Earth Day Requires Repudiation of Capitalism

EARTH DAY RANT: I'll be blunt. If you support Earth Day but don't see the relevance of an economic analysis that demonstrates the fundamental cause of climate change is capitalism, then you are either ignorant of the facts or complicit in that very same climate change.
We simply cannot honestly embrace Earth Day and Support Science in public demonstrations if we do not include an analysis of society based on socialized economics, depth psychology, and spiritual ethics.
Science is good, but scientists who sold out to capitalism, selling us the "benefits" of pesticides, nuclear fission, fossil fuel energy, pharmaceuticals, etc., all as if science had rigorously established that there was no down side, have perverted science, every bit as much as the Catholic Church perverted the teachings of Jesus by their Crusades, Inquisitions and Witch-hunts. Thus the scientists who have sold their services for the almighty immoral "Dollar" and thereby have destroyed the objectivity and integrity of scientific studies in our universities are themselves the responsible parties for today's anti-science backlash.
By following these three moral precepts of Buddhism scientists could easily redeem science:
1. Do not kill, support life;
2. Do not steal, be giving;
3. Do not lie, be truthful.

But this requires that scientists must call out the death-supporting, stealing, and lying conduct of their fellow scientists.  Today, the vast majority of scientists protect each other from external criticism nearly as strenuously as the Blue Line of law enforcement does. To redeem science, scientists must point out when a colleague or university department has blurred the lines of the scientific method in order to get that grant or endowment or that paper published. 

Above all else, science must be an ethical calling, not an industry in service of capitalism, because capitalism is inherently anti-democratic, routinely unethical, and necessarily places a higher virtue on making profits than on protecting the environment and honestly practicing the scientific method.   

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications

This is a new feature for the TWW Blog with the hope of adding a little more coherence to the line up.  Under the title of “Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications” I will be outlining my pet peeves about Buddhism’s “coming to the West.”  Being aware of the processes of accommodation, acclimation, and acculturation that occur in transplanting Buddha Dharma into another culture is my primary concern.  The Buddha Dharma is the teaching of how mind awakens.  This awakening is not bound to any particular culture and is universally available to and inherent within each and every single person and living being. 

One of the most important factors in Buddhism’s arrival in the West is the necessity of disentangling the cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma from those aspects that are the common denominator of the human mind, i.e., the Buddha aspects. This happens whenever Buddhism enters a new cultural context.  It happened whenever and wherever Buddhism spread beyond the region where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, actually walked as a living, breathing, spiritual mendicant, e.g., into the areas now known as Southern India, Northwestern India, Southeast Asia, Ancient Gandhara, Centeral Asia. China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The core problem is that we mostly do not know what is cultural and what is mind. As Buddhism spread throughout the regions of Asia, there was a general cultural communication that facilitated the transplanting of Buddha Dharma without a head on collision of cultural themes.  For example, Buddhism moves relatively easily into a culture that has either an animistic-shamanistic or pluralistic-pantheistic approach, because it can either become one more view among others in a panoply of perspective, or can integrate the perspective of the mind’s awakening within the preexisting metaphors of awakening in a shamanistic cultural matrix. 

But Buddhism has more difficulty in cultures that worship and idolize an anthropomorphic monotheistic hegemonic God, such as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It is therefore historically significant that Buddhism is now able to come to the West, only after the West has had its own form of “Enlightenment” wherein the Dharma of Science has been able to free its own culture from the dogmatic rule of an anthropomorphic God.    

This current historical condition now presents problems of its own for Buddha Dharma coming to the West, as now practitioners of Buddha Dharma must take advantage of the cultural space created between the old precincts dominated by the God-religion and the new fields of the scientific worldview, while at the same time addressing the concerns of each.  Buddhism’s finding its place in the West between the polarization of an other-worldly God religion and a worldly science is analogous to Buddhism’s finding its place in China between the preexisting forms of Taoism and Confucianism. 

Part of the difficulty will be for Buddha Dharma to simultaneously shed the Indian, Chinese Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultural encrustations, yet remember and retain Buddha Dharma itself.  As we wash off the cultural accretions, this of course presents us with the paradigmatic conundrum of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.   As just one example, we can see in the West that some adherents to a materialistic scientific worldview misperceive karma and rebirth as merely cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma that can be jettisoned.  But as I see it, we have in the scientific field of psychology the common denominator of the study of the psyche with which Buddha Dharma can ally itself to show us that in the scientific study of mind, every single human culture that has existed has some form of teaching about karma and rebirth, e.g., the Christian teaching of “you reap what you sow.”  

For instance, in 1939 Carl G. Jung wrote an essay titled "Concerning Rebirth" recognizing that the concept of rebirth has various aspects and outlining five categories of rebirth as psychological forms that the archetype of rebirth manifests itself.  Jung points out that rebirth is not a materialistically measurable phenomenon, it can't be weighed or photographed, but it is a "purely psychic reality." Jung said,

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss--without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1, Par. 207.]

 

Therefore by recognizing the role of psychology we can scientifically determine that karma and rebirth are not merely cultural notions to be discarded but are archetypes of the universal collective unconscious that is the foundation of all cultures, and both karma and rebirth can be scientifically and personally studied today, with the 2500 year history of such Buddhist study providing insights for us today .    

For this series, the heading “Caveats” will warn about and point out the problems in sentences and ideas that I come across in English speaking texts, usually describing the Buddha Dharma erroneously, giving false impressions, causing confusion, or generally mistaking or misstating something about the Buddha Dharma.

The heading “Corrections” will attempt the brief restatement from my perspective to correct what was written.

The heading “Clarifications” will articulate the reasons for announcing the caveat and making the correction.

It should go without saying that I’m not writing from a position of a particular orthodoxy, but from a particular perspective.  The point is not that these corrections are intended to establish objective dogmatic views that everyone must adhere to, but that they reveal the “truth of perspective” itself, which is a central aspect of the core teachings of the Buddha Dharma, i.e., having an “Aligned View” is the first of the folds of the Eightfold Path that is basic to Buddhism.     

Here, the Buddha Dharma view we are centrally aligning with is the One Vehicle. This mind-only perspective “stands on zero” as the nondual teaching of emptiness (sunyata) and manifests Buddha Nature as the coming and going of thusness (Tathagata) for the great matter of bringing people to hear of, learn about, and enter into the Buddha’s seeing and knowing in order to alleviate the imbalance and off-centeredness (dukkha) that inevitably arises with self-consciousness and causes the general distress and dissatisfaction inherent in our lives that leads to our greed, hatred, delusions and the whole plethora of vexations, and ultimately to our killing, harming, stealing, lying, and generally bad behaviors towards each other.   

My initial anticipation is that many of first blogs of the series will circle around the areas of confusion between the One Vehicle and the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha themes of Buddha Dharma as understood by scholastics in the West. 

This page will act as the introduction and table of contents for the blogs posted in this series, as well as a preview of blogs I hope to include.  The posted blogs can also be found by clicking on the “CCC” link in the list of Labels on the side of the pages.

If you have any suggestions or pet peeves of your own about how Buddha Dharma is being accommodated and acculturated in the West, please let me know in the comments.

_/|\_

Gregory

Posts in this series:

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications: The meaning of ‘ Mind-only’

Anticipated Topics for Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications:

~ Manas, the 7^th Consciousness
~ Alayavijnana, the 8th Consciousness
~ Mind Only (citta-matra), Consciousness Only (vijnana-matra), and Notification Only (vijnapti-matra)
~ Lankavatara Sutra, The Sutra of Going Down to Lanka
~ Zen and Zen Samadhi
~ Samatha Vipassyana and Samadhi Prajna
~ Tendai Shikan and Zen Shikantaza
~ Five Types of Zen

Buddha Dharma Comes to the West

Thinking about Buddha Dharma coming to the West.

The Buddhism of the West, that eventually becomes identifiable as such, will be as different from the Buddhism of the “Far East” (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean Buddhism), Tibetan Buddhism, and Theravada Buddhism as they are different from the Buddhism of India before the 8^th century.  Personally, I push against the trends that currently go under the labels of “naturalizing” or “modernizing” Buddhism because it tends to be too one sided leaning towards the materialism of the West.   

Western Buddhism will have to acclimate and accommodate to certain Western perspectives as well as appropriate certain Western language terminology and frames, and this will mean bridging the language and cultural divides with appropriate imagery and symbolic language.  Thus, Buddhism will need to use the language of both science and the religions of the Levant, in order to relate to Western cultures.  

The problem with much of the “modernization of Buddhism” approach is that it is appropriating the wrong parts of modernization. That is, instead of relating to the cutting edge of 21^st century physics, general relativity, quantum theory, and string theory, it is just adopting a materialist inspired scientific framework of the 19^th century.  In its attempts to be modern and remove the “superstition” from Buddhism, this “naturalization of Buddhism” movement has actually adopted the worst of the denatured materialistic psychology of the 20^th century that has removed mind and psyche, and all depth, from psychology as just neuroscience and genetics.

Likewise, there is not much evidence of the necessary bridging of language memes with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in Buddhism’s coming to the West.  For example, Buddhism needs to unashamedly use the word “God," but in a Buddhist sense as a synonym for such Buddhist terminology as tathagata, sunyata, or dharmakaya. This is like the appropriation of the word Tao (the Way) when Buddhism came to China.  We need to tell the followers of the Abrahamic religions, “Yes, there is God, but it is not what you think.”  God is inconceivable, and if one conceives of or has a concept of God, then that is really the basic sin of ignorance as a human being.  

In this sense, John Lennon was right when he said “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” but it is the sense that our concepts of God are the concepts by which we measure or pain, i.e., measuring our understanding of Buddhism’s First Noble Truth that Life entails suffering.   To the extent that Lennon was singing “there is no God” he was wrong, but to the extent that he was singing to remind us that our concepts of God are not what God is, then he was absolutely correct.  This is actually what the mystics of Christianity, Judaism and Islam have said all along, but Buddhists need to speak of God in such a direct manner that reminds them of the mystic truths of their own religions in order for Buddhism to convince them that Buddhism’s not having an anthropomorphic God is not anti-religious.

For the transplantation of Buddha Dharma to the West, Buddhism needs to take up wholeheartedly such Western terms as “God,” “mind,” and “reality” and repurpose them within Buddhism’s frame of reference to accommodate itself to Western Culture.

 

Buddha doesn't teach materialism.

Someone wrote: Science is not intrinsically materialistic. It's intrinsically skeptical. ... Opinion polls show that a substantial number of American scientists, perhaps a majority, have religious beliefs.  I have objected to the term "scientific materialism," which suggests some theory of materialism.

I think that science is intrinsically and inherently materialistic by definition.

Science is based on the assumption and theory of matter and materialism.

Materialism, the philosophical theory that regards matter and its motions as constituting the universe, and all phenomena, including those of mind, as due to material agencies.

Matter, as distinct from mind and spirit, is a broad word that applies to anything perceived, or known to be occupying space.

In Buddha Dharma, as articulated in the Lankavatara Sutra, the Sanskrit for "materialist" and "materialism" is lokayata which literally means "limited to the world."

Red Pine wrote: The Sanskrit for ‘materialist’ is lokayata. This term included all those whose approach to knowledge was based on knowledge gained from the five senses. (Note 128, p. 202.)

Because science deliberately limits itself to the five senses perceiving an external world, it is by definition materialism, and by definition is not what Buddha articulated.

That is not to say that Buddha Dharma is incompatible with science, only that the materialist basis of science should never be confused Buddha Dharma as it all too frequently is confused. Buddha Dharma is based on the personal realization that all manifested phenomena are only mind, and this is called the personal realization of noble knowing/knowledge (aryajnana) or Buddha knowing/knowledge (buddhajnana)

For example, in Zen especially, we see the confusion of materialism and Buddha Dharma in the raw examples of every day life such as “a cup of tea” or “hitting the floor” or “raising the stick” or “the plum blossom” used as examples of suchness. But without the personal realization of suchness, the person who has not the realization has only the sensory experience of “a cup of tea” or “hitting the floor” or “raising the stick” or “the plum blossom” and thinks of these as “things” (i.e., dharmas) and mistakes the experience of the thing-as-a-sensory-object for the realization of the thing as the manifestation of suchness.

To view things as external to our mind is called the “externalist ways” (外道).

Externalism. of or pertaining to the world of things, considered as independent of the perceiving mind: external world.

To mistake a thing in the sense being a thing-as-a-sensory-object, i.e., an external thing, is the practical meaning of materialism. Materialism comes in very many varieties and some of them are very subtle and sound like “immaterialsm,” but they are still materialism. In section LXXIII of the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha tells Mahamati unequivocally, “I do not articulate materialism.” The Buddha goes on to tell Mahamati about a previous encounter with a materialist Brahman (世論婆羅門). It is an amusing story. The internally quoted matter is quoted directly from the Lankavatara.

The materialist Brahman approaches the Buddha and rudely without seeking permission to question and without waiting he rudely calls the Buddha by his family name “Gautama” and asks, “Is everything actually created?”

The Buddha replied declaring, “Brahman, that everything is actually created is the initial materialism.”

The other then asked, “Is everything not actually created?”

The Buddha said, “That everything is not actually created is the second materialism.”

The Brahman starts a rapid fire succession of questions about permanency, impermanency, birth, and no birth and the Buddha replies, “That’s six materialisms.” A few more such questions and the Buddha says, “That’s eleven materialisms.” the Brahman keeps asking philosophical questions, and the Buddha keeps saying “that’s also materialism,” and then the Buddha says, “As long as there are mental outflows erroneously reckoning on the external dusts (i.e., sensory data), in all cases it is materialism.”

The Brahman in exasperation then asked, “Rather, there is that which is not materialism isn’t there? For the propositions of every one of the externalist ways, I correctly articulate every kind of flavor of phrasing, causes and conditions, parables, and rhetorical embellishments.”

The Buddha declared, “Brahman, there is that which is neither your possession, nor doing, nor propositions, nor articulations. nor is it not articulating every kind of flavor of phrasing, nor is it not causes, metaphors, and rhetorical embellishments.”

The Brahman declared, “What is the position that is not materialism and neither not a proposition, nor not articulating?”

And the Buddha declared, “Brahman, there is the non-materialism that your various externalist ways are not able to know, because they use the means of external natures, untruths, antithetical conceptions, deceptive reckonings, and attachments. I designate not giving birth to antithetical conceptions and the complete realization that existence and nonexistence are nothing but the manifestations of one’s own mind. By not giving birth to antithetical conceptualizations and not receiving external dusts, the antithetical conceptualizations are forever stopped. This is called non-materialism. This is my Dharma, and not what you have!
“Brahman, to articulate in outline: their consciousness supposes coming, supposes going, supposes death, supposes birth, supposes ease, supposes suffering, supposes the submerged, supposes the visible, supposes contacts, supposes attachments to every kind of characteristics, supposes harmonious continuity, supposes reception, or supposes attachments to causes and reckonings. So, Brahman, that which compares to this position is your position of materialism and is not what I have.”

To clarify how materialism is used, Red Pine includes a note from old Chinese commentary:

Red Pine wrote: In his commentary, T’ung-jun notes, “The stance of those who understand the way of truth of self-existence is firm. They teach materialism all day, yet it is not materialism. Meanwhile, the stance of those who don’t understand is unstable. They teach what is not materialism all day, yet it turns out to be materialism. (Note 135, p. 204.)

The truth of “self-existence” means the truth of one’s own nature, the ultimate truth of svabhava, the third of the three own-natures (trisvabhava). This important note shows us that when the Buddha and Zen teachers point to a flower, hit the floor, comment on the sound of the rain, etc., it may seem like they are teaching materialism, but in fact this is not a teaching of materialism and is actually the teaching there is nothing but the manifestations of one’s own mind. But, when the non-Buddhists speak of non-materialism such as energy, space, gods, heavens, spiritual matters, etc., they still believe in an external reality and external things so they are in fact teaching materialism.

A brief look at Intelligent Design

Many people think there is a basic conflict between religion and evolution as a scientific theory. As I see it the conflict is not between religion and science, but between religion as myth and revelation and science as observation. Buddhism is at its core a religion of observation, not of mythic revelation, so there is no fundamental conflict between Buddhism and science.

(To those who are familiar with the mythic aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and marvel at the idea that Buddhism is not a religion of myth and revelation at its core, let me just say that Buddhism sees such myths as "the five cosmic Buddhas" as metaphorical teaching devices for people who want to hold onto the feelings of security of such things. They are not seen as statements of objective existence but as devices that will be seen through as the practitioner develops understanding going beyond such naive views, just as a student of science develops understandings that alter the naive view of the world as earth-centric or flat.)

To me the words "intelligent design" are not objectionable per se, because as a Buddhist I have a different take on both "intelligence" and "design." As I see it, intelligence is inherent in all component things. For example, the more we look deeply into the human body within the cells, the more we see what looks to the imagination like cities or factories of immense activity and complexity. This coherence of complexity is an expression of a level or dimension of intelligence that is integral with the manifestation of life at that level. What we call our personal consciousness at the "macro" level of individuality, is itself "built upon" the foundation of the totality of consciousness at the sub-cellular level.

A principle tenet of Buddhism is called "anatman" meaning that there is no separate "self" or "soul" or "entity" within or beyond an individual or distinguishable from the unity of the person-environment, and so similarly there is no need to posit the existence of a "designer" separate from the design. To speak of the design of nature is the recognition of the laws of nature and the functions and principles of consciousness that provide for pattern creation and recognition in the universe.

Creationism in Buddhism means that the complete and completely incomprehensible and undifferentiated emptiness or nothingness separates itself into one and zero, expanding toward one and contracting towards zero. Between one and zero is "the line" of the event horizon, that includes the fundamental polarizing effect that is apparent in a wave formation with a "hill" and a "trough". As the event horizon vibrates with greater varieties of expansion and contraction along the line, for example as a string of a guitar or violin vibrates with sub-harmonics, with expansions on expansions, expansions on contractions, contractions on contractions, and contractions on expansions, exponentially replicating in patterns upon patterns and patterns within patterns, all in-filled with randomness as part of the balance-imbalance of the complexity, then the universe as we know it is created.

In this view, creation is not something that just happened in the past or is separate from the immediate current of time -- it is time itself -- and it occurs moment to moment as conditions arise, form, and dissolve. Evolution is the tracking of the changes of creation through conventional time in the sphere of biology. By tracking the changes in as many spheres as we can (e.g., in biology, geography, meteorology, psychology, etc.) we can get a sense of the laws, principles, and patterns (Dharma and dharmas) that occur naturally in the changes of our universe as it is created moment to moment as seen through the three-cornered prism of conventional time viewed as past, present, and future.

P.S. This blog was stimulated by finding a 12/2006 blog "Orr on Dawkins" at Evolutionblog

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.