Our Civilizational Psychosis

And the medicine to cure it

“If … you now mentally investigate

All things that are within you or outside—

The mind and what appears to it—

Nothing, gross or subtle, do you find.

All things are empty; just like space

They have no entity.

If this you understand,

You will not cling or hanker after things.”

Longchenpa, Finding Rest in Illusion

While the Dzogchen teaching is now over, I am still sitting with it and reviewing the works of Longchenpa I was able to access. Here are some thoughts, still fresh and a bit raw:

I find the perspective of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism identical, in essence, to the philosophy of analytic or monistic idealism, as formulated by philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup and the physicist Amit Goswami. This perspective also fits with the discoveries made by quantum physics that the universe is “not locally real” — that objects only come into (apparent) manifestation when there is an observer to register them.

Longchenpa returns to this idea again and again, particularly in Finding Rest in Illusion, where he writes:

When the apprehender ceases,

The apprehended also is no more.

When the subject has withdrawn,

All holding of an object vanishes.

Then there is no link with an appearing object.

The framework of discernment falls away.

Then there’s simply primal wisdom,

Nondual, self-arisen.

Quantum mechanics convincingly proved the universe is “not locally real” a half century ago. But this result deeply troubled Einstein and other physicists, who made a long, fruitless search for “hidden variables” that might explain quantum phenomena such as action at a distance, quantum entanglement, and the results of experiments like the famous double slit and further elaborations which revealed that the observed and the observed could not be separated. According to Scientific American, in an article on the Nobel Prize winning discoveries:

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead the evidence shows that objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement.

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. As Albert Einstein once bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” To adapt a phrase from author Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

I consider it essential that Western physics and Eastern mysticism have converged, reaching identical conclusions. I still do not see our mainstream intellectual culture making the necessary, strenuous effort to thoroughly reflect upon this or absorb what it means. We don’t have the intellectual framework in place to hold such a paradigm-crashing realization. Instead, it gets ignored.

The best contemporary philosophical minds in the West — thinkers such as Byung-Chul Han and Slavoj Zizek, for example — still approach reality from a materialist or romantic/existentialist lens. This severely limits the value of their critique. The best-known social critics and anthropologists — people like Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari — do not make a deeper investigation into their own, embedded ontology. The more sophisticated mainstream media organs — The New York Times, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic — are still trapped in the reductive materialist ideology, even though this is painfully obsolete.

I am thinking — probably many who read this newsletter will agree — that we can see modern, Western civilization as a particular type of psychosis. According to the dictionary, psychosis is a “condition of the mind that results in difficulties discerning what is unreal and what is real.”