Essays in Search of Understanding

By George M. Brockway Ph.D

This book, Essays in Search of Understanding, covers a wide range of topics from "Puzzles and Problems in Buddhism" to so-called "unconditional love." Many of them are short and pithy, meant more as discussion starters than as something authoritative and final. But all of them reflect considerable thought and inquiry. Thoughts and lines of argum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Vine Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953699558

George M. Brockway Ph.D

George M. Brockway, Ph.D. (Philosophy, Univ. of Wisconsin) Dr. Brockway spent many years in the classroom both here in the U.S. and in Switzerland, making Philosophy and other subjects come alive for his students. Initially trained as a Jesuit, he has read deeply in the classics and the Philosophy of Religion, especially, in recent years, in the area of Buddhist Studies. Dr. Brockway also spent time in the private sector, first as an administrator of a medical clinic and then as a stock broker and investment consultant in the financial industry. He finished his professional career back in a university classroom teaching Comparative Religions, Logic and Philosophy. His broad experience and keen interest in teaching give his writing a very practical and down-to-earth bent.

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Introduction

Recommendation: don’t just start with Essay #1 and start reading. And definitely do not plan on or try reading the whole book at a single sitting or two. It’s meant to be dipped into as the spirit moves you. (Some of the essays are harder than others to follow and understand.) Rather, start by picking one whose subject really interests you and start with that one. (Though many do refer to others, they do not have to be read in any particular order.)

Most of these essay are quite short by design. And the short ones can be easily read in 15 or 20 minutes. (Though understanding what they are saying may take a moderate amount longer.) And the purpose of keeping them short is to encourage you to read them. If the topic interests you, go for it! It won’t take that long. And if, after reading it, you’re inspired to think some more on the topic, great!

No or not many definite answers here. It’s more thinking out loud. These are some of the questions I think are important and where my thinking about them stands at the present moment. The essays are meant as discussion starters. If the questions being considered are also of interest to you, then you might find my current thinking on them to be helpful, or at least provocative, for your own thinking about them. (Essay #9 is an especially good example of this work-in-progress character of these essays. When I started it, I thought I could establish an interesting new way of arriving at important truths, but as I got further into it, I discovered that I couldn’t do it. My new way was not as sure-fire as I had thought going into the essay.)

Before launching into the essays themselves, I’d like to indicate where I’m coming from in how I approach these topics. I would say that the bottom line when considering any claim (from anyone and about anything) is that whatever insight someone (including yourself) might have, it ultimately has to be vetted by both common sense and The Court of the 4 (+1) judges. (See below.)

Take as an example that you meet a supposed guru. This person has just spent 18 years meditating in a cave high in the Himalayas and he claims that as a result of his meditation he has now come to see the way ‘things’ r e a l l y are. Is what he has ‘seen’ actually true? Is it the way ‘things’ r e a l l y are? How would you tell?

Well, his life style and character (assuming both are exemplary) certainly might lead you to be receptive and open to his claims being true, but even more would depend on what his claim(s) are and whether they pass muster before common sense, logic and what you know to be true on other grounds (claims which have already passed muster). Passing muster in this case means going before the court of the 4 (+1) judges. The ‘judges’ of: clarity, consistency, coherence and completeness (+ simplicity). I’ll refer to this as The Court in what follows. If his claim(s) are not clear– no sense can be made of them– then there is nothing to believe and his insights become gibberish. And similarly so with the other judges. If the claim does not pass their scrutiny, there is at least good reason not to believe it. So, whether the insight comes from your own experience or that of another, ultimately it must pass muster before this court to merit acceptance or belief on your part. Be open minded, but not so open minded that your brains fall out.

Thus, if someone, let’s call him Sam, has an insight that his cat is really a human person in disguise you might ask him what he means by that. Does it mean, e.g., that his cat has all the same abilities that most persons have? E.g. can his cat speak a human language or read a book or plan what she is going to do tomorrow or make a promise? And if Sam says no, it doesn’t mean any of those things. And, in fact, he can’t say exactly what it does mean, then there is nothing to be believed (save, perhaps, that Sam is a bit weird).

Now let’s go back to the guru that we met earlier. And suppose the guru says that what he has ‘seen’ is that everything we encounter in our daily living, everything, is illusory. So, we take that claim before The Court and see if it passes muster. First issue, is it clear? What does it mean exactly? E.g., does it mean that the truck barreling down the road at 60 mph is just an hallucination so that I could step out in front of it and would suffer absolutely no damage or injury? No, no, says the guru, it doesn’t mean that.

So then, what does it mean? Well, what it means, he says, is that nothing that we encounter through our senses (and our mind) is really and actually just and only what it seems to us to be. So the rose isn’t really red, and at a more basic and fundamental level, the tree isn’t really solid, etc. OK, we can understand that and it agrees with what we already know by other means, by science in this case. So if that’s all he means, no problem. But did he (does anyone?) need 18 years meditating in a cave to come to that insight? (Why not just half a semester in a 10th grade science class?) All of which leads one to think that that’s not all he means by the claim that everything is illusory. So we ask him: is that all it means or does he mean something additional by the claim that everything is illusory? Well, yes, actually, he does mean something more. What he really means is that things outside of us don’t exist at all outside of us or independently of us. They are all just created by our own minds.

Woahhh! Now that’s a big and a significantly different claim than the first meaning he offered. So let’s look at the original claim in this new light. To clarify its meaning we might ask: "so you’re saying that the truck and the tree aren’t there at all (not just: aren’t there in the ways that I perceive them to be). That they are wholly dependent upon my mind for any existence they have?"

But that, it seems, is pretty easily shown to be false, so he might respond: no, no, not just your mind, but some mind or other. So if I were to die, you reply, the truck and the tree would not go away because someone else’s mind would create them? Yes, exactly so. And their mind would create them in very much the same way that my mind created them? Yes. But if everything, absolutely everything, is created by my own mind, isn’t that other person also simply a creation of my mind? And if that is so, can ‘they’ cause any effect outside my own mind?

Well, as you can see, there are lots and lots of questions to be asked just to get clear about what the guru is saying, to get clear about whether it has any meaning at all and then, assuming we can find some intelligible meaning, about whether, given that meaning, it passes muster before the other judges of The Court. And that will be my approach in the essays that follow.

Remember that old rhyme you may have heard in high school?

I have six serving men, they taught me all I knew, Why, What and When, How Where and Who.

Well, I’m here proposing an additional ‘rhyme’:

I have five judges, they help me see what’s true: clarity, consistency, coherence, completeness and simplicity.

These essays are (meant to be) provocative rather than answer-giving /authoritative / apodictic. And not even so much provocative as suggestive and questioning. My fondest hope is that you, dear reader, will find at least some of these essays to be suggestive and question provoking and worthy of your own musings.

And finally, these essays are meant to be ‘fun’. I.e., fun to read and think about the issues raised. ‘Fun’ the way a crossword or a jig saw puzzle is fun for many people. Here are some ideas you may never have thought about. If the subject grabs you, join in the ‘discussion’. Who knows where your thinking might take you? It’s an adventure, but a safe one. Well, maybe not sooo safe. But hey, live life!

Chapter One

Materialism or Not?

[Warning: this essay is moderately long (16 pp.) and difficult to track in places. It’s an important subject and underlies much of what follows it, but you might enjoy and find it easier to start with one of the other, shorter, essays.]

The issue here is whether everything that exists is material or dependent upon the material for its existence. Being material simply means it is made up entirely of matter (and/or energy since we now think that these two are convertible, one into the other). Thus, on this view of things, our bodies are clearly something material, something made of atoms and electrons. Our minds, on the other hand, may or may not be themselves something material (they would be, e.g., if they just are our brains) but if they are not just our brain, it is claimed, they are at least, wholly dependent upon something material (again, usually thought to be our brains). Thus, if no brain, then no mind. This view of things I’ll be referring to as materialism.

And there is another word that will come into our discussion which signifies something other than materialism but which is, itself, dependent upon materialism. That word is naturalism. And I mention it here because some of the thinkers and commentators we’ll be looking at deal with this issue of materialism by focusing on naturalism. The two notions are related in this way: if materialism is true and everything just is material or is dependent upon the material for its existence, then everything that exists is bound to obey the laws that govern our physical universe. The laws of chemistry, biology and ultimately, the laws of physics. And there would not be anything outside of the universe of everything physical or material. Thus the whole shebang, so to speak, would operate according to and in strict compliance with the laws of physics, the laws that govern the behavior of matter. And paramount among these would be the law of cause and effect. The law which states that every physical event is caused by some prior physical event(s) and that such a sequence can be traced back to the very beginning. Thus, naturalism refers to the natural (physical) universe operating as one big, extremely complicated, machine according to fixed laws and there is nothing outside of that whole. (N.b. that such a view of things is monistic, meaning simply that ultimately there only is just one ‘thing’ that makes up everything else, and that one thing is matter (or the matter-energy dyad. This notion of monism will be dealt with more fully in Essay