Secular Buddhism UK

I’ve read the recent learned, detailed posts by Robert Ellis and Andrew Kennedy with interest. I feel unqualified, however, to comment either on Robert’s five types of secular buddhism, or Andrew’s seven sorts of self (with diagram). What I’m offering here is a simple description of some of what I do, with an invitation to you to describe what you do, in your life, with the dharma.

My practice is based on an attempt to develop a compassionate outlook, founded on developing an understanding that everything I desire or seek to push away is subject to change, and is essentially without the substance that I give to it. My effort to act with compassion and without fear fails daily, but I now feel that over the years I have made enough progress to make the work worthwhile. If that sounds a bit pious, well, I wouldn’t still be bothering if it hadn’t brought me some stability and occasionally joy.

So what do I do? As a secular buddhist, my meditation practice is important to me as a basis for trying to act with more awareness in daily life, so I’ll stick to that in this post, plunging in with developing compassion. I find the phrases usually offered, such as ‘May they be happy’, wear a bit thin, so I have taken to addressing the progression of people I am concentrating on in a rather structured way, wishing them (three times each, twice) health, contentment, confidence and trust, joy, peace. If this becomes boringly ritualistic, I shall stop; but it’s what’s working for me now.

A meditation on the four elements, taught me by Jenny Wilks, a Gaia House teacher, is something I have found powerful, helping to dissolve the boundary between my sense of self and the natural world; the best generator of wonder and awe in my set of practices. The death meditation works pretty well to sharpen me up, too. There’s nothing like thinking about death to give one a lively feeling for the value of life and what should be done with it! I got that one out of a book, Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs. Look up the chapter helpfully titled ‘Death’, if you haven’t tried it.

Then there’s the ground for these fancy pants practices: mindfulness and insight. When I sit first thing every morning after I have shaved, I settle my mind on my breath and try to feel where I am just then, moving my attention from breath to body, working my way slowly up from my toes (yes, I’ve done a Goenka course, and I’m very glad I did, but one’s enough for now, thanks), feeling my body slowly straightening, opening to the attention it is receiving, calming my mind, mind and body in contact with each another again. Or not calming, in which case I use some of Martine Batchelor’s suggestions, working on acceptance or listening, say, or both. Even on the worst days I feel a bit better at the end than at the beginning. On the good days, I can use the calmness to explore, getting a felt sense of the little bit of dharma reading I did the night before, perhaps; or just waiting for nothing to happen.

So that’s my meditation practice. ‘Eclectic’ might be a polite word for it.

What do you do?

The 2011 Census statistics for religion in England and Wales, released today (Tuesday 1.12.12), gives a rounded figure of 248,000 people who identify themselves as Buddhist. That is just 0.4% of the population..

The 2001 Census gave a figure for England and Wales of 144,453 Buddhists. That is 0.27757 % of the population (Bluck 2004).

7.2% of the population did not answer the religion question. I’m not sure if unrounded numbers are yet available, or if the statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland have been published.

But it is clear that Buddhism remains a very minority religion in England and Wales, even though the number of people who label themselves as Buddhist has increased by a third over the last ten years.

There are no firm figures for membership of Buddhist organisations, so ‘[the]..figures should be treated with caution’ (Bluck 2004), but it is likely that far less than half of all UK Buddhists have a relationship with any Buddhist organisation.

I don’t know if Secular Buddhism UK will ever find a way to offer assistance to these people. Perhaps that would be too much like pushing the river.

——————–

Bluck, Robert, 2004, ‘Buddhism and Ethnicity in Britain’ in Journal of Global Buddhism, (5), p. 90.

There seem to be several causes for the notion that human beings are persons possessing a ‘self’. We are separate physical objects; we know what we do, remember what’s done, predict what to do, and feel responsible for our actions.  These are not just private conclusions, for as much of society as can be bothered, observes our status as physical objects, knows, remembers and predicts our actions, and holds us responsible. All of this finds expression in the uses, conjugations and derivations of the term ‘self’, alongside companion terms such as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’: I have a self; it belongs to me; this is myself.

As well as these ordinary usages, there is overlap in meaning between ‘self’ and ‘soul’ (or ‘spirit’), which seems to be motivated by the continuity of physical features observed, and behaviours expressed, by individuals throughout childhood and maturity. In the West, that overlap has motivated considerable argument at cross-purposes between Humanists and Christians.

With the infiltration of eastern ideas, especially the concept of anatta (not-self) the overlapping meaning of ‘self’ and ‘soul’ is once more called into question. As usual, there is disagreement about translation (you say not-self, I say not-soul, she says not-‘divine spark’) but the Buddhist doctrine of anatta seems to be an overt rejection of the notion of a soul, if soul is understood as any sort of continuous self, a self that endures unchanged throughout the life of an identifiable person, or again: a soul is a self with enduring qualities that enable a person to be identified, from a God’s-eye view, as distinct from all others, even in the absence of habitual embodiment.  Anatta, then, may not quite mean not-self as such, but it does mean not-continuous-self, not-enduring-self, or not-unchanging-self.

At risk of exacerbating the confusion between soul, self and anatta, here’s a list of possible meanings covered by the root term ‘self’.  Such a list is unlikely to  attract agreement without cooperative input, but something along these lines could forestall a lot of talk at cross-purposes. In any event, language-users ought to be clear about what they mean when they talk around the self.

1. I/me/ myself/her/him/herself/himself. Indicative ways by which individuals identify each other.
2. Subject of experience. According to John Crook, on careful observation the subjectivity of experience is always slightly retrospective. Francisco Varela seems to offer a neuroscientific explanation for this tardiness, with his suggestion that subjectivity is constituted by the end-state of any and all sequences of synchronous neuronal activation, which (almost) immediately become the beginning-state of subsequent sequences.
3. Proto-self.  The awareness or feeling of embodiment, originating in phylogenetically-ancient parts of the brain as a response to approximations towards and away from homeostasis in bodily systems. This basic sort of self has been suggested by Parvici and Damasio, and by Panksepp.
4. Moral self. This is the responsibility ascribed to persons by themselves, by society, and hence by laws and customs. It is a personal assimilation of what makes a social system function, developed out of long adjudication of actions and consequences. The moral self arises from the innate ‘duplexity’ of human nature, as much for others as for oneself.
5. Historical self. A mode of assessment by a person and of a person, in the light of their role in past actions and events.
6. Surrogate self. Imaginary versions of the person appearing in cognitive scenarios, from daydreaming to planning, designed to rehearse future possibilities.
7. ‘Face’ self. Described by Irving Goffman, these are manifestations of self in social situations. They are relatively deceitful behavioural presentations to suit a variety of motivations and expectations.
8. Soul-like self. A ‘divine spark’ or spirit, in the sense of an enduring mental substance (atta). This cluster of concepts affords some sort of meaning in many kinds of discourse but especially religious discourse concerned with continuing existence after death. From my own hybrid Buddhist/neuroscientific point of view, they are an imaginary concept referring to a fictional state of affairs.

As I have only a layperson’s understanding of Freud’s psychoanalytic system of classification, I have not included the ego, id and superego. The ego might encompass 6, the surrogate self, 7, the ‘face’ self, and 5, the historical self. The id could be associated with 3, the proto-self, but that alone would do scant justice to the id’s supposed relation to the unconscious. The superego might encompass 8, the soul, and 4, the moral self. But this sort of abrupt assimilation of one set of categories to another is unpersuasive, for it takes little account of Freud’s underlying theoretical justifications.

The list does not enable a conclusive definition of self or not-self, but it goes some way to explain why precision is so difficult: the meaning of self is too extensive. There are grounds for arguing that the term ‘self’ is a reasonable cover for 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, since they are parts of personality without which ordinary life would be impossible. Number 6, the surrogate self, fulfils a useful and efficient purpose in the cognitive modelling of future dangers and opportunities, but because it appears in a host of forms, some archetypal and others idiosyncratic, to suit a variety of hypothetical situations, it may be better characterised as not-self. Since 7, the ‘face’ self and 8, the soul are both imaginary and both deceptive, they seem to me to be suitable candidates for not-self.

The precise contents of the list matters less than awareness of the complexity covered by the concept of self. For a Buddhist, such complexity is likely to be investigated by mindfulness, observing reason and emotion, concepts and feelings, in formal meditation carried through into everyday life. When aspects of the self come to mind, here are labels to use when are helpful, labels to lose when they are not.

(Bibliographic references on request)

During January Stephen Batchelor wrote a 10,000 word article entitled “A Secular Buddhism”. He says that this is the most detailed and scholarly statement he has made so far in defining what a secular Buddhism might be:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/102934129/A-Secular-Buddhism

Hopefully it should generate some interesting discussion

Barry Daniel