[Buddha-l] there he goes again (sam harris)

[Alex Wilding]

As a non-American perhaps I can be forgiven for not having heard of Sam
Harris until this morning, so my knowledge of him is limited to the mails of
the last few hours, the Shambhala Sun article, his website and that fount of
quick and often correct information, Wikipedia.
His expressed attitudes do not at first sight jibe with my experience at
all. The attempt to wrest some reinvention of "meditation" without "the
beliefs of Eastern religion" seems likely to miss the point almost entirely.
What is "meditation", after all? Without the context of a framework of
understanding, a theory or a tradition of practice, it could be almost
anything. The "meditation" practices I have been given to work on would make
no sense at all in a sanitized, non-religious, intellectually aseptic
environment.
This is quite apart from the hubris I am inclined to assume would be needed
to undertake the task of extracting what is useful and leaving the rest.
On the other hand, the sense in which I want to use the word "religion" has
little in common with the unpleasant things he appears to be most interested
in attacking. I would, I'm sure, not be the first to suggest that the
breadth of the word's usage is problematic.
All the best
Alex W