04.30.09

Complexity of human evolutionary psychology

Posted in New Age at 6:19 pm by nemo

I promised another post on J.G.Bennett, in the previous post, Matter, life consciousness, but maybe that was enough. Dealing with Bennett is impossible at this point, as he carries too much baggage to be believable in the current culture.
But modern civilization is lacking a decent brand of ‘spiritual psychology’, which should rebranded ‘evolutionary psychology’, and flounders between Christian theology, where such a psychology is non-existent and the realm of scientism, where such a thing is also absent, and where an alarming set of delusions has taken root, with the fanatic imprimatur of science.

Bennett made a valiant attempt to correct that, but the result in his book The Dramatic Universe attempts too much, and ends up in a speculative mishmash. That’s a pity, because if you read his book almost archaeologically, throwing out all the junk, you find a core of ancient Samkhya, and a few basic structures that might be extracted and put on a reasonable basis, as an insight into spiritual pschology issues. That core revolves around the ancient Samkhya, whose understanding has been lost, but which suddenly springs to life again in Bennett.

Unfortunately you can’t discuss such things either with scientific audiences, or, sadly, even New Age audiences. There is a yahoo group devoted to Bennett: the mental mush that is visible there is a severe warning against bringing such an author into public discussion, like sellling alcohol to Indians.
But there is no reason why anyone who can read betweent the lines, discipline himself with Kantian critiques, might not pursue Bennett’s tome The Dramatic Universe to get a glimpse of how a real spiritual psychology might be constructed (but such a thing is still absent in that book!) for modern society.
Short of that, a study of Kant, maybe a reading of Schopenhauer, might help (Bennett quietly uses a Schopenhauer idea of ‘will’ to interpret Samkhya, a brilliant insight) might at least give a warning that the current psychologies in fashion are not adequate in any way.
In any case, human psychology is very complicated and could never have evolved by a Darwinian mechanism, as Wallace finally realized, tossing in the towel on ‘Darwinism’ (Wallaceism) and moving on to something else.
The entire Darwin succession ought to do likewise. There is no way trying to impose Darwin on world civilization can succeed, so why inflict this failed obsession?

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04.26.09

Sufis: the biggest bums in spiritual history

Posted in New Age, religion at 6:58 pm by nemo

This blog has been consistently critical of Karen Armstrong, and absolutely scathing on Sufism.
Now the two connect, and I may need James to restrain me from foaming at the mouth, no… I can handle it.
Armstrong dishes out some cliches on the subject. Don’t believe any of it.
Sufis almost always get a good press, but it is a terra incognita in which many are lost. Propagandists like Armstrong should suffer the same penalty as the victims conned by the come ons of such.
I truly resent such asshole idiots talking up sufism since it is such people who misled me into the sufi theives den many years ago.

To be sure, the majoritarian Sufi phenomenon is no doubt benign, in Islamic countries, and elsewhere in the superficial forms promoted by its pious and ignorant adherents. Sufism in that form is a slight variant of Islam itself.

But real sufism is a ferocious and very equivocal phenomenon. With violent occultists and self-styled devils who are on the prowl to invultuate their victims. Their contempt is enough to justify mass murder, I have heard such talk with my own ears, and from the ‘real’ sufis, who peddle baraka and steal it back, knowledgeable monstrosities. They must be chuckling at the slide into slaughter in Iraq, courtesy of the Americans.

Gurdjieff, a destable exemplar, at least was honest enough to call himself a devil.

I won’t continue. Sufism is religious shit at this point, the most stinking kind. Don’t believe these promoters, least of all an ignoramus like Armstrong. Five minutes with real sufis and she would a whimpering idiot, carried out in a straight jacket.
Karen Armstrong discusses Sufism

Sufism is a marvelous form of Islam and would do anybody good anywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

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04.25.09

New Age Larry Flynt competition

Posted in New Age at 7:08 pm by nemo

Comment on Andrew Cohen…

James said,
April 25, 2009 at 6:38 pm ·
Great…the New Age Larry Flynt. He might as well stop beating around the bush (no pun intended) and admit that he is a pervert.

Close, but the real Larry Flynt for the New Age is E.J.Gold and his sidekick Archibald the ‘ArchDruid’, the founder of the San Francisco Ball, and an Al Goldstein competitor. A sufi school run on the profits of SF porno is a Flynt clone to the t.
I wonder how many people realize the gangster game run by this sufis?
As to Cohen don’t be unfair: his sale pitch after so many sex pervert gurus is to keep his **** in his pants, and not screw his female followers.

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More crap from Enligntenext mag

Posted in New Age at 5:25 pm by nemo

Month after month the same recycled crap from Andrew Cohen, who is probably getting desperate, another issue on Sex.

I noticed an article on Swedenborg (I will have to read it for free in the bookstore when I get to Barnes and Nobles), The Buddha of the North.
Naturally, the mystic folks at Andrew Cohenville will do a Swedenborg number and omit any reference to Kant, the Sage of the North.
In all fairness, Kant studies suffer the reverse problem and too frequently omit the historical reference to Swedenborg when they discuss Kant’s critical system, or its history.
Thus students of Kant often fail to connect with the way in which Kant’s (bookish?) contact with, and critique of, Swedenborg is the backdrop to his famous and early Visions of a Ghostseer, and thus one of the stealth themes of those later critiques. Clearly Kant was interested/frustrated, and partly inspired/revolted by Swedenborg to adopt a critical stance toward the kind of false mysticism that Swedenborg (as far as I know) peddled ad infinitum. But Swedenborg, like so many, had a kind of mushy contact with a mysterious something.
Kant’s critiques are thus both unsatisfying to New Agers who are prime metaphysical basket cases, abetted by guttersnipes like Cohen, and discourses of last resort, after you have wasted many years on the bogus fronts produced by New Age spirituality peddlers, and, I fear, all too often Hindu spiritual gurus (whose entire tradition was ripped off, and Sanskritized, with the addition of the law of caste and the bogus Manu material of the Aryans tacked on).
This subterranean current in Kant is one of the beguiling open secrets of his biography and philosophical development, and is a tonic, or might be, for many New Agers getting overdosed by people like Wilbur, and Cohen. It is also an interesting duet of the north and an interesting and seldom told history. If I am not mistaken Kant’s term the ‘insensible world’ comes from Swedenborg.

Andrew Cohen is a pathetic case. He represents Neo-Brahminism with a Jewish face, caveat emptor, and was made into a fake Buddha to keep stupid gentiles in line. The conservative gurus of India think only Jews and Hindus have a spiritual potential, and treat all others as human garbage, very politely.
Thus spake the gurus of India. I fear they destroyed Cohen in the most subtle way possible. I feel truly sorry for him.

Moral: don’t hang around gurus waiting to get zapped. Don’t! NOT!
You reach ‘state 4′ (historical termiation) (forget the crap term ‘enlightenment’) ALONE, following your own way. And you have to fight the endless round of predators doing namaste as you go along.

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04.20.09

Armstrong, Thurman sausages

Posted in New Age at 7:59 pm by nemo

We can see Buddhism biting the dust. The Spiritual Quest – Karen Armstrong & Robert Thurman

This one is a head-scratcher. What on earth is that idiot Karen Armstrong doing hitched up with Robert Thurman, who I had thought had some connection with Tibetan Buddhists? Perhaps he has no connection. Another abused (jewish) front for the invisible college.
Armstrong always get a strange deference as a religious expert, and it is shocking what a mishmash she makes of everything she touches.

There was a good chance the issue of the Axial Age could have entered public consciousness to demonstrate something about the evolution of religion, but instead we got Armstrong’s ripoff and its dreadful sausage machine of monotheism and Buddhism.

Buddhism can’t survive too much of that much longer.

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04.18.09

Eagleton on the postmodern

Posted in New Age at 3:10 pm by nemo

Culture & Barbarism
Terry Eagleton plays the postmodern, pro/con, but is there such a catergory? The decline of modernism is a better description, despite the wish of many to refound a new age beyond the modern.
As students of the eonic effect we know that won’t work. The rise of the modern is too complex, with a hidden dynamic impossible to imitate. Why should we need to? A religious postmodernist wishes to undo modernity in the name of religion? Study the effects of modernity on Christianity, starting with a consideration of its state before the Reformation. We will hear no more of that.
The solution, actually, is to fulfill a new ‘modern’ style of religion. Christianity is stuck in the era of the Axial age and its later history. Religion must move on. Perhaps overcome itself, or start from fundamentals. The New Atheists aren’t much threat there. They are staking their own place in the modern.
The false polarization of modernity as anti-religion fails to see that the Reformation began the modern era. What it should be after that, hmm, Christians have shown very little insight into position. But secular they are, as any. By definition, however.

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04.05.09

Newsweek’s The End of Christian America

Posted in New Age, religion, Science & Religion at 2:37 pm by nemo

The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

These statistics are possibly misleading. Twenty years ago was the height of the New Age movement as untold numbers of ‘Christians by birth’, with far more sophisticated critiques of Christianity than science types could imagine, moved into a different ‘religious’ mode altogether. It is possible to say that religion has progressed in that interval, not receded.
Getting past Christian dogmas can accelerate religious enquiry in new directions. The attempt by the Dawkins cult to monopolize such developments with a puerile and badly thought out ‘atheism’ (what of the magnificent Buddhist variety?) is a distraction. An immense number of propagandsists are rushing to fill this void.

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04.01.09

Religion and secularism

Posted in New Age, religion, secularism at 7:41 pm by nemo

The issues discussed in the previous post, Beyond Buddhism, actually are the same issues people grappled with in antiquity, and there is a short section from World History And The Eonic Effect on this: A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
The idea of the ‘fourth way’ is a distant echo of a primordial idea of spiritual democracy, one that by the time we heard of it was already coopted by the forces of cultural reaction and social domination, Read the rest of this entry »

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Beyond Buddhism

Posted in New Age, religion at 7:20 pm by nemo

Secularists misunderstand secularism?, and Misunderestimating Tibetan Buddhism.

James and I have a tendency to challenge secularism, and then often interject a Buddhist theme on that score. In terms of the misunderstanding of religion so rampant in the cult of scientism that is not inappropriate but it fails to grapple with the real ‘New Age’ issue which is that Buddhism is itself, as many Buddhists have said, something surviving from an earlier era of man, and, whatever its profundities, a stampeding elephant unable to find its place in a society of the future. Read the rest of this entry »

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03.29.09

New Ages, New Age movements

Posted in New Age at 7:58 pm by nemo

The discussion of Tibetan Buddhism is strangely caught up in New Age mythologies, and these are discussed in World History And The Eonic Effect: New Ages.
However Buddhists, in some cases, were well aware of the coming of a new era, although its form was not what they expected.
I have perhaps been too harsh to New Age movements, but nothing in what i have said denies them their right to exist!
In fact, such movements, as Schopenhauer chronicles it (among others), were built into modernity from the start.

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03.14.09

Reinventing the sacred

Posted in New Age, religion, secularism at 4:51 pm by nemo

Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing The Sacred is an honorable exercise, but one that stumbles into terra incognita fairly quickly, inducing instant failure of the enterprise. A theory of self-organization, some Spinoza, how beat that for the next paradigm? Problem is that reductionist science isn’t even in the competition, and noone is going to be much interested in a form of ‘reinventing the sacred’ that take away five thousand years of religion and replaces it with dish water spinozism.
Here’s a link to World History And The Eonic Effect online wherein I do NOT reinvent the sacred, but show, tenuously perhaps in a fashion not at first clear, that the ‘sacred’ is already there in the form of cultural secularism, a latent or implicit potential waiting to be realized.
This view will not be popular with New Age anti-modernist gurus, reactionary sufis, and a lot of other shady characters peddling traditionalism.

I don’t recommend using the term ‘fourth way’ for personal or practical efforts (it also has a very shadowy usage in various cults): I use it here to make a point.

6.6.3 A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra

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03.12.09

Passing of Christianity

Posted in atheism, New Age, religion at 2:12 pm by nemo

The coming evangelical collapse
by The Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer

Reposted from: Dawkins site

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

I am not confident in such prophecies, but have always felt that despite the resurgence of fundamentalism the secular trend would prove stronger. Please note that this article speaks of Christianity, not religion. Discourses on this subject are too often from New Atheist types or scientists who promulgate scientism against religion.
This article is far more cogent and speaks of Christianity. (Actually it is about evangelicals, and broods over a new form of Christian denominationalism)
Let me note that Christianity has a lot of momentum. I myself would be ware of predicting its demise.

Although I never use the eonic effect for predictions, it is obvious from the overall pattern that it points to that the ‘modern transition’, as with the ancient Axial Age, shows a sudden ‘religion in motion’ phenomenon, as the old is set aside, and something new comes to the fore. This is very very obvious from the Axial phase of the eonic effect, but less obvious from the modern period, where the rise of secularism produced a transitional form, Protestantism, whose fate is unclear, but, to me at least, ‘sealed over the long term’. But I could be wrong. The problem here is that Protestantism and Christianity are/are not the same. Protestantism is thoroughly modern, as good as anything else in that respect. Of course, that is a bit quibblish.
I suspect as the eonic effect makes clear that this ‘modern’ off spin of Christianity will shuck off its snake’s skin and turn into something else, thus satisfying its change dynamic. The real future will probably spring from some combination of the New Age movement and general secularism. But I doubt, depending on how you define religion, that religion as such will fail to survive the passing of Christianity.
In any case, the New Atheism is already a clear example of a ‘New Age religion’ in formation, and a stupid one at that. But in all fairness the New Atheist movement is an almost perfect example of the ‘New Age’ effect spawning post-Christian organizations of civil society, but its formation is, to me at leas, far too narrow. But history and religious evolution is like that, superficial things arise and fall and replace each other.
Before secularists celebrate the passing of Christianity, remember the case of Ron Hubbard. Hucksters and con men in droves are licking their chops to produce gnostic con game substitutes, spiritual exploitation of the Predator gurus.
You will soon feel nostalgia for your Christian kindergarten.

So long sucker.
Read the rest of this entry »

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02.23.09

Booknotes, AIT/OIT and Human Devolution

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution, New Age at 8:21 pm by nemo

In the library today, bit of an India day, looked at: Hinduism: A Short History (Oneworld Short Guides) (Paperback)
by Klaus K. Klostermaier

Our discussion here before on the Aryan Invasion Theory vs Out Of India Theory, and other posts, has tried to show an open mind on the issue of the Out Of India hypothesis (since I tend to fall by default into the old-fashioned AIT camp). I want to get this one straight, but it appears to be not so easy.
It is hard to make headway here. So, looking through Klostermaier’s book I find much that is problematical: this book is solidly in the OIT camp, but all at once something seems awry here: the composition of the Rig Veda pegged at 4000 BCE forces me into a double take.
I simply can’t accept without a specialist review, or several, the idea that Vedic Sanskrit with its clear resemblance to Homeric Greek sources so early, several millennia earlier. Surely something is wrong here.
Languages change a lot in a thousand years, the change from 4000 BCE to the period of the Upanishads would have been very great indeed.

Book Two, for today:
Human Devolution
A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory
Michael Cremo

I haven’t read much of this! The information at Amazon is useful. Cremo is of course ‘notorious’ and the Darwin community would go ballistic on anything he did.
This book is so packed with data that it is hard to evaluate in a short look.

But the details apart, and the probable failure of most explicit ‘devolution’ theories, the fact remains that the project of an evolutionary theory can’t be completed unless we can resolve the unseen aspect of man’s total anatomy.
Perhaps more on this book some other time. It tends to generate a sense of hopelessness, despite the cornucopia of interesting tidbits (which make it worth looking at, a Vedic perspective on Darwinism being of public interest for the record).

You could do all this much better without the Hindu wrapper using the Schopenhauer framework.

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12.12.08

Psychic delusions

Posted in New Age at 5:48 pm by nemo

Comment on Dawkins interview of Derren Brown

James:
This interview is unintentionally hilarious because Dawkins doesn’t seem to realize that he is a member of the group that he is criticizing. A charlatan who has convinced himself that he isn’t a charlatan.
From Dawkins interview, 2008/12/12 at 5:01 PM

I am not familiar with Derren Brown, but it is clear that Dawkins precipitates a ‘joke’s on us’ comedy routine on humanists/skeptics, charlatans denouncing charlatans. Those who claim psychic knowledge are almost always confused or victims of imagination, but the final generalization about psychicism ends up false.
Much in this realm deserves the exposes of these skeptics, but the basic issue won’t go away.
It’s why the Buddhists recommend traveling light: seek first the realities of your inner dog nature (?) and the rest will be granted unto you/thou (?)
Something to that effect.

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12.08.08

Finishing The Dramatic Universe

Posted in Evolution, New Age at 8:53 pm by nemo

J.G. Bennett and Samkhya’s evolutionary psychology

I finished rereading the four volumes of J.G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe, and feel, as before, that science fiction has been passed off as science, but at the same a kind of begrudging respect for the enormity of his effort. There is an irony here: the book is hardly more fictional than the standard Darwin paradigm! Bennett at least faces all the problems that a real theory of evolution must face: from the origin of life to the emergence of man, to all the other problems with evolutionary biology that are currently swept under the rug and said to be solved by natural selection.
One feels an impulse to share something, but the book is a kind of taboo.
Since the book is totally unacceptable, few will read this book, few will encounter therefore its outlandish side, along with its curious profundity, and the book will remain the reader’s secret, the secret of a few, a book rapidly seen through the rear view mirror as knowledge progresses…what? We are still back in 1859, as to evolution.
The interest of the book lies in the ‘scratch pad’ tinkering that is thrown together to make an argument. One of the most provocative is the way in which the idea of three dimensions of time is taken as a construct for the understanding of cosmology and, indeed, psychology. This idea leads to the idea of the dimension of ‘hyparxis’, and, remarkably, the relationship of teleology, the ‘hyparxic future, i.e. potential’. The point is that a very advanced form or thinking seems to go over a barrell, but in the process spots the host of difficulties that haunt Darwinism. Bennett actually faces up to what would be required for a teleological science, in his view, an orthogonal dimension of a virtual future, the hyparxic dimension. And he actually hired a General Relativity expert to do the Minkowski and tensor math to produce a space-time metric for space, and three dimensional time.
The idea of the hyparxic future is one of the most provocative in the book, but there are literally dozens of others. The combination of Einstein level intelligence and New Age loose thinking is completely disconcerting and frequently brilliantly insightful, if not mythological.

Its most significant challenge to current ideas of evolution lies in the way he treats consciousness as a ‘cosmic’ or hypernomic (see the linked post) energy that is injected in man at a certain stage of his evolution, it doesn’t evolve at all. Consciousness in Bennett’s sense is different from standard usage for which he uses the term ‘sensitivity’. ‘self-consciousness’ would be the right translation. This switch in terminology is confusing, but once you get used to that his point is unnerving. A operation of cosmic entities emerges to create a species where the factor of ‘consciousness’ appears for the first time. OK, nice story, but with a point. Scientists don’t even understand what ‘consciousness’ is, yet claim to explain it via natural selection.
As the ID people realize this kind of stupidity can’t go on forever.
It is a sobering read, and it makes me realize that the theory situation is a bit grim.
Darwinism aren’t even close to a theory of evolution. They aren’t even as close as the most demented creationists, who are at least clear the Darwinian situation is an embarrassment to modern culture. And, worse, they don’t know that they don’t know, and have frozen progress for so long that science has come to a halt. Actually science is progressing on all fronts, even in the evolution field. But it hasn’t explained evolution. And probably can’t explain it.

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12.06.08

It’s All God — Amen, Om, Whatever

Posted in New Age at 2:00 pm by nemo

It’s All God — Amen, Om, Whatever
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted December 6, 2008.
Eliezer Sobel bowed, chanted, nude wrestled, meditated, and overdosed on ‘shrooms in a 40-year search to find God. But he still feels empty inside.

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12.01.08

More on the thinker J.G. Bennett

Posted in Booknotes, New Age at 3:56 pm by nemo

James on More on Reinventing The Sacred

James said,
December 1, 2008 at 2:03 pm · I haven’t read Bennett, but from what I gather the main value of his work is that it gives a sense of what a psychology of the future (i.e. beyond reductionist and spiritual fallacies) might look like even if one can’t take the specifics of his work seriously. Would you say that Bennett is out of Wilber’s league? Maybe this is like asking someone to compare the skills of two garbagemen.

Bennett’s work was something from long ago, for me, the period of the seventies, when his book was published, or completed. I went to a lot of trouble to forget him! But recently it has seemed as if I was too harsh, or that at least the history of his approach deserves a place, in the history of universal systems, from Hegel onward. Reading Kauffman makes me realize that current science even in its future paradigm shifts isn’t going to really get straight on man.

Often you understand people much later, it’s a lot to digest, starting with General Relativity. Perhaps Bennett’s day will come. One reason I reconsidered his work is that, without being unkind, it seems to me that the work of Wilbur hasn’t done the job, or has bottomed out as too plastic. Wilbur, despite the resemblance of the two, can hardly get anywhere near Bennett who, just at the point of kaluza/klein theory in General Relativity physics in the twenties and thirties, popped out of the wordwork with a theme of five-dimensional physics. Such supersmart people are often subtly incompetent in other ways, and Bennett somehow compromised the whole point of being ‘smart’ by doing some stupid things in his system.
More generally the sheer breadth of Bennett’s work recommends it, until you realize that something went awry with his immense project, next to the corruption created by proximity to Gurdjieff. I have discussed this at The Gurdjieff Con several times.
The point is that current scentific psychology appears incapable of producing a serious account of man. So-called spiritual psychologies are seldom much better, but at least they deal with the real human animal.
In this situation Bennett made a classic gesture: adopt the universal scheme of Samkhya naturalism (materialism) and revive the brilliance of that early precursor to Buddhism. The cogency of this approach still shines through the confusions of the final version of Bennett’s work (book, The Dramatic Universe), which has many other things weaved in to disguise the source, it seems.
This kind of effort is significant because it adopts an ancient tactic to bypass the futile spiritual/material division. Materialist, or naturalistic, Samkhya to the rescue! The result lets some air into the window and you get a sense, a bird’s eye view of the immense complexity of the human psychological framework and the dangers of the arising of a reductionist science culture that systematically deprives man of all his potential in the deep psychology of his ‘higher’ selves. It is not surprising a revolt against science should commence, not only among fundamentalists. Can’t science do any better?

Anyway, the jury is out on Bennett. I am critical because his supporters (cf. the yahoo group ‘deeper_d’, from which I am banned, typical) are incapable of doing him justice due to the very unthinking allegiance to his system that they are already making almost doctrinal, and confused with the sufistic corpus, from which Bennett was completely independent, despite all his pious efforts in that milieu. But that criticism actually starts to uncover the ingenuity of his whole system, despite the unfortunate lapses, and wrong metaphysical temptations.

It should be noted that he was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer who gave him the ingenious idea of interpreting the ancient samkhya in terms of an idea of the ‘will’.
So in the final analysis we are back at Kant/Schopenhauer, unable to penetrate the noumenal limits on our knowledge.
Bennett gives us nonetheless an interesting attempt to survey the whole psychology of man that is not riddled with religious metaphysics. But he ends up with a metaphysics of his own, and the problems with what he called it, ‘systematics’. More on that some other time.
But his basic scheme was based on the idea that ‘time, eternity, and hyparxis’, that is, three dimensions of time, were needed to describe the human mind, and that, however, outlandish at first sight, is not so different from what is implicit in Kant/Schopenhauer, although they won’t say so.
On that basis Bennett’s work has some exciting moments, science fiction perhaps, and in broad strokes, forget his system, it is pretty hard to say he is wrong. The mind’s relation to the timeless is something that science forbids, categorically, but the result is the failure to grasp human psychology of which we are complaining.

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11.24.08

New Age confusions

Posted in New Age, Philosophy at 6:41 pm by nemo

James replies to Hucklebird comment on Is deep evolution beyond the limits of knowledge:

Stephen P. Smith said,
November 23, 2008 at 10:14 pm ·
It is only science that must face not having an answer.
Religion does not need to explain what becomes self evident, as religion is not about explaining. Science is about explaining. Spirituality has to do with feeling and self evdence, and religion grew out of spirituality.
Evolution cannot be explained independent of substance for the simple reason that explanation is abstract and substance is concrete. Substance can only be caricature, and when pressed the caricature fails. Darwin’s theory running on a computer will find itself disconnected from substance, and hence it won’t do what people say it can do.
I don’t think you are giving people like Wilber and Cohen enough credit in providing a workable aternative to what will take us beyond fundamentalism on both sides. The “New Age” caricature won’t work anymore.
Last night, the liberal PBS had a special program with Deepak Copra. And this is most remarkable for a secular media outlet to give air time to a spiritualist. It was not the first time I seen an example like this on PBS. A few months about there was a PBS special on Taoism and Wayne W. Dyer. This is the same contradicted PBS that pushes Darwinism. But what is not appreciated is that secularism is found being a breeding ground for spiritualists that hunger for meaning and spiritual significance.
The secularist first fool themselves into believing that Darwin’s evolution is consistent with Copra’s vitalism. But having accepted Copra’s vitalism the seeds that will deconstruct Darwin have been planted.

——————–

James said,
November 24, 2008 at 3:50 pm ·
“I don’t think you are giving people like Wilber and Cohen enough credit in providing a workable aternative to what will take us beyond fundamentalism on both sides. The “New Age” caricature won’t work anymore.”
The problem is that Wilber, Cohen, and Chopra don’t exhibit any competence in either science or religion. In order to create a “workable alternative,” first, you have to know what you are talking about. Actually, they have some value as unintentional comedians as they lack the self-awareness to realize their own status as dilettantes.

In the final analysis you have to find out the hard way about who’s who and what’s what with spiritual teachers, so Hucklebird’s view is perfectly OK. And yet I tend to agree with James about the way in which shallow so-called spiritual teachings lead to very little. I should however say that there is a kind of sadness in the question. So many gurus since the seventies, Da Free John a fuckup, Cohen a kind of instant replacement, now a fuckup, books on spiritual psychology, one and another a bust, Mr. supersmart Wilbur enters to settle the question, his integral yoga another fuckup. All the ‘New Age’ activity is encountering a peculiar obstacle, one I have tried to point out.
There are many things to say here, but the obvious problem on one level is that people are too confused by 1. Christian theology 2. reductionist scientism 3. ‘New Age’ exploitations and deceptions 4. emnity from social conformist culture
to embark on a spiritual path. It didn’t use to be that way. After the field clears a bit, we will see.
As to Wilbur, whether New Age or not, I think I could write a better spiritual psychology that what he has produced.

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11.23.08

Fourth instinct, secularism and religion

Posted in New Age, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:19 pm by nemo

Arianna Huffington at EnlightenNext, audio

In our highly polarized political climate, it is rare to find an individual who is as familiar with both sides of the aisle as Arianna Huffington is. A bestselling author, a nationally syndicated columnist, and named by Time magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in 2006, Huffington’s eclectic career has always defied convention—and partisan categorization. She was once married to a Republican congressman. She ran for governor of California as an independent. And her popular internet newspaper, The Huffington Post, has a decidedly liberal bent. But while we’ve long admired Huffington’s broad political perspective as well as the passionate dedication to political and cultural change that has defined her career, it is her interest in the relationship between spirituality and politics, articulated in her book The Fourth Instinct, that compelled us to take a closer look.

Being interviewed at Andrew Cohen’s rag is a dubious opportunity. Cohen is constantly trying to snare celebrities in his ‘postmodern’ project (for world domination, I guess).
The combination of politics and ‘spirituality’ is a big debate, one might mention here only that the attempt to get ‘beyond left and right’ smacks of the ‘non-dual verbiage’ peddled in the name of Vedanta by Cohen and Ken Wilbur.
A. Huffington’s ideas of a ‘fourth instinct’ (I doubt if there is such an instinct) are reasonable enough (I haven’t read the book), but the problem these days is that a massive movement, or set of such, to organize the ‘impulse to transcendence’ is now bombing out in the long list of burnt out gurus, since the seventies.
The Integral movement with Wilbur voluminous hot air texts is the next effort to organize everyone’ s fourth instincts, and the result isn’t going to go anywhere, as far as I can tell.
One needs to ask what is going wrong with these movements.
Actually a study of the eonic effect, and what we mean by evolution for man, will suggest why these movements are so often unable to achieve lift.
The rise of the modern was itself a great evolutionary transformation, and these confused efforts by postmodernists to negate the rise of modernity in the name of a new spiritual age can’t succeed against its momentum.

It is simply a smear against modernity to call it somehow devoid of spiritual potential. In fact, we can see that the rise of the modern world is just as much a ‘spiritual’ age (in its secularism) as any other. The idea of freedom, and its realization, is as spiritual, if we are still using this term, as anything in religion.

In any case these New Age movements, while they can plow the field, seem unable to sow the seeds of future religion.
A look at the eonic effect shows why: as with Karen Armstrong trying to prophecy a second ‘Axial Age’ (and also interviewed at Cohen’s mag on just this topic), the predictions of a postmodern spiritual renewal appear at the moment when the impulse of modernity might deviate from its initial point, and the result will be a degradation of culture, not an advance. There is no possibility of aping the Axial Age. Noone can seem to understand it. It was not a spiritual age, but a point of global transformation over a whole spectrum of cultures. The result gave birth to two religions, one theist, one atheist, and to secularism and science, in Axial Greece.
Those who peddel non-dual felicities might consider that breadth of the Axial spectrum’
The modern age will simply not replicate that moment, having moved on to something different. That does not mean that modern scientism triumphant will rule the future either. On the contrary, the attempt to create a future of religion is the great open question of secularism (which is often defined falsely as ‘anti-religion’, a viewpoint hard to fathom since the trigger of modernity was the Protestant Reformation).
It needs to be done in a secular fashion! We need hype-free religion-free guru-free non-propagandistic ‘manuals of human software’ (what used to be called ‘spiritual psychologies’, Ken Wilbur having gone into overdrive trying in vain to produce one) that can map out, on the basis of human autonomy, man’s potential as an evolutionary being.
Not a sinlge effort in this direction has suceeded in modern times. The ancient efforts of the Buddhists put current commercialized New Age texts to shame. The so-called ‘traditionalists’ are no better.

One who came close, the writer J.G. Bennett, with his The Dramatic Universe, significantly based his immense system on the ancient Samkhya, but his whole effort got hijacked by the attempt to remould this ancient ‘spiritual materialism’ with a wrapper of Christian theology, wrecking the whole job, and probably making the classic Samkhya unusuable.
I have often had a notion to rewrite Bennett’s Samkhya portion without this grotestque addon factro.
In any case, the debate over materialism and the spiritual is too useless to serve the times. Scientism is simply out in left field. The New Age movements have become private delicatessens for vampire gurus. Result: there is nothing in the modern cultural zone, left, right or middle, scientific or traditionalist that can do the job.
Meanwhile the New Age appropriation of the idea of evolution shows how hard it is to blend the ancient and the modern, and this instant fallacy is a sign that even advanced yogis are no better at it than anyone else.
So the future of religion remains so far an abortive initiative.

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11.21.08

New Age movements

Posted in New Age at 4:08 pm by nemo

New Age Movements, archive file, a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect on New Age movements (with respect to previous post).

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The New Age postmodern sabotage game

Posted in New Age at 3:43 pm by nemo

I said I would scan up something from EnlightenNext magazine, Building the Foundations ofa New Worldview, Joel Pitney, EnlightenNext mag, winter 2008-9.
here is a paragraph or so, enough….

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine living in a world without democracy and the natural right to live a life of one’s own choosing. These fundamental principles of
modernity, which flourished in the salons of Paris during the late eighteenth century, have become so ingrained in our individual and collective psyches that we mostly take them for granted. But
the principles of the Enlightenment might never have become manifest were it not for the founding fathers of the United States, who designed the world’s first democratic government and self¬determined nation with only their philosophical convictions to guide them.
Fast-forward more than two hundred years to the present, where another group of individuals is attempting to incite a new philo¬sophical revolution that has such profound and broad-ranging implications for human life and the world that some observers
of cultural evolution are calling it the second Enlightenment. They’re talking about the emergence of the integral worldview. And thanks to the work of philosopher Ken Wilber and others,
this new perspective is helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world-including the editors of this magazine-to start to see the many dimensions of reality, both inner and outer, as multiple reflections of one unfolding process of cosmic evolution. After decades of relative obscurity, an international movement of integral scholars, practitioners, and activists is now working to give this little-known perspective more legitimacy in the public eye. And through a variety of social networks, websites, centers, academic programs, and conferences, they are attempting to build the cultural foundation for what integral theorist and author Steve McIntosh suggests could ultimately be “a new, historically signifi¬cant level of human civilization.”
The roots of the integral movement go back more than a cen¬tury to the theories and visions of various philosophers, mystics, and developmental psychologists, such as Sri Aurobindo, and Pierre Teilhard de (hardin, and Jean Gebser. But in the last thirty years, so much more developmental work has come to the fore that we now have a variety of maps and established theories to describe these processes of psychospiritual, cultural. and biologi¬cal evolution and how they are related. Perhaps the most complete synthesis of this recent work can be found in Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) model, which is based on years of exhaus¬tive research and spiritual inquiry and brings together the many disciplines through which humanity seeks truth-the spiritual …..

This is apparently a mouthpiece essay from an Andrew Cohen flunkie, or hanger on.
The opening paragraph of this piece is ambiguous, and in the context of these New Age gurus, alarming. It is seemingly affirming the principles of democracy and rights, or snidely setting them up for debunking, tacitly, of course, in the stealth fascism lite of Andrew Cohen (the original version in the early twentieth century on the part of New Age occultists having faileld). We know the answer. Here comes another ‘postmodern’ reevaluation of that dratted Enlightenment, and its replacement with a ‘new world view’ provided by these remorphs like Cohen of the Neo-brahmanical gurus of medieval India. Cohen looks Jewish, but he is really a Indian medievalist in disguise. Clever tactics by his guru, a notable ‘shaktipat’ windbag in the post-Rajneesh disorganization of Indica spirituality.
If they want a new age so much, why not sell ‘shaktipat’ in jars, a sort of compressed gas approach to ‘instant gurudom’ we see in Andrew Cohen.
Cohen is in trouble, the postmodern fad is passing, and the New Age appropriation of the leftist/secularists on the subject was never convincing anyway.
Why is it these people have such a problem with the Enlightenment? I can see no problem with a critique of the Enlightenment, the source of so many critiques, but it would seem useful to remember (as many secularists don’t) that the Enlightenment period triggered the rebirth of Indic spiritual studies, long nearly moribund in India itself. (Cf. Schlegel et al, or a biography of Schopenhauer for this effect of the later (counter)enlightenment)
Moral: there is no going back to the restoration of an Indic spiritual culture in the induced postmodern rubble of modernity. It is a fascist notion that has been turned into chewing gum ever since its hidden conspirational birth in the nineteenth century and echoed in such figures as Blavatsky and, indeed, even the unwitting Nietzsche.

Meanwhile, the sheer presumption in this passage, that Ken Wilbur single-handedly is going to replace the Enlightenment with a new one is breathtaking, and completely stupid. It is a misunderstanding of what the Enlightenment was, and its place in world history. Quite apart from anything else (as a study of the eonic effect makes clear) the rise of modernity is far larger than the Enlightenment, and is constructed to be more than the sum of its parts, not so easy to dismantle with confused New Age cults.
Teilhard, Gebser, and Aurobindo are poor competition with the net advance we see in the whole transition from the early modern to the Enlightenment and beyond. Its effect is as decisive as the Axial Age, which produced among other things the world traveller Buddhism, an incident far beyond the capacity of these guru degenerates to imitate.
It is sad to watch Ken Wilbur go into overdrive on such an issue. These gurus have kidnapped this person and wasted his talents on a false proposition. These gurus are getting desperate. After a century of the New Age movement, the whole gang can’t even produce a simple text of ‘spiritual psychology’ that is clear, honest, and useful. The reason is that the vice of deception has entered into the presentation of these ancient teachings. Thus a recruit like Wilbur thrown into the game ends up with a useless pastiche of pre-Kantian metaphysical notions that noone can use.
Now this integral nonsense is getting turned into a business. Who can stop them? Why worry about them? They can’t recreate the Enlightenment, that much is sure.

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11.20.08

Wilbur attacking the Enlightenment

Posted in New Age at 5:49 pm by nemo

We were talking yesterday about EnlightenNext magazine. Having looked through I have to throw up my hands. Now Ken Wilbur is ready to take on the Enlightenment, and replace it with his version. I will scan up the material for tommorrow.
The combination of arrogance and incomprehension on the part of Wilbur, and Andrew Cohen, as to the Enlightenment, modernity, and the New Age fallaccy is something I have commented on here repeatedly. It is part of the same New Age mythology of the postmodern creation of a new age of spirituality. And it won’t happen.
Meanwhile, Integral Yoga is such a useless pastiche of spiritual teachings. It’s almost comic to think this is to replace the legacy of modernity.
I recommend that these people study the eonic effect. The point of attack, the Enlightenment, is part of a larger movement in one of the great turning points in world history (which included far more than the Enlightenment, which itself is six ‘Enlightenments’. To try and undo that and do something else using Ken Wilbur’s Integral Yoga is an absurd project.
We already have enough problems, undoing the Enlightenment is a pointless exercise.

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11.19.08

Reinventing the sacred? Buddhists have 2 thou year headstart

Posted in New Age, Science & Religion at 9:07 pm by nemo

comment: God enough
You are having the same bad reaction, infuriated rage, I get from reading Andrew Cohen’s magazine (just got the new issue, after citing Huffington, needed to do so). Kauffman doesn’t quite deserve it, and yet he is a bit presumptuous. Reinventing the sacred? Buddhists have a two thousand year head start. I get it. Destroy Tibet, and reinvent the sacred. We are on the hit list ourselves.

And Kauffman has stashed capitalist ideology inside his self-organization. Maybe Marx can reinvent the sacred for him.
Perhaps it is the sense that ‘reinventing the sacred’ is just not possible for scientists at this point, and yet, at one and the same time, they will get away with it because the Big Science propaganda machine is hard to stop and if they can manage the destruction of Christianity, Buddhism, the New Age movement, and make people forget about spiritual antiquity they will hold the field to themselves.

James said,
November 19, 2008 at 5:38 pm ·
“We are organisms with meaning in our lives, and the way the biosphere will evolve is ceaselessly creative. The way the economy evolves is ceaselessly creative in ways that cannot be predicted ahead of time.”
“”God” carries with it a sense of awe, reverence and wonder that no other symbol carries. It’s a choice. Can we give up the creator God — the all-powerful, omnipotent, all-loving God who confronts us with the problem of evil — and instead find reverence for a ceaseless creativity in the unfolding of nature?”
After watching my portfolio get wiped out in the stock market crash, I don’t find anything “awe-inspiring” or “wonderful” in this “creativity.” Maybe he should get together with Karen Armstrong so he can find somebody else to spew this romantic New Agey cliched sugary feel good horsesh*t with. We need practical solutions, not some pseudo-profundities that we can get from the average idiot who has dropped acid.

Remain calm

Update: we should do penance by looking at Kauffman’s book in detail. It is, after all, possible to find the sacred in anything. The sense of mystery in self-organization may in fact be a sense of mystery projected on self-organization. In any case, what is the final status of complexity theory? After all, the designists are critical also, and anticipate its failure to their benefit.

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11.18.08

Fallacies of New Age ‘evolution’

Posted in Evolution, History, New Age, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 6:18 pm by nemo

From yesterday, Liberal blogosphere needs to pick up postdarwinism.

Arianna Huffington clearly has problems with Darwinism. So why not say so at Huffington Post? Darwinism’s reign has gone on too long, and the liberal sphere owes nothing to ‘science’ on this question, long taken over by Darwinian pseudo-science and propaganda.

At the same time New Age themes of evolution are themselves a problem. The problem is acute if certain people like Andrew Cohen make dubious claims about ‘enlightenment’ and seem to give authority to the idea. The idea has become an endemic New Age myth on its own terms.
Correctly defining evolution is not as simple as it looks, and the purely reductionist version given by scientists is almost certainly too narrow.
At that point the study of the eonic effect suggests a new and comprehensive way to ‘recalibrate’ the idea of evolution (human evolution) to take into account the observable ‘developmental’ sequence, quite complex, that we see in world history. That is a strange step, and hard for those stuck in genetic reductionism, but the evidence in its favor over the range of history, justifies it.
In that context, we see the interconnection of ‘evolution’ and religious issues, but in an abstract and indirect way, and there is no easy or simple way to connect this to the activity of individuals. The eonic effect shows an action on two levels, and the level of system evolution is not the same as the level of individual realization. There is no other way to analyze the question, and we can see in the Old Testament the confusing difference: the historical interval of Israelite history that intersects with the Axial interval shows, remarkably, correlation with ‘eonic evolution’, but the actual realization is that of individuals, and this includes the actual formation of the Biblical corpus, which now seems to secularists as myth, which is true up to a point, but these materials do reflect the remarkable evolutionary moment of the Axial period. It is a complex issue requiring a thorough understanding of the eonic effect.
At one and the same time we see in the same Axial interval the completely different emergence (among many other correlates) of Buddhism. The synchronous appearance of theistic and atheistic religions should be a reminder of the complexity of the phenomenon of evolution in this instance and the dangers of electic efforts to throw things together that we see in New Age efforts.
This example should be a warning against casual uses of the term ‘evolution’ for ‘spiritual’ endeavors.
If you think that these gurus, with their claims now on the term ‘evolution’, know what they are talking about, I recommend a long look at the eonic effect which shows how macrohistory generates its action on these questions. While it is permissible to talk of ‘evolution’ in terms of religion, in light of the eonic effect, it must be done with great care, and the eonic model shows how to do that. In a gist, ‘evolution’ only applies to a macro level. It does not apply to the efforts of individuals, by definition, unless you care to invent a new term like ‘self-evolution’ and state what you mean. The eonic effect clearly distinguishes (and yet braids) ‘evolution’ and ‘history’ in a special way, and the evolution of religion on one level is not the same as the history of religion on another.
These gurus clearly don’t understand the distinction, and in general have no grasp of the larger issues. And yet they speak with an authority, to some, that is going to imprint this new usage in a fruitless and ineffectual way. It is just the same kind of difference we see vis a vis the ‘evolution’ of religion and the ‘history’ of religious realizations, most of which suffer human frailty.
At this point we don’t control the evolution of religion, and are limited to the realization of its traditions, whatever we think of them. However, attempts to roll back modernity to reconstruct some Axial religious age are completely harebrained misunderstandings, rife in the New Age movement.

The distinctions macro/micro of the eonic model are important, because endless initiatives by New Age figures have emerged in the last century to somehow produce movements, cults, or whatever as ‘evolution’, can’t be called ‘evolution’, and if you examine the wake of the Axial Age you will see what the future will show, which is chaotification and decline, and that the distinction of macro and micro (in the eonic sense) is crucial to understanding the outcome of the Axial Age, as the system slowly but surely degenerated into medievalism. There, apparently, religion thrived.

I will leave it there for the moment, except to suggest not using the term ‘evolution’ in a New Age context. None of the ancient sutras used it, btw. They knew what they were talking about.
It is open to question what should be done here. Relative to world history Buddhism is a massive religious movement, but relative to the eonic effect it is a brief moment of ‘historical realization’, but with the charm and double prestige of association with the Axial Age in a brilliance that not even the best of gurus can imitate. But its initialization was a unique moment, and its realization a long deviation from initial conditions. Its future is therefore under a cloud, even as fragments of its teachings proliferate in a secular world. Perhaps that is all that can be expected, since no replication of the unique generation of Buddhism would be possible now. Every half-baked guru claiming to be a Maitreya is going to try to defy this logic, but something deep and novel is needed, by that rare individual who grasps the significance of antiquity and modernity both. Til then we will see the equal obsfuscations of the Darwin-style reductionists and the traditionalists competing for a glorious future that won’t come because everyone has the wrong approach.

http://eonic-effect.net

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11.16.08

Evolutionaries?

Posted in New Age at 7:47 pm by nemo

The previous post cited an article, Arianna Huffington at EnlightenNext, and I notice the phrase there,
The Magazine for Evolutionaries

The obvious play of ‘evolutionaries’ on ‘revolutionaries’ might fool you into thinking 1. that these gurus would ever let you ‘evolve’ in their sense, and 2. that they are somehow socially progressive. No they aren’t, they aren’t revolutionaries, they are ‘evolutionaries’, reactionaries: destroy the modern age and restablish the spiritual authority of the gurus.
For the reactionary character of these types, check out http://gurdjieff-con.net

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10.13.08

Alert: new blog foreign policy on sufism

Posted in New Age, religion at 12:15 am by nemo

The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony (Hardcover)
by Stephen Schwartz

I just came across this new book on sufism. Read the rest of this entry »

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09.24.08

Indian skeptics

Posted in New Age, Science & Religion at 6:38 pm by nemo

Myers going global, Free Thought In India, with an Indian ‘Freethought’ site, http://nirmukta.com/, the sutbtitle ‘Breaking The Spell’ gives it away, Dennett & Ananda Meera. There is a lot of commentary here on that subject, check the search function. The question of Indian religion is complex, but the attack on the whole of the Indian tradition in the context of attacking right-wing Hinduism, is, as usual, the wrong approach. A figure such as Ananda Meera should have known better.
The religion bashers like P.Z.Myers confronting this subject are going to enforce the regime of ignorance and are incapable of studying the subject, or of learning anything.
Darwinian/scientistic stupidity is dangerous, because it is totally closed, like fundamentalism. You would think that scientists would approach the issue of religion in India with sufficient openness of mind to see at least something, or at least consult the scholarly literature and history. Real critics, such as this blog, need to be wary of these science idiots, they mean only destruction.
Nothing could be plainer than the presentation of Buddhism, for those who don’t like the ‘superstitions’ of Hinduism. But the strategy of enforced ignorance has so narrowed the focus of science obsessives that they can’t digest the issues, and they seriously think a sceptic’s approach is going to work.

For a real sceptic’s site on New Age subject, check out The Gurdjieff Con, and the hard and frightening work needed to expose the problems with Eastern religious subjects.
The Humanist New Atheists/Darwinists/Dawkins groupies aren’t much help here.
Real students, granting the hopeless confusions of many New Agers, who wouldn’t reject real science for a minute, are having a good laugh at this pseudo-skeptic charade.

Incidentally, these issues are decisive evidence of the failure of Darwinism. This theory cannot account for the complexities of human consciousness.

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09.22.08

The passing of Buddhism?

Posted in New Age, The Eonic Effect at 7:09 pm by nemo

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.

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09.17.08

Evolution and the Problem of Evil

Posted in Evolution, New Age, religion at 6:50 pm by nemo

From Evo-News:

In his book Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, biophysicist Cornelius G. Hunter explains that in Darwin’s day, some of the most commonly used arguments for evolution were theological arguments, not scientific.

And here is a blurb from Amazon on Hunter’s book:

Biophysicist Hunter brings rare depth and originality to this analysis of an often-neglected stream of Darwin’s thought, illuminating not only the original debates surrounding The Origin of Species, but also contemporary questions about evolution and religion. Hunter’s main argument is that most interpreters of evolution have misjudged Darwin’s metaphysical motives. Rather than an assault upon God’s existence, evolution was for Darwin and many of his contemporaries a defense of God’s goodness, a strategy for disassociating God from the often unsavory details of nature by introducing a blind process of natural selection.

It would seem that the ID proponents have failed to see the cogency of this difficulty. And as we grasp the failure of natural selection/Darwinism the problem resurfaces.
Long before the ID movement, the writer J.G. Bennett wrote a book which did not flinch at this problem and, with a acumen for science all the way to General Relavity, produced a strange concoction which tackled this issue head on with a sort of ‘gnostic demiurge’ version of the design argument. These designers were not so nice!
The Dramatic Universe

Bennett’s book, which I certainly don’t buy, is little more than science fiction (but what strange and brilliant science fiction), yet it carries out the problematic details of the design argument, with a sort of Kantian ‘as if’, with results that should caution us against facile ID thinking. The point is that ancient gnosticism has long disassociated divinity from worldly/cosmic entanglement.

I recommend the study of the eonic effect. It can rescue the Old Testament from this difficulty!!!
The Old Testament: An Eonic Riddle

The Old Testament divinity, as the New Atheists have shouted themselves hoarse pointing out, is somewhat unsavory character.

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Science’s blindspot, and the failure of Darwinism

Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, New Age at 6:12 pm by nemo

There are about fifteen good reasons why contemporary science as Darwinism totally fails to explain the evolution of man (whatever else we think of its explanations of earlier ‘deep time’). It just flunks, and can’t be taken seriously beyond the level of social ideology.
The regime of enforced ignorance of the real potentiality of man’s self-consciousness, finally realized by Wallace, who should be the real founder of evolutionary theory (along with Wallace), simply voids the claims of Darwinists on the spot. The debate between science and religion thus tends to be a distraction, neither side can get a grip on the issues. The suppressed questions unaddressed in the socially conditioned public philosophies are really ideologies designed to suppress human potential in the name of control. The shadow world behind that is the permanent crisis of human civilization.
Those trying to get their bearings as they enter collision with this shadow world are simply stricken from the lists, to navigate alone through the uncharted terrain of man’s greater invisible culture alone.
Science, Christianity are of no help here. Buddhism, a little better, at least in principle, is, finally, another ideology along the same lines. Best of luck, you are on your own.
General Propaganda Machines And Occult Proxies

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