Sam Harris on spiritual experience

[Edward theurj Berge]

We've all heard about Harris' scathing criticisms of religions of all flavor, including Buddhism. In this 2-part talk at You Tube he defends meditation and contemplation and criticizes the atheist community for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In my atheistic mind this is indeed a step towards re-visioning the great traditions by nourishing the baby while also pulling the plug on the dirty bathwater.

Also of note is that he echoes kennilingus in claiming one must take up the injunction of meditation before one can criticize its phenomenal experience. He does qualify that one can certainly criticize based on reason alone the metaphysical accoutrements of those who have such experiences. Yet the experiences themselves cannot be refuted by reason alone. And that such experience must be translated into postmetaphysical terms shorn of religious dogma to be of pertinent use in today's world.

[andrew]

And I blame Harris for this: 

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/08/12/peter-foster-inside-...

[Edward theurj Berge]

I say Alleluia brother.

[Layman Pascal]

Hey Ambo,

Happy to spiral through this with you.  And I agree (obviously) about the need to dis-embed our cultural symbols and words from inherited assumptions born of long practice using primitive definitions.  I think "integrative thinking" is in a special position to see this.  For example: beliefs, believers vs. non-believers, membership, tradition, orthodox mysticism, conformism, etc. are -- viewed through an integral lens -- characteristics of the amber/blue/traditionalists band of culture and cognition... and NOT characteristic of religion, per se.  Yet it is only by understanding more and more deeply the qualities of the different layers in our psyche that we can see where one developmental phase is hijacking subsequent phases.  Which, I would assert, is pretty much the definition of pathology.

Ambo Suno said:

Yes, I am following you and something maybe is clarifying in me.

One part of my tracking has to do with ownership of words' meanings, as you point to with, "From a modern, post-modern or integrative worldspace the word "religion" cannot simply be owned by sectarian, ethnocentric cultists and politicized mystics."

This also touches on the broader idea that is implicit in your Xmastionary. That is - we are raised through our educations and the deeply assimilated nature of our seeming knowings, often invisible to us, as coming from the past. When we want to dialogue, we look up a definition in the dictionary and what we choose to emphasize among the various meanings becomes the solid footing for our arguments, premises to our logics. There is momentum to the past definitions, which were established by these prior groups like local ethnocentrics, and also inertia to allowing substantial change and growth in our language and thinking. We may know that there is a plurality of meanings, and may know the etiological roots and derivations that seem to insist on a certain logic for the meaning of words, but that is not enough to stay contemporary.

I would say that you are exemplifying a need to allow our words' meanings to fit with current circumstances and contexts. These meanings that words, ideas, and our creative imaginations serve for how to understand, articulate and organize our inner worlds need to be able to take flight a bit. This stance has felt quite strange, radical, and sometimes resistance-making to me

I'll try to find my way further into this. When speaking to someone about religion, say to some type of atheist or literalist Christian or fundamentalist Muslim, we ought simultaneously from the outset let them know that even though they are accustomed to fixed meanings and setting out those meanings, we can not buy into all of those, into those momentums. We slow down the conversation and question or point out, we converse some about it.

As you, Ken and many others have laid out in prior posts, the world is so different now, as with historical knowledge through archeology, geology, and science that we would be very remiss in not accounting for what we know now. To converse,  we are going to need a language that is flexible enough to account for more current realities. Even what "religion" means must be reconsidered. This of course is not easy for most conventionally educated and conditioned people, me included.

People don't know what they don't know; we don't understand what we don't understand. We think we are tightly justified in adhering to certain denotations/connotation and we become vulnerable to disorientations of identity, self-coherence, and basic ego investments when someone is insisting on continuing to talk funny about what religion means. We sort of can't do it, can't break the memetic gravitational pull. And so on.

Yet you proceed in redefining things regardless, at least here among fellow inquirers, because it's correct from the more enfolding perspective. And I may be doing so also, though not in such leaps and bounds.

I hope, Layman, that the idiosyncratically detailed way that I have been unwrapping this makes enough sense and hasn't drifted off the mark.

Spiraling in, or out, on meaning, ambo

Layman Pascal said:

Hi Ambo,

My High School "Western Civ" course was entirely based on Kenneth Clark's book & TV series -- so your references resonate with me.  

When I say "robustly dissociate" it has a certain energetic flavor. I could equally have said "tease apart".  They both suggest the differentiation phase which is the necessary first step in the integration process.  We cannot effectively re-combine things in healthy and productive ways until we have first dis-embedded them from their conventional context.   

I'm saying that what people call "religions" (both in terms of what they affirm or in terms of what anti-religious people complain about) is currently a misleading concept.  The popular and academic discussions do not separate healthy and functional religion TODAY from primitive or pathological versions. We would not accept this lack of distinction in any other area of rational concern.  When I go to the corner store, I expect that "apples" necessarily implies non-toxic, up-to-date applies as far people can presently determine.  If they presented apples of mixed toxicity and applies from years gone by then, obviously, apples themselves would start to have a unjustly bad name.  And I might "robustly dissociate" from that store if they kept mixing in shitty apples with good apples (as if the former has the same right to the name as the latter).

We want religion to mean: "Good religion from our point of view today".  

That is what it meant in all the historical periods in which religion-civilization was rising and enhancing the mutual bio-cultural and spiritual realm of humanity.

Anything else represents a kind of straw man.  And the whole discourse of overcoming religions to create a new trans-religion or non-religious spirituality (while obviously being the right track) subtly keeps the straw man in place. 

 Both believers and non-believers believe in a world of believers and non-believers.  It is this vision of believers and non-believers that, I believe, characterizes the 'infidel' in any given context.  In a tribal or national context we expect everyone to be pre-included -- although opposed to those that fall outside of that context.  But we ourselves are not looking from that perspective.  We are, generally speaking, all aware of the planet and the total human culture regardless of our attitude toward it.  Rational approaches to religion must be based on a rational, worldcentric definition of religion and the inclusion group that goes along with that.  To center our thoughts on religions as if they were extensions of ethnocentric nations or sub-cultural dogma tribes is to import an outdated, pre-rational assumption about religion.  

Mythic religion is the religionization of mythic worldspaces.  And it contributed enormously to the art and culture of the great civilizations.  Your phrase "palpable surpluses of resonance" captures it very well. But I would go further and say that it IS the art and culture (and spirituality and science and rituals and pleasures and practices) of the great civilizations.  From a modern, post-modern or integrative worldspace the word "religion" cannot simply be owned by sectarian, ethnocentric cultists and politicized mystics.  What they meant is not what we mean.  Or rather our idea overlays and enfolds their idea -- just as we now assume that their bodies were made of molecules even they they did not think in terms of molecules.  We must now assume that their religion was one which meets our standards of understanding.

 

[andrew]

I am all for it Ed! Anything that wakes people out of there institutionalized mythic slumber is OK with me. Perhaps, these nascent groups can become a political starting point to counter the rabid toxicity of the regrettable religious rights foray into politics over the last 50 years ( not that they don't have some valid conservative concerns). Myself, I would argue that religion should be organic and peer to peer ; de-institutionalized, and a matter between an individuals heart and God ( God's heart , should such a thing exist).

[andrew]

A little bit more on this line of thinking: the LL atheist groups no matter how much affected by individual UL thinking would remain agnostic towards  the greater community of other minded human groupings. This would, imo, limit the terrible dualistic schisms and ideological warring occurring on the planet today. Conversely, organic peer to peer religion as expressed in the LL would have no codified institutions and the groupings would not surpass 'the library type structure '; it would recognize that the path to being like christ, or attaining buddha nature, is a private matter between any given individual within the context of the larger kosmos . Imo., both of these possible avenues forward would only really work where societies are not being manipulated by toxic economic activity i.e.- perhaps, as one exp.,  the CIA-- who's main agenda is to act as economic hit men on a global scale, thereby securing the agenda of the corporatocracy.

[andrew]

Secular charters should allow minimal outwards expressions of individual faith as long as they are benign. 

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/pastafarian-fights-to-wear-spaghetti-s...

One doesn't want to piss off the FSM.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I wonder if they'd let me wear the headgear of my religious icon Khora, a vagina?

[andrew]

I'm all for it but I'd have to point out that Thatcher; Clinton; and really, countless other females are proof that the vagina offers no surety that things will ever get better on this planet. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

You obviously don't know Khora. Or her vagina.

[andrew]

This from Rorty:

Whereas the philosophers who claim that atheism, unlike theism, is backed up by evidence would say that religious belief is irrational, contemporary secularists like myself are content to say that it is politically dangerous. On our view, religion is unobjectionable as long as it is priva- tized—as long as ecclesiastical institutions do not attempt to rally the faithful behind political proposals and as long as believers and unbelievers agree to follow a policy of live and let live. 

I couldn't agree more!

[Edward theurj Berge]

US religious institutions have there hands deep into the till of our political system. And yet see the religion and politics thread for legitimate crossovers.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Camfree posted this on FB, from Zizek's The Perverts Guide to Ideology:

"The message of Christ is I’m dying but my death itself is good news. It means you are alone, left to your freedom, be in the Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, which is just the community of believers. It’s wrong to think that the second coming will be that Christ as a figure will return somehow. Christ is already here when believers form an emancipatory collective. This is why I claim that the only way really to be an atheist is to go through Christianity. Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonetheless retains a certain trust into the Big Other. This Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within a harmonious whole of evolution or whatever, but the difficult thing to accept is, again, that there is no Big Other. No point of reference which guarantees meaning."