Daniel Jones:
For topical sake of discussion, I posit this (my current state of thinking), in counter-balance to all the mapping that seems incesant here:
Your dhamma diagnosis doesn't matter.
What matters is your actions. What matters is, as conditions in your life change, what is your relationship to them? What matters is causes and conditions.
Maybe a dhamma diagnosis helps understand things, but it only matters in the sense that it alters conditions such that you moved from a place of suffering to a place of relatively less suffering & those interactions with the world & the other from a place of suffering to a place of less suffering.
A dhamma diagnosis is just another cause/condition for other things.
Is it useful or not? I posit: mostly not.
It's too easy to be entranced by the nature of your own experience and how that has changed over time. Mostly, that's what people are doing in daily life, being entranced in their experience and the way it's changing. Dhamma diagnosis can't be "well my experience is like this now, previously it was like that"... why not?
The measure of personal change is how conditions have changed, and the role 'you'[0] play in those causal networks. Maybe, for instance, gradually you come to a feeling that there's no experience in the world worth repeating. So causally "wanting" is absent in certain circumstances. Maybe, at somepoint, it's absent in all circumstances. like losing a limb... causal networks able to catch a ball with your right arm will not arise. Causal networks that involve motivations caused by wanting will not arise.
This is the traditional fetters model.
Take the number of times there's dhamma diagnosis and it causally feedbacks in order to remove the taints, by say, seeing the unsatisfactory nature of all experience and how there being an 'experiencer' is inherintly stressfull, and then take the number of times there's a dhamma diagnosis and it causes people to be further entranced by what is going on with their own experience? I think you could count on one hand the number of time dhamma diagnosis has fed back to benefit insight directly. [Causally, I think it could be encouraging, or give hope, when given by a well respected teacher... In that sense it could benefit insight, but rather indirectly.] Then you have to weight that against the benefit (or lack thereof) of how many times it encourages further self-view and identifying with one's own experience.
Thoughts? Views?
DISCLAIMER: DANIEL JONES IS NOT EVEN A STREAM ENTERER[1] AND USED TO STUDY PHILOSOPHY SO PROBABLY HAS A SHIT-TONNE OF WRONG VIEWS CHARACTERISED AS PAPANCA AND CONCEPTUAL THINKING ABOUT DHAMMA, TAKE THIS WITH A SHOVEL LOAD OF SALT. BUT HE THINKS THIS MIGHT BENEFIT OTHERS & HIS OWN DEVELOPMENT SO...
[0] aka 'this dependently arisen mass of sankhara's/volitional formations, consciousness, contact, etc etc'
[1] and anyway, dhamma diagnosis doesn't matter. What matters is causal effects of this post...
aloha daniel,
I agree about the obsession with maps being counter-productive in overcoming ego. A "map is not the territory" has become a truism, so of course it is wrong. Lewis carroll once wrote (in "sylvie and bruno concluded") about a map with a "scale of a mile to a mile." One character noted there were difficulties in using the map and said, "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." (Luis borges wrote a little story based on this idea.)
There is, presumably, a "territory" (ding an sich, if you philosophize), but what we think we know is more of a map. We see what we believe is out there based on sensual clues and (mostly) context. The more context, the fewer the clues we use to fill in the map we use to "navigate" the world. So-called "experience" provides context. The more experienced a person is, the less they actually encounter the world in all its randomity, vigor, and beauty. Children and "empty" adepts experience the freshness and vitality of life.
There is also a lot of talk about the commentary that goes on in people's heads, the "inner dialogue" which seems to overlay experience with anything from sober and considered commentary to utter babble; more or less. If what we see and hear and believe is "real" is actually just a map, then all this inner commentary is a secondary sort of map, at one remove from actual "experience." The kazoo playing over the orchestra. Then we have the comments of others, some wise perhaps but most not, as a tertiary source of mapping. By this time we have gotten to a pretty attenuated version of "reality." Tatters of old maps crop up here and there in the deserts, as in borge's story.
Plato noticed that we see circles, horses, people, but the ones we actually see with our senses are not perfect circles, perfect horses or perfect people, they deviate from perfection in countless small ways. He concluded that the idea of perfection is more real than the experiences of things that are more or less conformable to the idea.
I think in actual fact there is constant feedback between novelty (randomity) and context (pattern; plato's "idea"). What conforms to pattern is seen as right, good, beautiful, just. The Pattern, what is good, beautiful, just and true, evolves intuitively in accordance with encounters with randomity. We interfere with this natural process when we try to take directions instead of trustingour own reason and intuition. Logic tells us that what has happened will happen again (pattern). Intuition sees everything new (random). We have two hemispheres, and the logical left distinguishes "symbol" from "reality." The intuitive right half probably cannot distinguish symbol from reality, dreaming and hallucinating its reality. We use these two halves of the brain to provide parallax, as the eyes do; a sense of depth.
This said, you go straight from decrying an obsession with maps to denying that anyone's dhamma diagnosis matters. I can't go that far. What about the zen mondos, the q & a that so often leads to sudden, overpowering insight?
The delusion that our thinking is strictly our own has to do with accepting the subjectivity of the ego, which the buddha tells us is false, there being no self-nature in nature. We can only think in terms of dialogue, anything else is babble; as wittengenstein points out, "there is no private language." The hindus have the image of the lotus blossom, which floats on the surface of the pond, but rises and falls with that surface, never losing touch with the supporting water. So we interface our own map with other's maps, while language itself provides a metamap coincident with the territory of conscious human experience. We can only rise as high as our (human) imagination can go. It doesn't matter what we may imagine another knows, if we don't know it ourselves. There was once a half-wise fish, who approached a wise fish and asked, "please sir, can you tell me where the ocean is?" The wise fish replied, "The ocean is all around you." The half-wise fish, disappointed, swam off saying, "but this is just water."
If we try to adapt the map of another to our own needs we will be confused. We will translate their map points into our own, simply to try to make sense of it. Our skills at discerning patterns will overlay one set of patterns on another, causing dissonance. If we are not true to our own experience, we will lose any real sense of who we are. I suspect this is the cause of dark nights and letdowns. When one's map (lright brain) and one's territory (left brain) don't coincide, we feel distress and have difficulty coping. This is often caused by accepting uncritically what people say and trying to believe in contradictory things. No one can walk the path for us. We have to be path-oriented and not goal-oriented.
Now, perhaps I diagnose a dhamma "problem" as one of attachment to maps? Is this not what we are doing? We're not saying my map is better than your map, and that you should use mine. Yet there is guidance, in the form of "throw away your map."
As for "the measure of change" being pragmatism, that's just another map. Or a clock. Maybe, as nietzsche says, you gradually come to feeling that all experiences are ones you will be willing to repeat endlessly, as "eternal recurrence." Maybe the endless sequence of human lives is our "eternal recurrence."
terry
from gregory bateson, "mind and nature":
2. THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, AND THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED
This principle, made famous by Alfred Korzybski, strikes at many levels. It reminds us in a general way that when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain. But in a abstract way, Korzybski's statement asserts that in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, coding, between the report and the thing reported, the Ding an sich. Above all, the relation between the report and that mysterious thing reported tends to have the nature of a classification, an assignment of the thing to a class. Naming is always classifying, and mapping is essentially the same as naming.
Korzybski was, on the whole, speaking as a philosopher, attempting to persuade people to discipline their manner of thinking. But he could not win. When we come to apply his dictum to the natural history of human mental process, the matter is not quite so simple. The distinction between the name and the thing named or the map and territory is perhaps really made only by the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic and affective hemisphere, normally on the right-hand side is probably unable to distinguish name from thing named. It therefore happens that certain nonrational types of behavior are necessarily present in human life. We do, in fact, have two hemispheres; and we cannot get away from that fact. Each hemisphere does, in fact, operate somewhat differently from the other, and we cannot get away from the tangles that that difference proposes.
For example, with the dominant hemisphere, we can regard such a thing as a flag as a sort of name of the country or organization that it represents. But the right hemisphere does not draw this distinction and regards the flag as sacramentally identical with what it represents. So "Old Glory" is the United States . If somebody steps on it, the response may be rage. And this rage will not be diminished by an explanation of map-territory relations. (After all, the man who tramples the flag is equally identifying it with that for which it stands.) There will always and necessarily be a large number of situations in which the response is not guided by the logical distinction between the name and the thing named .
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