Margot Wilson

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard (et al.). These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: (1) cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, (2) being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and (3) efficacy of...

I argue a case for interpreting Yeats through the metaphysics of The Order of the Golden Dawn and the human/cosmic life cycle of their Rider-Waite tarot deck. In doing so, I will explain how the metaphysics of Indian and Egyptian sacred geometry inform his poetry, and his plays, in particular, ‘A Vision’ (1925) and ‘The Herne’s Egg’ (1938).

In this essay I will discuss four interpretations of the Epicurean Swerve and my conclusion that at most the swerve achieves only ‘elbow room’ in the theory of freedom, but it is Epicurean Repulsion, that achieves freedom at all times as well as rejects determinism.  The swerve and repulsion are innately intertwined, as it is repulsion that produces the swerve, but there are problems, which arise when we examine closer the role of the swerve. For this argument I will refer to Tim O’Keefe and his book titled, Epicurus on Freedom, where he discusses and compares four distinct interpretations of Epicurean Freedom namely the Traditional Interpretation, The Radical Emergence Interpretation, the Internal Cause Interpretation and his own Bivalence Interpretation.  These four interpretations look at how the Epicurean Swerve counts as evidence of freedom.

  I will also be relating these interpretations to Marx’s interpretation of Epicurean freedom, which develops an interpretation of ‘repulsion’ that makes it the essence of atomic ‘self-sufficiency’. Both of these he discusses in his 1835 dissertation titled, ‘Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature in General’.  In terms of ancient materials, I will in the main be citing the works of Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch and Cicero. Finally, I will be introducing the ancient notion of the vortex as a possible explanation of how collective freedom is possible with the suggestion that this is what Marx was aiming for in his radical social theory.

It is my view that in writing his dissertation in defense of Epicurus, Marx was provided with the basis of material autonomy he needed to a) refute Hegelian idealism and b) to model his own radical social theory as a framework that promised collective freedom.

I argue a case for interpreting Yeats through the metaphysics of The Order of the Golden Dawn and the human/cosmic life cycle of their Rider-Waite tarot deck. In doing so, I will explain how the metaphysics of Indian and Egyptian sacred geometry inform his poetry, and his plays, in particular, ‘A Vision’ (1925) and ‘The Herne’s Egg’ (1938).

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency.  Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard (et al.). These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: (1) cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, (2) being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of  efficacy, and (3) efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time.

My art practice led independent research is an inter-disciplinary discourse borrowing from the ideas and ‘theory-fiction’ style of Lyotard as art practice, philosophy, astrophysics, dream yoga, and meditation. This research borrows and aligns the concept of Lyotard’s libidinal band with breath directed bipedal uprightness and aspects of cosmic breath-directed spiral verticality in disk galaxies (Ghosh et al 2022a) and proposes the examples of breath-directed bi-handed drawing and bi-directional writing as observable stabilised spiral spatio-temporal happenings, referred to here as acts of soma-neuro-emergence. Drawing upon recently published research that makes such contemporary speculations possible and correlations in ancient Eastern metaphysics, in particular early Buddhist teachings (EBT) on impermanence and the inter-spiritual concept of kundalini spiral energy1 and Zen this research approaches existence and being as continuously cosmologically emergent. The research further concentrates on the ‘bending’ nature of the spiral as enabling the essential ‘folding’ move in the Möbius strip /libidinal band deployed by Lyotard. In contrast to bipedal uprightness the research also links my Breath Induced Vivid Dreaming [BIVD] (Wilson: 2005, 2016) method that posits dreaming, hypnagogia, hypnopompic visualization as horizontal circadian paradigms.

The aesthetics of debate, as Barthes states and Sontag executes, is ‘to outplay the signified […] not explode it, but to outplay it.’  As Sontag writes on Barthes ‘he wants a politics and an anti-politics, a critical relation to the world and one beyond moral considerations. The aesthete’s radicalism is the radicalism of a privileged, even a repleted, consciousness – but a genuine radicalism nonetheless.’  Radical is what Channel 4 was when it burst into life in 1983, situating some of the most radical thinkers of our time on the same stage, giving full voice to the performative dialogue between John Berger and Susan Sontag. There is no way of knowing whether in the green room they schemed Benjamin as absent mediator, or as I prefer to think, upon Berger’s opening subtle reference to The Storyteller essay, Sontag set in motion ‘the game’.

Stigmata by Hélène Cixous is a waking dream: a meditative cauldron stirred anticlockwise against itself: a somnabulatory retracing of a scar that rediscovers itself: the footprints that remain point in all directions. In Bathsheba or the Interior Bible Cixous weaves a poetical tapestry that pierces the private worlds of both Rembrandt and his muse. In placing Cixous's moving meditation on Bathsheba next to Salvador Dali's Galatea of the Spheres, and borrowing the lens of frontier thought in neuroscience, this essay explores reclaiming of Origin and liberty in dreaming. Margot Wilson on 'everything that endlessly paints us'.