From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Aug 15 2004 - 17:15:13 BST
David Morey said:
All well and very good. But the advantage of
Pirsig & Wilber and a number of other thinkers is that they
explain how we have got ourselves embroiled
in dualistic approaches to existence such
as SOM. Much PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, I've
read the Huxley, presents an alternative without explaining
how the division between dualism and non-dualism has
occurred, how they are related, and how we may get
back to non-dualism without losing the gains we made on
the journey through SOM. PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY
can seem like going backwards and losing what we have
gained through SOM rather than a going forward to a new
form of non-dualism. You can surely see this danger/problem
with PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY?
dmb says:
Well, yes. Our contemporary thinkers can grapple with SOM, flatland,
scientific materialism or whatever we wish to call it. But the perennial
philosophy itself predates all of that by many hundreds of years. I mean,
Plotinus couldn't have dealt with SOM as we understand it because it didn't
yet exist. (Huxley only gave it a name, he didn't invent it.) As for the
problem of going backwards rather than bringing this ancient wisdom into the
future and into higher levels, I think Pirsig and Wilber both handle that
quite well. Wilber calls such a mistake "the pre/trans fallacy". In this
case, that would mean mistaking pre-modern rejection of modernity for a
post-modern rejection of modernity. Wilber doesn't just talk about this
fallacy in the abstract either. He has attacked many of our contemporaries
for making this mistake, most especially the back-to-nature romantics,
enviromentalists, new agers, neo-pagans and the like. Pirsig's attack on the
hippies for rejecting social and intellectual values and for confusing the
biological and the dynamic. In both cases, these guys are quite well aware
of the danger of adopting the perennial philosophy in a regressive way. Both
of them have integrated this wisdom into the higher intellectual level(s).
And finally, I don't if we can really "explain" non-dualism so much as
experience it. Perhaps the best we can do there is explain why we can't
explain it, explain why it is beyond explanation. I mean, the perennial
philosophy expresses the vision experienced in a mystical experience, an
experience of unitive consciousness. Naturally, this same truth will be
handled differently in our time than it was in Buddha's. Not that the
ancients were any less correct, its just that we now have ideas and thought
categories that simply weren't available at the time.
Thanks,
dmb
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