those aspects, effects of nature, whether it's climate or something else, that have no evidence, you know, human agents, certainly we can rail against that darkness all day and night, but that's nature being nature. Right. So what do we do? What do I do to really personalize it, like ultimately. Well, I've got to find another way other than just railing against it.
- [79:42]
Stefan Dulich
Yeah, absolutely. And I was thinking while you're talking of something that Darwin wrote about an insect or some kind of an animal that would lay its eggs within a living host and would eat it alive, basically, and then ask the question, how could a Benevolent God come up with something like that, or Jung's answer, which was because God is a complexio appositorum and the light and the dark, dark or as we call it, good and evil exist within that from the beginning. That, that's the, that's existence itself. If we're going to experience the bliss of being alive, we're going to also experience this, this darker aspect of it. They come together. That doesn't make it any easier to bear. And I, I with that. There are pendulum swings, it seems. I mean it's a very, it's very complex. It's not black and white. But there are pendulum swings and we're experiencing one right now. And that makes me wonder whether there was actually an imbalance in the system, which is why we're experiencing this push in another direction or if there's just, you know, really bad actors that have learned how to manipulate things because they're, you know, the, the tech bros. Right. The, the Elon Musk's have of understand fundamentally how the human mind works and how easy it is to manipulate people to get what it is that you want. But even that, even at that level, they don't exist for no reason. And these are just questions that I have that it seems to me that it's a question of finding balance. That it's not quietism just to say that we're seeking maybe not the still point, but a kind of a, a balance point where we, we're not moving too far in any, any direction. And that's a kind of a deeply meditative place to be. To live in the world, but to live in the world kind of holistically out of, out of a center that establishes itself through our practice over time. And if we're guided by that rather than guided by our appetites, then maybe that makes a difference. I don't know. I think it does. Love it.
- [82:25]
Sean McCracken
Yeah. I just. Oh, that, that, yeah. That moment with the, the insect, it's so grotesque and it's even traumatic to the sensitive person. I think it illuminates for me also where we put our attention. And these traditions will talk about an attentional focus. Now if you're traumatized by some aspect of nature, you can't but be focused on it. You're in the past, you're stuck, you're kind of stuck with that. But as far as, you know, practices of like non dual engagement and awareness, these traditions will really enjoin kind of a. Not starting with the grotesque, not starting with the horrific, and not starting with the traumatic, but really trying to find sweet moments and, you know, refined sweet points. And that's kind of the point of entry into expanding awareness. I did want to not let the time pass though. Also with talking about, you know, I touched on this a little bit with the contemplative and how there's at least three broad moments for me with the contemplative. Right. There's one where the person is just kind of in an inner private state, which is an important part of the arc. But it can lead also, if one stays there, it can lead to a kind of like fundamentalism, you know, a contemplative, non dual fundamentalism. Oh, well, I'm not going to tell you it's a secret. My guru says my guru is better. It can be very ego informing, narcissistic, solipsistic, producing if one is really trying to pin the pendulum on that side and stay in that private moment. Right. There's also a type of contemplation that is very generative and sweet and relational, but not amenable to any sort of communication. Right. We're on a threshold where we can't barely even talk about what we experienced. Right. We're invested in coming back into the world, but the privacy of the contemplation has got us with ourselves despite the impulse to relate. And then there's a moment that has guided, I think, my entire process with this, which is to be able to articulate, communicate where we were and how we got there. And this doesn't need to be in words and in fact, arguably can't actually be solely in words and so invites a deeper sense of relationality that goes beyond just having a nice conversation, but is about actually being with, being present with and having a trust arc and relationship over time. And I think that's the, the place from which I've always found a sense of how to contend with these traumas. Whether it's the broligarchy that you mentioned or whether it's, you know, these terrible things that nature has got into doing. For God's sake, couldn't you just not, why did you have to do that? But at the same time, the wonderful, amazing thing about consciousness as it's being communicated in these traditions, non dual shaiva traditions, is about spontaneity and play, not necessarily of the cosmos, but of the individual. Like how that reflects, how that reflects the divinity. It refracts a tiny essence to be able to play and to be able to, you know, mammals do this very well. Living beings do this very well. So we Have a playful and improvisational sense of being able to individually or collectively, like, you know, turn towards and be with trauma when we're ready and to suspend and hold it lightly and kind of turn away and go somewhere else when we're not and hopefully not get stuck and caught perpetually in one or the other. It really could be the entire full range of experience.
- [86:32]
Jonathan Kay
Oh, thanks, Sean. Yeah, that was really nice points on the contemplative posture. And thanks for sharing your experience with that. And I think the last one, the last point you mentioned is, is kind of in line with that, the Upanishadic from that quote of Debashish, which he would kind of define that praxeology as kind of a liminal twoness, oneness where you're sitting with the, the guru, but the guru is a person, but it's also maybe an animal and maybe it's some kind of a raga deity or something else. And there's this sense of like, you know, being open to co transformation and that, that, that kind of. I think it really opens to, you know, a type of integral pedagogy that is beyond an academic discipline, but is just about a more ethical posture of being in the world with others. And, and that's how I, I think that's how I would really, you know, and it sounds like you are also opening up this idea of the contemplated contemplative as that in like the subjective or the, the interiority. But also that idea of how do we slowly open that up as well. And so therefore we have something which can arise in terms of the micro political act of contemplation is actually, you know, it's maybe not working on the level of a social justice, but it is actually changing the relation of the part, parts to the whole. And contesting what we're being told is.
- [88:04]
Sean McCracken
The whole or what we're.
- [88:05]
Jonathan Kay
What is being forced upon us as mediating our access to the whole, for instance, you know, and so I just think that, you know, contemplate contemplation and this integralism, this integral theory that we've been talking about is, is I think really, really important in addressing our, you know, the problematic that we find ourselves in this, you know, in the state of, of the, the, you know, like this radical interconnectivity of the global condition, you know. Yeah, but we, we've been speaking for just over an hour and I would love to be able to go on, but I think maybe we could. It's close here. And then just say, let's do this again. I'd love to hear after your course. I'd love to hear about how the course went. Have a good semester. Wait, is it next semester or this semester you started?
- [88:56]
Sean McCracken
Yeah, we're doing it now. Great. Great. Yeah.
- [88:58]
Jonathan Kay
Yeah, perfect.
- [88:59]
Sean McCracken
Love to come back and. And say how it went. Absolutely.
- [89:01]
Jonathan Kay
Yes, absolutely. Is there anything that you want to mention before we close out? Just in terms of projects you're working on, any books you're coming have coming out, any. Anything.
- [89:15]
Sean McCracken
The. And I. I would lovingly encourage anybody who might be doing a long term project, whether that's your permaculture presentation at Rainbow Serpent Festival, it's the book club, your master's thesis, or your dissertation, just to kind of imagine and project yourself ahead to where it's going to be. So the dissertation's been embargoed and all the fates and graces willing, it'll become a book. But that's still in process, so. To be continued. Nice.
- [89:50]
Jonathan Kay
Well, thanks for being with us. And thanks, Stefan, as always, for being here with me.
- [89:55]
Stefan Dulich
Yeah, thanks, Jonathan. John, it was wonderful to spend an hour, a little over an hour with you, chatting and getting to. We haven't had a conversation like this in a while, so it's wonderful to see how your. How your. Your thinking has evolved and I can see that our students are in good hands with you.
- [90:16]
Sean McCracken
Thank you. To me, this is what it's all about.
- [90:18]
Stefan Dulich
Yeah. Yeah. The conversation. Beautiful.
- [90:22]
Jonathan Kay
All right, until next time.