June 15, 2015

June 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing will be my sixth response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. I woke up from a dream in which I was walking in the streets of my old home town. The houses had been painted in a light shade green. I had to complete some dreadful task and was carrying a heavy bag. Upon seeing the streets I knew so well, I dropped the bag and told myself that I didn’t need to complete this task. It made me feel emotional, so much so that I almost cried, but then I woke up.  

“As Zen Buddhists often emphasize, all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in, and is meaningless from a Zen point of view.” From the point of view of the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), this is a typical NVB statement,, because, NVB is meaningless talk and  only SVB is meaningful.  Spiritual condemnation about talking is always about NVB.However, such condemnation shows as much a lack of skill as well as a lack of understanding. Since people, Zen masters included, don’t know how to have SVB, they condemn NVB, but, as this statement makes clear,, talking as such is abandoned. 

Yet, there is something inconsistent about this abandonment because masters still talk at and instruct their students. Also, it illustrates this talking happens fairly often, and that is why “Zen Buddhist often emphasize that all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in.”  (underlining added).  It seems to me that these Zen masters were able to recognize that their own way of speaking was NVB , but since they didn’t know about SVB, they tried to limit  their speaking altogether, while they, the so-called authorities,, paradoxically continued to talk about Zen. In an attempt to create peace, Zen, like other religions, has perpetuated NVB. The statement “all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in, and is meaningless from a Zen point of view of Zen” denies that public speech or “outside” environmental variables, cause a person’s private speech construed as the “inside.”  

Zen is based on a misunderstanding of the causation of behavior. Supposedly, the person is causing his or her own behavior and that is why he or she is instructed to work on his or her enlightenment by not talking, by looking at the “outside” from the “inside.” 

In SVB a speaker pays attention to what happens within his or her own skin. This is congruent with Zen’s focus on the “inside.” However, in SVB, we talk,, but in Zen talking supposedly has become meaningless. Zen can’t be an unexpressed nonverbal peaceful experience, of “things as they are", SVB teaches that, such peaceful nonverbal experience follows from verbal expression. Complete means congruence between verbal and nonverbal expression of the speaker. It means that in SVB the speaker is his or her own listener. 

Interestingly, in Zen jargon there are more references to looking in than to listening in, because talking is not considered to be an option. Yet, if we would begin to listen to our private speech,, we would figure out something about our public speech: if public speech is NVB,, it results in negative, non-meditative, endlessly chattering self-talk.

Bass who is convinced that both "share at least some  common ground” , acknowledges that for both “Zen and behavior analysis commonly held distinctions do not apply”, but then he goes on to make the silly claim that “Zen goes further because distinctions themselves don’t apply.”   From a behaviorist point of view he is absolutely wrong. Behaviorism goes further than Zen because it considers verbal behavior which operates on the environment on both sides of the skin. Moreover, in SVB this effect is such that the environment inside and outside of a person’s own skin is experienced and talked about as one. Zen’s wholesale rejection of verbal behavior,, indeed, of the verbal community itself, is eerily similar to the way in which sects indoctrinate and recruit new members by alienating them from their familiar environment. Zen may have led to some meditative nonverbal behavior, such as archery, music,, tea-drinking, walking and sitting, but it didn’t and it couldn’t contribute anything to enhancing our way of talking. "A verbal community’s distinctions are not applicable to Samadhis and Enlightenment.” This anti-social aspect of Zen is deeply problematic. 

Zen masters presumably “warn monks to ignore experiential sideshows produced by Zen practice.” Such warnings are verbal behavior and the Zen monk repeats these instructions to him or her self during his or her meditation.  Thus, public speech is affecting private speech. In behaviorism private speech is considered to be the same as thinking. Calling it “a sideshow” doesn’t explain anything. 

Behaviorism explains private speech,, but Zen isn’t  and can’t.  Moreover, behaviorists are not against private speech, which they consider to be part of verbal behavior. Furthermore, a behaviorist would be a bad behaviorist is he or she would have to warn those whom he or she instructs about the “sideshow produced by” their instruction. Plus, there is precision teaching in behaviorism. Rather than having verbal-less activity, they engage in enriched verbal behavior because in SVB speaking and listening behaviors are and remain joined. The processes Bass claims which are due to Zen meditation(generativity, stimulus equivalence, transformational functions and ultimately, stimulus equivalence singularity), nevertheless require involvement in speaking and listening. 

“Zen, we are told, gets us to things in themselves (i.e. independent of distinctions we bring)” (underlining added).The fact that Zen masters say this, doesn’t make it  “an Eastern science, a distortion free means for, as Skinner said, “getting back to the original.”” There is no such thing as Eastern science. Likewise, there is no Eastern biology or physics. “Getting back to the original” as Skinner described it in Walden Two or Verbal Behavior always involves people talking with each other and making sense to each other. In fact Skinner was already referring to SVB. 

Let’s explore the Zen Koans from a SVB/NVB perspective. According to Bass,, the Zen master says “No” to the question “does even a dog have a Buddha nature?” because it “quells the unconscious flow of private, verbally influenced responses during mediation.” Rather than “stopping verbal activity” in the belief this will bring a person closer to enlightenment, in SVB speakers are given the full support to express themselves verbally  Moreover, the SVB knowledgeable, behaviorist audience would unequivocally answer to the question that a dog is incapable of verbal behavior.

As previously stated, Zen masters mostly give examples that deal with seeing. Thus, Master Baizhang answers that enlightened persons are “not blind to cause and effect.”  If Bass is “not blind to cause and effect” how come he insists on the impossibility of “verbally unmediated perception?” Skinner describes this blindness as “a fixation on imagined or fabricated causal chains,,” but Bass doesn’t realize perception is part of verbal behavior. 

The shoes the master placed on his head were another example of seeing. Presumably this demonstration shows we are using words as a tool in a wrong way “for achieving our ends.” There is a word for what Bass describes: reification, changing a verb into a noun.

Another great example of Zen’s overemphasis on the visual tricks was a master who pointed his index finger upward whenever asked a question. He even cut off of the finger of an innocent child, who might have been too talkative, but who presumably instantly reached enlightenment. It makes me sick to my stomach to read such a fanatical explanation about such an event that “the child had to lose the symbolic representation for Zen before Zen itself could emerge.”