Expectation of Enchantment.

“People say what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive…so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive”.

Joseph Campbell

We have gotten very good at living but have forgotten how to be alive.

We our masters at tending to most of our daily needs. For much of the world transportation is fast and far reaching, food is plentiful, water is clean and free flowing - yet many are disconnected and disenchanted.

Despite our remarkable achievements in the external world, as we pass one another on the street, it becomes evident that the pace of modern life, driven by technology and ambition, has left little room for the profound and innate experiences that make us truly alive.

A smile with a stranger. A crisp breeze on our skin. The sun shining in our eyes. We have lost our expectation of enchantment. The capacity to be enchanted by the so-called mundane, I think, is the mark of someone who is truly educated.

I had the pleasure of learning from philosopher and educator Kevin Bartlett about his new curricular system that, among other things, seeks to align who students become with what they are taught. The system acknowledges that we ought to care about what concepts students understand, what skills they become competent at performing, and what kind of character they develop along the way. So how can we develop anew, or rather, uncover anew, our capacity to be awestruck by mere existence? I think it’s by going beyond theories and by transcending our obsession with explanations. Let me explain.

Throughout our sessions together, Kevin repeated the following quote attributed to British statistician George Box.

“All models are wrong, some are useful”

This quote works wonderfully when thinking about aphorisms and psychological frameworks. But what does it mean with regards to physical theories? What about the atomic model, what Richard Feynman calls the most important theory we have? Is the world not really made of atoms? Is our atomic model merely a highly effective thinking framework?

In essence: are the entities postulated by scientific theories actually real, or is it just pragmatically useful to act as if they were real?

Are scientific models of reality simply useful techniques for making predictions, or do they point to an underlying way things actually are?

Our friend Richard Feynman is no stranger to admitting his ignorance. In fact, this is a quotation I show to my students early on in the year to instil within them this fundamental epistemic attitude of accepting uncertainty and impermanence.

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong…I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, or being lost in a universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell”

Returning to our questions around the reality of scientific entities (especially atoms) - philosopher of science Ian Hacking has some definitive words on the matter.

“There was nothing wrong with asking, once, Are atoms real? But to go on discussing such a question may be only a feeble surrogate for serious thought about the physical world”

Perhaps utility and reality are synonymous. Perhaps we can never hope to know the bedrock of reality. Perhaps it’s hilarious to even think that a species of primate with a slightly larger brain than its cousins could come up with theories that explain everything! And we already have empirical hints that we are surrounded by something much beyond our understanding. We once thought that atoms constituted most of the mass of the cosmos, yet now we know that dark matter constitutes roughly 85% of the matter-density of the universe, and we know nothing about dark matter other than it exists!

While coming to a picture of so-called fundamental reality might be futile, we can certainly create incredibly useful theoretical frameworks. In fact, I am writing this very newsletter on a machine whose construction rests upon Quantum Mechanics!

While theories and explanation are useful for certain things, clinging to them is utterly antithetical to happiness. Vitality is lacking from modern life not because we don’t yet have the right theory - but because we think that vitality will come from a theory or a viewpoint.

Vitality is present here and now! Our theories and clever explanations merely block its appearance!

Venerable Ananda, the historical Buddha’s chief attendant, writes the following when speaking about what he knows:

“The extent to which there are viewpoints, view-stances, the taking up of views, obsessions of views, the cause of views, and the uprooting of views: that's what I know” AN 10.96

Venerable Ananda cares not about what viewpoints you hold, but only about the mechanisms by which you hold them and the mechanisms by which you release them. The Buddhist path of liberation is not a path of accumulation but a path of letting go. And what do we let go of but our wrong conceptions. We let go of our naive thoughts about life. Perhaps we thought there wouldn’t be any pain in a good life. Perhaps we thought that we would always be surrounded by what was pleasing and protected from what was vile. We thought. We thought too much and lived too little. And then we constructed caves of thinking and lived there.

Francisco Varela and his colleagues liken this cave of theoretical speculation to a spacesuit that separates us from reality.

“this abstract attitude is the spacesuit, the padding of habits and preconceptions, the armour with which one habitually distances oneself from one’s experience” Francisco Varela

We need to cease being enchanted by this spacesuit alone. Our life shrinks dramatically when we focus only on the spacesuit of the Self, the personality, and the views we happen to hold.

We came to this Earth for so much more than to be obsessed with ideas.

“Do not take life’s experiences too seriously. For in reality, they are nothing but dream experiences. Play your part in life, but never forget that it is only a role” Paramahansa Yogananda

We need to play our part but not become enchanted by our part.

We need to be enchanted by the entire spectacle of life! Yet, paradoxically, we only become cognizant of the spectacle when we play our part correctly, when we get out of our own way. And to do this of course we need to think. Of course we need to engage in theoretical planning. As they say, planning is everything but plans are worthless.

“You can plan for a hundred years. But you don’t know what will happen the next moment” Neem Karoli Baba

But what you can know about the next moment is that if you approach it correctly, you can expect to be enchanted by whatever it brings.

It is as it is.

Sasha