my idea of pragmatic dharma

Chris Marti wrote: In re "pragmatic dharma" --

Anyone up for the task of defining it???

Without overly complicating it, which folks seem to do for various reasons, it is pretty much defined in my mind as "whatever works." You can take pieces of practices and processes from any lineage and join them together. This is best done under some form of guidance with an accomplished teacher. I can name a few of those who I believe are fully qualified to teach under a "pragmatic dharma" shingle. If necessary, of course.

See pragmatism:

prag·ma·tism
ˈpraɡməˌtizəm/
noun
1. a pragmatic attitude or policy. "ideology was tempered with pragmatism"
2. PHILOSOPHY: an approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.

Now we are cook'n

1. Results oriented
2. Whatever works
3. Success of their practical application
4. Clear language and methods that elicit direct experience in the practitioner
5. Creating common vocabulary and frameworks
6. Honesty and openness to speak of attainments and what defines these
7. Eclectic collection of methodologies/practises are deemed useful
8. Tailored path to each practitioner’s specific needs and makeup
9. Distrust of authoritative approaches
10. Self reliant practice. Noone else will/can do it for you.
11. Teacher/student interaction more one on one

Anyone else? Please add your 2 cents
~D

Chris Marti wrote: There is no need to start over:

www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/06/the-core-f...of-pragmatic-dharma/

Thanks Chris....I feel like we pragmatic practitioners exist now. As long as someone somewhere is defining what we are.
...anything missing or in need of modification? 2 cents? good enough? Can we wiki it?
Thanks,
~D

Chris Marti wrote: I perceive a potentially substantial pragmatic dharma flaw -- everything, literally everything, must be explained, defined, codified and nailed down. Security is thereby preserved.

When I read the subject of the thread - my idea of pragmatic dharma, It made me pause and wonder what we were talking about from a meta level. Are we on the same page of what this means? If so I didn't get the memo. This might have been discussed before to death but I didn't find much in my cursory searches. I am a project manager and consultant by trade and my degree is in psychology. I really enjoy taking concepts and explaining, defining, codifying and nailing down things. It creates frameworks that allow me to understand things at a deeper level. It also allows some consensus at the meta level that we are not talking past each other.
What is the flaw that you see? Could you explain what you mean by "Security is thereby preserved"? Is this a bad thing unto itself or are you implying something else that is bad?
Thanks,
~D
Edit - Just read this from Shargrol - Post Is that what you meant by security?

Chris, you seem to be asserting a false dichotomy -- to know or to not know. Following Korzybski, our maps are useful insofar as they have structural similarity to the territory. No map can account for all the territory, and very few maps have no structural similarity to experience. In between is a vast gray area. ('map' in the korzybskian sense refers to any abstraction)

You also seem to be subtly implying that it's possible to not make maps about our experience. This is a particularly dangerous assumption because it allows for this:

Spend a lifetime making maps ---> Appeal to extreme agnosticism ---> Comfortably go on basing our evaluations on our original maps anyway

As opposed to

Spend a lifetime making maps ---> Recognize extreme agnosticism ---> Ruthlessly challenge and uproot our own maps and the maps of others---> Determine what maps have (multiordinal) structural similarity to our experience ---> Determine which maps allow for the best pragmatic outcome (however we define it; also subject to step 3) ---> Back to step 3

Yes, I believe being comfortable with uncertainty is important. No, I don't think this voids our map-making responsibility, as that's what the mind does whether we realize it or not.

To be clear, my post was in response primarily to your

Mind likes security....

post and the security bit. I'm pointing out that humans inevitably make maps (for security). Your comments about this situation are indeed a map that makes you feel more secure. This is not unique to the pragmatic dharma community.

Also, I pointed out that

('map' in the korzybskian sense refers to any abstraction)

but you still wrote

Maps, like all concepts

The sense of the word 'map' that I'm using subsumes the concepts 'concept' and 'category'.

Chris Marti wrote: There is no need to start over: www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/06/the-core-f...of-pragmatic-dharma/

Pragmatic Dharma: List Of Links
Nikolia already did the work of listing the links to Pragmatic Dharma sites..
Thanks Nik
~D

Chris Marti wrote: making ourselves think we really understand everything. Everything. Even when we don't really understand we try to convince ourselves that we do.

This is a danger but what is the alternative? How do we transmit anything?

Chris Marti wrote: My practice has taught me that permanence of that nature, and creating order amid the natural chaos, is not really possible.

I see this as a framework you have created based of your current experience. Does this make you feel more or less secure?

Chris Marti wrote: Let me ask you this - do you feel more or less comfortable (secure) the more or less familiar you feel during any given experience? Why do new experiences tend to feel less comfortable? Where do we feel most secure and safe in our mental states? Does that not apply to the practice?

I was reading some bits of "Meet Your Happy Chemicals" on her site - http://www.innermammalinstitute.org/ She goes into the cortical release during threatening experiences vs Dopamine - The great feeling motivates the body to invest effort in pursuit.
So looking at the pursuit of defining ideas and stretching our understanding outside of the current "knowns" is a dance of reward and stress. Staying within the current understood framework or paradigm keeps stress away but you do not get any rewards. So stretching your understanding can be stressful and/or rewarding. Staying safe in a definitive paradigm of our understanding of order or chaos can avoid stress and rewards chemistry. When it applies to practice I think that pushing your understanding is a good thing regardless of the stress it creates.
I'm really not trying to be a jerk or anything, I just feel like there is an anti intellectual stance being taken and I can not understand it where I am currently at. I have learned more about pragmatic dharma now than I did before I asked the question...I see this as good as I consider myself in the pragmatic category.
~D

I think everyone is basically right in this thread (and DW's practice thread) but the problem is we're all a little too right. (Including me making that every-so-witty statement.)

Ultimately, as long as a framework or map keeps us practicing and opening, then things are going to work themselves out. Even a bad map, when combined with a genuine interest and curiosity, is probably better than a great map, dogmatism, and missing experiencing "experience itself" because of over-conceptualizing. Yet, at the same time, lots of mediation cults go down the road of "thoughts are bad, maps are bad, curiosity is bad, stepping outside of the framework is bad" and obviously that kind of oppressive framework is a dead-end too. Somewhere is a middle path of conceptualizing but recognizing that it's >just conceptualizing<.

We just have to face the facts that when we start talking about the goals or the experiences that form the center of the reason for practice... ultimately it's going to be paradoxical and tautological and essentially unable to be described. It's along the lines of "two plus two..." -- how to you say what even that domain of thinking is, outside of having the insight of numbers and addition? With meditation it's about experiencing... Its about the realness of actual experience and yet the dreamlike-empty-fleetingness of actual experience. How can both be true? It's about the altering sense of "worthy" self and a "suffering" self that happens within a solid sense of "me/my experience"? How is that possible unless there is some separate me, but where does that separate me exist? Anything that keeps us looking into actual experience itself is helpful and will tend to promote an instantaneous, unintentional, meta-insight into the way things are. (And that statement is another framework of course.) In a way, sitting practice is just basically holding the questions in an open and alive way.

So ultimately all a teacher or sangha can do is encourage a looseness in trying to intellectually pin stuff down, so that we can get "closer" to an open experience of the way things are, but yet enough framework so someone doesn't get completely frustrated and rolls up their mat and leaves the practice.

Having though about it more, it seems like the "pragmatic" aspect of PD is

"using whatever framework is helpful at the time to keep you curious and investigating your actual experience with an openness that allows for novel insights into the way things are"

and maybe "not being dogmatic about the framework one uses, because of an intuitive understanding that this overlay is a simplification of the way things are"

and maybe "a sense that there is a basic sanity that comes from insights into the way things are"

and maybe "while there is some sense of universality to awakening, there is a simultaneous acceptance that the expression of it and even the articulation of it is unique to the individual."

Hope this adds something. Feel free to chuck it out the window, too!

I am by no means anti-intellectual, but there are two tendencies that I find unhelpful to progress on the path to awakening:

1. Becoming engrossed in speculative discourse about stages or states of awakening that one has not actually experienced. It is not only fine but is actually consistent with a pragmatic dharma approach to talk openly, with as much clarity as possible, about whatever one actually has experienced, especially with others who have more experience. Teachers should have more experience in order to be useful, and can recognize what the individual is describing and be able to advise the person how to proceed from there. People with less or different experiences can compare their progress, but this should be handled cautiously in order to avoid proliferating ignorance or becoming competitive. On a forum such as ours, one can assume that many people with differing levels of experience are listening in. It is important to be honest but at the same time careful in keeping one's reflections at an experiential level, rather than speculating about what happens next, or what awakening is like. Obviously we're all curious about it, we all think about it, and each of us has an idea of what it entails. So some speculation is inevitable. But speculation should be seen for what it is: fascinating, but ultimately unfruitful. The only useful and worthwhile object of attention is what is here, now. Anything that takes a person away from that is a distraction.
2. Scripting experience. This is a danger in a practice such as ours, which thrives on maps. I found the maps to be tremendously useful for a long time, and I am not advocating setting them aside; however, there does come a point when they become less useful, and a different emphasis is called for. If you're not there yet, then by all means use them. But don't start imagining what comes next and striving in what you think is that direction (problem #1). All that will do is take your attention away from the only useful and worthwhile object of attention. All you have to do on the cushion is pay attention to whatever is arising, and whatever technique you use to do that is fine. Trying to make anything else happen is useless for insight practice.

I am not trying to be argumentative and put other people down. Shargrol, your attempt to find middle ground is well-intentioned, but the important thing here is being true to the essence of pragmatic dharma: doing what works, and only what works. If I see people indulging in counter-productive practice or discourse, I have a responsibility not only to them but also to the audience out there to tell the truth as I understand it.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I'd add also that I think we're actually conflating a couple of slightly different things here.

- One is 'being intellectual' in contrast to the trend in some spiritual circles that one should never think about/conceptualise anything (as if that were possible).

- One is the question of whether or how accurately we can describe experience in words.

- One is the issue of how useful maps to spiritual progress are in general, and particularly whether we can imagine or conceptualise what the 'next stage' may be in order to try to get there.

There's an inter-relationship or overlap between these but they're not identical. So I don't think it's anti-intellectual, for example, to say as Chris did that maps are concepts and need to be let go of.

For me, as for Laurel above, I was very glad of the maps for a time (1st and 2nd path) but now they have no utility to me, indeed I let go of them (with some pain) because they felt like a constraint, and I feel it's been useful to my practice to let go of them, even though occasionally I get a bit frustrated about 'progress.' I would recommend to anyone else that they do this, but it's me and what worked for me so of course I would! I would say that the idea that 'this is what worked in the past so it will always work in the future' is worth questioning, because the nature of the spiritual path is precisely about unlocking patterns, and that having a teacher is extremely useful.

Also worth noting that in PD for the most part we're not talking about 'maps' plural, we're talking about one or maybe two specific maps, Daniel and Kenneth's interpretation of the Mahasi map.

I actually think the 'map is a concept' thing may not be the problem with maps - we cannot step outside of concepts in language - rather, it's that maps are a particular kind of concept that bind us to an idea of linear progress and give us a preconception of what that will look like before we arrive there, and may tend to striving and scripting.

Yes, Chris, we're talking past each other a bit. I'll try to be explicit. When I say 'map' I'm using the korzybskian definition -- any abstraction, including: concepts, words, meditation maps, etc. Any abstraction or interpretation of perceptual/experiential events would be called a 'map' by this definition.

I wholeheartedly agree that the direct non-conceptual experience of this moment is the standard par excellence in meditation. All my breakthroughs have happened when I stick to this level. Indeed, Korzybski's system encourages one to be constantly aware of his or her map-making; he called it 'consciousness of abstraction'.

That said, I don't believe it's possible to not make maps about experience. Even a hardcore Zen practitioner inevitably makes maps about their experience. Even an arhat, I'm assuming (they have thoughts), inevitably makes maps about their experience, even if they can see the mapping thoughts arise and pass clearly. Even choosing to not fit an experience into a framework, a meditation map, is a map. At some point such a meditator had to have thought "It doesn't matter if I fit impressive, or indeed any, experiences into a meditation map or framework". That thought itself is a map and the genesis of a map for future experiences.

With this in mind, I think it's our responsibility to make our maps fit the territory as well as possible, to understand that the map isn't the territory, to consider the pragmatic consequences of using a particular map, and not to pretend we don't have a map.

Also, with respect to scripting, don't you suppose that the danger for scripting could be greater for someone without a map? They could assign some crazy interpretation of their own making to an impressive event and then go on scripting themselves into that interpretation (*cough*Richard*cough*).

Laurel Carrington wrote: Shargrol, your attempt to find middle ground is well-intentioned, but the important thing here is being true to the essence of pragmatic dharma: doing what works, and only what works. If I see people indulging in counter-productive practice or discourse, I have a responsibility not only to them but also to the audience out there to tell the truth as I understand it.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I agree of course. But I also think that sometimes we also need to give people space to persist in what they find helpful, even if we think we have a better suggestion, because -- let's say that our suggestion is actually good, in this case -- that experience of ignoring advice, entrenchment, and failing is part of the path, too. I don't think the sangha has as much of the liberty to kick out the crutches out from under someone (Jackhat1's expression) as compared to a teacher. I agree that we can offer comment and critique, but I don't think we can assert the rightness of our advice, ultimately. It may be that someone needs to stagnate at a particular time in their practice and stabilize what ground they have gained. That's part of the practice, too.

shargrol wrote:

Laurel Carrington wrote: Shargrol, your attempt to find middle ground is well-intentioned, but the important thing here is being true to the essence of pragmatic dharma: doing what works, and only what works. If I see people indulging in counter-productive practice or discourse, I have a responsibility not only to them but also to the audience out there to tell the truth as I understand it.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I agree of course. But I also think that sometimes we also need to give people space to persist in what they find helpful, even if we think we have a better suggestion, because -- let's say that our suggestion is actually good, in this case -- that experience of ignoring advice, entrenchment, and failing is part of the path, too. I don't think the sangha has as much of the liberty to kick out the crutches out from under someone (Jackhat1's expression) as compared to a teacher. I agree that we can offer comment and critique, but I don't think we can assert the rightness of our advice, ultimately. It may be that someone needs to stagnate at a particular time in their practice and stabilize what ground they have gained. That's part of the practice, too.

Also part of practice is discovering that even now, even after making the shift, a person can become self-righteous and cling to views. So here I am and I know how that has felt--I've re-experienced the tightness of it, the unpleasantness, all of it. Thank you, everyone. We must be patient with ourselves over and over and over.