compassione del Tao

La ricerca del Sé e della Coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista, considerando mondi di coscienza ed esperienza senza fondamento analizzato secondo la tradizione del Buddhismo Abhidharma, implica diverse considerazioni etiche, tra le quali la principale è la compassione (con - passione) che nella tradizione Buddhista è, insieme alla saggezza (prajñā), una delle due basi di fondamento:

WORLDS WITHOUT GROUND

Laying Down a Path in Walking

Ethics and Human Transformation

Compassion: Worlds without Ground

If planetary thinking requires that we embody the realization of groundlessness in a scientific culture, planetary building requires the embodiment of concern for the other with whom we enact a world. The tradition of mindfulness/awareness offers a path by which this may actually be brought about.
The mindfulness/awareness student first begins to see in a precise fashion what the mind is doing, its restless, perpetual grasping, moment to moment. This enables the student to cut some of the automaticity of his habitual patterns, which leads to further mindfulness, and he begins to realize that there is no self in any of his actual experience. This can be disturbing and offers the temptation to swing to the other extreme, producing moments of loss of heart. The philosophical flight into nihilism that we saw earlier in this chapter mirrors a psychological process: the reflex to grasp is so strong and deep seated that we reify the absence of a solid foundation into a solid absence or abyss.
As the student goes on, however, and his mind relaxes further into awareness, a sense of warmth and inclusiveness dawns. The street fighter mentality of watchful self-interest can be let go somewhat to be replaced by interest in others. We are already other-directed even at our most negative, and we already feel warmth toward some people, such as family and friends. The conscious realization of the sense of relatedness and the development of a more impartial sense of warmth are encouraged in the mindfulness/awareness tradition by various contemplative practices such as the generation of loving-kindness. It is said that the full realization of groundlessness (sunyata) cannot occur if there is no warmth.
For this reason, in the Mahayana tradition, which we have so far presented as being centrally concerned with groundlessness as sunyata, there is an equally central and complementary concern with groundlessness as compassion.ll In fact, most of the traditional Mahayana presentations do not begin with groundlessness but rather with the cultivation of compassion for all sentient beings. Nagarjuna, for example, states in one of his works that the Mahayana teaching has "an essence of emptiness and compassion." This statement is sometimes paraphrased by saying that emptiness (sunyata) is full of compassion (karuna).
Thus sunyata, the loss of a fixed reference point or ground in either self, other, or a relationship between them, is said to be inseparable from compassion like the two sides of a coin or the two wings of a bird. Our natural impulse, in this view, is one of compassion, but it has been obscured by habits of ego-clinging like the sun obscured by a passing cloud.
This is by no means the end of the path, however. For some traditions, there is a further step to be made in understanding beyond the sunyata of codependent origination-that is, the sunyata of naturalness. Up to now, we have been talking about the contents of realization in primarily negative terms: no-self, egolessness, no world, nonduality, emptiness, groundlessness. In actual fact, the majority of the world's Buddhists do not speak of their deepest concerns in negative terms; these negatives are preliminaries-necessary to remove habitual patterns of grasping, unsurpassably important and precious, but nonetheless preliminaries-that are pointing toward the realization of a positively conceived state. The Western world-for example, Christianity-although pleased to engage in dialogue with the negating aspects of Buddhism (perhaps as a way of speaking to the nihilism in our own tradition), steadfastly (at times even self-consciously) tends to ignore the Buddhist positive.
To be sure, the Buddhist positive is threatening. It is no ground whatsoever; it cannot be grasped as ground, reference point, or nest for a sense of ego. It does not exist-nor does it not exist. It cannot be an object of mind or of the conceptualizing process; it cannot be seen, heard, or thought-thus the many traditional images for it: the sight of a blind man, a flower blooming in the sky. When the conceptual mind tries to grasp it, it finds nothing, and so it experiences it as emptiness. It can be known (and can only be known) directly. It is called Buddha nature, no mind, primordial mind, absolute bodhicitta, wisdom mind, warrior's mind, all goodness, great perfection, that which cannot be fabricated by mind, naturalness. It is not a hair's breadth different from the ordinary world; it is that very same ordinary, conditional, impermanent, painful, groundless world experienced (known) as the unconditional, supreme state. And the natural manifestation, the embodiment, of this state is compassion-unconditional, fearless, ruthless, spontaneous compassion.

"When the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps, ... one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born, and compassionate energy arises without pretense."

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

What do we mean by unconditional compassion? We need to backtrack and consider the development of compassion from the more mundane point of view of the student. The possibility for compassionate concern for others, which is present in all humans, is usually mixed with the sense of ego and so becomes confused with the need to satisfy one's own cravings for recognition and self-evaluation. The spontaneous compassion that arises when one is not caught in the habitual patterns-when one is not performing volitional actions out of karmic cause and effect-is not done with a sense of need for feedback from its recipient. It is the anxiety about feedback-the response of the other-that causes us tension and inhibition in our action. When action is done without the business-deal mentality, there can be relaxation. This is called supreme (or transcendental) generosity.
If this seems abstract, the reader might try a brief exercise. We usually read books like this with some heavy-handed sense of purpose. Imagine for a moment that you are reading this solely in order to benefit others. Does that change the feeling tone of the task?
When discussing wisdom from the point of view of compassion, the Sanskrit term often used is bodhicitta, which has been variously translated as "enlightened mind," "the heart of the enlightened state of mind," or simply "awakened heart." Bodhicitta is said to have two aspects, one absolute and one relative. Absolute bodhicitta is the term applied to whatever state is considered ultimate or fundamental in a given Buddhist tradition-the experience of the groundlessness of sunyata or the (positively defined) sudden glimpse of the natural, awake state itself. Relative bodhicitta is that fundamental warmth toward the phenomenal world that practitioners report arises from absolute experience and that manifests itself as concern for the welfare of others beyond merely naive compassion. As opposed to the order in which we have previously described these experiences, it is said that the development of a sense of unproblematical warmth toward the world leads to the experience of the flash of absolute bodhicitta.
Buddhist practitioners obviously do not realize any of these things (even mindfulness) all at once. They report that they catch glimpses that encourage them to make further efforts. One of the most important steps consists in developing compassion toward one's own grasping fixation on ego-self. The idea behind this attitude is that confronting one's own grasping tendencies is a friendly act toward oneself. As this friendliness develops, one's awareness and concern for those around one enlarges as well. It is at this point that one can begin to envision a more open-ended and nonegocentric compassion.
Another characteristic of the spontaneous compassion that does not arise out of the volitional action of habitual patterns is that it follows no rules. It is not derived from an axiomatic ethical system nor even from pragmatic moral injunctions. It is completely responsive to the needs of the particular situation. Nagarjuna conveys this attitude of responsiveness:

Just as the grammarian makes one study grammar,
A Buddha teaches according to the tolerance of his students;
Some he urges to refrain from sins, others to do good,
Some to rely on dualism, others on non-dualism;
And to some he teaches the profound,
The terrifying, the practice of enlightenment,
Whose essence is emptiness that is compassion.

Unrealized practioners, of course, cannot dispense with rules and moral injunctions. There are many ethical rules in Buddhism whose aim is to put the body and mind into a form that imitates as nearly as possible how genuine compassion might become manifest in that situation (just as the meditative sitting posture is said to be an imitation of enlightenment).
With respect to its situational specificity and its responsiveness, this view of nonegocentric compassion might seem similar to what has been discussed in certain recent psychoanalytic writings as "ethical know-how." In the case of compassionate concern as generated in the context of mindfulness/awareness, this know-how could be said to be based in responsiveness to oneself and others as sentient beings without ego-selves who suffer because they grasp after ego-selves. And this attitude of responsiveness is in tum rooted in an ongoing concern: How can groundlessness be revealed ethically as nonegocentric compassion?
Compassionate action is also called skillful means (upaya) in Buddhism. Skillful means are inseparable from wisdom. It is interesting to consider the relationship of skillful means to ordinary skills such as learning to drive a car or learning to play the violin. Is ethical action (compassionate action) in Buddhism to be considered a skill-perhaps analogous to the Heidegger/Dreyfus account of ethical action as a non-rule-based, developed skill? As we discussed at some length with respect to meditation practice, in some ways skillful means in Buddhism could be seen as similar to our notion of a skill: the student practices ("plants good seeds")-that is, avoids harmful actions, performs beneficial ones, meditates. Unlike an ordinary skill, however, in skillful means the ultimate effect of these practices is to remove all egocentric habits so that the practitioner can realize the wisdom state, and compassionate action can arise directly and spontaneously out of wisdom. It is as if one were born already knowing how to play the violin and had to practice with great exertion only to remove the habits that prevented one from displaying that virtuosity.
It should by now be obvious that the ethics of compassion has nothing to do with satisfying some pleasure principle. From the standpoint of mindfulness/awareness, it is fundamentally impossible to satisfy desires that are born within the grasping mind. A sense of unconditional well-being arises only through letting go of the grasping mind. There is, however, no reason for ascetism. Material and social goods are to be employed however the situation warrants. (The middle way between the extremes of ascetism and indulgence is actually the historically earIiest sense in which the term middle way was employed in Buddhism.)
The results of the path of mindful, open-ended learning are profoundly transformative. Instead of being embodied (more accurately, reembodied moment after moment) out of struggle, habit, and sense of self, the goal is to become embodied out of compassion for the world. The Tibetan tradition even talks about the five aggregates being transformed into the five wisdoms. Notice that this sense of transformation does not mean going away from the world-getting out of the five aggregates. The aggregates may be the constituents on which the inaccurate sense of self and world are based, but (more properly and) they are also the basis of wisdom. The means of transforming the aggregates into wisdom is knowledge, realizing the aggregates accurately-empty of any egoistic ground whatsoever yet filled with unconditional goodness (Buddha nature, etc.), intrinsically just as they are in themselves.
How can such an attitude of all encompassing, decentered, responsive, compassionate concern be fostered and embodied in our culture? It obviously cannot be created merely through norms and rationalistic injunctions. It must be developed and embodied through a discipline that facilitates letting go of ego-centered habits and enables compassion to become spontaneous and self-sustaining. The point is not that there is no need for normative rules in the relative world---clearly such rules are a necessity in any society. It is that unless such rules are informed by the wisdom that enables them to be dissolved in the demands of responsivity to the particularity and immediacy of lived situations, the rules will become sterile, scholastic hindrances to compassionate action rather than conduits for its manifestation.
Perhaps less obvious but even more strongly enjoined by the mindfulness/awareness tradition is that meditations and practices undertaken simply as self-improvement schemes will foster only egohood. Because of the strength of egocentric habitual conditioning, there is a constant tendency, as practitioners in all contemplative traditions are aware, to try to grasp, possess, and become proud of the slightest insight, glimpse of openness, or understanding. Unless such tendencies become part of the path of letting go that leads to compassion, then insights can actually do more harm than good. Buddhist teachers have often written that it is far better to remain as an ordinary person and believe in ultimate foundations than to cling to some remembered experience of groundlessnes without manifesting compassion.
Finally, talk alone will certainly not suffice to engender spontaneous nonegocentric concern. Even more than experiences of insight, words and concepts can be easily grasped at, taken as ground, and woven into a cloak of egohood. Teachers in all contemplative traditions warn against fixated views and concepts taken as reality. Indeed, our promulgations of the concept of enactive cognitive science give us some pause. We would surely not want to trade the relative humility of objectivism for the hubris of thinking that we construct our world. Better by far a straightforward cognitivist than a bloated and solipsistic enactivist.
We simply cannot overlook the need for some form of sustained, disciplined practice. This is not something that one can make up for oneself-any more than one can make up the history of Western science for oneself. Nothing will take its place; one cannot just do one form of science rather than another and think that one is gaining wisdom or becoming ethical. Individuals must personally discover and admit their own sense of ego in order to go beyond it. Although this happens at the individual level, it has implications for science and for society.

comunicazione specifica del Tao

M.C. Escher, Circle Limit III, 1959

Charles T. Tart descrive in questo capitolo come la comunicazione tra due o più individui dipenda dal loro stato di coscienza relativo:

State-Specific Communication

"According the general opinion of the uninitiated," mused Nasrudin, as he walked along the road, "dervishes are mad. According to the sages, however, they are the true masters of the world. I would like to test one, and myself, to make sure."

Then he saw a tall figure, robed like a Akldan dervish—reputed to be exceptionally enlightened men—coming towards him.

"Friend," said the Mulla, "I want to perform an experiment, to test your powers of psychic penetration, and also my sanity."

"Proceed," said the Akldan.

Nasrudin made a sudden sweeping motion with his arm, then clenched his fist. "What have I in my hand?"

"A horse, chariot, and driver," said the Akldan immediately.

"That's no real test",—Nasrudin was petulant—"because you saw me pick them up."

In d-ASCs people often claim to have exceptional and important insights about themselves or about the nature of the world that they are unable to communicate to the rest of us owing to the ineffability of the experience, the inadequacy of language, or the "lowness" of the ordinary d-SoC that makes us incapable of understanding "higher" things. The general scientific opinion, however, is that communicative ability deteriorates in various d-ASCs, such as drug-induced or mystical states. This opinion is usually based on the observation that the experimenter/observer has difficulty understanding what the person in the d-ASC is talking about; his comments make no sense by ordinary consensus reality standards.
I suspect that sometimes this judgment is based on fear, on the semiconscious recognition that what a person in a d-ASC is saying may be all too true, but somehow unacceptable. I recall the time when a friend of mine was having a psychotic breakdown: it struck me that half the things he said were clearly crazy, in the sense of being unrelated to the social situation around him and reflecting only his own internal processes, but the other half of the things he said were such penetrating, often unflattering, observations about what other people were really feeling and doing that they were threatening to most of us. Bennett makes the same observation, noting that after his wife had a cerebral hemorrhage she seemed to lose all the usual social inhibitions and said directly what she felt. This was extremely threatening to most people and was regarded as senile dementia or insanity; yet to a few who were not personally threatened by her observation, her comments were extremely penetrating. If you label someone as crazy, you need not listen to him.
How can we decide in an objective fashion whether someone in a d-ASC is able to communicate more or less clearly? Perhaps this is the wrong question. I propose that, for at least some d-ASCs, there are significant alterations in the manner in which a person communicates. Changes in various subsystems, especially the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem, produce a new logic, so that the grammar of communication, including the nonverbal aspects of expression, constitutes a different kind of language, one that may be just as effective in communicating with someone else in the same d-ASC as ordinary communication is in the ordinary d-Soc. We must consider this possibility in an objective manner, but be careful not implicitly to equate "objectivity' with the standards of only one d-SoC.
For a given d-ASC, then, how can we determine whether there is deterioration, improvement, or simply alteration in communication ability, or a complex combination of all three? More specifically, we must ask this question with respect to communication across d-SoCs—about communication between two persons in different d-SoCs as well as about communication between two persons in the same d-SoC. In regard to the last two situations, only theorizing is possible, for all published research deals only with the restricted situation of an experimental subject in a d-ASC and the experimenter/observer in his ordinary d-SoC.
If the grammar of communication is altered in a d-ASC, then clearly a judge in an ordinary d-SoC cannot distinguish between the hypotheses of deterioration and of alteration in the communicative style of a person in a d-ASC. The specialized argot of a subcultural group may sound, to an outside observer, like the talk of schizophrenics. A person familiar with that subculture, on the other hand, finds the communications exchanged among the group perfectly meaningful, perhaps extraordinarily rich. In this example, contextual clues may make the outsider suspect this is a subcultural argot, but if the group is in an institutional setting and is labeled "schizophrenic," he may readily conclude that its speech has indeed deteriorated, without bothering to study the matter further.
To judge adequately whether communicative patterns have altered (and possibly improved) rather than deteriorated, the judge must function in the same d-ASC as the communicator. Experienced marijuana smokers, for example, claim they can subtly communicate all sorts of things—especially humor—to each other while intoxicated. The degree to which an observer in a different d-SoC—for example, his ordinary d-SoC—can understand the same communication is interesting, but not a valid measure of the adequacy of the communication within the d-ASC. And, as explained in earlier chapters, identification of a person as being in a particular d-ASC must be based not just on the fact that he has undergone an induction procedure (for example, taken a drug) but on actual mapping of his location in experiential space.

Suppose the judge is in the same d-ASC as the subjects in the study, and reports that their communication is rich and meaningful, not at all deteriorated. How do we know that the judge's mental processes themselves are not deteriorated and that he is not just enjoying the illusion of understanding, rather than prosaically judging the subjects' communication? The question leads to general problems of measuring the accuracy and adequacy of communication, an area I know little about. All the work in this area has been done with respect to ordinary d-SoC communication, but I believe the techniques can be applied to this question of adequacy of communication in d-ASCs. I shall try to show this by describing one technique for rating ordinary d-SoC communication with which I am familiar that could be readily applied to judging d-ASC communication.
It is the Cloze technique. It measures, simultaneously, how well a written or verbal communication is both phrased (encoded) and how well it is understood by a receiver or judge. From a written message or a transcript of a spoken message, every fifth word is deleted. Judges then guess what the deleted words are, and the total number of words correct is a measure of the accuracy and meaningfulness of the communication. If a judge understands the communicator well, he can fill in a high proportion of the words correctly; if he does not understand him well he gets very few correct. This technique works because ordinary language is fairly redundant, so the overall context of the message allows excellent guesses about missing words. This technique can be applied to communications between subjects as judged both by a judge in the same d-ASC, thus testing adequacy of communication within the d-ASC, and by a judge in a different d-SoC, thus measuring transfer across states. We think of the different d-SoC, thus measuring transfer across states. We think of the different d-SoC as being the ordinary state, but other d-SoCs are possible, and we can eventually use this technique for a cross-comparison across all d-SoCs we know of and produce important information about both communication and the nature of various d-SoCs.
Two problems arise in applying the Cloze technique in investigating communications in d-ASCs. One is that a particular d-ASC may be associated with a switch to more nonverbal components of communication. This difficulty could probably be remedied by making videotapes of the procedure, and systematically deleting every fifth second, and letting the judges fill in the gap. The second problem is that communication in a d-ASC may be as adequate, but less redundant, a circumstance that would artificially lower the scores on the Cloze test without adequately testing the communication. I leave this problem as a challenge to others.
Another important methodological factor is the degree of adaptation to functioning in a particular d-ASC. I am sure techniques of the Cloze type would show deterioration in communication within d-ASCs for subjects who are relatively naive in functioning in those d-ASCs. Subjects have to adapt to the novelty of a d-ASC; they may even need specific practice in learning to communicate within it. The potential for an altered style of communication, state-specific communication, may be present and need to be developed, rather than being available immediately upon entering the d-ASC. I do not imply simply that people learn to compensate for the deterioration associated with a d-ASC, but rather that they learn the altered style of communication inherent in or more natural to that particular d-ASC.
In Chapter 16, in which I propose the creation of state-specific sciences, I assume that communication within some d-ASCs is adequate: this is a necessary foundation for the creation of state-specific sciences. In making this assumption, I depend primarily on experiential observations by people in d-ASCs. Objective verification with the Cloze technique or similar techniques is a necessary underpinning for this. As state-specific sciences are developed, on the other hand, technique for evaluating the adequacy of communication may be developed within particular states that can be agreed upon as "scientific" techniques within that state, even though they do not necessarily make sense in the ordinary d-SoC.
Another interesting question concerns transfer of communicative ability after the termination of a d-ASC to the ordinary (or any other) d-SoC. Experienced marijuana smokers, for example, claim that they can understand a subject intoxication on marijuana even when they are not intoxication themselves because of partial transfer of state-specific knowledge to the ordinary d-SoC. We need to study the validity of this phenomenon.
In earlier chapters I avoid talking about "higher" states of consciousness, as the first job of science is description, not evaluation. Here, however, I want to speculate on what one relatively objective definition of the adjective higher, applied to a d-SoC, could mean with respect to communication. If we consider that understanding many communications from other people is more valuable than understanding few of their communications, then a higher d-SoC is one in which communications form a variety of d-ASCs are adequately understood; a lower d-SoC is one in which understanding is limited, perhaps to the particular lower d-SoC itself.

Tao senza fondamento orientale e occidentale

Jacek Yerka

La ricerca del Sé e della Coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista, considerando mondi di coscienza ed esperienza senza fondamento analizzato secondo la tradizione del Buddhismo Abhidharma, trova in Nishitani Keiji e la Scuola di Kyôto un esempio rilevante di integrazione tra le prospettive orientali e occidentali:

WORLDS WITHOUT GROUND

Laying Down a Path in Walking

Nishitani Keiji

In our discussion of the Cartesian anxiety, we saw that there is an oscillation between objectivism and subjectivism that is linked to the concept of representation. Thus representation can be construed either as the "projection" (subjectivism) or "recovery" (objectivism) of the world. (Usually, of course, both aspects of representation are incorporated in accounts of perception and cognition.)
For Nishitani, this oscillation between subjectivism and objectivism arises for any philosophical stance that is based on what he calls "the field of consciousness". With this phrase Nishitani refers to the philosophical construal of the world as an objective or pregiven realm and of the self as a pregiven knowing subject that somehow achieves contact with this pregiven world. Since consciousness is here understood as subjectivity, the problem arises of how to link consciousness with the supposedly objective realm in which it is situated. As we have already discussed, however, the subject cannot step outside of its representations to behold the pregiven world as it really is in itself. Therefore given this basically Cartesian stance, the objective becomes what is represented as such by the subject. In Nishitani's words, "The mode of being which is said to have rid itself of its relationship to the subjective has simply been constituted through a covert inclusion of a relationship to the subjective, and so cannot, after all, escape the charge of constituting a mode of being defined through its appearance to us."
When the notion of objectivity becomes problematic in this way, so too does the notion of subjectivity. If everything is ultimately specified through its appearance to us, then so is the knowing subject. Since the subject can represent itself to itself, it becomes an object for representation but is different from all other objects. Thus in the end the self becomes both an objectified subject and a subjectified object. This predicament discloses the shiftiness, the instability of the entire subjective/objective polarity.
Nishitani's next move, however, displays the deep influence of the Buddhist philosophical tradition and mindfulness/awareness practice on his thinking. He argues that to realize the fundamental instability or groundlessness of the subjective/objective dualism is in a sense to slip out of the "field of consciousness". We do not "overcome" or step out" of this dualism as if we knew in advance where we are going, but we do see the arbitrariness and futility of going back and forth between the poles of a fundamentally groundless opposition. Instead our concern shifts to the very disclosure of this groundlessness. Nishitani then follows the pragmatic intention of mindfulness/awareness by emphasizing the existential role that this disclosure plays. The realization that we do not stand on solid ground, that things incessantly arise and pass away without our being able to pin them down to a stable objective or subjective ground, affects our very life and being. Within this existential context, we can be said to realize groundlessness not only in the sense of understanding but also in the sense of actualization: human life or existence turns into a question, doubt, or uncertainty.
In Zen Buddhism, the Japanese adaptation of mindfulness/awarenessin which Nishitani was raised, this uncertainty is called the "Great Doubt." This doubt is not about any particular matter but is rather the basic uncertainty that arises from the disclosure of groundlessness. Unlike the hyperbolic and hypothetical doubt of Descartes, which is merely entertained by the subject on the field of consciousness, the Great Doubt points to the impermanence of existence itself and so marks an existential transformation within human experience. This transformation consists of a conversion away from the subjective/objective standpoint to what is called in the English translation of Nishitani's work the "field of nihility." Nihility is a term used to refer to groundlessness in relation to the subjective/objective polarity; it is a relative, negative notion of groundlessness that Nishitani wishes to distinguish from the groundlessness of the middle way.
Nishitani distinguishes between these two kinds of groundlessness because his fundamental point is that European thought in its largely successful critique of objectivism has become trapped in nihilism. Here Nishitani's assessment of our situation actually follows Nietzsche's. As we mentioned, nihilism arises for Nietzsche when we realize that our most cherished beliefs are untenable and yet we are incapable of living without them. Nietzsche devoted considerable attention to the manifestation of nihilism in our discovery that we do not stand on solid ground, that what we take to be an absolute reference point is really an interpretation foisted on an ever-shifting impersonal process. His famous aphorism announcing "the death of God" is a dramatic statement of this collapse of fixed reference points. Nietzsche also understood nihilism to be rooted in our craving for a ground, in our continual search for some ultimate reference point, even when we realize that none can be found: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer." The philosophical challenge that Nietzsche faced, which has come to characterize the task of postmodern thought, is to lay down a path of thinking and practice that gives up foundations without transforming itself into a search for new foundations. Nietzsche's attempt is well known: he tried to undercut nihilism by affirming groundlessness through his notions of eternal return and the will to power.

Friedrich Nietzsche, La volontà di potenza, Bozza autografa per il frontespizio

Nishitani deeply admires Nietzsche's attempt but claims that it actually perpetuates the nihilistic predicament by not letting go of the grasping mind that lies at the source of both objectivism and nihlism. Nishitani's argument is that nihilism cannot be overcome by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will - no matter how decentered and impersonal. Nishitani's diagnosis is even more radical than Nietzsche's, for he claims that the real problem with Western nihilism is that it is halfhearted: it does not consistently follow through its own inner logic and motivation and so stops short of transforming its partial realization of groundlessness into the philosophical and experiential possiblities of sunyata. The reason why Western nihilism stops short is that Western thought in general has no tradition that works with cognition and lived experience in a direct and pragmatic way. (The one possible exception is psychoanalysis, but in most of its current manifestations it has been unable to confront the basic contradictions in our experience of the self or to offer a transformative reembodiment.) Indeed, our scientific culture has only just begun to consider the possibility of pragmatic and progressive approaches to experience that would enable us to learn to transform our deep-seated and emotional grasping after a ground. Without such a pragmatic approach to the transformation of experience in everyday life - especially within our developing scientific culture - human existence will remain confined to the undecidable choice between objectivism and nihilism.
We should note that Nishitani's point when he claims that Western nihilism stops short of the groundlessness of the middle way is not that we should adopt Buddhism in the sense of a particular tradition with various cultural trappings. It is, rather, that we must achieve an understanding of groundlessness as a middle way by working from our own cultural premises. These premises are largely determined by science, for we live in a scientific culture. We have therefore chosen to follow Nishitani's lead by building a bridge between cognitive science and mindfulness/awareness as a specific practice that embodies an open-ended approach to experience. Furthermore, since we cannot embody groundlessness in a scientific culture without reconceptualizing science itself as beyond the need of foundations, we have followed through the inner logic of research in cognitive science to develop the enactive approach. This approach should serve to demonstrate that a commitment to science need not include as a premise a commitment to objectivism or to subjectivism.
Objectivist science, by its very ideals as well as its historical context in our society, has maintained a role of ethical neutrality. This neutrality has been increasingly challenged in the social discourse of our time. The need for planetary thinking behooves us to consider groundlessness, whether evoked by cognitive science or experience, in its full light in the total human context. Is it not the self that has been considered the bearer of moral and ethical potency? If we challenge the idea of such a self, what have we loosed on the world? Such a concern, we feel, is the result of the failure in Western discourse to analyze the self and its product, self-interest, with experiential acumen. In contrast, the ethical dimension of ego and egolessness are at the very heart of the Buddhist tradition. We tum now to take up, as our final consideration, the issue of what the mindfulness/awareness tradition might have to offer social science for a vision of human action at its best.

approccio sistemico al Tao

M.C. Escher, Snakes, 1969, woodcut in orange, green and black, printed from 3 blocks

Charles T. Tart riassume in questo capitolo le varie strategie per la descrizione sistemica della coscienza:

Strategies in Using the Systems Approach

The systems approach generates a number of strategies for studying states of consciousness. Some of these are unique consequences of using a system approach, some are just good-sense strategies that could come from other approaches. Many of these methodological strategies have been touched on in previous chapters; some are brought out in later chapters. Here I bring together most of these methodological points and introduce some new ones.

The Constructed Nature of Consciousness

Realizing that the ordinary d-SoC is not natural and given, but constructed according to semiarbitrary cultural constraints, gives us the freedom to ask some basic questions that might not otherwise occur to us. And it should make us more cautious about labeling other states as "pathological" and other cultures as "primitive." The Australian bushmen, for example, are almost universally considered one of the world's most primitive cultures because of their nomadic life and their paucity of material possessions.

Yet Pearce argues that, from another point of view, these people are among the most sophisticated in the world, for they have organized their entire culture around achieving a certain d-ASC, which they refer to as the experience of "Dream Time." Our bias toward material possessions, however, makes us unable to see this. Recognizing the semiarbitrary nature of the system of the ordinary d-SoC that has been constructed in our culture should make us especially aware of the implicit assumptions built into it, assumptions were so taken for granted that it never occurs to us to question them. In Transpersonal Psychologies, nine expert practitioners of various spiritual disciplines wrote about their disciplines not as religions, but as psychologies. In the course of editing these contributions, I was increasingly struck by the way certain assumptions are made in various spiritual psychologies that are different from or contrary to those made in Western psychology. As a result, I wrote a chapter outlining several dozen assumptions that have become implicit for Western psychologies and that, by virtue of being implicit, have great control over us. I have found that when asked what some of these assumptions are, I have great difficulty recalling them: I have to go back and look at what I wrote! Although my study of systems that make different assumptions brought these implicit assumptions to mind, they have already sunk back to the implicit assumptions to mind, they have already sunk back to the implicit level. We should not underestimate the power of culturally given assumptions in controlling us, and we cannot overestimate the importance of trying to come to grips with them. We should also recognize that the enculturation process, discussed earlier, ties the reward and punishment subsystems to the maintenance and defense of ordinary consensus reality. We are afraid of experiencing d-ASCs that are foreign to us and this fear strengthens our tendency to classify them as abnormal or pathological and to avoid them. It also further strengthens our resolve to deal with all reality from the point of view of the ordinary d-SoC, using only the tool or coping function of the ordinary d-SoC. But since the ordinary d-SoC is a limited tool, good for some things but not for others, we invariable distort parts of reality. The tendency to ignore or fight what we do not consider valuable and to distort our perceptions to make them fit is good for maintaining a cohesive social system, but poor for promoting scientific inquiry. A possible solution is the proposal for establishing state-specific sciences.

The Importance of Awareness

The systems approach stresses the importance of attention/awareness as an activating energy within any d-SoC. Yet if we ask what awareness is or how we direct it and so call it attention, we cannot supply satisfactory answers. We may deal with this problem simply by taking basic awareness for granted, as we are forced to do at this level of development of the systems approach, and work with it even though we do not know what it is. After all, we do not really know what gravity is in any ultimate sense, but we can measure what it does and from that information develop, for example, a science of ballistics. We can learn much about d-SoCs in the systems approach if we just take basic awareness and attention/awareness energy for granted, but we must eventually focus on questions about the nature of awareness. We will have to consider the conservative and radical views of the mind to determine whether awareness is simply the product of brain and nervous system functioning or whether it is something more.

System Qualities

The systems approach emphasizes that even though a d-SoC is made up of components, the overall system has gestalt qualities that cannot be predicted from knowledge of the components alone. Thus, while investigation of the components, the subsystems and structures, is important, such investigative emphasis must be balanced by studies of the overall system's functioning. We must become familiar with the pattern of the overall system's functioning so we can avoid wasting energy on researching components that turn out to be relatively unimportant in the overall system. We might, for example, avoid spending excessive research effort and money, as is now being done, on investigating physiological effects of marijuana intoxication, as we have seen, indicates that psychological factors are at least as important as the drug factor in determining the nature of the d-ASC produced. The systems approach also emphasizes the need to examine the system's functioning under the conditions in which it was designed to function. We are not yet sure what, if anything, d-ASCs are particularly designed for, what particular they have. We must find this out. On the other hand, we should try not to waste effort studying d-ASCs under conditions they were clearly not designed for.
For example, conducting studies that show a slight decrement in arithmetical skills under marijuana intoxication is of some interest, but since no record exists of anyone using marijuana in order to solve arithmetical problems, such studies are somewhat irrelevant. This emphasizes a point made earlier: that it is generally useless to characterize any d-ASC as "better" or "worse" than any other d-SoC. The question should always be, "Better or worse for what particular task?" All d-ASCs we know of seem to associated with improved functioning for certain kinds of tasks and worsened functioning for others. An important research aim, then, is to find out what d-ASCs are optimal for particular tasks and how to train people to enter efficiently into that d-ASC when they need to perform that task. This runs counter to a strong, implicit assumption in our culture that the ordinary d-SoC is the best one for all tasks; that assumption is highly questionable when it is made explicit. Remember that in any d-SoC there is a limited selection from the full range of human potential. While some of these latent human potentials may be developable in the ordinary d-SoC, some are more available in a d-ASC. Insofar as we consider some of these potentials valuable, we must learn what d-SoCs they are operable in and how to train them for good functioning within those d-SoCs.
This last point is not an academic issue: enormous numbers of people are now personally experimenting with d-ASCs to attain some of these potentials. While much gain will undoubtedly come out of this personal experimentation, we should also expect much loss.

Individual Differences

As we have seen, what for one individual is a d-ASC may, for another individual, be merely part of the region of his ordinary d-SoC, one continuous experiential space. By following the common experimental procedure of using group data rather than data from individual subjects, we can get the impression of continuity (one d-SoC) when two or more d-SoCs actually occurred within the experimental procedure. We should indeed search for general laws of the mind that hold across individuals, but we must beware of enunciating such laws prematurely without first understanding the behavior and experiences of the individuals within our experiments.
Recognizing the importance of individual differences has many application outside the laboratory. If a friend tries some spiritual technique and has a marvelous experience as a result, and you try the same technique with no result, there is not necessarily something wrong with you. Rather, because of differences in the structures of your ordinary d-SoCs, that particular technique mobilizes attention/awareness energy in an effective way to produce a certain experience for him, but is not an effective techniques for you.

Operationalism, Relevant and Irrelevant

Operationalism is a way of rigorously defining some concept by describing the actual operations required to produce it. Thus an operational definition of the concept of "nailing" is defined by the operations (1) pick up a hammer in your right hand; (2) pick up a nail in your left hand; (3) put the point of the nail on a wood surface and hold the nail perpendicular to the wood surface; (4) strike the head of the nail with the hammer and then lift the hammer again; and (5) repeat step 4 until the head of the nail is flush with the surface of the wood. An operational definition is a precise definition, allowing total reproducibility.
Some claim that whatever cannot be defined operationally is not a legitimate subject for scientific investigation. That is silly. No one can precisely specify all the steps necessary to experience "being in love," but that is hardly justification for ignoring the state of being in love as an important human situation worthy of study. A further problem is that in psychology, operationalism implicitly means physical operationalism, specifying the overt, physically observable steps in a process in order to define it. In the search for an objectivity like that of the physical sciences, psychologists emphasize aspects of their discipline that can be physically measured, but often at the cost of irrelevant studies.
An example is the equating of the hypnotic state, the d-ASC of hypnosis, with the performance of the hypnotic induction procedure. The hypnotic state is a psychological construct or, if induction has been successful, an experiential reality to the hypnotized person. It is not defined by external measurements. There are no obvious behavioral manifestations that clearly indicate hypnosis has occurred and no known physiological changes that invariably accompany hypnosis. The hypnotic procedure, on the other had, the words that they hypnotist says aloud, is highly amenable to physical measurement. An investigator can film the hypnotic procedure, tape-record the hypnotist's voice, measure the sound intensity of the hypnotist's voice, and accumulate a variety of precise, reproducible physical measurements. But that investigator makes a serious mistake if he then describes the responses of the "hypnotized subject" and means by "hypnotized subject" the person to whom the hypnotist said the words. The fact that the hypnotist performs the procedure does not guarantee that the subject enters the d-ASC of hypnosis. As discussed earlier, a person's b-SoC is multiply stabilized, and no single induction procedure or combination of induction procedures will, with certainty, destabilize the ordinary state and produce a particular d-ASC.
I stress that the concept of the d-SoC is a psychological, experiential construct. Thus, the ultimate criterion for determining whether a person is in a d-ASC is a map of his experiences that shows him to be in a region of psychological space we have termed a d-ASC. The external performance of an induction technique is not the same as achievement of the desired d-ASC. A hypnotic induction procedure does not necessarily induce hypnosis; lying down in bed does not necessarily induce sleeping or dreaming; performing a meditation exercise does not necessarily induce a meditative state.
When an induction procedure is physiological, as when a drug is used, the temptation to equate the induction procedure with the altered state is especially great. But the two are not the same, even in this case. As discussed in Chapter 10, smoking marijuana does not necessarily cause a transition out of the b-SoC. Nor is knowledge of the dose of the drug an adequate specification of depth.
We do need to describe techniques in detail in our reports of d-ASCs, but we must also specify the degree to which these techniques were actually effective in altering a subject's state of consciousness, and we must specify this for each individual subject. In practice, physiological criteria may be sometimes so highly correlated with experiential reports indicating a d-ASC that those criteria can be considered an indicator that the d-ASC has occurred. This is the case with stage 1 REM dreaming. Behavioral criteria may be similarly correlated with experiential data, though I am not sure any such criteria are well correlated at present. But the primary criteria are well correlated at present. But the primary criterion is an actual assessment of the kind of experiential space the subject is in that indicates the induction procedure was effective. Operationalism, then, which uses external, physical, and behavioral criteria, is inadequate for dealing with many of the most important phenomena of d-ASCs. Most of the phenomena that define d-ASCs are internal and may never show obvious behavioral or physiological[2] manifestations. Ultimately we need an experiential operationalism, a set of statements such as (1) if you stop all evaluation processes for at least three minutes, (2) and you concurrently invest no attention/awareness energy into the Interoception subsystem for perceiving the body, (3) so that all perception of the body fades out, then (4) you will experience a mental phenomenon of such and such a type. Our present language is not well suited to this, as discussed earlier, so we are a long way from a good experiential operationalism. The level of precision of understanding and communication that an experiential operationalism will bring is very high; nevertheless, we should not overvalue operationalism and abandon hope of understanding a phenomenon we cannot define operationally.

Predictive Capabilities of the Systems Approach

In Chapter 8 I briefly describe some basic subsystems we can recognize in terms of current knowledge. We can now see how the systems approach can be used to make testable predictions about d-SoCs.
The basic predictive operation is cyclical. The first step is to observe the properties of structures/subsystems as well as you can from the current state of knowledge. You ask questions in terms of what you already know. Then you take the second step of organizing the observations to make better theoretical models of the structures/subsystems you have observed. The third step is to predict, on the basis of the models, how the structures/subsystems can and cannot interact with each other under various conditions. Fourth, you test these predictions by looking for or attempting to create d-SoCs that fit or do not fit these improved structure/subsystem models and seeing how well the models work. This takes you back to the first step, starting the cycle again, further altering or refining your models, etc.
The systems approach providers a conceptual framework for organizing knowledge about states of consciousness and a process for continually improving knowledge about the structures/subsystems. The ten subsystems sketched in Chapter 8 are crude concepts at this stage of our knowledge and should eventually be replaced with more precise concepts about the exact nature of a larger number of more basic subsystems and about their possibilities for interaction to form systems.
I have given little thought so far to making predictions based on the present state of the systems approach. The far more urgent need at this current, chaotic stage of the new science of consciousness is to organize the mass of unrelated data we have into manageable form. I believe that most of the data now available can be usefully organized in the systems approach and that to do so will be a clear step forward. The precise fitting of the available mass of data into this approach will, however, take years of work.
One obvious prediction of the systems theory is that because the differing properties of structures restrict their interaction, there is a definite limit to the number of stable d-SoCs. Ignoring enculturation, we can say that the number is large but limited by the biological/neurological/psychical endowment of man in general, by humanness. The number of possible states for a particular individual is even smaller because enculturation further limits the qualities of structures.

My systems approach to consciousness appears to differ from Lilly's approach to consciousness as a human biocomputer. I predict that only certain configurations can occur and constitute stable states of consciousness, d-SoCs. Lilly's model seems to treat the mind as a general-purpose computer, capable of being programmed in any way one can conceive of: "In the province of the mind, what one believes to true either is true or becomes true within certain limits." Personal conversations between Lilly and I suggest that our positions actually do not differ that much. The phrase "within certain limits" is important here. I agree entirely with Lilly's belief that what we currently believe to be the limits, the "basic" structures limiting the mind are probably mostly arbitrary, programmed structures peculiar to our culture and personal history. It is the discovery of the really basic structures behind these arbitrary cultural/personal ones that will tell us about the basic nature of the human mind. The earlier discussion of individual differences is highly relevant here, for it can applied across cultures: two regions of experiential space that are d-SoCs for many or all individuals in a particular culture may be simply parts of one large region of experiential space for many or all individuals in another culture.
I stress again, however, that our need today, and the primary value of the systems approach, is useful organization of data and guidance in asking questions, not prediction. Prediction and hypothesis-testing will come into their own in a few years as our understanding of structures/subsystems sharpens.

Stability and Growth

Implicit in the act of mapping an individual's psychological experiences is the assumption of a reasonable degree of stability of the individual's structure and functioning over time. The work necessary to obtain a map would be wasted if the map had to be changed before it had been used. Ordinarily we assume that an individual's personality or ordinary d-SoC is reasonably stable over quite long periods, generally over a lifetime once his basic personality has been formed by late adolescence. Exceptions to this assumption occur when individuals are exposed to severe, abnormal conditions, such as disasters, which may radically alter parts of their personality structure, or to psychotherapy and related psychological growth techniques. Although the personality change following psychotherapy is often rather small, leaving the former map of the individual's personality relatively useful, it is sometimes quite large.
The validity of assuming this kind of stability in relation to research on d-SoCs is questionable. The people who are most interested in experiencing d-ASCs are dissatisfied with the ordinary d-SoC and so may be actively trying to change it. But studies confined to people not very interested in d-ASCs (so-called naive subjects) may be dealing with an unusual group who are afraid of d-ASCs. Stability of the b-SoC or of repeatedly induced d-ASCs is something to be assessed, not assumed. This is particularly true for a person's early experiences with a d-ASC, where he is learning how to function in the d-ASC with each new occurrence. In my study of the experiences of marijuana intoxication. I deliberately excluded users who had had less than a dozen experiences of being stoned on marijuana. The experience of these naive users would have mainly reflect learning to cope with a new state, rather than the common, stable characteristics of the d-ASC of being stoned.
An individual may eventually learn to merge two d-SoCs into one. The merger may be a matter of transferring some state-specific experiences and potentials back into the ordinary state, so that eventually most or many state-specific experiences are available in the ordinary state. The ordinary state, in turn, undergoes certain changes in its configuration. Or, growth or therapeutic work at the extremes of functioning of two d-SoCs may gradually bring the two closer until experiences are possible all through the former "forbidden region."
Pseudomerging of two d-SoCs may also be possible. As an individual more and more frequently makes the transitions between the two states, he may automate the transition process to the point where he no longer has any awareness of it, and/or efficient routes through the transition process are so thoroughly learned that the transition takes almost no tie or effort. Then, unless the individual or an observer was examining his whole pattern of functioning, his state of consciousness might appear to be single simply because transitions were not noticed. This latter case would be like the rapid, automated transitions between identity states within the ordinary state of consciousness. Since a greater number of human potentials are available in two states than in one, such merging or learning of rapid transitions can be seen as growth. Whether the individual or his culture sees it as growth depends on cultural valuations of the added potentials and the individual's own intelligence in actual utilization of the two states. The availability of more potentials does not guarantee their wise or adaptive use.

Sequential Strategies in Studying d-SoCs

The sequential strategies for investigating d-SoCs that follow from the systems approach are outlined below. These strategies are idealistic and subject to modification in practice.
First, the general experiential, behavioral or physiological components of a rough concept of a particular d-ASC are mapped. The data may come from informal interviews with a number of people who have experienced that state, from personal experiences in that d-ASC. This exercise supplies a feeling for the overall territory and its main features.
Then the experiential space of various individuals is mapped to determine whether their experiences show the distinctive clusterings and patternings that constitute d-SoCs. This step overlaps somewhat with the first, for the investigator assumes or has data to indicate a distinctness about the d-ASC for at least some individuals as a start of his interest.
For individuals who show this discreteness, the third step of more detailed individual investigation is carried out. For those who do not, studies are begun across individuals to ascertain why some show various discrete states and others do not: in addition to recognizing the existence of individual differences, the researcher must find out why they exist and what function they serve.
The third step is to map the various d-SoCs of particular individuals in detail. What are the main features of each state? What induction procedures produce the state? What deinduction procedures cause a person to transit out of it? What are the limits of stability of the state? What uses, advantages does the state have? What disadvantages or dangers? How is the depth measured? What are the convenient marker phenomena to rapidly measure depth?
With this background, the investigator can profitable ask questions about interindividual similarities of the various discrete states. Are they really enough alike across individuals to warrant a common state name? If so, does this relate mainly to cultural background similarities of the individuals studied or to some more fundamental aspect of the nature of the human mind? Finally, even more detailed studies can be done on the nature of particular discrete states and the structures/subsystems comprising them. This sort of investigation should come at a late stage to avoid premature reductionism: we must not repeat psychology's early mistake of trying to find the universal Laws of the Mind before we have good empirical maps of the territory.

scienza & esperienza del Tao

Igor Morski

La ricerca del Sé e della Coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista, considerando mondi di coscienza ed esperienza senza fondamento analizzato secondo la tradizione del Buddhismo Abhidharma, si ritrova a rispondere in modo circolare alla domanda "Come mai sembra esistere un Sé coerente se non c'è?". La risposta ritorna alla circolarità ricorsiva tra scienza (in particolare scienze della cognizione) ed esperienza senza cadere nel baratro del Nichilismo:

WORLDS WITHOUT GROUND

Laying Down a Path in Walking

Science and Experience in Circulation

In the preface we announced that the theme of this book would be the circulation between cognitive science and human experience. In this final chapter we wish to situate this circulation within a wider contemporary context. In particular we wish to consider some of the  ethical dimensions of groundlessness in relation to the concern with nihilism that is typical of much post-Nietzschean thought. This is not the place to consider the many points that animate current North American and European discussions; our concern, rather, is to indicate how we see our project in relation to these discussions and to suggest further directions for investigation.
The back-and-forth communication between cognitive science and experience that we have explored can be envisioned as a circle. The circle begins with the experience of the cognitive scientist, a human being who can conceive of a mind operating without a self. This becomes embodied in a scientific theory. Emboldened by the theory, one can discover, with a disciplined, mindful approach to experience, that although there is constant struggle to maintain a self, there is no actual self in experience. The natural scientific inquisitiveness of the mind then queries, But how can there seem to be a coherent self when there is none? For an answer one can tum to mechanisms such as emergence and societies of mind. Ideally that could lead one to penetrate further into the causal relationships in one's experience, seeing the causes and effects of ego grasping and enabling one to begin to relax the struggle of ego grasping. As perceptions, relationships, and the activity of mind expand into awareness, one might have insight into the codependent lack of ultimate foundations either for one's mind or for its objects, the world. The inquisitive scientist then asks, How can we imagine, embodied in a mechanism, that relation of codependence between mind and world? The mechanism that we have created (the embodied metaphor of groundlessness) is that of enactive cognition, with its image of structural coupling through a history of natural drift. Ideally such an image can influence the scientific society and the larger society, loosening the hold of both objectivism and subjectivism and encouraging further communication between science and experience, experience and science.
The logic of this back-and-forth circle exemplified the fundamental circularity in the mind of the reflective scientist. The fundamental axis of this circulation is the embodiment of experience and cognition. It  should be recalled that embodiment in our sense, as for Merleau-Ponty, encompasses both the body as a lived , experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms. Thus in the communication we have portrayed in this book between cognitive science and the tradition of mind fullness/awareness, we have systematically juxtaposed the descriptions of experience taken from mind fullness/awareness practice with descriptions of cognitive architecture taken from cognitive science.
Like Merleau-Ponty, we have emphasized that a proper appreciation of this twofold sense of embodiment provides a middle way or entre-deux between the extremes of absolutism and nihilism. Both of these two extremes can be found in contemporary cognitive science. The absolutist extreme is easy to find, for despite other differences, the varieties of cognitive realism share the conviction that cognition is grounded in the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven subject. The nihilist extreme is less apparent, but we have seen how it arises when cognitive science uncovers the nonunity of the self yet ignores the possibility of a transformative approach to human experience.
So far we have devoted less attention to this nihilist extreme, but it is in fact far more indicative of our contemporary cultural situation. Thus in the humanities - in art, literature , and philosophy - the growing awareness of groundlessness has taken form not through a confrontation with objectivism but rather with nihilism , skepticism, and extreme relativism. Indeed, this concern with nihilism is typical of late-twentieth-century life. Its visible manifestations are the increasing fragmentation of life , the revival of and continuing adherence to a variety of religious and political dogmatisms, and a pervasive yet intangible feeling of anxiety, which writers such as Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being depict so vividly.

[...] Se la prese con se stesso, ma alla fine si disse che in realtà era del tutto naturale non sapere quel che voleva. Non si può mai sapere che cosa si deve volere perché si vive una vita soltanto e non si può né confrontarla con le proprie vite precedenti, né correggerla nelle vite future. E’ meglio stare con Tereza o rimanere solo? Non esiste alcun modo di stabilire quale decisione sia la migliore, perché non esiste alcun termine di paragone. L’uomo vive ogni cosa subito per la prima volta, senza preparazioni. Come un attore che entra in scena senza aver mai provato. Ma che valore può avere la vita se la prima prova è già la vita stessa? Per questo la vita somiglia sempre a uno schizzo. Ma nemmeno “schizzo” è la parola giusta, perché uno schizzo è sempre un abbozzo di qualcosa, la preparazione di un quadro, mentre lo schizzo che è la nostra vita è uno schizzo di nulla, un abbozzo senza quadro.
“Einmal ist keinmal”. Tomàs ripetè tra sé il proverbio tedesco. Quello che avviene soltanto una volta è come se non fosse mai avvenuto. Se l’uomo può vivere solo una vita, è come se non vivesse affatto. [...]

It is for this reason (and because nihilism and objectivism are actually deeply connected) that we turn to consider in more detail the nihilistic extreme. We have reserved this issue until now because it is both general and far reaching. Our discussion must accordingly become more equally concerned with the ethical dimension of groundlessness than it has been so far. In the final section of this chapter we will be more explicit about this ethical dimension. Before doing so, however, we wish to examine in more detail the nihilist extreme.

Nihilism and the Need for Planetary Thinking

Let us begin not by attempting to engage nihilism directly but rather by asking how nihilism arises. Where and at what point does the nihilist tendency first manifest itself?
We have been led to face groundlessness or the lack of stable foundations in both enactive cognitive science and in the mindful, open-ended approach to experience. In both settings we began naively but were forced to suspend our deep-seated conviction that the world is grounded independently of embodied perceptual and cognitive capacities. This deep-seated conviction is the motivation for objectivism-even in its most refined philosophical forms. Nihilism, however, is in a sense based on no analogous conviction, for it arises initially in reaction to the loss of faith in objectivism. Nihilism can, of course, be cultivated to a point where it takes on a life of its own, but in its first moment its form is one of response. Thus we can already see that nihilism is in fact deeply linked to objectivism, for nihilism is an extreme response to the collapse of what had seemed to provide a sure and absolute reference point.
We have already provided an example of this link between objectivism and nihilism when we examined the discovery within cognitive science of selfless minds. This deep and profound discovery requires the cognitive scientist to acknowledge that consciousness and selfidentity do not provide the ground or foundation for cognitive processes; yet she feels that we do believe, and must continue to believe, in an efficacious self. The usual response of the cognitive scientist is to ignore the experiential aspect when she does science and ignore the scientific discovery when she leads her life. As a result, the nonexistence of a self that would answer to our objectivist representations is typically confused with the nonexistence of the relative (practical) self altogether. Indeed, without the resources provided by a progressive approach to experience, there is little choice but to respond to the collapse of an objective self (objectivism) by asserting the objective nonexistence of the self (nihilism).
This response indicates that objectivism and nihilism, despite their apparent differences, are deeply connected-indeed the actual source of nihilism is objectivism. We have already discussed how the basis of objectivism is to be found in our habitual tendency to grasp after regularities that are stable but ungrounded. In fact, nihilism too arises from this grasping mind. Thus faced with the discovery of groundlessness, we nonetheless continue to grasp after a ground because we have not relinquished the deep-seated reflex to grasp that lies at the root of objectivism. This reflex is so strong that the absence of a solid ground is immediately reified into the objectivist abyss. This act of reification performed by the grasping mind is the root of nihilism. The mode of repudiation or denial that is characteristic of nihilism is actually a very subtle and refined form of objectivism: the mere absence of an objective ground is reified into an objective groundlessness that might continue to serve as an ultimate reference point. Thus although we have been speaking of objectivism and nihlism as opposed extremes with differing consequences, they ultimately share a common basis in the grasping mind.
An appreciation of the common source of objectivism and nihilism lies at the heart of the philosophy and practice of the middle way in Buddhism. For this reason, we are simply misinformed when we assume that concern with nihilism is a modem phenomenon of Greco-European origin. To appreciate the resources offered by these other traditions, however, we must not lose sight of the specificity of our present situation. Whereas in Buddhism, as anywhere else, there is always the danger of individuals experiencing nihilism (losing heart, as it is called in Buddhism) or of commentators straying into nihilistic errors of interpretation, nihilism has never become full blown or embodied in societal institutions.
Today nihilism is a tangible issue not only for our Western culture but for the planet as a whole. And yet as we have seen throughout this book, the groundlessness of the middle way in Mahayana Buddhism offers considerable resources for human experience in our present scientific culture. The mere recognition of this fact should indicate that the imaginative geography of "West" and "East" is no longer appropriate for the tasks we face today. Although we can begin from the premises and concerns of our own tradition, we need no longer proceed in ignorance of other traditions, especially of those that continually strived to distinguish rigorously between the groundlessness of nihilism and the groundlessness of the middle way.
Unlike Richard Rorty, then, we are not inspired in our attempt to face the issue of groundlessness and nihilism by the ideal of simply "continuing the conversation of the West." Instead, our project throughout this book owes far more to Martin Heidegger's invocation of "planetary thinking." As Heidegger wrote in The Question of Being,

We are obliged not to give up the effort to practice planetary thinking along a stretch of the road, be it ever so short. Here too no prophetic talents and demeanor are needed to realize that there are in store for planetary building encounters for which the participants are by no means equal today. This is equally true of the European and of the East Asiatic languages and, above all, for the area of a possible conversation between them. Neither one of the two is able by itself to open up this area and to establish it.

Our guiding metaphor is that a path exists only in walking, and our conviction has been that as a first step we must face the issue of groundlessness in our scientific culture and learn to embody that groundlessness in the openness of sunyata. One of the central figures of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy, Nishitani Keiji, has in fact made precisely this claim. Nishitani is exemplary for us because he was not only raised and personally immersed in the Zen tradition of mindfulness/awareness but was also one of Heidegger's students and so is thoroughly familiar with European thought in general and Heidegger's invocation of planetary thinking in particular. Nishitani's endeavor to develop a truly planetary form of philosophical yet embodied, progressive reflection is impressive.