[Buddha-l] How Khushwant Singh does

[Dan Lusthaus]

> Some psychological counselors say that people can recall their
> birth traumas under the right techniques,  but I suspect these
> views are off the mark. My guess is that our cognition cannot
> recall birth because we had no thought structures by which to
> recall it.

There are baseline cognitional backgrounds -- comfort, discomfort, 
agitation, relaxation, etc. -- that subtends "thought structures" which are 
active in the womb and during birth and early life, which remain in the 
background as we get older and thoughts crowd the foreground. Sthiramati, in 
his commentary on Vasubandhu's Trimsika describes the alayavijnana as having 
these sorts of background cognitions, whose objects and features (alambana 
and akara) are indistinct, subliminal (aparicchinna).

Remembering can add verbal/conceptual content interpretively, like when one 
remembers a past event but gains some insight into it (why one felt the way 
one did, what really motivated a certain action or mood, some feature 
overlooked at the time the event took place, etc.).

>Didn't Freud say that the
> feeling of 'spiritual' bliss was the oceanic sensation
> experienced in the womb?
>
> I suspect that Freud missed it, there.  Instead, such a feeling,
> as some Buddhist texts claim, could be the result of being freed
> from the thought chatter of everyday life, freed from prapanca,
> freed from ruminating, freed from self vs. other-- via a
> cultivated meditation practice. Nursing infants surely don't seem
> to be suffering from prapanca or monkey mind. If they do suffer,
> it's from colic (if they are not being starved to death by lack
> of social --er--entitlements.)

That's the crux. For Freud, no such "freedom" is possible in actuality since 
life inevitably involves tension. The absence of tension is death, so all 
desires for such release from tension are necessarily death wishes, since 
the absence of tension is death. Buddhists and others claim otherwise. Self 
vs other is a perpetual tension (emotional, psychological, ethical, 
political, etc.), not something that a living person is ever freed from --  
Confucians would agree. With increasing experience and wisdom one can 
navigate that more and more easily, and with less and less tension. It took 
Confucius 70 years to achieve the ability to do that without inner conflict. 
Outer conflicts would be another story. Some ruminating is requisite for 
problem solving and basic understanding. Thoughtlessness is a form of 
avidya, not enlightenment (Vasubandhu and Nietzsche are in full agreement on 
that point).

Question is: Are the Buddhist promises (and/or the promises of others) fairy 
tales (sublimated death wishes), or legitimate possibilities? Buddhists 
themselves have had their doubts through the centuries.

Unless one has personally achieved those "freedoms", the jury would still be 
out.

Dan