Followup to: Effortless Technique

No one would mistake my writings for ancient Eastern wisdom. Successfully or not, I aspire to clearly set forth the reasoning, antecedent assumptions, and pragmatic use of my conclusions. Successfully or not, I aspire to cut my proposals into modular pieces, so that a user can reject one mistake without destroying the whole. This standard of writing is inherited from the ancient traditions of technical thinking, not the ancient traditions of Zen.

No one would mistake my writings for ancient Eastern wisdom. My goals are not the goals of Buddha or Lao Tse. Feeling Rational suggested that emotions should follow from beliefs but not beliefs follow from emotions: the ideal is to free yourself of all attachment to preferred conclusions about reality, arrive at your beliefs of fact by weighing the evidence without prejudice, and then feel fully whatever emotions follow from these beliefs-of-fact. In stereotypical Eastern philosophy, you are supposed to free yourself of all attachments, not just attachment to beliefs-of-fact apart from evidence; you are supposed to relinquish all desire. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that - but still, their goals are not mine.

And yet it oftimes seems to me that my thoughts are expressed in conceptual language that owes a great deal to the inspiration of Eastern philosophy. "Free yourself of attachments to thinking that the universe is one way or another: Arrive at your picture of the world without prejudice, and then feel fully whichever feelings arise from this picture. Let your emotions flow from your beliefs, not the other way around." It's not a Buddhist conclusion, but the language owes a nod in the direction of Buddhism. Even if a Buddhist teacher would vehemently disagree, they might still grasp immediately what was being proposed. Grasp it more clearly, perhaps, than an old-school (i.e. pre-Bayesian) Western rationalist.

No one would mistake my writings for ancient Eastern wisdom. And this is well, because I can't stand people who try to pass off their ideas as ancient wisdom. As if that were a recommendation! The fifth-century Chinese philosopher Xiaoguang Li observed that ancient civilizations are revered, and yet ancient civilizations are not wise like venerable huma...

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