--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Dave" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Very well said. > > Have you read Sam Harris' book, "End of Faith," or something like > that? He says pretty much the same thing.
Not quite. >From the recent interview with Harris in Salon.com: S: One thing I find so fascinating about your book is that you're out there as an atheist. And yet you also say life has a sacred dimension. You talk about the value of spirituality and mystical experiences. It's interesting that you put all that in the same pot. H: Yeah, many atheists felt it should not have been in the same pot. But I think it's necessary to just be honest. These are some of the most beautiful and most profound experiences that human beings can have. And therefore we're right to want to understand them and to explore that landscape. S: But it does raise the question, what do you mean by spiritual? And what do you mean by mystical? H: By spiritual and mystical -- I use them interchangeably -- I mean any effort to understand and explore happiness and well-being itself through deliberate uses of attention. Specifically, to break the spell of discursive thought. We wake up each morning, and we're chased out of bed by our thoughts, and then we think, think, think, think all day long. And very few of us spend any significant amount of time breaking that train of thought. Meditation is one technique by which to do that. The sense that you are an ego, busy thinking, disappears. And its disappearance is quite a relief. S: Well, it's interesting to hear this description of mysticism because I don't think that's how most people would see it. I mean, most people would play up the more irrational side. Yes, you're losing yourself, but you're plunged into some larger sea of oneness, of perhaps transcendent presence. Obviously, you're staying away from that whole supernatural way of thinking. H: Well, it's very Buddhist of me to do that. The Buddhists tend to talk in terms of what it's not. They talk about it being no self, they talk in terms of emptiness. But the theistic traditions talk in terms of what the experience is like. There, you get descriptions of fullness and rapture and love and oneness. And to some degree, I've had experiences that can be characterized that way. But there are pitfalls in using that language. People tend to reify these states and make metaphysics out of it. It's not like you learn about physics by being a mystic. S: I want to ask you about one sentence from your book "The End of Faith." You say, "Whatever is true now should be discoverable now." It sounds like you're putting inordinate faith in science. Are you willing to acknowledge that there might be plenty of things we still don't understand scientifically that could very well be true? H: There's no scientist who would hesitate to acknowledge that. This is one of the ironies of religious discourse. Religious people talk in terms of their own humility and talk of the intellectual arrogance of science, whereas the situation is totally reversed. Every scientist worth his Ph.D. will admit that we have no idea how the universe, or why the universe, came into existence. We have no idea why there is everything rather than nothing. And most of what is there to be discovered has not been discovered. S: Let me mention one case in point. There is a wealth of anthropological literature about sorcery in Africa and Latin America, and there are plenty of personal testimonies about the power of witchcraft. From the scientific world view, this looks like sheer nonsense. Yet I'm wondering if it might be possible that science some day will be able to explain what now seems supernatural. H: Oh yeah, I think the only way to explain it is with a scientific frame of mind. Now, scientists tend to be dogmatically opposed to looking at this kind of phenomenon -- at telepathy, for instance, because there's been so much fraud and wishful thinking. Science generally has been eager to divest itself of the spookiness of this area. But I think that kind of phenomenon is fascinating and worth looking into. And it may be that minds have some effect upon the physical world that we currently can't explain. But the way we will explain it is scientifically. http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/07/07/harris/index.html ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Groups gets a make over. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/XISQkA/lOaOAA/yQLSAA/UlWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
