Freedom from Suffering

Freedom from Suffering

I want to talk about philosophy as a practice and to see if I can get across what I understand that to mean, and how yoga and meditation are a part of that practice, at least for me. The best way I think I can get the idea of philosophy as a practice across is to describe my own experience, where philosophy went from being an intellectual pursuit to something that shapes all aspects of how I live. 

I studied Philosophy and English Literature, and I also practised yoga, while I was an undergraduate. Even before I started at university, I’d wondered about fairness, and justice. By the time I’d finished my degree, I wanted to put what I was learning into practice. I thought it was pointless to learn about the theory of ethics, and then to go off and work in a merchant bank. So I became a volunteer for VSO, first of all in Sudan and later in Indonesia and in a refugee camp.

But before I get into all that, let’s have a look at the etymology of the word, philosophy. The word is an amalgam of two Greek words, one for love (the affectionate kind that exists between friends) and wisdom. Looking at that meaning, we can see that the practice of philosophy involves becoming friends with, or getting to know, wisdom, and the exploration of how to live that emerges from a regular practice of meditation, is involved in roughly the same search. Giri means live the right way - that’s the tattoo I have on my upper thigh and philosophy demands, is there a right way to live?

Because philosophy demands that we face the big questions - what is the meaning of life? (42!) - is there life after death? Who, or what is god? - it also demands that we face the intimacy of these questions: what manner of creature is a human? Who am I? How am I supposed to live? 

If you take away an external arbiter or judge of your character, like God, and the fear of going to hell, you will remove that which, for generations, in a monotheistic, patriarchal mode, has dictated how people live. What if you didn’t have to do something because of the fear of God, but because it’s the right thing to do? This sort of question, or approach, has much deeper roots in understanding what sort of creatures we are. 

Modern Anglo American or Analytical Philosophy, which is the basis of ethics, law, the UN charter, builds an ethic from logical, rational building blocks. 

This same critical, analytical curiosity has also motivated us to ask questions like,  what or who am I? But that question is not just about the kind of material I’m made of. It has a phenomenological aspect to it. It is a question we are guided to explore through meditation. 

This illustrates the two philosophical camps. On the one hand you have the logical, rational way to understand the world. AI is an extension of that logical approach, using building blocks, numbers, all the technology about working things out quantitatively that evolved out of critical thinking in a very rational step by step, if you like, male way. 

The other kind of philosophy that is coming to the fore now, and the approach which now informs my own perspective on the practice of philosophy, is a phenomenological, non-linear way of seeing. My first degree was in the analytical tradition, political and moral philosophy, then I did an MA about John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, justice as fairness, and that approach gives us all the logical, rational arguments for behaving well to one another. 

Then I began my PhD looking at logical, rational reasons for respecting nature. I’d worked in social justice, and wanted to extend this, given the climate crisis. I could see how social justice and meditation both focus on the intention to create more peace, to put into place rights, like the right to good relationships, to connected communities, to peaceful places to live. My work in Indonesia, Sudan, London and Oxford, showed me that people were being forced to move not just because of land grabs, corruption, war and greed, but also because the land itself was being degraded, rivers drying up, or being choked with pollution, the sky thick with smoke from fires. 

I decided I would do a PhD because of the Corrib Gas Controversy. This was a plan to put a double refinery for a huge gas project off the west of Ireland, in a tiny community near where I lived. There was an uproar locally, including community groups organising protests, public meetings, and much talk of rights. However, almost immediately, families and communities fragmented and there was deep divisiveness, acrimony, and even threats of and actual violence. The project was more or less bulldozed in, using a heavy police presence, with imprisonments, hunger strikes, violence, and other features of an involuntary imposition in evidence. 

It was a deeply traumatising experience. In the early days, I joined the protests. I had one young child and I was pregnant. The protests became violent so I stopped protesting, and I started writing instead. I wrote about the breakdown of the community and how we needed to unite. Yoga means union, of course. I was interested in bringing parts of ourselves together and also bringing community together, as a response to the fragmentation. 

I started writing about all the reasons we had for respecting nature, in a very logical, Kantian manner, following up on Paul Taylor’s ‘respect for nature’. I wanted to show that Taylor’s theory failed to take into account microbial life which blurs the boundary between individuals and systems, and also the line between living (organic) and non-living (mineral). I wanted to write about relational respect. But I was having trouble with my supervisor. We weren’t getting on well. I found him to be increasingly unpredictable, and angry. And perhaps I was angry too. Things went from bad to worse. I asked if I could change supervisors. Very soon after, I learned that my supervisor was very ill. And then my supervisor died. 

I had no money. I told the mandarins who paid out my measly grant that I needed to grieve. They said that was all very well but that funding would be withdrawn, and I would need to reapply, if I decided to pause my studies. 

I googled. 

And I came across Professor Graham Parkes, a Nietzschean scholar, and an expert on South-East Asian philosophy. He asked me to read The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo, Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation. 

I was grieving. The text was revelatory, but difficult. The metaphors contradicted each other. I couldn’t solve the paradoxes logically. I had to simply sit with the imagery, to meditate. To practice philosophy, being with the ignorance. 

I realised that what was happening in my PhD studies was being reflected to some extent in the actual experiences of my life. My own marriage had almost entirely broken down, but I knew I wanted to make compassion the basis of how I acted in relation to a man I had loved, and still love. We went through a long series of meetings, with a mediator, and we managed, after a brief hiatus, to maintain civil contact, and more, to get along. 

My practice became a practice within the context of fragmentation, of climate, community, soil and water systems, the fragmentation of communities, human, more than human, and the fragmentation of us as individuals, with addiction, depression, anger, and so on. My meditations circled around what we can do with this. 

Deep breath. 

What I think happened with my PhD wasn’t necessarily because of anything I chose. I am in the moving changing realm of my experience, and my thesis itself became a kind of manifestation of integration, an attempt to bridge these two ways to see and understand philosophy, from an analytical, but also from a phenomenological perspective, from within the experience, but with enough space to be able to bring awareness to that experience. What is it like to go deep into meditation with the thoughts of a 13th century Kamakura priest, in the context of the ecological emergency?

I read a lot around environmental philosophy. I could have read a lot more! Tim Morton used the phrase ‘the ecological emergency’ which I found much more fruitful than ‘climate change’. I attempted to integrate the language I was using, to change metaphors, to move from thinking of the internal and the external as separate worlds, to thinking that what is going on inside is a reflection of what is going on outside. And vice versa. The ecological emergency is a manifestation of our own, individual fragmentations. It’s important that we all resolve to relieve our own pain and suffering, not by overcoming it, but by accepting it. Only by accepting it can we integrate it, so that it becomes a part of what we see in the bigger picture, so we can move from respect for nature, to agency, and not an internal agency, but an attunement to compassion.