--- In [email protected], "coshlnx" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://www.tinyurl.com/2q9oem > > But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that > there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them > are led to suspect this by religionby the claims of people like > the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And > such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of > attentionoften called "meditation" or "contemplation"as a means > of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see > if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.
The talk from which this is taken is titled "The Problem with Atheism," and his discussion of mysticism takes most of the second half of it; I get the distinct sense it's what he most wanted to convey. He leads into the discussion very cleverly, in such a down-to-earth, practical way that even the most hard-core atheist rationalist materialist, I suspect, would have a hard time objecting to it. It's worth a read just to see how he does it (and interestingly, his approach has much in common with the TM intro lecture). Then toward the end, he writes: As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness. We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth- infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales. I don't think there is a more important intellectual struggle to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once, and continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism. He comes *so close* in this essay to bridging the gap between personal mystical experience via meditation/contemplation and religion, but in the end he refuses to make the leap, dismissing religion as "Iron Age fairy tales." If only one of his "hundred sides" of this intellectual struggle could involve a close study of religious dogma *alongside* the reports of mystical experience, to the point where it becomes clear that the dogma in many if not most cases is a metaphorical rendering of that very mystical experience rather than "Iron Age fairy tales" dreamed up in a vacuum. Bottom line, once the real nature of the "fairy tales" is understood, there will no longer be any need to dismiss and disparage them.
