Reason, alter-guised

This post represents a move to stretch beyond early post-postmodern conceptions of the limits of reason, which can be seen as having been birthed in a worldview vilifying the whole epoch of the Enlightenment as a flatland, devoid of nuance, absent of ability to consider deeper structure, or the environment upon which it reason constructed itself, absent of consideration of it's own people, of affect.

To rehabilitate reason into a role more relevant to the challenges we face as we face the world and her various crises, this post considers the role of what Juan Pascual-Leone (1990) and Ortega y Gasset (1980) describe as the wisdom of 'vital reason'. Vital reason here is described as insightful practical rationality embracing forms that are mutually contradictory but jointly needed, in a transcendental view of the totality which extends through evolution into the possible of the person. To get to the heart of what vital reason might look like, Kant will be excavated and resuscitated for a rich elucidation on the nature of will, and the extent to which reason, refracted through the lens of will, becomes informed by consciousness revealed as transformative integration  of cognition and affect in such a way as to tolerate ambiguity and nurture insight into emotional life, relationship and prosocial awareness.

Pascual-Leone has written a brilliant chapter for Sternberg's book on wisdom, intelligence and creativity, a book that, across it's many esteemed authors such as Paul Baltes, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Gisela Labouvie-Vief and Daniel Robinson does much to emphasise the centrality of integration of the constituents that make up wisdom, in the overall picture of the definition of wisdom that emerges from the text.

Wisdom itself is a complex psychological construct, and the evolutionary hermeneutics through which we might explore it's origins reveals minimal agreement in a field articulated through spiritual text and philosophical treatise, reaching back through history to the Platonic Dialogues. A recent Delphi method study bringing together expert consensus on the meaning of wisdom sees an increasing emphasis placed on social-self awareness, empathy, emotional regulation and complex postformal thought including tolerance for paradox and uncertainty, and reflective tendency. These qualities can be seen as optimally developed within a human lifespan, but my research on wisdom, mindfulness and late stage ego development aims to address in part the question of whether age is (n)either necessary or sufficient for the development of wisdom.

Juan Pascual-Leone articulates a fully fledged account of the ontogenetic development of consciousness on his way to articulating a model of wisdom that may or may not be age-associated, in his chapter: 'An essay on wisdom: towards organismic processes that make it possible'. The chapter goes well beyond a view of the organism, to ground in an ontology birthed via intertwining Husserl, Heidegger, Kant and Jaspers. It's interesting to note that Pasucal Leone credits to Jaspers much of what Wilber credits to James Mark Baldwin, in Integral Theory.

Pascual Leone draws on Kant with intriguing complexity to theorise an adult model of agency or will. In 'Religion within the limits of reason alone' Kant outlines the will as jointly constituted by:

1. Willkur - 'act-of-will';
2. Wille - 'judgment-of-will';
3. Gesinnung - 'disposition-of-will'.

The act-of-will is an effortful cognitive orchestration led by the sense of 'want' or desire, as a radical (Kantian transcendental) act of free choice.

The judgment-of-will is a repertoire of metacognitive schemes related simultaneously to the persons life project and ethics base. Here some processes will be of pure affective drive, which mobilises mental energy through to prefrontal cortex executive decision making, which ideally is aligned to affective drive in an automatised way (where affects and cognitions cohere without effort).

The disposition-of-will is the ground for this automation of alignment of cognitive and affective drive, the personality constructs that provide the structure for metaexecutive processes.

In adult development, an early stage that aligns with Nietzsche's 'will to power' is articulated by Pascual-Leone as the 'will-to-will' (referring to Heidegger's same concept). Here a person seeks choices from a polar object set, lacking insight into contingencies and nuances, choosing actions in a way that is virtually entirely dependent upon sociocultural or mentor models, for guidance. At this stage, motivationally misleading states may arise as a dynamic synthesis, where the judgment-of-will (emotions) drives a violation of the longer term disposition-of-will, which holds the ethical framework of the personality.

The next developmental stage identified by Pascual-Leone is the stage of the development of wisdom, the ultraself, the level of vital reason, also called the 'will-not-to-will' stage. Here the earlier dialectical contradictions between the wills, experienced in the space of declining ability in mental energy and mental interruption (as occurs from the mid-thirty age bracket onwards, in humans) is proposed as precipitating a mental reworking of the different processing strands, of emotional, affective, cognitive and socially related self-streams.

The ultraself emerges not from direct interaction with the Other, but moreso from internal process birthed from the need to resolve dialectical contradictions (the interior space of the transcendental movement, having distinct superordinate self organisation).

The ancient Greeks called this higher and more integrative mode of processing reason. 

Kant and constructivist thinkers ever since also call it 'reason', constrasting it with simple understanding.

'....[Of vital reason] Scheler posited that a heightened affective awareness of life's resistances, when attentively experienced in an open yet detached manner (letting oneself into the nearness of reality by bridging with feeling the gap between contradictory aspects) is at the origin of spiritual (ie ultraself) growth and valid cognition ...Scheler describes it as the mental attitude whereby inferential and existential/affective aspects of...situations offering resistances to praxis are 'susupended', suspended in the sense of being tuned down to mere actualities by an aware but detatched 'releasement' (Heidegger) toward a pure (uninvolved) existential awareness (blended cognition and affect) of the ongoing situation.

Heidegger calls this qualitiatively different attitude meditative thinking , and he contrasts it with 'calculative thinking'.'

Here the self-soul emanates through three subrepertoires: feelings about  the Other, with communion of the self as central construct, passions of the self, understood as good bad-valuations leading to affective expression, and the ethos of the soul, which is the site of ethical motives and possible acts. At this level, affects are inextricably recognised as bound with cognitions, and thinking becomes so open to reality that thinking becomes thanking (Heidegger) expressed as metasystemic, bold, causal abstractions. Here the will is engaged only as necessary on vital grounds (hence, 'vital reason'), a pure resting-in-itself, releasing itself to inner and outer reality.

Truly, madly, deeply and with great equanimity, not-two.

Vital, alive, and be-loving, reason.

Ref:

Pascual-Leone, J. (1990). An essay on wisdom: towards organismic processes that make it possible' in R Sternberg (Ed) Wisdom: It's Nature, Origins and Development. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chö nyi

Chö nyi is Tibetan for the Sanskrit 'dharmata', which means the essence of things as they are, the true nature of phenomenal existence. In the four bardos of living and dying, the bardo of dharmata represents the dissolution of the painful bardo of dying, and the beginning of the dawning, like the grey-to-brilliant-colour of morning, of the Ground Luminosity, Mother Consciousness.

A natural radiance that clothes all being as energy and light, primordial purity, fully revealed, before the involution process that begins to clothe our Child Consciousness as we begin to incarnate.

'What is actually taking place here is a process of unfoldment, in which mind and its fundamental nature are gradually becoming more and more manifest. The bardo of dharmata is one stage in that process. For it is through this dimension of light and energy that mind unfolds from its purest state, the Ground Luminosity, toward its manifestation as form in the next bardo, the bardo of becoming.' ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

From the Dzogchen Tantras, we are graced to understand that there are four levels to the bardo of dharmata - each may, through the slightly less well known practice of Tögal, result in liberation, no rebirth. As in all tantric practice, these words give conceptual glimmerings, but no real understanding, of the emergent property not well classified as 'experience' that grounds the actual practice, that reveals the phenomena.


1. Luminosity — The Landscape of Light
"like a mirage on a plain in the heat of summer." ~ Bardo Thodol

Here, you take on a body of light. The first phase of this bardo is when "space dissolves into luminosity": All pervasive is a flowing vibrant world of sound, light, and color. This is brilliantly clear and radiant, transparent and multicolored, unlimited by any kind of dimension or direction, shimmering and constantly in motion.

Without mastery of Tögal practice, the bardo of dharmata simply flashes by, like a bolt of lightning.


2. Union—The Deities
"where the luminosity manifests in the form of buddhas or deities of various size, color, and form, holding different attributes" ~ Bardo Thodol

After the lightning bolt, where we are unable to recognize this as the spontaneous display  of Rigpa, the simple rays and colors then begin to integrate and coalesce into points or balls of light of different sizes, called tiklé. Within them the "mandalas of the 42 peaceful and 58 wrathful deities" of the Bardo Thodol appear, as enormous spherical concentrations of light seeming to occupy the whole of space.

The brilliant light they emanate is blinding and dazzling, the sound is tremendous, like the roaring of a
thousand thunderclaps, and the rays and beams of light are like lasers, piercing everything. The peaceful and wrathful deities unfold over a certain period of "days," taking on their own characteristic mandala pattern of five-fold clusters. This is a vision that fills the whole of your perception with such intensity that if you are unable to recognize it for what it is, it appears terrifying and threatening, where sheer fear and blind panic can consume.

From yourself and from the deities, very fine shafts of light stream out, joining your heart with theirs. Countless luminous spheres appear in their rays, which increase and then "roll up," as the deities all dissolve into you.


3. Wisdom

If again you fail to recognize and gain stability, the next phase unfolds, called "union dissolving into wisdom."
Another fine shaft of light springs out from your heart and an enormous vision unfolds from it; however, every detail remains distinct and precise. This is the display of the various aspects of wisdom, which appear together in a show of unfurled carpets of light and resplendent spherical luminous tiklés:

First, on a carpet of deep blue light appear shimmering tiklés of sapphire blue, in patterns of five. Above that, on a carpet of white light, appear radiant tiklés, white like crystal. Above, on a carpet of yellow light, appear golden tiklés, and upon that a carpet of red light supports ruby red tiklés. They are crowned by a radiant sphere like an outspread canopy made of peacock feathers.

This brilliant display of light is the manifestation of the five
wisdoms:
wisdom of all-encompassing space,
mirror-like wisdom,
equalizing wisdom,
wisdom of discernment, and
all accomplishing wisdom.

If you do not attain liberation here through resting undistracted in the nature of mind, the carpets of light and their tiklés, along with your Rigpa, all dissolve into the radiant sphere of light, which is like the canopy of peacock feathers.


4. Spontaneous Presence

This heralds the final phase of the bardo of dharmata, "wisdom dissolving into spontaneous presence." Now the whole of reality presents itself in one tremendous display. First the state of primordial purity dawns like an open, cloudless sky. Then the peaceful and wrathful deities appear, followed by the pure realms of the buddhas, and below them the six realms of samsaric existence.

The limitlessness of this vision is utterly beyond our ordinary imagination. Every possibility is presented: from wisdom and liberation to confusion and rebirth. At this point you will find yourself endowed with powers of clairvoyant perception and recollection. For example, with total clairvoyance and your senses unobstructed, you will know your past and future lives, see into others' minds, and have knowledge of all six realms of existence. In an instant you will vividly recall whatever teachings you have heard, and even teachings you have never heard will awaken in your mind.

The entire vision then dissolves back into its original essence, like a tent collapsing once its ropes are cut. If you have the stability to recognize these manifestations as the "self-radiance" of your own Rigpa, you will be liberated.

In the Bardo Thodol, periods of days are allotted to the experiences of the bardo of dharmata. These are not
solar days of twenty-four hours, because in the sphere of dharmata we have gone completely beyond all limits such as time and space. These days are "meditation days," and refer to the length of time we have been able to rest undistracted in the nature of mind, or in one single state of mind. With no stability in meditation practice, these days could be minutely short, and the appearance of the peaceful and wrathful deities so fleeting that we cannot even register they have arisen.

The key to understanding this bardo is that all the experiences that take place in it are the natural radiance of the nature of our mind. What is happening is that different aspects of its enlightened energy are being released. Just as the dancing rainbows of light scattered by a crystal are its natural display, so too the dazzling appearances of dharmata cannot be separated from the nature of mind. They are its spontaneous expression. So however terrifying the appearances may be, sthey have no more claim on your fear than a stuffed lion.

Strictly speaking, however, it would be wrong to call these appearances "visions" or even "experiences," because vision and experience depend upon a dualistic relationship between a perceiver and something perceived. If we can recognize the appearances of the bardo of dharmata as the wisdom energy of our very own mind, there is no difference between perceiver and perceived, and this is an experience of non-duality.

To enter into that experience completely is to attain liberation.

For, as Kalu Rinpoche says,

"Liberation arises at that moment in the after-death state when consciousness can realize its experiences to be nothing other than mind itself."

Rinpoche, S. (1992). The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. New York: HarperOne.