Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Looking for more opinions...

A great post on spirituality and consciousness here . Would love your feedback. Here is a sample:

"There is no question that people have "spiritual" experiences (I use words like "spiritual" and "mystical" in scare quotes, because they come to us trailing a long tail of metaphysical debris). Every culture has produced people who have gone off into caves for months or years and discovered that certain deliberate uses of attention—introspection, meditation, prayer—can radically transform a person's moment to moment perception of the world. I believe contemplative efforts of this sort have a lot to tell us about the nature of the mind."

HH

3 comments:

shane said...

Cool article. I think experiences like that could go a long way in making us feel more intimately related if we didn't corrupt them with religious baggage. At the same time, I'm not sure scientific investigation of those experiences is all that productive, either. Yes, "we need a way of talking about human well-being that is as unconstrained by religious dogma as science is". But science is pretty tainted by it's own brand of religious dogma, at times. Also, I don't like the idea of valuing an experience only for the emperical knowledge it might produce--a conclusion often implied by the dominant scientific ideology. Do we really have to understand something--i.e. own it--to appreciate it?

HH said...

"Do we really have to understand something--i.e. own it--to appreciate it?"--

NO, I don't think we have to understand it. I do think that if we conjecture, ponder, process things then understanding is what we seek. I can look over a beautiful landscape without a thought in my head and just enjoy the visual and emotional sensations generated by it. But When I attempt to convey it to someone else then the wondering has begun. Does communication always involve understanding and ownership? I wonder?

shane said...

I think it's (communication as always involving understanding and ownership) taught that way, but, as you pointed out in your remarks to my post, our educational system--both the institutionalized form and the more subtle forms--is all about "answers" and not questions. That reminds me of a Rilke quote: "Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now."
If we taught that lesson, then maybe we'd learn a different non-ownership style of communication.