Dear Friends,

I read Dr. Studholme''s article mention by John Ralph above, and must confess to find it weak.  Understandably weak, but weak nonetheless.  I say "understandably" because many anthroposophists don't do very well when they think about social and historical events.  To fully illuminate this would require a book, but I'll just make a couple of cautionary comments for those who do read the article.

You can read in Steiner's The Fifth Gospel, that Christ isn't all that concerned with theology or philosophy, so that the conflict of points of view, such as the world view of Tibetan Buddhism vs that of Mao Ze Dung is not all that significant.  In my social research it is clear that Christ's Love is focused not on the historical background of the times, but on the individual biographies.  The biography is the essence, the stage setting (the historical backdrop) is merely context.

So, in the case of Tibet, the significant matter is not the preservation of a philosophy (Anthroposophy also will pass away into the mists of time eventually) but that world historical forces (the Chinese invasion in 1949) pushed the last remaining theocracy out into the modern world, freeing those biographies from group soul contraints and also leading this particular brand of Buddhism into contact with the West, which brought in its train a whole other set of circumstances in individual biographies.

For example, I was living in Berkeley, California, in the 1970's when Choygam Trungpa (a Tibetan Llama) was teaching, and the influence of these ideas on many biographies was profound.

As to the New Atheists, I have been reading their books and in particular following Sam Harris's lecturing and website.  While he, like most of us, has some good ideas and some bad ideas, he is following his biography, and as are all of us, he influences others to the extent that they choose to be influenced.  The argument itself (the conflict between materialism, atheism and religion) will not be (if we really think about it) resolved like some kind of culture wide rational debate.   The processes by which an individual I finds its way to its personal world view is far more complicated than any of such imaginary debates.

Harris, for example, writes as follows in his book The End of Faith: "Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate?...Is there life after death?  These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind.  If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they are now to astronomers." (page 20). 

Now when I read this, I was hopefully surprised, because Harris was basically saying that there is a high value to our rational nature, and that a rational science of mind ought to lead us to many useful answers.  Of course, he was assuming the neuroscience he was studying had the answer, but his question left a huge doorway through which, in the right circumstances, someone who really understood the science underlying The Philosophy of Freedom could drive one of those proverbial trucks through.

joel

And the interesting thing to me about Harris is that he has basically acknowledged that non-local consciousness (various species of clairvoyance) can be aruged for rationally (and he point to different instances/research). And Harris has flately stated his respect for Stephenson's work on reincarnation.  It is sometimes almost akward to watch how Harris is having to dance within the New Atheist community.  Before his first book became huge it was not a community he was associated with at all, but it was the community that saw itself most neatly reflected in his book. Over the last three years Harris has begun to distinguish his main points from the other leaders of that group (Dennett and Dawkins).  Joel, have you seen the video online in which Harris argues (at an atheist convention) all the reasons why the tern atheism is rediculous AND THEN finishes on the point that only via meditation can we study a vital aspect of reality.  Dennett stands up at the end and takes him to task for such beliefs.  It is an interesting video to view symptomologically.

Jeff