R.I.P. Michael Crichton

Some free offerings at Integral Life.

Night by the River

My friend Alen Kapidzic - author, meditator, and shadowexplorer - just published a novel entitled "Night by the River" (NB: Rijeka in Croatian means "river") with a dedicated blog, and even has a typically Rijekan webcast announcement for the novel, available for all who can't read Croatian, produced by Filmaktiv. Enjoy!

Trailer for the Wisdom Film

Found this at Susan Piver's blog. Time just 5:46 Enjoy!

Predictions of Fire

Made in Slovenia by American documentary filmmaker Michael Benson, this documentary offers a look at the history of the recently formed Republic of Slovenia and how it relates to the earlier formation of the controversial NSK (the New Slovenian Arts collective). The NSK came together in the '80s just before the fall of the Communist party, Yugoslavia broke into several war-torn nations. It was begun by Laibach, a popular industrial rock band and later joined by the Red Pilot theater group and by Irwin, a band of painters. As collective artists, they used their arts to look back into European history and show the destruction wrought when ideology overshadows humanity. Art plays a subtle but key role in ideological domination. With history as their basis, NSK predicted the eruption of hatred and war that would tear Yugoslavia apart in the '90s. This is a series of clips, playing one after the other: 8 parts in all, total time 85 minutes.

NOTE: Unfortunately, the account of "mariborchanx", where this video was posted, was suspended along with many other videos on Laibach, NSK, Zizek, and Derrida.

China's Wild West

A documentary from Current.com. Time 27 mins.

Unlike their Hollywood friendly brethren, the Tibetans, the Uighurs of northwestern China, claim to be an oppressed minority group that no one has ever heard of. That is, unless the Chinese government publicizes an attack by Uighur insurgents, such as the one that killed 16 Chinese police officers on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. In this Vanguard report, Laura Ling travels to the wild-west frontier in China's Gobi Desert, an area the Chinese named Xinjiang, or New Land, but a place many Uighurs believe should be an independent Uighur nation.

Leaving Fear Behind

Blurb: Leaving Fear Behind (in Tibetan, Jigdrel) is a heroic film shot by Tibetans from inside Tibet, who longed to bring Tibetan voices to the Beijing Olympic Games. With the global spotlight on China as it rises to host the XXIX Olympics, Tibetans wish to tell the world of their plight and their heartfelt grievances against Chinese rule. The footage was smuggled out of Tibet under extraordinary circumstances. The filmmakers were detained soon after sending their tapes out, and remain in detention today.

Time 25 minutes. Click screen icon for fullscreen.


For further info, visit leavingfearbehind.com

R/Evolution Be Upon Us

"A revolution is upon us", says Alan Wallace, stemming from the exploration of consciousness and the mind, using direct, immediate, first-hand observation -- meditation. "A new axial age", says Karen Armstrong, so that "once again, a radical change has become necessary." Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber take a strong position on this issue and say we must be willing to break the rules. An excerpt:

AC: To dare to even speak about radical transformation, let alone call other people to a higher level, is against the unstated rules. And of course, one's definitely going to be put in one's place for doing something like that. But unless the possibility of genuine transformation is actually declared, unless one is willing to demonstrate it publicly and to call other people to the same, no one is even going to know that it's possible. And then unknowingly, everybody's going to be participating in the conspiracy of mediocrity.

KW: Yes, the conspiracy of mediocrity, which is basically the conspiracy to express your ego instead of transcending it or letting go of it. The idea is "If I can really emote and express my self-contraction with sincerity, I'm somehow spiritual." So then we have a convention of the self-contractions, and that's basically boomeritis spirituality. It's a problem, to put it mildly. And it's a concern to me that a lot of teachers actually embrace that kind of postmodern flatland pluralism.

AC: Well, I think that part of the reason for that is that many people are teaching now who actually have had little if any enlightenment experience or satori themselves. And if one is a teacher and yet has little authentic experience on which to base one's teaching, one is going to end up being in the kind of position you described.

KW: I think that's certainly part of the picture. Another part of the picture, which concerns me even more, is that I know some teachers who have had a very strong satori, but they still interpret it through the mental apparatus that they have in place. And so they interpret it through boomeritis, the mean green meme, pluralistic flatland. And that, frankly, is extremely unsettling.

This subject of an emerging spirituality at the beginning of the 21st century, and the obvious obstacles to its unfolding, is definitely an extremely important one. Not just for those of us in the postmodern West, but equally for those who are backstroking everywhere in an attempt to preserve some semblance of value and purpose. In Western Buddhist circles little is done to stir this awareness and discussion of an emerging, radically sane spiritual culture, as if we are less-then-confident in the potential of teachings if we acknowledge that something unprecedented and unpredicted is taking place, something not to be found in sutras and tantras of old, except as a hint that nothing ever stays the same, including both the teachings and our purpose for realizing and manifesting enlightenment. As we know all too well, the world does not wait. Something new is being born, right now.

Now, this newborn has a human face. As Rumi invoked for all of us, this newborn is "not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen". This makes the Newborn somewhat uninteresting for those of us who believe that preserving the legacy is of utmost importance, as well as for those who believe that doing away with the essence of that legacy - namely, the ever-fresh discovery of freedom - is even possible. However, this Newborn is in all probability our only chance of seeing this century bloom in terms of a global civilization. This new expression of our common Ground, informed by a sharp evolutionary awareness and demanding clear action and a rational way of being beyond any vestige of self-righteousness, is the only true fountain of inspiration for not just a sustainable but also creative future. Ethically, philosophically, and spiritually, this impersonal Newborn needs mature human beings as agents in every conceivable form and then some.

As Robert Godwin says, in an interview to WIE,

there is not just one but four unaccountable singularities in existence—Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit—that mark the unfolding of new dimensions in the cosmos. At each of these levels of evolution, there’s a deepening interiority. That’s the vertical dimension. It’s the deepening interior of the cosmos. Each is in its own way a bang, a unique one-of-a-time warp between what was before and what came after. The first bang goes from nothing to a very exquisitely ordered something. With the second bang, we go from a dead universe to a living universe. That’s pretty bizarre. With the third singularity, we go from a living universe to a thinking and creating universe that mirrors the creator. That’s very bizarre. And then the most bizarre is the fourth singularity when we human beings have the spiritual revelation, “Aha! I am That,” which is very unexpected.

And then points further,

How do ironists find something that they revere and don’t just mock and look down upon? How do you make them look up? That’s the trick. [...] In some form or fashion, you have to find something that you spontaneously bow to, that you revere. And it can’t be something lower. It can’t just be Gaia. It’s got to be something higher that you recognize as such that makes you fall to your knees spontaneously. [...] Look at the external movement of human evolution, going out of Africa and into Europe, then crossing the Atlantic, then coming to the East Coast of the United States, and then slowly migrating into the frontier—to the West Coast. Then the frontier closes. By the 1890s, there is nothing left. That’s when the interior journey really starts on a cultural level. You start seeing postmodern people like James Joyce, Einstein, Picasso. All of a sudden, you see much more focus on the interior as the new frontier. We are now just beginning to explore that interior frontier. That’s what’s so exciting about it. People long for that old frontier: “Oh, gosh, I wish I could go live on the frontier again.” But the frontier is here and now. The interior frontier is here, ready to be conquered and explored and inhabited. It’s so exciting. We’re on this incredible interior journey now, and we’re finding out that this is the only journey that is or has ever been. Because for us, the exterior frontier was actually an interior frontier all along. It was a longing for new horizons, for new experiences. All along it was that. But now we don’t have the inconvenience of the material world to worry about. We don’t have to “Go west, young man.” Now it’s “Go in and go up. Become inwardly mobile.” That’s the real journey and the next evolution.

How do you resonate with that?

Pinker on Violence

A fair look at violence through ages. Blurb: "In a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about." Time 20 mins.

Tarantino's Mind

Go and watch "Tarantino's Mind" over at Hungrymantv.com, a short film by Brazilian duo 300ml aka Manitou Felipe and Bernardo Dutra.

Ritual: Theory in Practice

Review of Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice, ed. by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, review written by Zoketsu Norman Fischer for the Spring 2008 issue of Buddhadharma. Excerpt:

There’s no doubt that if you read Buddhist texts—from the Zen masters’ sayings to the Pali canon materials—you will find a basic philosophy and recommended practice that does lend itself to the idea of Buddhism as a sort of rational self-improvement religion. And Zen and early Buddhist texts do express, to some extent, the notion that ritual, faith, and sacrifice are to be rejected in favor of personal ethics, meditational cultivation, and transformative insight. So the early scholars, however blinded they were by their own cultural biases, were not making something up out of whole cloth. They had texts to cite.

But the essays in this book are not based on the study of sacred texts. These essays are valuable because they reflect a crucial sea change in the contemporary study of religion: a shift away from the study of what religion says it is about (as explained in sacred texts) to what religion is actually about (as discovered in historical records and sociological observation). And this turns out to be one of the most astonishing and salient facts about Buddhism and religion in general—that there is always a huge gap between what a religion says and thinks it is about, and what it is actually about. And the question of ritual, why and how it is practiced, and how important or unimportant it is lies at the center of this gap.

Read the whole piece.

A Call to Arms for the Postmodern Male

By Andrew Cohen, from the current issue of WIE.

. .

Until I was in my early twenties, I never even thought about what it meant to be a man. I grew up in an upper-middle-class secular Jewish family in Manhattan and went to liberal, progressive schools throughout my childhood. I never had a bar mitzvah, the Jewish boy’s traditional rite of passage into manhood. My brother, who is five years older, used to beat me up on a regular basis from before I can remember, which turned me into a bit of a wuss. I was always one of the last picked when we engaged in competitive sports, and it goes without saying that I lacked confidence. Endeavoring to relieve my insecurities, my mother sent me to a therapist at the ripe old age of five.

My father, who was not an introspective man, loved me deeply. When I was eleven my parents separated, and shortly after my fifteenth birthday, my father died a slow and painful death. During those years and afterward, I spent a lot of time with my mother, who was at the time a passionate advocate of feminist values. My teachers in the three different high schools I attended in the United States and in Europe were generally decent, sophisticated, and well-meaning people. But when I think back on those days from the wisdom of my current fifty-two years, I’m stunned by the realization that no adult, including even my counselors at summer camp, ever counseled me about what it means to be a man. I now understand that I wasn’t the only one in this strange predicament—in fact, it seems to be a cultural phenomenon. I don’t think this subject was brought up in any situation I was ever in until I began to think about it myself in my early twenties.

When I was twenty-two, as a result of a profound spiritual experience that had occurred six years earlier, I seriously committed myself to becoming an enlightened human being. My first step was to take up a disciplined daily practice of martial arts because I wanted to become strong. I wanted to conquer my fear; I wanted to be tough—I wanted to be a man.

At the age of thirty, after much serious practice and dedicated searching, I found what I was looking for in Mother India. To my own astonishment, I ended up in the uncomfortable position of becoming a spiritual teacher virtually overnight! In this unusual profession where soft and sweet are generally considered to be the hallmarks of authenticity, I’ve been the very opposite. Almost from the start, I’ve had a reputation for being bold, strong, direct, and confident—for more than a few of my contemporaries, too confident.

Ever since my life turned upside down in this way, I’ve had the rare privilege of meeting and interacting with many different people from all over the world. I’ve gotten to know lots and lots of men. And I came to recognize that the majority seemed to share the same perplexing postmodern cultural predicament that I did: Very few seem to have ever considered the perennial question, What does it mean to be a man?

I’ll never forget my surprise when I discovered a hidden secret about some men who have seriously considered this question. I’m talking about men who are invested in being tough and who can project an air of confidence that is uniquely masculine—the kind of man that I at one time in my life had aspired to be. I’m talking about students of mine who were martial artists of high attainment. I was amazed when I discovered that whenever one of these tough guys was in a situation that required that they trust a little more and give up a bit of the control they were so invested in, they usually fell into an utter panic. Underneath their bravado, even though they weren’t afraid of a street fight, they were terrified of real intimacy, especially spiritual intimacy. Ironically, this would come to the surface especially when they came together with other men—spiritual brothers who were committed to creating a new culture together, a culture based upon higher values, the evolution of consciousness, and the commitment to be strong, transparent, and authentic at all times.

I became a man when I found the courage and conviction to trust God more than I trusted the fears and desires and conditioned thinking of my puny ego. The first expression of authentic manhood was when I boldly declared from the therapist’s couch, “I don’t want to do this anymore; I want to be free!” and noticed no hint of fear in myself when the therapist responded strongly, “But Andrew, you’re barely getting started!” The final moment of transition happened eight years later. My longing for liberation had become so all-consuming that I was ready to let go completely—to die to everything I had known and been up to that point. I was sitting in front of my last teacher, passionately telling him, with a hint of desperation, “I want to die, but I don’t know how.” I can visualize that moment as if it was yesterday, and I clearly remember that he remained silent. At first he looked shocked, and then tears welled up in his eyes.

What it means to be a man, of course, always relates directly to the cultural context within which the question is being asked. We are living in a very challenging time, when old values are crumbling and new ones are just barely beginning to emerge—including what it means to be a real man. My experience as a spiritual teacher in the midst of this upheaval has convinced me beyond any doubt that it will be impossible for the postmodern male to become a vibrant, powerful, and truly evolved expression of the masculine principle unless he pays the ultimate price by transcending his culturally conditioned, overly sensitive, highly narcissistic, and painfully arrogant self. A cultural revolution at the leading edge needs strong, liberated, and highly evolved men to be compelling examples of what is possible for us all. That’s what spiritually enlightened men do.

. .

(See original article.)

Can we spell G-o-d?

Julian Walker questions "God" in a new post:

While I admire and agree with the observation that "god" has been conceived of in all three of these ways though time and across cultures - i find myself asking if it makes sense to use a word so laden, as Wilber acknowledges in no uncertain terms, with it's dominant religious connotation and bloody history, in the creation of a contemporary, integral spirituality.

I am quite familiar with the argument for the inclusivity of using the word - and think they have merit, however this article focuses more on why I, personally think we do better to find more evocative, accurate and less supernaturally/metaphysically loaded language in the description of a contemporary spirituality.

And then Julian goes through the "3 faces of God" - or Godhead - namely the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person sketches of ultimate reality. The post makes good reading, though I don't find much of substance in it, and basically for one main reason: if we wish to liberate the very notion of ultimate reality as "God" from traditionalist and conventional limitations and imbue it, that is, revitalize it with more mystical and contemplative and - why not - evolutionary denotations, we certainly need to use a language that acknowledges and includes "God", at least as an enriching option for the "Ultimate", instead of renouncing it to the fundamentalist reduction, right? Well, not everyone will agree (see the discussion on Julian's blog).

Now, I'm an esoteric Buddhist by method and view, therefore neither theist nor atheist in preference. The Ultimate to me is both beyond conceptualization and is the very nature of every occasion, so it must have a personal as well as an impersonal dimension, also a subjective as well as an objective one, and also an inter- and an intra- modality - that is, being simultaneously within and between everything - and yet is never exhausted by or limited to any of these. Plus, it's rather plain and evident, thanks to advances in developmental studies, that individuals and cultures tend to contextualize the Ultimate in accordance with their meaning-making protocols, either in elite mystical mini-cultures or in mainstream discourse.

Most of conclusions Julian makes are patently rationalistic - somewhat surprising - along with strengths and limitations implied. In contrast to his analysis, "God" was and is and will always be a non-ordinary trope, not a regular topos, irreducible to analysis by definition, being a name for the unnamable, an expression of ineffable, a polysemic antanaclasis of sorts for those that would regard it as a common concept or a name for something outside or even within themselves. Yet, this evading untraceable "God" is somehow perfectly obvious.

It seems a developmental necessity that each of us - and we together - move through a negation of this omnipotent semiotic device when we find it limiting - and practically impotent - in order to rediscover and ressurect its vitality at a new level - not just through meditation, contemplation, and mystical awakening - but also by creating a new public language, wherein "God" will again be a light unto ourselves and the world we live in, instead of a defense against death and reason, as it most undoubtedly is for far too many educated people today. Anyway, not to worry, God surely has a future.

Perhaps someone who knows God on a first-name basis is to be consulted in this regard.:-)

Semiotics for Beginners

An excellent online book by Daniel Chandler.

From the preface:

. . . Semiotics is a huge field, and no treatment of it can claim to be comprehensive. My attempt to offer a coherent account of some key concepts is in some ways misleading: there are divergent schools of thought in semiotics, and there is remarkably little consensus amongst contemporary theorists regarding the scope of the subject, core concepts or methodological tools. This particular account betrays its European origins, focusing on Saussurean and post-Saussurean semiotics (structuralist semiotics and post-structuralist critiques) rather than, for instance, on Peircean semiotics (although some key Peircean concepts are mentioned). The focus on structuralist semiotics is intended to be of value to readers who wish to use semiotics as an approach to textual analysis. However, semiotics is far more than a method of analysing texts in a variety of media, and I hope I will also inspire the reader's enthusiasm for exploring some of the fascinating philosophical issues which semiotics raises.

01. Introduction
02. Signs
03. Modality and Representation
04. Paradigms and Syntagms
05. Syntagmatic Analysis
06. Paradigmatic Analysis
07. Denotation, Connotation and Myth
08. Rhetorical Tropes
09. Codes
10. Modes of Address
11. Encoding/Decoding
12. Articulation
13. Intertextuality
14. Criticisms of Semiotic Analysis
15. Strengths of Semiotic Analysis
16. D.I.Y. Semiotic Analysis

Glossary; References; Suggested Reading; Index; Semiotics Links.

Projecting the Dharma

An intriguing talk by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche on "projecting" Dharma in the Western world, given at Yale Law School, New Haven, Connecticut on 25 January, 2008. Time 82 minutes. Note: the first half is most interesting, and an AQAL analysis of the discourse Dzongsar Khyentse uses with this audience gives interesting - though not surprising - results.


Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche: Projecting the Dharma from Siddhartha's Intent on Vimeo.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Derrida on Fear & Writing