Brian Aldiss and Karl Marx

Rereading a Poul Anderson novel in order to discuss it on the Poul Anderson Appreciation Blog, I found an Introduction by Brian Aldiss, to the Master SF Series edition, that is relevant here. In the novel, the IQ of every animal and human being on Earth suddenly increases.

Aldiss, discussing means of attempted self-enhancement, therapy, Eastern religions, drugs and "the State", describes Marx's prediction that the State would wither away as foolish. (1)

By quoting Marx and Engels in State and Revolution, Lenin shows that bourgeois and bureaucratic states must be overthrown by the qualitatively different workers' state which will then wither away. Familiar states are instruments of coercion by a small social minority over the vast majority. A workers' state, for the first time in history an instrument of coercion by the majority over a recently dispossessed minority, will have no reason to remain in existence when the dispossessed minority has failed to reproduce itself as a class but it would be foolish indeed to predict that "the State" as we know it will ever wither away.

Aldiss, Brian, "Introduction" IN Anderson, Poul, Brain Wave, London, 1976, AT pp. 5-8, p. 5.

Society and Psychology

A comrade addresses our social problems by speaking at a meeting and opposing economic exploitation. A Zen trainee addresses his psychological states by facing a wall and understanding mental processes. These are responses to issues that are interconnected but on different levels, "outer" and "inner." The best people that I know include Party comrades and Zen trainees.

By meditating facing a wall, I realize that I have been almost completely wrong and mistaken:

insufficiently attentive to interpersonal and social interactions;
unempathetic and uncompassionate;
accepting and defending a belief merely because I had been indoctrinated in it;
thinking that merely abstract reasoning would resolve major issues about reality, society and morality;
entirely abstract and theoretical in outlook;
responding and behaving neither honestly nor spontaneously but in accordance with an idea of what was expected;
not addressing practical issues earlier in life because accustomed to someone else, adults, controlling and dictating (as an adult, I now fundamentally disagree with their beliefs and values);
not appreciating the value of study until a very late stage of education;
attending to issues that happened to interest me but not to other issues that were equally important.

I could have wound up as a celibate priest or bachelor and absent-minded academic. Fortunately, wider reading, marriage, family life, unemployment, political activity, other kinds of work, professional retraining and meditative practice, in other words life, intervened.

We can and must disagree about the state of society but each must attend to his mental states. I was brought up to confess sins to a priest or, in the absence of a priest, to God. I now think in terms of actions and consequences, not of sins (Buddhist, not Biblical, teaching), and attend to them myself although without any quick absolution.

Social Karma

My karma is my action or behaviour. How I tend to act, have acted and still act. Karma matters because actions have consequences. I realise that my actions have been unwise and uncompassionate and accept a responsibility to "cleanse my karma" by acting in accordance with meditative insights. However, not all karma is mine. Each of us survives early childhood only because of the actions of adults. We are fed, taught and socialised. I was also indoctrinated, pressured, bullied and intimidated. Many of my actions were reactions to theirs. Thus, I tended to be solitary and resented being condemned as unsociable.

I cannot cleanse the karma of others. Bodhisattvas act for the enlightenment of all living beings but most living beings will not noticeably approach the realisation of their enlightenment in our life times. Politics addresses action collectively, not individually. We struggle to build an association for the free development of each. Thus, each will be responsible for his own actions but will not be impeded, indoctrinated or intimidated by the actions of others. This is probably as much as we can do to address the fact that many of our problems are caused by the actions of others.  

Practice of Consciousness

Thesis: Organismic sensitivity is necessary for consciousness.
Antithesis: The organismic responses of self-preservation and the pursuit of pleasure hinder the further development of consciousness.
Synthesis: The practice of consciousness, meditation, addresses hindrances to the development of consciousness.

Starting to address hindrances is as far as some of us have got. Imagine an entire planet whose entire population comprises only individuals whose consciousness and understanding of their natural and social environments is no longer impeded by any attachments, favoured self-images, uncontrolled thought processes, exclusivist loyalties, desire for self-promotion or self-aggrandisement, indoctrination, prejudice, divisive dogmatism etc, a planet where everyone realises, "I am a transient psychophysical organism sharing this environment with every other organism. I no longer identify myself with a particular religious tradition or armed nation-state perceived as in conflict with others. I aim to learn, work, contribute and share in social wealth but not to promote my individual interests or prestige at the expense of anyone else."

I believe that this outcome is possible but not that it will be reached by persuading millions to meditate - unless, of course, every individual member of the economic ruling class were to realise that they should abdicate power and should work to replace competitive accumulation with cooperation for need. It is far more likely that the majority will have to dispossess them. 

Meditating Matter

There is no one else here. I am alone facing a wall. Does anyone watch while we meditate? Potential watchers:

named gods like Indra and Krishna are myths;
unknown gods are hypothetical and must be presumed non-existent until proved existent;
the historical Buddha was a man and died a long time ago (we know him through his teaching; he does not know us; according to the teaching, he has not been reborn);
the cosmic Buddha is a principle;
the Buddha within is a potential;
neither is a person or conscious subject;
Jesus was another man who died a long time ago;
omniscience is arguably impossible (see below).

Jesus' disciples believed that he had been resurrected but their proclamation is insufficient reason for us to believe this. Like Krishna, he is sometimes vividly imagined. Thus, he has passed not from death to immortality but from history to myth. Therefore, we are not watched by gods, Buddhas, Jesus or any omniscient deity. 

No one is omniscient. Self is known only by contrast with other. Other is recognised as such only when it has been perceived and re-perceived, then recognised as having continued to exist independently of self between perception and re-perception. The consequent distinction between present and remembered perceptions entails an unknown future. Subjects of consciousness necessarily perceive an objective realm which is mostly unknown. No omniscient deity watches us meditate. 

Did gods give humanity reason and morality? Mythically, yes. Biologically, both the ability to reason and concern for others were naturally selected. Reasoning about the environment has obvious survival value. Our earliest ancestors were social, therefore motivated by collective, not just individual, self-interest. Also, we help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return. Psychologically, we experience that motivation as moral obligation. 

Society imposes on individuals both acceptable behaviour and linguistic usage. Sexual taboos prevented in-breeding, then patriarchal monogamy preserved property. Individuals internalise shame as guilt and speech as thought. Thus, we are variously motivated by reason, collective and individual self-interest, social pressure, shame, guilt and moral obligation. Morality is conceptualised and even experienced as divine commands. However, biological motivation preceded religious imagination. Socialised language-users personified and addressed their environment. Because human beings become self-conscious persons only in interpersonal interactions, they projected personal relationships onto the heavens.

    

Socially, we are both subjects and objects of consciousness. Immature subjects are conscious of being objects. Immature behaviour is for an audience or a camera. Mature subjects are simply conscious. Meditation is pure subjectivity or spirituality, without shame or deliberate thought. We neither perform for an audience nor address a deity. Thus, we begin to observe self dispassionately. I am accountable for my actions but not to anyone watching me meditate. I must address my states of consciousness. Painful memories are consequences of past actions, karma. The consequences are present but the bad karma can remain past. There is guilt only as consciousness of consequences. The Western Paradise may be Earth seen differently. Samsara is Nirvana. To use theistic language metaphorically, the Kingdom is within. We are not going anywhere. We are here. 

In purely secular terms, we are not there yet but have a long way to go. However, the potential for socialised production and distribution of abundant wealth is present. Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

"Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud."

Trotsky, contemplating green grass and blue sky, wrote:

"Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, violence and oppression and enjoy it to the full." 

The present is the now of individual awareness and the time for collective action, a cross-roads and meeting place between meditation and revolution. (The Christian cross symbolises an eternal-temporal intersection but also a barbaric blood sacrifice. We can incorporate some though not all aspects of Christian mythology into a coherent world view with more effective symbols: 

(the seated Buddha;
yin-yang;
Thor's hammer;
the fish;
the clenched fist...)      

"Great Wisdom From Birth"

All (or at least most) of us have to be:

attached before we can be non-attached;
un-empathetic before we can be compassionate;
naive before we can be wise;
immature before we can be mature;
superficial before we can be profound
etc. 

We are not like the Isvara of the Yoga Sutras, a special kind of being, perennially liberated. Is it possible to have great wisdom from birth, as Dogen said the Buddha did? It is too late for us. We cannot change our pasts. Can we have great wisdom from birth in a future life? I do not believe that we will have future lives. The One is reborn in all beings but each being is a single organism, not a series of organisms.

Earlier and later subjects of consciousness have different bodies and memories. Conceivably the dispositions of an earlier organism are transmitted to a later organism through a psychic medium but where is the evidence that this occurs and would this alone suffice to constitute identity between earlier and later psyches? Instead, can we bring it about that future generations, whatever their initial dispositions, are helped to move towards wisdom as quickly as possible with a minimum of obstacles? Can we build the Western Paradise here? Yes, that is a realistic political goal. In fact, radical social transformation is urgently necessary in any case.

 

Inner and Outer

Two people converse. They see and hear each other. They also see their surroundings and hear other sounds. Thus, they share a publicly accessible, empirically discernible, objective, material realm. Each also accesses a private, inner, subjective, mental realm of memories, imaginings, thoughts, emotions, motives, apprehensions and anticipations. Thus, experience has two layers or levels which, however, are not ontologically equivalent.

Objects pre-existed subjects which generate their individual subjectivities. Despite its lack of objectivity, the inner realm is powerful, full of ideas, reasons and motives. We need to understand both realms, reducing neither to the other. We exist where they intersect. The entire content of the inner world is derived from natural and social environments. Language is social before it is internal. However, it is with the inner powers of intellect and imagination that we understand and set out to change the external world. Mind is creative, not passive; a god, not a mirror. It developed with manipulation, not as mere cognition.

The inner world includes dreams. Because, when dreaming, we seem to leave the body and to enter a realm where we can meet (dream about) the dead, it was thought that:

the inner world was inter-subjective or objective;
it touches the visible world;
we enter it temporarily in sleep and permanently at death;
it has other inhabitants. 

In fact, it is still inhabited by myths and fictions.

We understand the inner world through meditation, psychology and literature, the physical world through physics, chemistry and cosmology, the biological world through Darwinian analysis of natural selection underlying species diversity and the human world, I suggest, through Marxist analysis of economic realities underlying social appearances.    

Practice and Experience

When we meditate, we engage with the kind of practice and experience from which the rishis derived the "Atman is Brahman" teaching and the Buddha derived the "anatta" teaching, although the latter was backed up with philosophical analysis and argument. Thus:

practice and experience are more basic than teachings;
teachings are guides to meditative practice, as Marxist theory is a guide to political practice;
both experiences and teachings derived from them differ.

However, we can synthesise apparently contradictory teachings. "Atman is Brahman" means that each individual soul is identical with the transcendent whereas "anatta" means that there are no individual souls. However, the Upanishadic teaching can mean instead that each individual self is identical with the one universal self whereas the Buddhist teaching can mean that there are no separate selves. In that case, the teachings agree.

Buddhists do not refer to a universal self and rightly if this were taken to mean that the universe is a single person. However, it need only mean that the universe is conscious of itself through many individual selves and this formulation is consistent with materialism.  

Is Compassion the Nature of Reality?

Yes, according to a passage read to the Lancaster Serene Reflection Meditation Group. However, reality pre-existed consciousness whereas compassion requires it. I suggest that: 
 
someone who is one with reality is compassionate;
therefore, he simultaneously experiences both reality and compassion;
therefore, he tends to identify them, especially if he is influenced by idealist belief in the primacy of consciousness.
 
Meditation on reality shows us our karma (action and consequences) and how to cleanse it. Thus, reality resembles a compassionate teacher but is not a conscious teacher. Although most religions (responses to the highest transcendence) personify or idealise the transcendent, the most basic Buddhist concept is emptiness, not consciousness. "The nature of reality is emptiness" might be more appropriate. The realisation that every subject and object of consciousness is empty of permanent, independent substance may generate compassion for those whose suffering is caused by desire for permanence and fear of impermanence. However, mere emptiness, equally present both in conscious subjects and in unconscious objects, is not itself identical with compassion.

When a group of workers engages in conflict with an employer or manager, any of the workers who practises Buddhist meditation may also practise compassion towards the person with whom they are in conflict but should not let this obscure either the issues involved in the conflict or the need for solidarity with fellow workers whose attitudes may be far from compassionate. Compassion may be a kind of solidarity, with all conscious beings, but, if so, it must be differentiated from solidarity in a more specific sense. Compassion, "suffering with", motivated the Buddha to teach meditation to individuals of all castes whereas class solidarity is a common interest which, when fully realised, will put workers in control of production, thus ending the economic conflict of interest between buyers and sellers of labour power.
 
A Buddhist employer might:

accept pro-capitalist economics, therefore disagree with the political analysis presented here;
reason that the capitalist role, extracting surplus value from living labour, is essentially uncompassionate, therefore cease to be an employer;
reason that we must continue to act within the existing economic system until it is overthrown while avoiding both personal greed and an overtly oppressive or exploitative approach to employees.

Idealism is multifarious:

one conscious being pre-existed matter (theism);
many co-exist with it (Jainism);
the idea of goodness pre-existed instances of goodness (Platonism);
shared ideas, not economic relationships, determine social institutions (common sense);
greed, hate and delusion are beginningless whereas compassion is timeless (Buddhism).

Dialectical materialists, affirming that materially based consciousness generates psychological dispositions and that ideas reflect societies, not vice versa, can value consciousness and compassion without reifying them.
Although Buddhist teaching includes "no soul" and the transience of mental states, it also attributes a perennial robustness to basic motivations. The materialist view is that desire and fear begin anew in each conscious organism and end when the organism dies but that no empirically discernible medium transmits such motives from the last mental state of any dying organism to the first mental state of a particular later organism. The complex of attachments and aversions comprising a human psyche seems to end when the brain dies unless the individual realises enlightenment before death. Between realisation and death, there is consciousness without attachments and aversions. After death, I think, there is neither consciousness nor a potential psyche, unless Spiritualists can prove otherwise.

Barring an ecological catastrophe or thermonuclear war, many people will be born after I have died. Let us consider one of them. He will think of himself as "I", will not remember having been me and will not be regarded as identical with me but can be affected for good or ill by my present actions. These propositions seem to exhaust the entire karmic and moral point of the rebirth teaching. Between my death and that future person's birth, human beings will continue to interact. Some interactions will be direct or indirect effects of my actions. Some will be causes of his birth. It is unlikely that a linear causal sequence will directly link me to him but he and I are indirectly connected as parts of a single empirically discernible reality.

Other, supernatural, realms are the subject matter of religious teachings but are neither verifiably real nor mutually compatible. Catholic priests talk about Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. Zen monks talk about rebirth. Individuals receive these ideas from their traditions, not from their own experience. Catholic practice presupposes Catholic belief whereas Zen practice need not presuppose rebirth. For a Buddhist-materialist synthesis, I suggest recognition of: 
 
the value of meditation;
the possibility of enlightenment;
impermanence;
no soul, but also no rebirth;
materialism that is neither reductive nor mechanical but dialectical and historical.
 
This last aspect incorporates actions that are not only individual and moral but also collective and political. The only negation of traditional Buddhism is "no rebirth" but this is a logical extension from "no soul".

The Cause and End of Suffering

Medicine, economic reform and Buddhism address aspects of suffering. Suffering can occur only because consciousness exists. Consciousness is a by-product of natural selection. For mobile organisms, pleasure and pain have greater survival value than merely unconscious sensitivity to environmental alterations. For conscious beings, consciousness is not a by-product of another activity but an end in itself. However, conscious beings are the only kind of beings that can have ends in this sense.

"Mind" means either intellect in particular or consciousness in general. In the general sense, we contrast, for example, the "mind" of an ant with that of a man and Buddhists mean by "Buddha Mind" the faculty of intuitive wisdom, not of intellectual comprehension. Meditation discloses, first, that mind in general is not a visible, tangible object and, secondly, that its states are even less permanent than those of external objects. Mental states succeed each other with great rapidity. This reflects their physical basis. Organisms maintain their form actively, not passively. They continually change their composition by exchanging matter with their environments. Cells change their states as bodies adjust to environmental alterations. Multiple brain cell linkages change while processing changing sensory inputs and respond differently according to their past experience.

Mental flux reflects this psychophysical flux. Not mere complexity but complex organism-environment interaction generates consciousness and action on the environment generated human consciousness. Increasing complexity causes mental suffering by adding memories, anticipations and imaginings to immediate sensations. Buddhists seek the cause and end of suffering within. On different levels, Buddhists and Marxists see and do what needs to be done without requesting questionable divine help.

 

Zen meditation is not practised in discrete stages but Zen trainees might experience: the transience of mental states; the tendency of thought to perpetuate them; the emergence of deeper dissatisfactions like guilt or resentment. We need to heed problematic feelings when they arise but not to perpetuate them by thinking about them at other times. In this case, our thinking about how to solve the problem is the problem. Heeding guilt etc means not thinking about it but watching it arise and pass. What matters is not the passing mental states but the awareness through which they pass like clouds through the sky. That awareness is the way to the end of suffering.      

Reflection and Society

Thought internalises language which reflects naturally selected sensation. Thus, reflection began as a means to survival but, when survival is ensured, reflection can instead become an end in itself as science, philosophy, art and meditation. Because reflection as a means to survival began as language, reflective beings are social. Social labour successively produced no surplus, a small surplus and a large surplus. The small surplus, necessarily distributed unequally, supported a reflective minority whereas socialisation of technology with equal distribution of a large surplus will release the potential of the majority.

The optimal state is reflection as an end in socialist society. I suggest that education will:

(i) help each individual to identify his interests and abilities;
(ii) equip him with knowledge and skills for self-realising work;
(iii) provide sabbaticals from work so that anyone who wants to can learn about other work activities;
(iv) also provide re-training at any time for a change of direction.

Work that is socially indispensable, universally unwanted and impossible to automate should be reduced to zero. Until then, it should be shared so that everyone spends minimal time doing what no one wants to. It should be impossible to pay anyone to do your share. 

Each individual should at any time have access to eight social relationships:

(i) "family", people we grew up with and have always known, however this is organised;
(ii) teachers/tutors/mentors/guides or one in particular;
(iii) solitude;
(iv) those engaged in the same kind of work;
(v) people with common interests other than work;
(vi) public areas (streets, parks, restaurants, theatres etc) to be visited alone or in groups;
(vii) places to go for the sole purpose of meeting new people;
(viii) discussion and decision-making about matters of concern to society as a whole.

Family has changed throughout prehistory and history, is changing now and will change in future. What matters is that new members of society are encouraged to realise their potential. Solitude is a relationship because society must respect and support it. Most of us work with colleagues. A writer's work is solitary but probably enriched by meeting other writers and readers.

Matters of concern to society as a whole would be:

(i) maintenance of a material and cultural environment;
(ii) defence of the Earth against cometary strikes or against continued ecological consequences of pre-revolutionary society;
(iii) long term preservation of humanity in self-sustaining extraterrestrial habitats.

  

A non-polluting rapid global transport system would facilitate participation in the eight relationships. Teleportation would be ideal but is probably impossible. Electronic communication would facilitate decision-making but should involve full audiovisual contact between local mass meetings, not, impossibly, between millions of isolated individuals. The technology currently used to conceal and distract can instead be used to inform and involve.

Years ago, a relative of mine who watched television news every evening thought that a major industrial dispute was about the closed shop, not merely about union recognition as I learned by attending a strike support meeting. My relative also thought that the employer who had sacked a shop steward was being bullied by the union which campaigned for her re-instatement! Of course, readers of this article will have a range of views about such issues and do not know the details of the particular case but my point here is that my relative had no access to alternative views and did not even know that such views existed although it should be obvious that a dispute is controversial. She knew that a certain military dictator had restored democracy in his country but not that it was he who had destroyed democracy in the first place. Any view critical of the status quo was filtered out. 

In another dispute, a man crossing a picket line informed me that there was no industrial dispute despite the fact that I had spoken to strikers and had joined their picket line. Seeing my puzzlement, fellow pickets told me that the man was management. The management view was that the people standing outside the building had been dismissed, therefore no longer worked for the company. It followed that the firm was not in dispute with any of its current employees. Then I understood the management view although I continued to disagree with it.

These cases are relevant to the discussion of socialism because withdrawal of labour is a first step towards control of work and unalienated labour. If I thought that "socialism" meant a bureaucratic dictatorship stifling initiative and squandering wealth, then I would have to accept a market economy as the lesser evil (but what an evil, especially now in 2009).

Further speculative features of a future society might be:

(i) human brains in animal-like bodies needing neither clothes nor buildings but comfortable in natural environments although retaining intelligence and technology;
(ii) brain implants bestowing psychokinetic control of immediate environments;
(iii) nanotechnology eating dirt and pollution and excreting oxygen;
(iv) extension of habitable environments not just to other planetary surfaces but throughout solar space;
(v) "intelligent", self-adjusting environments.

Science, Spirituality and Socialism

Scientific knowledge is based on observation, measurement and experiment, thus on experience, not on authority. Much spiritual teaching is based on the authority of scriptures or gurus. If it can be established that a guru knows whereof he speaks, then it makes sense to accept his authority at least provisionally although many gurus claim more than merely provisional authority. Buddhist spiritual teaching is a guide to practice and is to be confirmed or disconfirmed by individual experience. On this basis so far, I accept the teaching of karma (action and consequences) though not of individual rebirth. Zen monks authoritatively tell us what the teaching is but we are not obliged to accept the teaching on their authority.

Utopian socialism is an idea based not on authority but on abstract reasoning. It would be good if the economy were co-operative, not competitive etc. Utopian socialists can only argue that their idea is better than the current reality whereas Marxist theory guides the kind of political practice that potentially builds socialism. Effective arguments for socialism occur in the context of struggle against aspects of the capitalist system and of its state apparatus. All such struggles potentially challenge the system and demonstrate how to overthrow it. Thus, Marxism is "scientific socialism", to be confirmed or disconfirmed by collective experience. Marxism would be disproved either by a crisis-free capitalism or by the continued oppression of social minorities in a genuinely socialist, as opposed to state capitalist, economy. Also, Marxist theory has developed in the light of subsequent experience. Such development continues to explain capitalism, not accommodate to it.

Buddhism contrasts with authoritarian and theistic spiritual traditions. Marxism contrasts with utopian and reformist socialist movements. Although neither Buddhist teaching nor Marxist theory achieves scientific precision, they are our closest approaches to scientific spirituality and socialism.

Traditions

The Buddhist tradition recognises:

a beginningless, not recently created, universe;
beginningless greed, hate and delusion, not a prehistoric fall by our first parents;
universal causation without divine interventions;
cause and effect in morality as well as in physics;
endless process and transience, even for gods;
philosophical analysis and understanding as integral to spiritual enquiry;
insights gained through meditation, not given in revelation;
our ability to create new, not just endure past, karma;
many human Buddhas, not one divine Saviour;
food for the poor as a better sacrifice than blood for the gods.

Karma is action. If action and consequence are cause and effect, then new karma not caused by previous actions contradicts universal causation. However, this problem is not unique to Buddhists. We experience both a causally ordered realm and our ability to act anew within it. We may favour determinism but must accept responsibility. Kant's antithesis between theoretical and practical reason paradoxically but accurately expresses our experience as active subjects, not passive objects. Causes affecting us are internally processed and their effects experienced as decisions or actions. Unrestrained and uncoerced actions are free. Thus, we are caused to act freely. Meditation discloses internal processes but first life must motivate us to meditate.

Greek Atomists postulated, and quantum physicists confirm, that some particles change position without causation but such microcosmic indeterminacy does not affect macrocosmic experience. Chaos, unpredictable major changes caused by initially minor events, precludes inflexibly mechanistic determinism.

The Buddha's experimental practice of asceticism and meditation and his philosophical analysis of existing religious concepts were motivated by compassion and spiritual concern. Consequently, he founded a meditative tradition that generated its own, Buddhist, philosophy. The premise of Christianity is neither compassion nor spirituality but a conviction of the believer's salvation. This conviction does not generate philosophical enquiry and can even be hostile to it. When Christians did philosophise about their beliefs, they had to adapt originally pagan Platonism and Aristotelianism. If Christianity had not been imported by missionaries, then imposed by the state, then myths, epics, philosophies, local rituals and mystery religions might have converged as a European equivalent of Hinduism.

The Marxist tradition recognises:

scientific cosmogony and cosmology;
an ascent from animality to humanity through collective labour;
universal causation, including economic determination of social institutions;
social determination of individual psychology;
endless process and transience with gods as myths;
philosophical, historical and economic analysis as integral to political practice;
theory guiding and tested by practice;
that men make their own history though not in circumstances of their own choosing;
the self-emancipation of the working class;
the dispossessed as agents of struggle, not passive recipients of hand outs.

Materialist Theory and Spiritual Practice

The Cosmic Perspective

Meditation is practice of consciousness. Traditionally, it was believed that consciousness had pre-existed material conditions and processes. It followed that individual subjects of consciousness were souls and that an ultimate subject, if such existed, was God. Philosophers either elaborated or questioned these ideas. Buddhists, believing neither in souls nor in God, nevertheless believed that consciousness was beginningless and that mental processes had been transmitted into current organisms from a beginningless past. Thus: 

for Plato, philosophy or reflective thought liberated souls from matter;
for Jains, meditation transcending thought liberates souls from matter;
for Hindus, meditation unites souls with God;
for Buddhists, meditation liberates present consciousness from perennial mental processes.

I accept scientific evidence that consciousness originated from material conditions and processes. Cosmically, consciousness is novel, not perennial. Its origin was a qualitative revolution. It follows that: 

organisms, not souls or God, are the subjects of consciousness;
mental processes began in a finite past;
meditation is practice of individual consciousness but not also participation in a perennial consciousness. 

  

Mobile organisms were naturally selected for sensitivity to environmental alterations. The most intense degree of sensitivity is sensation. Therefore, consciousness is a by-product of natural selection. It begins as sensation but becomes reflection: language, thought, self-knowledge, meditation etc. Reflective beings can regard reflective consciousness as an end, not a means. However, only conscious beings can have ends. Therefore, consciousness was not an end of pre-conscious processes. The universe did not intend, although it did tend, to become conscious at least once. We can treat persons as ends in themselves while recognising their accidental origin. The lotus grows from dark places.

Naturally selected reflective consciousness can either continue the struggle for which it was selected or reflect. Reflection can be either a means to survival or an end in itself. Meditation can be a relaxation technique or the supreme enlightenment. Those who engage in conflict not for self- or group-aggrandisement but because disengagement would be a greater evil can synthesise the end of contemplation with the necessity of action. However, political analysis is necessary to determine which conflicts are lesser evils and which merely perpetuate a conflictive status quo. 

The Global Perspective

Specifically:

the American war on terror does not end causes of terrorism but is one;
soldiers merely obeying orders abdicate responsibility;
when a minority resists oppression, a "peace keeping force" merely maintains the status quo, thereby perpetuating oppression;
arming the minority would help to end oppression;
assassinating dictators is less harmful than destroying cities but cannot change society;
mass action can change society, if not derailed by compromising leadership;
markets need states to enforce laws protecting property in work places and resources;
economic competition becomes military;
the global economy needs war - a new century of technology initiated not world peace but two World Wars, then nuclear deterrence therefore Cold War, then a single super-power therefore "war on terror". 

The war on terror can be prolonged indefinitely. When each enemy is defeated, another appears not because the system is good, therefore attacked by everything bad, but because the system must externalise conflict in order to deny that it is inherent. An American clergyman said, "We fought Nazis, then Communists, now terrorists", an uncritical mouthpiece of the status quo.

Many conflicts perpetuate the system but only one can end it. "The last fight let us face..." The whole Earth is now Kurukshetra, the battlefield where Arjuna fought with Krishna as his charioteer.

The National Perspective

Britain, May 2009:

a Labour Government saving global capitalism fails to address global warming;
resurgent fascism is widely opposed even by the anti-immigrant press;
economic pressure on public services causes endless re-organisation in futile attempts to quantify qualitative work.

The Individual Perspective

Obviously, each individual must do what s/he thinks is right. Few accept all the perspectives outlined above but we are obliged at least to question received values before either committing to them or seeking alternatives.

Body and Soul?

Philosophically, I am dialectical materialist. I think that each of us is a single psychophysical organism, not two conjoined entities, a body and a soul. However, the language of "body and soul" makes some sense if it is understood that the "soul" must be mortal, not immortal. If your "body" is your visible physical social appearance and role whereas your "soul" is your consciousness, then "body" and "soul" can be differently related. Consciousness may be completely identified with physical satisfaction and enjoyment and/or with social appearance and role. Alternatively, it may be completely detached from them.

People around us treat us as if we were simply identical with the person (persona =mask) that is visible to them. We are socially trained to accept this identification but can see things differently. It is as if the soul has entered the world with a mission to stop identifying with the body by becoming more conscious of the reality underlying roles and appearances. My public persona can be a role that I play for social purposes, but not what I think I am. I think that my consciousness has grown organically with my body, not that it has entered this body from a previous life or another realm. But it is as if it has come here to learn non-attachment to the body in the sense of "body"  suggested here. This does not entail negation of the body. The Buddhist teaching of "no soul" entails a middle way between asceticism, emphasising the "body", and hedonism, emphasising the "soul".

As we meditate, we become dispassionate observers of our past social interactions. We are no longer simply the person who was in conflict with others but observers of the conflict who are more likely to avoid unnecessary conflict in future.

Is Buddhism a Religion or a Philosophy?

It is both although we would not go far wrong if we called it a practical philosophy so old that it has religious forms. We meditate before a Buddha image on an altar, bow either towards the image or towards each other and even place offerings on the altar. By contrast, we do not practise analytic philosophy before an image of Socrates on an altar. Buddhist teaching addresses philosophical issues:

the concept of souls;
causality;
the eternality or otherwise of the world;
the constituents of consciousness;
how to live rightly.

As an analysis of the cause of suffering and a way to the end of suffering, Buddhist philosophy is practical, not academic. Buddhist practice refers neither to the gods nor to a creator. The religious formulae of a temple or meditation hall facilitate the practice of meditation. They do not placate deities. So far, this makes Buddhism philosophical, not religious. In Buddhist countries, the culture incorporates both Buddhist and polytheist practices. Further, Buddhist practice does refer not to a transcendent being but definitely to a transcendent state. Since I define religion basically as response to the highest transcendence, I regard Buddhism as both philosophical and religious.

Marxism also incorporates both philosophical analysis and practical action. Both Buddhism and Marxism address the state of the world and what is to be done about it.

Consciousness as Emergent Interaction II

Emptiness need not mean idealism. No substance need not mean mind only. The proposition that there is no permanent substance underlying any transient phenomenon could be taken to mean that only consciousness and appearances to consciousness exist, thus that there is no external reality causing or corresponding to appearances. However, "Consciousness as Emergent Interaction" (see here) describes consciousness as an emergent property of organisms that had previously interacted unconsciously with their environments. It follows that both organisms and environments pre-existed consciousness and still exist now.

"Emptiness" teaching means that apparently distinct entities exist only by virtue of their relationships to other apparently distinct entities, not that they exist only when observed. Before sighted organisms existed, leaves absorbed some wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and reflected others although there were not yet any subjects of consciousness able to experience "green."

We take for granted the existence of, e.g., trees, technologies and taxes. Trees exist only because there is soil and air. Technological commodities exist only as part of an industrial economy. Taxes exist only as part of a vast social superstructure which also enables wage workers, unlike ancient slaves or medieval serfs, to take their employer to an industrial tribunal, to worry about whether their tax code is correct, about whether they will lose their no claims bonus if they are involved in a car accident and about how inflation will affect their pensions. Employment laws, insurance, inflation and pensions are entirely dependent on a money economy which has not always existed and will not always exist.

According to both materialist philosophy and conservation laws, energy continues to exist whatever form it takes. However, Lenin argued that its nature is inexhaustible so that successive scientific theories only approximate to it. We might replace the reality-appearance distinction with a threefold distinction between reality as not understood yet, reality as currently understood and appearance. The most obvious feature of energy is its potentiality, its capacity to transform itself, or to be transformed, into anything from particles to works of art. In conscious and intelligent beings, potentiality becomes creativity.

"Emptiness"  expresses the empirical fact that everything experienced, every entity, environment, economy etc, exists only temporarily and in specific conditions. "Every entity" includes us, you and me, all of mankind, as inhabitants and observers of environments and economies. Nothing and no one is fixed or unchanging. This may sound obvious but it was argued, e.g., that Apartheid or Stalinism could not be overthrown and it is frequently stated that human nature is unchangeable. On this level, arguments for Buddhist emptiness are also arguments for Marxist materialism because both insist that nothing is unchanging.

Evidence for stellar, biological and social change is also evidence for emptiness. Emptiness entails change, not consciousness only. Lacking later scientific knowledge, Buddhists saw change as cyclical, not evolutionary, but they did emphasize change and on the basis of experience. Engels, synthesizing Hegelian philosophy with scientific knowledge, envisaged spiral development towards higher syntheses but also longer term cosmic cycles. We not only hypothesize successive universes but also understand stellar processes. Stars are not eternal and their explosive ending fills space with the elements necessary for transient life. 

Any reality underlying changing forms affects us only through those changing forms and therefore is not in itself a permanent part of our experience. Any single, permanent and unchanging aspect of experience would not be noticed. If everything were always white, then nothing would be recognized as white. A visitor from a polychrome universe would not be able to communicate the difference between "This is white, that is white..." and "This exists, that exists..." "White" is meaningful only when we say, "This is white, that is black..." or "This is white but was black." Organs adapted to notice differences and changes would not register an unchanging feature of existence.

Buddhists like others have formulated idealist philosophies but the Buddha primarily taught the way to the end of suffering in a mutable realm.   

Consciousness as Emergent Interaction

Organisms were selected for sensitivity to environmental alterations.
Sensitivity increased until it became sensation.
Thus, consciousness was a by-product of natural selection.
It was a means to survival, not an end-in-itself.

The earliest consciousness was motivated, not dispassionate.
Motivation focuses attention on desired or feared objects of consciousness.
Meditation is the practice of consciousness as an end-in-itself.
Emergent consciousness is not perennial.

However, neither meditation nor Buddhist teaching requires perennial consciousness.
The Buddha rightly described psychophysical states as transient.
"No soul" means no enduring self underlying transient mental states.
"Emptiness" means no permanent substance underlying any transient phenomenon.

The Buddha taught that attachment to transient states causes suffering.
Marx analysed economic causes of alienation and conflict.
Their successors can address inner processes and outer conflicts.
Krishna in the Gita applied meditative non-attachment to work and war.

Darwin: natural selection.
Marx: class struggle.
The Buddha: meditation.
Krishna: non-attached action.

What Is and What Is Not

Zen is seeing what is. It has been argued that we see not things as they are in themselves but only how they appear to us. I reply that to observe that an object appears to be a particular size, shape, colour etc when seen by us is not to deny but to affirm that we see it. If our sensory apparatus were different, then we would see objects differently but would still see them. A galaxy appearing either as a single point of light when seen across millions of light years or as millions of discrete stars when seen from within remains a seen galaxy.

Do we perceive reality or only appearances? I argue that the appearance of reality to us is our perception of reality. “We perceive it” and “It appears to us” are interchangeable. We do not perceive appearances and infer reality but perceive reality. Of course, if our perceptual apparatus differed, then appearances would differ but they would still be reality appearing, not appearances appearing. We perceive not the total reality but those aspects that are perceptible by us. For example, we see not submicroscopic particles but our macroscopic environment, not the whole electromagnetic spectrum but enough for survival purposes.

Mystics disagree about whether ultimate reality is personal but theists do agree that it transcends concepts so we potentially agree that it is variously conceived because it is inconceivable. I argue elsewhere against pre-existent consciousness. Can contradictory propositions, affirming and denying personality, apply to an infinite reality? I suggest that they remain incompatible.

Zen is seeing mental states and interactions. Although we directly know our immediate thoughts and emotions, reflection uncovers deeper dispositions and reveals that conditioning and indoctrination make us see what is not. A badly treated child sees all adults as threats even when they are indifferent or benevolent. Some adults are conscious only of how they appear to others, not of how anyone is. Some see only what they want, or have been indoctrinated, to see. Some cannot see that they are ever at fault or see others only as means, not as ends. Some see only that the world is not as they want but not what to do about it. For example, we can change how we perceive the past but not the past.

Many people do not understand that world views differ, therefore that what seems obvious to them is not obvious to others. Introduced to a Polish man as a “Communist”, not, more accurately, as an unorthodox Trotskyist, I was subjected to a denunciation of the then Polish regime based entirely on the assumption that I supported it. Dialogue was impossible especially with limited time. When I had to leave because of a prior appointment, my accuser apologized on the mistaken assumption that I was leaving because I was offended! 

In a similar conversation with a Polish couple, I was asked whether I had read a particular book by Solzenitsin. I began to reply, “No, but I have read Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed and Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia.” However, I was interrupted after “No…” and addressed as if I had not heard of Stalinist oppression. On reflection, I should have replied, “Yes”, because that was the only point at issue. The couple would later have claimed that they had met a Communist who had not read Solzenitsin, meaning by this that I supported the Soviet Union and knew nothing bad about it. They conversed not with me but with their preconception.

When I did manage to summarize an analysis of Stalinist Russia as state capitalist, not socialist, the friend who had mischievously introduced me as a Communist commented that I sounded as if I was merely reciting a rehearsed response. I sounded like this because I was being put on the spot and had to speak quickly before the next interruption. A proper debate with time for each side to state its case and with attention given to what was in fact being said might have advanced our understanding. What I did learn was that there are people with whom dialogue is impossible. Of the couple, the man “knew” as a fact, not an opinion, that black people were inferior. His certainty on this was frightening.

It makes sense to ask an alleged Communist what he understands by “Communism” and why he supports it. Instead, a vicar in a televised debate with a Communist Party member set out to define both sides of the argument. He stated what he believed, then what (he thought) she believed. Meanwhile, Communist Party politics had changed from revolutionary to reformist. Of course, a complete change of policies should be reflected by a name change. That did occur later while a “New Communist Party” preserved the Stalinist tradition and rival organizations applied different interpretations of the original revolutionary socialist tradition. 

I have been told that by a workers’ democracy with full employment I meant a bureaucratic dictatorship with unemployment, not that the former inevitably degenerates into the latter, as is argued ad nauseam by supporters of political though not economic democracy, but that the latter was what I meant. No. Conversation floundered with no agreed terminology or terms of reference. 

Attention to what is includes attention to what others say and to why they say it, not just to preconceptions based on labels like “Communist” or “Christian”. Assuming that every Anglican is an Evangelical, that every Catholic is a Latin ritualist, that every Muslim is a Jihadist, that every Jew is a Zionist, that every Hindu is an idolater, that every Conservative is Thatcherite or that every American is imperialist would be similar errors.

Introducing myself as a Religious Education Teacher, I was subjected to ridicule of Christian belief in the Resurrection although Religious Studies covers all traditions and can include skepticism about supernaturalist claims. Evangelicals capable only of assuming the truth of their belief cannot present reasons for it, so that again dialogue is impossible, whereas instructors in Zen meditation advise trainees to test Buddhist teaching in their experience. Teachings that do not facilitate perception of what is can be “put on the back burner” unless and until they become applicable: the opposite of a creedal approach.

After twenty three years of practicing zazen, I have started to glimpse the limits of my perception. I had always believed that ultimate philosophical and spiritual questions mattered whereas lesser issues like how to relate to other people socially did not. Thus, I missed the point of familiar teachings: the transcendent is immanent; the beyond is in the midst; the Kingdom is within; Samsara is Nirvana; Bodhisattvas return; eternity is now; all is one; “thou art That”; strangers are gods or angels in disguise, like superheroes with secret identities; mythically, God was incarnate in Vrindavan and Jerusalem – as Arjuna saw his friend’s cosmic form, so Peter, James and John saw their friend transfigured; God manifest, according to a polemic for a more world-affirming Hinduism, is higher than God unmanifest; theses and antitheses are synthesized; abstractions are concretized; dualities are unified; concepts are instantiated; theories are practiced; plans are implemented, at least by us if not also by the gods.

Creativity involves understanding what is by imagining what is not. Insanity involves misunderstanding what is by confusing it with what is not. Thus, a fictitious character meeting a ghost, considering suicide, visiting a graveyard, contemplating a skull, avenging a murder and dying young addresses mortality but anyone claiming to be Hamlet is mad. Some imaginative writers have seen their characters but only momentarily.

Marxists analyze how society is. Capital economically coerces formally free workers to produce more than the value of their labour power and competitively accumulates surplus value but periodically stops production whenever competition reduces the rate of accumulation. Banks do not produce wealth but gamble that others will. Governments manage but do not end capitalism. Workers usually accept but periodically challenge capitalism. Received ideas are questioned when they contradict experience. Living labour, organized by capital to increase capital, can instead organize itself to meet needs.

Buddhist psychological analysis addresses experience. By practicing awareness, we realize our unawareness. Marxist economic analysis addresses alienation. By resisting exploitation, workers realize their power. 

The quantitative difference between society and individuality explains the qualitative difference between unavoidably controversial revolution and universally accessible meditation.

Understanding World and Self

World

Why is the world as it is? Why is life often unsatisfactory? What can we do about it?

Buddhist answer, formulated two and a half millennia ago:
Greed, hate and delusion turn the Wheel of Life. Human beings can end this process in themselves.

Marxist answer, incorporating modern knowledge:
Scientific cosmogony, natural selection and class conflict explain our condition. Workers collectively organized at the point of production can end exploitation and oppression and emancipate society.

Comparisons:
Buddhism assumes consciousness. Science explains it.
Social relationships transcend individual motivations. We are economically compelled to compete to survive whether or not we are individually greedy. Individually, we may patiently address our motivations but, collectively, we must urgently change the economy.

Self

Can you and I know how we appear to and affect others? (We often believe that we are reasonable, honest, helpful etc.)

Buddhist answer: Yes, through meditation.

Marxism does not address this question. By understanding society, we can overcome social prejudices and campaign for a better society but social psychology does not fully explain individual psychology. Political activists can lack self-knowledge in personal relationships.

 

Both

According to Buddhist teaching, understanding of the world and of the self are identical. The same process occurs in both.

According to Marxist theory, they are not identical. Natural processes preceded consciousness. Material forces of production determine historically developing relations of production and qualitatively differing social structures whose causes are therefore not simply reducible to the most basic attachments and aversions to be found in individual consciousness. The study of history and economics informs political activity whereas only personal experience is necessary for meditation.

Two understandings are not identical but both are necessary if we are both to change society and to know our effects on others.

The Zen Marxism Proposal

The Zen Marxist thesis, adequately expressed in an article, was originally conceived as a book. This was a proposal to publishers.

Many people in Western countries seek an alternative to established ideas and life-styles. Two main alternatives considered are:

(1) Eastern spirituality, yoga and meditation;
(2) radical political ideas, especially those associated with Karl Marx.

It is widely thought, first, that these Eastern and Marxist alternatives are mutually incompatible and, secondly, that Marxism has been refuted by recent events in Eastern Europe. I argue against both these assumptions and for the following propositions:

(1) Zen meditation is psychologically or “spiritually” beneficial and need not presuppose supernaturalist beliefs;
(2) Marxism is a culmination of European science and philosophy although it is not usually recognized as such because it challenges present social arrangements;
(3) Marxist practice offers a way of resolving current social inequities and conflicts;
(4) it is not only logically coherent but also positively beneficial for any individuals who want to do so to practice both Zen meditation and Marxist politics although it is neither necessary nor appropriate to launch a new organization on this basis – I advocate involvement in already existing Zen groups and Socialist organizations;
(5) such “Zen Marxist” practice would constitute a genuine, concrete East-West synthesis as opposed to more abstract aspirations towards a meeting of the minds of East and West.

A book on this theme might appeal to:

(1) the “left”, in its widest sense, many of whom would probably want to refute it though for different reasons;
(2) the public that reads about and/or practices forms of meditation;
(3) those who feel that human problems demand some kind of new or alternative response;
(4) anyone interested in considering a specific and concrete proposal for East-West synthesis;
(5) those in academic institutions or elsewhere who value summaries and attempted clarifications of specifically philosophical issues.

Since, as far as I know, nothing else has been published on precisely this theme, I feel that Zen Marxism meets a need, addresses a major issue and could, possibly, initiate an important debate.

What Is "Zen Marxism"?

This article appeared as continuous prose on www.paulshackley.co.uk. I now think that the meaning and sequence are clearer when the text is re-presented as Indian philosophical "sutras", short telegramic statements of a kind that were originally memorised and transmitted in an oral tradition. No doubt, some readers will dislike this approach. Karma is action. Actions have consequences. Karmic theory guides yogic-meditative practice. Yoga is meditation or meditative postures. Meditation is practice of awareness or mindfulness. Mindful actions avoid harmful consequences. Attentive performance of tasks without hopes or fears for outcomes is karma yoga, nonattached action. The Bhagavad Gita applies karma yoga to work and war. Ancient Indian religions and philosophies presuppose many reincarnating souls. Reincarnating souls would experience karmic consequences in later lives. However, the number of souls can be reduced to one, then none: some Upanishadic rishis identified each apparently distinct soul with the one transcendent power invoked in Vedic rituals; the Buddha replaced reincarnating souls with reborn attachments and aversions (materialist input); Zen emphasises present meditation, not future rebirth (Taoist input); action and consequence are discernible within a single life (experiential input); therefore, karma and meditation need not presuppose reincarnating souls. Yogis and Marxists agree that matter is eternal and uncreated. The Yoga Sutras systematise yogic practice but presuppose atheist soul-pluralist philosophy. However, they refer to "God" as a permanently discarnate soul, not a creator, thus incorporating theist devotion as bhakti yoga. Yogis and Marxists also agree that matter is unitary. Rishis intuiting oneness conceptualised reality as immaterial. However, materially, one appears as many. Yogis and Marxists disagree about whether matter can be conscious. Yogis are body-soul dualists, reifying consciousness and regarding matter as permanently unconscious. However, philosophically, “matter” is being, not mere mass. Scientifically, mass is also energy. However conceived, being is dynamic, not inert. Its qualitative transformations explain consciousness. Mechanical materialists reduce apparent qualitative differences to mere quantitative differences. Marxist “dialectical materialists” recognise that quantitative changes become qualitative transformations. Energised complex molecules became self-replicating, then combined through natural selection. Organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. Cerebral processing of immediate sensations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into perception of discrete objects. Cooperative manipulation of objects transformed cerebral processes into understanding of environments. Understanding and manipulation of environments became mental and manual labour. Productivity of labour increased until it transformed relations of production. Production of a small surplus of wealth generated leisure for a social minority. Mental labour became administration of the surplus. Thus, it became exploitation of manual labourers by a leisured class. Leisure also facilitated art, science, philosophy and meditation. Ideologies legitimise and support exploitation: God, karma or genes predetermine social status; kings rule by divine right; inferior races are rightly enslaved; workers should compete against each other, not unite against employers. Industrial production challenges received ideas and empowers collective action to end exploitation. Therefore, Marxist theory opposes ruling ideologies and guides revolutionary practice. “Zen Marxists” accept karmic responsibility and dialectical materialism, meditate and build the revolutionary party, apply karma yoga to class conflict and interpret “rebirth” as consequences for later organisms. However, “Zen Marxism” has other meanings (see here). Email address: paulshackley@gmail.com

Zen Marxism

A shorter version of this article was published in Contemporary Buddhism, Volume 2, Number 2, Autumn 2001, ©2001 Curzon Press ISSN 1463-9947

Zen and Marxism are ways to emancipation, each addressing a different kind of obstacle to it. Thus, according to Buddhist teaching, "suffering," ranging from acute distress to general dissatisfaction, is caused by mental grasping which can be ended by Buddhist morality and meditation. Thus also, according to Marxist theory, social ills, ranging from extreme poverty and violence to general injustice and alienation, are caused by economic exploitation which can be ended by socialist revolution. If, as I believe, both diagnoses are valid, so that unfreedom is both psychological and economic, inner and outer, then meditation is individually advisable and the building of the revolutionary party is politically urgent. Thus, it makes sense to practice both simultaneously. In fact, there is no practical contradiction between regular zazen, "just sitting with no deliberate thought," and regular political activity.
Invariably, however, those who practice Zen do not practice Marxism and vice versa. Further, the practices are associated with mutually incompatible ideas. Buddhists regard the psychological dispositions of attachment and aversion as determining human life whereas Marxists regard the material and social conditions of life as primarily determining the contents of human consciousness. More generally, Marxists are "materialists," believing that being (how the world is and how people live) determines consciousness (how the world and life are perceived and understood) whereas Buddhists are "idealists," believing that consciousness determines being.
However, this disagreement reflects the historical origins of the practices and need not prevent their current synthesis. Most pre-industrial thought was idealist for reasons analyzed by Marxists but this does not commit everyone who meditates to idealism. Meditative awareness of the potentially harmful consequences of some basic motivations need not presuppose that these motivations have no material cause, especially since a scientific understanding indicates that a long unconscious development preceded and produced the earliest motivated consciousness. At the same time, those whose political aim is the revolutionary transformation of social conditions need not forego the demonstrable benefits of meditation.
Marxist dialectical materialism is not reductionist mechanical materialism. The latter reduced all being, including consciousness, to nothing but mechanically interacting particles with only the quantifiable properties of mass and volume. This was a scientific theory of the nature of being and is now an outmoded one. By contrast, dialectical materialism is not a scientific theory of the nature of being but a philosophical theory of the relationship between being and consciousness, namely the theory that being determines consciousness, in fact has become conscious, not vice versa. Apart from this, dialectical materialists recognize that the precise nature of being (mass, energy, particles, quanta, strings etc) is an empirical scientific question which may have no final answer because being is, arguably, inexhaustible so that successively more comprehensive scientific theories only approximate to it.
Additionally, dialectical materialists recognize that being develops through qualitatively different levels each of which has new and emergent properties that are not simply or mechanically reducible to the properties of earlier or lower levels. Consciousness is not exhaustively reducible to any number of unconscious processes. "Human nature" is not fully explicable in terms of its animal ancestry. Human history differs qualitatively from natural history. Biological, social and psychological processes are more and other than complicated mechanical processes. Each new level emerges from but goes beyond the earlier levels. This natural and emergent transcendence differs from the supernatural, pre-existent transcendence of religious belief but should not therefore be identified with the denial of any transcendence that is entailed by mechanical reductionism.
Precisely because social relationships cannot be reduced to mechanical interactions, Marxists specifically study history and economics and propose that: economic relationships are both material and social; other social relationships, cultural, legal, political etc, are based on stages of material production, thus on economics; these changing relationships confront each new generation as an extra layer of external reality primarily determining the contents of human consciousness – the ideas, beliefs, values and attitudes in individual minds; received ideas are often contradicted by new experiences and are adapted or replaced as human beings change their natural and social environments further.
Although Buddhists explain human life by mental states, they do not regard ultimate reality as a mind. Their most fundamental ontological category is not "consciousness" but "emptiness," meaning not "nothingness" but absence of any permanent, unchanging substance underlying the impermanent, changing interactions that appear as subjects and objects of consciousness. Similarly, empirical science reveals that the "being" of dialectical materialism is changing interactions of energy occurring in empty space. Materialist "matter" already meant being as opposed to consciousness, not mass as opposed to energy, and science now equates mass with energy. Thus, there is some convergence between Buddhist emptiness teaching and Marxist dialectical materialism.
Two other concepts that need to be considered are "spirituality" and "religion." Zen meditation is a spiritual practice. The term "spirituality" connotes both idealist belief in spirits as immaterial subjects of consciousness and inner practice for the development of consciousness. Inner practice is theistic prayer or nontheistic meditation. Prayer presupposes divine existence but meditation does not. Further, Zen meditation is the focusing of attention on the present moment, not on any immaterial entity. Thus, spiritual practice need not presuppose idealist belief.
The Buddha practiced in a tradition that was spiritual in both senses. It referred to immaterial souls and advocated meditative practice. However, the tradition was atheist in the sense not of rejecting an established theism but of presupposing a beginningless universe. Further, the Buddha reformed the tradition by criticizing and rejecting its concept of souls. In this, he was possibly influenced by ancient Indian materialist philosophers who regarded the emergence of consciousness from material elements as a qualitative change comparable to the emergence of a new color from the mixture of two existing colors. Also, the Buddha first practiced, then rejected as unsatisfactory, the asceticism that was associated with body-soul dualism. The materialists were, allegedly, hedonists whereas Buddhism is a "middle way" between asceticism and hedonism.
The nosoulist middle way arguably synthesizes aspects of soul pluralist asceticism and hedonist materialism, the synthesized aspects being the meditative development of consciousness and a materialist critique of the idea of souls. "Zen Marxism" updates that synthesis whereas the title Zen and Marxism would suggest theoretical comparison, not practical synthesis.
"Religion" is: acceptance of the supernatural; response to the highest transcendence; a way to salvation. In all three senses, Buddhism is a religion and Marxism is not.
On the question of the supernatural: Indian atheism, denial of an extracosmic creator, is compatible with Indian polytheism, belief in many intracosmic deities. By acknowledging such beings, Buddhists merely accepted then current worldviews. In the same way, we can now accept a scientific worldview while meditating. We heed weather forecasts instead of invoking weather deities.
Buddhist heavens and hells can be interpreted as metaphors for human experience. For example, mythologically, gods enjoy long but finite periods of good karma in heavenly realms but cannot create new karma until they are reborn as human beings on earth. Similarly, very wealthy human beings may enjoy enviable life styles but lack the incentive for self-change. Spiritual ideas refer either to possible experience or to nothing.
Apart from the common religious ideas of gods, demons, spirits, heavens and hells, there is one specifically Buddhist supernatural idea. Despite rejecting reincarnation of immaterial souls, the Buddha taught rebirth of psychological dispositions. Attachments and aversions that have not been ended at the time of death are somehow transmitted into a later organism and may be accompanied by latent memories which, if activated, perpetuate the illusion of a persisting soul.
The role of meditation is to end the perpetuation of harmful dispositions not only into future lives but also within the present life and the latter is worth doing even if we suspect that Buddhist rebirth is an unwarranted hangover from pre-Buddhist reincarnation. By questioning rebirth, we continue a critical process initiated by the Buddha himself. "Karma" means "action" and is important because actions and their motives have consequences which can harm the self or others. When it was believed that souls reincarnated, then it followed that consequences for the self could occur in later lives but harmful consequences are evident even in a single life. By the time we are mature enough to reflect on life, it already contains both the consequences of our past actions and the tendency to continue acting in the same way even if this has been problematic. This is the practical problem of karma as a result of which each of us has something to resolve within ourselves as well as, to introduce a Marxist perspective, in the social world outside.
On the question of transcendence: there are two religious responses to the highest transcendence, personification and contemplation. The Marxist critique of religion relates polytheist and monotheist personifications to stages of material production but does not explain contemplation. According to the Marxist account, people personified and placated natural, then social, forces that they could neither understand nor control. Accumulation of a small surplus of wealth, with consequent social stratification and coercion, meant that gods of natural forces like the weather were replaced by gods of social forces like war. I suggest that the surplus also provided, for a small minority, leisure for contemplation and that the object of contemplation could be either identified with or differentiated from the deity that was believed to control natural and social forces. Thus, both theists and atheists can meditate. In the Marxist account, collective understanding and control of both natural and social forces will end personification but I suggest that it will also provide leisure for more contemplation.
The theist response to the highest transcendence is worship of the unified personified external forces, God, whereas the Buddhist highest transcendence is a potential inner state, not an actual external being. Therefore, acknowledgement of this transcendence does not contradict the materialist proposition that being determines consciousness. In fact, it agrees with the dialectical materialist concept of qualitatively different levels of being some of which naturally transcend others.
Before practicing Buddhist meditation, we bow to a Buddha image. This prepares the mind for meditation and expresses respect for our inner potential, not for an external deity. This is not a reinterpretation of Buddhism but the explanation given in a Zen meditation group. The Buddha is honored as an enlightened being but not worshiped as a divine being. He is given divine-sounding titles like "the Exalted One" but these do not include "Creator" which, if it were used, would reduce Buddhism to theism and make the Buddha responsible for suffering. His "omniscience" is comprehensive wisdom, not all-inclusive factual knowledge. He himself, according to the teaching, has neither endured as an immortal soul nor recurred as a karmic effect but has gone out like a candle flame that has not been passed on to another candle. The candle analogy applies even within a single life because momentary mental states are mistaken for a substantial self like a constantly changing flame mistaken for a single solid object. Buddhism is, in this sense, the opposite of Christianity. We do not rise again but end and transcend our fear of dying.
Whether, after his death, the Buddha somehow continued to exist in a transcendent state although not as an immortal soul is a question that is answered positively by religious belief and negatively by materialist philosophy but that need not be answered for the purpose of Buddhist meditation.
On the question of salvation: this means individual emancipation from evil whether the latter is conceived as sin, suffering or ignorance. Buddhist emancipation from suffering and ignorance is to be realized before death and by natural human meditation, not after death or by supernatural divine intervention.
The vices described by Buddhists are "greed, hate and delusion." Marxists argue, I believe correctly, that greed in the familiar sense of desire for abundant possessions is not universal in human experience because it presupposes production of a storeable, possessable surplus of wealth which is comparatively recent. Further, future production and equal distribution of abundant wealth will make hoarding, competition, theft and avarice socially and therefore also psychologically redundant. However, Buddhist "greed" is the more basic desire for repetition of pleasure. "Hate" is frustration at its nonrepetition and "delusion" is the belief that pleasure or its experiencer could ever be permanent.
Buddhists have thought that greed, hate and delusion were beginningless but we can now incorporate Darwinian understanding. Mobile organisms became conscious, their sensitivity quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into sensation, because pleasure and pain enhance survival. Animal pleasure, pain and consciousness became human greed, hate and delusion which meditation transmutes into Buddhist nonattachment, compassion and wisdom.
If nonattachment entailed inactivism, as practiced by some Indian ascetics, then it would definitely be anti-Marxist. However, Buddhism is a middle way between asceticism and hedonism. Further, nonattachment is a principle of action, not of inaction, as expounded in the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. Withdrawal from action, and particularly from political and military action, may seem to be the only way to avoid causing suffering. However, Krishna replies that: inaction is impossible because the universe acts through us at all times; some actions that cause suffering are lesser evils; the way to minimize harmful consequences of necessary actions is to attend to each action and to perform it as if for its own sake without being distracted by desire for success, praise, prestige and reward or fear of failure, blame, recrimination and punishment. If we are thus "nonattached," then our performance at work or in other activities is more effective in itself and less problematic for others and is followed by less vanity or recrimination within ourselves. Thus, nonattached action decreases greed, hate and delusion and is classified as a kind of yoga. This "karma yoga" is alone accessible to the Buddha when, having ended his attachments, he starts to act for the good of the world.
Further, consistent Marxists, patiently building the revolutionary party against all the hostility of the capitalist state and of bourgeois economic rule and ideology, remain selflessly dedicated and effective despite temptations towards compromise and sell-out and therefore are, without realizing this, secular karma yogis. They also recognize the harmful role played in the labor movement by self-promoting careerists who do not prosecute the struggle for its own sake but use it as a means towards personal ends. Even among Marxists genuinely committed to the political goal of workers’ self-emancipation, some are less consistent because they retain personal ambitions and favored self-images that impede co-operation and solidarity. They fail both as Marxists and as karma yogis. The Gita addressed issues of work, just war and social order and can now be applied to work, class war and social revolution. We remain responsible for judging which is the right course of action. Karma yoga is, arguably, the right attitude to bring to action once we have begun to act.
"Compassion" means "suffering with," not distanced pity. When self-emphazising attachments are ended, all suffering is seen as a condition to be ended. Otherwise, the Buddha would have remained in passive contemplation and not have taught a way to the end of suffering.
Production and equal distribution of abundant wealth were not possible before the industrial revolution. Now that they are possible but can only be achieved by socialist revolution, which is not a violent change of government but a mass transformation of society, compassion should entail support for revolution. Those whose only contribution to social change is to change themselves by meditation ignore urgent social problems that can be addressed by collective action. A revolutionary process which actively involves the majority of the world population and which significantly raises their standards of living and culture will enhance access to beneficial aspects of existing traditions including meditative practices for self-development and self-transcendence. In fact, since the mythological "Western Paradise" of Pure Land Buddhism is imagined as an environment conducive to enlightenment, we can build the revolutionary party now and the Western Paradise here.
This does not mean that Marxists are now motivated by something like Buddhist compassion. There is a simplistic popular dichotomy between "selfishness" and "altruism." Buddhists themselves exacerbate this dichotomy by differentiating between the potentially selfish goal of individual enlightenment and the actively compassionate goal of universal enlightenment. In the popular view, Missionaries of Charity are credited with "altruism" whereas revolutionaries are suspected of covert "selfishness." No doubt, some have private agendas which are fostered and encouraged by the values of the society that they oppose. However, others are consistent Marxists and thus are secular karma yogis. But, in any case, most human actions are neither selfish nor altruistic but expressions of a common interest, like speaking a common language, communicating intelligibly, obeying most of the laws most of the time and driving on the same side of the road. The widest common interest is that of the whole working class which materially unites the vast majority of a growing world population. It is in the interest of this class to end economic class divisions and thus to initiate for the first time in history a society in which it will be possible to act in the genuine common interest instead of either overtly or covertly supporting one class as against another. Therefore, compassion is better served by proletarian solidarity than by classless charity which alleviates poverty without ending exploitation.
The teachings of Buddhism and arguments for Marxism can be found in the many books on these subjects or by talking to those who practice them. The only point of the present article is that, while many people meditate and others try to build the Party, more could do both.

Appendix 1: Principles

(160 sutras or theses, including the Four Noble Truths, four Yoga Sutras, four Marxist principles and some practical applications)

Meditation

There is suffering.
Attachment causes suffering.
Ending attachment ends suffering.
Mindfulness ends attachment.
Teaching the way to the end of suffering required compassion.
However, the way to nonattachment is also the way to compassion and wisdom.
Zen meditation is just sitting with no deliberate thought.
Working meditation is Zen attention to practical tasks.
Yoga is control of thoughts.
Then, man abides in his real nature.
Otherwise, he remains identified with thoughts.
They are controlled by practice and nonattachment.
Mantra yoga is repetition of significant syllables.
Bhakti yoga is devotion to a perennially nonattached being.
Karma yoga is nonattached action.
Hatha yoga is meditative postures.
Transcendental Meditation is private inner repetition.
Krishna Consciousness is public devotional chanting.
Nonattached action is military in the Gita but pacifist in Gandhism.
Yoga instructors teach postures.

Marxism

History is the history of class struggles.
The ruling ideas are those of the ruling class.
The emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class.
States are instruments of class rule.
Workers need to replace existing states with states based on workers’ councils.
Workers’ councils grow from workers’ struggles.
Workers’ councils replace existing states only when led by a revolutionary party.
The party is built by revolutionaries leading workers’ struggles before there are workers’ councils.
The increasingly parliamentarist German Social Democratic Party ceased to be revolutionary.
Spontaneous workers’ councils overthrew the German Emperor.
The Social Democrat-led German state destroyed workers’ councils.
The National Socialist-controlled German state destroyed parliament and workers’ organisations.
The illegal Russian Bolshevik Party remained revolutionary.
Bolshevik-led workers’ councils replaced the existing Russian state.
Isolated and besieged Russian workers lost control of their increasingly bureaucratised party and state.
A bureaucratic dictatorship presented itself as a workers’ state.
Marginalised revolutionaries analyzed the German and Russian defeats.
Their successors rebuild revolutionary parties.
Revolutionary parties lead current struggles.
Continuing struggles overthrow dictatorships.
Comparison
Zennists practise nonattachment.
Marxists oppose exploitation.
Nonattached Marxists are more effective.
"Zen Marxists" seek inner and outer freedom.
Marxists say that nature preceded consciousness.
Most meditators disagree.
Zen is neutral.
It develops present consciousness.
However, society precedes individual consciousness.
Capitalist society pre-existed its current members.
Increased productivity generated capitalism.
Capitalism revolutionised class relationships.
Feudalism was coercive and static.
Capitalism is commercial and dynamic.
Capitalists reinvest competitively.
Competition constrains pay.
Even compassionate capitalists must compete to survive.
Workers resist.
They can take control of production.
That will end capitalism.
Synthesis
Zen and Marxism are ways to emancipation.
Their simultaneous practice is revolutionary karma yoga.
Non-revolutionary karma yogis oppose injustice.
The pacifist Martin Luther King acknowledged that exploitation causes injustice.
Hunting and gathering merely sustained life.
Agricultural and industrial labour produce an increasing surplus.
Exploitation is appropriation of the surplus by a ruling class.
Ruling classes control production, states and ideas.
Ruling ideas include meditation as a means to contentment.
However, exploited labour is neither worker-controlled nor self-realising.
Therefore, even contented workers remain alienated from their own activity.
Also, capitalist exploitation undermines contentment.
Competitive reinvestment periodically decreases profit rates.
Consequent disinvestment causes slumps and redundancies.
Economic competition necessitated international exploitation.
International competition causes technological warfare.
Successful socialist revolution ends exploitation.
Therefore, compassion entails support for revolution.
Relatively timeless meditation complements inherently historical struggle.
Meditation and unalienated labour are ways to self-realisation.
Sources
Sutras are the authoritative propositions of Indian philosophical systems.
Materialist sutras did not survive.
Hindu sutras define consciousness as immaterial.
Dialectical materialists describe consciousness as irreducible but emergent.
Short, cryptic, oral sutras required explanatory commentaries.
Hopefully, the "Zen Marxist" sutras are clearer.
They summarise Buddhism, Yoga and Marxism.
The Buddha taught the way to the end of suffering.
Later Buddhist sutras emphasised compassion and wisdom.
The Yoga Sutras explain mantra and bhakti yoga.
Other texts explain karma and hatha yoga.
The Communist Manifesto explains struggle, ideology and emancipation.
The Paris Commune demonstrated that states are instruments of class rule.
The Communards briefly replaced the existing state.
Russian workers' councils clarified the structure of a workers' state..
The Bolsheviks learnt the need to build a non-parliamentary party.
Historical lessons inform current struggles.
Spiritual traditions transmit meditative practices.
"Bhakti" is Yogic incorporation of theistic practice.
"Zen Marxists" meditate nontheistically and apply karma yoga to class struggle.
Spirituality
Theism is personification of external forces.
Atheism is non-personification.
Jainism is atheist soul pluralism.
Buddhism is atheist nosoulism.
The Buddha taught rebirth and meditation.
However, Buddhists can de-emphasise rebirth.
Also, materialists can meditate.
Meditators can intuit their identity with being.
Idealists identify being with consciousness.
Materialists reply that being became conscious.
Apparent duality usually conceals subject-object identity.
Mystical experience is realisation of identity.
Mystification is obscuration of reality.
Therefore, mystification contradicts mystical experience.
However, it incorporates mystical ideas.
For example, respect for intuition becomes rejection of intellect.
Further, recognition of cosmic unity becomes relegation of social divisions.
"Zen Marxists" acknowledge unity but analyze division.
Therefore, they meditate and organise.
Classless society will facilitate unitive intuition and understanding.
Practice
Learning is actively changing, not passively sensing, environments.
Action generated thought.
Uncontrolled thoughts impede awareness.
Meditation is control of thoughts.
Thought is application of concepts.
Philosophy is analysis of concepts.
Analysis is not change.
Meditation changes individuals.
However, it does not change society.
Social change requires collective action.
Socialist revolution requires workers' action.
Marxism is the theory and practice of socialist revolution.
Marxist theory incorporates philosophy.
However, it synthesises it with economics and socialism.
Thus, it guides political practice.
Political practice leads workers' action.
Ascetics reject action.
Buddhists and karma yogis reject asceticism.
However, they meditate.
Thus, "Zen Marxism" addresses individual and social change.
Summary

Society is divided.
Social division is basically economic.
We can end economic division.
Marxism helps.
Marxism addresses conflict.
Conflict generates action.
Action changes things.
Workers act collectively.
Reality is one.
We are it.
We can realise this.
Meditation helps.
Meditation addresses karma.
Karma is action.
We experience its consequences.
Karma yogis act meditatively.
Problematic karma is unreflecting action.
Meditation is reflection.
Workers' action is initially spontaneous.
Marxist theory guides it.
Appendix 2: The "Zen Marxist" Lineage

Indra releasing rain from heaven personifies the life-giving aspect of nature.
Prometheus stealing fire from heaven personifies life-enhancing action on nature.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras systematise Yoga philosophy.
Krishna’s Gita discourses characterize yogic action.
Arjuna, Krishna’s warrior disciple, personifies aristocratic duty and responsibility.
Spartacus, a revolutionary slave leader, personifies proletarian resistance and solidarity.
The Buddha taught a way to the end of suffering.
Jesus taught that a new consciousness and a new society were possible.
Lao Tzu founded Taoism, then travelled west from China.
Chuang Tzu synthesised the Tao with yin-yang polarity.
The Buddha meditated and founded Buddhism in India.
Bodhidarma took "dyana" (meditation) Buddhism from India to China where it was renamed "Ch’an".
Seng-chao converted to Buddhism and expounded it in Taoist terminology.
Hui-neng organised Ch’an, which some say synthesises Buddhism with Taoism.
Eisai and Dogen brought forms of Ch’an from China to Japan where they were renamed "Zen".
Jiyu Kennett brought Dogen’s Zen from Japan to the US and Europe where it is called Serene Reflection Meditation.
Chuang Tzu and Hegel explained qualitative change by the interpenetration of opposites.
The Buddha explained inner change by "anatta" (no soul).
Darwin explained biological change by natural selection.
Marx explained social change by class conflict and founded Marxism.
Lenin applied Marxism to leading a revolution.
Trotsky preserved Marxism after the defeat of that revolution.
Cliff completed the work of Trotsky by clearly differentiating Marxism from Stalinism.
Thus, Stalin did not consolidate the work of Lenin and Mao did not apply it to China: neither state capitalism nor Third World nationalism is international socialism.
The European tradition of understanding and changing nature and society and the Indian tradition of understanding and changing human consciousness converge as the understanding and changing of consciousness and its natural and social environments:

Thales	science	understanding and changing natural environments
Socrates	philosophy	understanding general concepts
Marx	Marxism	understanding and changing social relationships
The Buddha	meditation	understanding and changing individual consciousness

Some aspects of understanding developed in parallel traditions:

Eygpt, Mesopotamia, the Vedic Jyotish:	astronomy
Gilgamesh, Homer, Vyasa:	epics
Pythagoras, "Arabic" numerals:	mathematics
Leucippus, Kanada:	atomism
Democritus, Jayarasi:	materialism
Aristotle, Gautama (not the Buddha):	logic
Hippocrates, Ayurveda, acupuncture:	medicine
Macchiavelli, Kautilya:	political theory

Appendix 3: Symbols

Shiva dancing personifies endless creation and destruction and potential liberation and thus incorporates Indra etc. Christian crosses symbolise divine intervention and therefore presuppose a real person, not a mere personification, whereas Shiva is an acknowledged personification of cosmic process and yogic practice. Although both Spartacus and Jesus were crucified, their appropriate symbols are not crosses but a sword and shared bread and wine. Their social resistance and spiritual regeneration are steps in Shiva's dance.
Of course, the German Marxists called Spartakists did not adopt the cross as a symbol first because an execution is not a cause for celebration and secondly because Christian crosses already meant (i) blood sacrifice and (ii) historical resurrection.
(i) Sacrifice is priestly offering of a (preferably perfect) victim to a receptive deity. Christians identify priest, perfect victim and deity. Thus, they interpret the crucifixion as: a divine offering for sinful humanity; divine solidarity with suffering humanity; divine acceptance of perfected humanity. Divinity, sin and sacrifice (=offering + acceptance) are inherently theistic whereas humanity, solidarity, suffering and perfectability are religiously neutral. Solidarity is now more comprehensible and palatable than sacrifice. However, Jesus' suffering was sacrificial. He thought it would initiate the kingdom. Paul thought it had initiated salvation. Thus, any interpretation of Jesus' suffering as solidarity but not sacrifice is unorthodox.
In any case: divine solidarity is meaningless to non-believers in divinity; Spartacus' solidarity was active resistance to Roman oppression, not passive acceptance of Roman execution; Buddhist meditation ends the psychological cause of suffering; meditative transformation of consciousness and revolutionary transformation of society approach human perfectability. Therefore, revolutionary and Buddhist practices are more helpful than the belief that God suffered and perfects believers hereafter.
(ii) The resurrections of Adonis, Baal, Balder, Jesus, Osiris etc symbolised seasonal and spiritual renewal. It is additionally claimed that Jesus' resurrection was historically pivotal. However, evidence for its occurrence is insufficient and men, not myths, make history.
Crosses symbolise intersections between (iii) myth and history and (iv) time and eternity.
(iii) The historical crucifixion became a significant story, thus a "myth", while the mythical resurrection was historicised. History and myth are both important but in different ways and must now be differentiated.
(iv) Christian "eternity" is endless duration but meditation as immediate awareness discloses a timeless present which is the alternative meaning of "eternity". When two straight lines intersecting at a right angle are freed from traditional associations, they remain an appropriate symbol for the present moment that alone connects temporal experience (of past, present and future) with timeless awareness (of the eternal present). Only in the present (symbolised by the point of intersection) can we remember the past and anticipate the future (both symbolised by the horizontal line) or disregard both and attend fully to the present (symbolised now by the vertical line). Perceptually, aesthetically and inwardly, the present contains more than we usually notice and can be contemplated without conscious reference to its past or future although, of course, it would not exist without a past. Finally, crosses on graves expressed hope of resurrection but might now simply suggest death. I think that exhausts their symbolism.

The seated Buddha personifies meditation.

The yin-yang symbol depicts dialectical interactions underlying natural processes, meditative practices and social conflicts. Its circular form expresses impersonal forces. The hammer and sickle symbolised an alliance between workers and peasants.

The ancient and abstract disciplines of science and philosophy have not been visually symbolised.

Language, literature, mathematics and logic are forms of symbolic communication. Astronomy and literature generate innumerable symbols, eg: Mars, war; Gilgamesh, mortality; Arjuna, duty; Hamlet, indecision; Milton's Satan, pride; Jane Austen's Mr. Collins, prejudice; Ulysses, long voyages and heroic returns etc.

Appendix 4: Comparing Traditions

Buddhism is based on an analysis of the cause of suffering, not on faith in a cause of the universe. It transmits practices, not dogmas. Buddhists reflecting on the Buddha’s teaching were able to create new philosophical systems whereas Christians reflecting on their beliefs had to adopt Platonism or Aristotelianism. An enlightened being who had investigated spiritual practices and analyzed experience is more inspiring than a sacrificial victim who had interpreted scriptural prophecies and expected an apocalypse. The Buddha taught that the best sacrifice was an offering of fruit to the poor, not of blood to the gods. Buddhists ask us to see that we can end suffering, Marxists ask us to see that we can end exploitation but Christians tell us to believe that Christ has to end sin for us. Some add that we are damned if we disbelieve this. Christians expect the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul whereas Buddhists and Marxists recognise the mortality of the body and the non-existence of the soul.
The essence of Buddhism is compassion. The essence of Christianity is not love but a belief about God’s love (Jn.3.16). Neither experience nor argument could answer questions about belief so answers were enforced.
Theism is philosophically questionable and the resurrection is historically questionable but meditation is demonstrably beneficial. Therefore, secularism supersedes the Abrahamic traditions but can be synthesised with meditative traditions.
By historicising death and resurrection mythology, Christianity reflects the transition from the cyclical, seasonal time of nature polytheism in agricultural societies to the linear, historical time of prophetic monotheism, then secular atheism, in urban civilizations. Marxists respond to the conflicts in industrial civilization by synthesising the urgent social interpretation and intervention of Hebrew prophecy, epitomised by Elijah, with the dispassionate intellectual enquiry of Greek philosophy, epitomised by Socrates. Thus, Marxists secularise prophecy. In modern terminology, Marxism synthesises economics (the science of wealth production) with socialism (the struggle for common ownership) and also synthesises Hegel’s dialectics (the philosophy of the interpenetration of opposites) with materialism (the philosophy of the primacy of being over consciousness).
Taoists meditate (like Buddhists) and recognise the interpenetration of opposites (like Hegel and Marx).
Moses’ commandment prohibiting theft expresses the rule of law against tyranny but also conserves unequal property relations, thus wealth and poverty. In English legend, King Arthur’s round table represents equality among those present and Robin Hood represents alleviation of poverty by redistribution of wealth in disobedience to the commandment: "stealing from the rich to give to the poor". Because an industrial revolution in the means of production has increased both wealth and poverty, Marxists advocate a social revolution in the relations of production that will abolish the distinction between rich and poor. Socialism will not tax the rich but prevent enrichment at others’ expense.
Any attempt to improve life by understanding and changing its conditions is "Promethean". Philosophical traditions also include anti-Prometheans: Greek Cynics, Indian Jains and Chinese Taoists.
Cynics thought that Zeus had not oppressively opposed Promethean progress but justly judged Promethean presumption. However, Prometheus remained the Greek prototype.
Jain monks starve their bodies in order to free their souls from attachment and thus from reincarnation. However, Buddhists practise non-attachment without asceticism.
Taoists neither control natural forces nor change natural environments but "flow with" natural processes. However, their meditation changes consciousness and thus is spiritually Promethean.
Thus, the proposed synthesis of Zen with Marxism incorporates some ancient and modern traditions but remains antithetical to others and therefore is not the impossible comprehensive synthesis envisaged by Hegel.

Appendix 5: Jesus, Christianity and Other Religions

Jesus:	was reportedly initiated by baptism, vision, fasting and temptations (Mk.1.9-13); preached that the kingdom was at hand (Mt.4.17), i.e., that God’s rule was imminent; thus, taught that a new consciousness and a new society were possible; preached the same message as John the Baptist (Mt. 3.2; 4.17); but preached independently after John’s arrest (Mk.1.14); healed (e.g., Mt.8.2-3); at least once, used a healing technique that was not immediately successful and had to be repeated (Mk.8.22-25); had less healing power in Nazareth where he was known (Mk.6.5) and therefore lacked mystique; initially refused to heal a foreigner (Mk.7.25-30); attracted popular support (Mk.3.7-9); wondered about his own role in the kingdom (Mt.16.13); attributed Peter’s identification of him with the Messiah (Mt. 16. 16) to divine revelation (Mt.16.17), not to Peter’s documented impulsiveness (e.g. Jn. 13.8-9); interpreted scripture (e.g. Mt.13.14-15; Lk.21.22); referred to God as his father (Mt.26.29); advised others also to address God as their father (Mt.6.9-12); identified with the Suffering Servant (Mt.16.21; Is.53.1-5), not with the Davidic monarch (Is.9.7; Is.33.17-24); thought that vicarious suffering, not military leadership, would initiate the kingdom (Mk.14.24-25); deliberately provoked the authorities (Lk.19.37-40; Mk.14.61-64); was executed (Mk.15.24-37); possibly died realizing that this approach to the kingdom had failed (Mk. 15.34); after crucifixion, would normally have been buried in a common grave; had expected to return soon (Mt. 10.23; 16.28; 24.34); but may have inaugurated a memorial meal (Mk. 14.22-24) as if anticipating a longer absence.
The disciples:	suffered disillusionment (Lk.24.21), bereavement and, in Peter’s case (Lk.23.54-62), guilt; but were consoled and inspired by a stranger en route to Emmaus (Lk. 24. 13-27); accepted the stranger’s scriptural argument that the Messiah had to suffer (Lk. 24.26-27); may have been reminded by this of Jesus’ scriptural interpretations; later, identified the stranger with Jesus (Lk.24. 31); accepted Peter’s traumatic vision as an appearance by the risen Jesus (Lk.24.34); met to re-interpret scripture; believed that Jesus was present, confirming their new understanding of Messianic prophecies (Lk.24.45); publicly proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 2.24); mentioned neither an empty tomb nor a tangible resurrected body but, primarily, prophecies and, secondarily, witnesses (Acts 2.14-36); interpreted prophecies in order not to understand the prophetic texts but to rationalize their experience and re-formulate their expectations; quoted Ps.16.8-11 which anticipates deliverance from death but not the resurrection of the Messiah (Acts 2.25-28); argued that this passage referred not to its author, David, who had died, but to his descendant, Jesus, who was risen (Acts 2.29-32) (whereas alternative interpretations would be that it had referred to David but had not been fulfilled, that it was fulfilled in heaven, that it merely expressed an aspiration towards immortality etc); also quoted less relevant passages, e.g. Ps.110.1 (Acts 2.34-35); worshipped in the Temple (Acts 2.46); began "breaking bread in their homes" (Acts 2.46); expected Jesus to return soon to lead the Jewish conquest of the Gentiles (Acts 1.6); thus, founded a new Jewish sect that could not indefinitely survive the destruction of Jerusalem.
Peter:	preached the first Christian sermon (Acts 2.14-36); spent most of the sermon interpreting scriptures regarded as prophecies (see above); incidentally claimed that the disciples present were witnesses to the resurrection (Acts 2.32); but did not describe any resurrection appearances. (If it was the disciples’ reinterpretation of scripture that had convinced them of Jesus’ continued presence, then they bore witness neither to the doubtful sighting later reported by Matthew nor to the series of physical encounters differently described by Luke and John but only to their own inner conviction, as Evangelicals do now.)
Paul:	initially opposed the new sect (Acts 9.1); accepted Jesus’ spiritual resurrection (1 Cor.15. 35-44) after a visionary experience (Acts 9.3-6); ridiculed the idea of physical resurrection (1 Cor. 15. 35-59); rationalized Jesus’ death as a perfect sacrifice, superseding all previous sacrifices; believed that this sacrifice saved men from sin (Rom.2.24-25; 1 Cor. 15.3), not Jews from oppression; taught that men were saved by faith alone (Rom.3.28); thus, contradicted the Matthean account of salvation through merciful acts (Mt.34-46) and his own statement that God "…will render to every man according to his works…" (Rom.2.6); (Added, Aug 2012: I now realise that there is no contradiction in Paul. The idea in this kind of Christianity is that those who are saved can be divinely punished without being lost.) taught predestination (Rom.9.13-22; 11.5-8); thus, contradicted the later Christian doctrine of free will; taught that salvation came to the Gentiles because the Jews had rejected it (Rom. 11.11-12); propagated his new belief beyond Jerusalem (Acts 13.4); was ejected from synagogues (Acts 13.50); took with him Gentiles attracted by Jewish monotheism and morality but repelled by circumcision and dietary laws (Acts 13.45-48; Acts 17.4); quoted the "poets" when addressing Greeks (Acts 17.28); baptized without circumcising (Acts.15.1-2); organised "churches" by appointing elders (Acts 14.23), revisiting the churches (Acts 15.36) and writing to them (1 Corinthians etc); affirmed Jesus’ sacrificial death and spiritual resurrection but dismissed his life and teaching as irrelevant (2 Cor. 5.16); thus, founded Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism, from Jesus’ teaching and from the Petrine Jewish sect; advocated abject subservience to state authorities (Rom. 13.1-7); subordinated women (1 Cor.11.3-9; 14.33-35); had to assert that his visions of Christ were superior to other versions of Christianity (2 Cor.11.12-15); but was arrested making an offering in the Temple (Acts 21.30); expected Jesus to return as soon as he, Paul, had completed his mission to the Gentiles (1 Cor.7.29-31; Gal.1.16).
The oral tradition:	proclaimed the resurrection; preserved collections of miracle stories and parables for preaching and teaching; may have added the story of a decent burial in an unused tomb.
Converts:	accepted the Pauline teaching that Christian salvation entailed freedom from ritual obligations; but asked questions about the nature of the resurrection.
The Evangelists:	were members of early churches; wrote not biographies of Jesus but propaganda for the belief that he was the Messiah; presented John the Baptist as the forerunner of the Messiah (Mk.1.7-8); added original texts to an adapted oral tradition; addressed their period, not posterity; exaggerated the miracles; usually presented Jesus’ acts of healing as effortless and immediately successful (e.g., Mk.1.40-42); tried to settle disputes about the nature of the resurrection; described an empty tomb and a visible, tangible risen Jesus; disagreed about the location of the resurrection appearance(s); wrote inconsistent accounts of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection; misrepresented the Pharisees (whose teaching agreed with Jesus’), the Sanhedrin (who could have stoned Jesus for blasphemy and would not have handed him over to the Romans), Pilate (who would not have vacillated, defended Jesus or consulted a crowd), the Jewish population (who would have been preparing for Passover, not gathering to pressurize Pilate), Jesus (who did not claim divinity) and the law (which did not allow for the release of a prisoner); blamed the Jews for a Roman execution (Mt.27.22); initiated Christian anti-Semitism (Mt.27.25); had begun to realize that Jesus would not return soon; therefore, characterized his kingdom as not of this world (Jn.18.36); reinterpreted "Son of God" to mean neither a collective adopted son, like Israel, nor an individual adopted son, like the King of Israel, but both a miraculously conceived individual (Lk.1.34-35) and, later, a second eternal person (Jn.1.1), still later re-named "God the Son"; thus, completed the transition from Judaism to Christianity.
Mark:	wrote the first Gospel decades after the events described, possibly in Rome; was a source for Matthew and Luke; added darkness at noon (Mk.15.33), possibly following Amos 8.9; received the tomb burial story (Mk. 15. 42-46) from the oral tradition; but added that the women "…saw where he was laid" (Mk. 15.47) in order to forestall the objection that they may have gone to the wrong tomb on the Sunday morning; did not describe Jesus’ resurrection appearance but implied that it was in Galilee; described a young man saying, "…he is going before you to Galilee…as he told you" (Mk.16.7) (see "Matthew" and "Luke" below); wrote that the women told no one of their experience at the tomb (Mk. 16.8) although the other Evangelists later contradicted this (e.g., Mt.28.8); possibly wrote this to explain why converts had not previously heard of an empty tomb.
Matthew:	added Joseph’s dreams (Mt.1.20 etc), the wise men (Mt.2.1), the star (Mt.2.2) and the slaughter of the innocents (Mt.2.16-17); interpreted Jer.31.15 as prophesying the slaughter; quoted a prophecy that is not in Hebrew scripture (Mt.2.23); added the virgin birth (Mt. 1.18) because of a mistranslation (1sa. 7.14) of a passage that had not, in any case, referred to the Messiah; located the nativity in Bethlehem (Mt 2.1) because of a supposed prophecy (Mic. 5.2); described the holy family as fleeing into Egypt (Mt. 2.13-15) in order to fulfill a supposed prophecy (Hos.11.1) that had in fact referred to God’s call of Israel from Egypt; added John the Baptist’s initial reluctance to baptize Jesus (Mt.3.14-15); thus, expanded Mark’s account (Mk.1.9-11) in order to affirm Jesus’ sinlessness and superiority to John; made Jesus’ private vision (Mk. 1.10-11) a public apparition (Mt.3.16-17); presented Jesus as a greater and more authoritative Law-giver than Moses (Mt. 5-7); wrote, "Blessed are the poor in spirit…" (Mt.5.3), not "Blessed are you poor…" (Lk. 6.20); quoted the positive Golden Rule, "…whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them…" (Mt.7.12) (see "Confucius" and "Marxists" below); increased the number of miracles; made one demoniac (Mk.3.1-13) two (Mt.8.23-34); added Peter walking on water (Mt.14-31) and finding a coin in a fish (Mt.17.27); changed Jesus’ inability to work miracles (Mk.6.5) into refusal (Mt.13.58); added Jesus’ empowerment of Peter (Mt.16.18-19) after Peter’s recognition of him as Messiah (Mk.8.29; Mt.16.15-16); added miraculous events at the time of Jesus’ death (Mt. 27. 51-53); added the guard on the tomb (Mt. 27. 66), the earthquake and angel at the resurrection (Mt. 28.2) and a resurrection appearance near the tomb (Mt.28.9); described the angel as saying, " …he is going before you to Galilee…Lo, I have told you" (Mt. 28.7) (see "Mark" above and "Luke" below); following Mark, described a resurrection appearance to the disciples in Galilee but added that some of the eleven "doubted" even as they saw the risen Jesus (Mt.28.17).
Luke:	added Gabriel (Lk.1.26), census (Lk.2.1), manger (Lk.2.7), shepherds (Lk.2.8-20) and an angelic choir (Lk.2.13-14); alleged a family relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist (Lk.1.36); added a meeting between their pregnant mothers when John leapt for joy in the womb (Lk.1.44); described Joseph and Mary as taking the newly born child to Jerusalem (Lk. 2..22), not fleeing to Egypt (Mt.2.13-14); added Simeon (Lk.2.25-35) and Anna (Lk.2.36-38) prophesying over the child; added the trial before Herod (Lk.23.6-12), the man on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24. 15-16), a tangible risen Jesus (Lk. 24.39) and the ascension (Lk. 24.51); described resurrection appearances only in Jerusalem, not in Galilee; described two men as saying, "Remember how he told you when he was still in Galilee…" (Lk. 24.6) (see "Mark" and "Matthew" above); described the ascension as immediate (Lk.24.51) but also as after forty days (Acts 1.3).
John:	identified the Greek philosophical Word with the Hebrew scriptural God; adapted "In the beginning, God…" (Gen. 1.1) as "In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God" (Jn.1.1); presented Jesus not, like Peter (Acts 2.24) or Paul (Rom. 1.4), as a man raised up by God but, for the first time, as God becoming a man, the "Word made flesh" (Jn. 1. 14); put long discourses into his mouth (e.g., Jn. 14-16), instead of short parables (e.g. Mk.4.1-32); represented John the Baptist as proclaiming that Jesus was the universal sacrificial victim as soon as he saw him (Jn.1.29); represented Jesus as beginning his ministry by talking to individuals (Jn.1.37-38), not by preaching to crowds (Mk.1.14); replaced Jesus calling Simon and Andrew (Mk.1.16-17) with Andrew introducing Simon to Jesus (Jn.1.40-42); emphasized immediate "eternal life" (e.g., Jn.3.15), not an imminent "kingdom" (Jn.3.3); placed the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (Jn.2.13-17), not at the end (e.g., Mk.11.15-17); personified the Spirit (Jn.16.13); replaced the trial before the Sanhedrin (e.g., Mk.14.55) with an interrogation by the High Priest (Jn.16.19); made the crucifixion (Jn.19.31), not the Last Supper (e.g., Mk.14.12), simultaneous with Passover; introduced the water into wine (Jn.2.9), the raising of Lazarus (Jn.11) and doubting Thomas (Jn. 20.24-29); called Barabbas a "robber" (Jn.18.40), not an insurrectionist (Mk.15.7; Lk.23.19); adapted appearance stories from Mt.28.9-10 (Jn.20.14-17) and Lk.24.36-49 (Jn.20.19-22); presented the disciples neither as going to a Galilean mountain in order to witness Jesus’ resurrection (Mt.28.16) nor as remaining in Jerusalem in order to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 1.4, 14-24) but as returning to the Galilean lake in order to resume their former work (Jn.1.3); added not an expected resurrection appearance at a Galilean mountain (Mt.28.16-17) but an unexpected appearance at the Galilean lake (Jn.21.1-14); thus, like Matthew, contradicted Luke’s accounts of appearances to all the disciples only in Jerusalem (Lk.24.36-51; Acts 1.3-9); did not mention an ascension.
Gnostics:	interpreted Christianity as esoteric contemplative cognition, not as exoteric credal conformity; thus, replaced historical prophecy with timeless mysticism; thus also, propagated a Christianity more consistent with Hinduism.
Marcion:	compiled the earliest Christian canon; included only "Gospel and Apostle" (Luke and Paul, minus Old Testament references); modelled this canon on the Jewish "Law and the Prophets"; but counterposed the Mosaic and Christian deities; therefore, saw Jesus as overthrowing, not fulfilling, the Law and the Prophets.
Constantine:	adapted Christianity to the Roman Empire; thus, adopted it as the ideology of a slave-owning society; thus also, institutionalized a scriptural canon beginning with the Hebrew "Moses and the prophets", not with the classical "Homer and the poets"; but accepted Christian freedom from the Mosaic Law; thus, initiated the distinction between church and state laws; convened a church council to impose doctrinal uniformity; divided the Empire between East and West; thus, laid the basis for a schism between Orthodox and Roman Churches.
Greek poets,	referred to as "Homer and the poets" (an epicist and some dramatists), were anciently regarded as divinely inspired authorities on theology and morality.
Homer,	author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, came instead to be regarded as the beginning of secular literature.
"The poets":	re-told and reinterpreted Homeric myths; reflected on moral responsibility and divine will.
Aeschylus,	the greatest Greek dramatist, believed that Zeus was just but transcendent; explained Prometheus’ suffering as a consequence of hubris.
Euripedes,	also a fifth century tragedian, expressed scepticism about traditional religion.
Virgil:	wrote the Roman epic, the Aeneid;modelled it on the Odyssey and the Iliad; re-told the myth of the Trojan ancestry of the founders of Rome; thus, presented the Roman Empire as the culmination of Homeric myth; referred, in Eclogue 4, to a virgin, a golden age and a new progency from heaven.
The Apostles:	were (male) witnesses to the resurrection; were originally twelve of Jesus’ disciples; then came to include Paul; founded and led particular churches; appointed assistants called (i) overseers (bishops) or elders (presbyters/priests) and (ii) servants (deacons); were each succeeded by a single bishop elected to lead a particular church and thus to control several priests and deacons; thus, appointed two levels of assistants but bequeathed three levels of "holy orders".
Bishops:	are successors of the Apostles; had each originally known a particular Apostle; but, after two thousand years, no longer have any privileged access to evidence for the resurrection; instead, can only read the New Testament like everyone else; as a group, in the early church, canonised documents affirming the Apostolic message of prophesied resurrection; thus, authoritatively defined the New Testament; therefore, did not regard its contents as inherently authoritative; included contradictory accounts of the nature and location of the resurrection; thus, affirmed the resurrection without being able to present a consistent history of it; therefore, cannot have believed that every part of the New Testament was historically accurate; were and remain based in cities and enthroned in cathedrals (Latin: cathedra = throne); based church organisation on imperial provinces, not on Jewish tribes; joined the political establishment; have exercised temporal power, e.g., in the Papal States and the British House of Lords.
Theologians:	incorporated the deified Jesus and the personified Spirit by trisecting God; adapted Greek philosophy but condemned Platonic reincarnation because it contradicted Pauline resurrection; accepted Hebrew God-world dualism, Greek body-soul dualism and a modified Zoroastrian good-evil dualism; interpreted resurrection of the body as its reunion with the soul; rejected both the Mosaic idea that God was the single source of good and evil (Ex.10.27) and the Zoroastrian idea that God’s opponent was an independent source of evil; preserved monotheism by regarding God as tri-personal and the Devil as a rebel angel.
Christians:	replaced gods with saints, sons of gods with the only son of the one God, presiding deities with patron saints, deification with canonisation, the Mother Goddess with the Mother of God, Perseus and Thor with Saints George and Olaf, idols with icons, sacrifice with sacrament, cyclical mythological with unique historical resurrection, Mithras’ birthday on 25 December with Jesus’, temples or synagogues with churches, the Pontifex Maximus or chief priest of the Roman state religion with the Bishop of Rome or Supreme Pontiff and the Roman Empire with both the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire; originally regarded the teachings of all apostolically founded churches as equally authoritative; later, invested supreme teaching authority in a council of all the bishops; adapted their beliefs to reflect feudal society, e.g., with knights, military religious orders and episcopal landholders; condemned surviving pagan practices as witchcraft; persecuted heretics and Jews and fought Muslims; regarded Virgil’s Eclogue 4 as a pagan prophecy; regard Abraham as the recipient of the promise of salvation (Gen.12.3) (see "Jews" and "Muslims" below).
Monks:	preserved the scriptures and classics; pray and meditate; practise a spiritual alternative to secular society.
Arians:	were Christians who denied Christ’s eternal status; therefore, also denied the Trinity; converted Northern European tribes to Christianity; forced the Western Church to convene a council to re-affirm Trinitarianism; thus, indirectly, intensified East-West schism because Eastern Churches accepted neither the authority of a merely Western council nor its particular formulation of Trinitarianism.
Luther:	adapted Christianity to reflect bourgeois individuality in emerging capitalist society; therefore, replaced the teaching authority of bishops with private interpretation of the Bible and replaced priestly sacraments with faith alone (Rom.3.21-24); expressed views that had existed previously but had been suppressed; translated the Bible so that it could be read in the vernacular; excluded Old Testament books that are not in the Jewish canon; excluded James because it taught that faith without works is dead (Js.2.20-26); also excluded other New Testament books; presented doctrines that were consistent with the Bible.
Calvin:	the second most important Reformer, presented only doctrines deduced from the Bible, including predestination (see "Paul" above).
Lutheran churches:	returned to the traditional New Testament canon in the seventeenth century.
Evangelicals:	accept Pauline-Lutheran belief in salvation by faith alone; think that believers cannot be lost, even if they commit serious sins; urge others to accept their belief; but state no reason for the belief ("It’s in the Bible" is not a reason for the truth of a belief; "The Bible is the word of God" and "You will be damned if you disbelieve this" are parts of the belief); thus, are fundamentally irrational; compound their irrationality by regarding mere unbelief as morally culpable; think that those who remain unconvinced by Evangelical propaganda freely reject their own salvation, not that they are simply unconvinced by the propaganda; thus, confuse honest disagreement with discreditable choice; claim that the Bible is inerrant despite its inconsistencies and inaccuracies (see "The Evangelists", "Bishops" etc above); claim to encounter Christ but not that he is visible, tangible or audible; thus, possibly reproduce the earliest Christian experience: the sense of a personal presence that is associated with the historical Jesus through an uncritical reading of scripture, disregarding contradictions, uncertainties and alternative explanations; reinforce and propagate their belief through preaching (Rom.10.14-17); read as scriptures not only the prophetic books that are held to prefigure Christian experience but also the New Testament that is held to confirm it; claim to experience the risen Christ only after they have started to believe that he exists; thus, acknowledge that, in this case, experience reflects belief, not vice versa; dismiss non-Christian religious experience as at best inadequate and at worst valueless or even demonic.
Christian fundamentalists:	interpret the entire Bible literally, even its two mutually inconsistent creation myths (Gen.1.1-2.4; Gen.2.4-25); thus, are close to Evangelicals.
Other Christians:	do not necessarily claim personal acquaintance with Christ; accept contact with Christ through sacraments rejected by Evangelicals; read the same scriptures but critically; acknowledge that scriptural historicity is problematic; sometimes, following Paul (2 Cor.5.16), differentiate the historically known Jesus from the spiritually risen Christ; may acknowledge the validity of other traditions and cease to be Christians in the traditional sense.
Catholics:	regard the bishop of Rome (the Pope) as the direct successor of the chief disciple of the incarnation of God; therefore, invest him individually with supreme teaching authority; believe also that he can decide whether, e.g., non-attendance at Mass should be punished by damnation (Mt.16.18-19); do not regard the exercise of such power as morally reprehensible; emphasise priestly re-enactment of the Last Supper (Mk.14.22-23; 1 Cor11.23-25), not general proclamation of the resurrection; excommunicated Luther; convene "ecumenical councils" excluding bishops not in communion with Rome; at one such council in 1870, defined the Pope’s teaching authority as infallible; but avoid invoking infallibility on controversial issues like contraception; have invoked it only to add to their doctrines of the supernatural status of Jesus’ mother; focus entire religious orders on doctrines like Jesus’ presence in communion, Mary’s assumption into heaven and the Spirit’s role in the Trinity; resisted a campaign to proclaim Mary the "Mediatrix"; thus, preserved Jesus’ uniqueness as the "one mediator " (1 Tim.2.5); preserved liturgical Latin until the 1960’s; ordain only celibate men; describe their faith as a divine gift, not a reasoned belief; thus, acknowledge that there is no reason to believe it; but have sometimes contradicted this by trying, unsuccessfully, to prove theism, resurrection and specifically Catholic doctrines like Papal infallibility and the immaculate conception; claim that the gift of faith is usually received not by adults at their conversions but by babies at their baptisms (thus, its receipt is not only irrational but even unconscious). (If we are not given faith, we cannot gain it but can analyse it, sceptically, and meditate, nontheistically.)
Eastern Orthodox Christians:	trace their origins back to particular Apostles; did not accept papal authority when it grew in the West; accept the teachings only of the early church councils; but share the Catholic emphasis on liturgy; ordain only men.
Anglicans:	rejected papal authority, thus becoming Anglicans, under Henry VIII; became doctrinally Lutheran, thus Protestant, under Henry’s successor, Edward VI; now claim to unite Anglo-Catholics (effectively English Orthodox), Evangelicals and liberals in a single Church; lead an international communion of episcopal churches with large Evangelical memberships; now ordain women; might split over homosexuality because liberalism contradicts Biblical texts (Lev.18.22; Rom.1.27).
Methodists:	were Anglican Evangelicals; ceased to be episcopally controlled; became a separate denomination after their founder’s death; ordain women.
"Christian Socialists":	adapt their beliefs to reflect socialist or social democratic politics.
Old Catholics:	were Catholics who did not accept papal infallibility in 1870.
Liberal Catholics:	were an Old Catholic Mission to England, taken over by Theosophists.
Theosophists:	were founded by a former spiritualist medium, Madame Blavatsky; claimed esoteric contact with superior beings; prepared Jiddu Krishnamurti to be the Vehicle of the World Teacher; regarded Krishna and Jesus as previous Vehicles; wrote accounts of Krishnamurti’s previous lives as an Atlantean priestess etc. (The British writer, Alan Moore, described religions as "higher fictions". Fiction requires willing suspension of disbelief. Religion requires willing belief. Sometimes, the contents are similar. Therefore, Moore’s description is appropriate. Even believers in a particular religion usually regard others as false and, to that extent, fictitious.)
Krishnamurti:	had mystical experiences; left the Theosophists; taught the value of self-awareness without reference to a World Teacher; applied his ideas to school education.
Anthroposophists:	split from Theosophy over the role of Krishnamurti; interpret Christianity esoterically; apply their ideas to school education.
Rosicrucians:	claim occult knowledge and abilities.
Latter Day Saints:	add the Book of Mormon to the Christian canon; believe that the lost tribes of Israel colonised North America and that Jesus appeared there after his resurrection; practised polygamy because they converted more women than men.
Christian Scientists:	instead add Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Rastafarians:	apply Old Testament prophecies to Haile Selassie, not to Jesus.
African religions:	refer to one supreme and many subordinate gods.
The Cuban Santeria:	identify African gods with Catholic saints.
Jehovah’s Witnesses:	are Biblical fundamentalists; emphasise the Biblical divine name (Ex.3.14); interpret the Biblical prohibition of eating blood (Lev.17.10-14) as also a prohibition of blood transfusions; reject Trinitarianism, Incarnation, sacraments, souls and Hell; regard denominational Christianity as pagan; like Jesus and his disciples (Mt.10.23; Mt. 16.28; Lk.21.32), expect the kingdom in current life times; in fact, expected it in 1914 and had to re-interpret Biblical prophecies accordingly; expect believers to survive or be resurrected and unbelievers to die or stay dead; expect 144,000 (Rev.7.4) of their number to reign with Christ in heaven while the rest inhabit a paradisal Earth; originally expected only 144,000 to be saved and had to revise this interpretation when they had recruited more members.
Neo-Pagans:	seek an alternative to Christianity in the past, not in the East.
Samaritans:	accept the Law but not the Prophets or Writings.
Jews:	were allegedly led from slavery by an Egyptian prince (Ex.2.10; Ex.5.1); claimed that he had been born a Hebrew (Ex.2.1-10); worshipped only one god (Ex.22.20; Deut.5.7); denigrated other gods as powerless to the point of non-existence (1 Kg.18.27-39; Is.44. 9-20); thus, came to believe that there was only one god (Deut.6.4); preserved anthropomorphic references, e.g., to God’s "face" (Ex.33.20; Deut.34.10) and "back" (Ex.33.23); but came to regard him as invisible and omnipresent; described him as making barbaric laws, e.g., Ex.22.23-34; 23.3-4; but also summarised morality as love of God and neighbour (Deut.6.4-6; Lev.19.18); claim descent from Abraham (Gen.12.2); may have been influenced by the monotheist Akhtenaten (a former Pharaoh) or by the priest Jethro (Moses’ father-in-law) (Ex. 2.16-21); regard Abraham as the recipient of the promise of the land (Gen.15.18-21) (see "Christians" above and "Muslims" below); regard the Prophets as applying the Law, not as prophesying Christ; were unable to continue animal sacrifice after the destruction of the Temple; closed their canon with the Law, the Prophets and the Writings in order to differentiate it from the then new Christian canon; ritually read the Law in synagogues; therefore, now organise worship through rabbis in local synagogues, not through priests in a single Temple.
The Jahvist epic:	celebrated the Davidic monarchy as the culmination of God’s plan; became a source for the early Biblical books; thus, was incorporated into a longer history.
Moses:	is said to have met God "face to face" (Deut. 34.10), to have worked greater miracles than anyone else (Deut. 34.11), to have died at 120 still physically fit (Deut. 34.7) and to have been buried by God in an unknown grave (Deut. 34.7); is identified with the Law, the first five books of the Bible; in the New Testament, appears with Elijah at Christ’s Transfiguration (Mk. 9.2-7), thus confirming the latter’s fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets.
Zoroastrians:	were Persian prophetic monotheists, founded by Zarathustra; called the supreme being Ahura Mazda; accepted as scripture a collection of treatises, poems and hymns called the Avesta;formulated dualist responses to the problem of evil; later, adopted the sun god Mithras as the eye of Ahura Mazda and ruler of the Earth; transmitted concepts of the Devil, a historical saviour and the resurrection and judgement of the dead into post-exilic Judaism, thus into early Christianity.
Plato:	was a disciple of Socrates; initiated written European philosophy; wrote philosophy as dramatic dialogues; reinterpreted myths; argued for the immortality and reincarnation of immaterial souls.
Aristotle:	was a disciple of Plato; addressed his readers directly in prose, not indirectly through dialogues; defined the categories of European science and philosophy; systematised logic; was less mystical and more scientific than Plato; defined the soul as the form of the body.
Mystery religions:	coexisted with Roman state polytheism; each focused on a particular deity; offered revelatory experiences through sacramental rituals; included Mithraism.
Mithraists:	were an off-shoot of Zoroastrianism; regarded Mithras as supreme; but recognised other deities; believed that Mithras had conquered evil and fertilised nature by sacrificing a bull; were baptised in the blood of a sacrificed bull; also consumed sacramental bread and wine; inculcated military virtues; spread through the Roman Empire; gained imperial patronage; did not historicise their mythology or initiate women; thus, did not become universal prophetic monotheists; therefore, failed to provide a world religion for the Roman Empire.
Mani:	was raised as a Christian in the third century; had a visionary experience; like other prophets, received an angelic order to preach; founded the syncretic Manichaean religion; preached it in the Persian Empire; taught by writing and painting; compiled a pictorial scripture, the book of Images; claimed to synthesise the teachings of Zarathustra, the Buddha and Jesus; taught dualism, reincarnation and the coming of a Saviour; was killed by the ruling Zoroastrians.
Manichaeains:	were regarded by Christians as Christian heretics; were persecuted in the Persian and Roman Empires, the latter both pagan and Christian; replaced the Acts of the Apostles with Acts of John, Paul, Peter, Andrew and Thomas.
St. Augustine:	converted from Manichaeism to Christianity; like others, synthesised Christianity with Platonism.
Aquinas:	synthesised Christianity with Aristotelianism; founded one school of Medieval Christian philosophy; came to be regarded as the authoritative Catholic philosopher; said that only believers in Jesus could see him risen (although: some doubters (Mt. 28. 17) and one opponent (Acts 9. 1, 5) did; Catholics teach physical resurrection, which implies a resurrected body visible to all: the Gospels confirm physical resurrection; Aquinas implies that other travellers on the Emmaus road would have seen two disciples apparently conversing with no one. However, it is plausible that: the disciples met a stranger; their bereavement and Paul's hostility to the recently executed Jesus became vivid experiences as of contact with a living Jesus; thus, psychological, not perceptual, processes generated talk of a risen Jesus; believers, stating the unverifiable, claimed to be witnesses, telling us what we would have seen if we had been there; converts, accepting this, invented empitical evidence, an empty tomb (Mk. 16. 6) and a tangible resurrected body (Lk. 24. 39; Jn. 20. 27).
Parsees:	are Indian descendants of Zoroastrian refugees from the Muslim conquest of Persia.
Muslims:	regard the prophets as including Jesus but culminating in Muhammad; replace Judaeo-Christian scriptures with the Koran; agree with Jews that there is one unincarnated transcendent creator; regard Abraham as a man of Islam (submission to God’s will) (Gen.22.1-18; Koran 19.39-44) (see "Christians" and "Jews" above); preserved significant Greek philosophical texts and transmitted them to Europe; transmitted "Arabic" numerals from India to Europe.
Sufis:	are Muslim mystics; regard God as immanent.
Sikhs:	were persecuted Muslim-Hindu ecumenists; survived as a group by differentiating themselves from both traditions; accept one unincarnated God from Islam and many reincarnating souls from Hinduism; accept as scripture a collection of hymns by Muslims, Hindus and Sikh Gurus.
Bahais:	are an eclectic Muslim off-shoot; regard other religions as earlier stages of revelation; believe that there have been prophets since Muhammad and will be more; accept some later writings as scriptures.
Subud:	is a spiritual practice initiated by a Muslim but open to all; is mentioned here because I have some experience of it.
Hindus:	accept as scriptures the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Gita etc; regard their epics as scriptures, not as secular literature; were originally polytheist ritualists; came to regard all gods as different forms either of a single personal God or of the one impersonal reality; thus, transformed polytheism into both monotheism and monism; assimilated tribal beliefs; also incorporated an atheist, soul pluralist yogic tradition; synthesised Vedic theism or monism with yogic theory and practice in the Upanishads; thus, interpreted yoga not only as control of thoughts but also as union with the transcendent; interpreted the goal of yoga not only as liberation but also as union; conceive of God as creator/preserver/ destroyer and as either male or female; can regard Rama, Krishna, the Buddha, Jesus and others as divine incarnations; also envisage animal divine incarnations; philosophically systematised logic, atomism, soul pluralism, yogic practice, Vedic ritualism and Upanishadic teaching; thus, systematised yoga both as a distinct tradition and as part of the Upanishadic synthesis; classify these philosophical systems as Vedically orthodox; canonise the authoritative texts (sutras) of the six orthodox systems; write original philosophy in the form of commentaries on the sutras; classify Jain, materialist and Buddhist philosophies as unorthodox; integrate theistic practice into Yoga philosophy by classifying it as devotion to a perennially liberated soul; use divine names as mantras; describe Upanishadic philosophy as "the end of the Veda", Vedanta; formulate theistic, monistic and intermediate interpretations of Vedanta; write Vedantist commentaries on the Yoga Sutras and commentaries on commentaries; claim to experience not only a personal deity but also an impersonal absolute.
Krishna devotees:	are a Hindu fundamentalist sect; regard atheism and "impersonalism" as serious errors; thus, are uncompromising theists; regard Krishna alone as the Supreme God; believe that he is not bodiless and invisible but humanoid and blue; believe that, in this form, he visited Earth without needing to be incarnated (I am not making this up but someone please tell me if I am getting any of it wrong); emphasise scriptural accounts of Krishna’s life in the Srimad Bhagavatam and of his teaching in the Bhagavad Gita;claim that one divine name, "Krishna", is particularly efficacious; thus, contradict the inclusive Vedic principle: "To what is one, sages give many a title…" (Rig Veda, 1.164.46); practise bhakti - mantra yoga; thus, claim to experience a personal relationship with the one God in human form; but promote Krishna and Gita, not Christ or Gospel; were possibly influenced by Christianity.
"St. Thomas" Christians:	are ancient Indian Christians; claim to have been founded by Thomas the Apostle.
Jains:	are atheist ascetics; believe that the universe is humaniform with this world at its waist, hells below, heavens above and liberated souls rising to the top of the head; regard karma as a material force weighing down souls, thus preventing their liberation; regard souls as immaterial but also as expanding or contracting to fit bodies and as affected by material karma; thus, preserve an ancient quasi-materialistic view of spirit; regard liberated souls as permanently distinct, not as united with the transcendent, and as superior to gods dwelling in the heavens; conserve the yogic-meditative tradition that Hindus incorporated and that the Buddha reformed.
Maskarin Gosala:	followed the Jain hero, Mahavira; then claimed to have surpassed him ascetically and magically; founded the fatalist Ajivika movement; died of self-starvation c. 487 BC.
The Ajivikas:	believed that every soul, however virtuous or ascetic, must traverse 8,400,000 lives; eventually merged with Jains or Vaisnavas (worshippers of the Hindu god, Vishnu).
The Buddha:	was raised in isolated luxury; first saw sickness, old age and death as a young adult; thus, realized the universality of suffering; became a religious mendicant; sought the way to the end of suffering; investigated existing spiritual practices; experimented with extreme asceticism; realized that asceticism requires rigid self-control, not relaxed attention; stopped fasting and regained his physical strength; thus, lost the respect of fellow ascetics; practised meditation as immediate awareness and relaxed attention; inwardly ended the psychological cause of suffering; thus, became able to teach the way to the end of suffering; could have remained in passive contemplation; but continued to be motivated by compassion; when asked, "are you a god?", replied, "I am awakened (‘buddha’)"; is said to have converted the ascetics who had left him when he stopped fasting; criticised established religious ideas and practices; replaced reincarnation of souls with rebirth of dispositions; regarded the ending of rebirth neither as the liberation of an independent soul nor as union with a transcendent being but as entry to a transcendent state; but discouraged metaphysical speculation as unconducive to enlightenment; founded a monastic order; taught rulers and laity; died aged 80.
Buddhists:	maintained the order; orally transmitted the Buddha’s teaching for centuries; then wrote it as "sutras"; also developed the teaching by writing original sutras; attributed the latter also to the Buddha; made compassion and wisdom more explicit than they had been in the earlier teaching; apply the term "Buddha" to a historical individual, to a cosmic principle embodied in that individual and to the potential for enlightenment in all beings; envisage many past, future and extra-terrestrial Buddhas; can acknowledge deities but regard the Buddha as superior because of his enlightenment; were reabsorbed by Hinduism in India, where the Buddha came to be regarded as a divine incarnation; spread to Tibet, Sri Lanka, China etc; adapted to different cultures; developed diverse traditions and practices; formulated monist, idealist and dialectical philosophies; but can de-emphasise philosophies, doctrines and concepts by focusing on present awareness; meditate; experience transient interconnectedness, not permanent substance.
Pure Land Buddhists:	invoke the ahistorical Amida Buddha; believe that he has created another world that is conducive to enlightenment; seek rebirth there; thus, practise devotion to Amida, not attention to the present.
Confucians:	are Chinese moralists; accept as scriptures the Five Classics, including the I Ching, and the Four Books; became a state cult; used their Canon as the curriculum for imperial civil service exams; focused ritual on their founder, Confucius.
Confucius:	claimed to know Heaven’s decree; according to tradition, edited four of the Classics, wrote the fifth and founded the movement that produced the Four Books; delivered teachings collected in the first Book, the Analects; taught the importance of relationships between fathers and sons, elder and younger brothers, husbands and wives, the old and the young and rulers and subjects; also taught the negative Golden Rule, "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others" (see "Matthew" above and "Marxists" below).
Mencius:	wrote the fourth Confucian Book; introduced meditation into Confucianism.
Hsun Tzu:	was a pessimistic and religiously sceptical Confucian.
Fei-tzu:	was a legalistic Confucian.
Mo Tzu:	diverged from Confucianism; preached universal love in opposition to Confucian emphasis on specific relationships.
Taoists:	reject Confucian formalism and conservatism; accept as scriptures the Tao Te Ching and later works; resemble Buddhists in both mystical philosophy and meditative practice; developed an elaborate religion incorporating their original philosophy; deified their legendary founder; represented him as teaching both Confucius and the Buddha; imagine a heavenly hierarchy comprising the Jade Emperor, Tao Chun (controller of yin and yang), Lao Tzu and lesser deities serving the Three; inspired utopian rebellions; sought inner peace through meditation when the rebellions had been suppressed; sometimes replaced government services through religious organisation; practise magic and alchemy as well as spirituality; seek physical longevity as well as oneness with the eternal; influence and are influenced by Chinese Buddhists.
Shih Huang Ti,	Emperor of China, burned Confucian books; is said to have sent a sea expedition to find the Taoist Isles of the Immortals.
Chang Tao Ling:	had a vision of Lao Tzu; received from him the title, Heavenly Master; founded a new Taoist religion; bequeathed his title to his descendants to the present day; claimed to possess a life-prolonging elixir.
Ko Hung:	wrote the Pao Phu Tzu on Taoist alchemy, medicine and magic.
Shintoists:	are Japanese polytheist nature mystics; worshipped the Emperor as a descendant of the Sun Goddess; accept as scriptures the Records of Ancient Matters and the Japanese Chronicles; interact with and influence Japanese Buddhists.
Spiritualists:	claim to prove survival.
Humanists:	ritualise secularism.
Some secularists:	wrongly regard all religious leaders as conscious deceivers.
Marxists:	apply a materialist analysis of society; do not impose atheism as a condition of membership of the revolutionary party; understand that theistic beliefs are materially based in social alienation; therefore, understand why such beliefs often cannot be dispelled by mere argument; respect the values of theistic workers; regard phenomena as transient and interconnected; regard ultimate causes as impersonal; regard the Communist Manifesto (1848) as significant though not scriptural (in fact, Marx and Engels recognised in their 1872 Preface that the Paris Commune of 1871 had demonstrated that their earlier assumption that the working class could use existing states was "antiquated"); practise collective struggle, not individual spirituality; advocate the fullest development of human potential; therefore, might come to recognise that some spiritual practice expresses self-realisation, not alienation; argue that elimination of class conflict will facilitate implementation of the Golden Rule (see "Matthew" and "Confucius" above).
Conclusions:	Experiences differ and are variously interpreted.
	Christianity is not Jesus’ teaching but beliefs about him formulated after his death.
	A belief about his resurrection could only have been formulated after his death.
	The first Christians were believers in a spiritual resurrection, not witnesses to a physical resurrection.
	Converts to Christianity imagined the physical resurrection.

	(The stages of development were:
	Jesus	love ethic
		faith healing
		vicarious suffering
	disciples	spiritual resurrection
	Paul	sacrificial death
	oral tradition	tomb burial
	Mark	empty tomb
		silence of witnesses
		predicted Galilean appearance
	Matthew	virgin birth
		guard on tomb
		doubtful Galilean appearance
	Luke	road to Emmaus
		tangible Jerusalem appearance
		ascension
	John	incarnation
		Lazarus
		doubting Thomas
	(Re-arranged chronologically, the list becomes: incarnation, virgin birth, moral teaching, miracles, sacrificial death, burial, resurrection and ascension, which are the familiar Christian beliefs.)
Conclusions, continued:	The kingdom was not at hand but a new consciousness and a new society remain possible.
	It had long been possible to approach selfless consciousness through individual meditation.
	Since the industrial revolution, it has become possible to approach a classless society through social revolution.
	Jesus, expecting neither continued historical development nor an eventual industrial revolution but imminent divine intervention, advocated repentance and acceptance of the good news (Mk.1.15).
	Buddhists and Marxists, expecting continued psychological and social conflicts, meditate and prepare for revolution, respectively. (Unorthodox Trotskyist organisations develop and apply Marxism. Individuals, who are not necessarily ordained lay Buddhists, meditate.)

I have summarised Christianity at greater length first because its particular synthesis of mythology with history makes it more complicated and secondly because the purpose of this Appendix was to consider Christianity’s specific claims to veracity and relevance. Other religions are summarised for comparison. The comparison shows the diversity not only of religious experiences but also of religiously authoritative texts. There is no central authority to adjudicate on the veracity of such texts. The Pope speaks authoritatively, even infallibly, for Catholics and the Dalai Lama speaks authoritatively for one Tibetan Buddhist sect but there is no super-Pope or –Lama to resolve disagreements between them. In fact, their worldviews are so different that there could not be such an agreed superior authority. We can study scriptures for their inherent value – spiritual, philosophical, literary or historical – if any, but should not accept scriptural propositions as authoritatively valid merely by virtue of their traditional status. Unquestioning acceptance of the Bible alone as "scripture" is unwarranted and increasingly inappropriate.

Main sources:
Smart, N.	The Religious Experience of Mankind	New York 1969
Marx, Engels	Manifesto of the Communist Party	Moscow 1971
Armstrong, K.	The First Christian: St. Paul’s Impact on Christianity	London 1983
Smart, N. Strange, R.	The World’s Religions The Catholic Faith	Cambridge 1989 Oxford 1996

Appendix 6: Minds and Brains

The philosophical mind-body problem is relevant to religious beliefs, to Buddhist teachings and to dialectical materialism. The following discussion is an attempt to clarify some of the issues.
Brain processes cause consciousness but causality is not identity. The properties of a brain state are not those of a corresponding mental state or vice versa. For example, brain cells are grey whereas a mental image of the sun is yellow and abstract thoughts do not have colours.
A mental image or image in the mind is not a material image in the brain. A material image is an object or at least a surface that resembles another object. Examples are reflections, paintings, photographs and statues. Observation of brains does not reveal any such images inside them and, even if it did, there would be no necessary connection between such images and consciousness. Reflections etc are not conscious of the objects that they resemble. A photograph is a visual record and reminder but not a conscious memory.
Even if there were material images inside our brains, we would not be able to see them there because we do not have eyes inside our heads. Even if we were able to see material images inside our brains, that is not what happens when we imagine something. We do not visually perceive a present image but inwardly consider the visual appearance of an absent or even non-existent object. An imagined but non-existent object is "imaginary". We say of imaginary objects either that they do not exist or, alternatively, that they exist only in our heads. This phrase acknowledges the location of mental processes in the brain but does not entail that anyone who looks into a brain sees in there a host of mythological creatures or fictitious characters. If these creatures and characters existed in a way that enabled them to be seen by external observers, then they would not be mythological or fictitious and would not fit inside a head.
Even if mental images were somehow identified with material images inside the brain, most mental processes do not involve mental images. For example, we learn the meanings of words without forming a specific image for each word as we hear it, especially not for words like "if", "but", "and" etc. We understand these words if we use them correctly, not if we entertain a particular mental image each time we hear or read them. The concept of whiteness is not a white mental image but an abstraction applicable to every instance of that colour, whether real or imagined. The ability to apply concepts is described by psychologists and philosophers in terms differing completely from those used by neurologists to describe brains.
Brain states can be scientifically observed whereas thoughts can only be divulged by their thinker, who is usually unaware of his own brain processes. A scientifically studied brain is part of a person as observed by others whereas that person’s consciousness is his observations of everything else. Therefore, our description of his brain and his description of his consciousness differ.
By interacting with environments, we become conscious. By interacting with each other, we become self-conscious and detect consciousness in others. We become sufficiently conscious to recognise conscious behaviour. By studying brains, we discover not consciousness but its causes. Psychology is related, but not reducible, to neurology. Consciousness is a relationship, not an object, the process of seeing, not a seen process. (Detection, recognition, study, discovery and seeing presuppose consciousness, thus do not explain it.)
A brain can be described entirely in terms of its own physical properties, electrochemical states and immediate sensory inputs whereas consciousness cannot be described without reference to its objects which may be spatio-temporally distant, like another galaxy, a remote quasar or the cosmic origin, abstract, like a taste for autobiography, the middle of next week or the square root of minus one, unvisualisable, like a tachyon, a singularity or the fourth dimension, evaluative, like a moral judgement or an aesthetic response, or non-existent, like the Philosopher’s Stone or the Holy Grail. Merely physical acts cannot have non-existent objects: we can think about the Philosopher’s Stone but not sit on it and can look for the Grail but not drink from it.
It is impossible to describe a process, X, in such a way that the description excludes synonyms of "consciousness" like "sensation", "experience", "awareness", "perception", "knowledge", "cognition", "recognition" etc yet hearers or readers of the description remark, " ‘X’ is what we mean by ‘consciousness’ ". It follows that consciousness, like whiteness, is qualitatively unique and indefinable but not that it is inexplicable. It is explained by its material causes. Organisms became increasingly sensitive to environmental alterations until some organisms began consciously sensing their external environments, then perceiving discrete objects. Self-consciousness can be analysed into constituents which include basic concepts and conceptual abilities but also include the simple and unanalysable property of consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness. We cannot describe whiteness to a permanently blind man but need not describe consciousness to a permanently unconscious man. A person’s physical and psychological properties are two aspects of one entity, not two entities. Psychology emerges from but is not reducible to physicality.
Imagination is reified, i. e., mistakenly regarded as a purely physical process, in eight stages:
(1) We describe imagination not as a mental act but as a series of passively experienced mental images. This downplays the extent to which imagining something for ourselves differs from merely seeing an object that already exists and that is visible to others.
(2) We differentiate mental images from material objects by describing privately imagined things as "internal" and publicly perceivable objects as "external". The words "in", "inner" and "internal" are ambiguous because they differentiate the mental from the physical but also have purely physical applications. My hand is inside my pocket but both are outside my mind. The heart is an internal organ but is part of the external world from the mind’s point of view. It is not a figment of its owner’s imagination. We know this because it is detectable by others and because we find that it has continued to exist and to function even when it has not been observed.
(3) We acknowledge that mental processes are effects of brain processes.
(4) We identify the effects with their causes.
(5) We conclude that "internal" mental images are internal to the brain.
(6) Because the brain is a material organ, we conclude that an image that is internal to the brain is a material image.
(7) Because material images are visible to external observers, it is thought that a scientist observing a brain with a sufficiently sensitive instrument will be able to see in there a material image of a giraffe whenever the person whose brain he is observing imagines a giraffe.
(8) It is thought that the imagining of a giraffe is nothing more nor other than the seeing of a material image of a giraffe inside one’s own brain, although it is usually acknowledged that we cannot see anything in that direction.
This may sound implausible but I have had several heated arguments on the subject. People argue that an image must be detectable inside the brain because they think that the only alternative is to claim that the mind is independent of the brain. When this proposition is stated clearly, it is seen to be false. The mind may depend on the brain whether or not there are material images in the brain. All that the scientist needs to observe in the brain is whatever neurological process causes a mental act of the imagination. There need not be a visible resemblance between the physical cause and its psychological effect.
The brain is not divided into one part that is the observing subject and another part that is observed objects. Instead, the whole brain is somehow involved in generating consciousness, first of the external world, then of an internal realm that is not merely visual and that cannot be read in the brain in the way that words are read in a book. Conceivably, a scientist might record a person’s entire brain state at a particular moment, receive from the person, perhaps by hypnosis, an exhaustive account of his mental state at that moment and correlate the two states. However, every moment of consciousness is unique. Further, brains function differently and dynamically. Therefore, even a large number of specific brain-mind correlations would not necessarily enable a scientist observing a future brain state to describe the corresponding mental state. Further, even if he were able to do this, he would still be inferring a mental state from an observed brain state, not directly observing the mental state.
As a single water molecule is not wet, so a single brain cell is not conscious. As Hegel argued, quantity affects quality. Cerebral processing of environmental inputs became complicated (a quantitative change), then conscious (a qualitative change). Unconscious organisms and their environments became conscious subjects and their objects.
If natural brains cause consciousness, then so would artificial brains. However, rule-governed manipulation of symbols is not knowledge of their meanings and simulation is not duplication. Therefore, analogue computers are not artificial brains.
The qualitative difference between psyches and brains entails at least the logical possibility of a bodiless psyche. Just as there are unconscious material objects, there could be immaterial conscious subjects. We can, without self-contradiction, imagine a person losing all his physical properties of size, weight, mass etc while retaining his mental abilities to perceive, remember, think etc. We would then say either that his body had become invisible and, more generally, undetectable or that he had become bodiless. He would see without eyes or a brain. There is only an empirically contingent, not a logically necessary, connection between possession of bodily organs and the familiar experience of direct acquaintance with the visual properties of material objects. We can, as an imaginative exercise or thought experiment, conceive of experience without organs whereas we cannot, for example, conceive of a triangle without three sides. Fictitious accounts of disembodied subjects and real life accounts of alleged "out of the body" experiences are regarded as contrary to common experience but are not usually dismissed as verbally incoherent as a phrase like "square triangle" would be with the result that no one thinks of using such a phrase whereas people can and do imagine leaving their bodies.
If the relationship between brain states and consciousness is causal, then it is an empirically discerned constant conjunction between brain states and consciousness, not a necessary implication of the meanings of the words used to describe either brains or consciousness. Any empirically known generalisation is contingent, i.e., could have been otherwise. When a generalisation is necessary, i. e., could not have been otherwise, then we recognise its necessity simply by considering the meaning of the general statement, e.g., "all white men are men", and do not have to settle the matter experientially, i.e., by observing all white men in order to check whether one of them turns out not to be a man. The general statement that brains cause consciousness is known empirically. Of course, if, knowing that brains in fact cause consciousness, we then define a brain as that which causes consciousness, then the proposition that brains cause consciousness becomes a tautology or logical necessity but matters of fact about the world are not settled merely by defining words. If a brain is defined as the organ inside the skull, then it remains possible, first, that some brains will be found to control only automatic and unconscious responses of organisms to their environments and, secondly, that some instances of consciousness could have causes other than brains.
Violation of causal laws is physically impossible, i.e., we confidently predict that a violation will not occur because it would contradict all past experience and scientific knowledge. However, a violation is logically possible, i.e., we can conceive of its occurrence. Otherwise, stories about magic and miracles would be not false or fictitious but incomprehensible. Even in the real world, it is conceivable, first, that causal laws could vary in different cosmic epochs and, secondly, that there can be occasional exceptions, e.g., irregularities resulting from random "quantum" fluctuations. The possibility of consciousness independent of brains cannot be ruled out a priori.
However, disembodied consciousness remains merely a logical possibility. The experienced actual world is only one of many logically possible worlds. Other such worlds would contain different physical properties, natural laws or historical events or even different relationships between consciousness and its objects, e.g., a world composed entirely of approaching and receding sounds and of a hearer who, if he hears a particular sound continuously and identifies himself with it, thereby regards it as his body but who, otherwise, would have no reason to think that consciousness could be embodied.
In the world that we do inhabit, however, most empirical evidence supports the proposition that consciousness not only is caused by but also remains dependent on physical processes in visible and tangible brains. "Out of the body" experiences are possibly altered states of consciousness in which bodily sensations are disregarded and the immediate environment is vividly imagined as if seen from a point outside the body. "Near death" experiences are "out of the body" experiences that occur while the clinically dead body remains intact and revivable. Therefore, they do not guarantee continued consciousness after the body’s irrevocable decay. If a medium says what only X, who is dead, could have known, this could mean that X is disembodied and speaking through the medium but could also mean that we were wrong to think that only X could have known it. However, I have not studied the body of prima facie evidence for communications from the dead and therefore cannot comment further.
Only embodied subjects can be objects of each other’s consciousness. Only subjects that are also objects can participate in communities. Only participation in a linquistic community teaches individuals how to use words and other symbols consistently, therefore meaningfully. Only words and symbols enable individuals to think about things that are not immediately present. Only thought about objects of consciousness that are past, future, absent, hypothetical, imagined, general etc differentiates abstract thought and reflective self-consciousness from immediate animal sensation. Therefore:
any disembodied subjects that are capable of abstract thought and reflective self-consciousness must originally have been embodied;
any disembodied subjects that enter a common environment where they can communicate with each other are somehow re-embodied;
the dialectical materialist principle that consciousness is based in a form of being, i.e., in an objective realm independent of consciousness, applies even to a hypothetical hereafter.

Email address: paulshackley@gmail.com