[Buddha-l] Hindu Fundamentalism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 18:28 -0400, StormyTet at aol.com wrote:

> ST: I just finished reading Ken Wilber's "The Marriage of Sense and
> Soul.' In his insistence that the core of spirituality (looking
> within) leads to what he calls 'vision-logic' or transrational
> knowledge, he insists that Science needs to recognize that through
> meditation and the community of meditaters, there is a way to meet the
> basic criteria of science in terms of validity and method in
> acknowledging higher states of being (and he does mean higher than
> reason).

As soon as one begins to speak of any mode of consciousness as being
higher than any other, one has left the domain of science and entered
the domain of value judgement. It would be completely impossible for a
scientist to speak of "higher states of consciousness" without ceasing
to be a scientist. Why not just accept that reason is one way of several
ways that the mind works? On what basis would one say that any way of
using the mind is higher than reason.

I have never read anything by Wilber that struck me as worthwhile for
either the scientific life or the contemplative life. He strikes me as
pathetic hyper-narcissistic man enamored of his own brilliance. Still,
his books are so thick that they do make good footsteps when one needs
to fetch a can of pinto beans off a high shelf.

> He traces the problems with the rift between science and religion to
> Popper and Kuhn.

Popper and Kuhn were both anticipated in this by Peirce, Vaihinger and
Kant, and they were anticipated in important ways by Descartes, and he
by Aristotle. I think we can safely say that there is a long history of
a way of thinking, and of an opposition to that way of thinking, and
Wilber simply chooses sides in a very long debate that will probably
still be going on as long as there are human beings discussing such
things.

> think that Wilber would call for a type of practice of meditation in
> schools as a valid tool toward understanding. He suggests that truly
> 'spiritual' people need to stand up to dogmatic myth believers and
> tell them that they need to get to the core of what it is all about
> and stand up for that -- which for wilber comes down to the validity
> of meditation that is to some degree universal in all the world
> religions.

Gee, that sounds pretty dogmatic to me. What he really advocates, it has
always seemed to me, is not transcending dogma but accepting HIS dogma.

> Wilber considers the materialistic science that we are fed in school,
> scientism -- in otherwords, as sectarian and full of myths as any
> fundamentalist religion in its insistence in that science has the
> corner on truth.

This is a very fashionable dogma these days. The problem with it, as
with most dogmas, is that there is very little evidence to support it.
Very few scientists that I know about believe that they have cornered
the market on truth. The people who say that about scientists are
usually anti-science bigots, just as those who say that Christians (or
Muslims) are predominantly intolerant fundamentalists or that liberals
are predominantly unpatriotic socialists are anti-Christian, or anti-
Muslim or anti-liberal, bigots. Wilber sometimes sounds refreshing, but
when one scratches beneath the surface, one finds the same old
prejudices hard at work.

-- 
Richard Hayes