Commusings: Jeff’s (Absurdly Brief) Eastern Philosophy Handbook

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Dear Commune Community,

Over the past 4 years, I have listened endlessly to Alan Watts unpack Eastern mysticism as I have perambulated through the hiking trails of the Santa Monica Mountains. Across this same period of time, I have interviewed hundreds of doctors in the quest to understand the nature of well-being.

Over and over, these two separate inquests converged. The metaphysical was patterned in the physical. As I peered into the microcosm of my organism, macrocosmic truths were everywhere to be found.

Eastern religions understand the universe as emergent, spontaneous, and interdependent governed by an intelligence that seeks balance or “the middle.” As I learned more about my physiology, I witnessed these exact same characteristics. My organism is the delegated adaptability of a greater intelligence. It is impermanent – changing in relation to its environment – and always seeking the middle – or homeostasis. In fact, it’s engineered for balance.

Today’s musing is a ridiculously brief primer on Eastern philosophy. While these traditions all possess their own stories and nuances, they share a basic view of the universe as underwritten by an organic intelligence that seeks a middle way.

I will follow up this musing with a future essay that describes the middle path of the human body.

Holding the middle on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

P.S. For more on how to bring your body into delicate equilibrium, check out my new course, Good Stress, as well as this recent podcast.

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Jeff’s (Absurdly Brief) Eastern Philosophy Handbook

Taoism

Sometime around 500 BC, during the period of the Warring States in China, there lived an old wise man named Lao Tzu. The old boy, they called him. Legend has it that Lao Tzu served as the royal archivist for the Zhou dynasty court at Wangcheng. Known to have a long white beard that extended below his navel, Lao Tzu was revered for his wisdom.

Eventually, the time came for Lao Tzu to hang up his official robes, as it were, and to embark on a journey. This type of ritualistic walkabout in later life is the stuff of many traditions. Āśrama is a system of life stages outlined in Hindu texts. The four Āśramas are: Brahmacharya (student), Gṛhastha (householder), Vanaprastha (forest walker/forest dweller) and Sannyasa (renunciate). In short, after you marry, raise your family and “hold your house,” you perambulate through the forest meditatively and, eventually, become a great sage.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, also wrote about this phenomenon of later life. In the second half of life, Jung claimed, you seek out the true self, your inner and inherent identity.

Lao Tzu’s historical and philosophical counterpart was Confucius. There is an account of a putative meeting between the two great masters in the Taoist classic, the Zhuangzi but the history of this era is mangy at best. Confucianism is a philosophy of social order and ritual, ethics and filial piety. But Lao Tzu was no longer interested in engaging with society. He was ready to be a forest dweller, to live his true identity. He is often depicted in ancient Taoist art as barely discernible in the background, wandering a misty mountaintop, seemingly without purpose.

So, Lao Tzu left his pencil-pushing gig to become the original hippie. But before he could exit the royal palace, however, he was stopped by a sentry. The guard recognized Lao Tzu as the great sage he was and refused him egress until he chronicled his wisdom on a parchment.

The old boy rejoined, “Those who say do not know. And those who know do not say.” And then he proceeded to write a book on the foundational intelligence of the universe.

The Tao Te Ching is a short text of around 5,000 Chinese characters in 81 brief chapters. There have been thousands of attempts at translation. It’s tricky. Ching means book. Tao can be understood as “the path” or “the way.” Te is directly translated as virtue. So, you could understand this book as “The Path of Virtue.”

But the Chinese have a very different understanding of virtue than we do in the West. Westerners tend to associate virtue with morality and qualities such as compassion, temperance, courage, and humility. However, the Chinese don’t recognize virtue as concomitant with ethics. Instead, “te” is a skill that one refines. Virtue results from a profound study of nature and is expressed by aligning yourself with its course. You identify the river’s current and get with it, like a virtuoso becomes a conduit for epiphanous art. The Taoist master possesses “mu shin” – the unhesitating, non-deliberative, spontaneous mind. He enters the “flow,” thus, the way is often associated with water.

The Tao Te Ching is also a guide for good governance but, as a “spiritual text,” we can think of it as the way of nature, or the water’s course. The Tao (or the way) is the foundational intelligence of nature. But it’s not a thing, it’s a process that is always evolving.

Buddhism

Contemporaneous with Lao Tzu, some 1,700 miles to the west, in the Northern Indian town of Lumbini, now Nepal, lived a prince named Siddhartha Gautama. At around age 30, unsatisfied with the hum-drum opulence of his parent’s palace, Gautama set off on his own walkabout. He renounced his domestic existence to live as a wandering ascetic. Life outside the palace opened his eyes to the default state of the human condition – suffering – or what Gautama eventually referred to as dukkha.

Eventually, while meditating under the Bodhi tree, Gautama had an awakening. He saw the cause of and the solution for dukkha. And, in this moment, he became the Buddha, “the awakened one.”

The solution to suffering was not endlessly sitting in Lotus pose or prostrating all day to the Gods or renouncing all pleasures of the flesh or fasting for months on end. Nor was the solution carnal indulgences and decadence. The Buddha preached a “middle way” between ascetism and hedonism that led to Nirvana, freedom from ignorance (avidya), craving (trishna), and the cycles of rebirth (samsara) and suffering (dukkha).

Nirvana literally means to blow out, to exhale, to let go. It is often said that breath is life. Of course, the simplest way to lose your breath is to hold on to it. If you let it go, then it comes back. When you stop clinging to objects, to opinions, and even to your mind’s projection of yourself, then you are free, you merge with all of the energy of the universe. This is called Samadhi, the sensation of integrated consciousness in which the feeling of being a “separate self” dissolves and you become one with the cosmos.

The source of suffering is trishna, translated as thirst or craving. This sensation of craving has its origin in the feeling one has of being a separate self, in competition with others and with nature. This phenomenon is a natural response to our special sensory instruments that labels the outside world and, by extension, self-labels. The accumulation of myriad labels forms the ego – the symbol one gives to oneself. Humans then confuse the ego – what they have, what others think of them, their roles and status in society – with their true self. Hence, our self-worth is a never-ending process of comparing ourselves to the world around us. This creates trishna, an insatiable appetite to seek out and consume external agents to feel worthy and assuage our perceived deficiencies.

The Buddha called this confusion avidya, technically non-seeing, but better translated as ignorance. Becoming a Buddha is “waking up” from avidya — the dream that you are a separate “self.” Those with Buddha nature recognize that there is no stable, reliable self. Rather, they embrace the anatman (the non-self). They surrender to their impermanence (annica), to the reality that they are always changing in relation to their environment. And, ultimately, they feel their true nature, their inseparability from the ecosystem in which they live.

The Middle Way, or madhyamaka, is the method of Buddhism. The practice has evolved considerably across the course of history. Unlike other traditions, there is no final word of Buddhism. On the contrary, it is purposefully designed to adapt and evolve as part of a dialectic between a master and his student and among the sangha (the community).

The Middle Way can be understood as a general principle of seeking balance and avoiding extremes in all aspects of life. In a way, it is always seeing yourself as in the middle. It is a way of understanding the interconnectedness of all things, a state of consciousness that transcends dualistic thinking and embraces the unity of opposites. It is a path above and beyond polarities that leads to the cessation of dukkha and the attainment of enlightenment. The middle way fosters a sense of centeredness in which one is not swayed by transitory advantage or disadvantage. It fosters upekkha, or equipoise, a calm and present mind.

Heraclitus

There must have been something in the water around 500 B.C., for another 3,500 miles to the west, the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, was brooding over the same concepts as Lao Tzu and the Buddha. This era in history appears akin to the 1960’s, a time of political upheaval and spiritual efflorescence. These three legendary characters might be considered the original Dharma Bums. Lao Tzu, it is apocryphally mythologized, was so wise that he was born with a long white beard. Heraclitus’ most famous quotation sounds like a Ram Dass meditation, “Everything flows (dude),” he quipped, “Nothing stands still.” Like the Buddha, Heraclitus viewed the world as utterly impermanent, with change and transformation being the only constants.

Heraclitus lived in Ephesus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, not far from Miletus, the birthplace of philosophy. It was here that Heraclitus hatched the concept of the “Logos,” which he deemed the fundamental principle of the universe.

Heraclitus is renowned for his concept of the “unity of opposites.” In brief, like Lao Tzu, Heraclitus believed that the natural world was characterized by opposing forces such as hot and cold, light and dark, and life and death. However, he viewed opposites as not separate and distinct, but rather as united in a manner that fosters harmony and balance in the world.

The Logos of Heraclitus, like the Tao of Lao Tzu, is the foundational force that brings opposites together in a tenuous and sensitive balance. This cosmic intelligence is always in flow and in relationship to its environment. From a macro-biological standpoint, it can be understood as evolution, the intelligence that, under pressure, incessantly selects for survival. From a microbiological perspective, it is the innate, balance-fostering intelligence of your organism.

Yoga

Yoga was (and still is) a primary praxis of the Hindus. Yoga, or yuj, is best translated as union, a yoking of body and mind, of intention and action, of matter and spirit. The original yoga should not be confused with the lycra-clad gymnastics taught and practiced at Planet Fitness. While asana and the movement from one posture to another was deemed one of the eight limbs of the practice, it was primarily a tool to prepare the mind for meditation. In Verse 2 of his Yoga Sutras, Patanjali describes the target of yoga this way: yogas chitta vritti nirodha.

Yogas is union or oneness. Chitta is the mind. Vritti is turbulence. Nirodha is cessation. All together, it could be translated as: yoga is the progressive stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

This results in non-judgmental sacred presence, otherwise understood as mindfulness or centeredness. Yoga, too, is the Middle Way.

Nirvana. Samadhi. Moksha. Liberation. These are the objectives of these Eastern philosophies. They represent a change in consciousness from the feeling of separateness to the sensation of interconnectedness. This transformation is mystical in nature. That is, it is not derived cognitively, but through direct experience. Our discursive minds get out of the way and yield to our inner nature.