incredibly precise injunctions

“We do not have any analogue in the Western tradition to the methods devised, mostly in the Buddhist tradition and the Indian tradition generally, where you have incredibly precise injunctions about how to train attention upon the mind itself and make discoveries about the character of first-person experience. Now its true that those are embedded in classical explosions of religious bullshit and so you have Buddhism and Hinduism which when you go through the front door you encounter a garish display of religiosity. But the truth is you can get into the core significance of these practices without believing anything on insufficient evidence, without accepting stories about miracles or karma and rebirth or anything else that will strike a student of science with being unwarranted.”

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and other anti-religious books, who has pursued contemplative experiences himself, makes an atheist case for self-enquiry in the Eastern traditions in this video interview promoting his new book Waking Up. You can hear the first chapter read by the author here. He makes a good case and one which I agree with on the whole, though for me his atheism is limited and fails to fully grasp the questions raised by its own system of thought. If consciousness/mind is our fundamental experience of the world, and if the universe has produced this experience through its constantly unfolding processes (as he asserts in the interview and elsewhere), then consciousness/mind has to be a fundamental property of the universe. What is the difficulty, then, in understanding that there is a unitive, universal consciousness underlying the singular, personal mind? Especially as he and other scientists are able to show that the idea of a personal agency in thought and action is an illusion, and that the universe acts us rather than that we act separately from it, somehow freed from and above its processes (a mystical notion if ever there was one). 

pic from here

coarse and tendentious atheists

Some decent points made by John Gray here in his review of Richard Dawkins new autobiography. 

"Quite apart from the substance of the idea, there is no reason to suppose that the Genesis myth to which Dawkins refers was meant literally. Coarse and tendentious atheists of the Dawkins variety prefer to overlook the vast traditions of figurative and allegorical interpretations with which believers have read Scripture. Both Augustine and before him the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria explicitly cautioned against literalism in interpreting the biblical creation story... It was only around the time of the Reformation that the idea that the story was a factual account of events became widely held. When he maintains that Darwin’s account of evolution displaced the biblical story, Dawkins is assuming that both are explanatory theories—one primitive and erroneous, the other more advanced and literally true. In treating religion as a set of factual propositions, Dawkins is mimicking Christianity at its most fundamentalist."

pic from here