New Age and Skepticism

Julian Walker brings an article by Karla McLaren entitled "Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures". Excerpt:

I'm not just a member of the New Age community - I've also been a purveyor of the very things the skeptical community is so concerned about. I've been involved in metaphysics and the New Age for over thirty years, I've written four books and recorded five audio learning sets in the genre, and I was considered one of the leaders in the field.

I'm not in the field any longer, but it's hard to truly disappear when so many of my books and tapes are already out there. It's also hard to disappear when I don't really know what to say to the people in my culture. The cultural rift is so extreme that anything I say will prove that I have gone to the other side, the wrong side - the side of the enemy. In actual fact, however, I have just seen enough to know that the skeptics and the critical thinkers have some extremely pertinent and meaningful things to say. I've now studied enough skeptical and scientific information about paranormal abilities and events to question many of the precepts upon which my work was based. More important, I've seen enough to understand firsthand the real costs of the New Age.

I've also learned to understand the differences and similarities in the New Age and skeptical cultures, so that I no longer react in a stereotypically offended fashion when I or the people I know and love are referred to as frauds, shams, or dupes. I understand now that these terms are not meant disparagingly, for the most part. I understand now that these terms often mask a great deal of care and concern for people in the New Age culture. It's sometimes hard to unearth that concern - it often requires an almost anthropological capacity to understand the cultural differences between us - but the concern is there.

Until I understood that concern, I couldn't find myself in the skeptical lexicon. I couldn't identify myself with the uncaring hucksters, the wildly miseducated snake-oil peddlers, the self-righteous psychics, the big-haired evangelists, or the megalomaniacal eastern fakirs. I couldn't identify my work or myself with the scam-based work or the unstable personalities so roundly trashed by the skeptical culture, because I was never in the field to scam anyone - and neither were any of my friends or colleagues. I worked in the field because I have a deep and abiding concern for people, and an honest wish to be helpful in my own culture. Access to clearheaded and carefully presented skeptical material would have helped me (and others like me) at every step of the way - but I couldn't access any of that information because I simply couldn't identify with it. Until now.

Read the whole piece at Julian's Gaia blog.

Hide your love away

Not a Beatles fan at all, but here it is. Time just 2:11




The song was covered by Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell and Noel Gallagher. All three seem to find the "Hey!" part somewhat flummoxing. See which one you like best.

Thurman at NYTimes Magazine

Thanks to WH for pointing to this interview with Robert Thurman at NYTimes. It's fun, as usually, to read Thurman's observations on the Dalai Lama, China, and Buddhism in American culture -

...when I am annoyed with Dick Cheney, I meditate on how Dick Cheney was my mother in a previous life and nursed me at his breast.

Nice image there. Then we have the inevitable E-question:

Do you consider yourself enlightened? Someone who goes around saying, “I’m enlightened,” is almost categorically not.

That's exactly the kind of generalization and evasion we don't need these days. Gautama the Buddha went around and said he was awakened every single day, throughout his life. His awakened disciples, from Shariputra to Kashyapa to Maudgalyayana, even his aunt Pajapati Gotami, freely proclaimed their attainment to everyone who'd listen. Examples too numerous to list abound in the histories of every major Buddhist school from India to Japan. Robert Thurman's answer should have been (1) Yes; (2) No; (3) Sometimes; (4) Partially; (5) I'm on my way but haven't made much progress; or the tantric (6) Ask my wife!

Granted, it's become customary with institutionalization of Buddhism in most Eastern cultures - from Tibet to Japan - to consider open disclosure of accomplishment as something of a taboo. Others are supposed to do it for you, and they usually do, even when it's not the case and you've been appointed to an important position.

But it's simply not true that proclamation of awakening demonstrates the opposite. And it's unbeneficial to spread this sort of political correctness in these days when most Buddhists in the West of every tradition and ilk don't even consider enlightenment in their own lives as something really doable. That is almost categorically not beneficial.

Reinventing the wheel

The advertisement for "Reinventing the Sacred" by Stuart Kauffman just came in from WIE. The intro seemed interesting enough:

"One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know."

Then, however, I googled the title and found a video with Kauffman himself explaining the essentials of his view on the Sacred and what it is that needs to be reinvented. In short, Kauffman is another highly intelligent person who unfortunately can see only two major cultures in today's "First World" - namely, the ahteistic, agnostic, secularist humanist on one hand, and the rigid, fundamentalist, mythic-God worshipping believers on the other. For those of you fluent in integralese, that's the classic level/line fallacy, commited not long ago by the Four Horsemen (with a feable nuanced exception by Sam Harris, not to make much of). Kauffman too speaks of "faith and reason". So, it's back to square one with this attempt in reconciling the opposites which are not really that. There is potential, nonetheless, in Kauffman's point of view, to become influential in both camps and this then may well serve as an introduction to a truly transformative discussion with more integral ideas being included as necessary for building mutual trust. (Just speculating, of course.) Kauffman mentions Wittgenstein and Weinberg, but certainly won't mention Wilber and Wallace who have done more to bridge the Gap, known both as matter vs. mind and science vs. spirituality. First, however, I should read the book that won't let biology be reduced to physics (chapter 4) - of course Kauffman is a biologist - while wondering if ethics and even "the Sacred" can be somehow reduced to "biocomplexity."

There's a Ning network devoted to Reinventing the Sacred, where you'll find the aforementioned video and some discussion that you may want to join if you resonate.

And finally a quote from the book:

"Today the schism between faith and reason finds voice in the sometimes vehement disagreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who believe in the transcendent Creator God, and agnostic and atheist "secular humanists" who do not believe in the transcendent God. These divergent beliefs are profoundly held. Our senses of the sacred have been with us for thousands of years, at least from the presumptive earth goddess of Europe ten thousand years ago, through the Egyptian, Greek, Abrahamic, Aztec, Mayan, Incan, and Hindu Gods, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions. (...) Ways of life hand in the balance. This book hopes to address this schism in a new way."

Ok - Aztec, Mayan, Incan? But do read the pages made available at Amazon's Search Inside.

Swimming In Qualia

Music by Steve Jansen, visuals by Shoko Ise. Extract from a video installation (original length - 24:11) presented at Contemporary Art and Photography in Japan - 'STILL/ALIVE', Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, December 22.2007 - February 20.2008. Time 8 minutes.



More from Steve Jansen: "I don't worry about the demands of the music industry. In the 80's I made a record with Richard Barbieri under the name of The Dolphin Brothers, for Virgin Records. I sung all the songs and wrote all the lyrics and yet it was a far less rewarding experience than making 'slope', primarily because I wasn't being true to myself with the work. It wasn't the sort of music I wanted to be making (even though at the time I thought it was), but it's where the industry led me. I learnt my lesson. Now, I'm pleased to say, with the advancement of technology, that element of the industry is dying somewhat as new artists can find the means to record and release material without the bank-rolling of record labels whose only real concerns are making as much money as possible whilst leaving the artist with as little as possible. Such are the demands made by, what is essentially, a loan company."

What is Yoga?

Herbert Günther wrote in his "What is that which is called Yoga?":

"The Indic word yoga has become a household word in any Western language where, as in its original Indian cultural context, it has become a cover term for a variety of disciplines and techniques, each claiming to be the last word. Given this state of affairs the question "What is that which is called Yoga" is still pertinent and must be dealt with in its historical context."

Read the whole article.

Memoria by Murcof

"Memoria" performed by Murcof from his album "Martes" (2002). Video done from fragments of the live visual set. Time 6 min.

Wordle is fun

Have you seen this little thing called "Wordle"? From the website:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I've done a few to contribute. See below "Song of Mahamudra" and click for a larger view. Join in!

Height Gap

Quote from "The Height Gap", an article in Newyorker:

"Around the time of the Civil War, Americans’ heights predictably decreased: Union soldiers dropped from sixty-eight to sixty-seven inches in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, and similar patterns held for West Point cadets, Amherst students, and free blacks in Maryland and Virginia. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.

Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.

The average American man is only five feet nine and a half—less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.

Just in case I still thought this a trivial trend, Komlos put a final bar graph in front of me. It was entitled “Life Expectancy 2000.” Compared with people in thirty-six other industrialized countries, it showed, Americans rank twenty-eighth in average longevity—just above the Irish and the Cypriots (the Japanese top the rankings). “Ask yourself this,” Komlos said, peering at me above his reading glasses. “What is the difference between Western Europe and the U.S. that would work in this direction? It’s not income, since Americans, at least on paper, have been wealthier for more than a century. So what is it?”

Read the whole piece.

Portraits of Masters

Some of the greatest Tibetan masters and yogins portrayed in this brief video (plus some annoying music). Enjoy!

Thinkable Futures

This is from Kevin Kelly, something he did 15 years ago with Brian Eno, and published a list of "unthinkable futures" or worst case scenarios in 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Some of these are actually quite thinkable, so here goes a selection from each:

Kelly:

* A new plague seizes the world. As fatal as AIDS, but transmitted on a sneeze, and spread by airplane travelers, the virus touches billions within a year.

* Alcohol is so severely restricted that people need "licenses" to drink it. Tobacco is, of course, prohibited from being sold. You can grow your own, though, and some do. The underworld moves to North Carolina as cigarets become contraband.

* The human genome project is halted by activists. Placards at demonstrations say: "Our DNA, Our Selves."

* American universities go franchise. Ivy League schools launch branches in Tokyo, Berlin, London.

* Twenty-five years from now, the American public becomes even more conservative at the grass-roots level than it is now, and the Reagan years are viewed as "moderate."

* GLOBAL COOLING -- After a steady increase in mean temperature, the Earth starts cooling off. Dire warnings are issued; no one pays any attention.

Eno:

* Everybody becomes so completely cynical about the election process that voter turnout drops to 2 percent (families and relatives of prospective politicians) until finally the "democratic process" is abandoned in favour of a lottery system. Everything immediately improves.

* A new profession -- cosmetic psychiatry -- is born. People visit "plastic psychiatrists" to get interesting neuroses and obsessions added into their makeup.

* A new profession, meme-inspector, comes into being.

* Famous and talented men routinely auction their sperm for huge sums.

* Disabled people finally come into their own as remote operators of telerobots. They are the only ones prepared to commit the immense amount of time necessary to learn the finesse of working inside another body.

See the whole list...

Why materialists cheat

The 2008 Shift Report: Changing the Story of Our Future, published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Among its many other compelling facts, here's a description of an experiment conducted by Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia that investigated the ways in which believing, or disbelieving, in free will affects moral choices:

[W]hat one believes about free will has an important social consequence.... In the Vohs and Schooler study, [some] participants read passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis by Nobel laureate biologist Francis Crick, which promotes the idea that free will is an illusion: “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” Others read more neutral statements as a control condition. The results of the study showed that participants who read [Crick's] anti-free will statements were significantly more likely to cheat on several experimental tasks. If exposure to [anti-free will messages] increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then what does this same message, repeated by authoritative scientists and promoted by the media, do to societal behavior?

This came in from WIE. Download free Intro chapter at the Shift Report website.

Change and the Changeless

An utterly delightful talk from Father Thomas Keating, entitled "Oneness and the Heart of the world", found at GlobalOneness. Time 35 minutes. Enjoy!



Thanks to Vincent Horn for heads up. Here's the link to the original video, available in high and low res, and also for download in .mp4 format.

Buddhism Made to Measure

From Donald Lopez at the Immanent Frame:

'...By the end of the nineteenth century, Methodist missionaries in Sri Lanka, Chinese revolutionaries in Shanghai, and Japanese reformers in Tokyo were all dismissing Buddhism as superstition and (in the case of the former) dismissing its followers as idolaters. A group of Buddhist elites, several of whom would visit the West, responded to these charges by claiming that Buddhism was not primitive, but instead was modern. Indeed, with its lack of a creator God and its mechanistic universe (driven by the engine of karma), it was the religion most suitable for the modern world. Some went so far as to say that Buddhism was not a religion at all, but rather a philosophy, even a science. In this way, viewed in light of the academic model of the day, which saw a movement from superstition to religion to science, Buddhism was able to leap from the beginning of the evolutionary chain to its end.

But the formation of Buddhist Modernism cannot be credited entirely to Asian Buddhists. Central to the process was the work of nineteenth-century European Orientalists. Although there were Buddhists almost everywhere else in Asia they found no Buddhists in India, the land of the Buddha’s birth; Buddhism had disappeared there by the fourteenth century. Instead, they found monuments (often in ruins), cave temples (overgrown by jungle), and statues (often broken). There were stone inscriptions to be deciphered, and there were Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Nepal to the north and Pali manuscripts in Sri Lanka to the south. These were the materials from which European scholars would build their Buddhism.

What would come to be called “original Buddhism” or “primitive Buddhism,” became the domain of European and, later, American and then Japanese scholars. They would create a Buddha and a Buddhism unknown in Asia, one that may never have existed there before the late nineteenth century. Just as there was a quest for the historical Jesus, there was a quest for the historical Buddha, and European Orientalists felt they found him. Like Jesus, the Buddha wrote nothing and, unlike Jesus, nothing that he said was written down until four centuries (rather than four decades) after his death. This Buddhism then became a model against which the various contemporary Buddhisms of Asia were measured, and were generally found to be lacking, not only by Europeans, but eventually by Buddhist elites in Asia as well.

The Buddha was transformed from a stone idol into a man of flesh and blood, a man very much of modern times. Described by some as “the Luther of Asia,” he became famous for having spoken out against the corrupt priestcraft and the crippling caste system of “Brahmanism.” He also became something of a Romantic hero. In 1879, Edwin Arnold published a poem on the life of the Buddha, entitled The Light of Asia, that would become one of the most popular books of the Victorian period, and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself; Arnold was knighted for his work. The Buddha became an alternative Jesus, a Jesus who was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a Europe obsessed with questions of race and questions of humanity, the Buddha was both racially superior and a savior for all humanity, an ancient kinsman, a modern hero. This Buddha was the product of a different Enlightenment...'

Precious points. Read the whole entry.

1-click Shift

One minute shift with teacher Adyashanti. Also, some cool stuff at the Cafe Dharma section of his website. Enjoy!



Thanks to WH for heads up.