Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

B. Allan Wallace Reviews Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation.

Sam Harris Responds.

C4chaos posted this little excahnge between these two in a thread started by Balder on the I-I Water Cooler board.

I thought to repost it with some questions as a follow on form the Kill the Buddha thread:

1) I am assuming that several people have read Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation or The End of Faith and have begun formulating an integral critique. I would be fascinated to hear a truly integral critique of where he is coming from that isn't knee-jerk emotive because he is “arrogantly” breaking the taboo against questioning religious beliefs.

I think there is much to say about where he is dead on and where he could use a little more of the integral perspective we all are interested in.

2) I think that Wallace's criticism of Harris above is also very lacking in an integral perspective (and frankly quite bad) and am interested to hear if anoyone has a positivge or negative integral critique of Wallace's review.

3) Finally, what think you all of Harris' response?

Just some questions to get the dialog started.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Hi Julian,

I've been following the Kill the Buddha thread as much as I can. I've resisted getting into the mix due to a lack of time to stay present to it. But I wanted to offer up this old post (from February, 2006) from my Integral Options Cafe blog as a reply to Harris's flatland worldview. I think it addresses many issues from the Kill the Buddha debate (so does this post from last June).

************************************************************************************************

It seems I have been waging my own private war against Sam Harris and his reductionist version of reality (see here, here, here, and here). I have commented on most of his posts at other blogs, but he has chosen not to address the issues I have raised, even when he does address criticisms of his position.

The latest offering from Harris is an article in the March 2006 Shambhala Sun, “Killing the Buddha.” In this piece, Harris argues (much as Ken Wilber did in The Marriage of Sense and Soul) that meditative science must be stripped of its religious clothing for it to become a universal tool available to all. He feels that the “wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism.”

In many respects, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). The spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious encumbrances, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to develop our scientific understanding of human subjectivity.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Dear Will, it's good to see you joining the fray and this is a very helpful perspective and series of rabbit holes :) many thanks,

nicole

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

great to hear from you will. this is an excellent bit and i look forward to following all the links.

you make a good case for buddhism as an effective vehicle to support people at each stage of their growth. i agree with your thesis.

here's the question it brings up for me:

do you think that there is enough of an existing understanding within buddhism of the prerational, rational and transrational developmental stages? in other words, is there an acknowledgment somehwere that the mythic stage should be relinquished at a certain point, and are there practices that you know of that help mythic level buddhists to make the transition?

if most buddhists are at the petitionary/mythic level of their understanding of the teachings, do you see vaue in helping this group to move toward the next stages, or do you see this as oppressive?

what do you think of the observation that it might be a little unfair to accuse harris of hatred for pointing out the violent consequences of the hatred that preratioal mythic belief has a pretty good track record of inducing?

lastly i think it is not correct that harris sees both pre and trans as worthless, in fact i have read and heard him say many times that he values the powerful process of how both meditative and altered state experiences can awaken people spiritually.

that said - i would be interested to hear your disrtinction between prerational and transrational spirituality as they relate to the rational level?

more later, let me print up your links….

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

ok looking at your second blog piece.

very nicely done.

so it seems you are suggesting (that a presently nonexistent)  truly integral buddhism be brought into being. i coudlnt agree more and i think that part of this birthing would have to do with educating a generation of buddhist teachers to teach from this perspective, which as wilber points out in his conveyor belt idea would mean the teachers themselves wouuld have to be green or higher - which for me implicitly means that they would have to have gone through a rational revision of their prerational faith, no?

as integral think-tankers, what does this imply in terms of our own personal practice as well as writing, teaching etc…

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Julian,

Thank you for your comments and questions.

I will try to address some of your other questions a bit later today, but for now I want to try to address the idea of moving people up the developmental ladder.

I think that an Integral Buddhism (or an integral Christianity or integral Islam, and so on) will first have to be developed within the integral community. For the most part, that will happen in the West. That means being as inclusive as possible of all the world's major traditions and honoring all the stages people must pass through in order to reach integral.

I tend to agree with Don Beck when he says we cannot move people up the Spiral. What we can do, and where our efforts should be focused, is to create the life conditions that inherently make progression along the Spiral possible. [I am of the opinion that SDi must be combined with AQAL in a more harmonious way than has been the case of late.]

Much of Buddhism – and the other world religions – is still centered in pre-rational cultures. In order for those people to progress along the ladder we need to take an all quadrant approach that creates physical, psychological, cultural, and societal structures for evolutionary growth to occur. To a certain extent, this is happening in India right now, but there is still much to be done.

As you suggest, we need to bring more Buddhist teachers into the integral community. But those most likely to have any impact right now are Westerners like Lama Surya Das, B Alan Wallace, Pema Chodron, among others, and the second generation children of Tibetan teachers, those who were born in the West. Right now, these are among the few Buddhist teachers who will have the necessary skill sets (i.e., rational level development, among other things) to adopt an integral viewpoint, even if they are not centered in an integral developmental stage.

I think of myself as firmly entrenched (for now) in an orange-green (SDi) worldview. But I can think integrally and so I can formulate an integral model to a certain extent. Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient, however, so having the benefit of Western culture and social structures is also important. Then, of course, I need to do the work in Western psychology that lays the groundwork for Eastern spiritual practice to emerge unencumbered by shadow material. This is where integral practice in general is so important.

In terms of practice, I think we can adopt practices from the whole spectrum of Buddhist beliefs, as long we can recognize why and how we may use them. Simply because someone reaches turquoise or teal (in SDi color schemes) does not mean all the lower stages no longer need to be honored and respected. A healthy integral practice in any tradition will take into account the needs of the lower developmental stages that have been transcended AND included – they do not cease to exist simply because we have passed through them.

The other thing to consider is that we need to seek out the healthiest practices for each stage – those that can foster growth assuming all the other quadrants are being taken care of.

What we see in the West with Christianity is that three of the quadrants are in good shape (for the most part) but that cultural values and beliefs (and the practices that go with them and support them) are keeping people stuck in pre-rational belief systems. This may be the hardest element to work with. As Wilber has pointed out, it's very hard to ever rise more than half a level to a full level above where your parents were – which points to the power that collective beliefs can have in shaping our individual positions – and keeping us anchored in the dominant cultural beliefs.

These are complex ideas that cannot be reduced to simple “If, then” statements. But the conversations that have been taking place in this pod are crucial to developing a more comprehensive understanding of where we are and where we might want to go.

Peace,
Bill

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

this is very good bill. thanks.

i like your list of buddhist teachers who could go integral and find myself in substantial agreement with much of what you wrote.

i look forward to more from you, especially on your distinction between prerational and transrational as it applies to today's religious and new age movements.

this is a question that no-one has yet been willing to really address.

i would also love to hear your take on wallace's critique of harris, as i think it warrants an integral approach too!

what follows is my statment of some of the questions i think are interesting/crucial - i am not saying that all of these relatie drirectly to your post or position. i am however interested in what you think about them…

1) i guess one of the sticking points i have with many here is this idea that transrationality or second tier literally includes an embrace of all the previous levels.

now i get that a) theoretically, yes we have transcended AND included.

but b) WHAT gets included is the healthy version of the previous level and by definition of intgeral development, what gets left behind is the partial, and in some cases pathological aspects of the previous worldview/belief structure.

2) i think that may spiritually oriented, people, even those intellectual enough to be into wilber have an inate conflict around rationality - springing in some part from the mystifying instruction we have all heard for years to be less rational in order to become spiritual, that somehow “the mind” is the problem, is in the way…..(an instruction which i think is as dualistic as it is partial and as limiting of serious growth as it is devaluing of one of our most precious divine capacities…)

i think there is plain and simple a green bias that wants to be accepting and non-judging (noble qualities) and so unfortunately refuses to acknowledge the aspects of prerational mythic belief that really should be left behind or transcended as we keep developing.

(the above is NOT the same as saying that we should abandon, condemn, or execute those still developing through prerational spiritual worldviews…)

it seems meaningless to talk of a developmental process into a transrationality that still uses prerational interpretations in some kind of uber-inclusive way.

this sounds suspiciously like a green fear of making distinctions, acknowledging healthy hierarchy and being able to spot pathology. what i have heard so far from several people sounds to me like a lazy position that says - yellow/second tier/transraitonal includes everything else without judgement. prehaps so in a certain way, but what i hear though is more without discernement and healthy clear distinctions and that troubles me…

3) i think what also gets missed a lot in the discussion of contemporary spirituality is how much of the new age fascination with exotic mythic religion (as a substitute for more familiar religion), magical indignenous worldviews, as well as the pastiche of aliens, angels and holy men - is that there is much about this that is inherently regressive, it is a pathological donwturn away from secnd tier or transratinality toward the prerational - it has a very hard time telling the difference and is largely convinced that pre rational really is transrational and that anyone who says otherwise is an oppressive rationalist locked into scientism - all very predictable green stuff here…

also, as a counselor/healer i find that serious trauma and/or difficulty adjusting to the existential crisis necessary for ratiponal and transrational spirituality to emerge often sends people into this regressive pop spirituality which is then tightly held onto as a defense against the trauma/existential angst.

now of course we cant move anyone up the spiral, but i think these are important things to recognize as am integral community and to keep creating  options for practices, perspectives and worldviews that address the problems.

i do this by supporting the development of resources that can help the person turn and face the fear, surrrender the defense and embrace the beauty of the next level of awareness.

i know it sounds one sided, but my sense is that 90% of what passes for spirituality and religion is a defense structure against fear of the unknown (especially death) and suffering. authentic healing and consciousness deepening practices should train people to spot this as a way to keep developing wisdom and compassion. seeing as we have better practice-based and therapeutic tools to address these problems, i think that relinquishing the superstitious prerational defenses through healing and learning helps to free up the spiritual line to develop into something other than a regressive/defensive posture.

my suggestions are:

a) create practices and perspectives that help people to understand developmentla stages and actually expoerience themselves moving thorugh them. it's all very well to be able to talk SDi or piaget but what does it look like to get into really doing the work that allows us to keep growing and healing. of course the rpesumption here (and i think it is accurate) is that health higher stages = more truth beauty and goodness for individual and collective, yes?

b) create pratices and perspectives that truly integrate shadow work into spirituality so that there is less of a tendency to the “flight toward the light” and more a of a grounded non-judgmental awareness of the deeper layers of work that require dealing with the psyche in all it's beauty and horror.

c) encourage at every level an underlying sense that one is in an inquiry process that will require deeper and more complete truths to be uncovered at each stage and the relinquishment of fantasy/consoling beliefs as we become more empowered, existentially awake and present to what is. this is also based on the presumption (which i think is correct) that all metaphysics or faith in beliefs for which there is no evidence is a way to protect ourselves from the searing flame of reality - whcih paradoxically is where genuine awakening happens, at every stage.

and just incase i am misunderstood again - i am NOT saying that anything should be abolished.

i am NOT suggesting any kind of enforced atheism.

i AM suggesting a genuinely transrational integral perspective that creates strucures that invite the higher and healthier devlopment of the cognitive, spiritual and psychological lines.

though religion IS the repository of so much beautiful myth and meaning, it is - at the exact same time - a highly problematic limiting factor in growth of those three lines.

can we please differentiate a critique of that limiting quality from some kind of opressive attempt to abolish any worldview?

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Hello again,

Like Bill, I have given Sam Harris more than a bit of thought over the past few months:

Rational dialogue and human development
Atheism, meaning and morality
Why won’t God heal amputees
The great divide
Itchy fingers

Unlike Bill though, I have found myself coming to Sam’s defense. I have a hard time thinking about what an “Integral” response to ANY issue looks like, to tell you the truth. Most so-called “Integral” analyses strike me as little more than oversimplified, misapplied developmental arguments, usually filtered through the kaleidoscopic lens of Wilber’s Spiral Dynamics Rainbow.

As I said before, I think Harris is quite clear as to what “level” of religion he is criticizing, i.e. the literalist/fundamentalist level. He’s also is quick to point out that most of the people who embrace unreasonable, irrational beliefs in the religious sphere, are quite capable of (in fact, they insist on) being rational and reasonable in all other spheres of life. So, it doesn’t make sense to me to say “We need mythic level religion as a conveyor belt for all those pre-rational people out there.” These people are not “pre-rational” in any other area of their lives. They are not six year olds. A truly pre-rational person (i.e. a six year old) would only be confused by a church sermon or a Buddhist Satsang.

What a pre-rational person needs is a proper environment in which to naturally develop to the rational stage. Like I said before, religion is totally unnecessary for this process, as further brain development and Sesame Street take care of this quite nicely.

What Harris is trying to expose and knock down is the taboo against using our given rational capacities in the religious sphere. If Integral Theory applies here, perhaps it is in how the cognitive line relates to the spiritual line. I have too many questions about the concept of a “spiritual line” to take that any further right now.

This whole issue is personal, I think we must all admit. When I was twelve years old or so, it was rational arguments, like the ones Harris provides, that spared me from indoctrination into the world of mythic religion. It was this wholesale rejection of religion that, for me, cleared the way for development of a rational, then transrational spirituality. Rationality was my conveyor belt, and a set of parents who did not reinforce the taboo against criticizing religion. I’ll shut up now.

–Bob

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Hi Bob,

You make some good points.

Harris does tend to focus his attack on the fundamentalists, but he is also attacking any and all notions of God, in whatever form they may take. And while he supports meditation, he does so within a strictly scientific worldview.

However, you make a good point about rational people holding irrational religious beliefs. But this is not about cognitive development, it is about cultural values and beliefs and how difficult it can be to break free of those. You admit that you were spared that fate by parents who allowed you to question religion. I had a similar experience (reading Plato while going through the confirmation process as a 13 year old). I adopted a rational viewpoint and for years rejected all religion, until I read Wilber's The Atman Project and Up From Eden back in college.

If Harris could adopt an all-quadrant viewpoint and allow for even the possibility of developmental stages in people AND cultures, he might have a lot more success with his mission. Right now, he is simply preaching to the choir.

I agree that too many people talk about integral this and that within a very simplified viewpoint, but that does not negate the integral view, only the views of those who reduce integral to simple “if, then” statements.

In terms of developmental lines, intelligence is necessary but not sufficient, as I said above. But I also think that cultural values, and the assorted lines that create that quadrant, can severely limit or restrict the spiritual line, which is purely interior-individual. So while you may have very smart people who hold pre-rational religious beliefs (those Harris targets most vehemently), their spiritual developmental line is limited by the cultural beliefs they hold (and the virus protections built into those memes, such as hell).

You are dead-on correct, in my kind, that “What a pre-rational person needs is a proper environment in which to naturally develop to the rational stage.” I couldn't agree more.

Peace,
Bill

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Great reply Bill. Unfortunately, I’ll be working at the hospital until Tuesday (with just a sleep break), so I won’t have time to continue this fine dialogue until then.

Keep rockin’.

–Bob

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

I think it is a little misguided to refer to Buddhism, as it exists now, as pre-rational.  This is partly what I meant earlier when I said we need to be careful not to conflate holding a particular worldview with rationality itself.  The Buddhist training many monks undergo, for instance, involves a great deal of logical analysis and debate, and arguably, Nagarjunian inquiries into emptiness – which involve logical rigor and strong meditative awareness (e.g., following thought to a loggerhead and observing the dissolution of polarities when they are held together equally) – requires even post-rational capacities.

Because Buddhism has not yet developed a scientific worldview and has not inquired empirically into certain phenomena in the same way that science has does not mean that it is “pre-rational” or merely mythic.  I think this is just the kind of broad brush-stroking I've been objecting to here.  It's not an either/or affair. 

I do think it is fair of Sam (or anyone else) to ask Buddhists not to exempt certain teachings – say, about nagas or the six lokas or whatever – from the rigors of scientific analysis, and I think many Buddhists in the West are already willing to do this (myself included), but this move in itself should not be mistaken as the “entry” into rational or post-rational cognition.

Best wishes,

Balder

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

i agree completely bruce.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

bob

your blog posts on the subject are very clear and direct and you make some great points.

i am going to cut and paste a couple bits from you as well as a harris quote that you reference that i think really speak to the multi-thread discussion so far:


this is bob:

I just don’t think you can dismiss Harris with a simple developmental-levels argument. I’ve read/listened to/watched several Harris performances in the past few months, and I think he is very clear about which “level of God” he’s arguing against. Harris is repeatedly trying to point out what many of us are refusing to believe might be true–that a huge percentage of the world populace, including many in positions of considerable power and influence, believe that a particular book (i.e. the Bible or the Koran) is the absolute word of God, a God thought of as the omniscient creator of the universe. If this level of religious belief is really as widespread as Harris suggests, then we are all in deep shit, because such beliefs have dangerous implications in today’s world. That there are deeper, more developed conceptions of God and religions is beside the point. Changing “levels” or definitions in mid-debate (like Prager does) is dodging the issue. Maybe Sam is exaggerating or giving us trumped up statistics on just how many Americans believe Jesus is coming back soon to kick ass and take names. But if he’s even in the ballpark on his numbers, we should be very concerned indeed. The deeper articulations of our religious impulses have a place in the discussion, of course, when we are talking about how best to address the problem, but not as subterfuge used to keep us from recognizing it.

this is harris:

“The point is not that all religious people are bad; it is not that all bad things are done in the name of religion; and it is not that scientists are never bad, or wrong, or self-deceived. The point is this: intellectual honesty is better (more enlightened, more useful, less dangerous, more in touch with reality, etc. ) than dogmatism. The degree to which science is committed to the former, and religion to the latter remains one of the most salient and appalling disparities to be found in human discourse.”

and more bob:

First, if there is to be any clarity whatsoever in a discussion about God, we must come to an agreement as to what we’re discussing. Clearly, Harris is arguing against a fundamentalist or literalist notion of God as being the author of certain holy books, a notion which can and does lead to consequential beliefs about life and about the world. He’s not talking about God as a transpersonal principle or a label for all that is mysterious, wonderful and ineffable in the universe. There’s nothing unreasonable or dogmatic per se in acknowledging a transpersonal level of reality. But believing either the Bible or the Koran is the perfect, infallible word of the omniscient creator of the universe, and thus should be followed to the letter (according to your own or some authority’s interpretation),–this belief is highly unreasonable and dogmatic. And changing the use of the term “dogmatic” seems to muddy the discussion rather than clarify. Harris eschews dogma because beliefs based on unassailable principles are conversation killers.

ME:

to the above point i have heard the positions o far that “scientism” is dogmatic too and in fact that people like harris are fundamentalist atheists…….

are you serious, people!? this is quite weak.

the distinction between faith and science turns on evidence and inquiry. yes science and rationality remain closed to certain ideas - because they are ludicrous and unprovable - that is NOT a form of closed-minded faith, it is also not a problem. closed-mided faith believes it's assertions without proof to support them and in spite of proof to the contrary . this is antithetical to rationality and science whatever “ism ” you want to incorrectly tack onto them, and it IS a problem.

HOWEVER,  the integral critique regarding different kinds of scientific inquiry/evidence viz the 4 quads - that would be a good point, but that point actually leads do a deeper deconstruction of religious faith viz the scientific method of contemplative practise - which i think leads to higher/deper UL perspectives that do not require and in fact go beyond the kind of religious faith that harris is rightly speaking against…

encouraging critical thinking and inquiry-based practice, combined with an awareness of ongoing development beyond the dualistic saved/damned struggle in religious believers would be a great start.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

To the point you make about dogmatism in Harris's work:

I respect his efforts to do battle with dogmatic religious beliefs. This is a valuable effort and he is right in many of his charges in this respect.

Where I think he fails – miserably – is in seeing that science – and scientism in particular – for the most part only embraces the right-hand quadrants. There is a near total rejection of the left-hand, interior quadrants.

Even when Harris supports medititation, it is only as a means of supporting the materialist stance toward consciousness.

His views are dogmatic in that he recognizes little or no distintion between fundmentalism and all the other forms of religious faith. He says that all religious are not bad, but he rejects their beliefs as superstitions.

For everyone except atheists, there is a god of some sort or another – but what that god looks like and how it is experienced varies with one's worldview and combination of developmental lines – Harris is not willing, most of the time, to confront this with any kind of open-mindedness.

Peace,
Bill

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

really intersting conversation bill.

i hear that you agree with harris to some extent and feel his work is important.

if by scientism (and i think this term is a bit of a misnomer as it equates science with religious isms and this is a contradiction in terms) you mean a kind of extremely narrow materialism that denies any interior experience, meaning or value - i couldnt agree more that this is dangerous and sad. as are all forms of reductionism - this is why AQAL is so brilliant and beautiful.

but harris is not advocating this at all. he is merely pointing out the incongruity of religious faith in the contemporary world and the weird taboo against reasonable people simply stating the obvious.

using an AQAL approach means that we actually apply scientific methods of 4 different varieties to the domains at hand. we still use “communities of the adequate” in the UL to determine validity, yes? we still find that the science of the UL allows us to discern various levels of depth and accuracy and varoius pathologies, distortions and delusions, yes? in the UL we use practices and educational processes to discover meaning morals, consciousness, compassion etc…mythic religion still comes up incredibly short in this UL scientific method too. if we start to look at mythic belief through any of several different UL lenses (psychology, literature, philosophy etc..) it is demonstrably quite low on the scale in terms of revealing UL truth, beauty and goodness…it also has serious problems of the same sort in all 3 of the remaining quads.

all of the above happens without the bugaboo of “scientism”.

the reason i am objecting to the term is that i think it is an attempt to say, as several have done so far - that both religion and science are relativstic choices that rely on faith and dogma and that the moment science contradicts faith this is a sort of fundamentalism.

i am sorry but that argument is simply flawed for several reasons.

the term attempts to relativize worldviews as all being equally probable, all requiring equal faith, and attempts to turn science into an oppressive force.

the reality is that historically, science and reason have been forces that have liberated people from oppression by religion!

no population has ever suffered from an over abundance of reason causing suffering, on the contrary.

now of course there have been dogmatic antireligious totalitarians, but their position and beliefs have far more in common with religious faith than the do with scientific method or reason-based argument.

“harris says all religious people are not bad, but he rejects their belief as superstition” - do you disagree? are there some mythic level religious beliefs that are not superstition? does it make sense to talk of religious beliefs that are not mythic, or is that a contradiction in terms?

“For everyone except atheists, there is a god of some sort or another – but what that god looks like and how it is experienced varies with one's worldview and combination of developmental lines – Harris is not willing, most of the time, to confront this with any kind of open-mindedness.”

i agree with the above, but i think that we would be criticizing harris for not playing the integral game, when that wasn't the table he sat down at - it is our job as integralists to transcned and include harris' vlis and pwoerful rational stance and integrate it with AQAL perspectives. (and you left out agnostics - :O)

by itself harris' work stands as a powerful piece of rationalist spirituality that points out the outdated dysfunction of mythic belief and cries out for us to evolve further by acknowledging the problem.

this is good.

of course it is partial and could benefit from an integral slant. i am curious  about how you would apply your transcendance and inclusion fo what is valuable about his approach?

also still curious if you are up to defining the difference between prerational and transrational in relationship to rationality? examples would be great too….

what do you think of wallace's critique from an integral perspective?

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Julian,

First off, I agree with much of what Mary said.

As for Wallace's review of Harris's Letter, it is certainly not integral, and seems to me a bit green in SDi terms. However, it is a fair response from a religious moderate, and those are the people most alienated by Harris, and those we need most to temper the fundamentalism Harris derides.

By scientism I mean the complete rejection of anything other than rational, materialist science. This is where I tend to find Harris and Dawkins, among others, most lacking. When science becomes a belief system rather than a methodology, you get scientism.

Harris argues that atheism is not a worldview, ”it is simply an admission of the obvious.” In this single statement he has rejected all possible views of god, no matter what developmental level they hail from. But IT IS a worldview, no matter how much he argues that it isn't.

I am a huge fan of science and I tend to need “hard evidence” before I will believe anything, and since I work in the health field, this has served me well. But it has also served me in my spiritual practice. I loved Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul, and this is the proper use of science to my way thinking.

So I am not rejecting rationality or science, but I am asking for it to be open to possibilities that materialism cannot, at this point in time, deal with. Harris seems to me unwilling to allow for this possibility.

I don't think that science and religion are relativistic choices in any way, but they are separate developmental lines inhabiting separate quadrants. The scientific method is useful in all the quadrants, but traditional science is mostly an UR quadrant discipline.

It does make sense to talk about religious beliefs that are not mythic. Christianity has its variations, as does Buddhism and Judaism and Taosim, and so on. It's not fair to lump all religious beliefs into the mythic category.

Looking only at the idea of God:

There are many scientists who believe in God in some form or another. To them, my guess is that God is not an old man in robes pointing a finger at humanity. To them God might be the natural laws of the universe, which are so incredibly complex and elegant that they can inspire belief in some kind of higher intelligence, but it is not likely to be anthropomorphized by scientists the way that it might be by Southern Baptists.

I don't really think that there is anything new in Harris's arguments that hasn't already been a part of integral thought. The only difference is that he takes it to the extreme while integral theory does tend to be a bit relativistic in the hands of many people (which says more about the people than it does about the theory). A lot of people claiming to be integral are to me, and to Don Beck, still stuck in first tier and confusing higher development in the cognitive line with overall development (center of gravity).

One of the great things about Buddhist practice is that it helps us see how ego might be getting in the way – both in the Buddhist sense and in the Western psychological sense.

You asked: ”also still curious if you are up to defining the difference between prerational and transrational in relationship to rationality? examples would be great too….”

To which I answer that there was a time when I would have willingly written for paragraphs on this topic, but the reality is that I have very little experience of transrational states so I am not qualified to speak to them. I have to rely on others who have that experience as my guideposts.

But let me offer this from my recent readings:

Buddhism has as one of its practices Diety Worship. A pre-rational version of this might be actual belief in the deity itself. A rational version of this might be to see the deity as representative of internal psychological structures. A trans-rational version of this might be to see the meditation on a deity as a way of embodying the archetypal (in the Plotinus sense, not the Jungian sense) energy of the “deity,” which is seen as only a visual cue for the meditation.

Does that even come close to answering your question?

This is a cool discussion – glad to be involved.

~ Bill

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

bill we agree on all counts- i think at this point any disagreement is largely about semantics.

in the substantial essence of what you are saying and implying i am with you completely.

i do think that by definition religious belifs are mythic. period.

once we get into the esoteric, mystic, transrational versions of those beliefs they don't really count as religion in the way that most of the world believes in it…

i don't agree that harris is rejecting anything that is not materialist at all. in factm as a philosopher, he is very concerned with serious UL and LL questions reagrding morality, meaning, consciousness, etc… and he is clearly a meditator.

dawkins waxes absolutely poetic about the extraordinary complexity, beauty and intelligence of  the universe, our planet, all forms of life and especially human beings.

i don't think it makes sense to talk about science “becoming a belief-system” though. again the scientific method is applicable by meditators, physicians, philosophers, musicians, psychotherapists, anthropologists etc…..it merely suggest hypothesis, experiment and evidence, as well as the possibility of being disproven.

the scientific method is demonstrably more effective at revealing truth beauty and goodness in all four quadrants, it is a massive leap forward from the faith and superstition that preceded it in every single field.

what could be wrong about holding that logic, reason and scientific method are more effective ways of ascertaining truth, beauty and goodness than are faith and dogma?

scientific reductionism is definitely a problem, but so is reductionism to any of the quadrants.

look at what the new agers try to do with junk science interpretations of quantum physics and  overly inflated fantasies about the power of intention!

one reason i find “scientism” problematic is that i think it is a contradiction in terms. there is by definition nothing fundamentalist about trusting the scientific method. fundamentalism means strongly believing unproven faith based assertions in very literal terms, regardless of evidnece to the contrary… whatever you can say, even about scientific reductionism doesnt put the two in the same balll park.

i think it unfairly and inaccurately  diminishes science and elevates fundamentalism.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Julian, you wrote –

there is by definition nothing fundamentalist about trusting the scientific method. fundamentalism means strongly believing unproven faith based assertions in very literal terms, regardless of evidnece to the contrary… whatever you can say, even about scientific reductionism doesnt put the two in the same balll park.

Here are the Webster's definitions of fundamentalism, just for the fun(damentals) of it …. :-)

1. A movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching …

2. A movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles.

Thus fundamentalism need not be dependent on faith-based assertions per se – it may be rooted in any set of “basic principles,” including science.

I'm all for the scientific method –but fundamentally (okay, I'm being kind of silly) I just don't think it's the final word on everything…

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Julian , you asked, “are there some mythic level religious beliefs that are not superstition?”

Perhaps not, if by mythic level belief you mean beliefs that depend on the worship of a great deity in the clouds who created the world in seven days …

But if you take, for example:

love each other intensely from the heart (1 Peter 1:22)

or

… the man said … “who is my neighbor?” Jesus said, “A man … fell into the hands of bandits … A Samaritan traveller who came on him was moved with compassion … which, do you think, proved himself a neighbor … ?” (Luke 10: 29-37)

Are these necessarily superstitious proclamations? Might these mythic scriptural passages contain wisdom for those at mythic level belief and beyond? And what if the assertions contained in these passages were carried to their logical conclusions … ?

(btw these responses are falling all over the place … when I reply to a particular post I don't always know where I will end up!)

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

mary i love both of those ideas. neither of them require any mythic belief and the essence of both are common to many different schools of both religious and secular thought/philsophy.

:O)

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

If Harris says this:

“The point is not that all religious people are bad; it is not that all bad things are done in the name of religion; and it is not that scientists are never bad, or wrong, or self-deceived. The point is this: intellectual honesty is better (more enlightened, more useful, less dangerous, more in touch with reality, etc. ) than dogmatism.”

Then why does he also claim that religious moderates are “enablers” of religious fundamentalism and that people should be made to feel embarrassed about having religious faith?

He seems to think that all religious moderates are “tolerant” of each and every kind of religion. I don't think this is the case. I know religious moderates (and progressives) who are critical of and concerned about fundamentalism, and who would agree with much of what Harris says. They would certainly agree with what Harris says about intellectual honesty versus dogmatism. But they would not say that religion itself must be opposed in order to get rid of fundamentalism.

As many others have mentioned in these rapidly multiplying threads, fundamentalism is a problem that occurs within a certain developmental stage, according to SDi, at least. If that's the case, it wouldn't matter if all religious faith were stamped or laughed out of existence (as if that could ever happen anyway …) Some other red-tinged amber / mythic-level forms of dangerous intolerance could still emerge.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

you make a good point mary.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

i want to point out that there is often the suggestion that i or harris are suggesting stamping out or abolishing religion.

nothing so violent or totalitarian has been suggested at all.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

“yes science and rationality remain closed to certain ideas - because they are ludicrous and unprovable - that is NOT a form of closed-minded faith, it is also not a problem.”

There is a lot in this little sentence that get's to the heart of this whole debate for me.  Maybe it is just semantics, or even unintentional, but here's what I see and possible why others see scientism as dogmatic to a certain extent.  It's the notion that if something is unprovable than it is necessarily ludicrous.

Here's a silly (and ludicrous) example.  You can't prove that my 3 yo son pooped in his underpants twice today.  It is unprovable because we have already washed the underpants, and if you asked him he is likely to deny it;-)  Also, we are likely to deny it because we want to show the world that we are capable parents who have licked this potty-training thing at last on the day before his 3rd birthday.  (I know, that doesn't have the same legitimacy as the weighty topic we are discussing, but it is damn funny!)

Seriously, unprovable is not the same as ludicrous.  It's just unprovable.  To say otherwise is to get emotionally involved in science.  A no-no in my book of rationality.  Likely, to equate unprovability with ludicrousness is pre-rational mythic shadow lurking around a rational worldview.

Keith

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

keith i always enjoy your humor. :O)

well to extend your example, i think we all agree that certain things actually are ludicrous - i think it's just a matter of where we draw the line and why, right?

the whole baby poop thing, alright ya got me there, hide the evidence and you could probably get away with it…i dont know if it seemed ludicrous in the first place, but whatever….

it is ludicrous to suggest that goerge w. bush has conversations with the god of abraham who has advised him on his middle eastern policy, yes?

maybe that is not a given…..

is it ludicrous to say that gay people fornicating are the reason god allowed 911 to happen?

better yet is it ludicrous to suggest that somehow the karma or negative thoughts of the people in the towers and on the plane manifested the tragic events of that day?

is it ludicrous to suggest that god wants people in africa to die of aids rather than use condoms?

is it ludicrous to suggest  (a la bertrand russel) that there is a tiny porcelain teapot orbitting the sun - too tiny for our telescopes to see?

how about that women are nothing without their husbands and should immolate themselves on his funeral pyre if he dies before them?

what about the idea that people of african descent are less human and deserve less human rights than people of european descent?

how about that low caste indians are living out their bad karma from past lives and high caste indians are actually more spiritually evolved as proven by their more priviledged birth?

is it ludicrous to suggest that qutzalcoatl was actually an earlier incarnation of jesus and that in 2012 that saviour will come again? (perhaps we'll have to wait and see , but you know where my money is….)

is it ludicrous to suggest that i can walk through walls?

how about that sai baba manifests ash and jewelry from out of thin air?

the point is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the burden of proof is on those making the extraordinary claims, not on those who find them ludicrous. this is standard philosophical logic.

we all find certain claims ludicrous precisely because they have never been satisfactorily proven and more than likely will never be proven.

we all have a line, it's just a question of where you draw it and why.

where do you draw the line between the possible and the ludicrous and why?

did you answer no to any of the above questions?

do you have a) something you think is ludicrous.

b) an example of something highly improbable that you think others might find ludicrous but that you believe?

i await your humor. :O)

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

A primordially funny thing to me is that we exist at all.  Everything after the Big Bang is icing on the cake.

Now that was probably not very funny.  See!  You assume too much!  I am not always funny;-)

…..I've been trying to come up with something to answer your germane questions, and as much as there is part of me that says,” yes, those are ludicrous claims,” there is a bigger part that will not allow me to state it in such a way as Harris does.  I really want to answer your question about where I draw the line, but I just can't.  It appears that I am literally not able to do so from my perspective.  Maybe that's where the answer lies.  I have made it such an important part of my practice to not draw distinctions when it comes to perspectives, that it appears to be paying off.  You get what you pay for, and I have apparently paid for a wishy-washy, namby-pamby, moral relativist perspective;-)

Frankly, I don't care as much about the particulars as I do the results: people are suffering.  When someone like Jerry Falwell says outrageous things about gays being the cause of all the problems in the world, I see that as insensitive.  I do not blame Falwell for thinking that way.  How could I?  If I were him, with all the biological and social conditioning and life circumstances, I would say the same things.  Likewise, I do not blame Harris for writing and saying what he does.  He has been conditioned to do exactly that.  In either case, they both seem, to me, to be suffering greatly in their perspectives.  They appear to hate each other's points of view.  I do not hate theirs, and I do not hate them.  I do not wish to enflame their suffering by using pejoritive words like “ludicrous” to define what is aligned with their very identity.  So, what to do to mitigate this suffering rather than enflame it.  Funny enough, if you probed deep into the hearts of both Falwell and Harris, I would not be surprised if the core motivation for each was exactly the same: mitigate suffering.  They just don't believe in the same ways to go about it.

So that's as good as I can do with the question about drawing the line.  I'll be more direct with the other questions.

did you answer no to any of the above questions? No, just like I don't think it's ludicrous for Harris to hold his view, or for you to hold yours.  It just is.

do you have a) something you think is ludicrous. The idea that Andrew Cohen is enlightened!

b) an example of something highly improbable that you think others might find ludicrous but that you believe?  You can ask my family and friends.  They'll tell you about my ludicrous musings;-) To me, the idea that I believe something highly improbable just doesn't make sense.  If I believe it, it's because I find it probable.  Strangely enough, even mere possibility, beyond all reason, is often enough.  No, I should say infinite possibility, as opposed to mere possibility.  I tend to hold things up the the light of infinity.  If one could think long and hard enough, anything could be found to be reasonable.  Human beings don't have that luxury.  Perhaps Being Itself does.  If one had infinite perspective, then all possibilities could be seen.  We do not have that while operating within the linear apparatus of cause-and-effect thinking, so our perspective is limited/aka contracted.  Hence, suffering.

i await your humor. :O)  Me too;-)


Keith

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

what can i say keith? you are an endearing guy.

your couple jokes made me smile.

you are clear that you are on a path right now where the kinds of distinctions i am making seem counterintuitive.

i think it is important for many of us to drop all judgments for a time. this can be very energizing and reduce the power of a certain kind of mental controlling psychological defense. it can make us available perhaps in a new way to avenues of experience, intuition, vulnerability, playfulness, altered states, innocence - how beautiful!

for myself that has been an important part of the process. later on i got curious about how to bring discernbment back in and about what sorts of judgments were actually valuable, midwiving of truth beauty and goodness and important to struggle with in a mature spirituality.

i am sure this sounds condescending, but i am also aware that the path is in many ways a spiral and we all travel through it from different angles.

growing up in a police state under apartheid made me ask very intense questions from a young age about the nature of truth, about morality, about how spirituality, philosophy, psychology affect the flesh and bone real world.

for a time i was deeply interested in a transcendentalist abstract otherworldly spirituality - but for me that was an escape from reality - a reality which i gradually sacralized as i used the tools i was learning through multiple disciplines to enage more deeply with it.

thanks for your frank and good natured answer, i hope you find my response the same.

no why question is - why do you find it ludicrous that andrew cohen is enlightened? seriously i think we may have actually found your line in the sand. don't back down on it - tell me why!

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

“you are clear that you are on a path right now where the kinds of distinctions i am making seem counterintuitive.”

You know what's interesting is that the distinctions do arise.  I just don't do anything with them.  I anticipate that the doing about distinctions just unfolds as it does in due time.  I think even Don Beck (as referenced maybe in Bill's earlier post) suggests that you can't do anything about these distinctions in that you can't make anybody move up the spiral.  So I just witness and offer myself to the process.  For me, right now that means potty training, doing my job, preparing for my boy's birthday party  tonight, and feeling/knowing that my attention/intention just might be enough of a contribution to this process.  It has been hard for me as kind of an alpha dog to sit on the sidelines and trust that there are scores of capable folks doing the good work on actively configuring the conveyor belt.  I have found contentment playing a more passive role in the process of smoothing out some of these distinctions in my mind.  If there is some aspect of mind that allows for some kind of conscious m-field generation, then maybe that is how I am engaging discernment and fostering something….better. When life circumstances permit, I just might find myself in a position to engage this more fully.  If that is the case, so be it.  Until then, I am in a hurry to go get a birthday gift for young Stephen (that's him in my avatar at age 8mo).

Regarding Cohen, most recently is his denial of unconditional love that I read about here.  To me there is a big difference between recognition of unconditional love and tolerance.  Maybe that is an important distinction to make here.  I see that you are interested in dialogue about how to improve the situation.  That can be approached from the perspective that Cohen seems to take, which seems to be missing the point, which may be that one wants to improve something because they love it, not because they are resisting it or reacting harshly to it.  And, because whatever enlightenment may be, I hold it up to the highest of standards: no shadow allowed, only blinding brilliance.

A bit of a ramble, gotta hit the toy store.

Keith

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Balder,

I think I addressed your point above, but I'll try again.

We must make a distinction, I think, between cognitive ability and development, and worldviews, as you rightly assert. While many Buddhists have highly developed cognitive skills, a great many still hold pre-rational worldviews.

I think we need to make center of gravity part of this discussion. I might be able to think (assuming all the stars are properly aligned [grin]) in an integral way, but my center of gravity is decidedly not integral. Likewise, a Buddhist monk might be able to make incredible distinctions at the highest levels of rational thought, but still hold beliefs that we might consider superstitious.

I don't think of Buddhism as pre-rational, but a great many Buddhists hold pre-rational worldviews. Buddhism is fully integral if people are willing to step outside of their own favorite practices or lineages. Within the body of Buddhism there are pre-rational beliefs and practices, rational beliefs and practices, and post-rational beliefs and practices.

We should be willing, as you suggest, to submit all of Buddhism to scientific inquiry, but we should not simply dismiss those beliefs and practices found to be pre-rational simply because they are pre-rational.

There are a lot of egoic, power-god level people, some of whom are Buddhist, who need mythic-authoritarian structures – religious or otherwise – to contain their egoic power-drives so that they may evolve. Likewise, there are many mythic-authoritarian level people who need rational-scientific structures to allow them to evolve. And so on up the Spiral.

But again, we need to think about centers of gravity. We need to create the conditions that allow a whole person to evolve, not merely one or two developmental lines.

Peace,
Bill

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

diggin' on the nuances bill - thank you.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Hi, Bill,

I agree with what you've said and think you put it very well.  I also agree that my post was making a similar point to one you had previously expressed; I just wanted to emphasize the following point.  I wanted to stress that religion itself is not necessarily pre-rational, but may contain (and, in fact, already does contain) rational and transrational elements.  So, when we talk about people who are cognitively developed in some areas while still subscribing to prerational beliefs, we should be careful not to treat religion itself as that “prerational” element.  These distinctions may be present within any particular religious tradition: there may be highly cognitively developed strands within it, which are held alongside other beliefs which are pre-rational, or which have not been held up to the same level of rational analysis and scrutiny as other aspects.

Julian,

I may sometimes unfairly have addressed critiques to you which are really more appropriate for Sam Harris' position, not yours.  But to the extent that either of you argue that there is no rational basis for belief in God – no rational or transrational forms of valid theology – I think this is an erroneous argument, which ignores important developments and lines of thought within multiple religious traditions.  As I've said before, I'm not personally wedded to theism, but I have read enough theology to have encountered sophisticated forms of it which are not prone to the same categorical errors and logical fallacies of mythic fundamentalism, and which should not be indiscriminately lumped together with them. 

Several people here seem to be arguing that the world would be better off without any religion whatsoever – just certain religious practices which can be coopted by a secular humanist “tradition,” and used within the context of a purely scientific worldview.  In my view, it is one thing to argue that, personally, you do not need religion; another altogether to claim that everyone would be better off without it, and that we should weed it out of modern society and shame believers in any theistic tradition in the same way we shame members of the KKK (which Harris has argued).

Best wishes,

Balder

P.S.  Oops, there I go again, Bill: repeating the same arguments you've been making!  This time I did it at the same time as you…. :)

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Spirituality and Science

a: astrology is bunk

b: well i dont know, some people get a lot out of it, it's a spiritual path like any other - and there's a science to it.

a: well….i know this guy who wont get out of bed when mercury is retrograde and that just seems so superstitious and narcissistic, besides any scientific appraisal of astrology proves it is nonsense.

b: well arent you just a little bit open to the possibility that it might be true? i mean where's your sense of the mystery, dude? you sound so uptight and linear, haven't you seen what the bleep……unless the scientists were open to the experiment being true, their consciousness probably screwed it up - too bad for them…

a: open to it being true? no, why should i be? the only serious experiments done with astrology were designed by well-known astrologers and failed dismally. until i see otherwise i am pretty sure it's bunk. besides, the “mystery” is much more complex and mind-blowing than inane astrological junk science reductionism…and what the bleep is sooooo misleading about quantum physics.

b: well gee you sound just like a fundamentalist now.

a: what on earth do you mean?

b: listen to you! it's like science is your religion and you hate the astrology people and want to kill them and abolish astrology because they don't believe in your god - science!

a: whoa who said anything about killing anyone or abolishing anything or hating anyone? i am just saying that astrology is superficial and baseless. what's worse - it claims both to be psycho-spiritually deep and based in science!

b: yup thats your shadow man, you are a closet scientific fundamentalist - you're just as bad as the jihadists - i bet you have a lot of mars in your birth chart……and just think of what the water in your cells must look like with all that negative energy…

a: wait a second i am talking about wether or not astrology is bunk, not suggesting waging war on anyone for what they belief…

b: well you sound pretty serious in your opinion.

a: yes, i get fired up about truth - that's what the scientific method is all about, the rigorous pursuit of truth - it's a lot different than attacking a person physically. the attack on bad ideas and weak arguments is the opposite of jihad, it's more related to the rational enlightement that birthed the modern era and started to free us from what the jihadists want. to go back to. whats wrong with a little healthy debate?

b: geez, i dont know, sounds like your ego. cant it all just be true? different strokes for different folks..

a: what, like jesus, buddha, mohamed, krishna and moses all playing pool with james dean and marilyn monroe in a bar in the clouds and sinking synchronistic balls into pockets based on the movements of the planets that then control our destinies down here? or maybe the aliens are really angels and if you just pray to them before you drink the water you've infused with good thoughts you'll live forever, make a lot of money and never be sad…….shit, i know this woman who believes the jihadists are actually aliens in disguise because she thinks islam is so holy and thats the only rational explanation….

b: wow you sure are mad about all this, you need to just let it go sometimes, you know? it's all perfect anyway and that woman has her own karma, you are so arrogant!

a: ok, here we go -  well, this appropriated idea of karma is reallly self serving.

b: what do you mean, don't you believe that what goes around comes around?

a: not really.

b: wait i thought you were a meditator….

a: uh huh…

b: but, you know, karma, reincarnation, we're all working through our past life stuff, everything happens for a reason - isnt that what meditation and yoga are about?

a: not to me. and in a post 911 world i don't see how anyone can still take those oversimplified explanations seriously.

b: well that's ok, i wen't to this satsang where i heard that even that was all an illusion too. the teacher said that we were all already enlightened and any attempt to get there through practices or therapy or doing anything except just recognizing that. was a total waste of time!..

a: that's too bad, i bet a lot of the people there could benefit from yoga, meditation, therapy or  some combination of them….probably why they were there in the first place.

b: well i guess, but as long as they are not getting caught up in the story, you know?

a: story, what do you mean?

b: you know like thinking they are victims and complaining and believing that they haven't co-created everything for a higher reason…he said therapy was like putting lipstick on a pig! i think it comes down to just letting go of your ego and being happy.

a: oh you mean as long as they don't get honest about their lives? some people really have been victimized. in psychological terms they actually need to develop a healthy ego, not let it go……and that aint a pig it's a human psyche.

b: huh?

a: i think healing and spiritual growth ask us to get really real with ourselves and keep dropping fantasy metaphysics.

b: there you go being all fundamentalist again. what is real? who are you to say?

a: well your life is real and while your interpretations may not be 100% reliable the way you feel is real and the things that trigger you are real and deserve your attention. practices can give you tools to work with all of that and be more honest with yourself.

b: feelings? that doesn't sound very scientific, mister linear!

a: actually, you can follow a scientific method  in a healing process or meditation practice, and there should be results that  are verifiable in certain experiential ways.

b: but i could say that about astrology….don't you see how empowering it is to recognize that the planets affect us and everything is connected - haven't you seen “the secret?”

a: on the contrary i think it is profoundly disempowering to put your power in the stars or yahweh or zeus, and profoundly delusional and ignorant of socio-political and psychological reality, (not to mention the laws of physics) to imagine that your thoughts have supreme power over what happens in your life. yes i have seen the movie and i had a lot of problems with it.

b: but don't you use the power of intention when you do yoga?

a: sure.

b: well….

a: i see that as a way to focus the mind and enter a transformamtional process, not attempt to control everything from my feelings to wether or not there is a parking space at whole foods! that sort of intention is a very misguided fantasy that real practice should see through…

b: damn you are so harsh!

a: i don't mean to be - i just think a lot of these ideas are very problematic.

b: well they don't do any harm do they - i mean shouldn't people be free to believe whatever they want about the universe?

a: sure.

b: well then what are you talking about?

a: people can believe whatever they want and peaple can also debate the relative truth or accuracy of different positions - it's good mental excercise and i think it actually matters what is true and false.

b: but isnt spirituality beyond all that ?

a: in some ways yes - in some ways no.






 

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

the above is just me having fun with the ideas i see and hear flying around the spiritual community and my own mind.

it is certainly not intended to be lampooning anyone in this thread - just so you know!

:O)

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Well,  Julian, throughout all of these threads, I have asked you in various ways how you deal with the unexplainable, non-rational occurrances in life.  It would seem that you either ignore them or don't have them.  This is a perfect example of the myth of the givens.  None of us can see what we can't see. 

Nobody, from what I can tell on this thread, would have any interest in pursuing  or defending the irrational mumbo-jumbo that you are so intent on debunking.  Most of us have done a lot of time on debunking duty ourselves.  Nobody would be the least bit resistent to shining the non-dogmatic light of rational thought on any thing that they might be experiencing. 

But there is more than that too. It seems that you cannot see unexplainable phenomenon.  It seems that you believe anyone who claims to see unexplainable phenomenon that you cannot see yourself  is 'pre-rational'.   

Everything that you have written so far that I have read makes me think that you are not transrational.  I think that you are a rational person on a crusade to debunk the pre-rational gibberish that has been running amok for years.   I think this is a valiant quest, and I am thankful for your energy, and for the energy of Dawkins and Harris.  All of you are stirring up the pot, and certainly creating a lively debate.
Jane

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

well i am thrilled to hear that jane! :O) glad we have something we agree upon…

hi. how are you doing?

well, regarding your question, i am going to be frank and self-revealing here at the risk of giving people ad hominem ammunition:

i grew up in an overtly religious country that used religion to justify oppression. that said i still had profound spiritual openings as a child, enjoyed singing in church and was introduced to many perspectives on religion, spirituality and life through my parents and their liberal intelllectual post-hippie bookshelf.

i have had many, many experiences of non-rational phenomena, some by my (later) assessment prerational, some i call transrational and some are still open to evaluation.

my first phase as an adult in the spiritual world was the usual creative visualization, you create your own reality, instant enlightenment, new age fascination at around 19. i was deep into it with a whole community of friends that shared the interest.

as i have mentioned before i spent some years exploring psychedlics - just about all of them. this happened for the most part in intentional, ritualized ways as a path of self-inquiry and healing. as i am sure you know those altered states produce all kinds of fascinating experiences and some of them were pretty compelling in terms of explanations like past-lives, destiny, soul mates, synchronicity, god talking to me directly etc…

i had also been exploring various meditation practices and reading the beat poets since i was a teenager, so all sorts of interesting states and perceptual shifts there…

spent 3 months in the osho ashraam in poona delving into various east-west experiences of energy, psyche, catharsis. meditation etc…

played a lot in rock and roll bands and experienced group mind and powerful altered state ego dissolution with audiences varying from very small to festival size.

i have been quite involved in both the practice and teaching of yoga - practicing for the last 17 years and teaching for almost 13, as well as practicing energetic/structural bodywork with people since about 1997 and guiding group holotropic breathwork workshops.

i do energetic bodywork with people every day and create a space in which people open up into an experience of kundalini/kriyas/energetic catharsis/ecstatic core opening in both my private and group work.

i have done probably a couple hundred or so of my own personal holotropic breathwork sessions and recieved many more bodywork sessions too. for about 10 years i have been part of an ecstatic dance community that meets every week - about 200 of us now, to explore movement as a shared altered state spiritual practice.

all of this i am sure is familiar to you and others here. also like others here i have been excercising my mind with intellectual pursuits. mine have fallen mostly in the realm of psychological theory and wilber's integral trip - which started off as transpersonal psychology.

now, before when i listed some of these it was suggested that it came across as egoic.

sorry if that is the case but i am just wanting to be frank about how much time and energy i have put into non-ordinary states and what i think of as transpersonal body-mind process.

all of this has been engaged and continues to be engaged in the spirit of deep inquiry into energy, consciousness, emotions, healing, relationship…

i have found over the years that i embraced very convincing metaphysical explanations for things that later turned out to more believably be something else or to not be as convincing once i had more information or experience.

i have also found over time that as my own personal work progressed a lot of the need for metapysical explanations dropped away and the need to feel like i was taken care of by a parental god or universe also dissolved. it has been an evolution, but i do wish i had better guidance early on.

funny to me how the folks who want to believe in a linear ordered universe in which everything happens by synchronicty, intention or “for a reason” find people like me who don't buy that anymore to be uptight or too literal - do you see the irony of this? acknowledging the reality of chaos, chance, and existential uncertainty is actually much less uptight and much more engaged in the mystery….

i found too that much of the quest for paranormal, metaphysical, magical explanations for reality lay in unmet early needs, existential anxiety, unresolved traumas, lack of real world resources etc… and that the more the work of resolving that material happened, the less interesting, compelling or convincing those explanations appeared. now they mostly seem kinda sillly.

that said - i am totally enamoured of the spiritual life, but for me it has expanded beyond a fascination with trying to prove magic, myth or divine order, and into a deep wonder at and engagement with reality - with emotions and sensations, ideas and beliefs, with music and art, cinema and literature. a lot of the spiritual stuff i was exposed to before, be it new age or yogic/buddhist was in many ways a dissociation from what now holds much more meaning and sacredness for me.

in fact i have found so much more depth in the more classical intellectual spiritual realm  as well as the visceral emotional experiential realm than i ever experienced in the new age spiritual quest i cut my teeth on. the practices continue but are more grounded and feel more integrated. they have next to nothing to do with faith.

for me the transrational is not at odds with rationality - it is a higher form of rationality - it is also just beyond the grasp of the rational mind but in no way dualistically contradictory with rational interpretations.

for me the transrational does not include ghosts and goblins, angels and faeries, enlightened holy men, literalized archetypes, yogis that dissolve into light when they die, people turning into animals etc..

it does include the rich depths of the psyche, the mystery of the unconcious, the power of poetry and myth, the ecstasy of deep surrender into emotion, sensation, revelatory experience, intimacy, improvisation…..the expansive cross-referencing of the intellect as well as the consciousness that dwells everpresent behind, in and around it…

lastly :O) a little sticking point i have sometimes:

i find it to be a contradiction when people offer an explanation that doent feel quite right to me - like synchronicity or reincarnation, and then when i say so - i am told that i leave no room for “the mystery”…..

au contraire!

i leave more room for the mystery by not accepting what feels like a very limited and improbable explanation for something as yet undiscovered…..

i also think it makes more room for the mystery to eliminate explanations that seem inadequate to it…

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Julian,
Thank you for all that information.  I totally understand that  you are not telling me this for any 'egoic' reason,  but to stress the integrity with which you have been pursuing this path of sprititual discovery, and to map out the the various avenues that you have been down.  It sounds like they have been numerous.  I am glad, with the all the new age hokey pokey  on the go, that you have been exploring and shining the your rational light on it.

In the clip with Dawkins, he says at some point that he believes that there will be a very simple explanation for how the universe got here.   I agree with him. Though I don't think very many people necessarily follow me, I actually ponder the physics formula for the universe often.  I started  a thread about this on the old, old (1st) Integral Naked forum called “how the uroborus eats its tail.”  It is a statement of how consciousness becomes conscious of itself, and what the real physics formula for this phenomenon we call the universe is, and how it overlays the phenomenon we call 'enlightenment'.  “How is it that the brain is in the body but the body is in the mind.”  The instrument of perception is embedded in the very thing which it trying to be perceived.

I actually expect that synchronicity and clairvoyance, the power of intention, creative visualization and other 'unexplainables' are toing to be able to be explained too in a real bonafide physics formula too.  But saying that there is a physics formula that will explain it, is not to say that all of these unexplainables are pre-rational lies that need to be hauled out to the trash can in our pursuit of truth.  (though, clearly some real life 'cases' of them are lies and crap and fake) 

I often think of how Tyco Brahe actually was able to make measurements that did not fit the formula that the sun travelled around the sun.  These accurate yet unexplainable inconsistencies were essential in the next step for copernicus. When Copernicus made his heretical claim that the earth was travelling around the sun, this was like a psychic earthquake at the time, and defied all the religious dogma about god and man and the order of things.  In the same manner, the 'siddhis' of the world are, in my view, just like those measurements that Tyco Brahe made.  They cannot  be explained by our present world view.  If we throw them out, we will be losing some valuable information, information that we require to solve the big riddle.

I believe that the riddle that we have been trying to solve: how did we get here?—has its solution embedded in the very pre-rational mythology that you would relegate to the 'in here'. 
I look at tall of those aphorisms, and I ponder what the deeper (out here)messages.  What are they trying to offer us, what clues to solve this riddle?  

For instance: “It is more difficult for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven, than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. ”   This statement is about the layers of self that must be dis-indentified with in order to shift into a non-dual state of awareness.  

“The first will be last and the last will be first”—“what goes around comes around”—actually speaks to the circular nature of the universe.  Which begins to describe part of  the two-sided, mobeus-like configuration, where the inside becomes the outside and the outside becomes the inside, or as Aurobindo and Teilhard spoke about: materialization of spirit and the spiritualization of matter.  

“physical reality is a condition of reality the same way that ice is a condition of water”—saying something about the nature of spirit and matter, the right and left quadrants, how they interchange.

“Take off the mask of the devil and you will find God”—a statement about the matter and spirit, the right and left quadrants of the AQAL.  Also the math of the absolutes.

I love Robert Anton Wilson's recognition that each one of us(stripped to our bare essence – no longer indentifying with the stuff we have accumulated, the drama in our lives ,or our egos) is a 'reality tunnel'.   I would have loved Stephen Hawking to have put his theories with Robert Anton Wilson…… 

So, Julian, I am also a rationalist but one who believes that the next peices of the puzzle are emerging not by throwing out all the mythologies as 'gibberish' or reinterpretting them like they are expressions of only our inner workings, but rather by mining them for even deeper meaning, not just 'in here', but 'in here', 'out there',' All level, All Quadrant.'…And I actually think this is being done.  Although I appreciate the intention of what you doing, it seems to me that you are throwing some lovely helpful babies out with the bath water…..

In any event, thank you for your clarity about your position in your last post.  The road has a way of rising up and meeting us, shattering all of our previously held notions of truth.  I will be delighted to let you know if this happens to me again, any time soon.

jane

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

I have lost a post this morning….correcting my memory of how the events unfolded.  Copernicus was long gone,before Tycho came along with his measurements, proving what Copernicus said was true.
Still, that is often the way it is, the lens of perception is often one step behind…..

here is what Goethe wrote: “Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind - for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What became of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic - religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of.” [Goethe.]  

Oh, it appears we are in another such upheaval.  What if it turns out, and I am quite sure that it will, that the center is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere.  What if it turns out that every human being is a center, and when cleared of psychological debris and all other identity, each one of us is a pure witness.  A witness in integral math is a zero. The math of zeros turns out to be far more interesting than ever expected!  I remember my Grade 3 teacher well meaning that she was, insisting, that I was mistaken about zeros.  I am quite sure she simply could not see the big picture.  I think in integral physics the laws of thermal dynamics hold true….energy is neither created nor destroyed, etc….

I went into this in more detail in the post that I lost. alas,…. oh, it will come around again, if not through me, someone else will come up with it.   They are probably coming up with it this very minute.

It is freezing cold here.  Brutal….if it was not so crisp and clear.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

“Oh, it appears we are in another such upheaval.  What if it turns out, and I am quite sure that it will, that the center is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere.  What if it turns out that every human being is a center, and when cleared of psychological debris and all other identity, each one of us is a pure witness.  A witness in integral math is a zero. The math of zeros turns out to be far more interesting than ever expected!  I remember my Grade 3 teacher well meaning that she was, insisting, that I was mistaken about zeros.  I am quite sure she simply could not see the big picture.  I think in integral physics the laws of thermal dynamics hold true….energy is neither created nor destroyed, etc….”

Jane, darling!  Thanks for this.  I'll add to it that this is exactly the line of thinking I seem to take regarding centers and circumferences.  I read a book a few years ago titled “The Inflationary Universe” by Alan Guth, MIT professor of physics.  In spite of his lofty intellect, the book was a fairly easy read.  I found it easier than some of Wilber's stuff.  Some of the conclusions that cosmologists seem to largely agree upon are that, indeed, the center is found at every point in the universe.  Further, the entire energy of the universe exists in each and every point.  To me, from the perspective of a perspective (sounding integral mathish here…yikes!), that makes perfect sense.  My perspectival worldview is a balancing act with my witnessing center as the fulcrum that leverages lofty ideals against very heavy rocks.  Inflation theory and the science that props it up explain to me that Big Bang in such a way that I find no problem at all in at least imagining how this is indeed a balancing act of unmanifest perspectives projecting reality into manifest forms.  Not in a simplistic and narcissistic “you create your own reality” kind of metaphysics, but one that considers not individual consciousness as the creators, or even co-creators (co-anything implies duality that doesn't fit into my evolving perspective at this time), but just as creation itself being none other than the infinite expanse of manifest and unmanifest potentials balanced on the head of a pin.  Guess what.  You and I are the pinheads!  (have fun with that, Julian!)

I wrote a blog a while ago having fun with this concept of zeros and infinities and unities.  I tied it up in metaphysical packaging of the holy trinity, in linguistic packing of first-second-third person perspectives, and some more.  None of it is authoritative in any sense.  It's just musings, but you might get a kick out of it.  The gist:  1 = 0 = OO (OO is how I represent infinity as a typed character).

Keith

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Keith, you drop in this morning like mana from heaven…I will look forward to your blog…and if you could stand to find the 1st Integral Naked Forum….you will find the from around December 2005—“how the uroborus eats its tail”…..about exactly the same thing…

Maybe you and I are the only two integral physists on the face of the planet so far….scary really, when I can't spell uroboros the same way twice, and I am never sure about the word 'physist' either….. though I did do very well in Physics 101 in university…it hardly constitutes a credible credential….but shag it, I just found out that Copernicus was a winsome fellow mostly interested in translating Greek poems into Latin. 

Jane

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

fun stuff keith, i am enjoying it…

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

quick point - i have never said that mythology was gibberish. in fact you'll notice i included it in my last post as one aspect of the transrational.

i have said that literal interpretations of myth are by definition prerational and that the superstitious belief that mythic archetypes exist out there somewhere or as real flesh and blood  instead of recognizing them as being projections from the psyche leads to superstition and confusion about spirituality instead of the deep awe for consciousness, psyche and the way we make sense of the kosmos that i am describing.

question for you jane: is there anything that you  would you classify as purely prerational? (can't hurt to ask one more time i guess…:O)

you called me out as a mere rationalist with no knowledge of the transrational and i gave you my sincere reply.

now i call you out as someone who is invested in keeping pre and trans merged.

can you show me your distinction between the two and why you think it matters?

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

Julian, there is a ton of stuff that I consider pre-rational, it is probably all the same stuff that you consider pre-rational. 
*George Bush's war on terrorism and  the underlying conviction that 'god is on the side of the american people' but not on the side of the 'bad guys ' over there.
*A four year old child's 'belief ' in Santa Claus(but not a four year old's awe) coming down the chimney.
*God the big guy in the sky
*An external uninvolved creator of the universe,
*creationism in general with the literal 7 days time frame that we consensually agree upon….
*Jehova Witness' claim that if you willing take in blood products you are out of the running for heaven and a spot with the 144,000
*Abraham about to kill Isaac, and most of the rest of the voodoo practices, and ritualized practices in most/ perhaps all, religious setting……
*the belief that my life is so great because I am such a fantastic person and as a result God is really looking out for me.
*that I can with the 'power of my intention' win Ramsses a million dollars on the 649 lottery tickets
*to believe that I have much  personal power at all, aside from the ability to move this body of mine, and scare up a bit of stuff around me, think up some interesting thoughts–all of which is transient power at best. The outside stuff depends on the laws and agreements between me and my community, the natural world etc.  (None of my personal power is anything  that a Tsunami couldn't wipe out in a second. )
*to believe that I am helpless and can't do anything at all, because the rest of the world holds me in chains.
*that King Knutt could stand at the sea and order the tide out.
*that the pope has any more clout (except what the deluded RC church gives him) than the rest of us when it comes to all earthly and heavenly matters.
*that Hitler was the devil, rather than a perfect storm of corrupt political will,  abhorent child-rearing practices, and various other contextual factors (although he had a pretty good run at it, yuck) Same goes for Saddam…..
I could go on and on…and on…..and on……..
*ritualized human sacrifice.


Are we in agreement so far?
I am losing posts today, so I will post this and continue with next part of the assignment.
Jane

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

great examples jane! thanks. yes.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

“now i call you out as someone who is invested in keeping pre and trans merged.”
“can you show me your distinction between the two and why you think it matters?”

Well, Julian, I have so much invested in differentiating these two (pre and trans)that I could cry my eyes out every moment of the day if I thought it would be the least bit helpful, and, quite frankly, I don't think it is.  I think that all of the suffering in the world comes from distorted pre-rational beliefs of all kinds.  These ridiculous beliefs have served to fortify corrupt political systems; perpetuate the poisonous pedagogy of child abuse; cloak the way that money is sequestered among the few rich guys in the world, while the vast majority of humanity toils with little recognition of their effort and without  the share of the earth that everyone needs to live a dignified life.   this is presently the state that our beautiful world is in……it is not hard to be discouraged! 

So again, let me say it again, I agree with the need to clear out the pre-rational beliefs, breath fresh air into the mix, straighten out the mess.

And STILL there are unexplainables(see the thread on Siddhis)……here is one:  My mother was pregnant with me.  She is shopping in Eaton's Department Store in Toronto, on the morning of August 2, 1956.  Her sister has just given birth to my cousin Svend, early that morning.  My mother is suddenly overcome with a feeling of absolue dread.  She turns to her friend and says,  “I have to call the farm.  My father has just died.”  Forty miles away her mother confirms that this has happened.  They are just taking the his body away in the ambulance.  He has shot himself.  He is dead.

I have a whole life full of these kind of preposterous coincidences, some of them as tragic as the one above, some of them totally silly; once I even won  $20,000 with a ticket I had forgotten I had supporting and charity organization.   I have nothing invested in whether or not you believe these occurance, I don't even know if is important that I believe them , but the fact is, They Happened.  there is some evidence here that does not fit  into the rational belief system. 

To me 'rational' is a kind perspective that requires a 'cause and an effect' chain of logic.   Sometimes it is not obvious at the time an event happens so it appears “magical” but later the cause and effect chain will be come obvious–this is the scientific methodology.

A pre-rational system is a kind of beligerant postering that refuses to allow rational scientific methodology to be applied to some 'sacred  cow' or another, as if the sky will fall down if that was to happen! As others have said, these pre-rational systems are protected by, or encoded by layers of pre-rational beliefs, to try to obscur anyone from seeing what is in most cases before their very eyes.  This is not only in the religious spheres.  Look at how the industrial world has been destroying our very earth, and somehow doing it, as if human beings do not depend on it for our very survival!  Eating the hand that is feeding you, worse than biting even! How totally stupid is that!

Any trans-rational perspective will not shirk having a rational light shone one ANYTHING it has to offer.  Bring it on! and when all is said and done there will be 'unexplanables' , just like Tycho Brache measurements that will require a new world view…..and not because i say so, just because. 

I for one, believe we need the new world view, yellow turquoise, 2nd, 3rd tier….and sooner rather than later, if we want anything to be left of this beautiful glorious earth.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

total agreement jane.

thanks!

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

total agreement jane.

thanks!

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

i understand the impasse. :O) good to get down to the bottom of it.

Re: Wallace vs. Harris Mini "Battle Royale"

hey bruce, mary, and jane

bruce, my responses to you have been shorter because bob and bill just joined and it has been fun getting a little back and forth going with htem.

i also have found that you and i agree on a great deal, but that there are a couple details that form an impasse we will probably have to agree to disagree on.

nevertheless i continue to enjoy every moment of our discussions.

mary i have to say the same. i like what you have to say but we disgaree on a few details and neither of us find the others points convincing.

what both of you have shown me is that highly intelligent and educated people can differ with my opinoin on religion and to this i bow deeply.

jane i feel a great affinity with you and yet am cautious to get in too deep because i think that we come at reality from totally different perspectives and express oursleves in almost opposite language. that said, as always i love your poetic, expansive, soulful offerings and have done my best to give you a well overdue response below…

what a fun few weeks it has been here in pod-land!

thanks so much
~julian