On Nov 2, 2011, at 10:23 PM, Yifu wrote:
Right, precisely. The words Harris uses such as "compassion, awe, devotion, feelings of oneness, etc..." are very similar to those used by other materialists such as Hawking to explain what they mean by (the closest entity to): "God". Unfortunately, few of such people venture into "Transcendence" apart from such mood-making - although there are certainly many recorded cases (Cf. Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness" and the works of William James); in which various feelings of "awe" may provide a bridge to "actual" Transcendence as TM'ers may experience IT as Gnosis. In other words, "feelings of Oneness", or Oceanic feelings (as Freud put it), may go along with Transcendence as in MMY's usage of the word, but may not. Certainly, people like Harris don't even get as far as Aristotle and Aquinas. They're having enough difficulity dealing with relative consciousness, let alone "Pure Consciousness".
What you have to realize is that a lot of these neuroscientists are trying to grok, in scientific terms, the brilliant work on Buddhist abhidharma and Neuroscience of the late, great Francisco Varela. This guy was so far ahead of his time, it will take decades for neuroscientists to quantify what he began to describe. Of course many of the things Varela imagined may turn out to be different once the science pans out. But it would be hard to understand Buddhist neurophenomenology (i.e. what Harris is trying to describe) without first reading and understanding Varela.
I don't see either of these people using the words "transcendence" which from their POV would be a form of neurological escapism. If you want to understand what they''re trying to say and the insights they're trying to approach with the scientific method (both the objective and taboo subjective scientific approaches) you'll have to throw away the baggage of a "pure consciousness" approach, as they're very. very different. The whole idea of a pure consciousness as hobbled together by TM apologist-researchers is the forcible merging of square pegs with round holes - that is, it does not conform to reality "as it is" but instead to the sleight of hand of dishonest researchers who've been assigned the job of reshaping square pegs to conform to their "master's" babblings.
