Really enjoyed reading this. Super dense (probably too dense to really take in) but luckily it was a lot of either “yep, that’s matches the pattern” or “oh, hadn’t thought to frame it that way” for me; milage may vary. After all, if I think back to myself 7 years ago, I wouldn’t have understood any of this or only understood it in the most superficial of ways!
I was reminded reading this, too, of why I went looking for a practice in a spiritual tradition (ultimately settling on Zen since it fit my aesthetic well). I had figured out a lot of this stuff but figuring it out is not the same as living it, and I wanted a practice space that allowed me to deeply engage with these concepts. I tried to piece it together as best I could on my own, but eventually realized I was ignoring the presence of multiple wisdom traditions with active practice communities that, although they often understood these concepts in weird ways, provided a way of doing what I had been looking for. What I’ve come to understand over the last year of Zen practice is that understanding is probably not even all that necessary: if you can create a process that works it doesn’t matter if the people who built or maintain that process understand the underlying machinery that makes it work so long as they have robust ways of keeping it working as intended. A way of interpreting this might be to say that, through cultural evolution, the practice communities of some wisdom traditions have converged on things that work and we only in the last 50 years or so have come to really understand something of why they work in a way that makes sense to post-Enlightenment thought.
Thanks again for posting this and hope you post more of them!
I agree about not needing to understand the machinery in *most* cases. When the environment changes and you need a gears level model of which practices are still well adapted and which now have hidden downsides understanding the machinery becomes useful. Of course this gets super complicated when one of the things you are investigating is the tendency to need to understand things and the hidden downsides of *that*. :)
Really enjoyed reading this. Super dense (probably too dense to really take in) but luckily it was a lot of either “yep, that’s matches the pattern” or “oh, hadn’t thought to frame it that way” for me; milage may vary. After all, if I think back to myself 7 years ago, I wouldn’t have understood any of this or only understood it in the most superficial of ways!
I was reminded reading this, too, of why I went looking for a practice in a spiritual tradition (ultimately settling on Zen since it fit my aesthetic well). I had figured out a lot of this stuff but figuring it out is not the same as living it, and I wanted a practice space that allowed me to deeply engage with these concepts. I tried to piece it together as best I could on my own, but eventually realized I was ignoring the presence of multiple wisdom traditions with active practice communities that, although they often understood these concepts in weird ways, provided a way of doing what I had been looking for. What I’ve come to understand over the last year of Zen practice is that understanding is probably not even all that necessary: if you can create a process that works it doesn’t matter if the people who built or maintain that process understand the underlying machinery that makes it work so long as they have robust ways of keeping it working as intended. A way of interpreting this might be to say that, through cultural evolution, the practice communities of some wisdom traditions have converged on things that work and we only in the last 50 years or so have come to really understand something of why they work in a way that makes sense to post-Enlightenment thought.
Thanks again for posting this and hope you post more of them!
Thanks!
I agree about not needing to understand the machinery in *most* cases. When the environment changes and you need a gears level model of which practices are still well adapted and which now have hidden downsides understanding the machinery becomes useful. Of course this gets super complicated when one of the things you are investigating is the tendency to need to understand things and the hidden downsides of *that*. :)