MLE Friends Talk with Br. Pháp Linh

“The Art of Unknowing”

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Do we have a worldview, or do we have the world? Is the world we experience real, or is it a mental simulation? Do we see things as they really are? Or do we see a collage, constructed in whole or in part by our views? Is there even a “real world,” somewhere out there, waiting to be seen? Or does our seeing and perceiving participate in the manifestation of our world?

I propose that scientific materialism has crept into our very senses, through a process of “cognitive penetration,” until it has become largely invisible to us. This is the “surreptitious substitution” of the abstraction for our first-person lived experience.

The narrative of a dead cosmos, made of inanimate matter still serves as the unacknowledged foundation for most “serious” scientific discourse, and thus invisibly dominates our culture. According to this narrative, the world has no will, no volition, no agency—there’s just us—the rest is no more than scenery.

We know that we urgently need to restore our ability to experience and participate in a truly living world—not as an intellectual belief, but as our lived experience. If we could remove the scales from our eyes, and unknow the scathing certainty of materialism, we would have a chance to live once again from and within reverence, reciprocity and relatedness.

What kinds of practices can help us reveal to ourselves the invisible views and faulty concepts that condition and constrain our very perception?

In this talk we will present insights from Yogacara Buddhist Psychology as a way to help us understand how the belief in our separateness may begin at a physiological level, in the very arising of subject and object of consciousness. The “natural attitude” of Husserl is thus seen to be truly natural. Scientific materialism only appears to confirm something that to some extent we are programmed by evolution to believe.

Applying the lens of Buddhist psychology reveals that we are also more than this natural attitude, and lights to way to releasing our instinctive identification with body, feelings, and thoughts. Transforming our conditioned “self-concept” into the mind of non-discrimination and the insight of interbeing puts us powerfully back in touch with the wonders of the resonant living world. With concrete practices for unknowing our reductive instrumentalising gaze, we discover the possibility of a new way of living, no longer as human actors on a dead cosmic stage, but as interconnected nodes in the living tapestry of reality.