From: David Morey (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sun Aug 15 2004 - 17:37:47 BST
Hi DMB
Thanks for reply, I pretty much agree with what
you have said.
thanks
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Buchanan" <DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 15, 2004 5:15 PM
Subject: RE: MD Plotinus, Pirsig and Wilber
>
> 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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