09.22.08
The passing of Buddhism?
Weinberg and Buddhism post from today.
Make no mistake: I am also critical of Buddhism, and also believe Buddhism may be passing away, for the simple reason that Buddhists themselves have often said so.
Gautama predicted it millennia ago, and almost got the half-millennium to century right (2400 years is the right measure). It was also a belief (although statements on this subject claiming a source in the era of early Buddhists must remain open to question) that epochs of religion ‘start the wheel of dharma’ in motion, and that the epoch of Buddhism would yield to something new.
Unfortunately this has generated the confusion over ‘Maitreya’ that has degenerated in the current New Age movement into a competition of gurus to found the ‘new Buddhism’, unable to grasp why they can’t succeed.
But Weinberg’s statements fail to consider that he is right for the wrong reason: Buddhism, and the other Axial religions are indeed passing away, but that seems to be the passageway to a new disposition or recreation of religion, a perilous circumstance that seems beyond the capacity of the current New Age era with its hopeless confusion of movements and gurus.
The world would be better off with the original Buddhism, stripped of its corrupt hierarchies and degenerations, but, just as Gautama predicted, the outer form of Buddhism is likely to fall to pieces.
We are in tremendous need of the highest level of leadership here, else the future will see only a wasteland of remnant bits and pieces of Hinduism/Buddhism proliferating in toxic forms.
So what can scientists contribute here? Nothing, I fear. They aren’t even in the right ballpark. They haven’t a clue.
I recommend a better study of secularism and the rise of the modern. (Especially in light of the eonic effect)
There you will see concealed what the future needs, but deeply concealed. The leopard stares out from the jungle with piercing eyes in the subtle transition from Kant to Schopenhauer, and you see the whole Upanishadic totality cast a brief light onto the secular sphere, and then go silent.
Schopenhauer is of interest here because he showed the way to the burial of the past and its renewal in a scientific context, with the Kantian discipline against metaphysics in effect.
So I would say that scientists need, desperately, without delay, ASAP, to recreate the educational system that is currently producing deadbeats of scientism, to a deeper understanding of their own secularism, since that is what they propose. So propose it, but do it right. Forget this Darwin junk and reductionist idiocy and look at the potential in the emergence of secularism as it really is.
The key here is not ‘religion’ as some abstraction, but the potential of human self-consciousness in the ambiguity of freedom. The archaisms of religion are not needed. Only the factor of self-consciousness as the realization of human potential is needed.
Man has a tremendously complex evolutionary software built in, but he is unable to use it, and doesn’t even know it is there.