Escaping the Western Cultural Prison of Dualistic Materialism

I spent last weekend catching up with my Rigpa dharma community at the Sydney Rigpa Centre in Newtown, for a special Buddhist retreat with Patrick Gaffney. Patrick co-authored The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1993) with Sogyal Rinpoche, based on his oral teachings to his students who by then were clustered in groups all over the world—the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada.

Patrick met Sogyal Rinpoche when they were both students as Cambridge University in the early 1970s, and would soon abandon his career as a budding Egyptologist in the British Museum to work closely with Sogyal Rinpoche, becoming fluent in the classical Tibetan language of the dharma,  and so becoming part of the great ‘translation’ of the Tibetan Buddhist knowledge system for the Western mind. This wisdom knowledge system was brought to Tibet from Buddhist India in the 8^th century, providing a unique system that links experiential meditative practices and mythopoetic ways of talking about reality with analytical philosophy to explore the nature of the human mind, cognitive perception and emotional experience. In so doing it makes a clear distinction between ordinary conceptual mind (sem) and primordial wisdom mind (yeshe) with its quality of self-cognisant awareness (rigpa). The training of the mind to arrive at this realisation requires considerable effort and guidance by a teacher of recognised spiritual attainment and is the subject of countless books on Buddhist meditation in the Tibetan tradition.

This understanding of mind pre-dates Western engagement with psychology, which only emerged in the late 19^th century, along with the new focus on scientific materialism that came with Darwin’s controversial theory of the evolution of species, Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ arguing for the liberating effects of free commerce, and Karl Marx’s call for the emancipation of working people through their ownership of the means of economic production (communism)—all emergent with the great Industrial Revolution that fundamentally reshaped Western culture. The later 20^th century interest in cognitive science took a materialist approach by focusing on the brain, only more recently recognising that ‘intelligence’ might be more distributed in the whole body-system as a complex system, with a new focus on gut biome.

As Patrick said last weekend, when he encountered Tibetan Buddhist ideas at Cambridge through Sogyal Rinpoche and such renowned teachers as Dudjom Rinpoche, he was completely captivated by its radical profundity. It had the same impact on me when I met Sogyal Rinpoche in 1985 during his first visit to Australia. Despite my professional career in the sociology of technological innovation, my real interest was in the wisdom knowledge system of Tibetan Buddhism, which has kept me enthralled my entire life, and which I have written about in my published memoir, Call of the Dakini.

The Embodied Mind and Awareness

So, it was with great interest when I came across this article by Tham Zhiwa from his substack, Dhama Beat on the idea of Quantum Phenomenology where he references the work of Francisco Varela et al, The Embodied Mind (1991), whose book had a big impact on my thinking. I briefly met Varela when he visited Lerab Ling, Sogyal Rinpoche’s retreat centre in France, while I was there for a 3 month retreat in 1992. Varela was instrumental in the establishment of the Mind and Life Institute with the Dalai Lama, seeking to explore similarities and differences between Western cognitive sciences and Buddhist understanding about the nature of mind, human perception and emotions. As Varela notes, In the panoramic perspective of rigpa awareness, mindfulness is likened to the individual words of a sentence, whereas awareness is the grammar that encompasses the entire sentence (p.26).

Zhiwa’s article on ‘quantum phenomenology’ continues this project of building bridges between scientific thinking and Buddhism to question and deconstruct the dominant Cartesian worldview that infects Western cultural materialism, arguing that continuing to cling to Cartesian dualism through reductionism, binary thinking, and the myth of objectivity perpetuates the cultural anxiety that haunts us and is ever present. Varela et al claim that the rediscovery of Asian philosophy, particularly of the Buddhist tradition, is a second renaissance in the cultural history of the West, with the potential to be equally important as the rediscovery of Greek thought in the European renaissance (p.22).

Drawing on Varela, Zhiwa calls for the meditation practice of communion as embodied reflection. In basic mindfulness training of the mind, Buddhist meditation practices such as shamatha (calm abiding), allow us to discover an aspect of mind that is  neither thoughts nor emotions, and in this space to further discover in that stillness the quality of self-cognising awareness that is the basis of both wisdom and compassion. Associated analytical contemplative practices allow the meditator to investigate the very idea of a ‘self’ , which occupies such an important role in Western culture, as anything fixed or locatable, to discover it is rather a process of ‘self-ing’ moment by moment, interdependently arising with the world around us. Recognising this has often been translated in English as ‘egolessness’, but this should not be confused with having no experiential sense of personal agency.

The methodological heart of the interaction between mindfulness/awareness meditation, phenomenology, and cognitive science… is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By ‘embodied’ we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together; i.e., reflection not just on experience, but reflection as a form of experience itself.

Meditation works counter-intuitively with the normal processes of conceptual thinking. As Sogyal Rinpoche explains, “it is to make a complete break with how we normally operate, it is free of struggle, of trying to succeed and fearing failure. Instead it is an ambitionless state where there is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither hope nor fear; a state in which we slowly begin to release all those emotions and concepts that have imprisoned us”. However, in the Buddhist tradition, the purpose is not merely releaving stress and anxiety. Rather in that calm stillness, there is the potential to experience a state of expansive awareness and natural compassion, a sense of profound interconnectedness with the world around us that can heighten our cognitive capacity.

Quantum Phenomenology

Zhiwa says: “I’ve come to think of this kind of experiential reflection myself as the practice, or praxis, of quantum phenomenology; that is, approaching phenomenal awareness with a worldview informed by quantum physics (holistic, integral) rather than the ‘abstract, disembodied’ paradigm of classical physics.”

He goes on to suggest that Cartesian anxiety is chronic and obstructive because it points to the shaky foundations of our worldview. It has given rise to a mental health crisis that is unprecedented and widely acknowledged, with the obsession with borders and security in a world where none can hide from the relational interdependence of climate breakdown, while all but the Indigenous and dispossessed are complicit in the breaking of world systems.

Drawing on his dharma work with Neljorma Khandro Tseringma, Zhiwa suggests that just as we can measure our own mind with brain waves, so when our mind focuses in on the illusion of solidity all it finds are waves of potential energy waiting to be collapsed by conscious agency. A world waiting, in other words, to be experienced as a present phenomena, not to be ‘othered,’ objectified, or constrained by linear temporal constructs.

This is the fertile ground from which holistic indigeneity emerges – as a participatory experience of the natural world.

Zhiwa Woodbury proposes core principles of holistic indigeneity, where Earth becomes our ally, in his book Climate Trauma, Reconciliation & Recovery: Coming into Proper Relationship with Mother Earth (Amazon, 2022) as:

1. RADICAL HUMILITY: We have to begin by admitting we were wrong, especially about Indigenous peoples and our ability to control nature and the basic powers of the universe.
2. SHARED RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CLIMATE: Instead of blaming corporations and asking government to save us from the consequences of the way we live in the world, we need to actually take responsibility for the way we live in the world, focusing on what we are not doing for the future rather than dwelling on what others have done in the past.
3. RECIPROCITY ~ this is an attitudinal shift grounded in gratitude and acknowledgement of interdependence.
4. SIMPLICITY ~ a complement to reciprocity by which we take only what we need, and leave the rest.
5. HOLISM ~ this is an integral worldview grounded in Gaia theory, ecology, quantum physics, and our organismic relationship to Earth.
6. ANIMACY ~ borrowing from Robyn Wall-Kimmerer, this linguistic orientation follows from holism, and grants being-ness to what we have up till now objectified as living ‘things.’
7. RELATIONAL ORIENTATION ~ the takeaway from quantum physics is that there ARE no things in the world, there are only relations, and thus we must stop objectifying every living thing and nature herself.
8. BIOPHILIA ~ a love of life and the living world which supports a more symbiotic relationship between humans and Gaia, and includes such initiatives as promoting alliances with keystone species in the restoration of degraded ecosystems.
9. And finally, ENTHEO-GENEITY ~ the recognition, based upon Indigenous wisdom and personal experience, that certain plants connect us with Gaia’s superior intelligence. They are like her voice.

 At its most fundamental level, reality is a boundary-less, conscious communion of self and other, where ‘self’ is found to be reflected in and composed of all that is other, and ‘other’ is discovered to be none other than self-reflecting awareness.

 That, suggests Tham Zhiwa, is the experiential, embodied worldview of quantum phenomenology in a nutshell.