Virtual Pro Wrestling English Translation

[Luisa Rodocker]

Mostmodern Westerners see this as a yearning for the void, for oblivion, and as having fundamentally nihilist tendencies. Certainly this was the way Nietzsche famously viewed Buddhism, as life-hating, and this reading of Buddhism has persisted until rather recently, a trend which cultural translators like Epstein and Thurman work hard to overcome. But it takes quite a bit of effort.

What does it mean for something to have no essence? That it is free. That it can become anything else, that it is not limited by some deep core which binds it to being one particular way over another. Put something in a different context, and it will mutate. Rather than see things as expressing eternal essences, essences which are expressed in their outer form, and which hence limit the possibilities of these forms, the forms something can take is seen as determined fully by their contexts. And so, any sense of essence is created by relational context. It can be thought of as an illusion, or at least, as a secondary creation of this context, with the context as that which determines what an aspect of the world can do.

From such a perspective, the fundamental stuff of the world is free to be anything it can be in relation to its contexts, all of which mutually determine each other. The world is what it makes itself to be. And any fixity is mutually determined and relative, but not necessary and absolute. Essences are produced, not producers.

Anti-essentialism is also part of contemporary philosophy. Much of contemporary philosophy is preoccupied with an immanent, this-worldly approach to the stuff of our experience. Rather than see the world as the expression of some transcendent beyond, either in quasi-Platonic essential forms or a transcendent God, much of contemporary thought is an attempt to understand this world immanently. And this would mean that even the essences that seem to direct this world are part of this very world, its products rather than its producers. They are folds within the fabric of the world, but not some external, controlling beyond.

The notion of a single self, a single story and/or image which defines us, is simply the most obdurate, persistant, and fixed of these. Once we see this as the product of our history, our parents, our prior defense mechanisms whose causes are no longer there but whose effects are, we start to feel these as less necessary. We start experimenting, often in the laboratory for new performances of relationality we call therapy, with new ways of existing in the world. Therapy is about providing the safe space in which this questioning, experimentation, and new ways of imagining can happen. The therapist is simply someone who is good at guiding this process of self questioning and expeimentation, and this usually happens by providing a safe space and a relationship which can act as secure anchor to the process.

Buddhism helps us to practice separating from our passions, to see ourselves as being free of them, as having more than the limited potentials they provide. We stop becoming slaves to our pleasures, needing to have them, and this provides us with freedom to desire other things. By giving up our desires, we gain desire itself. Again, paradox, to truly gain something, you have to lose it . . .

For example, by practicing imagining everyone in the world as having been reincarnated multiple times, as having been your mother, and you their mother, at infinite times in past and the coming future, we see whatever nasty things they do to us now as the result of the way karma distorts our vision of things, leading to a bad feedback loop of defensive actions that create pain. And this karma is itself a reflection of the contexts which produced it, which is itself the results of chains of cause and effect, which is to say, karma. By visualizing an exchange of self and other, we see any evil we do to others as evil to ourselves, and any good the same. We ask for the pain of others, and imagine it in ourselves, and we imagine the blessings that come to us as freely given by us to others.

And this can provide a happiness that we know we are living as best as we know how, something which needs to be renewed at each moment. This is, of course, a hard discipline, and one which requires constant practice. Meditation is this, but Buddhists also view everyday life as a form of meditation. Once again, non-dual thinking, the interpenetration of opposites.

And in this sense, what we see here, in many forms and degrees of conscious deployment, is a use of virtual reality to impact the actual world, between belief and disbelief. Or, Buddhism as a type of practice in non-reified thinking and acting in this world, wrestling with the world in virtual reality. Perhaps religion, cosmology, mathematics, and even philosophy are simply various forms of precisely this, ways of playing with symbols to lead us to create virtual universes that can help us navigate and modify not only our relations to the actual world, but the selves we imaginatively create, dissolve, and recreate in this perpetually renewed process.

And this hope, this faith, is the Buddhist faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, in the fact that eventually, it will hear this message. And the Buddha, who in the Tibetan tradition in particular is imagined as outside of time and place, but rather, as having infinite manifestations and emanations, down to and including ever aspect of the world, which has a Buddhanature in it even if it does not notice this, is this hope and faith in the potential of everything for liberation and freedom from self-and-other mutually imposed restraints. The Buddha, not as historical person, which was simply an incarnation, but as principle, is precisely this, the potential for freedom lurking within everything which exists.

This is why the Jewel Tree that Thurman describes articulates the dharmas of Buddhism, which is to say, its teachings, as jewels, and the various mentors and sages as jewels in their own way, and why so much of the discourse talks in terms of light. For in fact, distinct and discrete entities are seen as refractions of this potential, in their own, holographic way.

There is nothing articulated here that is not in sync with the networkological worldview. The logic or the node, or reification, is viewed in networkological philosophy as a necessary aspect of the differentiation of emergence in the world. And yet, this logic is like a lure, for it is the root out of which paranoia, defensiveness, and various other destructive formations grow. Identifying with the logic of emergence, rather than that of the node, is one of the crucial ethical and therapeutic aspects of the networkological worldview. Reification, in any and all forms, is necessary, and yet, a distortion of the whole, one which always must be overcome if grow is to occur beyond the limitations of the reification in question. Much more will be said about these links, however, in future works.

My concern is not personal, as in about you, but in how prevalent is the view that anyone can just pick up anything and understand it. That said, an originary or historic view is not necessarily better than another; it is only the misidentification that is particularly problematic.

I think most readers of ancient texts, Eastern or otherwise, approach them by simply taking the meanings at face value. And I think in philosophers tend to do this more than, say, literary or classics scholars. But maybe this is less prevalent than I think?

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