One must let go of one’s certitudes and beliefs

Looking For Right Answers Times of India ANIL MATHUR, May 21, 2010

As a child, questions concerning life and death would perplex me. Sixty years later, i find myself grappling with the very same questions. Is there such a thing as an ideal life? If there is, how does one know how to attain it? I tend to think that my destiny is in my hands. Experience, however, says something different. The path my life has taken is evidence enough that my destiny is not in my control; it does seem as though some kind of superpower is orchestrating the way each and every moment of my life unfolds. 

I have tried my best to try and quantify how much of what happens in my life is within my power to change and how much is not. However, the answer is still not within my grasp. I have failed to find the answer. Despite knowing that as a rational thinking person i would not come to the conclusion that one has to accept total surrender as that is the only approach that will help one to stay sane i find that surrendering to the inevitable seems to be inevitable. […]

Why have religions made life and death so difficult to comprehend? Going on pilgrimages and travelling to different places of worship and religious importance has given me much joy and pleasure. I have also enjoyed meeting and knowing several enlightened souls and interesting persons from whom one can learn a lot. Despite all of this, i still have not been able to find an answer to the question: In its final form, can salvation be achieved through pilgrimages and darshans? 

All roads lead to the same destination that's one philosophy i have tried to believe in. However, i do not know if the difference in quiet prayers at the Pondicherry Aurobindo Ashram and the vibrant chanting of Hare Krishna at the Vrindavan ISKCON temple are cosmetic or are marked by definite characteristics. I have enjoyed both, but cannot say which will help me reach the desired goal of salvation or peace. How does total surrender to God differ from escapism? Is being totally rational, or trying to be rational, an exercise in irrationality? […] 
If you get the message that i am totally confused you are right but i have still managed to live a life of some relative sanity because of spiritual or higher pursuits. Meanwhile, i will welcome any answers to some of my questions from the readers of the column that has helped me stay afloat. anilm30@rediffmail.com  

Belief and Fact May 20, 2010 by Jeff Carreira

Michael Shermer in his book “Why We Believe” describes the mind as a “belief engine” that is constantly creating patterns of belief. From fractured information and sense impressions the mind weaves together plausible pictures of reality that we believe in. What do we mean when we say we “believe” then? Things that we believe in are things that we “think that we know.” 10 Comments » 

From the comments, on the inevitability of utilitarian judgments from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

Benthamite reasoning is hard to escape. Everyone relies on it when making decisions in everyday life, whether it be voting on a job candidate or buying one car rather than another or putting a bus line on one road rather than another.  Even a lot of the arguments for following rules rely on an ultimate Benthamite judgment about good vs. bad consequences…Benthamite reasoning is inescapable, though it is a big mistake to make cardinal utility the only relevant value.  We're all pluralists now, but cardinal utility should be a major part of the relevant pluralist bundle.

How to know the Divine Will? « Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo ... By Sandeep  May 20, 2010

The Divine Will is an elusive thing for sure.  The religious preacher confuses his strong beliefs with the Divine Will, the despot attributes his success to it’s action, and spiritual aspirant is supposed to surrender to it.  Does any such thing as the Divine Will really exist?  How can one recognize it ?  The Divine Will does exist because there is a teleological purpose in evolution.  Every soul is being led to the Truth through a certain line of evolution, seemingly haphazardly, and it is this Divine Will which subtly goads him to progress forward. Ordinarily, the Divine Will remains concealed due to our ignorance of our true nature but it begins to unveil itself as we gradually erase the ego through Yoga and allied occult-spiritual practices. […] Conditions for knowing the Divine Will

Purification of consciousness is necessary to uncover the Divine Will. There are certain set of practices one must do regularly as an integral part of spiritual life.  First, one must let go of one’s certitudes and beliefs, and clear the clutter of opinions one has acculumated regarding the world.

Like cats, professors are naturally suspicious

 Advice by Rob Jenkins The Chronicle. April 12, 2010

Like cats, professors tend to be highly intelligent, deeply self-actualized, and fiercely independent. They need to be stroked occasionally, but only on their own terms and in their own good time. Mostly, they just want to be left alone to do their own thing. They might not come when called—perhaps because they're suspicious of the caller's motives—but they may very well show up on their own when least expected.

In fact, the real question isn't whether or not faculty members are like cats. The real question is, "What's wrong with that?" Perhaps, instead of constantly trying to rein in faculty members, we should be cultivating their catlike qualities.

Take independence. It's true that many faculty members, perhaps most of them, seem to view themselves as independent contractors rather than employees in the traditional sense. They sometimes find themselves at odds with administrators who definitely regard them as employees, in every sense.

For college professors, however, independent-mindedness is hardly a negative trait. Indeed, it's largely responsible for the rich diversity of personal viewpoints, teaching approaches, and classroom methodologies that makes getting a college education such a rewarding experience.

Another quality I admire in cats is that they have a certain moral integrity. The truth about dogs is they can be bought. Cats generally can't. You won't see anybody bribing a cat with a kitty treat. Oh, it might take the treat, but it will still do exactly as it pleases.

Similarly, good faculty members are not easily manipulated—much to the frustration of some administrators, who think they can persuade professors to embrace the latest make-work mandate simply by stroking them with vague promises, empty rhetoric, and meaningless awards. Like cats, professors are naturally suspicious, not because they're cynical (although some are) but because they're highly sensitive to ulterior motives. […]

Just feed them regularly, don't abuse them, don't patronize them, and occasionally they might climb up on your lap and purr—metaphorically speaking, of course. Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College. He blogs at http://www.academicleaders.or

Religion needs yoga or practice—or spiritual technology—to help reveal and deepen it in one’s life

The Beams of the Absolute and The Struts of Discipline: Religion in the Post-postmodern Age by Chris Dierkes Friday, 15 January 2010

As noble a goal as immanental transcendentalism was (and still is), it expressed itself via two major flaws in the postmodern age. Those twin errors have reaped untold amounts of suffering as well as caused nearly irreparable confusion regarding how we approach the ultimate.

The first flaw was that postmodernity had no real mechanism for differentiating between and judging amongst the various forms of immanental expression.  In extreme cases, just about anything that could be expressed—anything within this world and particularly within one’s experience—was considered to be salvific.

A prosaic example is the notion, common since the 1960s, that the intellect is anti-spiritual and what you need to do to become more spiritual is “get into your feelings”—as if any old feeling were automatically more enlightened somehow than any thought.  Martin Luther King Jr. you may recall had a dream, not a feeling.  Dreams are visions that involve the mind.

This same virus has infected not only individual spiritual seeking but also social-political movements.  By the (il)logical rigor of the position that feelings expressed are the mode of liberation, the Tea Party protests in the United States this year were a great enlightening event—according to postmodern thought.  It was a collective form of immanence and hence therefore, according to this school of thought, salvific.

In terms of collective expression of will—if that alone is what is salvation—then there is no difference between the Civil Rights movement and the Tea Party protests.  None.  Not spiritually, emotionally, or psychologically.

At which point of course postmodernists—generally not fans of hard right-wing American views—would likely balk and say something to the effect of “well I didn’t mean that kind of expression.”

And the phrase “that kind of expression” shows the limits of postmodernity and traps itself in its own self-inconsistency.  In other words, that kind of expression understood to be somehow wrong or immoral shows that not all kinds of immanence are equally transcendent or salvific in nature.

Yet, generically speaking, postmodernity lacked any rationale as to why it held the opinions it held regarding which forms of immanence were valid and which forms were invalid.  It all became essentially a matter of emotional preference, leaving individuals increasingly alienated from one another (because of their feelings!!!).  As I will argue later in more detail, alienation (i.e. the avoidance of relationship) is the primary form of sin—or the breaking of the link to the transcendent.  If that is true, then we are lost in a collective practice of sin.

The second flaw of postmodernism with regard to religion was not having a sufficiently grounded yoga or practice—or spiritual technology—to help illuminate the transcendent in the immanent in a profound and really transformative way.

An example.  I mentioned earlier that Jacques Derrida towards the end of his life spent a significant amount of time studying and writing on negative theology (traditionally called apophatic theology). Though the term apophatic usually refers to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystical theology, there are Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoism versions of apophaticism (though they go by a different name)… Derrida—here representing the postmodern urge and mood—never undertook those practices (so far as I can tell by his writings on the subject)… 

As such, postmodernity became a “talking school” of spirituality and religion.  It was still all too identified with the eye of mind.  All of the postmodern writers above, though they write beautifully and at times transcendentally, have no real way of teaching how they got to the point of view that they did that offered them such a majestic vista on the life process. Without a mature intellectual understanding of the spiritual nor a practice to help reveal and deepen it in one’s life, postmodernism floundered. 6:20 PM   9:26 AM

Denying differences is a recipe for disaster

ESSAY APRIL 23, 2010 A Dangerous Belief By STEPHEN PROTHERO

From this perspective, popularized by "perennial philosophers" such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, all religions are beautiful and all are true. The prevailing metaphor portrays the world's religions as different paths up the same mountain. "It is possible to climb life's mountain from any side," writes Mr. Smith, "but when the top is reached the trails converge."

This is a seductive sentiment in a world in which religious violence can seem as present and potent as God. But it is dangerous, disrespectful and untrue. […] Of course, one purpose of the "all religions are one" meme is to stop this fighting and this killing. But this meme, however well intentioned, is neither accurate nor ethically responsible. God may be one according to the Abrahamic religions, but when it comes to the mathematics of divinity, one is not the only number. Many Buddhists believe in no god, and many Hindus believe in 330,000. Moreover, the characters of these divinities differ wildly. […]

You would think that champions of multiculturalism would warm to this fact, glorying in the diversity inside and across religious traditions. But even among multiculturalists, the tendency is to pretend that the differences between, say, Christianity and Islam are more apparent than real, and that the differences inside religious traditions just don't warrant the fuss practitioners make over them. […]

The Age of Enlightenment popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink—call it Godthink—has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religions that threaten us world-wide.

Faith in the unity of religions is just that—faith, and perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism. And it does not just infect the perennialists. While popular religion writers such as Mr. Smith see in all religions the same truth and the same virtue, new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins see in all religions the same idiocy and the same poison. In both cases, Godthink is ideological rather than analytical. It gestates in the dense clouds of desire rather than with a clear-eyed vision of how things are in the ground. In the case of the new atheists, it springs from the understandable desire to denounce the evil in religion. In the case of the perennialists, it begins with the equally understandable desire to praise the good in religion. […]

Some people are convinced that the only foundation on which inter-religious civility can be constructed is the dogma that all religions are one. I am not one of them. In our most intimate human relationships, who is so naive as to imagine that partners or spouses must be essentially the same? What is required in any healthy relationship is knowing who the other person really is. Denying differences is a recipe for disaster. What works is understanding the differences and then coming to accept and, when appropriate, to respect them. After all, it is not possible to agree to disagree until you see just what the disagreements might be. And tolerance is an empty virtue until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. This essay was adapted from his book "God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter," recently published by HarperOne. 

Funeral of secular reason

 Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? New York Times (blog) - Stanley Fish‎

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment ... In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”
The question of course is what does Habermas mean by “introduce”? How exactly is the cooperation between secular reason and faith to be managed? Habermas attempted to answer that question in the course of a dialogue with four Jesuit academics who met with him in Munich in 2007. The proceedings have now been published in Ciaran Cronin’s English translation (they appeared in German in 2008) under the title “An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age.”  

Habermas begins his initial contribution to the conversation by recalling the funeral of a friend who in life “rejected any profession of faith,” and yet indicated before his death that he wanted his memorial service to take place at St. Peter’s Church in Zurich. Habermas decides that his friend “had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage.” The point can be sharpened: in the context of full-bodied secularism, there would seem to be nothing to pass on to, and therefore no reason for anything like a funeral.

To be sure, one could regard funerals for faith-less persons as a vestige of values no longer vital or as a concession to the feelings and desires of family members, but Habermas chooses to take it seriously “as a paradoxical event which tells us something about secular reason.” What it tells us, he goes on to say, is that secular reason is missing something and without it threatens to “spin out of control.”

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Higher realms of consciousness and deeper truths of being

The Sleep of Reason Produces One-Eyed Monsters

from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

I guess I first realized this after reading Ken Wilber's Eye to Eye, in which he distinguishes between the physical eye (which knows sensory/empirical reality), the rational eye (which knows math and logic), and the eye of contemplation or intellection (which sees the higher realms of consciousness and deeper truths of being). Each of these is separate and distinct, and not reducible to the other.

It's painfully obvious once you think about it, for how can one possibly understand, say, the square root of negative one in empirical terms? Nor can you use empirical measurements to explain why the tone of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar is so perfect. And although the Trinity is a "number," to imagine that it can be understood mathematically is the height of folly.

Regarding my own field, psychology, I've witnessed its evolution (and devolution!) on a first hand basis. One thing you will have noticed is that the higher up one ventures into the great chain of being (i.e., matter, life, mind, spirit), the greater the potential for fragmentation, schism, and competing theories.

Now, I don't happen to believe that this fragmentation is necessary, and that most of it is due to sloppy, undisciplined, and unsystematic thinking (in fact, it's not really "thinking," more like fantasy). But one of the primary reasons contemporary thinking is so sloppy is the pervasive reductionism and materialism that prevent people from ever acquiring the proper skills and methods to explore, map, and colonize the higher realms.

For the essence of science -- at any level of reality -- is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. As such, there is clearly an appropriate kind of reduction, so long as it confines itself to its own domain, and doesn't try to pull all of the other ones down with it. Even if the material realm operated under completely mechanistic principles, that would have no relevance to the manner in which the mind operates. Your Dreamer, for example, couldn't care less about linear causation or Aristotelian logic.

When psychoanalysis was invented by Freud in the 19th century, he tried to make it completely consonant with the naively mechanistic and positivistic scientific paradigm of the day, which is why some of his ideas are absurdly outdated. America had its own version of a mechanistic and "scientific" psychology with the development of behaviorism. Here again you see how otherwise intelligent people can be "trapped into seeing in the science of the day its ultimate phase of development." 

In my view, we should begin our philosophizing with those things that will never change, or with the eye of Spirit. Nothing that occurs in science has any relevance to these truths, since they are timeless. And although they have no direct relevance to the practice of science, they certainly have an indirect relevance. 

For example, if a scientist insists that Darwinism proves that there is no objective distinction between good and evil, or that beauty is entirely subjective, we know that he is a fool. And there is no reason to try to argue him out of his delusion, any more than one can explain to a blind man why he shouldn't wear brown shoes with a tux. In both cases, the eyes must be open (the eye of flesh in the case of the blind man, the eye of spirit in the case of the blind Darwinian).

A higher purpose, a transcendent moral order

No Smiting By PAUL BLOOM
NYT: June 24, 2009 God has mellowed...

In his brilliant new book, “The Evolution of God,” Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter-­gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.

In sharp contrast to many contemporary secularists, Wright is bullish about monotheism. In “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (2000), he argued that there is a moral direction to human history, that technological growth and expanding global interconnectedness have moved us toward ever more positive and mutually beneficial relationships with others. In “The Evolution of God,” Wright tells a similar story from a religious standpoint, proposing that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”

This sounds pro-religion, but don’t expect Pope Benedict XVI to be quoting from Wright’s book anytime soon. Wright makes it clear that he is tracking people’s conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes this as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.

Wright also denies the specialness of any faith. In his view, there is continuous positive change over time — religious history has a moral direction — but no movement of moral revelation associated with the emergence of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Similarly, he argues that it is a waste of time to search for the essence of any of these monotheistic religions — it’s silly, for instance, to ask whether Islam is a “religion of peace.” Like a judge who believes in a living constitution, Wright believes that what matters is the choices that the people make, how the texts are interpreted. Cultural sensibilities shift according to changes in human dynamics, and these shape the God that people worship. For Wright, it is not God who evolves. It is us — God just comes along for the ride.

It is a great ride, though. Wright gives the example of the God of Leviticus, who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he points out that this isn’t as enlightened as it may sound, since, at the time, “neighbors” meant actual neighbors, fellow Israelites, not the idol-worshipers in the next town. But still, he argues, this demand encompassed all the tribes of Israel, and was a “moral watershed” that “expanded the circle of brotherhood.” And the disapproval that we now feel when we learn the limited scope of this rule is itself another reason to cheer, since it shows how our moral sensibilities have expanded.

1 2 Next Page » Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author of “Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.” His book “How Pleasure Works” will be published next year. [The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright]

Posthuman

Causality and Cognition posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

This post by Graham made me do a Scooby-Doo double take, letting out a deep confused, yet high pitched, “huhr?”, wondering why he is attributing these claims to me: I’ve encountered this claim from others ...

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For some time now I have tried to relate major innovations in science and mathematics to the movement of society in history. At the grandest level of generalization, there are observations such as Oswald S...

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Promiscuous Ontologies

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects 

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Ethical Etymologies: Thinking Out Loud (Always Dangerous)

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Mereologies and Objects

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

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Peace means the summer of 1965 posted by M J Akbar at M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist

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What Is "Good Government"? Part 3 posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE 

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Nick Live: OOO, Naturalism, Polytology, and SR

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects . 

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Civil religion of a different kind posted by Ebrahim Moosa at The Immanent Frame 

[image: The People of Chilmark, Thomas Hart Benton (1920)]Very different from the mode of civil religion that I discussed in my previous post are the experiences of religious communities in South Africa. A...

What Is "Good Government"? Part 2

posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE 

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Everything You Wanted to Know About Kabbalah But Were Afraid to Ask

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Mrs. G. doesn't actually depart until tomorrow morning, so here we are. With luck, we'll have time for another post. Remember "Ezekiel," the raving Jewish sage from a couple of posts back? He says that t...

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In this issue, we will tread carefully on the delicate issue of sleep. The world of science has taken multiple peeks into this mysterious phenomenon, mysterious because one probably has absolutely no clue ...

Flowers of the month posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore 

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The crystal orb posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

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Question of the month posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

Am I right in thinking that she as an individual embodies all the Divine Powers and brings down the Grace more and more to the physical plane, and her embodiment is a chance for the entire physical con...

From Savitri posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

The Force in her drew earth’s subhuman broods; And to her spirit’s large and free delight She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives Of animal and bird and flower and tree. They answered to her with the si...

Editorial posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore 

The Mother has said on herself, “Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body; They are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention. Throughout all this l...