12.18.08
Reinventing the sacred: the case of buddhism
Consciousness, meditation and the Dalai Lama
This is the third time I have referenced this article on Buddhism by Pigliucci. It must have me worried! But not for the reasons you might suspect.
Basically, it is a reality check for me on the sheer wilful ignorance of scientists on issues of religion.
It is, to be sure, the trickiest of questions, and I am almost tempted to say, exempt Christianity from the discussion on the grounds that its adherents have so corrupted it that it has ceased to be a religion. That won’t work, but it might keep Christians on their toes.
The case of Buddhism is completely different: it has managed, and I don’t refer to organized Buddhism, to preserve itself over several millennia, and the result is a series of insights into consciousness that deserve some place in our considerations. This is not a statement from an adherent or believer. Not at all. I have had to put my criticisms of Buddhism on hold as I confront, somewhat stunned, a snapshot of the incompetence of scientists on such questions.
Thus we find the arrogant dismissal of people who call themselves scientists like Pigliucci, people who won’t listen to anyone outside their closed caste, and who won’t bother to study what they condemn, and what certainly plan to destroy. I hope I am wrong, but after seeing what has happened in Tibet from the Chinese (the first of the post-Feuerbachian materialist devotees of the cult of scientism), destruction and murder is what will eventuate indirectly from these ignorant scientists.
Such people are dangerous, and I am mindful as Darwinism confronts a paradigm shift in the Altenberg materials, that what comes next could simply be more of the same.
In any case, the idea that Buddhists have a superior knowledge of consciousness than anything in science is a well-known finding, going back to the nineteenth century. For Pigliucci to be unaware of the issues makes me suspicious that scientists are even worse informed than I had thought, in which case they have no business giving us evolution dogmas.
In fairness, Buddhists are often their own worst enemies and cause scientists, in attacking some of their false formulations, to derail Quixote-style with the wrong argument:
Bond goes so far as to suggest that there is an area of research where Buddhism actually has achieved more than what science has produced so far: when it comes to studying consciousness, he says, Buddhism offers “a kind of science of introspection.†It’s worth quoting Bond in full here: “Whereas cognitive science’s best guess is that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal organization, Buddhists see it at some pure subtle level as not contingent on matter at all, but deriving instead from ‘a previous continuum of consciousness†— the Dalai Lama’s words — that transcends death and has neither beginning nor end.â€
The issue of introspection (except speaking in general terms) is a red herring. Introspection is the kind of mistake made by beginner Buddhists. This Buddhist thus misstates the issues.
The real issues are discussed in innumerable sutras of very precise lineage and statement. Scientists can no longer simply pretend this zone of historical culture doesn’t exist.
We don’t live anymore in the kind of cocoon that allowed Darwin to get away with a form of reductionist idiocy for over a century.
Scientists are losing their grip on the general culture, for the simple reason that they don’t have the methodology to deal with the core issues.