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Showing posts from October, 2014

Spirituality: Sam Harris versus Thomas Merton, Duelling Banjos of the Self

     So, I had a sudden inspiration to read Thomas Merton's book The Inner Experience , which talks a lot about the "I", and play that off against Harris' book, which will talk about how the "I" is an illusion, and see whether anything interesting comes from it. Maybe, maybe not.

Spirituality: The Case of Sam Harris, Entry 3, Taking on OMMM Mechanics

     Here Harris is right on. There is no reason to conclude from QM that the universe is fundamentally Mind. QM is indeed mysterious and counter-intuitive in many ways, but Idealism is not the necessary consequence of this. As Harris points out, 'measurement' does not invoke Mind per say, it only invokes measurement.      Now, there are strange things in QM, mainly non-separability, which is genuinely strange, but that doesn't mean we have to smoke doobies and try to use The Force.      Additionally, Harris points out that the Mind is still dependant upon the physical processes within the body, and, as much as I find Penrose an interesting read, it is not obvious that QM gets us anywhere when it comes to solving the PHILOSOPHICAL problem of Mind.

Spirituality: The Case of Sam Harris, entry 2

     Here I'm going to digress onto some of his comments about Christianity and its relationship to mysticism. I'll open by quoting the opening of Dante's Paradiso: "The glory of the One who moves all things permeates the universe and glows in one part more and in another less." This is from the Allen Mandelbaum translation. Other Christian mystics, many of whom are quoted in The Perennial Philosophy , which Harris takes to task for being an inaccurate representation of Christianity, make similar points to the above.  I see the mysticism in Christianity as not merely the result of a few outliers, but as part of the mainstream integration of Greek thought into Christianity. The opening Gospel of John is as mystical as anything you are likely to read: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... All things were made and came into existence through Him; and without Him was not even one thing made that has come

Spirituality: The Case of Sam Harris, entry 1

     So, I got Sam Harris' new book, Waking Up . I am not going to venture into his recent controversy with Ben Affleck and Bill Maher. I am only going to respond to the topic of this book  -- sorry, folks.     Harris recounts a life-changing experience on Ecstasy. I used to hear this kind of stuff when I was in college; I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now. When I started college I read a lot of Aldous Huxley, including The Doors of Perception and The Perennial Philosophy(which Harris quotes and then criticizes -- I'll have more to say about this later). I once wrote a paper in a philosophy class about Huxley -- it was assigned as our final paper. I wrote that if a drug can create the same experience as meditation then logic won't allow me to distinguish one from the other. The professor didn't like my answer: he claimed that the drug would have to make you virtuous etc..., in keeping with traditional Christian mysticism. I still disagree with him. Lo