As David Loy pointed out in his Buddhist History of the West (SUNY 2002), the character of a culture is largely a matter of a strategy for systematizing experience, a struggle to impose an orderly understanding of and control over phenomena. Our modern industrial culture is yet another such strategy, remarkable for its mechanistic materialism, its vast breadth and lack of depth. Life in general consists of an endless series of attempts to repair the breakdowns of the ever-shifting strategies.
Is it possible to build a model from which reality will never diverge? If instead every possible model has some limited scope beyond which the risk of divergence becomes non-negligible, can a model incorporate an accurate definition of its own scope of validity? Can any sort of higher level meta-model of the models themselves somehow extend or transcend the limits of those models, or is any meta-model really just another model with the same inevitable sorts of limits as any other model? Such fascinating and challenging metaphysical questions have been explored deeply over the millennia. In the Buddhist tradition, these discussions revolve around the topic of emptiness and the two truths (relative and ultimate). In the European tradition these are core philosophical questions in the realms of ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of science.But whatever one's metaphysical approach might lead one to expect, our experience continues to be one of constant surprise and breakdown. Whether or not a universally valid model is possible, no such model is in our grasp.
In Buddhism, one's understanding of the inescapability of constant breakdowns and one's approach to managing the repair process are at the core of its transformative project, liberation from suffering for oneself and those with whom one shares those struggles. Our present struggle itself is, at every moment, a perfect example displaying the true nature of reality, a doorway to understanding and effective engagement.
While every moment brings some such struggle with that kind of precious potential, our present crisis of industrial culture, where the breadth of our social-technical systems is amazingly exceeded by the scope of their breakdowns, from the nuclear meltdowns of Fukushima to the massacres of the Syrian civil war, from the collapse of financial institutions in New York to the collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica, the magnitude of our present crisis perhaps brings an opportunity of parallel magnitude, to see in this crisis the stamp of reality, the nature of samsara, the clear understanding of which and effective engagement with which are its transcendence.
