Objectivism and Zen
Paul Hibbert has posted an interesting essay on Objectivism and Zen over at the Sense of Life Objectivists web site. Some good discussion has ensued, and I just posted the following on their bulletin board:
Thanks for the intriguing discussion, everyone. I agree with Paul and Ross that Objectivism and (parts of) Buddhism are compatible.
Like Paul and Ross, I have personally benefited from Buddhist practices like meditation and mindfulness. In fact, these practices have dramatically increased my ability to be rational during stressful circumstances where I would have otherwise been quite ineffective at marshalling the resources of my mind.
I had mixed feelings reading Paul’s essay, however. Although I understand what he’s talking about and I recognize that he has some valid points, they are expressed in a fashion that is not likely to be embraced by, or even comprehensible to, Objectivists who have not taken the initiative to explore the topic on their own. This is unfortunate, because anyone committed to consciousness has much to learn from Eastern approaches to the development of consciousness.
One particularly difficult sticking point is that Paul (and Stewart) are not clear about what they mean by “consciousness” when they say that reason and consciousness cannot be exercised at the same time.
The missing piece of information here is that, in Buddhist practice, present-moment awareness is rightly viewed as the ultimate basis of consciousness. I mean, how much value would there be to logical thinking if you had no first-order perceptions to base it on?
And yet, practicing present-moment awareness is mutually exclusive with abstract thought, which always draws one’s attention away from the present moment. As such, cultivating a deep capacity for present-moment awareness, through meditation, does require the temporary suspension of reason-oriented thinking. You have to turn off “thinking” in order to turn on “watching deeply.”
This dichotomy between thinking and watching is not entirely foreign to Westerners; it can also be found in the writings of many Western psychologists (esp. humanists and existentialists), who have discovered in their work with patients that people often must turn off their “judging mind” in order to be fully and authentically present with their life experiences.
(Unlike Paul, I don’t think it’s necessary or helpful to dichotomize the brain along these lines. The conventional wisdom about the brain’s hemispheres is overly simplistic and leads to numerous misunderstandings of what is actually taking place at the neurological level.)
After practicing Buddhist-style awareness, one can return to rational thought at any time. But one does so from a place of greater serenity, insight, and connection with the simple facts of reality. One’s mind is released from the emotional/rational feedback-loops that characterize so much of our “thinking” and can lead to neurosis.
Almost everyone who experiments with present-moment awareness finds it to be a therapeutic state of mind, and I’m fully confident that psychologists will be exploring it in far more detail in the coming decades. (In fact, I have an outstanding article, here on my desk, about mindfulness and psychological health that is about to be published by Kirk Warren Brown and his colleagues in the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology.)
This subject warrants a much longer essay, and I plan to write one soon for publication in a Rand-oriented journal. My comments here are intended only to point one in the right direction, in case one is open to the general line of inquiry.
I am posting a copy of this essay on my weblog, at http://www.muditajournal.com, which is devoted, in a general way, to the interface of mindfulness and individualism. I welcome further comments or discussion of the topic there, since I am not (yet?) a regular visitor to this forum.
Even though I have strong reservations about Paul’s approach to the subject, I am grateful that he wrote the essay, stimulating this discussion. And I heartily commend SOLO HQ for their willingness to publish the essay. I’m adding them to my blogroll links under the “Objectivism” category.
You give a very nice description of (Buddhist) in-the-moment direct sensory perception vs. (Objectivist) thinking!
I personally have found it almost moment-by-moment challenging to balance the two. I journaled this a couple days ago:
When you’re someone who best filters the world through through your own self-analysis, then minimizing self-analysis — trying to simplify & shut down & be more naively Buddhist — leads to ignoring the world! Being very sensate does reduce one’s consciousness to range-of-the-moment, sadly…
The whole thread, including a requested expansion on that bit, is here.