> 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.
I am not so sure you are that far apart. Here is a quote that struck me: "And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of "spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia." There is only a small part of religious literature that deals with such experiences. Since I don't buy that scriptures are divinely inspired I don't see any reason to think that most religious mythology is actually a type of code for spiritual experience. When scriptures talk about sacrificing an animal to appease a hidden God, I don't feel compelled to see it as more than what it appears to be: a way of thinking that people used to have when magical thinking was in place of scientific thinking. People like to make up stories and often times they are completely wrong factually. The Sun really doesn't get dragged across the sky in a chariot because it isn't the sun moving that makes it appear to rise and set, we are moving around the sun. It is a cute story but it misses the most important part of our relationship with the sun, we revolve around it. The Buddhists may have a lot more scriptures that deal with yogic mental states, but I can't think of that many in Hinduism if you don't take the leap that all of the literature is a fantastic code for something else. Most of them reveal truths about human nature and work better (for me) as great literature than as divinely inspired texts conveying absolute reality. Because I have had experiences of shifting states of consciousness through meditation, I am very sympathetic to people who value these states. I am less so of people who assert that they have all the knowledge about what these states mean, and the ontological claims they can make after having them, because they believe a certain scripture was divinely inspired and explains it all. Most scriptures came from eras when even a basic understanding of mental illness was lacking, let alone distinguishing useful states of consciousness shifts from psychotic breakdowns. In every area of human knowledge we have had to make a new start from the past. In medicine they used to believe that men had one less rib than women because God took one from him to make her. Then they counted. It may be the same for all the yogic literature. It may all be man's first crack at the mystery of human consciousness, but far from what we can come up with today if we apply ourselves. It doesn't help this process to believe that the Vedas are the blueprints of creation or that the details of "God's" life are in the Puranas. MMY's religious devotion to his traditional scriptures marginalizes his contribution to this field. His techniques were developed by a pseudo scientific process of trial and error. I say pseudo because he does not have a genuine interest in testing falsifiable theories, he always loads the deck. (and the people on his development courses don't get their money back when he finds something else, he just charges them again for the new stuff.) Since your approach to Vedic scriptures isn't of the hook line and sinker variety Judy, I would think you would have a more favorable view of his position. --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "coshlnx" <coshlnx@> 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. >
