Letters to the Editor
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@ Racetoinfinity
How exactly is mediating and getting into some mental state where the self becomes one with everything actually supposed to solve a real-world problem? I suppose if everyone is sitting around just breathing we might use less fossil fuels, but seriously, ending war?
The idea of "honoring all levels of actualization" and "communicating" with them is a path to suicide. Some guy tried it a couple thousand years ago and got hung up on a big stick. It is a waste of time to try to communicate with Fundies of any dogma, especially (in my opinion) those based on religious or magical thinking.
Why honor the views of people that are patently false? My original post in this thread days ago was to disagree with Wilber and his assertion that all views of the world/cosmos/whatever are basically as valid as any other. No. They're not. The world does not rest on a serpent on a turtle. Saying that such a view is worthy of any kind of respect is simply nonsense.
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@Michael B.
Oh but it does. One thing that meditation is particularly good at is disolving the boundaries of the self. This makes compassion not just some sort of pretty ideal or but rather an inevitability of being. To give you a quick but telling example-- after meditating for say, an hour, one becomes more patient, more tolerant, more understanding, and more attentive. And this isn't just my experience. You are never going to meet a happier bunch of folks than a room of people who just finished a sit. I don't know about you, but I think the lack of the virtues the meditation helps develop are exactly what causes "real world" problems. I'm not saying their aren't other ways of cultivating them. What I am saying is that meditation does have applications beyond just sitting around and being blissful.
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Shiny happy people
I am all for happy and compassionate people. In theory, the more people are compassionate, the more likely they might act to do things like relieve the suffering of others. Great. But that's not going to get people to stop doing the things they need to do to make a living. Like work. For corporations. Which is reality of the world that humans have created. It is how shit gets done. Even if the happy and compassionate people do wonderful things like eat all vegetarian, somebody still has to truck the stuff to market. No amount of meditation is going to take us back to the medieval villages where everything is local.
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@Michael B.
Hell no. Meditation isn't going to bring us back to the middle ages. The whole point of spirituality (for anyone with a lick of sense, that is...and I realize there are a bunch of rascals out there) is to find happiness, compassion, and wisdom within our day to day lives. It's about seeing reality unmitigated by our attachments and false sense of self. Religion, at least the gnostic kind, doesn't deny that life can be a load of shit. It also doesn't deny that there are very practical things to accomplish.
"All sentient beings without number, I vow to liberate
Endless blind passions, I vow to uproot
Dharma gates beyond number, I vow to penetrate
The way of the Buddha, I vow to attain."
The true expression of the spiritual life is action and contemplation. Until we actualize both, we aren't actualizing our potential as human beings.
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Claims about meditation
The problem with the arguments going on in these letters is that everybody seems to be saying something a little different about what Wilber, meditation and mysticism all mean. As far as I can see there are some claims that are defensible and some that aren't:
Defensible claims:
1. Meditation is a real experience that causes changes in the brain.
2. The experience is similar among people in different cultures and practices.
3. Meditation has benefits that it can instill in people who practice it.
Non-defensible claims:
1. Meditation reveals a "higher" level of consciousness.
2. Meditation reveals something new about reality.
3. Concrete knowledge is gained from meditation (aside from simple knowledge of what the experience is like).
4. Science will never be able to explain the it.
The problem is that we don't yet understand how meditation works. No one knows exactly why these experiences happen and why they create benefits in people who practice them. All those non-defensible claims I referenced above are just efforts by people like Wilber to fill that unknown space with the answers to the universe.
For whatever reason people just can't seem to help doing this. They come up with things that seem reasonable, are sufficiently unverifiable, and seem to make people happy and they claim they are reality. There's nothing wrong with this... except for the fact that it becomes impossible to reason with people who believe in things that are beyond being verified. As soon as that happens, conversation and argument become pointless because their subjective experience trumps any logic or reason you can throw at them.
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@ Michael B
You wrote:
"Why honor the views of people that are patently false? My original post in this thread days ago was to disagree with Wilber and his assertion that all views of the world/cosmos/whatever are basically as valid as any other. No. They're not. The world does not rest on a serpent on a turtle. Saying that such a view is worthy of any kind of respect is simply nonsense."
I said ''....and communicate with them", i.e. help them up the spiral of conscious development - we live in a cybersphere now, too - all levels are available to instant communication even if lower levels have a hard to impossible time understanding the complexities of the higher ones.
That's a good question, about "honoring" pre-rational mythic and magic cultures (like the Christian fundies here and those of Islam), since I find myself angry and exasperated at their idiocies which stand in the way of progressive action. So as an idealist, I'd like to believe we can help them move up along the Spiral, I know it's not that easy, and that's an area I'd like to see where Wilber and the I-I community address, unless I've missed it and need to research. I see it as a problem to be solved, now.
P.S. I'll also check out your original letter - hadn't seen it.