Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Ken Wilber

You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber | Salon Life
There are at least two main types of religion. One is dependent upon a belief in a mythic or magic dogma. That is certainly what most people mean by religion. Science has pretty thoroughly dismantled the mythic religions. But virtually all the great religions themselves recognize the difference between “exoteric” or outer religion, and “esoteric” or inner religion. Inner religion tends to be more contemplative and mystical and experiential, and less cognitive and conceptual. Science is actually sympathetic with the contemplative traditions in terms of its methodology.

I’d call that a distinction without a difference.

While science may agree with the contemplative religions that, by doing “x”, “y”, and “z” you can still your thoughts and enter a state of profound physical and mental relaxation or focus, science and religion will ALWAYS disagree about the meaning of that state. To science it will — it MUST — be natural. To religion, it is usually supernatural.

Whether a religion involves running around burning incense and consecrating bread and wine or it involves sitting very quietly and “connecting with the Great Being” — it’s STILL all about the supernatural. Same stuff. Just different manifestations.

I’m a little familiar with Ken Wilber from a brief investigation I made a few years ago. I’d read something about him somewhere (maybe salon?) and thought he sounded interesting. What I discovered was a rather boring writer who was extremely good at over-complicating essentially simple ideas. Over-complication of that sort fools many people into believing someone’s really smart and profound and that’s apparently been the case for Wilber. He’s made his living doing it.

Conventional science has correctly dismantled the pre-rational myths but it goes too far in dismantling the trans-rational. The mythic and magic approaches tend to be pre-rational and pre-verbal, but the meditative or contemplative practices tend to be trans-rational. They completely accept rationality and science. But they point out that there are deeper modes of awareness, which are scientific in their own way.

Snicker! Oh, gee — it’s big of him to acknowledge that science has correctly dismantled the “pre-rational myths”. Thank you! Thank you, Ken Wilber! Science is so grateful for your stamp of approval! Bwahaha! “Trans-rational”, my ass. This is just Ken Wilber saying that his own personal fairy tale about what all his navel-gazing has brought him is different. It’s special.

The human capacity for self-deception knows no bounds.

Wilber then goes on to explain what he means by “trans-rational”. Essentially, people, if you’ve studied the Upanishads at all, you’ve already gone through this. The basic idea is that the dualism we see in the world is illusory. There is only one essential reality and “we” are “it”. (Even our language is based in the idea of dualism, so you have to kind of come at this sort of thing sideways.) Wilber has nothing new to say — just new ways of complicating simple ideas.

The rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense — fairies and ghosts and goblins — and lumps it together with the trans-rational stuff and says, “That’s non-rational. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

Right. They’re both NON-RATIONAL. The NON-RATIONAL has nothing to say to science.

Wilber may be comforted by separating his own brand of irrationality out from the rest of the pack by calling it “trans-rational” but, in reality, it’s all fairy dust. The only difference is that in the “pre-rational”, the fairies are pink and live up above the clouds. In the “trans-rational”, the fairies are invisible and live in your own head.

Big difference, eh?

Ken Wilber does the same sort of thing the Intelligent Design people do. He tries to bring respectability to his ideas by calling them scientific — and by blaming the scientific community’s rejection of his ideas on a supposed lack of sophistication in their thinking. ‘If they’d only open their minds to the profound scientific complexity of my philosophy, they’d see how it really IS scientific. Really! It is!’

Heh, heh… it’s the song of crackpots the world over.

Not that Ken Wilber is a crackpot. I’m sure he’s said plenty of interesting and even profound things over the years. He needs to accept, though, that what he’s dealing in is religion. It’s a form of religion that’s different from what we see in much of the United States, but it is religion nonetheless and it’s substantively no different from Catholicism or Wicca or any other religion.

This formless ground of being is found in virtually all esoteric religions around the world. For the final test, take scientists with a Ph.D. who are studying brain patterns and put them in a contemplative state of the supreme identity and ask them whether they think that state is real or just a brain state. Nine out of 10 will say they think it’s real. They think this experience discloses a reality that’s independent of the human organism.

All this tells us is that human brains are extremely similar in their capacity for assigning meaning to their experiences. This isn’t surprising. We are, after all, pattern-and-meaning-assigning creatures. It’s one of the talents that enabled our species to climb to the top of the current evolutionary pile. If this is Wilber’s “final test”,though, his theory is in big trouble.

It’s fascinating the language Wilber employs, though. “Real” versus “just a brain state”. Even he can’t resist the pull of thinking in dualistic terms! I’d say that the true monist wouldn’t even bother trying to talk about this kind of thing. But, then… he wouldn’t be able to make a living that way.

I’ll say it again: the capacity for human self-deception is amazing.

Perfect Duluth Day

This kind of thing makes me proud to be from Minnesota.

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Tip o’ the hat to the Perfect Duluth Day blog.

Buying Beans

Okay, okay… so salon.com does still have a few really good writers on staff. I’ve always especially enjoyed Heather Havrilesky. It’s well worth taking the time to read her entire article. Hey, I’m totally in tune with the whole thing of buying beans — and everything else that goes along with it.

Recession, economy, market | Salon Life
I feel certain that America’s heyday has come to a close, that the cocky overspending and luxurious indulgences and service-economy boom times are gone for good. When I read about hidden, complex, unregulated financial markets and peak oil and the rising cost of gas and food, it all dovetails perfectly for me with the news that “Dancing With the Stars” and “American Idol” are enormous hits, that Britney Spears is staging yet another comeback and that fighting rages on in Baghdad.

I Hate Cary Tennis

The bosses used to monitor us on video from home, a Since You Asked column on Salon.com by Cary Tennis | Salon Life
Dear Wrapped and Confused,You are a rare individual. It is good to be rare. It is better to be rare than to be ordinary. And yet since you are rare, an ordinary job won’t do. You need a rare job. Rare jobs are hard to find.

Oh, puh-leeze!! There’s nothing “rare” about the letter-writer! Nothing whatsoever!

This advice-seekers’ problem could have been stated in a single paragraph but, typical for salon.com, the letter goes on and on…and on. Apparently, with salon, the longer and more angst-ridden the letter, the greater the likelihood of it being published. (Or maybe it’s Cary Tennis’ call — if the letter writer goes on and on…and on, he feels like it gives him a license to do the same thing.)

In case you haven’t got the time or energy to read the column, here’s a mercifully brief re-statement of the letter-writer’s problem: ‘I’m 24 years old. My current job, and the couple jobs I’ve had before his one, have been in some kind of telemarketing. I’ve come to the realization that I hate telemarketing! Like many people in their early/mid 20s, I’m feeling confused and anxious about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. Sometimes I feel like I just want to run away from it all. What should I do?’

Simple, right? It’s a common enough sort of problem — nothing “rare” about it at all. A reasonable person might have responded with something along the line of: Take some free online personality and career aptitude tests, think hard about how you most enjoy working — not the specific job you want, but the kinds of things you like best such as working alone, talking on the phone a lot, adding up numbers, analyzing things, whatever. Find another job — it doesn’t have to be something you want to do forever — just something that will let you do more of those kinds of things you actually enjoy. THEN, enroll in a college or professional training program that will give you the credentials for doing the stuff you like best all the time at a reasonable rate of pay.

Had I been giving the advice on salon.com, I might also have added that there’s no shame in getting yourself into something (telemarketing, for example) and then discovering that you really don’t like it. It happens all the time. You just need to regroup, think hard, and start again.

Makes sense, right? Simple, straight-forward, practical advice.

That’s not what Cary Tennis is about, though. No, no… instead of reassuring the advice-seeker that their problem isn’t unusual and that it can be solved without too much difficulty, he decides to reinforce yet another young American’s absurd sense of their own specialness.

Grr. I hate Cary Tennis.

Maybe hate is too strong a word. He does, every now and then come out with a really poetic line or two, but so much of his advice column prose seems to be less about helping people than it is about stroking his own ego by way of a kind of literary masturbation. Actually — a lot of salon.com is like that. Hm.

Heh… and I write a blog.

Oh well.

Kim Jong Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot

I knew it!  I always thought there was something unnatural about that guy.

Kim Jong Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Zahar and Carter Start Talking

Mr. Zahar and Mr. Carter – washingtonpost.com
Mr. Zahar lauds Mr. Carter for the “welcome tonic” of saying that no peace process can succeed “unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.” Yet Mr. Zahar has his own preconditions: Before any peace process can “take even its first tiny step,” he says, Israel must withdraw to the 1967 borders and evacuate Jerusalem while preparing for the “return of millions of refugees.”

The Washington Post’s editorial writer needs to spend a little more time reading carefully and a little less time sharpening her righteous indignation.

Zahar said there should be no preconditions to “sitting at the negotiation table”, he didn’t say he has no conditions on what he considers a workable peace agreement. Indeed, both the United States and Israel have conditions of their own as far as what they would consider an acceptable outcome to discussions with Hamas. Obviously, if Zahar is sitting down to talk with Jimmy Carter, he didn’t mean to imply that he was unwilling to even talk without Israel first withrawing to the 1967 borders. Quite the contrary, it’s typically been representatives of the US government who have been too bull-headed to even pull up a chair without “preconditions” having been met.

Jimmy Carter is a very wise man and he understands that there can be no lasting peace unless people are willing to simply talk — talk without preconditions. Diplomacy must start with talking. And talking and talking and talking until — eventually — you find something the two sides can agree on. It may take months or even years, but it will happen. And then you’ve got something to start building on.

It’s the only way.

But it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.

Refusing to “recognize” Zahar would be absurd. He’s a major player in the Middle East. The fact that he’s a terrorist doesn’t make him any less of one. And, while Zahar is a terrorist, he is first of all a human being and where there’s humanity, there’s a way through to communication.

Refusing to talk with people like Zahar is exactly the sort of thing that got us in our current, completely screwed up, situation in the Middle East.

What Are Your Chances of Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse?

44%
This is a total lie. My chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse are WAY higher than this because I have an unusually deep understanding of how to deal with zombies. I’ve been reading zombie fiction for years and, trust me on this, I know how to deal with the undead.

For example. This quiz makes a big deal out of having a gun and knowing how to do an effective head-shot. However, the gun is not really the best weapon when you’re in an urban environment with a bunch of zombies around. Don’t forget. The average zombie is attracted by loud noises. Very often, your best zombie dispatching device is going to be a blunt object.

Anyway. Take the test. But don’t necessarily trust the results.

Bitterness? No.

Eugene Robinson – Shot and a Chablis – washingtonpost.com
Um, so the issue isn’t whether you regularly sit in a church pew or even occasionally go hunting, but whether you can manage to seem like the sort of person who does? I think I need a shot and a beer, too. Just give me whatever the lady’s drinking.

Thank you, Eugene Robinson!

He’s such a smart guy.

Barack Obama is a smart guy, too, but I think he had it wrong when he ascribed to bitterness the way some people cling to their guns or their religion or their bigotry.

I don’t think it’s bitterness. I think it’s fear.

We live in a rapidly changing world. Every year — every day — the rate of change accelerates. That scares a lot of people and, when people are afraid, they fall back on the things they know. If they were religious, they turn towards fundamentalism. A sense of unease around people who are “different” becomes flat-out xenophobia.

It’s not just in the United States that we see this. It’s happening all over the world.

So, while I think Obama is right about what he’s observing, he’s wrong about the cause. I suspect, though, that the fear explanation would be even less palatable than the bitter explanation.

Why Is The Vatican Protecting Cardinal Law?

Pope: ‘Ashamed’ of Clergy Abuse Scandal – washingtonpost.com
“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the Church in general and for me personally that this could happen,” Benedict said. “It is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betray in this way their mission … to these children.

“I am deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible so this cannot happen again in the future,” the pope said.

In recent days I’ve read several criticisms of the Pope along the line of, “Why is the Vatican protecting Cardinal Law?” I wonder what, exactly, they think the Pope ought to be doing? Should Law be marched out into St. Peter’s Square for a public stoning? If there were criminal charges pending against Law in the United States, then –yes, these people might have a point. But there are no criminal charges. Cardinal Law behaved immorally when he covered up sex abuse by priests. There’s little question, though, that he’s an able administrator. The Vatican is making use of Laws abilities in that regard and, as for how he’s atoning for his role in the child sex abuse scandal, that’s really between him and his confessor.

Surfin’ Safari

They had a little bit of a blizzard in northern Minnesota yesterday. Yeah, yeah… I know. Blizzard??!? In April??!??! Hey, that’s one of the joys of the Northland — interesting weather.

Anyway, the blizzard brought with it a nice strong wind, creating excellent conditions for…Yes! Surfing on Lake Superior!!