Dear Gene and list
The interpretation of Shankara I know best is TM, which I understand as a
modern interpretation of the tradition from Shankara. They operate with 7
stages of consciousness, which you can also find in Christian mystics like
Boehme, Ruysbroeck and Eckhart. But you are right they do not come from
observing nature and TM claims to be a new version through its very simplified
and relaxed meditation technique that comes before any ritual or reading of
scriptures; though the do use recitation of the Vedas for their sound quality,
like the mantras also seems to have been taken from the Vedas and are supposed
to be "holy" sounds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_Meditation_technique .
1. Waking consciousness
2. Deep sleep
3. Dreaming
4. Transcendental consciousness (or the pure source of consciousness a sort
of Firstness of Firstness)
5. Cosmic consciousness
6. God consciousness (I think this is where you reach pure zero)
7. Unity consciousness
>From the 5.th you are aware of sleeping and already connecting to nature, but
>it has to stabilize to be aware of deep levels of silence. You are supposed to
>see the Vedas in the silence like the probability waves in the quantum vacuum
>in 7'th, as far as I remember. But these things are beyond my experiences.
>There is an endless amount of research on this. But no scientific agreement on
>defining any sort of higher states of consciousness from the EEG patterns and
>other physiological parameters discovered in meditation. Probably because the
>Vedic definitions seem mostly to phenomenological experiential.
Robert K. C. Forman describe his own experience of the stages along with nature
observation in his Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be: A Journey
of Discovery, Snow and Jazz in the Soul.
Cheers
Søren
Fra: Eugene Halton [mailto:[email protected]]
Sendt: 2. juni 2014 20:00
Til: Søren Brier
Emne: RE: Buddhisto-Christian-Vedantic question
Dear Soren,
Thanks for your reply. Shankara traveled and argued with other
schools, and apparently was masterly in disputations. But I do not see anything
on the results of his close observations of the minute particulars of wild
nature.
Similarly, the oneness with all of nature as a form of
enlightenment extends back beyond the conceits that this was an "advancement"
of civilization, to include aboriginal versions of the same idea. But the
civilized versions, especially of the last 2500 year developments, including
Shankara, invoke close attention to scriptures, ritual practices, reasoning,
and experiences focused on the human perspective, as the ways to enlightenment,
at least as I have been able to find. Not to mention taking the human as a
higher form of incarnation.
Cheers,
Gene
From: Søren Brier [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2014 9:01 AM
To: Eugene Halton
Subject: SV: Buddhisto-Christian question
Dear Gene
I do agree that most religions lack to integrate an evolutionary aspect. This
was pretty much what Charles Hartshorne worked to develop. Still in most
mystical accounts there is a stage where you experience oneness with all living
nature and the next step with all of nature. If you look at the Advaita
Vedanta in the Vedic tradition og which the last great recognized teacher was
Shankara , then they do have an irreversible time concepts of these great four
yugas that the evolution of the universe goes through.
Best
Søren
Fra: Eugene Halton [mailto:[email protected]]
Sendt: 31. maj 2014 19:11
Til: Søren Brier
Emne: Buddhisto-Christian question
Dear Soren,
Belated reply regarding your question about why I claimed Peirce's term
"Buddhisto-Christian religion" does not go far enough to break through human
centered anthropomorphism endemic to these products of the past 2,500 years."
Religion, and human beings, changed in very basic ways with settlement and
civilization, moving from attunement to wild nature to progressively more
human-centered attunements, including human-centered social constructions of
religion. Roughly 2,500 years ago this process entered a new phase, which was
termed "the axial age" by Karl Jaspers, and which, in a book I recently
completed, was mapped out even earlier than Jaspers by another scholar whose
work I describe in my book. A more critical consciousness emerged across a
number of civilizations in religion and philosophy, religion took on a more
moral character, but the de-attunement to wild nature continued, as
anthropocentric mind developed.
As I put it in my post: "Civilized religions turned away from the primordial
attunement to wild nature and turned toward the domesticated world, radically
altering the conception of religion, and gave rise to supernatural conceptions
of divinity as transcendent, as well as anthropocentrism." The attunement to
and determination by the objects of wild nature are, as I have argued
elsewhere, where the human genius for abductive inference was forged. If a
religion capturing the capacity for the Neglected Argument of Peirce were to be
found, it would involve what I called the Neglected Evolutionary Argument,
involving the religious mindset that co-evolved with human beings through
attunement to the minute particulars of wild nature. Neither Buddhism nor
Christianity have this focus, though Buddhism comes somewhat closer. The focus
of aboriginal religions on wild nature comes closer to the focus of modern
science on wild nature than the civilized religions do, particularly those of
the past 2500 years, in my opinion.
Cheers,
Gene
Søren Brier Fri, 23 May 2014 14:35:27 -0700
Dear Gene
A agree with a lot of what you are saying here. It is very clear-cut. But I did
not catch the argument why "Peirce's term "Buddhisto-Christian" seems to try to
get at something like this, but simply does not go far enough to break through
the Buddha-Christ human-centered anthropomorphism endemic to these products of
the past 2,500 years. But his philosophy and appreciation of "the natural
light" does allow for the longer evolutionary perspective. " I think there is
an ongoing evolutionary perspective i Peirce's Buddhisto-Christian Synechistic
Agapism. It is a process philosophy and in that the state of perfection is
irreversible evolution. It is one of the argument in Hartshorne's book: The
logic of perfection" , which I just bought and hope to read when my fever
allows me. I guess you agree with me that the zero-state og vacuum fields are
not supernatural in the way you use the term here?
Best
Søren
Fra: Eugene Halton [mailto:[email protected]]
Sendt: 23. maj 2014 17:38
Til: 'Peirce List'
Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and
religion: text 1
I agree with Gary Fuhrman's point on the significance of "the natural light" as
the root for Peirce's conception of instinctive beliefs, common sensism and
practical beliefs, religion, and the potential connection of science with
religion. It opens up evolutionary questions that also can inform a critique of
religion and science.
If "the natural light" represents some evolved resonance of human
intelligence with the laws of nature, it is, as Peirce argued, because we are
evolved out of determination by and alignment with those laws, and so are able
to have insight, in-sight, and "see the light," even with the great range of
human plasticity. So that for modern science, built on the model of Galileo's
emphasis on il lume natural, "...it is the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of
the more facile and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be
preferred; for the reason that unless man have a natural bent in accordance
with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all." 6.477.
Something more than human must be the object which determines human beliefs, to
cite the quotation from the revised version of "The Fixation of Belief," "To
satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by
which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external
permanency...by something Real..." CP 5:383-4 (revised version of "Fixation of
Belief").
Religion, in my view, evolved into being with a very similar
outlook, taking what we feebly call nature, in its minute particulars, as the
living determinant of human belief and also object of reverence. The gods, or
"God," were insignificant or non-existent, only becoming significant much later
as human social constructions. Civilized religions turned away from the
primordial attunement to wild nature and turned toward the domesticated world,
radically altering the conception of religion, and gave rise to supernatural
conceptions of divinity as transcendent, as well as anthropocentrism. But
modern science also imposed a grid between itself and wild nature, the grid of
the machine, the clockwork grid, and derived a subnatural conception of nature.
There can be no reconciliation between supernatural religions and
subnatural science. The filter of anthropocentrism and its human-centered
conception of supernatural divinity or transcendence is unsustainable, having
lost the touch of the earth. But so too is the filter of subnatural science,
which would disqualify the qualitative dimensions of experience, as Galileo
nominalistically did. Galileo: "I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on
are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are
concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature
were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated" Galileo
Galilei, The Assayer, 1623.
The possible reconciliation of religion and science would have to
involve the broader evolutionary foraging past through which religion and
humans co-evolved, and the original natural illumination that the more one
attunes to the variescent surrounding wild living earth, practically and
reverentially, the more one becomes participant in the drama of creation. I
will call this the NEA, Neglected Evolutionary Argument. Our foraging ancestors
believed in a psycho-physical universe, and religion, as seen in numerous
ethnographies, exhibits itself as a two-sided reverential and practical way of
living in a psycho-physical universe, however fantastically imagined. Peirce's
term "Buddhisto-Christian" seems to try to get at something like this, but
simply does not go far enough to break through the Buddha-Christ human-centered
anthropomorphism endemic to these products of the past 2,500 years. But his
philosophy and appreciation of "the natural light" does allow for the longer
evolutionary perspective.
Gene
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