Reincarnation and karma: Buddhism, Christianity, and Science..

Here's my response to an interesting blog over at Pathos by the Christian blogger Christian Piatt titled "Do Buddhism and Quantum Theory Support the Idea of Original Sin?"  Mr. Piatt shares his ruminations about original sin and reincarnation from a Christian perspective as they were stimulated by an NPR radio program  "talking about the philosophy behind the doctrine of reincarnation." (He doesn't say which program it was but it might have been Radiolab's program "After Life.") 

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Interesting to eavesdrop on the inner musings of a Christian grappling with the big picture of reincarnation/rebirth. As a Buddhist it is just now self-evident to me in the way that gravity has become self-evident after Newton put together the conceptual framework that allowed the new idea to be "perceived."

1. It is important to know that the Buddhist frame for karma-rebirth is not the same as other religious views of rebirth, such as the classical Hindu, the Albigensian or Rosicrucian Christian, Egyptian, Neoplatonist, etc. So, as you note, modern physics is catching up to Buddha’s view of reincarnation without individual entity, soul, or self. But in the Buddhist view this also means no universal soul or self as well.

2. As it stems from the first, the idea of karma-reincarnation is as complex and nuanced as genetics and understanding the genome, or understanding global weather patterns and climate change. We “understand” plate tectonics, but can’t predict an earthquake or volcano. We “understand” weather but can’t predict the formation of hurricanes or tornadoes and can’t foretell how the jet stream will modulate. Likewise, we can “understand” karma in a general way, but can’t predict how it will be formed in new rebirths in a specific space-time reference.

3. Karma and rebirth have absolutely nothing to do with morality or “learning from my past lives.” So the idea that memory should be there so we can learn from our past lives is an erroneous assumption. Karma means action, and the law of karma is no more “moral” than the laws of thermodynamics. When we put a hand into a flame, it hurts or worse depending on how long the hand is in the flame. We don’t say the flame is evil or that it was an immoral act or that the pain and blistering are “retribution” for our “sin” of putting our hand too close to the flame. Likewise, karma has nothing to do with the concept of “sin”, though unfortunately the idea of karma is too often translated into Western parlance using such ideas as sin or moralization.

4. The selflessness of karma and rebirth are very difficult for beginners and those attached to the idea of a self to realize. For example, take the idea “So when we die, there’s really no need any more for the ‘self’ to continue.” That represents a Western view of rebirth, because in the Buddhist view the statement is based on the false assumption that there was a self to begin with in this life. The idea of a self, is just that, an idea, an image, i.e., a self-image. Our mental processes are creating selfie images constantly and stringing them together by means of memory and this concatenation of self images is put together and called my self. But outside the mental image, there is no objective self. So since there is no self in this life, there is no self that is reborn in another life.

5. So what is reborn that warrants the prefix “re”? In the Buddhist context we can say it is the Dharmakaya, the body of reality, if we want to use religious terminology or to be poetical we simply say it is the ocean that is reborn as the wave. In the physics context we could say it is energy that is reborn. In the Christian context we can say it is God that is reborn. Every birth is the rebirth of that which is. But there is more, because there is the identity factor that connects one birth to another. And in the Buddhist context this identity factor is what creates the illusion of a self or soul passing from life to life. In our modern context of physics, we see this selfless continuity between lives in the field of wave dynamics. When a wave travels through the ocean there is no physical “thing” that is moving across the face of the waters. At any one location on the surface, such as indicated by a log or a duck, we see the object merely go up and down as the wave passes horizontally. The wave is not a “thing” at all, but the pattern of force traveling through the water creating the image of a wave. Likewise, a single life constitutes an up and down motion on the surface of the water but over “time” the up and down motions of the surface create the image of a wave traveling through the ocean, and this wave is just a force, not a thing. Thus, our rebirths are the expressions of the karmic forces that have been created and thus there is continuity without any soul, self, or entity passing from one life to another. What is reborn is just the karmic force or influence, not a thing. There is connectivity, but no “tissue,” other than what we might call God, Energy, Reality, Dharmakaya, Tathagata, Suchness, etc.

6. The burden of our forebears that we bear today is exactly right as one important dimension of the meaning of karmic fruit. We reap what we have sown and that sowing is both on the physical dimensions of earthly continuity and on the mental dimensions of continuity, but for us who live in the dimension of earthly continuity, it is more than enough to realize that our actions today will definitely bear the fruits of their development in the future generations. We are necessarily bound to those fruits as they take shape in and through the forces of space-time.

7. The idea of “sin” is very important to confront, as it is the very idea of sin that maintains sin as an influence in law of karma. This is an extremely nuanced philosophical truth that is easily and readily misunderstood by philosophical beginners and people who believe in the literalization and objectification of evil. In Buddhism, the basic “sin” is ignorance. It is the primal ignorance that creates the separation from reality that is the source of all good and evil, i.e., the source of sin. In Christian myth this is represented in the story of eating from the tree of knowledge. This myth is alive in each of us, first as our own consciousness develops form the moment of birth to our self-consciousness, and also moment to moment in our current self-consciousness. It is our own sense of separation from God (to use the Christian terminology) at any and every moment that is the continuity of eating from the tree of knowledge and is the sin of the present moment. The original sin of the separation of self and other is at the root of all suffering. Knowledge rests upon the bifurcation of our perceptions so that we can perceive reality though a frame of reference. However, the simple polarizations of perception, such as high-low, left-right, large-small, become confused with the other simple polarizations such as pain and pleasure to form complex polarizations such good and evil, and then we become self-deluded about the ontological reality of the complex polarizations because these complex bifurcations become the basis for our mentally constructed self, our self-image of our self consciousness and the separation from the “other.” Thus, the original sin is believing in the reality of our individual self as separate from others as well as separate from total reality because we have based that self on our frame of reference that includes the complex polarization of good-evil. In Zen we have a saying, that the True Good is the Good that transcends, or is not subject to, good and evil. In other words, the True God is the God that transcends the deluded dichotomy of God and Devil.

8. The idea that nirvana and heaven or analogous is correct. But suffice it to say, in both Buddhism and in Christianity both nirvana and heaven are grossly distorted and misunderstood by people who have only a superficial realization of Buddhism and Christianity, which unfortunately, means most of the people who “believe in” these religions without actually practicing and awakening to them.
Lastly, for now, the importance of understanding that all theories “are fabrications of human imagination” can not be overstated. In Buddhism, this is stated as the “mind-only” teaching of the One Mind. All views, perspectives, and constructs of consciousness are only manifestations of mind. This is not the philosophical notion of idealism, but a psychological recognition that there is no way to bootstrap ourselves out of our psyche. The very idea of a “physical world” is an idea of our psychology. This fundamental realization is so disorienting that most people flee from it in confusion or fear. It is much safer for our the stability and fixation of our self-image to believe in the stability and fixation of a physical world. However, as noted in the post, even the most sacred ideas of the physical sciences “simply break down on both infinitely large and infinitely small scales.” This is because the simple bifurcation of large-small breaks down when taken to its own ends. In fact, all oppositions and bifurcations break down when taken to their extreme ends, and this is one of the ways we can learn that the bifurcation and opposition is itself a construct of the psyche and a manifestation of mind.

Jesus On My Mind: the Man & the Myth

 

Two recent blog articles got me to turn to Jesus, as I often do, to note the One Vehicle at work in the Jesus story of the Christ as well as the Siddhartha story of the Buddha.

THE MAN

The first was a Salon story by Andrei Codrescu under the headline “’Zealot’paints Jesus as a Nazarene Che Guevara” reviewing the newly published book by Reza Aslan titled ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

I’m not a fan of Codrescu’s style so I won’t go into what he writes except to say he uses his usual hodge-podge approach for contextualizing and politicizing which makes critique of his content as confusing as the content itself. Suffice it to say Codrescu hides good points within his self promoting use of superfluous points. Codrescu didn’t like Aslan’s Zealot, but he tell us little of the evidence he is relying on to come to this conclusion and he doesn’t reveal his own version of Jesus that provides a better portrait of the man.

 I haven’t read Aslan’s book, but if Codrescu’s one real examination of the book regarding the story of Caesar’s coin is accurate, then Codrescu is correct that Aslan has come to a conclusion that is based on inserting his own interpretations at the beginning of the analysis and not on the facts of the story.   However, neither Aslan nor Codrescu mention the most important point necessary if we are to have a serviceable historical picture of Jesus the man, and that is that Jesus was an Essene.

Here’s the man as I see him. There is nothing in the historical facts or the orthodox narrative to suggest that Jesus was ever a member of the Zealot party.  He could be called a “zealot” in the generic sense that Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi were zealots having great zeal for their mission.  By birth and family upbringing, Jesus ben Joseph was a member of the Essene community of Nazareth in the Mr. Carmel area. His cousin John, later known as “the Baptist”, was in the Southern Essene community associated with Qumran.

Jesus felt that the Essene teachings were the truest teachings of Judaism, but that the Essenes were too closed off and insulated from the mainstream of the two major sects of the Pharisees and Sadducees which had lost the true way. While accepting that the Essene teachings were the most true to the prophets and the Essene communities were the most “right with God” in their formation and activities, Jesus did not accept the isolationist and separatist social structure of those same Essene communities. Jesus’ mission was to bring tear down the divisions within Judaism and its three major sects, to bring it back to the truth centered on God and to show the Pharisees and Sadducees the error of their ways.

Jesus did not say "You must become Essenes" because he knew that was hopeless politically and socially, but he did teach what the Essenes held and believed, for example, as in the Sermon on the Mount and regarding the correct way to pray in private, and he said this is how to worship God. 

Some people hold that to have a picture of Jesus the man we can only use the Gospels, including Acts, of the Bible and we must take them at face value without going beyond the four corners of their pages.  From this position the objection is raised that since the Gospels were written in the format of Greek biography and history we cannot say that Jesus was an Essene because the Gospels do not identify him as Essene.

However, and it is not just sophistry to say it this way, the Gospels did not identify him as an Essene exactly because he was an Essene. There is no way to portray Jesus the man without going beyond the pages of the Gospels to the history of the times and of the Jewish people.  There were three sects at the time: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Gospels identified the Pharisees and Sadducees because they were the two major sects that Jesus was aiming his criticism at for failing God. The Gospels do not mention the Essenes because Jesus did not criticize the very sect that he grew up in and whose teachings were the foundation of his own teachings.

This is most important in perceiving his mission. Jesus was not on a mission against the Roman Empire, he was not on a mission to recover the lands of Judaism for the Jews, and he was not on a mission to teach the Gentiles anything at all.  His mission was to awaken the Jews to their own heritage and their own need to get right with God according to the prophets of their own scriptures.

So how do we know that Jesus was an Essene? Primarily by taking the description of Jesus in the Bible and comparing it to the historical records from outside the Bible. He learned the scriptures as a child as the Essenes taught their children; but the Pharisees and Sadducees did not teach their young children the sacred texts. This explains the story of the amazement of the men at the Sadducee synagogue when the young Jesus knew the scriptures so well, because none of their own children were taught scripture at that age. 

The Essenes lived communally without individual possessions being more than another’s, and this is why Jesus taught the disciples to not worry about where the next meal would come from because all they had to do was identify themselves in any community and they would be fed by the Essenes living there. As the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote, “No one city is theirs, but they settle amply in each. ... For this reason they make trips without carrying any baggage at all.”  

The Essenes especially studied and revered the Book of Isaiah and Jesus was especially well versed in Isaiah.   The Essene community of Nazareth was among the most successful and important of the Essene communities throughout the land, and Jesus was from Nazareth.  One could go on, but it is clear that Jesus was an Essene.

Objection: Some people say that since we have no objective source regarding the details of Jesus' life and words, all attempts to create a "historical" Jesus are doomed to failure. Evangelical Christians have even said this as a reason to not look for the historical Jesus the man and to therefore only look to Christ the Savior portrayed in the Bible. They see the historical Jesus as a “a figment of your imagination” but somehow see no contradiction or aspect of imagination in the “fact” of Christ the Savior.

 

Creating a historical Jesus based on the best of the actual historical knowledge we have is not an endeavor "doomed to failure."  It is the essential enterprise of telling the story of history.  On the other hand, we need to bear in mind that the historical Jesus should be distinguished from the myth of the Christ. We can talk about the historical Jesus and we can talk about the myth of Christ. But we should not confuse or conflate the two.

 

THE MYTH

In this regard, the second blog article that caught my attention is from the website Pathos and confronts the question of myth verses history head on.  The blog is called “The White Hindu” from blogger Ambaa, and the post is titled “Krishna is a Myth; Jesus is aMyth”

I like this blog. Ambaa is sharing her spiritual journey in a very sweet and generous way. Ambaa notes that people often get upset if the stories of their religious founders and figures might be more mythical than literally and historically true. She says,

I don’t think it matters at all whether Jesus really lived or whether he really said what he said. I don’t care if it was Lau-tzu who said the things attributed to Lau-tzu. Someone said them and they have wisdom. It’s the message itself, the wisdom itself that matters to me, not what name you stick on it.

I don’t know if Krishna was a real person. I don’t know if he was more than one person whose lives got glomed together over the years. I don’t know if the stories are literally true but I do know that they are metaphorically true and that is far more important to me personally.

(Note for the sticklers, I think “Lau-tzu” is how they spell it in Scotland.)

This is a different view of the historical picture issue that takes the position that the picture of the historical man is not important at all and what we know of the myth is what is important.  In this view, the myth of the Christ is not taken as a fact, but man Jesus is taken as a myth. To me, it is still important to distinguish between the man and the myth, and that is why I use the names Jesus for the man and Christ for the myth.

What is a myth anyway? Today, many people think the word "myth" means "false." This is the materialistic bias of people misinformed by junk science, not real science. As the real scientist of psychology, Carl Jung, has taught us, myth is a psychological orienting principal or matrix of the mind, i.e, psyche.  Myth is good because we can't live as humans without myth. Without a myth, there can be no consciousness, because the consciousness would be too chaotic and disorganized for awareness to cohere into a coherent worldview. Jesus the man is now totally cloaked within Christ the myth. To have our own best-estimate opinion about the man does mean we have to take account of the myth.

Jesus the man and his historicity doesn’t directly inform us about Christ the myth. Personally, I follow the myth of Buddha and that works well for me. There are many points of contact and comparison between the myth of Buddha, the Awakened One, and the myth of Christ, the Anointed One. But that is another essay.

And while it can be a lot of fun, as well as educational, comparing our myths and how they orient and organize our psyches, but it can also be dangerous when someone doesn't understand that their myth is just a myth, that is, when they don't understand their very own worldview and sense of self within that worldview is based on myth not on something outside the realm of myth.  

Why is that? Because there is no consciousness outside of the matrix of the mind and therefore there is no worldview outside the matrix of a myth. There is no objective perspective outside of the psyche. The myth of objective science is not wrong because it is a myth; it is just that objectivity is also a myth within the mind's view of the world.

 

Objection: "Myth" means "story of beginnings" and there is no implication of history or fiction.

That "definition" of myth is itself characterized by its own myth. Myth is not just the story of beginnings, but the story of what is primary in our own living worldview, which must also mean now, and not just in some beginning to be found in the past. When myth comes in the packaging of time and space, then it often does wear the clothing of historicity in the "once upon a time" or "in the beginning" variety. But it is in the present that the myth is alive.  People who believe the myth of objectivity of materialist science view myth as a synonym of "fiction." People who are fundamentalists believe in their own myths as absolute history while saying that other people’s myths are make believe.  

Ambaa wrote: "For those who need their religion to be seen as the best one or the only “real” one in the world, being able to say that their saint or prophet actually lived while others did not must help them bolster their belief that it is real."

 

Objection: I think you're maybe being a little unfair; at least, I think that you're generalizing more than is accurate. Speaking as a Christian who believes Jesus for-real lived, I don't think that religious supremacy or exclusivity would primarily motivate most Christians who believe Jesus is a historical figure, though it might motivate most to greater or lesser degrees. Based on the conversations I've had, it seems most Christians are concerned that losing the historical Jesus would render the logic of salvation invalid...and most Christians are pretty serious about salvation. I assume the concern with salvation, or some similar mechanism which seems to depend on a particular event actually happening, would hold true for other historical religions (Judaism, Islam, etc.). That being said, historical religions tend to be monotheistic, so your suggested motivation probably is a real motivation, just not the only one. But I do know lots of Christians (or some, anyway) who aren't especially hung up on exclusivity (I hope I can include myself) and simultaneously affirm that Buddhism etc. has mythic wisdom and that Christianity has historical truth. And I also know Christians (a lot this time) who would largely agree with you regarding Genesis and other early Biblical books, that Adam and Eve or Abraham are mythical, not historical. That being said, for those who are triumphalistic in their religions, I think you are right that historical truth helps them feel superior. And I also agree with the general point of your post, that the wisdom winds up being more important, practically, than the history.

 

The objection seems to have difficulty seeing the distinction between Jesus the man and Christ the myth? Between Siddhartha Gautama the man and Buddha the myth? Between Arthur the man and the Once and Future King as the myth?

To me, the point of contact between the man (or woman) and the myth is exactly our own point of contact between life and death. The historical person (man or woman) had their own life and death, and it is the myth that informs us about our own life and death through the orienting images of the mythic life of the “historical” person.

In one sense, unless there is a person in history or historical legend upon whom the myth can be draped as a mantle, then the myth has no home within the world of life and death. So in this sense, there must be an incarnation of the myth to make it real. So yes, there can be no salvation or enlightenment unless there was a person who embodied that mythic story of salvation or enlightenment. The myth would be just fiction without the embodiment of the incarnation. But given the necessity of the myth to be embodied, it is still the core of misinterpretation to confuse the historicity of the person embodying the ahistorical myth with the myth itself.  

The incarnation makes the myth historical, but on its own ground, the myth itself is ahistorical and outside the strictures of the contextualizing myth of time and space. Otherwise the myth would be trapped in history and we ourselves would not be able to embody it in our own time with our own realization.

Objection: I like the argument that you have put forward, but without sun, there is no light, and if you look at these as a fact, then the sun really doesn't matter day to day, but in reality they go in hand in hand, and I think this is vital when it comes to faith, otherwise you will never take it seriously, and when you don't, it can't become part of you. I like Harry Potter but it's not part of my life.

Myths are myths, and that is why they are not real, or they may have been real, it's because of this word maybe, they are called myths, and when we have the word maybe involved, then there is no faith, and without faith I would be an atheist. It's not bad thing, but I would rather believe in something then nothing. Therefore what ever you believe in, then it matters whether anything is real or not and without that there is no point in the system.

By sitting in a fake aeroplane pretending you are going nowhere. And what is a point in that. Period.

Beyond the somewhat confused statement of the objection, which is the sun and which is the light? Is the historical person that the myth is hanging on the sun or the light? Is the myth the sun or the light?

Myths are most definitely real, because there is no "reality" without a myth of what is "real." Believing in something or believing in nothing are both the expressions of myth. "Faith" is a wide spectrum including hopeful supposition, belief, expectation, trust, confidence, and certainty. If we take something "seriously" then that is the evidence that myth is at work in our mind. It is our personal myth of reality that sorts things out as "this is really important" and “this is not important.” 

 

If we want to know the context, shape, and texture of the myths that are at work in our own mind, then we simply have to describe what it is that we take to be “true,” “really true,” and “really important.”  And since consciousness works by polarity, we need to be aware of and describe the things we take to be “false” and “unimportant” to see how our myth casts its own shadow.

Responses to David Brooks'"The Neural Buddhists"

David Brooks has recently written an op-ed column about religion in the light of scientific developments. Brooks has two or three good lines in the piece but he wimps out completely in the end and takes the side of Chrisitan orthodoxy by the neat trick of claiming to not take sides. I am most amazed to read a conservative Christian like Brooks have anything nice to say about Buddhism.

But if one reads his column closely, Brooks doesn't really say anything affirmativly positive about Buddhism as such; he only says that the area of human knowledge where science and Buddhism intersect is the central challenge to Christian orthodoxy. In this, Brooks is only echoing Pope Benedict's endorsement in 1997, when still known as Cardinal Ratzinger, that Buddhism in the 21st century would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church's greatest challenge. The Pope then called Buddhism "a spiritual self-absorption" that "offers a possibility of happiness by touching the infinite, without having concrete religious obligations." Brooks astutely stayed away from any discussion of morals or ethics either in Buddhism or science, for that is quicksand he would surely sink in.

Here are some of my spontaneous comments to Brooks's column, paragraph by paragraph.

Gregory Wonderwheel

May 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Neural Buddhists
By DAVID BROOKS
In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called ““Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,”” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.
To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are ““hard-wired”” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

Comment: This is a strawman argument. No self respecting scientist says “human beings are hard wired. to do this or that.” No sociologist or psychologist says “Religion is an accident” except in the most general sense that the universe is an accident. In human interactions scientists see religion in terms of social dynamics or psycho-dynamics, not as an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Comment: Here Brooks is confabulating two kinds of “religion”, the spirtiual kind and the psychotic kind. Obviously since the mind is one, there are not literally two kinds of religion, but as there are two kinds of things, those that exist and those that don’t exist, there are two kinds of religion, the kind that exists and the kind that is a delusion. When a person is “conversing with God” it depends on what the words “conversing” and “God” mean to determine whether they are living words or dead words. Brooks doesn’t distinguish between living and dead words.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and ““the soul is dead.”” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Comment: Brooks doesn’t know the meaning of the word “material”. No materialist would say the “the soul is dead” because they would not acknowledge that a soul ever lived. Brooks doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the argument over “whether” God exists is really an argument over “what” is God.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

Comment: Brooks assumes the Christian framing of the “debate.” Since Christians define “soul” in a certain way he says the argument is whether the Christian conception of soul is reasonable or not. Also he presumes that an “entity” created the “soul.”

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species” reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

Comment: Brooks is a textbook example of how rhetoric is used to confuse people. Of course new views of reason and analysis affect culture and socity. But they don’t affect everyone as shown by the anti-evolution supporters of Christian faith and Brook’s political conservatism.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

Comment: Again Brooks can’t tell living words from dead words. Most people who still have a literal “faith” in the dead words of the Bible arn’t going to be persuaded by any argument by a neroscientist. And those who have a faith in the living words of the Bible and so don’t need to take the Bible literally, also arn’t going to have their faith shaken by neuroscientists.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Comment: Here’s a paragraph that mixes up several issues. Every development of intellectual technology, from the book to the photograph and computer, has been used as a metaphor for how the brain works. No scientist confuses the metaphor for the reality. When people talked about the mind as a “blank page’ no one thought it was made from tree pulp. When people talk about memory as photographic, no one imagines film in the brain. When people talk about the mind operating like a computer, the computer is a man-made metaphor. The computer emulates the brain, not the other way around. Brooks has no theory of emotions and thinks he has elucidated something b calling them “squishy”. This is the kind of analysis that Bible bangers use in elucidating revelation.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Comment: That researchers are trying to develop hypotheses about morality, ethics, and fair play has nothing to do with a materialist or anti-materialist science. The concept of the “selfish” gene is a metaphor and another type of straw-man argument. I doubt that Brooks has any analysis of what an “instinct” is or does.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

Comment: More respect than who? Certainly scientists have demonstrated more respect for human experience of kind labeled spirituality than most Bible banging church leaders have demonstrated. Such reverends and ministers could care less about anyone’s spiritural experience unless it fits into and is subservient to their own molded interpretation of revelation. Brooks’ declaration of merging with a “larger presence” is an argument that is presuming the conclusion. Saying that the “mind” is transcending itself for a larger presence is presuming that the mind is a small mind not the large mind that is ever present, as well as presuming that the larger presence isn’t the mind itself It is Brooks who is materialistically objectifying his so-called “larger presence.”.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

Comment: One wonders how and where Brooks has come upon his image of Buddhism. Certainly from his politics, he shows little if any personal understanding of Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

Comment: Brooks is confirming that he has no personal experience with what he is talking about but is attempting to digest what he has been reading, if in fact he has read these works.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Comment: That is a good list for beginners who are weaning themselves of Biblical materialism and literalism. However, in Buddhism the self is neither a fixed entity nor a dynamic process of relationships. Self is used only as a term of discrimination not as an assertion of something that exists. So what he is describing should not be called “neural Buddhism” if it asserts a self. Second, the basis for our common moral intuitions is the mind we all share. The one mind is no-mind. Third, people experience strong emotions that are sometimes called “the sacred” or “love” but the experience of the sacred is the medicine for the disease of the mundane, it is not a state in and of itself to be made into a new object to grasp. Fourth, Brooks has stated good conception of God from a perspective where we all have difficulty speaking. Is he prepared to meet this God without objectification in the moment of the now? This unknowable total is totally unknowable. Who can die in this unknowability?

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

Comment: In what way does Brooks mean to say that people who defend the “existence of God” had an easy debate? Brooks doesn’t seem to have a clue that the people defending the existence of God are generally the Bible bangers who say the Bible is literally true and that God is a person who speaks to them. How is it easy for Bible bangers to debate Richard Dawkins? By discounting everything he says as only the words of a scientist, and as these Bible bangers assure us, since we all know that scientists went to college and are just elites and liberals, what they have to say is just political not real. Here I can agree with Brooks that the area where scientists overlap with Buddhists is the area that presents the greatest challenge to contemporary Christian beliefs. But the challenge is not to those people holding conventional Christian beliefs because they will continue to claim the world is only 5,000 years old because the Bible says so, no matter what the evidence presented to them says. The challenge will be to those who are not brainwashed by Christian fundamentalism. But this is a challenge that Thomas Jefferson and the Age of Reason brought to the table long before Buddhism was known widely in the West.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’’s going to have big cultural effects.

Comment: By saying he is not “qualified to take sides” Brooks is acting the fool. Does he really expect people to accept that he has no position regarding the literalism of Bible revelations? Does he really expect us to believe that he has no opinion about whether or not the Bible is to be taken as literally true? His cowardice is astonishing only to those who do not know is work. Brooks is actually holding onto Biblical revelation in the face of the scientific revelation and by saying that he can’t take the side of reason, he has committed himself to the side of Biblical delusion.