Here It Is, Your Moment of Zen

This is a brief post about Buddhist views of the world as fundamentally processual and relational—but first I need to talk about religions and non-religions in general.

One of the barriers to talking about how reality works (i.e., technically the domain of metaphysics), even at the most general, empirically-grounded, two-directional level I do here, is that people expect such discussion to be aimed at some kind of grand conversion or deconversion. Skeptical spidey senses tingle. I get it! After all, changing how we think is hard enough about little things. It's understandable to wonder: how much more difficult and disruptive must it be to change how we think about literally every thing, in the broadest possible sense, that constitutes existence? Yet I think that's not quite the right frame.

That's because we all already have process-relational thinking within us all the time. It's not learning something new or different so much as bolstering ways of knowing we already have. As I've discussed before, there's strong evidence the whole right half of our brains' frontal lobes operates primarily in this less reductionist mode. Thinking of things as processes embedded in dynamically regenerative relations with other processes, rather than as separate objects defined by determinate essences, rigid hierarchy and zero-sum competition as has been conventional in Euro-Western culture, does admittedly require slowing down and being more intentional in many instances. However, it's a thought habit that can be cultivated incrementally. It's powerful, and at the same time, quite doable.

More importantly for purposes of this post, it's a thought habit that's totally compatible with every major world religion, with thousands of indigenous worldviews, and with secular thought.* You can ground yourself in empirical process-relational reality and in Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Daoism, Zoroastrianism, or other traditions if you want to. That makes process-relationality an impressive bridging tool.

I do have to say, though, that Engaged Buddhism might be the most upfront about its process-relationality among non-indigenous religions. Just check out these excerpts from the writings of Vietnamese Thiên (Zen) Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhât Hạnh (1926-2022). Known as the "father of mindfulness," he promoted the thoroughly process-relational concept of interbeing to explain the core Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination or interdependent co-arising. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 (no award was given that year). In the compilation Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (2021), Nhât Hạnh especially highlighted the Diamond Sutra, an originally Sanskrit scripture with origins in the first half-millennium of the Common Era and "one of the most beloved scriptures in the Zen tradition and the earliest text to explore deep ecology." The Diamond Sutra urges throwing away four notions of separation and stasis to understand the true nature of reality.

• Self: "[We have a notion] that there is a self, separated from the rest of the world; that we're ourselves, and everyone and everything else, including the Earth, is not 'us.' … Intellectually, we may know that nothing can exist by itself alone, but in reality, we still believe things can, and still behave as if we’re a separate self-entity … and it creates a lot of suffering." But contra René Descartes, and echoing Catholic process philosopher Nicholas Rescher among others, "[y]ou don’t need a rainer for the rain to be possible. And you don’t need a thinker for the thinking to be possible." Everything is interconnected or entangled with no definitively distinct in-here and out-there.
• Human being: "We believe ourselves to be exceptional. We think we have a right over everything else and every other species, as though they have been created for us. With this view we have done a lot of damage to the Earth. We want safety, prosperity, and happiness only for humans, at the expense of everything else. And yet, looking deeply, we see that humans are made only of non-human elements, including plants, animals, and minerals. Not only historically but in this moment, we continue to inter-be with all the non-human elements within us and around us. … Seeing this, we know that to preserve other species is to preserve ourselves." Nature and culture are one, and excessive anthropocentrism fails even on its own human interest terms because our well-being is so entangled with the more-than-human world.
• Living beings: "Many of us are caught in a distinction between sentient or 'animate' beings and non-sentient or 'inanimate' matter. Yet … [t]o separate out living beings from the inanimate world and make a divide between them is incorrect. We are made of non-sentient elements. The speck of dust, the elementary particle, the quark—they are us and we are them." Nhât Hạnh also notes that you can translate "living beings" as "mortals," and that we must also throw away the notion of dividing what is mortal from what is holy or eternal. There is no rigid hierarchy of being; sacredness is pervasive.
• Life span: "We have the impression that we came from the realm of non-being into being, and, after staying in the realm of being for perhaps a hundred years, we’ll pass back into the realm of non-being again." But no. "There is only continued manifestation in different forms." The fundamental nature of reality is change.

It's all there! And that's just skimming the surface, before we even get to Buddhist multi-valued logic and other aspects of the world's fourth-largest religion.

What does this mean for non-Buddhists, like myself and probably most if not all of my lovely readers here? For one thing, it's conclusive evidence of the fact that the other direction of understanding things, the map-metaphysics mistake of thinking the simplifying either/or separations of our mental models actually mirror the terrain of reality, is culture-bound. It's not objective or universal. Thus, it's changeable—not necessarily by converting to Buddhism, but by recognizing the kinds of evidence already granted credibility in Euro-Western cultures, like physics and biology, and choosing to apply the reality-based process-relational thinking which that convergent evidence supports.

In practical terms, that's especially handy knowledge for overcoming what philosopher Mark Fisher called capitalist realism, "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." I look forward to getting into some coherent process-relational alternatives, like social-ecological economics, and how we could get there in future posts.

Another, more humbling upshot, however, is that there are cultures that already have deep expertise at truly reality-based thought, and they're generally not Euro-Western ones. After two and a half millennia of left-brained map-metaphysics largely dominating Eur0-Western worldviews and whole-brained process-relational integration being distrusted as primitive, foreign, feminine, and less rational, we're just taking baby steps in the direction of systems thinking. I very much include myself here in the baby steps category. Even now, you can find academic philosophers saying that process(-relational) philosophy goes back to Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps name-checking the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, as if process-relational traditions from elsewhere don't count. But of course they do!

Accordingly, it's not just diversity itself that matters when people are choosing leaders or putting together teams to address big, interconnected issues. People with deep, socially scaffolded expertise in process-relational thinking, whether from Buddhism, indigenous relational worldviews, African ubuntu humanisms, or whatever other source, should be at the forefront of guiding science, economics, and policy. These kinds of perspectives deserve more than inclusion at already-existing tables. We all benefit when they're actively prioritized, when research and economics and policy-making starts with process-relational design.

If Euro-Western culture wanted to prove it was as rational as it has often claimed, if it wanted to actually uphold Enlightenment ideals, the best thing it (we) could do would be to collectively step back from control to active allyship and engage in some real decolonization. That could, theoretically, start with each of us choosing to cultivate reality-based loving-kindness, right from where we are.

Have at it in the comments!

*Process-relational reality isn't compatible with every subdivision within all those religious and non-religious categories, of course (without getting into what counts as a religion, or as indigenous for that matter). Fascism, for example, is far toward the separating and essentialist map-metaphysics end of the "thinking about things" gradient, and it includes religious right-wing nationalism. Yeah, I'm a little fixated on fascists at the moment. They de-generate possibilities of coexistence by mistaking their simplified, dogmatic maps for the complex, pluralistic territory of interconnected reality, or by trying to terraform the latter into the former. The common denominator is the fascism, though. Not the religiosity.