hokai's hybrid blogging: references and brief comments on entertaining, educating, and enlightening stuff on the web. evolving view, integral studies, esoteric buddhism, transformative practices, social change, cultural shifts etc.
Labels: pathology, psychology, religion
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.
"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."
"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.
The incident happened during a protest against the Church of Scientology on May 10. Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church's £23m headquarters near St Paul's cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was "abusive and insulting".
Writing on an anti-Scientology website, the teenager facing court said: "I brought a sign to the May 10th protest that said: 'Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.'
"'Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector."
A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and "strongly advised" him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.
The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a "cult" which was "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".
After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.
Article at Guardian.
The article at N Y Times begins:
And so it goes on with pictures and even an audio slideshow. Now, the story might have been charming if it wasn't a bit of a problem for the Tibetan sangha West and East, involving even the office of the Dalai Lama. The woman mentioned in the article is not the only woman involved (link on four dakinis), while Roach insists on still being a Gelugpa monk, and Robert Thurman won't talk to him."Ten years ago, Michael Roach and Christie McNally, Buddhist teachers with a growing following in the United States and abroad, took vows never to separate, night or day.
By “never part,” they did not mean only their hearts or spirits. They meant their bodies as well. And they gave themselves a range of about 15 feet.
If they cannot be seated near each other on a plane, they do not get on. When she uses an airport restroom, he stands outside the door. And when they are here at home in their yurt in the Arizona desert, which has neither running water nor electricity, and he is inspired by an idea in the middle of the night, she rises from their bed and follows him to their office 100 yards down the road, so he can work.
Their partnership, they say, is celibate. It is, as they describe it, a high level of Buddhist practice that involves confronting their own imperfections and thereby learning to better serve the world."
"There is much to make the jaw drop in “Inside a Cult,” a timely documentary about the Strong City sect in New Mexico being shown on Wednesday on the National Geographic Channel. But by its end you may feel that the most stunning thing is that this film exists at all. Why would these people have let a documentarian get so close to their exceedingly eccentric world?Members of the cult maintain their own website, where they denounce the film (for example, letter to Ben Anthony). Meanwhile, their leader was arrested on charges of criminal sexual contact. While it's better than nothing, is that the best authorities in a modern society can do?
The cult consists of about 50 followers of Michael Travesser, a gaunt, scraggly man who says he is the Messiah (something he says God revealed to him back in 2000, when his name was Wayne Bent). The film is no archival cut-and-paste job; Ben Anthony, the director and cinematographer, was admitted to the group’s compound and invited to interview both leader and followers."
A secret document which sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church is examined by Panorama. Crimen Sollicitationis was enforced for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became the Pope. It instructs bishops on how to deal with allegations of child abuse against priests and has been seen by few outsiders. Critics say the document has been used to evade prosecution for sex crimes. It instructs them how to deal with priests who solicit sex from the confessional. It also deals with "any obscene external act ... with youths of either sex." It imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witnesses. Breaking that oath means excommunication from the Catholic Church. Reporting for Panorama, Colm O'Gorman finds seven priests with child abuse allegations made against them living in and around the Vatican City. One of the priests, Father Joseph Henn, has been indicted on 13 molestation charges brought by a grand jury in the United States. During filming for Sex Crimes and the Vatican, Colm finds Father Henn is fighting extradition orders from inside the headquarters of this religious order in the Vatican. The Vatican has not compelled him to return to America to face the charges against him. After filming, Father Henn lost his fight against extradition but fled the headquarters and is believed to be hiding in Italy while there is an international warrant for his arrest. Colm O'Gorman was raped by a Catholic priest in the diocese of Ferns in County Wexford in Ireland when he was 14 years old. Father Fortune was charged with 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and another serious sexual offence relating to eight boys but he committed suicide on the eve of his trial. Colm started an investigation with the BBC in March 2002 which led to the resignation of Dr Brendan Comiskey, the bishop leading the Ferns Diocese. Colm then pushed for a government inquiry which led to the Ferns Report. It was published in October 2005 and found: "A culture of secrecy and fear of scandal that led bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of children."(documents, transcript and more from BBC news)
Labels: religion
Labels: religion
"...Until relatively recently, most social theorists, from Marx to Freud to Weber, believed that as societies became more modern, religion would lose its capacity to inspire. Industrialization would substitute the rational pursuit of self-interest for blind submission to authority. Science would undermine belief in miracles. Democracy would encourage the separation of church and state. Gender equality would undermine patriarchy, and with it, clerical authority. However one defined modernity, it always seemed likely to involve societies focused on this world rather than on some other."
"I have been a Zen practitioner for roughly forty years. Many years ago I became interested in viewing Zen from a scholarly point of view as a way to explain the great disparity I witnessed between how the Zen institution claimed its leaders behaved and what I saw first hand. I was driven to understand what was happening and why, not out of a dry, academic interest, but rather, by the confusion, trouble and suffering that I and others were experiencing.
By luck, in the early 1990's, I met an academically-minded monk connected with Chinese Buddhism. From him, I was introduced to an academic view of the history of Zen that strongly contrasted with the more familiar history promulgated by the Zen institution. Needless to say, it was an eye opener that led to many exciting hours of study up to this day. Later, through a friend, I became interested in the sociology of religion and of institutions.
Looking at Zen through both the lens of academic history and the lens of the sociology of religion and institutions, I hope to show how Zen developed over time, and how it responded to historical settings and necessities. I will show how the institution that has grown up around Zen functions - as do most institutions - to promote and protect itself, and how it empowers its leaders and enables that power to function.
I am attempting to make clear for myself and other Zen practitioners what is happening at Zen centers in America. I have found some conceptual tools that helped me analyze how these Zen centers operate. These tools were especially helpful in understanding how the conceptions of Dharma transmission and unbroken lineage and their supporting structures impact Zen students' lives at their Centers.
Critical thinking is Buddhist and Buddhism is critical thinking. By demanding tough answers and not being satisfied with easy ones, I hope to improve the situation of Zen in America which, since the mid- 1960's , has suffered from repeated scandals - scandals that hurt its practitioners, caused others to leave and marred its reputation for years to come.
Buddhism has a history of adaptability to many cultures. No doubt, it will adapt to the West. We have an opportunity, by understanding the institutions and history of Zen, to claim its true spirit and inherent freedom for our lives."
Labels: buddhism, enlightenment, myth, politics, religion
"Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date. I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?"
"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."I really enjoyed Terry Eagleton's review of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins for the London Review of Books. Two teasers here:
"What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right..."And there's much more, of course, from Eagleton. Do read the whole piece.
"His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.) There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion."
He opens the book with the story of an ant climbing a blade of grass, falling down and climbing up again because "its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke, that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle." He asks, "Does anything like this ever happen to human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings . . . devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their brains."
Sometimes Dennett is friendlier to his religious readers, and offers them lengthy justifications for his skeptical approach. He concedes that religion can serve a useful function by bringing out the best in a person. He also cites a series of studies that show that regular churchgoers tend to be healthier, have better morale and live longer than those who do not attend religious services.
Whatever the benefits of religions, Dennett believes that they arise entirely inside human minds. No spiritual realities exist outside us. He also takes it for granted that the mind "is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved in much the same way as our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved . . . by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection." He assumes what he sets out to prove.
The central message of this book is that religion is a product of evolutionary psychology, based on aspects of human nature favoured by natural selection over many thousands of years. Dennett proposes a variety of theories: First, "sweet tooth" theories. We have evolved a receptor system for sweet things, and in a similar way we might have a "god centre" in our brains. Such a centre might depend on a "mystical gene" that was favoured by natural selection because people with it tended to survive better.
Second, religions might be memes that infect our brains. They are not necessarily parasitic, but could be symbiotic, conferring advantages on those who are infected.
Third, religion might be favoured in sexual selection by females. For example, women might have preferred men who demonstrated sensitivity to music and ceremony, thus spreading genes for religious behaviour within the population.
Fourth, religions may be cultural artifacts, like money. They could have evolved because they make social life more harmonious, secure and efficient. Or else they could have evolved because they enable an elite to prey upon the ill-informed and powerless.
Fifth, religions may be rather like pearls, beautiful byproducts that arose in response to irritants, which then captivated human beings for no good reason.
The worry with the New Atheists, who are otherwise harmless and not particularly that deep in my book, is that they could veer towards illiberality. Dawkins most especially. Mostly they just come off as adolescent, maybe d–kheads a lot of the time. Which is fine; it’s a free country. They are not promoting communist gulags. They do practice psychological taunting, bordering on (mild) abuse I would say, de-humanizing and arrogant at times (Hitchens and Dawkins I’m thinking of now). Though they receive in truth far worse from so-called religious people, so that’s understandable if still not acceptable in my book.
What they miss is this–humans want their enslavement. Many humans that is. They want dogmas out of fear and if religion is destroyed then they will create atheists dogmas in order to fill in the gap. In other words, they are highly naive as to the depths of human evil. The evil they see as all outside implanted in us by parasitic religions. The truth often (sadly and more frighteningly) is that humans want and will create if needs be these parasites and inject themselves with them.
On the dark side, the most obvious criticism is that the book is not so much an argument as a tirade. It’s like an adolescent smug temper tantrum. Dawkins refers on a number of occasions to “sophisticated theologians”–though (un?)remarkably he doesn’t cite any by name. Who are these ethereal beings lurking in the background of the text? Has he ever read any? And why would I trust his judgment–as opposed to experts on the subject–on who is and isn’t a sophisticated religious thinker?...
One day (God willing) we will societally actually get over these Boomers and their egos and their unique ability to see everything through the spectacle of the 1960s cultural wars. But not yet sadly.
Read the whole post.
"...Underneath what Dawkins has written, philosophically (and I would add spiritually), is a naked display of power. The problem isn’t science. The problem is scientism–that is science taken from its proper context and applied as an ideology to all other arenas of existence without question.
The “whole of life”, in other words, is simply the description of how it (life) causally comes about. Power equals a hypothesis, an experimental test, and validation via evidence. It is about isolated scientists observing the laws of nature (so-called) usually alone or at most in a cliquish elite, who are too often infected with a lust for control of life. This is why Dawkins doesn’t understand communal (2nd-person) forms of being-in-the-world, only 3rd and 1st person. He’s not really in dialogue with nature. He’s not in dialogue with too many humans either."
Five monks from each school walked on the runway, then chanted prayers and wrapped up in a grand finale with confetti resembling lotus petals.
"We wanted to show the young people that Buddhism is cool, and temples are not a place just for funerals," said Koji Matsubara, a chief monk at Tsukiji.
... Harris declares 'the end of faith' only to celebrate the beginning of a new age of spirituality. That such a prominent rationalist is prepared to reclaim spiritualism in the name of science matters. When spiritualism, or mysticism, claims the status of rational knowledge or science, it ends up transforming what is essentially an ecstatic emotional experience into a knowledge claim about the nature of reality. These issues are not just theoretical. In countries like India, where spiritualism enjoys the blessings of the highest religious authorities, metaphysical beliefs that follow from mystical experiences exert a great deal of social influence. While India has a fairly large and advanced scientific workforce, science has not succeeded in displacing the authority of metaphysical truths from the cultural sphere...I don't think she understands correctly or precisely what Harris is or isn't endorsing, but that's another question - I still find her article useful to demonstrate how these matters are too complex for a rationalist, humanist, or even relativist platform. So much so, that on such platform you have to end up discarding something very, very essential to the grand human enterprise. Harris has done his best not to discard interiority, and not to discard deeper states of awareness, but he has failed to recognize higher structures, i.e. higher horizons that reconcile and integrate faith and reason in a marriage where everyone has to give up a little to gain so much more. Ken Wilber writes in his foreword to "The Marriage of Sense and Soul" (italics mine):
...Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences which can "uncover genuine facts about the world". He buys into the basic idea that what mystics 'see' in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds...
"... Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; therefore, the integration of science and religion is the theme of this book. If you are an orthodox religious believer, I would only ask that you relax into the argument and see where it takes you; I do not think you will be dismayed. The primary prerequisite I have placed on this discussion is that both science and religion must find the argument acceptable in their own terms. For this marriage to be genuine, it must have the free consent of both spouses. If you are an orthodox scientist, I would only suggest that, as you have a thousand times in the past when you were working on a problem, let curiosity and wonder bubble up, but in this case don't focus it on a specific solution. Simply let wonder fill your being until it takes you out of yourself and into the staggering mystery that is the existence of the world, a mystery that facts alone can never begin to fill. If Spirit does exist, it will lie in that direction, the direction of wonder, a direction that intersects the very heart of science itself. And you will find, in this adventure, that the scientific method will never be left behind in the search for an ultimate ground."Well, amen.
"...When Pullman kills off the Authority in his books, he's doing us all a favour. Rather than the mad Archon against whom the characters rebel, Pullman sides with the Dust, a barely detectable essence of permeating Divinity; a concept of God far more subtle, demanding more reflection, than pray-n-obey. I can see why the Zeus-worshippers don't care too much for Dust: They want their God throned, bearded and lightning-bolt chucking.See the whole piece by Jordan Stratford+. Nice comments.
The Magisterium is a metaphor for absolute power corrupting absolutely; to equate that with the Roman Catholic Church is to assert that Rome is exactly that corrupt power – an assertion I reject. I don't deny that the RCC has been this in the past, but certainly not in my lifetime. Get over it."
"...There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.
But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.
To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.
One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.
As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.
So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents."
Also sprach Sam Harris, the whole lecture here. There's a video of Harris giving these and similar arguments (link).
Now, clearly there can be a contemporary mysticism that does distinguish between prerational and postrational views of mind and life. This same mysticism is able to explain its main tenets in broadly rational terms, and present the transrational insight in accessible philosophical language, aided by a judicious measure of paradox and pointing to direct experience attained to only through methodical application of a discipline such as meditation coupled with a study of perspectives on reality.
The problem seems not to be in theism (which is no warranty of anyone's prerationality), or in atheism (which is no warranty of anyone's rationality), but instead in theists' and atheists', in Harris' words, "not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important", because in that case indeed they become less wise than the craziest in the other party.Theists and atheists, personalists and impersonalists, believers and skeptics, all are welcome to embrace what is their own full potential. Are they invited and actively encouraged to do so by their worldview? That seems to be the key issue, and the uniting human challenge.
Labels: meditation, religion, science
... So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.Sam Harris, from a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference in Washington D.C. on September 28th, 2007. Read the whole text here.
"...The only reservation I have with Harris's approach, is that, in his passion to wage intellectual war against the mythic membership, he fails to address the stages of moral development of people. Consequently, the stages of moral development applies to everyone, including Atheists. Thus, there are pre-conventional Muslims, conventional Muslims, post-conventional Muslims; pre-conventional Christians, conventional Christians, post-conventional Christians; pre-conventional Atheists, conventional Atheists, post-conventional Atheists. Meaning: Atheism is not immune to the extreme forms of fanaticism that Harris is ranting about. Although religion is indeed a big factor in stages of moral development, religion is not the root of all evil. Individual and social intelligences come into play along the way. Religion is a by-product of human (and collective) development, not a root cause. But I agree with Harris that religion is a source great suffering in the world; pre-conventional and conventional religions to be exact."
What made you write a new gospel?Read more about the book here.
FREKE & GANDY: We felt that a lot of people were getting bored of the old ones. On top of which, the Gnostics taught that the way to show you had understood the gnosis was by writing your own gospel, so we thought we’d have a go. Luckily we managed to talk Jesus into reprising his starring role. That was a bit of an unexpected coup, because we had no idea he was such a big fan of our previous books. Once we’d got Jesus on board we knew we had a potential bestseller on our hands.
On point one: Let me state clearly that in my view most mythic religion is not ridiculous poison. For many it is a noble and virtuous path of making sense of the world, living with decency, and striving to do what's best as humble servants of a loving God. The mythic religion of the poor, the uneducated, the backwards and underprivileged of society is not to be romanticized but neither should it be demonized as ridiculous. It's far too respectable a station of life for that, and if saying so draws the ire of the oh-so-respectable New Atheists, so be it. On point two: it's important to stress that post-mythic Christianity has progressed to decidedly orange and green and beyond levels.Thank you, Joe, excellent points! Read the whole thing.
Labels: psychology, religion, spirituality
"Normally I'm not a big fan of this (non)debate (so-called) between religion and science. The science is rarely, although sometimes defined, the religion never is---one kind of religion/faith is simply assumed and then argued from or about, depending on whether the person is pro or con.
The first question Dawkins answers by stating he is after "The truth". Watch how many times he drops the "t" word or the "R" word (reality).
Now you'll notice the truth is science. There is truth in what he says. And he is accurately describing his own position--he actually describes quite brilliantly the world he lives in, the space he inhabits."
