Know Thyself - East vs West
Coursera is offering a course this month called Know Thyself. From the outline, I think it will miss its mark. The course starts with ancient Greece, from the origins of the phrase, carved above a temple in Delphi. It's an eclectic survey of various threads woven into the expression, from philosophy, to psychotherapy, neuroscience and even a tip of the hat towards Buddhism and Zen.
The fundamental flaw in the approach, from the syllabus and the intro, and the reason I opted not to enroll, is that it appears to be researching the 'properties' of the self...i.e. what it is in abstract. With some titillating asides about the adaptive unconscious and the neuroscience tropes about how we aren't aware of many facets of our own 'selves' along with a little trolling from buddhism and zen thrown in to question whether a self actually even exists. Gasp! (A point of view various scientific dogmas would whole heartedly approve because of its seemingly immaterial nature.)
But ultimately any search for the 'self' from the outside, in definitions and philosophy, or even research or ethnology is not really relevant to knowing our self. And the phrase carries a more subtle meaning that is often overlooked: know (for) yourself. Observe. Watch. Experience. There is nothing in the world that can be observed more directly. So instead of exploring the why and the what from other peoples' experiences and ideas, we need to start with the how, to find out for ourselves.
This is the true 'work' of buddhism and zen, which were never intended to posit beliefs and statements like "there is no self." Instead they were designed to show 'how' to gain a little space and observe what is really happening. For our selves.
As Sakyong Mipham put it in Turning the Mind Into An Ally, if we lived in the wilderness, we could observe the patterns around us, the activity of the birds and the animals, the nature of the weather and changes in plant life. If we got intimate with our environment, we may be able to start predicting when winter is coming, for example, and whether it would be long or short. We would start to know our surroundings.
If we want to know ourselves, we need to be able to observe and understand patterns of our thoughts and emotions. We need to be able to see how our mind weaves one thought into another, how thoughts trigger emotions and how these lead to actions. How we fabricate our comfort zones and fight for stability and permanence there. And we need to see all this without judging or defining which just drops us down into the thought stream again where we are reacting rather than noticing, and reinforcing rather than learning.
While the course looks entertaining and informative, from the vantage of actually knowing ourselves, it appears more like an expedition into clever thoughts *about* the self rather than tools for exploring it directly. In the west, we tend to mistake descriptions for reality, so it's a tricky distinction to catch.
The fundamental flaw in the approach, from the syllabus and the intro, and the reason I opted not to enroll, is that it appears to be researching the 'properties' of the self...i.e. what it is in abstract. With some titillating asides about the adaptive unconscious and the neuroscience tropes about how we aren't aware of many facets of our own 'selves' along with a little trolling from buddhism and zen thrown in to question whether a self actually even exists. Gasp! (A point of view various scientific dogmas would whole heartedly approve because of its seemingly immaterial nature.)
This is the true 'work' of buddhism and zen, which were never intended to posit beliefs and statements like "there is no self." Instead they were designed to show 'how' to gain a little space and observe what is really happening. For our selves.
As Sakyong Mipham put it in Turning the Mind Into An Ally, if we lived in the wilderness, we could observe the patterns around us, the activity of the birds and the animals, the nature of the weather and changes in plant life. If we got intimate with our environment, we may be able to start predicting when winter is coming, for example, and whether it would be long or short. We would start to know our surroundings.
If we want to know ourselves, we need to be able to observe and understand patterns of our thoughts and emotions. We need to be able to see how our mind weaves one thought into another, how thoughts trigger emotions and how these lead to actions. How we fabricate our comfort zones and fight for stability and permanence there. And we need to see all this without judging or defining which just drops us down into the thought stream again where we are reacting rather than noticing, and reinforcing rather than learning.
While the course looks entertaining and informative, from the vantage of actually knowing ourselves, it appears more like an expedition into clever thoughts *about* the self rather than tools for exploring it directly. In the west, we tend to mistake descriptions for reality, so it's a tricky distinction to catch.
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