For Buddhism, taking the "red pill" means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true.

Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life.

The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is "to see it for yourself." He offers Neo two pills, a red pill and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

That's a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it's a choice that's so dramatic that you'd think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs -- that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.

The people I'm thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn't grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism.

At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as a belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy.

(Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism -- that it's atheistic and that it revolves around meditation -- are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don't meditate.)

Interesting. I'm definitely attracted to the Western form of Buddhism, since I like this philosophy (in Asia it is a religion) because it fits with my attraction toward atheism and meditation. This reminds me of a difference I observed between American and Indian members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization headquartered in India and led by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years.

On the whole we Americans were more interested in the fine points of the RSSB teachings and the meditation practice we'd been taught than the members of RSSB with an Indian background -- who seemed more devoted to the person of the guru and often meditated little if at all, being more concerned about seva, or volunteer service on behalf of RSSB and the guru.

There's no right or wrong here, just different ways of approaching spirituality. For Wright, a Western Buddhist, this gets at the question of how deeply committed someone is to truly upending their current view of reality versus merely improving our life without such a drastic change of perception. He notes:

Using meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn't deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine thing to do. It's good for you, and it will probably be good for the world.

But Wright goes on to say:

Still, using meditation this way isn't, by itself, taking the red pill. Taking the red pill means asking basic questions about the relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality. If you're thinking seriously about taking the red pill, you'll be curious as to whether the Buddhist view of the world "works" not just in a therapeutic sense but in a more philosophical sense.

So what is it that distinguishes a "red pill" approach to Buddhism? Not an easy question to answer. Wright offers up some hints in this passage.

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Due belonged) that you find the most radically based conception of illusion.

Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a "mind only" doctrine that, in its most extreme incarnation, dismisses the things we "perceive" via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought -- the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix -- isn't dominant within Mahayana Buddhism, much less within Buddhism at large.

But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have.

And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self -- you know, your self, my self -- is an illusion. In this view, the "you" that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn't really exist. 

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together -- the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness -- you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

Comments

[October]

When buddha had achieved enlightenment,he was approached by Maya.A woman of about 40.
U know what buddha did.
He slept and vipasana came into existence

There are two aspects of matrix thing.Is there really a matrix.what is it outside of matrix. Buddha found out it was EGO that is glitch in matrix. How to get rid of EGO?

[sant64]

Reading In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. He recounts a near-death experience that made him hyper-mindful of the preciousness of every moment.

Being acutely aware of the moment and all the wonder of being alive! This would seem like a good thing But it wasn't. The confrontation with death made Junger obsess that every day might be his last. One of his beleaguered doctors offered, "Have you tried religion"? The possibility that we might somehow survive death becomes Junger's quest.

If we're annihilated at death, then these Buddhist concepts about emptiness are totally meaningless, a kind of intellectual idolatry. "I believe I have no self and all phenomena are empty." If you actually believed that you wouldn't be living life as if everything was quite real. Certainly no harm in thinking that way, as we're all idolators of one kind or another.

As for RSSB, it might be that Indian satsangis are more focused on seva than on bhajan. If so, I put that down to Sikh cultural influence. Grok enlightened me on the differences between Sikhism proper and Sant Mat. Many RSSB folks might be surprised to learn that Guru Nanak never taught anything like the RSSB meditation technique. Nor did Nanak have the same conception of "Guru" that RS gurus teach. Sikhism started out as, and further developed as, a social religion.

We Westerners want to be mystics. But the dinner bell always holds sway over our lofty spiritual ambitions.

[sant64]

Why RSSB culture is better for India.
https://x.com/HowThingsWork_/status/1900146053547958344