> Imagine presenting this idea to the doctors at The > Harvard Medical Schoolor to Socratesor to Wittgenstein... > > > Here you go again RC - > coercing those Western big guns into your hockey team. (Why do you try to do that?).
RESPONSE: I guess, PaliGap, I am trying to point out how alien and unnatural is the East's version of what it means to be a human being in the universe endowed with (at least the sensation of) free will. What we inherited from psychedelics, TM, and Maharishi has uprooted us from our ancestral DNA history as persons living inside the metaphysical context of Western Civilization, which, after the Greeks and the Romans (and concurrent with this: the Jewish dispensation from God), was the creation of the Roman Church, even as we have, most of us at least, emancipated ourselves existentially from this Catholic legacy. It is true that I look for "coercing those Western big guns into [my] hockey team". But it's because I feel, here on FFL, that I am surrounded by the miasma of a kind of desiccated Hinduistic view of thingsand this seems uncriticallyeven unknowinglybiased. If we had never been taken psychedelics, or done TM, or known Maharishi, or read posts on FFL, and we read what Maharishi said at Squaw Valley in 1968, what would we make of his idea of making transcendental consciousness the means to escape the very personal experience of death? I just happen to have the strongest intuition that Maharishi's insight and prescription here would not even begin to be a serious candidate for philosophical not to say religious consideration by the Big Thinkers in the West. Am I wrong in this presumption? If, PaliGap, I thought that each poster here at FFL was balancing the Eastern mystical experience (they have all had) with the conceptual challenge to this experience as posed by the fact that for more than two thousand years, the Veda remained unknown to our Western European ancestorsand it remained unknown perhaps, because it was intrinsically false to the reality of what it means to be a created being living in this universethen I would not have been motivated to try to take apart and refute Maharishi's Squaw Valley lecture. The implicit assumption here at FFL is: Well, for two thousand years, through bigotry, through blindness, through prejudice, through ignorance, we remained unaware of the blessed and ultimate truth held inside the continent of India. How can this be? Are we smarter than everyone who lived before us who was conditioned by the Western mystical tradition? Blame LSDand before that, the death of the Roman Catholic Church. But back to the defence of my anti-Squaw Valley perspective on death: Do we, PaliGap, have any evidence that Eastern (especially Indian) civilization produced a context intellectually, artistically, culturally, religiously, scientifically, psychologically that even began to compete in its relevance to what it means to be a human being in comparison to what Western Civilization has produced? Just think of our literature: What can you readfrom the past, from Hinduism, from the Veda (notwithstanding Emerson, Thoreau, and Phil Goldberg)that reflects the reality subjectively of being a man or a woman inside creation having to make the decision we are forced to make, having to pass through the experiences which force themselves upon us? Look at your personal life, PaliGap: in what way does, for example, your belief in reincarnation intersect with a single real experience you have had, that is, an experience served up to you by life as its mysterious providence has seen fit to impress upon your memory? What Maharishi is proposing in this lecture simply trivializes everything that is real and powerful and true about what it is like to exist inside the universe as a person. And of course Maharishi was in principle against the value of suffering. Too bad. Maharishi didn't know what to do when he himself began to suffer. Suffer, Robin? Yes, suffer the death of his dream of converting the world, suffer the consequence of knowing his integrity spiritually was not sufficient to keep his teachers inspired and devoted and strong. But back to your point, PaliGap: I am trying to bring in reinforcements because I think most readers at FFL have been taken over by the paradigm of the East, and that paradigmbased on my own experimental knowledgeis false to reality. Thus my repudiation of my enlightenment. Thus my take-down of Maharishi's Squaw Valley deception. PG:Are we also permitted to try to imagine what, say, Wittgenstein, would have made of this piece of dogma? (take your pick of Wittgenstein 1.0 or 2.0): "There is no safety in meeting one's Creator. How did I first come to exist as the person that I am? In death we meet the author of our lifenot the author of our transcendental consciousness; we meet the author of the person that we are" RC, FFL 2011 Wittgenstein: "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits'' - Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus RESPONSE: Seems Ludwig here is quite abstract. How are you able to make what he says relevant empirically to your life? Contrariwise, what is difficult about imagining what I say (which you quote) having a high probability of perhaps being the truth? PG:Socrates: "For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils". RESPONSE: Fine for Socrates. He stood up fairly well under the threat of death. But can what he enjoins here become a living reality for you? I take it that the most irreducible intuition that everyone has about death is: It is not something one wishes to go through. We are animals (with a difference). All animals fear and avoid and struggle against death. Look at your mother, your father, your children: Is there anything that Maharishi said at Squaw Valley that you could offer to them which would, if they were dying, ease their pain, their apprehension, their acute sorrow? Death is the most tremendous unknown, and as far as I am concerned, no one has reported back from the experience such as to make me accord much veracity to their account. Because, ultimately, no oneexcept of course Christever could do anything about it, once they died. And Maharishi hasn't either. His effect from beyond the grave is attenuating [because of the actual condition he is in: his Squaw Valley lecture having been refuted in the most intimate and direct way possible], as Bevan and Tony and John et al, will gradually come to realize, however reluctantly, however fearfully. PG: What MMY had to say about death might be thought to fit quite well with that. Viz."...by gaining familiarity with that level of your being that is beyond corporeal, you may be able to free yourself to some extent from this unnecessary fear". Not unlike the way a modern-day allergy sufferer may be invited to very gently, and in tiny, tiny steps, expose themselves to the allergen that discomforts them. And just as in this case, it is not the allergen 'per se' that is the health problem, rather it's the panic in the immune system that creates the damage, I find it not unreasonable, and not so obviously unscientific as you assert, that our suffering in death might be similarly alleviated. If, that is to say, we could avoid the panic in our biology that is probably triggered when death approaches. RESPONSE: "If . . . we could avoid the panic in our biology that is probably triggered when death approaches." PaliGap: is this panic, fear, apprehension, trembling merely precipitated biologically? I think rather it goes to our soul's intuition: I am going to have to face *something*, and that something is more awesome than anything I have faced or could face as long as I am alive. You quoted approvingly in your last post to me that passage from Gerard Manley Hopkins: that quotation is infinitely, almost perfectly, pertinent to the consideration of what it means to go through death. Maharishi ignores the Hopkins perception of our selfbeing altogether in his panacea for death. I think this an oversight. The person PaliGap who is reading this very sentence now, that is the person who will have to do through the death experience. And what, pray tell, in all your TM experiences, has in any way touched this person so as to give you the assurance you will be better prepared to meet your death than the person who has never heard of TMor who remains ignorant of the Veda and the consensus of most the posters and readers at FFL? PG: Then again Socrates might have wished a plague on both your houses (RC & MMY) for excessive 'knowing': "And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?" RESPONSE: Yes. This was an extraordinary insight that Socrates got: *That he somehow came to know objectively the limits of what he actually knew*. And this was, decidedly, a mystical-ontological experience/revelation. Socrates was so supremely disinterested when it came to forming his apprehension of reality that reality itself was able to inform himperfectlyas to the degree to which he knew what the whole truth was. Socrates's epistemological intuition was: I know that I do not know. To know that you do not know is to know all the you can know, right? And what Socrates came to know in knowing what he did not knowand could not know (because he was a contingent and unnecessary and created being)was all that anyone could ever know. Maharishi goes well beyond thisand is implausible. I merely call upon my knowledge of my own experience, and the Western Tradition to refute him. Did I refute him? Not for most of the folks at FFLbut this may not be because of some flaw or weakness in my argument. I attacked Maharishi's analysis of death and transcendence because I thought it was a crock. It still seems that way to me, although at one time I would have sworn for its truthfulnessa sense of truthfulness that surely is carried along by the felicitous mystical context in which his argument is embedded. It is (or was) irresistible. But you see, you have to do TM to experience this very subtle thraldom. If you don't do TM, I feel pretty secure in saying: it (SV '68) would never make it into a introductory text on religion let alone on philosophy. Nice to hear from you though, PaliGap. And I hope you don't reincarnate. That way there is more of a chance that someday I might know you.
