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| M.C. Escher, Verbum (Earth, Sky and Water), 1942 |
WORLDS WITHOUT GROUND
Laying Down a Path in Walking
Ethics and Human Transformation
In Conclusion
Let us restate why we think ethics in the mindfulness/awareness tradition, and indeed, the mindfulness/awareness tradition itself, are so important to the modem world. There is a profound discovery of groundlessness in our culture-in science, in the humanities, in society, and in the uncertainties of people's daily lives. This is generally seen as something negative-by everyone from the prophets of our time to ordinary people struggling to find meaning in their lives. Taking groundlessness as negative, as a loss, leads to a sense of alienation, despair, loss of heart, and nihilism. The cure that is generally espoused in our culture is to find a new grounding (or return to older grounds). The mindfulness/awareness tradition points the way to a radically different resolution. In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion. We feel, therefore, that the solution for the sense of nihilistic alienation in our culture is not to try to find a new ground; it is to find a disciplined and genuine means to pursue groundlessness, to go further into groundlessness. Because of the preeminent place science occupies in our culture, science must be involved in this pursuit.
Although late-twentieth-century science repeatedly undermines our conviction in an ultimate ground, we nonetheless continue to seek one. We have laid down a path in both cognitive science and human experience that would lead us away from this dilemma. We repeat that this is not a merely philosophical dilemma; it is also ethical, religious, and political. Grasping can be expressed not only individually as fixation on ego-self but also collectively as fixation on racial or tribal self-identity, as well as grasping for a ground as the territory that separates one group of people from another or that one group would appropriate as its own. The idolatry of supposing not only that there is a ground but that one can appropriate it as one's own acknowledges the other only in a purely negative, exclusionary way. The realization of groundlessness as nonegocentric responsiveness, however, requires that we acknowledge the other with whom we dependently cooriginate. If our task in the years ahead, as we believe, is to build and dwell in a planetary world, then we must learn to uproot and release the grasping tendency, especially in its collective manifestations.
When we widen our horizon to include transformative approaches to experience, especially those concerned not with escape from the world or the discovery of some hidden, true self but with releasing the everyday world from the clutches of the grasping mind and its desire for an absolute ground, we gain a sense of perspective on the world that might be brought forth by learning to embody groundlessness as compassion in a scientific culture. Since we have been most affected by the Buddhist tradition and its approach to experience through mindfulness/awareness, we were naturally led to rely on this tradition in relation to the task of scientific and planetary building.
Science is already deeply embedded in our culture. Buddhism from all the world's cultures is now taking root and beginning to develop in the West. When these two planetary forces, science and Buddhism, come genuinely together, what might not happen? At the very least, the journey of Buddhism to the West provides some of the resources we need to pursue consistently our own cultural and scientific premises to the point where we no longer need and desire foundations and so can take up the further tasks of building and dwelling in worlds without ground.
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