05.07.10
Posted in Kant, New Age, Schopenhauer at 4:02 pm by nemo
MBFM comment on Karmapa
MBFM raises the issue of the right ‘Buddhist dharma’ to pursue in the modern world. Original Buddhism is so elegant and simple that the steps would seem transparent, but they are not. Westerners rarely succeed at meditation, while Indians seem to know it all first hand. Deepak Chopra talks a good game, but he knows he is an idiot, and, running scared, gets up to meditate two hours a day in fine Indian style. I don’t recommend that or anything one way or the other, you can’t imitate such people, you are not an Indian, but consider the confusion of the situation.
The tradition as received is not really accurate history anymore, and the techniques may fail on a modern body type. I have seen one person from the New Age who spent five years trying to learn to sit in full lotus, and failing in disgust, to abandon sadhana forever. Rare is the westerner who can do that. Who cares. Sit with legs loose on in half lotus or nothing. Don’t be distracted by such nonsense. That’s a good example of the way the obvious will fail, when it is so ancient. Yet Buddhism has a truly modern tone to its core. What a pity. Many Buddhists have understood this and the prophesy of the new Buddha have been many, only to result in a thorgoughly hopeless idiocy of pretenders. Many ancients Buddhists, and Tibetans, saw the new age effect, but their solution isn’t destined to succeed.
I should note that Schopenhauer produced a good part of the answer to translating the issues into modern thought two centuries ago at the dawn of the New Age movement, which he witnessed. It is a reminder that few really understand ancient sutras, even those born in Tibet or India. As the sufis say, the tradition is not reborn in time, but beyond time, verbiage with a point, in their sugary mystical language. But be wary of Schopenhauer: it was not his intention to create a religion or a spiritual path. You can also get hung up on his metaphysical slant. He, and Kant, simply clarified the language of spirituality, lost to most traditionalists, and certainly to most, all!, Christians, who try to get sustenance from religious propaganda of the late Roman empire.
I should note that James, a earlier frequent commenter here, was often prone to links to various Buddhist groups from Thailand, the Hinayana stronghold.
I can’t really advise anyone here, save to note that the pitfalls pointed to at The Gurdjieff Con are horrific. But that way is vital and still alive. Almost.
The answer to these questions is comically simple: the Hinduism/Buddhism/Jainism of the Axial Age were already recreations of ancient lost teachings, and got many things wrong. But they did succeed in producing a new cycle. Modernity can do the same. But it is not a question of New Age reactionaries destroying modernity.
Modern man is a different body type. Try this: if you are allergic to meditation try meditating five minutes or so a day for two years. An absurd exercise, but if the alternative is nothing, then… And the alternative is almost always nothing for Westerners. Five minutes a day is a steady reminder that you are not meditating, or are you? It forces the issue of what mediation is. Don’t discuss it with people. This is also good if you are busy in modernity. You can’t graft meditation onto modernity armed with New Age cliches. You don’t have an hour a day to spare from the prison of the modern economy. Take five minutes a day, something that can succeed, to reflect on you situation in a sitting posture. One day the right way to proceed will appear to you, willy nilly. There are many variants to this procedure. Five minutes is hardly meditation, whatever that is, but what is, and this is a ‘good question’, as they say, in you existence, one that is absent from many of the fashionable New Age meditation retreats that make a mechanical hodgepodge of meditation.
That five minutes will remain a good question, spare you wasted time on psedo meditative gymastics, and induce a slowly rising panic that your life has been a waste, so long sucker. Then you can hopefully proceed to something real. As real, maybe, as meditating five minutes a day.
After that you can order a five ton Shiva Lingam like the kind in Jain temples for your back yard from India. With its economy booming the way it is you can probably have one shipped UPS. Cash or creditcard, maybe even via the Internet. It can be a real come on for your Tantrik path, the successor to your five minute good question phase.
A far better starting point is to reflect on the self-consciousness behind your ordinary consciousness. That is the real point, along with the arduous task of coming to understand your human software, a very difficult thing to do. It is sad but we usually spend 90% of our life trying to understand our human software, and then barely succeed. But it need not be hard. It is not however a puzzle you can solve by thinking about it.
You cannot get it from current scientific psychology, and you cannot get it from Christianizing religion, and you cannot easily get it from the sutras of antiquity, but the odds improve. That’s often the key to meditation, don’t know, just sit and wait.
All you can do is reflect on consciousness, will, and the power of attention, and look at the way that Nature in its strange wisdom has planted a spiritiual (bad word, wrong word) path dead center in modernity, built around the question of your self-consciousness, an evanescent state momentarily real in the act of attention. That’s it, the whole sutra.
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
I am not a guru, and don’t propose anything, but the ground of self-consciousness is the universal ground of human evolution, an invariant at all times and places, and religions have no monopoly on it, if they have any connection to it at all. Ancient men at the dawn of human speciation must have had the first taste of it, perhaps even stronger that what is common in modern men. In that sense man as man is what he always was, strangely stuck between two worlds, with a mysterious software that has flowered in uncommon times and places. Alfred Wallace came to understand something of this and quite briskly trotted away from his original view of evolutiion (which Darwin plagiarized).
In the issue of self-consciousness secularism is the ground for a truer higher religious non-religion of the future.
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04.04.10
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 4:01 pm by nemo
TAG for Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe selections scanned for The Gurdjieff Con
Although I won’t allow the material on this blog due to its slightly outrageous New Age evolutionism character, I nevertheless think it is worth reviewing J. G. Bennett’s postdarwinian construct, now more than a generation old, Read the rest of this entry »
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03.01.10
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 3:06 pm by nemo
Update (read the original post first, below):
James’ comment on UFO’s (which I must shy away from) minds me to consider a related issue: the clear implications of transcendental idealism, Platonic ideas, and the potential to ‘exist’ in some sense in a body of consciousness of some kind. The latter science fiction idea appears on the sidelines in Bennett’s work, where the author doesn’t seem to understand what he has discovered. The point is that life and consciousness are distinct, athough copresent in man, and that consciousness might as Bennett considers be the ’stuff’ at the low end of cosmic embodiment of some kind. We can see Buddhists almost making it to this kind of thinking, but rightly staying grounded in what they know. But they sense that the life boundary at the high end stops at the consciousness boundary at the low end. To be sure, consciousness in the ordinary sense (as opposed to the supercharged consciousness usually called ’self-consciousness) probably exists in the lowest forms of life, but that doesn’t really change the issue here. We have a hard time discriminating the forms of consciouness. Weird stuff, maybe not weird enough. This kind of model, properly understood, solves at a stroke many of the paradoxes and muddles of traditional spiritual thinking, if only we could handle it in some intelligent fashion (out of the ear shot of New Age cookie monsters in human form hot on the trail of GIGO versions of the Theory of Everything. Warning: this form of ‘existence’ would probably include the queen in Alice in Wonderland, ‘off with their heads’.
Now to original post: Ironic value of Bennett on evolution
Going through Bennett’s material on ‘evolution’ could backfire as solemn (and mostly stupid) converts to Gurdjieffianity suddenly get an idea of what is being said, and proceed to a mystical belief system or screed on evolution.
But I think not: Bennett’s view is New Age hokum, if you like, but actually still close enough to science to collapse via falsifying challenges. But this view is of use, not as a theory, but as a sketch with a set of questions that ordinary science tends to filter out of its deliberations.
I have been going through J. G. Bennett’s material on evolution in his fourth volume of The Dramatic Universe.
This is very controversial stuff, and I hesistate even referring to it here, my purpose being to help students of Gurdjieff see through the New Age hype.
However, Bennett was his own man here and raised some questions about human evolution that won’t go away. In the end these issues are beyond resolution.
I don’t think it is possible to resolve the mystery of human evolution. And Bennett, following the ancient Samkhya yogis whom he is following, shows one reason why: the ‘triads of samkhya’ are a form of mechanization and design argument combined in a non-dual logic that is beyond verification, totally, at least so far. That is very frustrating because it is just the kind of explanation that might resolve the confusion over design/mechanical theories now so polarized. As the idiocy of Gurdjieff students has made clear you will produce nothing but New Age mush if you go down this route.
There is an intelligent alternative: considering the framework of transcendental idealism as in Kant, with its noumenal/phenomenal complication, and then considering Schopenhauer and his thesis of the ‘will’.
The restraint here might make it possible to create a samkhya of intelligent guesswork, echoing Schopenhauer, giving us some idea of the way in which evolution in general and the evolution of consciousness might have come about.
The point here is that Schopenhauer stumbles on the queer way in which physical laws shade upwards into the mechanizations of ‘will’ that he makes central in his system.
But in the end the Kantian critique of our form of consciousness makes our current efforts highly dubious.
Bennett failed to see the potential of his own framework, and I can begin to see all sorts of ways his viewpoint could approach science (as he himself suggested in the middle of extravagant New Agisms). But all of this stuff is not falsifiable/verifiable science at this point. But it does ask us to repose our questions, and refrain from dogmatic certainties.
Bennett ironically chaotifies the design argument by actually inventing a demiurgic designer who is far short of divinity, embedded in nature, and beyond the bodies it sees into existence. I question that on the grounds that he has obviously reduplicated his argument: after all the trouble of importing Samkhya a designer is superfluous. The cosmic triads were to replace such myths by showing how a ‘design’ mechanism in nature could shape emerent entities. But OK Bennett has to have two sets of toys for the same job.
It is just this kind of unempirical possibility that Bennett makes, if not plausible, then a phantasm lurking in the background to make a mockery of the demonic brand of Darwinism, whose fate will be to destroy modernity if its devotees can’t come to their senses and see through their primitive scientism. But the answer is not to go off the deep end.
Bennett’s science fiction is not to be believed, but it is a warning that our current views are probably so far off the mark as to be delusive, to put it mildly. In any case the question of triads of the ‘wil’, in a stage of stretching Schopenhauer in a direction he didn’t intend, is intuition of something more than mechanical law but less than mystical design thinking. This ancient form of Indic naturalism, although not sound knowledge, is a beguiling idea about the possible solution to the evolution of consciousness.
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01.30.10
Posted in Evolution, New Age, neuroscience at 2:38 pm by nemo
The saga of Gopi Krishna
and further posts: http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/index.php?s=gopi+krishna
Gopi Krishna (at the risk of cynical attacks by devotees of scientism) lived a unique saga on the subject of kundalini and is one the surprising corners of New Age thought of the last generation. I went to debunk his work at The Gurdjieff Con, and then baulked, because he is not so easy to debunk.
He is significant because he hoped to bring the subject to science/neuroscience, and even to the domain of evolution.
Unfortunately, even as we know by hunch what is the case here, we can’t carry out his project, as yet. But what he indicated was a clarification and grounding of one of the most outlandish of New Age superstitions, in the process showing that the legacy of ancient Indian spirituality, long before Hinduism and Buddhism, contained a knowledge of latent human potential unknown to neuroscience (and rightly based only there), one that broke into the fragments we now see floating down the river of Hindu cultural wreckage.
Gopi Krishna almost breaks through to the domain of science, as he points to the objective steps (yogic concentration so rarely rarely achieved) behind his experiences. And in the end this impinges on the issue of human evolution, so completely missed by reductionist Darwinism.
His work then points unwittingly to the keys to human potential suspected by Alfred Wallace, and the grounds for his, Wallace’s, realization that Darwinism was dangerously false.
He is a grim reminder that we don’t even know the ‘man’ who evolved, homo spiens, let alone how that evolution occurred.
We should be wary of New Age abuse of the idea of evolution, but it is also true that current evolutionary theory is almost completely wrong on the subject of human evolution.
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01.09.10
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 1:13 pm by nemo
Bennett: DU volume four…
I am thinking of pursuing an extended commentary of J.G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Unvierse, if only as a partial expose of some confusing and potentially exploitative ‘New Age’ material. But the ‘exploitation’ lies with all the people hovering around his work, not so much Bennett himself, who was a fool to let himself be used by various sufistic characters.
His work is flawed, but contains the seed ideas for a possible commentary on evolution, certainly on the Darwinian view of human evolution.
Bennett raises the question first posed by Wallace: how do we explain the sudden entry into the realm of mind and consciousness that we see in man?
Bennett’s unique answers are, I think, flawed, and incorrect, but the way he raises them leaves some important questions.
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11.18.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 4:33 pm by nemo
As a critic of many New Age confusions, I am ham-strung by the false idiocy of Darwinists taking on New Age figures, who quite rightly see the problems with Darwin’s theory:
Wilber on Darwinism
False Darwinian attacks on Wilber
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09.15.09
Posted in New Age, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect, atheism, religion at 5:33 pm by nemo
Over at The Gurdjieff Con we have been looking at the writings of Danielou on Indian religion, and here’s another such book: Shiva and the Primordial Tradition
This perspective can throw external students for a loop, as they might feel less disoriented with the later, streamlined traditions of Buddhism (and the confused Hinduism) or Vedanta, and the various syncretist traditions of a mere twenty five hundred years since the Axial Age, when a secondary development transformed the ancient legacy.
But Danielou’s basic orientation contains, it seems to me now, somewhat wiser after a number of historical phantoms chased in Indian history, an important clue, hard to grapple with at first.
As a student of the Neolithic (and the eonic effect) the thesis makes sense and tells us in specific terms what is suspected from history: that the great religious streams of civilization originate in the Neolithic transition, the great Axial Age beyond the Axial Age.
Danielou is a cogent critic of monotheism, and the destruction it wrought in India and elsewhere, so the ‘New Atheists’ might consider this ‘atheist’ competition, whose sense of the ‘divine’ is very deep, but not anything to do with the watered down monotheisms of the occident.
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09.13.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 6:36 pm by nemo
Consciousness and evolution in Bennett
Over at The Gurdjieff Con I put up some material from J. G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe on the issue of consciousness and human evolution, material so far from standard science as to be New Age science fiction, material I don’t accept, but whose very existence provokes a realization of our ignorance of how consciousness evolved. A closer look shows a series of cogent questions dressed up in a strange systematics created by Bennett. One issue is that for Bennett consciousness is not the same as the ‘awareness’ (or what he calls sensitivity) of the animal realm (and hence also human/animal realm). This is the most difficult part of human psychology to understand, and one can argue that Bennett imperfectly understood it, then created a myth to account for it.
But the basic issue won’t go away: the emergence of mind is a great discontinuity of nature, as great as the passage from matter to life. The point here is that Bennett could be crazy as a koot, but has nonetheless produced a formalized model, however outlandish, to take into account this factor.
The result is a design argument of another kind that would shock the Discovery Institute gang out of its boots.
The point here for me, since I am not a follower of Bennett, or a believer in his system, is that the question of the evolution of consciousness won’t yield to anything simple that we know. It is suddenly obvious in reading this kind of mythology that we are still apes unable to account for the evolution of our own consciousness.
To see this issue more clearly, it is useful to consider the more standard terminology of religions such as Buddhism, where the issue is consciousness vs self-consciousness (instead of Bennett’s reversal of the terms) and to see that the distinction is one that we don’t normally adopt, but which is a clear part of even everyday experience: we have a consciousness that is mechanized but which suddenly undergoes a transformation (self-consciousness) at the moment of attention.
It is clear from even a superficial exploration of the powers of attention that human ‘consciousness’ is somehow beyond man’s full control. So the point Bennett is making is not a bit of fiction. There is a complexity to consciousness in man that can’t be explained by univalent theories: we have to explicate the basic mechanized consciousness of man (and animals) and the moment of self-consciousness in man (probably in my view, to disagree with Bennett, marginally present in animals).
The point of all this that we tend to suppress what we can’t understand from human potential, and then devise theories of evolution that ignore who man is! The game is evident in Darwinian scientism, and Alfred Wallace, at least, woke up to it, disavowing his previous views. Darwin was simply incapable here, and never escaped his natural selection myth.
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09.11.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 12:23 pm by nemo
Human evolution and the problem with mind
The philosopher J. G. Bennett was one of the original New Age Darwin critics (after nearly a century of such starting with Blavatsky) and, while I have tended to shy away from his approach, since I simply don’t agree with it, it is nonetheless of interest to go over some of his views of human evolution, since it proposes a design argument that is completely different from what we see current (from the Discovery group, et al.), and is thus an ironic reminder of the ambiguity of design arguments. It is also of interest because it adopts a different view of the bondaries of naturalism, being based on a version of Indian naturalistic Samkhya.
But, whatever the case, Bennett makes a strong case (at first confusing, due to his weird model and terminology) that mind is a different category of nature and is not the result of standard evolution (of the organism).
Agree on not, this challenge to conventional evolutionism is stark, for it raises the stakes on the whole question, in a way that the ID movement does not.
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09.09.09
Posted in New Age, religion at 5:13 pm by nemo
Vedic religion: Danielou passage
An passage from Danielou’s A Brief History of India, from The Gurdjieff Con where we have been examining the confusions of Indian religion, Indo-European migrations, and the controversy surrounding that.
The confusions of Vedism are one of the liabilities of the New Age movement, and beg for a clarification.
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08.22.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age, Science & Religion, globalization at 12:09 pm by nemo
Self, Meditating
By Robert Wright
In the midst of the debate over history, evolution and religion, we are now treated to Mr. Wright’s explorations in Buddhism.
I am having a problem here, not dissimilar to the problem we had with Sam Harris.
And this is the hypocrisy of promoting Darwinian scientism and reductionism, and the informing us that the author has a New Age hobby.
It is possible that these two are simply confused, and/or navigate toward Buddhism because they find some resonance with science.
Whatever the case, Darwinism and Buddhism are totally incapatible, and it would be simple courtesy to stop trying to get away with these finessed contradictions at the expense of readers, and in many cases very naive readers, who are being harmed by the Darwin paradigm.
We should consider then that Wright is either confused beyond recovery, a hypocrite trying to sell the Darwin paradigm even as he dabbles in Buddhism, or else a human mess about to have a nervous breakdown as his Darwin career collides with the svengali Buddhist ghosts who are obviously trying to undermine him.
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08.20.09
Posted in New Age, The Axial Age, secularism at 9:06 pm by nemo
The issue of Buddhism is a confusing one. But one thing to consider is that it came into existence in the wake of the Axial Age, and then straddled an entire age until the modern, at which point its impetus began to fail. We see the desperation in the attempts to cast its ’seeds’ in the West, as the whole structure collapses.
The Axial Transitions
The ‘new age’ is going to do something different, but it is a good question at this point what that might be. The impulse to imitate the past is compulsive. But the deviation of modernity into a culture of scientism is almost worse.
This short essay might help, if you forget the term ’sufi’, and ‘fouth way’ and try to understand the invariant of all religion, man’s self-consciousness.
If religions can’t help here, and so far they haven’t, then they will pass away.
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
A clue, is to see the way in the elements spawned by modernity: the path of self-consciousness disguised in secular terms.
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Posted in Evolution, New Age, Science & Religion, religion at 6:30 pm by nemo
After today’s post on Wright’s adventures in meditation I am little sorry to be so negative even as I am prompted to remind myself that I am right and should issue a warning at the destruction of Buddhism going on even as we speak. (There are hundreds of better sources on meditation than Wright, but a reductionist Darwinist doing meditation is invaluable deception to the technocratic elite, and the power elite idiots at the Times)
It is unfair to blame Robert Wright, the Buddhist sophisticates in the West are no less responsible.
Let us simply note that with figures such as Wright a strategy to impoverish religion is the substitute for doing away with them.
Let us at least be clear that Buddhism and Darwinism are not compatible. Buddhism is often attractive to those who respond to its theme of ‘no self’. The reality is that it assumes a greater self in some fashion, and proposes the liberation from the round of rebirth via meditation. The factor of rebirth, or reincarnation, however confused its frequent formulations, is fundamental to the whole perspective of Buddhism (and Hinduism, we should say, but Westerners are never Hindus by birth, so we can simplify the discussion) and yet the clear unspoken strategy with many now is to corrupt the original Buddhism by hyping meditation and dissolving the ancient framework.
The point here is that the human frame is larger than the phenomenal body, eschewing useless material-spiritual dualities that are misleading, and therefore the whole game is simply outside the assumptions of reductionist scientism.
Beware of all of it. It is very easy to corrupt something, very hard to arrive at the real thing.
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Posted in New Age, Science & Religion at 5:37 pm by nemo
August 19, 2009, 9:30 pm
Self, Meditating
By Robert Wright
As with Karen Armstrong the attempt to discuss religion in Robert Wright gets problematical with Eastern meditative issues, and religions like Buddhism, Hinduism.
I guess I am supposed to applaud this gesture, instead I condemn it as still more crap on religion from Wright.
Give people a break here. We don’t need Darwin fanatics rewriting Buddhism for us (and real Buddhists would never get a hearing in that trashy paper, the Times).
This is part of the technocratic strategy of neutralizing these more subtle Eastern religions that won’t yield to the tactics set against Christians.
One tactic is to commercialize, trivialize meditation and/or to promote its health benefits and/or stress reduction benefits, etc,…
Meanwhile the destruction of the real meditators, the Tibetans, proceeds apace.
That’s not mediation.
Do it in private, Mr. Wright. Spare us the idiot details.
A good cave at Almora, yep, that would be proof of intent.
These hybrids are toxic because the psychology of, say, Buddhism is not compatible with the dogmas of scientism/Darwinism. So a remaindered form is needed, courtesy of jerk offs like Wright (and Karen Armstrong)>
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08.09.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 2:04 pm by nemo
Enlightennext
Having criticized Arianna Huffington (or else the gang now running Huffpost) on the issue of hypocrisy on Darwinism, it is important to note the same thing in another variant in Andrew Cohen and his (stupid) magazine.
They never quite come out and criticize Darwin, being too savvy and cunning for that. At the same time they corrupt the term ‘evolution’ by using it in a false New Age sense, or distortion, whereby any groupie of Cohen or Ken Wilbur is ‘evolving’ toward something higher.
The same thing is evident in Ken Wilbur whose obvious anti-darwinism is concealed behind a lot of hot air and jargon.
Why not just be honest about criticizing Darwinism? A little honest backup could help.
That’s pure crap, and a dishonest confusion by a so-called ‘enlightened guru’ who is exceptional for being the confused asshole that he is.
People in the New Age world are afraid to stand up to these people who have nothing to offer behind the glitz of their movement promotion.
Meanwhile the secondary corruption of the term ‘evolution’ in a derivative, ‘evolutionary’, is an obvious (crypto-conservative or reactionary) is veiled political dig at the idea of revolution, etc, etc…., Cohen’s great ‘postmodern’ revolution against modernity.
Take a rain check and stay out of the clutches of these people.
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08.06.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age, ethics at 3:16 pm by nemo
The Strange Case of Francis Collins
I have frequently been critical of Francis Collins, and find the attempt to create a hybrid Christian Darwinism to be incoherent. But the current witchhunt against him by the New Atheists is entirely alarming, and the obsessive efforts of Sam Harris, of all people, in this direction are a head-scratcher.
Harris, who is a closet New Ager, with beliefs he put in writing on non-dual Vedanta in his End of Faith, ought to know better than to start putting Collins into a New Atheist inquisition.
The contradictions in Harris’ position are either severe confusion on his part, or else a deception brought on by the unexpected success of his atheism promotion, reqjuiring him to change his story and/or downplay his New Age/Buddhist (or whatever they are) beliefs.
The addiction to public attention spawned by a bestseller is easy grounds to conveniently downplay one’s real or previous beliefs to play to the gallery.
However, Harris has failed to get away with it.
Now, how is it that a student of non-dual Vedanta is having so much difficulty with Collins’ moral beliefs?
Here is Harris’ inqjuisitorial case against Collins:
Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008):
Slide 1
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.
Slide 2
God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.
Slide 3
After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.
Slide 4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.
Slide 5
If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?
I find these views to be not fully coherent. However, they express perfectly the gaping hole in Darwinism whereby the question of evolution and ethics fails to find a proper account, instead giving us the extreme reductionist scenarios of group selection/kin selection, scenarios that make no sense and fail to expicate moral judgment in all its complexity.
So, if Collins, as a Darwinist, sees the problem here with his own beliefs, it is not surprising that he should move to create a hybrid to resolve the problem.
What I find strange is that Sam Harris should start obsessing over Darwian fundamentalism here. Surely a man as intelligent as Harris, with a background in New Age religion, must realize the limitations of Darwinian theory on the question of ethics.
Harris is acting stupidly here, and his position is hard to fathom.
I have recommended several times that the style of Collins’ moral argument might be clarified by a Kantian discourse on science and freedom, along with the various components of his moral theories.
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08.03.09
Posted in New Age at 4:08 pm by nemo
Over at The Gurdjieff Con there is an interesting post on the significance of the factor of ‘will’ in human psychology: Bennett, the will, and the power of attention, along with a citation from J. G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe on the will and the power of attention.
Much current discussion from scientists is woefully limited in his general reach, as everything is reduced to a footnote to physics. That strategy slowly but surely drives people to revolt in protest, perhaps in a passive protest in the sense that science leaves people with nothing whatever by which to understand themselves.
The approach of someone like Bennett is a tonic for this regime of scientism, as it constructs what is, in principle, the simplest psychology, based on the plain vanilla elements of function, being, and will.
Whatever we make of that of one thing we can be sure: the absurd notions of reductionist scientism are going to endure a brief reign due to the power of technocratic propaganda and the glamor of technological Big Science, but if scientists persist in trying to create a religion out of Newtonian physics, the great grandchildren of the Romantic rebellion will rise to sweep away scientific culture.
The elements to a cultural solution are there already in the emergence of modernity. So, the exotic Samkhya aside, we need a clear realization of the limits of scientism (and its first born, Darwinism).
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07.30.09
Posted in New Age at 3:17 pm by nemo
Man, evolution, and magic
We have cited today Robert Wright’s naive, if not arrogant, attempt to dismiss shamanism. Not so fast, I would say.
As it happens we are proceeding at a critical examination of the thinker J.G. Bennett at The Gurdjieff Con. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe contains an amusing passage on the origins of magic.
As a fairly extreme New Age critic of Darwinism, Bennett’s view of human evolution would strike most as science fiction at this point, and I am not endorsing those views: they are a unique and exotic brand of the ‘intelligent design’ arugment, only this time the ‘designer’ is a ‘demiurgic world power’ who manifests in relation to human evolution to guide that. Pretty exotic stuff, but the point for me (I am after all trying to rescue some New Agers from the snares of this and other characters) is that, as Bennett amusingly notes, why on earth would anyone make up the idea of magic, if it was false? Now, in fact, some might do so, and we can, by reviewing the history here easily detect the parts that are made up and the parts that might ring true.
Bennett’s point is that we see magic in decline, shamanism in decline, and can make no sense of it. Most of all almost noone has ever seen a ‘magician’, thus making it seem plausible that the whole thing is imaginary.
With Bennett, it is caveat lector. But then the same is true of Darwin dummies, who are uniquely ignorant in their boobhood.
All authorities agree that magic was the earliest cultural agent in human life: but no one can explain how magic started. It is simply ridiculous to suggest that the thought of claiming magical powers popped into the mind of some gifted Neanderthal youngster. One must make a determined effort to visualize the situation. Hunters are notoriously superstitious: why not Neanderthal hunters? Why should they not have had, spontaneously, notions of sympathetic magic and only later have looked among themselves for a suitable operator to perform the rites. Again, this is obvious nonsense. It is totally impossible to picture the origin of magic except through some deliberate action of a man who knew what he was doing and why.
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Posted in New Age at 2:01 pm by nemo
World History and the Eonic Effect has an extensive set of critiques of New Age confusion, New Ages is the start page, continue with the subsequence continuations.
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Posted in General, New Age at 1:54 pm by nemo
Do Shamans Have More Sex?New Age spirituality is no more pure than old-time religion.
By Robert Wright
Posted Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 1:59 PM ET
Wouldn’t it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the human spiritual quest had been corrupted by the “relentless onslaught of Western scientific materialism” and “dogmatic male-dominated religion”? Back when there were shamans—spiritual leaders—who could plug us into “the realm of the magical,” show us “the reality behind apparent reality,” and thus lead us to understand “how the universe really works”?
The quotes come from Leo Rutherford, a leading advocate of neo-shamanism, which is a subset of neo-paganism, which is a subset of New Age spirituality. But the basic idea—that there was a golden age of spiritual purity which we fallen moderns need to recover—goes beyond New Age circles. You see traces of it even in such serious scholars as Karen Armstrong, who wrote in A History of God that early Abrahamic religion had created a gulf “between humanity and the divine, rupturing the holistic vision of paganism.”
As the author of the just-published book The Evolution of God, about the history of religion, I’m primed to do some debunking. But before I start, I want to stress two points: 1) I think it’s great for people to find spiritual peace and sound moral orientation wherever they can, including neo-paganism; 2) I don’t doubt that back before Western monotheism took shape there were earnest seekers of a “holistic vision” who selflessly sought to share that vision.
When it comes to debunking New Age religion, I think few can compete with ‘me’ (nemo at Darwiniana!), so it is not in the name of some agenda that I find Wright’s attempt to debunk ‘New Age religion’ a little bit naive, not to say ridiculous.
The question of shamanism is very complex, but it is not the same as the issue of New Age ‘religion’.
The psychic archaeology of the shaman is simply unknown to us.
The roots of the ‘New Age’ movement are much clearer, and go back to the Axial Age, and before.
To take a pot shot at shamanism in the name of debunking New Age religion is a bit outrageous.
We are talking about the immense complexities of Hinduism/Buddhism/Sufism, and much else.
Wright, most probably, has zero knowledge of these traditions but wishes to insinuate instead, on the way to his great secular vision.
Trash. Why do these hypester journalists get so much press, and those with some knowledge here nothing at all?
Let’s issue a challenge: screw up the courage to mention, that’s it, just mention, the tradition of ‘enlightenment’ in, say, Buddhism.
Note how these propagandists almost dare not do that little bit: it raises difficult questions they certainly can’t answer!!!
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07.27.09
Posted in New Age, Science & Religion at 12:47 pm by nemo
Science Is in the Details
Harris’s attempt to evaluate Collins is a strangely arrogant, and extremely ignorant piece of thinking.
I can’t for the life of me think who is qualified for the job Collins is taking on.
Harris’ review of Collins’ religious foibles is alarming in the extreme.
I have criticized Collins’ views’ a number of times, but I find the current review of his religious beliefs as disqualifying him for the NIH disgusting.
Consider this bullshit from Harris’ article.
If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”
Why should Dr. Collins’s beliefs be of concern?
There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.
At least Collins grasps that Darwinism has a problem with the evolution of ethics.
To Mr. Harris I would say there is an epidemic of Darwinian stupidity at work in the United States. That Collins should be confused by the issue of ethics and evolution is not surprising, but at least he sees the problem that Harris can’t see.
Harris is a hypocrite: he is a closet New Ager who believes in Buddhist psychology, and this he will hide from the public.
He will corrupt that psychology, in public, to deceive that public, apparently. And he turns around and beggars Collins over his moral beliefs not squaring with Darwinism.
Harris and his ilk are moving into areas such as Buddhism to destroy them in the name of secularism. Be ware of such phoneys.
I think we are without qualified scientists for any kind of cultural task. They are all so confused they cannot function.
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06.12.09
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, New Age, secularism at 6:50 pm by nemo
RG mail
Or: Is It “Mean” to Tell Someone Their House is on Fire?
by Suzanne Duarte
Culture Change (May 13 2009)
You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place. – Gurdjieff
I find this perspective significant, but treacherous, liable to New Age delusions of what constitutes change.
The quote from the sufi type Gurdjieff, while of interest, is likely to be misleading in the extreme. If we take the statement at face value it should warn us of the dangers apocalyptic reactionaries who have never acknowledged modernity and will blame that modernity for collapse of ecology. Especially with a figure such as Gurdjieff, the concealed agenda is not clear to idealist students Buddhist PR texts. In any case, the statement from Gurdjieff is a injunction to revolution from the right, the extreme right, one that wishes to destroy democracy, rights, freedom, autonomy, but not the system that got us in trouble, capitalist economics.
I would translate the statement from Gurdjieff (assuming I accepted its dubious premises about ‘awakening’) that you can never awaken using the same system of capitalist economics that put you to sleep in the first place.
Modernity is not responsible for our predicament. It is the strange character of the economic system that arose inside that new age.
In any case I wouldn’t hire the Gurdjieff as a consultant for your troubles. Recall the age he lived in, the ambiguity of his allegiances, and the rest of it.
Also be sure to read Nietzsche’s fine print about the genocidal eugenic project he would like to see to destroy modernity.
Dearest Ones of Future Generations,
I thought you might find it interesting to hear what I’m observing of those people I know about who are just waking up to what the state of the planet is. Read the rest of this entry »
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05.19.09
Posted in Evolution, New Age at 1:34 pm by nemo
Confusing ‘evolution’ and ’sadhana’: a modern distortion
James said,
May 18, 2009 at 6:21 pm ·
It is rather odd that they are attempting to graft “evolution” onto the dharmic religions and it probably reveals that these people don’t understand either topic. Since the whole point of Buddhism is to achieve the “state” that isn’t subject to conditions or differentiation, what are these people really talking about? Are we even sure that “real consciousness” has any causal efficacy?
I think we can see a lesson from the eonic effect, the Axial Age, and the special challenge to modernity, still another ‘axial’ age, posed by these traditions. In fact those traditions are falling into a subtle decay, and we can see why: they are too far from their ancient roots.
We need to be vigilant and accept the challenge to reinvent them for a modern world that is perfectly compatible with their essence, which is eminently recast for a secular society. But, as we see, that recasting can turn out to introduce fallacies into the originals.
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05.18.09
Posted in Evolution, General, New Age at 7:21 pm by nemo
Confusing ‘evolution’ and ’sadhana’: a modern distortion
James said,
May 18, 2009 at 6:21 pm ·
It is rather odd that they are attempting to graft “evolution” onto the dharmic religions and it probably reveals that these people don’t understand either topic. Since the whole point of Buddhism is to achieve the “state” that isn’t subject to conditions or differentiation, what are these people really talking about? Are we even sure that “real consciousness” has any causal efficacy?
The whole question has turned into a hopeless confusion of bad terminology, and then everything gets ’sausaged’ by New Age hypestars, often selling magic crystals as a sideline.
The concepts and language of dharmic aspirants in the age of the Upanishads stretching into the age of Buddha (the Axial Age in India!) had an efficacy and effectiveness that disappeared later, and doesn’t exist today.
The idea of ‘conscious evolution’ has multiple ambiguities. For some it is a way of saying, let’s replace the amoral Darwinism with ‘conscious action’ as the evolutionary. It is an honorable impulse and a valid perspective, a challenge to social darwinism.
There is also a dark side to the term: for some ‘consciousness’ was to become the replacement for ethical action, whose rationality was in doubt.
(Even Rajneesh fell forthat one).
Further, in a figure like Gurdjieff a variant of this arises: the ‘work’ is ‘evolutionary’ and anything goes.
We forget he was entangled in the spectrum of early twentieth century New Age thought, mixed with fascism, evolutionism, social darwinism, and anti-democracy.
We need to recast the whole question of spiritual terminologies and psychologies. It shouldn’t be that hard, but in practice everything starts to hybridize and proliferate, until finally it gets commercialized, and the result is: entropy.
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