Too many notes, Mr Thrush

From Son of Moses:

More on the theory of evolution.

I am helping a new friend write a book about the possible resolution between modern science and theology.

He begins with an account of conventional evolutionary theory, explaining that when we hear a bird sing we would be mistaken if we assumed that this is some kind of joyful or magnificent occurrence. No, it is merely an assertion of territorial rights, or maybe an attempt to attract a female for the propagation of selfish genes.

So, please comment on the following.

a) A bird utters sounds (interpreted by ourselves in our sentimental ignorance as beautiful, divine etc.) merely so as to let other birds know that they should not intrude on its territory.

b) Mozart writes a mass merely to earn cash.

Yes, I am not denying that on one level this is true. But is there any difference between these two acts?

Yes, you say (possibly), there is a difference. It is this: unlike Herr Mozart, the bird is not able consciously to express anything (which leads to interesting speculations about the special nature of the human being, but let’s leave that till later).

But I say that the joy of the Creator is expressing itself through the bird just the same, and through everything else too. That is what creation is for. It is a vast song of praise.

If this, or something like it, is so, are not the territorial and survival issues necessary only so that the play may be kept on the road so that its message may be heard by those with ears to hear?

To try to lead others into the barren and joyless outlook of evolutionary reductionism is, I believe, a spiritual crime.

Yet I do not see how this is to be avoided if the conventional evolutional doctrine is propagated.

Discuss.

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A Gospel Principle

It is infinitely more worth while to present, for the time being, a mixture of truth and error, than to mutilate reality by trying prematurely to separate the wheat from the tares. I have followed this Gospel principle without hesitation, since it is the principle of all research and scientific progress.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, letter 1917.

I just discovered this today, and to me it articulates the right approach to enquiry of any kind. When people violate it - either by self-censoring and refusing to speak while they are uncertain, or by pretending that they understand something they don't - they distort not only their own minds, but those of others.

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The Twelve Days of Christmas

OK, guys, I think we could lighten up just for one day here!

This is a recording by Frank Kelly, otherwise known as Fr. Jack from Father Ted - a classic now available once again due to the miracle of the internet. The letters of Gubnait O'Lunasa to his beloved Nuala.

Click here.

Merry Christmas to one and all!

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Intellect

Personally I think it would be a good use of this blog to examine our use of certain words and phrases. It's clear that when one man uses a word, another man 'hears' something else (there is no personal comment implied to anyone here). So we endeavour to communicate but we filter words though our own associations and hence live in our own universe.

I recently read about Buddha. Buddha was described by the author as the embodiment of bodha. Bodha was defined as 'pure intelligence'. As we know, the words Buddha, bodha and buddhi all trace back to the same sanskrit root, 'budh' to do with being awake. This definition of 'pure intelligence' rang a bell here. So...

What is intelligence? What is intellect? Are they different? It seems to me that our habitual associations with these words are very different. Intellect, in common parlance, seems to be referring to analytical mind, manas. The word intellectual has come to be used (particularly in the school) as a derogatory term. ‘Someone who hasn't gone beyond book knowledge’ or something similar.

As I'm sure most are aware the Sri Purohit Swami translation of the Gita uses ‘intellect’ for buddhi. And I suspect the average reader would hear fairly un-buddhi-like connotations on reading it. But even in the english, getting back to ‘pure’ conception, devoid of associations:

Intellect:
1 a : the power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will : the capacity for knowledge
[Merriam-Webster Dictionary]

‘The power of knowing’ is an interesting notion. Depends on what sort of ‘knowledge’ we’re talking about as to how we think of this? Our current intellectual climate would probably associate ‘capacity for knowledge’ as ‘ability to absorb and order lots of facts’ ? i.e, manas.

What about the word intelligence? The modern connotations are perhaps to do with IQ or something similar. Despite the limitations of IQ, I suggest there is an important characteristic contained in those kinds of tests. The idea is that the ability to solve the test is not related to prior knowledge. All the information should be in the question. Of course it doesn’t quite work like this when confronted with 5 anagrams and asked, ‘which of the following is not a poet?’. Is this testing the ability to solve anagrams or testing 'information about poets which I have committed to memory' ?

To me, the ‘pure intelligence’ is that faculty of mind that operates in the present, ‘awake’ without reference to prior constructs, systems etc. It ‘sees’ directly what is true or false and it can only operate when ‘awake’. Intellect in its ‘pure conception’ as ‘power of knowing’ must amount to the same thing. I wouldn’t consider this to be a denial of analysis, systems etc. The buddhi is the overseer that can pick up or put down a number of conceptual tools. It doesn’t have to be bound by any of them. It knows that none of them are ‘the whole truth’.

“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.”

~ Thomas Merton

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Science - the lowest common denominator?

Son of Moses suggests a new thread following on from the one about evolution, which is as he says getting long. He writes:

Science, its validity, its limitations: a real subject for discussion, and at the root of so many of the concerns expressed in this blog ... Perhaps I could kick off the subject by being deliberately provocative and saying that the only way that Advaita manages to include all views is by a system of relative validity. On that scale, science is only one up from the evidence of the senses. It is a very culture-bound view of things and is given far too much credence by our contemporary world. It only manages to be ‘a public and shared endeavour’, as you put it, by inhabiting the lowest common denominator of understanding. A truer science would accept other modes of knowing, and yes we are debating the wonderful subject of epistemology, the science concerning the valid ways of knowing, a subject the Tradition takes very seriously but which is seldom debated within the School, surely a sign of the latter's limitations.

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The real unanimity

What we need for the future of the School is, I believe, a different kind of unanimity. Thus far we have had a unanimity not only of action, but of thought. In other words, as members of the School we assent to certain ideas which are held to be part of "The Truth" or "The Teaching", and are thus beyond question.

The yugas, the five elements, the four aspects of the antahkarana, the three gunas, the division between purusha and prakriti, the unity of atman and brahman (that all organised itself very nicely, didn't it?) ... we could go on.

The point of calling into question the yugas is not to bring the whole edifice of The Teaching down about our ears, but to say that they are just ideas. Ideas are provisional mental constructions, and are therefore fully open to question by mental means, such as reason (of which science is an aspect).

What I would like to propose is that the unanimity we require is emotional. That's to say - we can be united in our hearts, while holding different theories or opinions about the world. Indeed, if we are going to have a real conversation, we need to be strongly united if we are not to be driven apart by our ideas into factions.

We cannot limit the operation of reason; but we need faith if we are to venture along the path of reason - faith that there is something to find; faith that we can live without dogma or concepts; faith that if we disagree then we can push on further, and not fall back on a facile conceptual unity.

It is not enough to say "all concepts are just concepts" and give up on thought. We are "man" - "the being who thinks" - and until we have the answers, we must question.

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Evolution and the Yugas

We now know, as certainly as we can, that the species of the present day evolved from lower animals. Perhaps 100,000 years ago Neanderthals developed; then around 60,000 years ago homo sapiens.

Can we agree then that any idea of a descending series of yugas is untenable? That the Kaliyuga (literally "The Historical Period") is in fact all we know of our history, and that the other three yugas are imaginative fictions?


Come on, you know you want to disagree ... bring it on!

Illustration shows new Judaeo-Christian theory of synthetic evolution. Finally we know where the second and third 'women' came from. Thank you, Charles Darwin!

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Dare to peace

At this time of the year when we traditionally wish each other both a merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year, I was interested in the following from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor who was executed in 1945 for his opposition to the Nazi regime:

'There is no way to peace along the path of safety, for peace must be dared. It is in itself a great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war. To look for guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving yourself completely to God's commandment.'

For me, every word sounds a bell, every sentence is profound though simple, and the whole is a proclamation of the ideal Christian life. Not only Christian, there are peacemakers in every religion and in every generation. But Bonhoeffer was a Christian, living in extraordinarily difficult times, and his willingness and courage to bear witness and to lead the best Christian life led also to his execution. As has occurred before, his death did not seal him from the living. Rather, it opened the door so that his words and example spread forth.

'Peace is the opposite of security' carves a path right through the fuzzy undergrowth littering my emotional ground. Understand that, my heart tells me, and you may begin to understand God's commandment.

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Does Not Compute

"Mechanical" is a word often used to describe any habitual action, thought or word. I think it's probably a Gurdjieff-Ouspensky term, but it occurs to me to ask how useful it is as a way of describing a conscious, living organism.

I do recognise what it's saying, but ought we to speak of ourselves, even in our worst moments, as if we were machines? If a machine goes wrong, it blows up, or just stops; but if a person goes wrong, they usually keep going pretty well. I can live 'mechanically' for a whole day or a week and at the end of it I probably haven't walked off any cliffs, forgotten to eat, or accidentally stopped breathing. Maybe it could be said that I'm living "vegetatively" or "animalistically"?

And even when I am relatively unaware at one level, at another, I am witnessing all: there is the possibility of learning, even in the most unpromising circumstances. There's a chance that I might 'wake up' into consciousness.

It's all too delicate and mysterious to attribute to cogs churning round. Scientists, until recently, were very enamoured of machine metaphors, but they seem to be getting over it. Maybe it's time we did too.

I don't believe people are ever like machines. What about you?

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My Name is Tony, and I am an Advaitin

A couple of years ago an email was sent to most of the UK branches of the School from "Advaita The Source". It came from an anonymous email account and turned out to be an essay by Tony Parsons, possibly written by him, or just lifted from his web site. It said "please disseminate to all students". Here's a sample:

In reality, what we all long for is absence . . . limited ideas of becoming, destiny and personal attainment the absence of the "me" that seeks and feels separate. This is pure Advaita, which is totally beyond the, limited ideas of becoming, destiny and personal attainment, which are simply products of the mind.

Hmm. Not sure that I do long for absence, Tony. Except yours, obviously.

I had a correspondence with him which I think we both found mutually unenlightening.

It turns out that there is a big fashion in spiritual circles for what is called "Neo-Advaita", of which TP is a leading light. Other teachers such as Gangaji, Wayne Liquorman, Esther Veltheim, etc have remarkably similar things to say. According to Neo-Advaita, there is no need to follow a path, undergo discipline, work to help others, or to do anything at all that orthodox Advaita Vedanta, in common with most of the other philosophical and religious traditions, recommends to those in search of liberation. All that is necessary is to give up, accept that the script is already written, and stop worrying!

No wonder disenchanted members of the School are attracted.

Something about it seems to me a bit fishy. Some of these teachers do seem to have wisdom (see, for example, some quotations by Gangaji that are cited elsewhere on this blog by others) but is it really of a kind that can help others? There are some who believe that Neo-Advaita is a dangerous fad - that it absolves comfortable Westerners of concern about moral issues, that it attempts to short-circuit the process of spiritual growth, and that it is a nihilistic, empty philosophy or faith. What is Enlightenment? magazine has published a satire on Neo-Advaita, which you can read here, along with an account of a self-confessed former addict of what he calls 'spiritual heroin'.

As members of an organization that promotes a traditional, though also Westernized form of Advaita, I think we ought to be aware of the issues opened up in this article. Plus which, it's a giggle.

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What's the Sanskrit for "Basic Instinct"?

I've been reading The Language Instinct, by Stephen Pinker (left) which is the standard popular work on modern linguistics. Fascinating stuff.

For example, it has been shown that any devoted mothers who read to their unborn children, or attempt to 'hothouse' their newborns by teaching them language are wasting their time. Young children have a far higher ability to acquire language than their parents. This is proved by the example of those who speak 'pidgin' dialects - languages created among a disparate group of adults who do not share a language, such as prisoners in island colonies. Pidgin dialects generally have very basic grammatical forms, and they are easy to misunderstand as a result.

But the children of pidgin-speakers make this right, by instinctively creating from nothing a far more complex version of the pidgin, with a firm but supple grammatical structure. The result of this second generation is a new language, called a creole. A creole is not in any way inferior to one of the parent languages, such as English or French. Even a single child, with pidgin-speaking parents, will develop a creole of his own.

From such evidence, Pinker and others, notably Noam Chomsky, suppose that there is an instinctive grammar built in to the human mind. They call it 'mentalese', and all languages are a translation from mentalese into the spoken word.

(I read a chapter before going to sleep the other night, and just as I was dropping off I had a remarkable experience. My mind seemed to slip into a realm of meaning without words, and I watched, at it were, random phrases and sentences forming themselves without any effort from out of this curious space. This seems to explain how we can have long conversations in dreams that are apparently full of meaning - but a meaning that is forever just out of reach. What is happening in dreams - it now seems to me - is that our unconscious mind is playing with its easy, instinctive ability to construct sentences. Whether or not there is sometimes a higher import in the dreams, I don't know. But what I caught sight of, I think, was the mechanism of language. Thank you, Mr Pinker ...)

Now, I would be unwilling to say that "mentalese" is, exactly. But it seems to me that anyone who wants to make special claims for Sanskrit as being close to some kind of "unknown tongue", the natural language of meaning, ought to be familiar with the research of Chomsky and others (I've just checked the index, and Sanskrit is not mentioned once, although Indo-European gets five references).

I'm not trying to 'have a go' here - but although Chomsky is the single most academically-cited living author, I have never heard any of this in the School. Maybe it doesn't help that he is a political dissident. I would suggest that if we are to have a Language faculty, rather than just a Sanskrit one, then we need to be abreast of the latest research, and respond to it. It would be interesting to hear whether anyone has studied modern linguistics, and if so what views have been formed.

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Dude ...

A little while ago I heard the transcript of a momentous meeting addressed by Dr Roles on his return from his first trip to India. He described how he had been put under pressure by the Maharishi to change his flight back to England, because he would not get the chance to see Shantananda that week. His response was to refuse, on the grounds that he had said he would be back on that date and "a promise kept is worth any amount of spiritual experiences".

When I mentioned this before someone took this to mean "a promise kept is worth more than the self", but that isn't the point at all.

Last night I watched again the documentary Riding Giants, which is about the big-wave surfers of California and Hawaii. It's a terrific film and I found myself moved and uplifted by their passion for the biggest, most awesome, gnarliest wave imaginable. In the closing credits one of the surfers says something to the effect that, "if someone put this much energy and devotion into a religion, no-one would call them a religion bum; and I think this is a religion. There are no surf bums". It was hard not to believe him.

But what Dr Roles is saying adds a bit more. There's no doubt that a lot of people pursue a lot of different kinds of spiritual experiences, and that this transforms their lives and gives them meaning. But the really enduring traditions are not about spiritual experiences. Aim for "peak experiences" and you will get them, but that has never been the purpose of a real spiritual path. The experience is not the aim, but the by-product of the aim. And if the experience is won while neglecting some responsibility, then how pure was the motive?

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