A Very Good Place To Start

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

It's 10pm on a particularly dingy Friday in November.  The weather in London is moist with a side of chilly, and I'm sitting in a buzzing cafe-club near Waterloo, staring at my keyboard and wondering what the hell to write.

I've spent the evening dining on monkfish and drinking Old-Fashioneds at a ludicrously pricey Mayfair Club with some better-off family members.  Not my usual venue, and I massively over-dressed, but no-one called me on my prized Ministry Of Magic cuff-links so I'm claiming this as a win.

Back in the real world: Sunak is out (thank God), but Starmer is proving a bit too keen on "little gifts", and above all the crisis of Trump's second term looms over the world like a small-handed wannabe dictator over a debating opponent.  Giving a fuck has never been harder.

Enter the Buddha.

Buddha: Nani The Fuck?

As of my last blog post, on my last blog, before I went quiet for a couple decades, I was atheist.  Very atheist.  The kind of atheist that complains about Dawkins doing it wrong.  So... whence anything that could be described as 'religion'?

Short answer: I'm still that guy, that skeptical atheist that sticks "adjust me" signs on chiropractors' backs and struggles not to return sugar pills to homeopaths in enema form.  That wishes most religious folks would actually study the horrifying, incoherent histories of their own faiths and draw the obvious conclusion, and that would quite happily beat the average spiritualist over the head with a Bertrand Russell tome until the fluffiness dribbles out.

That's still me.  (Except - I hope - slightly less strident at cocktail parties.)  ((Unless Old-Fashioneds are involved.))

What has changed is my thinking within that envelope of skeptical sanity.  Previously I considered myself a Humanist, which is basically the "dunno" category of applied atheism.  Now I consider myself a Buddhist.  Specifically a Techno-Buddhist, just to be even more of a fucking hipster.

This is a side-effect of the last decade, in which I've seen my mental health slowly collapse from "functional eleven weeks out of twelve" to "what is this 'standing up' of which you speak, white man".  The last couple of days have been very much an upward spike.  (If this proves to be my last post for the next year, the term to google is reversion to the mean.)

Overall, what I've found is that skepticism is great for understanding the world outside the human brain, but not always the best paradigm for operating your own mind and interacting with those of others.  For Exhibit A, see: Trump's re-election.

...I have a cousin in the US who actually voted for the fucker.  Sanity is dead and we killed it.

Uhh, That Didn't Answer The Question, Man

Really?  Well, I'm sure another cocktail will help, right?

...

Yeah, that helped.  OK, so I've decided that - to use excruciatingly technical philosophical terminology - there are three types of stuff out there.  There's stuff that sits there and lets you analyse it, stuff that resists analysis, and stuff that actively conforms itself to whatever hypothesis you wanted to test.

The first category is where the scientific method kicks in.  It's good for most of what ails you.  It's great for putting woo-woo merchants out of a job.  It's... kinda iffy for day-to-day interpersonal activities, because people don't like being fully understood by others - quite reasonably seeing it as a threat to their autonomy - and will respond by upping their game and acting in an even more confusing fashion than they were previously.

(This, incidentally, explains at least 30% of romantic relationships.)

For that category, the "stuff that resists analysis", you need to rely on a witch's brew of nuance, cultural sources and confidence trickstery.  More on that in future posts, although it's not really the point of this blog.

The final category, and in some way the weirdest, is the "stuff that conforms" - that actively parrots your own assumptions back at you.  For a classic example, see the well-known correspondence between an office hierarchy and a tree full of monkeys.  In both cases, if you look down from the top, you see a lot of happy smiling faces, all ready to tell you how great and correct you are.  If you look up from the bottom, it's arseholes all the way.

Unfortunately, the other classic example is the human mind.  Like the old joke about consultants, our hindbrain has a bad habit of stealing our watch to tell us the time: treating any dissonance with whatever metaphor we've cooked up as a guilty secret to hide from us rather than a skeptical victory over self-ignorance.  Which is why stage hypnotism acts at concert halls were genuinely more effective during the Victorian peak of Mesmerism's popularity, and why Freud.

Not why Freud anything.  Just why Freud.  I think that's enough.

So... Buddhism?

Right, Buddhism.  So it turns out that a lot of people have spent slightly over two thousand years thinking about how the human mind works, and rolled it into a certain pseudo-religion whose name begins with a B.

...And, of course, most of that thinking was either utter bollocks or devoted to questions we modern skeptics couldn't care less about.  Quelle surprise.

But a few insights - mostly falling under the heading of Theravada or Zen Buddhism - are (a) not obviously wrong and (b) relevant to situations kiiiiiinda like mine.  I'll go into this more later, but Zen is basically OG Buddhism with the later Hindu influences stripped out and the less stupid half of Taoism added back in.

The key principles remaining from this complex alchemical synthesis are:

1. Excessive desire is a source of discomfort;
2. Meditation is good for getting the different parts of your brain-meats to work together; and
   
3. Buddha was a cool dude.

(Also koanism, but even a lot of the people who came up with koans thought koans are stupid.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  Depends: which side of your face do you want me to smack?)

And then there's the Techno part.

The Techno Part?

Yeah, where it says "Techno-Buddha" in the blog name?  That part.

Right.  What About That?

So this one gets a bit weird.  I was binge-reading fanfiction (as you do) when I found my way into the Warhammer 40,000 fandom (as you do).  I haven't played with the tabletop miniatures since I was a wee 'un, but it's a pretty decent dystopian kitchen-sink scifi setting.

 Relevantly, one human faction is the "Adeptus Mechanicus", commonly known as the Toaster Worshippers.  The degenerate remnants of a once-great techno-utopia on a par with Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, they now serve the Omnissiah, worship the Motive Force, and keep anything as dangerous as actual scientific knowledge safe behind a wall of dogma and chanting.  Anyone who disagrees with this state of affairs gets re-purposed as an automaton.

Then someone in the forum I was browsing referred to them as "techno-buddhists", and about five different concepts clicked together in my skull.

I googled the term and, yes, techno-buddhism is a thing.  Or at least it has a website.  A single, flat-page website with no contact details.  We may be seeing citogenesis in action here, people.

Quoth the site:

Technobuddhism is a contemporary interpretation of traditional Buddhism that focuses on the psychological and philosophical elements of the practice, rather than the metaphysical or supernatural aspects.

Technobuddhism omits the belief in reincarnation and other supernatural concepts from the practice of Buddhism and instead, focuses on leveraging modern scientific understanding and technology to understand and improve the human mind.

 Yup.  That.  That's what I need more of.

So What Now?

So now, I keep writing.  Partly for you, my currently-hypothetical audience.  Partly for the hope that Techno-Buddhism will grow to be more than just a single page on a static site.

Mostly for me, though.  Because they just called last orders and it's dark outside.